FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   172   173   174   175   176   177  
178   179   180   181   182   183   184   185   186   187   188   189   190   191   192   193   194   195   196   197   198   199   200   201   202   >>   >|  
a few of the remoter valleys they still linger, though beneath the surface. Either of the Backhouses, or Mary in her days of health, would have suffered many things rather than allow a stranger to suppose they placed the smallest credence in the story of Bleacliff Tarn. But, all the same, the story which each had beard in childhood, on stormy nights perhaps, when the mountain side was awful with the sounds of tempest, had grown up with them, had entered deep into the tissue of consciousness. In Mary's imagination the ideas and images connected with it had now, under the stimulus of circumstance, become instinct with a living pursuing terror. But they were present, though in a duller, blunter state, in the minds of her father and uncle; and as the weeks passed on, and the days lengthened toward midsummer, a sort of brooding horror seemed to settle on the house. Mary grew weaker and weaker; her cough kept Jim awake at nights; once or twice when he went to help her with a piece of work which not even her extraordinary will could carry her through, her hand burnt him like a hot cinder. But she kept all other women out of the house by her mad, strange ways; and if her uncle showed any consciousness of her state, she turned upon him with her old temper, which had lost all its former stormy grace, and had become ghastly by the contrast it brought out between the tempestuous, vindictive soul and the shaken weakness of frame. A doctor would have discovered at once that what was wrong with her was phthisis, complicated with insanity; and the insanity, instead of taking the hopeful optimistic tinge which is characteristic of the insanity of consumption, had rather assumed the color of the events from which the disease itself had started. Cold, exposure, long-continued agony of mind and body--the madness intertwined with an illness which had such roots as these was naturally a madness of despair. One of its principal signs was the fixed idea as to Midsummer Day. It never occurred to her as possible that her life should be prolonged beyond that limit. Every night, as she dragged herself up the steep little staircase to her room, she checked off the day which had just passed from the days she had still to live. She had made all her arrangements; she had even sewed with her own hands, and that without any sense of special horror, but rather in the provident peasant way, the dress in which she was to be carried to her grave. At l
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   172   173   174   175   176   177  
178   179   180   181   182   183   184   185   186   187   188   189   190   191   192   193   194   195   196   197   198   199   200   201   202   >>   >|  



Top keywords:
insanity
 

madness

 

weaker

 
stormy
 
nights
 
passed
 

horror

 

consciousness

 

events

 

continued


started
 
exposure
 

disease

 

complicated

 

weakness

 

shaken

 

doctor

 

vindictive

 

contrast

 

ghastly


brought
 

tempestuous

 

discovered

 
characteristic
 

consumption

 
assumed
 
optimistic
 

hopeful

 

phthisis

 

taking


Midsummer

 

arrangements

 
staircase
 
checked
 

carried

 
peasant
 

special

 

provident

 

principal

 

despair


naturally

 

illness

 
dragged
 

prolonged

 
occurred
 
intertwined
 

entered

 

tempest

 
sounds
 

mountain