"MacDONALD, George - The Wow O' Riven aka The Bell" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacDonald George)

that sinking at the heart which seemed to lay her whole nature open to a fresh
inroad of all the terrors and sorrows of her peculiar existence. No
correspondence took place between them. New pursuits and relations, and the
development of his tastes and judgments, entirely altered the position of poor
Elsie in his memory. Having been, during their intercourse, far less of a man
than she of a woman, he had no definite idea of the place he had occupied in her
regard; and in his mind she receded into the background of the past, without his
having any idea that she would suffer thereby, or that he was unjust towards
her; while, in her thoughts, his image stood in the highest and clearest relief.
It was the centre-point from which and towards which all lines radiated and
converged; and although she could not but be doubtful about the future, yet
there was much hope mingled with her doubts.
But when, at the close of two years, he visited his native village, and she saw
before her, instead of the homely youth who had left her that winter evening,
one who, to her inexperienced eyes, appeared a finished gentleman, her heart
sank within her, as if she had found Nature herself false in her ripening
processes, destroying the beautiful promise of a former year by changing instead
of developing her creations. He spoke kindly to her, but not cordially. To her
ear the voice seemed to come from a great distance out of the past; and while
she looked upon him, that optical change passed over her vision, which all have
experienced after gazing abstractedly on any object for a time: his form grew
very small, and receded to an immeasurable distance; till, her imagination
mingling with the twilight haze of her senses, she seemed to see him standing
far off on a hill, with the bright horizon of sunset for a background to his
clearly defined figure.
She knew no more till she found herself in bed in the dark; and the first
message that reached her from the outer world was the infernal growl of the
bull-dog from the room below. Next day she saw her lover walking with two
ladies, who would have thought it some degree of condescension to speak to her;
and he passed the house without once looking towards it.
One who is sufficiently possessed by the demon of nervousness to be glad of the
magnetic influences of a friend's company in a public promenade, or of a horse
beneath him in passing through a churchyard, will have some faint idea of how
utterly exposed and defenceless poor Elsie now felt on the crowded thoroughfare
of life. And so the insensibility which had overtaken her, was not the ordinary
swoon with which Nature relieves the overstrained nerves, but the return of the
epileptic fits of her early childhood; and if the condition of the poor girl had
been pitiable before, it was tenfold more so now. Yet she did not complain, but
bore all in silence, though it was evident that her health was giving way. But
now, help came to her from a strange quarter; though many might not be willing
to accord the name of help to that which rather hastened than retarded the
progress of her decline.
She had gone to spend a few of the summer days with a relative in the country,
some miles from her home, if home it could be called. One evening, towards
sunset, she went out for a solitary walk. Passing from the little garden gate,
she went along a bare country road for some distance, and then, turning aside by
a footpath through a thicket of low trees, she came out in a lonely little
churchyard on the hillside. Hardly knowing whether or not she had intended to go
there, she seated herself on a mound covered with long grass, one of many.
Before her stood the ruins of an old church which was taking centuries to