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

hopes. Often when the wintry fog of cold discomfort and homelessness filled her
soul, all at once the picture of the little churchyard-with the old gable and
belfry, and the slanting sunlight steeping down to the very roots of the long
grass on the graves-arose in the darkened chamber (camera obscura) of her soul;
and again she heard the faint ╞olian sound of the bell, and the voice of the
prophet-fool who interpreted the oracle; and the inward weariness was soothed by
the promise of a long sleep. Who can tell how many have been counted fools
simply because they were prophets; or how much of the madness in the world may
be the utterance of thoughts true and just, but belonging to a region differing
from ours in its nature and scenery!
But to Elsie looking out of her window came the mocking tones of the idle boys
who had chosen as the vehicle of their scorn the very words which showed the
relation of the fool to the eternal, and revealed in him an element higher far
than any yet developed in them. They turned his glory into shame, like the
enemies of David when they mocked the would-be king. And the best in a man is
often that which is most condemned by those who have not attained to his
goodness. The words, however, even as repeated by the boys, had not solely
awakened indignation at the persecution of the old man: they had likewise
comforted her with the thought of the refuge that awaited both him and her.
But the same evening a worse trial was in store for her. Again she sat near the
window, oppressed by the consciousness that her brother had come in. He had gone
upstairs, and his dog had remained at the door, exchanging surly compliments
with some of his own kind, when the fool came strolling past, and, I do not know
from what cause, the dog flew at him. Elsie heard his cry and looked up. Her
fear of the brute vanished in a moment before her sympathy for her friend. She
darted from the house, and rushed towards the dog to drag him off the
defenceless idiot, calling him by his name in a tone of anger and dislike. He
left the fool, and, springing at Elsie, seized her by the arm above the elbow
with such a grip that, in the midst of her agony, she fancied she heard the bone
crack. But she uttered no cry, for the most apprehensive are sometimes the most
courageous. Just then, however, her former lover was coming along the street,
and, catching a glimpse of what had happened, was on the spot in an instant,
took the dog by the throat with a gripe not inferior to his own, and having thus
compelled him to relax his hold, dashed him on the ground with a force that
almost stunned him, and then with a superadded kick sent him away limping and
howling; whereupon the fool, attacking him furiously with a stick, would
certainly have finished him, had not his master descried his plight and come to
his rescue.
Meantime the young surgeon had carried Elsie into the house; for, as soon as she
was rescued from the dog, she had fallen down in one of her fits, which were
becoming more and more frequent of themselves, and little needed such a shock as
this to increase their violence. He was dressing her arm when she began to
recover; and when she opened her eyes, in a state of half-consciousness, he
first object she beheld was his face bending over her. Recalling nothing of what
had occurred, it seemed to her, in the dreamy condition in which the fit had
left her, the same face, unchanged, which had once shone in upon her tardy
springtime, and promised to ripen it into summer. She forgot it had departed and
left her in the wintry cold. And so she uttered wild words of love and trust;
and the youth, while stung with remorse at his own neglect, was astonished to
perceive the poetic forms of beauty in which the soul of the uneducated maiden