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Page 16
He had met her for the first time when he was a lad of twenty, and she
a girl of eighteen. He could see her palpable before him now: her
slender girlish figure, her bright eyes, her laughing mouth, her warm
brown hair curling round her forehead. Oh, how he had loved her. For
twelve years he had waited upon her, wooed her, hoped to win her. But
she had always said, 'No--I don't love you. I am very fond of you; I
love you as a friend; we all love you that way--my mother, my father,
my sisters. But I can't marry you.' However, she married no one else,
she loved no one else: and for twelve years he was an ever-welcome
guest in her father's house; and she would talk with him, play to him,
pity him; and he could hope. Then she died. He called one day, and
they said she was ill. After that there came a blank in his memory--a
gulf, full of blackness and redness, anguish and confusion; and then a
sort of dreadful sudden calm, when they told him she was dead.
He remembered standing in her room, after the funeral, with her
father, her mother, her sister Elizabeth. He remembered the pale
daylight that filled it, and how orderly and cold and forsaken it all
looked. And there was her bed, the bed she had died in; and there her
dressing-table, with her combs and brushes; and there her
writing-desk, her book-case. He remembered a row of medicine bottles
on the mantelpiece; he remembered the fierce anger, the hatred of
them, as if they were animate, that had welled up in his heart as he
looked at them, because they had failed to do their work.
'You will wish to have something that was hers, Richard,' her mother
said. 'What would you like?'
On her dressing-table there was a small looking-glass, in an ivory
frame. He asked if he might have that, and carried it away with him.
She had looked into it a thousand times, no doubt; she had done her
hair in it; it had reflected her, enclosed her, contained her. He
could almost persuade himself that something of her must remain in it.
To own it was like owning something of herself. He carried it home
with him, hugging it to his side with a kind of passion.
He had prized it, he prized it still, as his dearest treasure; the
looking-glass in which her face had been reflected a thousand times;
the glass that had contained her, known her; in which something of
herself, he felt, must linger. To handle it, look at it, into it,
behind it, was like holding a mystic communion with her; it gave him
an emotion that was infinitely sweet and bitter, a pain that was
dissolved in joy.
The glass lay now, folded in its ivory case, on the chimney-shelf in
front of him. That was its place; he always kept it on his
chimney-shelf, so that he could see it whenever he glanced round his
room. He leaned back in his chair, and looked at it; for a long time
his eyes remained fixed upon it. 'If she had married me, she wouldn't
have died. My love, my care, would have healed her. She could not have
died.' Monotonously, automatically, the phrase repeated itself over
and over again in his mind, while his eyes remained fixed on the ivory
case into which her looking-glass was folded. It was an effect of his
fatigue, no doubt, that his eyes, once directed upon an object, were
slow to leave it for another; that a phrase once pronounced in his
thought had this tendency to repeat itself over and over again.
But at last he roused himself a little, and leaning forward, put his
hand out and up, to take the glass from the shelf. He wished to hold
it, to touch it and look into it. As he lifted it towards him, it fell
open, the mirror proper being fastened to a leather back, which was
glued to the ivory, and formed a hinge. It fell open; and his grasp
had been insecure; and the jerk as it opened was enough. It slipped
from his fingers, and dropped with a crash upon the hearthstone.
The sound went through him like a physical pain. He sank back in his
chair, and closed his eyes. His heart was beating as after a mighty
physical exertion. He knew vaguely that a calamity had befallen him;
he could vaguely imagine the splinters of shattered glass at his feet.
But his physical prostration was so great as to obliterate, to
neutralise, emotion. He felt very cold. He felt that he was being
hurried along with terrible speed through darkness and cold air. There
was the continuous roar of rapid motion in his ears, a faint, dizzy
bewilderment in his head. He felt that he was trying to catch hold of
things, to stop his progress, but his hands closed upon emptiness;
that he was trying to call out for help, but he could make no sound.
On--on--on, he was being whirled through some immeasurable abyss of
space.
* * * * *
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