A Country Gentleman and His FamilyOliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
General
A Country Gentleman and His Family
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
Marriage -- Fiction
Minnie had cried in the early morning as much as was right and
natural,--her eyes were still a little red; but she did not think it
necessary to begin over again, as Chatty did, who had a tendency to
overdo everything, like mamma. As for Theodore, he did not cry at all,
but grew very pale, and did not say a word when he was taken into the
chamber of death. The sight of that marble, or rather waxen, figure
lying there had a greater effect upon his imagination than upon that
of either of the girls, who perhaps had not got much imagination to be
affected. He was overawed and silenced by that presence, which he had
never met before so near. When his mother threw herself into his arms,
with that excess of emotion which was peculiar to her, he held her close
to him with a throb of answering feeling. The sensation of standing
beside that which was not, although it was, his father, went through
and through the being of the sensitive young man. Death is always most
impressive in the case of a commonplace person, with whom we have no
associations but the most ordinary ones of life. What had come to
him?--to the mind which had been so much occupied with the quality of his
beef-tea? Was it possible that he could have leaped all at once into the
contemplation of the highest subjects, or must there not be something
intermediate between the beef-tea and the _Gloria in Excelsis_? This
was the thought, inappropriate, unnatural, as he felt it, which came
into his mind as he stood by the bed upon which lay that which had
been the master of the Warren yesterday, and now was "the body"; a
solemn, inanimate thing arranged with dreadful neatness, presently to be
taken away and hid out of sight of the living. Tears did not come even
when he took his mother into his arms, but only a dumb awe not unmixed
with horror, and even that sense of repulsion with which some minds
regard the dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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