Beggars on HorsebackJesse, F. Tennyson (Fryniwyd Tennyson)
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Beggars on Horseback
Jesse, F. Tennyson (Fryniwyd Tennyson)
Fiction; Short stories, English
She was still to know month upon month of pain; sometimes acute as when
she stayed out of doors all night and made sounds and hurt herself
physically to distract her mind's distress; but mostly an ache that bore
on her like a weight, sometimes invading dreams and always by her
bedside when she awakened. She was to find that for the friendship she
could have made so exquisite he had no gift; she was to feel the many
hurts his lack of thoughtfulness inflicted; she was to bear the
unhappiness of seeing him unworthy of all that might have been so good
in him as he let himself drift into flirtations where not one of his
finer senses was touched. She was to feel one sharpest hour of any, when
the time came, which, if she had given herself would have seen his child
in her arms. . . .
And through everything, through the dreadful London months of loneliness
and the cruder physical hardships of extreme poverty; through her weary
clear-eyed knowledge of him she was to come back perpetually to the
refrain--that surprised herself after a few weeks of comparative calm
when she hoped she was "getting over it"--of "How I love him." She had
no high-flown theories of love; she knew he was not what is tritely
called "the right man," he was more--he was the one she loved well
enough to forgive for not being the "right one," and in those moments
there was no evading the simple fact that she would have given all the
rest of her life to have been his wife for one year and have borne him a
child.
But, through and above and around all that, went the memory of Beata's
vision which she too had seen. The vision itself was often dark and
meaningless to her in the actuality of her love and pain, but of the
knowledge that she had had it she was never bereft. Also, it was hers to
create those pleasant fruits and chief spices of which the greatest
love-song in the world tells as growing only in a garden enclosed.
THE MAN WITH TWO MOUTHS
On a grey day a girl was walking along a crescent of sand that curved at
the cliff's base. As she went the water welled up in the slanting
hollows left by her feet, and the fat, evil-looking leaves of the cliff
plants glistened with spray moisture; even the swollen fingers of the
marsh samphire, that all seemed to point at the girl as she passed, each
bore a tremulous drop at the tip. At the end of the little beach the
girl paused, and then turned to look out to sea, balancing herself on a
slab of wet shiny granite, where the cone-shaped shellfish clustered and
from which the long green weed floated out and in on the heave of the
tide. The girl held back the red hair that whipped about her forehead
and stared from under an arched palm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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