Curious, if True: Strange TalesGaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn
General
Curious, if True: Strange Tales
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn
Curiosities and wonders -- Fiction; Horror tales; Short stories
would play about in a corner of the great drawing-room as still as any
mouse, while Miss Furnivall slept, and I had my dinner in the kitchen.
But she was glad enough to come to me in the nursery afterwards; for,
as she said, Miss Furnivall was so sad, and Mrs. Stark so dull; but she
and I were merry enough; and by-and-by, I got not to care for that
weird rolling music, which did one no harm, if we did not know where it
came from.
That winter was very cold. In the middle of October the frosts began,
and lasted many, many weeks. I remember one day, at dinner, Miss
Furnivall lifted up her sad, heavy eyes, and said to Mrs. Stark, 'I am
afraid we shall have a terrible winter,' in a strange kind of meaning
way. But Mrs. Stark pretended not to hear, and talked very loud of
something else. My little lady and I did not care for the frost; not
we! As long as it was dry, we climbed up the steep brows behind the
house, and went up on the Fells, which were bleak and bare enough, and
there we ran races in the fresh, sharp air; and once we came down by a
new path, that took us past the two old gnarled holly-trees, which grew
about half-way down by the east side of the house. But the days grew
shorter and shorter, and the old lord, if it was he, played away, more
and more stormily and sadly, on the great organ. One Sunday
afternoon--it must have been towards the end of November--I asked
Dorothy to take charge of little missy when she came out of the
drawing-room, after Miss Furnivall had had her nap; for it was too cold
to take her with me to church, and yet I wanted to go. And Dorothy was
glad enough to promise, and was so fond of the child, that all seemed
well; and Bessy and I set off very briskly, though the sky hung heavy
and black over the white earth, as if the night had never fully gone
away, and the air, though still, was very biting and keen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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