Love stories; Nobility -- Great Britain -- Fiction; Switzerland -- Fiction
“How he has changed, oh! how he has changed,” she thought to
herself. The raw boy had become a man, and as she knew at once by her
woman’s instinct, a man with a great deal in him. Isobel was a
sensible member of her sex; one, too, who had seen something of the
world by now, and she did not expect or wish for a hero or a saint
built upon the mid-Victorian pattern, as portrayed in the books of the
lady novelists of that period. She wanted a man to be a man, by
preference with the faults pertaining to the male nature, since she had
observed that those who lacked these, possessed others, which to her
robust womanhood seemed far worse, such as meanness and avarice and
backbiting, and all the other qualities of the Pharisee.
Well, in Godfrey, whether she were right or wrong, with that swift
glance of hers, she seemed to recognise a man as she wished a man to
be. If that standard of hers meant that very possibly he had admired
other women, the lady whom he had pulled up a precipice, for instance,
she did not mind particularly, so long as he admired her, Isobel, most
of all. That was her one _sine qua non_, that he should admire her most
of all, or rather be fondest of her in his innermost self.
What was she thinking about? What was there to show that he cared one
brass farthing about her? Nothing at all. And yet, why was he here
where she had parted from him so long ago? Surely not to stare at the
grave of a dead woman with whom he could have had nothing to do, since
she left the world some five centuries before. And another question.
What had brought her here, she who hated churches and all the mummery
that they signified?
Would he never wake up? Would he never realise her presence? Oh! then he
could care nothing about her. Probably he was thinking of the girl he
had pulled up a cliff in the Alps. But why did he come to this place to
think of _her_?
Isobel stood quite still there and waited in the shadow of a Georgian
tomb, till presently Godfrey did seem to grow aware that he was no
longer alone. Something or somebody had impinged upon his intelligence.
He began to look about him, though always in the wrong direction. Then,
convinced that he was the victim of fancy, he spoke aloud as he had a
bad habit of doing when by himself.
“It’s very curious,” he said, “but I could have sworn
that Isobel was here, as near me as when we parted. I suppose that is
what comes of thinking so much about her. Or do people leave something
of themselves behind in places where they have experienced emotion? If
so, churches ought to be very full of ghosts. I dare say that they are,
only then no one could know it except those who had shared the emotion,
and therefore they remain intangible. Still, I could have sworn that
Isobel was here. Indeed, I seem to feel her now, and I hope that the
dream will go on.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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