The Adventures of Harry Richmond — Volume 2Meredith, George
General
The Adventures of Harry Richmond — Volume 2
Meredith, George
Adventure and adventurers -- Fiction
It was startling to me to wake up to twilight in the open air and
silence, for I was unaware that I had fallen asleep. The girl had roused
me, and we crept down from the cart. Horse and farmer were quite
motionless in a green hollow beside the roadway. Looking across fields
and fir plantations, I beheld a house in the strange light of the hour,
and my heart began beating; but I was overcome with shyness, and said to
myself, 'No, no, that's not Riversley; I'm sure it isn't'; though the
certainty of it was, in my teeth, refuting me. I ran down the fields to
the park and the bright little river, and gazed. When I could say, 'Yes,
it is Riversley!' I turned away, hurt even to a sense of smarting pain,
without knowing the cause. I dare say it is true, as the girl declared
subsequently, that I behaved like one in a fit. I dropped, and I may
have rolled my body and cried. An indefinite resentment at Riversley was
the feeling I grew conscious of after very fast walking. I would not
have accepted breakfast there.
About mid-day, crossing a stubble-field, the girl met a couple of her
people-men. Near evening we entered one of their tents. The women set
up a cry, 'Kiomi! Kiomi !' like a rising rookery. Their eyes and teeth
made such a flashing as when you dabble a hand in a dark waterpool. The
strange tongue they talked, with a kind of peck of the voice at a word,
rapid, never high or low, and then a slide of similar tones all round,
--not musical, but catching and incessant,--gave me an idea that I had
fallen upon a society of birds, exceedingly curious ones. They welcomed
me kindly, each of them looking me in the face a bright second or so.
I had two helps from a splendid pot of broth that hung over a fire in
the middle of the tent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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