The Certain Hour (Dizain des Poëtes)Cabell, James Branch
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The Certain Hour (Dizain des Poëtes)
Cabell, James Branch
Fantasy fiction; Short stories
Wycherley did not see her all that morning, for Lady Drogheda was
fatigued, or so a lackey informed him, and as yet kept her chamber.
His Araminta he found deplorably sullen. So the dramatist devoted the
better part of this day to a refitting of his wedding-suit, just come
from London; for Moncrieff, an invaluable man, had adjudged the pockets
to be placed too high; and, be the punishment deserved or no, Mr.
Wycherley had never heard that any victim of law appeared the more
admirable upon his scaffold for being slovenly in his attire.
Thus it was as late as five in the afternoon that, wearing the
peach-colored suit trimmed with scarlet ribbon, and a new French
beaver, the exquisite came upon Lady Drogheda walking in the gardens
with only an appropriate peacock for company. She was so beautiful and
brilliant and so little--so like a famous gem too suddenly disclosed,
and therefore oddly disparate in all these qualities, that his decorous
pleasant voice might quite permissibly have shaken a trifle (as indeed
it did), when Mr. Wycherley implored Lady Drogheda to walk with him to
Teviot Bay, on the off-chance of recovering his sleeve-links.
And there they did find one of the trinkets, but the tide had swept
away the other, or else the sand had buried it. So they rested there
upon the rocks, after an unavailing search, and talked of many trifles,
amid surroundings oddly incongruous.
For this Teviot Bay is a primeval place, a deep-cut, narrow notch in
the tip of Carnrick, and is walled by cliffs so high and so precipitous
that they exclude a view of anything except the ocean. The bay opens
due west; and its white barriers were now developing a violet tinge,
for this was on a sullen afternoon, and the sea was ruffled by spiteful
gusts. Wycherley could find no color anywhere save in this glowing,
tiny and exquisite woman; and everywhere was a gigantic peace, vexed
only when high overhead a sea-fowl jeered at these modish persons, as
he flapped toward an impregnable nest.
"And by this hour to-morrow," thought Mr. Wycherley, "I shall be
chained to that good, strapping, wholesome Juno of a girl!"
So he fell presently into a silence, staring at the vacant west, which
was like a huge and sickly pearl, not thinking of anything at all, but
longing poignantly for something which was very beautiful and strange
and quite unattainable, with precisely that anguish he had sometimes
known in awaking from a dream of which he could remember nothing save
its piercing loveliness.
"And thus ends the last day of our bachelorhood!" said Lady Drogheda,
upon a sudden. "You have played long enough--La, William, you have led
the fashion for ten years, you have written four merry comedies, and
you have laughed as much as any man alive, but you have pulled down all
that nature raised in you, I think. Was it worth while?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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