The Duchess of Wrexe, Her Decline and Death; A Romantic CommentaryWalpole, Hugh
History
The Duchess of Wrexe, Her Decline and Death; A Romantic Commentary
Walpole, Hugh
Great Britain -- History -- Victoria, 1837-1901 -- Fiction
"Nothing's worrying----"
"Ah, but I know--well, if you won't you won't--but if you knew how much
I loved you you'd feel that you were cruel not to let me help you."
"_Dear_ Dr. Chris--but there is _nothing_."
But her eyes were full of tears.
"Look here," he said. "Perhaps you'll feel later on you can talk to me.
Just come straight away if you do feel that."
He went on. "Don't be frightened, my dear, if there are a whole heap of
new emotions, new instincts, stirred in you by marriage. Just take them
all as they come. It's all progress, you know. Don't be frightened of
anything. Just take the animal by the head and look at it."
That led him to speak about Brun's Tiger. He explained it--the force in
people, the way they either grappled with the creature, and at last
trained it to help them with their work in the world, or ignored it,
silenced it, allowed it at last to die, and so, cosy and lazily
comfortable, passed to their day's end, but had, nevertheless, missed
the whole purpose of life.
He enlarged on that and showed the connection of the individual Tiger
with the welfare of the world, so that everyone who denied his Tiger
added to his world's muddle and confusion, and at last there would come
an inevitable crisis when war would spring up between those who had
grappled with their Tiger and those who had not.
"One knows one's own Tiger--absolutely of oneself one knows it and has,
of oneself, the choice whether to grapple or not--at least that's what I
gathered he meant--I know it struck me at the time."
"Oh," she said, with a sigh that quivered through her whole body. "It's
so _easy_ to talk.... But it's true what he says. I know it."
At last Christopher got up to go. He did not know whether he had done
any good; he felt that he was a miserable failure, and he had a
foreboding that one day he would be ashamed indeed that he had not
helped her.
"Do something," a voice seemed to tell him. "You'll regret ... all your
life you'll regret."
He turned and held again her hands in his.... "Rachel--dear--tell
me----"
Her hands were chill and lifeless. Her voice caught. "Oh! Dr. Chris!..."
Then she suddenly stepped back from him--
"_It's_ all right.... I'm all right. Come again soon, Dr. Chris
dear--come soon."
He left her and found his way into the hot, breathless street.
After he had gone Rachel sat, staring beyond the room out on to the
white walls of the houses and the green branches of the trees in the
square.
Roddy came in.
All the afternoon he had been thinking about her; at one moment he was
furious with the discomfort that life was now becoming to him, at
another moment he was imagining little plans that would sweep all the
discomfort away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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