Urith: A Tale of DartmoorBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
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Urith: A Tale of Dartmoor
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Dartmoor (England) -- Fiction
The old lady came to her again, and scolded her.
"There! there! this is too bad. Take your token, and give me the
flowers. I must do everything."
She put the broken medal again into Urith's hand; and left her, carrying
the flowers away.
Urith was at once back again under her overwhelming cloud--the
ever-present conviction that Anthony was dead, and that she had killed
him.
She saw him at every moment of the day, except when roused from her
dream, lying across the hearthstone with his heart pierced. She had seen
a little start of blood from the wound, when it was dealt, and this she
saw day and night welling up inexhaustibly in tiny wavelets, flowing
over his side, and falling in a long trickle sometimes connected,
sometimes a mere drip upon the hearthstone, and then running upon the
pavement in a dark line.
This little rill never dried up, never became full; it pushed its way
along slowly, always about the breadth of the little finger, and
standing up like a surcharged vein, hemmed in by grains of dust and
particles of flue. Urith was ever watching the progress of this rivulet
of blood, as it stole forward, now turning a little to this side from
some knot in the floor, then running into a crevice and staying its
onward progress till it had filled the chink, and converted it into a
puddle. She watched it rise to the edge of a slate slab, swell above it,
tied back, as it were, by each jagged in the slate edge, then overleap
it, and run further. The rill was ever advancing towards the main
entrance to the hall, yet never reaching it, making its way steadily,
yet making no actual progress.
On more than one occasion Urith stooped to remove a dead wasp that stood
in the way of its advance, or to sop up with her kerchief some plash of
water which would have diluted its richness.
Now, on the floor, lay a daisy head that had fallen from the flower
bunch Mistress Penwarne had brought to her and then had taken away.
Urith's eyes were on the daisy, and it seemed to her that the red rill
was touching it. It was nothing to Urith that she was in the parlour,
and that Anthony had fallen in the hall. Wherever she went, into
whatsoever room, into the garden, out on the moor--it was ever the hall
she was in, and the floor everywhere, whether of oak boards or of soft
turf, or of granite spar, was in her eyes the pavement of the hall, and
ever over that pavement travelled the little thread of blood, groping
its way, like an earthworm, as endowed with a half consciousness that
gave it direction without organs of sense.
And now on the floor lay the garden daisy-head, and towards it the
purple-red streamlet was pushing on; was the daisy already touched, and
the edges of the fringe of petals just tinctured? Or was its redness due
to the reflection on the pure white of the advancing blood? The dye or
glow was setting inward, whatever it was, and would soon stain the
petals crimson, and then sop the golden heart and turn it black.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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