Who Was Lost and Is Found: A NovelOliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
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Who Was Lost and Is Found: A Novel
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
Criminals -- Fiction; Mothers and sons -- Fiction; Scotland -- Fiction
And here even these broken half-words, that floated through her brain,
failed. She fell asleep--more soundly than she had slept perhaps for
years.
The thoughts that passed through the mind of the adventurer in his
retreat in Andrew’s tool-house could not have been agreeable ones, but
they are out of my power to trace or follow. Women are perhaps more
ready to see their disabilities in this way than men. A man will
sometimes set forth in much detail, as if he knew, the fancies,
evanescent and changeful as a dream, of a girl’s dawning mind, putting
them all into rigid lines of black and white. Perhaps he thinks the
greater comprehends the less: but how to tell you what was the course of
reflections and endless breaks and takings up of thought in the mind of
a man who had a career to look back upon, such as that of Lew, is not in
my power. I might represent them as caused by sudden pangs of remorse,
by dreadful questions whether, if he had not done this or that----! by
haunting recollections of the look of a victim, or of the circumstances
of the scenes in which a crime had been committed: by a horrible
crushing sense that nothing could recall those moments in which haste
and passion had overcome all that was better in him. I do not believe
that Lew thought of any of these things: he had said he repented of
nothing--he thought of nothing, I well believe, but of the present,
which was hard enough for any man, and how he was to get through it. It
was a situation much worse than that of yesterday. Then he had still
continued to wonder at his absolute safety, at the extraordinary,
almost absurd fact, that he was in a place where nobody had ever heard
of him, where his name did not convey the smallest thrill of terror to
the feeblest. He had laughed at this, even when he was alone, not
without a sense of injury, and conviction that the people around must be
“born fools”: but yet a comfortable assurance of safety all the
same--safety which had half begun to bore him, as he said. But now that
situation had altogether changed. There was a woman in this place, even
in this place, who knew him, to whose mind it had conveyed a thrill that
he should be here. And there was a man in Scotland who had arrived to
hunt him down. His being had roused up to these two keen points of
stimulation. They seemed to a certain degree to set him right with
himself, a man not accustomed to feel himself nobody: and in the second
place, they roused him to fight, to that prodigious excitement, superior
perhaps to any other kind, which flames up when you have to fight for
your life. I suggest with diffidence that these were probably the
thoughts that went through him, broken with many admixtures which I
cannot divine. I believe that at that moment less than at any other was
he sorry for the crimes that he had committed. He had no time for
anything in (what he would have called) the way of sentiment. He had
quite enough to do thinking how to get out of this strait, to get again
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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