She Was An Old Woman With Snow-White Hair, Which Contrasted
Rather Strangely With Her Hard Red Colour; But Her
Skin was
smooth, her face well shaped, with fine acquiline features.
No doubt it had been a very handsome face
Though never
beautiful, I imagine; it was too strong and firm and resolute;
too like the face of some man we see, which, though we have
but a momentary sight of it in a passing crowd, affects us
like a sudden puff of icy-cold air - the revelation of a
singular and powerful personality. Yet she was only a poor
old broken-down woman in a Wiltshire village, held fast in her
chair by a hopeless infirmity. With her legs paralysed she
was like that prince in the Eastern tale on whom an evil spell
had been cast, turning the lower half of his body into marble.
But she did not, like the prince, shed incessant tears and
lament her miserable destiny with a loud voice. She was
patient and cheerful always, resigned to the will of Heaven,
and - a strange thing this to record of an old woman in a
village! - she would never speak of her ailments. But though
powerless in body her mind was vigorous and active teeming
with memories of all the vicissitudes of her exceedingly
eventful, busy life, from the time when she left her village
as a young girl to fight her way in the great world to her
return to end her life in it, old and broken, her fight over,
her children and grandchildren dead or grown up and scattered
about the earth.
Chance having now put me in her way, she concluded after a few
preliminary or tentative talks that she had got hold of an
ideal listener; but she feared to lose me - she wanted me to go
on listening for ever. That was the reason of that painfully
intense hungry look in her eyes; it was because she discovered
certain signs of lassitude or impatience in me, a desire to
get up and go away and refresh myself in the sun and wind.
Poor old woman, she could not spring upon and hold me fast
when I attempted to move off, or pluck me back with her claws;
she could only gaze with fiercely pleading eyes and say
nothing; and so, without being fascinated, I very often sat on
listening still when I would gladly have been out-of-doors.
She was a good fluent talker; moreover, she studied her
listener, and finding that my interest in her own interminable
story was becoming exhausted she sought for other subjects,
chiefly the strange events in the lives of men and women who
had lived in the village and who had long been turned to dust.
They were all more or less tragical in character, and it
astonished me to think that I had stayed in a dozen or twenty,
perhaps forty, villages in Wiltshire, and had heard stories
equally strange and moving in pretty well every one of them.
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