I knew he would not get my letter
more than a couple of hours before I should see him, and thought the
short interval of suspense might break the shock of what I had to say.
Never do I remember to have halted more between two opinions than on my
journey to Battersby upon this unhappy errand. When I thought of the
little sallow-faced lad whom I had remembered years before, of the long
and savage cruelty with which he had been treated in childhood--cruelty
none the less real for having been due to ignorance and stupidity rather
than to deliberate malice; of the atmosphere of lying and self-laudatory
hallucination in which he had been brought up; of the readiness the boy
had shown to love anything that would be good enough to let him, and of
how affection for his parents, unless I am much mistaken, had only died
in him because it had been killed anew, again and again and again, each
time that it had tried to spring. When I thought of all this I felt as
though, if the matter had rested with me, I would have sentenced Theobald
and Christina to mental suffering even more severe than that which was
about to fall upon them. But on the other hand, when I thought of
Theobald's own childhood, of that dreadful old George Pontifex his
father, of John and Mrs John, and of his two sisters, when again I
thought of Christina's long years of hope deferred that maketh the heart
sick, before she was married, of the life she must have led at
Crampsford, and of the surroundings in the midst of which she and her
husband both lived at Battersby, I felt as though the wonder was that
misfortunes so persistent had not been followed by even graver
retribution.
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