She is an awful goddess, whose ministers are the furies, and whose highest reward is peace.'Īlice Hatfield hadn't read Huxley, but if she had she would have agreed with him in this and now it seemed as though the furies were driving her along the streets towards that miserable home of hers, where, so far, no dove of peace had folded its wings.
'Virtue is undoubtedly beneficent,' he says, 'but the man is to be envied to whom her ways seem in any wise playful and though she may not talk much about suffering and self-denial, her silence on that topic may be accounted for on the principle ça va sans dire. A somewhat higher authority (Professor Huxley) thinks otherwise. 'Be virtuous and you will be happy,' say the copy-books. But now that that gloomy monitor was on her side, it failed to give that comfort and support which one is taught to expect from it.
In that other life, which now looked brighter than it had ever done when it was hers, she had been racked and tortured by her conscience, which had at last forced her to try and silence it by renouncing what she had sacrificed everything to gain, and by voluntarily adopting this strange, hard way of living. She had been much alone in that other life, it is true, and her thoughts had not made solitude sweet but she had seen him sometimes, and now she was quite alone-always-save for the few slight acquaintances she had made in the house where she lived.
#Book of shemaiah the prophet free
She felt re-awakened too in her a liking for a different life among different surroundings the life she had given up of her own free will three months ago. She wished she had not gone she had derived no pleasure from the evening, and had only gained a sharper heartache from the sight of a certain face, which had been, and was still for that matter, the dearest face in the world to her. And somehow she was so much more easily tired now than she used to be in her Derbyshire home, where she had been used to breast the steepest hills without even a quickened breath. It was such weary work to keep putting one tired foot before the other. She felt almost as though she could never reach her lodging. IT seemed a very long walk home to Alice Hatfield, after that Sunday evening lecture. 'The situation becomes interesting,' he said to himself, 'and demands another of these very excellent cigars.' When he found himself once more in the chill, foggy, outside air, he looked up and down the court, and smiled. Well, whatever happens, I suppose we shall not see the amiable brothers to-night, and that will mean a tête-à-tête,' he added, as he came out from his dusty retirement, and carefully removed all traces of the same from his clothes. I trust that the outraged female proprietor of this staircase will not demand my blood. 'I'd better get out of this house of mystery at once. 'No foreigners here? Don't be too sure, my good woman,' Litvinoff muttered to himself, as he heard the landlady's door close to a continued accompaniment of reiterated objections in that lady's shrill treble. 'Of course not,' said Ferrier to himself, and strode downstairs. 'I don't want no dratted furriners here, and I haven't got none, thank God!' 'Stay, though,' he said 'have you any Frenchmen lodging here?' 'Thank you,' he said, and turned to pass down the staircase. I'm the landlady, and she'd have told me if she told anyone.' 'There was a young woman of that name in the front attic, but she left sudden this morning.' Will you kindly tell me if anyone lives here named Hatfield?' 'I'm very sorry, madam,' said Richard, in tones calm enough now.
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