Читать книгу List, Ye Landsmen!. A Romance of Incident онлайн

34 страница из 122

This was my belief. I was now fascinated and stood gazing, watching the fearful thing as it came and went with the lightning.

Do you know those Deal sand hills? A desolate, dreary waste they are, on the brightest of summer mornings, when the lark’s song falls like an echo from the sky, when the pale and furry shadows of rabbits blend with the sand, till they look mere eyes against what they watch you from, when the flavor of seaweed is shrewd in the smell of the warm and fragrant country. But visit them at midnight, stand alone in the heart of the solitude of them and realize then—but, no, not even then could you realize—the unutterably tragic significance imported into those dim heaps of faintness, dying out at a short distance in the blackness, by such a gibbet and such a corpse as I had lighted upon, as I now stood watching by the flash and play of near and distant lightning.

But what was that at the foot of the gibbet? I took a few steps, and the object that I had supposed to be a balk of timber, serving as a base-piece, arose. It was a woman. I was near enough now to see her without the help of the lightning. The glimmering sand yielded sufficient light, so close had I approached the gibbet. She was a tall woman, dressed in black, and her face in the black frame of her bonnet, that was thickened by a wet veil, showed as white as though the light of the moon lay upon it. I say again that I am no coward, but I own that when that balk of timber, as I had supposed the thing to be, arose and fashioned itself, hard by the figure of the hanging dead man, into the shape of a tall woman, ghastly white of face, nothing but horror and consternation prevented me from bolting at full speed. I was too terrified to run. My knees seemed to give way under me. All the good of the rum punch was gone out of my head.