Читать книгу The Valley of Squinting Windows онлайн

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Her tongue still clacking in soliloquy, Marse Prendergast hobbled out of the house, and Mrs. Brennan went to the small back window of the sewing-room. She gazed wistfully down the long, sloping fields towards the little lake which nestled in the bosom of the valley. Within the periods of acute consciousness which came between her sobs she began to examine the curious edifice of life which housed her soul. An unaccountable, swift power to do this came to her as she saw the place around which she had played as a child, long ago, when she had a brow snow-white and smooth, with nice hair and laughing eyes. Her soul, too, at that time was clean—clean like the water. And she was wont to have glad thoughts of the coming years when she had sprung to girlhood and could wear pretty frocks and bind up her hair. Across her mind had never fallen the faintest shadow of the thing that was to happen to her.

Yet now, as she ran over everything in her mind, she marveled not a little that, although she could not possibly have returned to the perfect innocence of her childhood state, she had triumphed over the blight of certain circumstances to an extraordinary extent. She was surprised to realize that there must have been some strength of character in her not possessed by the other women of the valley. It had been her mother's mark of distinction, but the dead woman had used it towards the achievement of different ends. Ends, too, which had left their mark upon the lives of both her daughters.