He was gone. Isabel stood wretched, alone in the drawing room, pondering on his great revelation. Upon first hearing his declaration of love, she had truly felt him compelled to action through some noble sense of honour, but as she refuted the necessity of such a self-sacrificing act, she had seen the vehemence of his conviction in his eyes; those blue windows to his soul, which cried out to her until her breath was stolen, and she was left in a rapture of agony and longing. At the very first utterance of that sacred word "love" - though strong and hard-of-heart (as she had taught herself to be) - all her efforts of the past were dashed to dust, and that great barrier she had erected over time, to keep those at bay who may hurt her the mostly gravely, came tumbling down with greater readiness and surer calamity than the great oak doors to the mill yard ever did. And she had not been tramped upon by some fervent mass of feral beings; she had not been attacked by a great and mighty surge, but had heard only that most touching of words, spoken in a tender, yet passionate voice.
It was the softness against the surge; and it had undone her, leaving her bereft. The agony of it! The torture to her soul, as her skin was set alight by his gentle intonation and his most beautiful of words. To hear them spoken - and in such a way - and to fear them so untrue - offered only through compulsion - had been to her, to offer water to a parched man, lying close to death in some vast and torrid desert; throat baked under the blazing sun, lying only one inch from death. She had thought Mr Thornton's words to be as the water that caught that parched man's eye, glistening with promise, stirring hope and a determination to snatch it up in triumph, but the glass dropped, the water sunk, bleeding into that unrelenting sand, and the agony of thirst was all the greater, for having had so lately, the promise of what one's heart so fervently desired.
But he had declared his conviction of sentiment, and had claimed his right to speak his feelings; so wholly felt and so unflinchingly impassioned. She could not deny his honesty; she could form no rebuke, and the very truth of that first declaration of love; the very tenderness and openness of heart with which it was made, ought to have been a balm to her fevered skin, and so it was. For the tears had abated and cooled upon her flushed cheeks, and so she had found the voice to reply, but the very realisation, that where she loved, it was returned, was only a pleasure in guise, for then she felt the burden of his own heart; of inflicting upon him one ounce of what she suffered in her unquenched love for him, for she could never have him, alien as she was. How, she asked herself, had such a cataclysm of unspoken love erupted, where it had no place in being? The story was not hers, but Margaret's, and for all her selfish desire, for all her personal hopes and dreams, she could never usurp the heroine of what had been for her, the most passionate and tender of love stories. And she! she, Isabel Darrow! To find herself the object of such a man's admiration? The blighted one! who had not passed one month of continual contentment in all her life? Who had lived off morsels of pleasure dropped one crumb at a time - often laced with arsenic, biting her about the throat when she least expected it, and gnawing at her insides.
'He cannot love me!' whispered she, into her lonely prison cell - for that was how that most comfortable and domestic of rooms now felt to her; stifling and suffocating in its bleak and hopeless prospect. 'He cannot!' repeated Isabel, her voice now taking on an edge of desperation, her fists clenching in defiance. And yet, if she allowed herself the indulgence of looking back on their every previous meeting, she could not but admit that never had he shown a preference for Margaret. A curiosity, indeed, and he appeared so take pleasure in her company, but only in a vexatious way, as though she was to him some itch or irritation, which was - when scratched - of sharp and fleeting satisfaction, only to be impatiently cast off once that initial relief was felt. No; he had looked upon Margaret closely - attentively - but never with any warm glow of feeling; never with unguarded admiration or tenderness of sentiment. And, if she was wholly honest, and sought not to see only what she wished - in the sense of her not being an impediment to the tale - she had sensed in Mr Thornton, a certain satisfaction in finding himself so understood; in knowing that his opinion was attended to and respected; not only listened to as any idle, obedient creature might, but readily understood and added to, probed and questioned, until he, himself, found that it was not he alone who imparted knowledge.
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Shadow in the North
قصص الهواةWhat if a work of fiction wasn't fiction at all? What if we only thought it was fiction because it was written down, and we were separated from it by the page? Isabel Darrow, troubled by her past and feeling disconnected from the world, likes her do...
