It was not many yards away from a
merry high-road, but once in the shade of its lanes, it seemed as though
you had been shut away from the world of living men. Black slopes of
pine and melancholy bars of sunset walled you in, as in some funeral
hall of judgment.
Alas! Beatrice's was not the happiest of hearts, and all day long this
autumn, as the mornings came later and darker and the evenings earlier,
always voices in the valley, voices of low-hanging mist and dripping
rain, kept saying: "Death is coming! Death is coming!"
Tapped at the windows, ticking and crying in the rooms, was the same
message; till, in a terror of the walls, she would flee into the wider
prison of the woods, and oppressed by them in turn, would escape with a
beating heart into the honest daylight of the high-road. So one flies
from a haunted house, or comes out of an evil dream.
Sometimes it seemed as if the white face of Silencieux looked out from
the woodside, and mocked her with the same cry: "Death is coming! Death
is coming!"
Silencieux! Ah, how happy they had been before the coming of
Silencieux! How frail is our happiness, how suddenly it can die! One
moment it seems built for eternity, marble-based and glittering with
towers,--the next, where it stood is lonely grass and dew, not a stone
left.
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