The brow of the upland overtops the square tower of the Colebrook Church. The slope is green and looped by a white road. Ascending13 along this road, you open a valley broad and shallow, a wide green trough of pastures and hedges merging14 inland into a vista15 of purple tints16 and flowing lines closing the view.
In this valley down to Brenzett and Colebrook and up to Darnford, the market town fourteen miles away, lies the practice of my friend Kennedy. He had begun life as surgeon in the Navy, and afterwards had been the companion of a famous traveller, in the days when there were continents with unexplored interiors. His papers on the fauna17 and flora18 made him known to scientific societies. And now he had come to a country practice—from choice. The penetrating19 power of his mind, acting20 like a corrosive21 fluid, had destroyed his ambition, I fancy. His intelligence is of a scientific order, of an investigating habit, and of that unappeasable curiosity which believes that there is a particle of a general truth in every mystery.
A good many years ago now, on my return from abroad, he invited me to stay with him. I came readily enough, and as he could not neglect his patients to keep me company, he took me on his rounds—thirty miles or so of an afternoon, sometimes. I waited for him on the roads; the horse reached after the leafy twigs22, and, sitting in the dogcart, I could hear Kennedy’s laugh through the half-open door left open of some cottage. He had a big, hearty23 laugh that would have fitted a man twice his size, a brisk manner, a bronzed face, and a pair of grey, profoundly attentive24 eyes. He had the talent of making people talk to him freely, and an inexhaustible patience in listening to their tales.
One day, as we trotted25 out of a large village into a shady bit of road, I saw on our left hand a low, black cottage, with diamond panes26 in the windows, a creeper on the end wall, a roof of shingle, and some roses climbing on the rickety trellis-work of the tiny porch. Kennedy pulled up to a walk. A woman, in full sunlight, was throwing a dripping blanket over a line stretched between two old apple-trees. And as the bobtailed, long-necked chestnut29, trying to get his head, jerked the left hand, covered by a thick dog-skin glove, the doctor raised his voice over the hedge: “How’s your child, Amy?”
I had the time to see her dull face, red, not with a mantling30 blush, but as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped, and to take in the squat10 figure, the scanty31, dusty brown hair drawn32 into a tight knot at the back of the head. She looked quite young. With a distinct catch in her breath, her voice sounded low and timid.
“He’s well, thank you.”
We trotted again. “A young patient of yours,” I said; and the doctor, flicking33 the chestnut absently, muttered, “Her husband used to be.”
“She seems a dull creature,” I remarked listlessly.
“Precisely,” said Kennedy. “She is very passive. It’s enough to look at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow, prominent brown eyes, to know the inertness34 of her mind—an inertness that one would think made it everlastingly35 safe from all the surprises of imagination. And yet which of us is safe? At any rate, such as you see her, she had enough imagination to fall in love. She’s the daughter of one Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a shepherd; the beginning of his misfortunes dating from his runaway38 marriage with the cook of his widowed father—a well-to-do, apoplectic39 grazier, who passionately41 struck his name off his will, and had been heard to utter threats against his life. But this old affair, scandalous enough to serve as a motive42 for a Greek tragedy, arose from the similarity of their characters. There are other tragedies, less scandalous and of a subtler poignancy43, arising from irreconcilable44 differences and from that fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads—over all our heads....”
The tired chestnut dropped into a walk; and the rim45 of the sun, all red in a speckless46 sky, touched familiarly the smooth top of a ploughed rise near the road as I had seen it times innumerable touch the distant horizon of the sea. The uniform brownness of the harrowed field glowed with a rosy47 tinge48, as though the powdered clods had sweated out in minute pearls of blood the toil49 of uncounted ploughmen. From the edge of a copse a waggon50 with two horses was rolling gently along the ridge51. Raised above our heads upon the sky-line, it loomed52 up against the red sun, triumphantly53 big, enormous, like a chariot of giants drawn by two slow-stepping steeds of legendary54 proportions. And the clumsy figure of the man plodding55 at the head of the leading horse projected itself on the background of the Infinite with a heroic uncouthness56. The end of his carter’s whip quivered high up in the blue. Kennedy discoursed58.
“She’s the eldest59 of a large family. At the age of fifteen they put her out to service at the New Barns Farm. I attended Mrs. Smith, the tenant’s wife, and saw that girl there for the first time. Mrs. Smith, a genteel person with a sharp nose, made her put on a black dress every afternoon. I don’t know what induced me to notice her at all. There are faces that call your attention by a curious want of definiteness in their whole aspect, as, walking in a mist, you peer attentively60 at a vague shape which, after all, may be nothing more curious or strange than a signpost. The only peculiarity61 I perceived in her was a slight hesitation63 in her utterance64, a sort of preliminary stammer65 which passes away with the first word. When sharply spoken to, she was apt to lose her head at once; but her heart was of the kindest. She had never been heard to express a dislike for a single human being, and she was tender to every living creature. She was devoted67 to Mrs. Smith, to Mr. Smith, to their dogs, cats, canaries; and as to Mrs. Smith’s grey parrot, its peculiarities68 exercised upon her a positive fascination69. Nevertheless, when that outlandish bird, attacked by the cat, shrieked70 for help in human accents, she ran out into the yard stopping her ears, and did not prevent the crime. For Mrs. Smith this was another evidence of her stupidity; on the other hand, her want of charm, in view of Smith’s well-known frivolousness71, was a great recommendation. Her short-sighted eyes would swim with pity for a poor mouse in a trap, and she had been seen once by some boys on her knees in the wet grass helping72 a toad73 in difficulties. If it’s true, as some German fellow has said, that without phosphorus there is no thought, it is still more true that there is no kindness of heart without a certain amount of imagination. She had some. She had even more than is necessary to understand suffering and to be moved by pity. She fell in love under circumstances that leave no room for doubt in the matter; for you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar74 shape.
“How this aptitude75 came to her, what it did feed upon, is an inscrutable mystery. She was born in the village, and had never been further away from it than Colebrook or perhaps Darnford. She lived for four years with the Smiths. New Barns is an isolated76 farmhouse77 a mile away from the road, and she was content to look day after day at the same fields, hollows, rises; at the trees and the hedgerows; at the faces of the four men about the farm, always the same—day after day, month after month, year after year. She never showed a desire for conversation, and, as it seemed to me, she did not know how to smile. Sometimes of a fine Sunday afternoon she would put on her best dress, a pair of stout78 boots, a large grey hat trimmed with a black feather (I’ve seen her in that finery), seize an absurdly slender parasol, climb over two stiles, tramp over three fields and along two hundred yards of road—never further. There stood Foster’s cottage. She would help her mother to give their tea to the younger children, wash up the crockery, kiss the little ones, and go back to the farm. That was all. All the rest, all the change, all the relaxation80. She never seemed to wish for anything more. And then she fell in love. She fell in love silently, obstinately81—perhaps helplessly. It came slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful spell; it was love as the Ancients understood it: an irresistible82 and fateful impulse—a possession! Yes, it was in her to become haunted and possessed83 by a face, by a presence, fatally, as though she had been a pagan worshipper of form under a joyous84 sky—and to be awakened85 at last from that mysterious forgetfulness of self, from that enchantment86, from that transport, by a fear resembling the unaccountable terror of a brute87....”
With the sun hanging low on its western limit, the expanse of the grass-lands framed in the counter-scarps of the rising ground took on a gorgeous and sombre aspect. A sense of penetrating sadness, like that inspired by a grave strain of music, disengaged itself from the silence of the fields. The men we met walked past slow, unsmiling, with downcast eyes, as if the melancholy88 of an over-burdened earth had weighted their feet, bowed their shoulders, borne down their glances.
“Yes,” said the doctor to my remark, “one would think the earth is under a curse, since of all her children these that cling to her the closest are uncouth57 in body and as leaden of gait as if their very hearts were loaded with chains. But here on this same road you might have seen amongst these heavy men a being lithe89, supple90, and long-limbed, straight like a pine with something striving upwards91 in his appearance as though the heart within him had been buoyant. Perhaps it was only the force of the contrast, but when he was passing one of these villagers here, the soles of his feet did not seem to me to touch the dust of the road. He vaulted92 over the stiles, paced these slopes with a long elastic93 stride that made him noticeable at a great distance, and had lustrous94 black eyes. He was so different from the mankind around that, with his freedom of movement, his soft—a little startled, glance, his olive complexion95 and graceful96 bearing, his humanity suggested to me the nature of a woodland creature. He came from there.”
The doctor pointed97 with his whip, and from the summit of the descent seen over the rolling tops of the trees in a park by the side of the road, appeared the level sea far below us, like the floor of an immense edifice99 inlaid with bands of dark ripple100, with still trails of glitter, ending in a belt of glassy water at the foot of the sky. The light blur101 of smoke, from an invisible steamer, faded on the great clearness of the horizon like the mist of a breath on a mirror; and, inshore, the white sails of a coaster, with the appearance of disentangling themselves slowly from under the branches, floated clear of the foliage102 of the trees.
“Shipwrecked in the bay?” I said.
“Yes; he was a castaway. A poor emigrant104 from Central Europe bound to America and washed ashore105 here in a storm. And for him, who knew nothing of the earth, England was an undiscovered country. It was some time before he learned its name; and for all I know he might have expected to find wild beasts or wild men here, when, crawling in the dark over the sea-wall, he rolled down the other side into a dyke106, where it was another miracle he didn’t get drowned. But he struggled instinctively107 like an animal under a net, and this blind struggle threw him out into a field. He must have been, indeed, of a tougher fibre than he looked to withstand without expiring such buffetings, the violence of his exertions110, and so much fear. Later on, in his broken English that resembled curiously111 the speech of a young child, he told me himself that he put his trust in God, believing he was no longer in this world. And truly—he would add—how was he to know? He fought his way against the rain and the gale112 on all fours, and crawled at last among some sheep huddled113 close under the lee of a hedge. They ran off in all directions, bleating114 in the darkness, and he welcomed the first familiar sound he heard on these shores. It must have been two in the morning then. And this is all we know of the manner of his landing, though he did not arrive unattended by any means. Only his grisly company did not begin to come ashore till much later in the day....”
The doctor gathered the reins115, clicked his tongue; we trotted down the hill. Then turning, almost directly, a sharp corner into the High Street, we rattled116 over the stones and were home.
Late in the evening Kennedy, breaking a spell of moodiness117 that had come over him, returned to the story. Smoking his pipe, he paced the long room from end to end. A reading-lamp concentrated all its light upon the papers on his desk; and, sitting by the open window, I saw, after the windless, scorching118 day, the frigid119 splendour of a hazy121 sea lying motionless under the moon. Not a whisper, not a splash, not a stir of the shingle, not a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth below—never a sign of life but the scent98 of climbing jasmine; and Kennedy’s voice, speaking behind me, passed through the wide casement122, to vanish outside in a chill and sumptuous123 stillness.
“... The relations of shipwrecks124 in the olden time tell us of much suffering. Often the castaways were only saved from drowning to die miserably125 from starvation on a barren coast; others suffered violent death or else slavery, passing through years of precarious126 existence with people to whom their strangeness was an object of suspicion, dislike or fear. We read about these things, and they are very pitiful. It is indeed hard upon a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless, incomprehensible, and of a mysterious origin, in some obscure corner of the earth. Yet amongst all the adventurers shipwrecked in all the wild parts of the world there is not one, it seems to me, that ever had to suffer a fate so simply tragic127 as the man I am speaking of, the most innocent of adventurers cast out by the sea in the bight of this bay, almost within sight from this very window.
“He did not know the name of his ship. Indeed, in the course of time we discovered he did not even know that ships had names—‘like Christian128 people’; and when, one day, from the top of the Talfourd Hill, he beheld129 the sea lying open to his view, his eyes roamed afar, lost in an air of wild surprise, as though he had never seen such a sight before. And probably he had not. As far as I could make out, he had been hustled130 together with many others on board an emigrant-ship lying at the mouth of the Elbe, too bewildered to take note of his surroundings, too weary to see anything, too anxious to care. They were driven below into the ‘tweendeck and battened down from the very start. It was a low timber dwelling—he would say—with wooden beams overhead, like the houses in his country, but you went into it down a ladder. It was very large, very cold, damp and sombre, with places in the manner of wooden boxes where people had to sleep, one above another, and it kept on rocking all ways at once all the time. He crept into one of these boxes and laid down there in the clothes in which he had left his home many days before, keeping his bundle and his stick by his side. People groaned131, children cried, water dripped, the lights went out, the walls of the place creaked, and everything was being shaken so that in one’s little box one dared not lift one’s head. He had lost touch with his only companion (a young man from the same valley, he said), and all the time a great noise of wind went on outside and heavy blows fell—boom! boom! An awful sickness overcame him, even to the point of making him neglect his prayers. Besides, one could not tell whether it was morning or evening. It seemed always to be night in that place.
“Before that he had been travelling a long, long time on the iron track. He looked out of the window, which had a wonderfully clear glass in it, and the trees, the houses, the fields, and the long roads seemed to fly round and round about him till his head swam. He gave me to understand that he had on his passage beheld uncounted multitudes of people—whole nations—all dressed in such clothes as the rich wear. Once he was made to get out of the carriage, and slept through a night on a bench in a house of bricks with his bundle under his head; and once for many hours he had to sit on a floor of flat stones dozing133, with his knees up and with his bundle between his feet. There was a roof over him, which seemed made of glass, and was so high that the tallest mountain-pine he had ever seen would have had room to grow under it. Steam-machines rolled in at one end and out at the other. People swarmed134 more than you can see on a feast-day round the miraculous135 Holy Image in the yard of the Carmelite Convent down in the plains where, before he left his home, he drove his mother in a wooden cart—a pious136 old woman who wanted to offer prayers and make a vow137 for his safety. He could not give me an idea of how large and lofty and full of noise and smoke and gloom, and clang of iron, the place was, but some one had told him it was called Berlin. Then they rang a bell, and another steam-machine came in, and again he was taken on and on through a land that wearied his eyes by its flatness without a single bit of a hill to be seen anywhere. One more night he spent shut up in a building like a good stable with a litter of straw on the floor, guarding his bundle amongst a lot of men, of whom not one could understand a single word he said. In the morning they were all led down to the stony138 shores of an extremely broad muddy river, flowing not between hills but between houses that seemed immense. There was a steam-machine that went on the water, and they all stood upon it packed tight, only now there were with them many women and children who made much noise. A cold rain fell, the wind blew in his face; he was wet through, and his teeth chattered139. He and the young man from the same valley took each other by the hand.
“They thought they were being taken to America straight away, but suddenly the steam-machine bumped against the side of a thing like a house on the water. The walls were smooth and black, and there uprose, growing from the roof as it were, bare trees in the shape of crosses, extremely high. That’s how it appeared to him then, for he had never seen a ship before. This was the ship that was going to swim all the way to America. Voices shouted, everything swayed; there was a ladder dipping up and down. He went up on his hands and knees in mortal fear of falling into the water below, which made a great splashing. He got separated from his companion, and when he descended140 into the bottom of that ship his heart seemed to melt suddenly within him.
“It was then also, as he told me, that he lost contact for good and all with one of those three men who the summer before had been going about through all the little towns in the foothills of his country. They would arrive on market days driving in a peasant’s cart, and would set up an office in an inn or some other Jew’s house. There were three of them, of whom one with a long beard looked venerable; and they had red cloth collars round their necks and gold lace on their sleeves like Government officials. They sat proudly behind a long table; and in the next room, so that the common people shouldn’t hear, they kept a cunning telegraph machine, through which they could talk to the Emperor of America. The fathers hung about the door, but the young men of the mountains would crowd up to the table asking many questions, for there was work to be got all the year round at three dollars a day in America, and no military service to do.
“But the American Kaiser would not take everybody. Oh, no! He himself had a great difficulty in getting accepted, and the venerable man in uniform had to go out of the room several times to work the telegraph on his behalf. The American Kaiser engaged him at last at three dollars, he being young and strong. However, many able young men backed out, afraid of the great distance; besides, those only who had some money could be taken. There were some who sold their huts and their land because it cost a lot of money to get to America; but then, once there, you had three dollars a day, and if you were clever you could find places where true gold could be picked up on the ground. His father’s house was getting over full. Two of his brothers were married and had children. He promised to send money home from America by post twice a year. His father sold an old cow, a pair of piebald mountain ponies141 of his own raising, and a cleared plot of fair pasture land on the sunny slope of a pine-clad pass to a Jew inn-keeper in order to pay the people of the ship that took men to America to get rich in a short time.
“He must have been a real adventurer at heart, for how many of the greatest enterprises in the conquest of the earth had for their beginning just such a bargaining away of the paternal142 cow for the mirage143 or true gold far away! I have been telling you more or less in my own words what I learned fragmentarily in the course of two or three years, during which I seldom missed an opportunity of a friendly chat with him. He told me this story of his adventure with many flashes of white teeth and lively glances of black eyes, at first in a sort of anxious baby-talk, then, as he acquired the language, with great fluency144, but always with that singing, soft, and at the same time vibrating intonation145 that instilled146 a strangely penetrating power into the sound of the most familiar English words, as if they had been the words of an unearthly language. And he always would come to an end, with many emphatic147 shakes of his head, upon that awful sensation of his heart melting within him directly he set foot on board that ship. Afterwards there seemed to come for him a period of blank ignorance, at any rate as to facts. No doubt he must have been abominably148 sea-sick and abominably unhappy—this soft and passionate40 adventurer, taken thus out of his knowledge, and feeling bitterly as he lay in his emigrant bunk149 his utter loneliness; for his was a highly sensitive nature. The next thing we know of him for certain is that he had been hiding in Hammond’s pig-pound by the side of the road to Norton six miles, as the crow flies, from the sea. Of these experiences he was unwilling150 to speak: they seemed to have seared into his soul a sombre sort of wonder and indignation. Through the rumours152 of the country-side, which lasted for a good many days after his arrival, we know that the fishermen of West Colebrook had been disturbed and startled by heavy knocks against the walls of weatherboard cottages, and by a voice crying piercingly strange words in the night. Several of them turned out even, but, no doubt, he had fled in sudden alarm at their rough angry tones hailing each other in the darkness. A sort of frenzy153 must have helped him up the steep Norton hill. It was he, no doubt, who early the following morning had been seen lying (in a swoon, I should say) on the roadside grass by the Brenzett carrier, who actually got down to have a nearer look, but drew back, intimidated154 by the perfect immobility, and by something queer in the aspect of that tramp, sleeping so still under the showers. As the day advanced, some children came dashing into school at Norton in such a fright that the schoolmistress went out and spoke66 indignantly to a ‘horrid-looking man’ on the road. He edged away, hanging his head, for a few steps, and then suddenly ran off with extraordinary fleetness. The driver of Mr. Bradley’s milk-cart made no secret of it that he had lashed155 with his whip at a hairy sort of gipsy fellow who, jumping up at a turn of the road by the Vents156, made a snatch at the pony157’s bridle158. And he caught him a good one too, right over the face, he said, that made him drop down in the mud a jolly sight quicker than he had jumped up; but it was a good half-a-mile before he could stop the pony. Maybe that in his desperate endeavours to get help, and in his need to get in touch with some one, the poor devil had tried to stop the cart. Also three boys confessed afterwards to throwing stones at a funny tramp, knocking about all wet and muddy, and, it seemed, very drunk, in the narrow deep lane by the limekilns. All this was the talk of three villages for days; but we have Mrs. Finn’s (the wife of Smith’s waggoner) unimpeachable159 testimony160 that she saw him get over the low wall of Hammond’s pig-pound and lurch161 straight at her, babbling162 aloud in a voice that was enough to make one die of fright. Having the baby with her in a perambulator, Mrs. Finn called out to him to go away, and as he persisted in coming nearer, she hit him courageously163 with her umbrella over the head and, without once looking back, ran like the wind with the perambulator as far as the first house in the village. She stopped then, out of breath, and spoke to old Lewis, hammering there at a heap of stones; and the old chap, taking off his immense black wire goggles164, got up on his shaky legs to look where she pointed. Together they followed with their eyes the figure of the man running over a field; they saw him fall down, pick himself up, and run on again, staggering and waving his long arms above his head, in the direction of the New Barns Farm. From that moment he is plainly in the toils165 of his obscure and touching166 destiny. There is no doubt after this of what happened to him. All is certain now: Mrs. Smith’s intense terror; Amy Foster’s stolid167 conviction held against the other’s nervous attack, that the man ‘meant no harm’; Smith’s exasperation168 (on his return from Darnford Market) at finding the dog barking himself into a fit, the back-door locked, his wife in hysterics; and all for an unfortunate dirty tramp, supposed to be even then lurking169 in his stackyard. Was he? He would teach him to frighten women.
“Smith is notoriously hot-tempered, but the sight of some nondescript and miry creature sitting cross-legged amongst a lot of loose straw, and swinging itself to and fro like a bear in a cage, made him pause. Then this tramp stood up silently before him, one mass of mud and filth170 from head to foot. Smith, alone amongst his stacks with this apparition171, in the stormy twilight172 ringing with the infuriated barking of the dog, felt the dread173 of an inexplicable174 strangeness. But when that being, parting with his black hands the long matted locks that hung before his face, as you part the two halves of a curtain, looked out at him with glistening175, wild, black-and-white eyes, the weirdness176 of this silent encounter fairly staggered him. He had admitted since (for the story has been a legitimate178 subject of conversation about here for years) that he made more than one step backwards179. Then a sudden burst of rapid, senseless speech persuaded him at once that he had to do with an escaped lunatic. In fact, that impression never wore off completely. Smith has not in his heart given up his secret conviction of the man’s essential insanity180 to this very day.
“As the creature approached him, jabbering181 in a most discomposing manner, Smith (unaware that he was being addressed as ‘gracious lord,’ and adjured182 in God’s name to afford food and shelter) kept on speaking firmly but gently to it, and retreating all the time into the other yard. At last, watching his chance, by a sudden charge he bundled him headlong into the wood-lodge183, and instantly shot the bolt. Thereupon he wiped his brow, though the day was cold. He had done his duty to the community by shutting up a wandering and probably dangerous maniac184. Smith isn’t a hard man at all, but he had room in his brain only for that one idea of lunacy. He was not imaginative enough to ask himself whether the man might not be perishing with cold and hunger. Meantime, at first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in the lodge. Mrs. Smith was screaming upstairs, where she had locked herself in her bedroom; but Amy Foster sobbed185 piteously at the kitchen door, wringing186 her hands and muttering, ‘Don’t! don’t!’ I daresay Smith had a rough time of it that evening with one noise and another, and this insane, disturbing voice crying obstinately through the door only added to his irritation187. He couldn’t possibly have connected this troublesome lunatic with the sinking of a ship in Eastbay, of which there had been a rumour151 in the Darnford marketplace. And I daresay the man inside had been very near to insanity on that night. Before his excitement collapsed188 and he became unconscious he was throwing himself violently about in the dark, rolling on some dirty sacks, and biting his fists with rage, cold, hunger, amazement189, and despair.
“He was a mountaineer of the eastern range of the Carpathians, and the vessel190 sunk the night before in Eastbay was the Hamburg emigrant-ship Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea, of appalling191 memory.
“A few months later we could read in the papers the accounts of the bogus ‘Emigration Agencies’ among the Sclavonian peasantry in the more remote provinces of Austria. The object of these scoundrels was to get hold of the poor ignorant people’s homesteads, and they were in league with the local usurers. They exported their victims through Hamburg mostly. As to the ship, I had watched her out of this very window, reaching close-hauled under short canvas into the bay on a dark, threatening afternoon. She came to an anchor, correctly by the chart, off the Brenzett Coastguard station. I remember before the night fell looking out again at the outlines of her spars and rigging that stood out dark and pointed on a background of ragged192, slaty193 clouds like another and a slighter spire to the left of the Brenzett church-tower. In the evening the wind rose. At midnight I could hear in my bed the terrific gusts195 and the sounds of a driving deluge196.
“About that time the Coastguardmen thought they saw the lights of a steamer over the anchoring-ground. In a moment they vanished; but it is clear that another vessel of some sort had tried for shelter in the bay on that awful, blind night, had rammed197 the German ship amidships (a breach—as one of the divers198 told me afterwards—‘that you could sail a Thames barge199 through’), and then had gone out either scathless or damaged, who shall say; but had gone out, unknown, unseen, and fatal, to perish mysteriously at sea. Of her nothing ever came to light, and yet the hue200 and cry that was raised all over the world would have found her out if she had been in existence anywhere on the face of the waters.
“A completeness without a clue, and a stealthy silence as of a neatly201 executed crime, characterise this murderous disaster, which, as you may remember, had its gruesome celebrity202. The wind would have prevented the loudest outcries from reaching the shore; there had been evidently no time for signals of distress203. It was death without any sort of fuss. The Hamburg ship, filling all at once, capsized as she sank, and at daylight there was not even the end of a spar to be seen above water. She was missed, of course, and at first the Coastguardmen surmised204 that she had either dragged her anchor or parted her cable some time during the night, and had been blown out to sea. Then, after the tide turned, the wreck103 must have shifted a little and released some of the bodies, because a child—a little fair-haired child in a red frock—came ashore abreast205 of the Martello tower. By the afternoon you could see along three miles of beach dark figures with bare legs dashing in and out of the tumbling foam206, and rough-looking men, women with hard faces, children, mostly fair-haired, were being carried, stiff and dripping, on stretchers, on wattles, on ladders, in a long procession past the door of the ‘Ship Inn,’ to be laid out in a row under the north wall of the Brenzett Church.
“Officially, the body of the little girl in the red frock is the first thing that came ashore from that ship. But I have patients amongst the seafaring population of West Colebrook, and, unofficially, I am informed that very early that morning two brothers, who went down to look after their cobble hauled up on the beach, found, a good way from Brenzett, an ordinary ship’s hencoop lying high and dry on the shore, with eleven drowned ducks inside. Their families ate the birds, and the hencoop was split into firewood with a hatchet207. It is possible that a man (supposing he happened to be on deck at the time of the accident) might have floated ashore on that hencoop. He might. I admit it is improbable, but there was the man—and for days, nay208, for weeks—it didn’t enter our heads that we had amongst us the only living soul that had escaped from that disaster. The man himself, even when he learned to speak intelligibly209, could tell us very little. He remembered he had felt better (after the ship had anchored, I suppose), and that the darkness, the wind, and the rain took his breath away. This looks as if he had been on deck some time during that night. But we mustn’t forget he had been taken out of his knowledge, that he had been sea-sick and battened down below for four days, that he had no general notion of a ship or of the sea, and therefore could have no definite idea of what was happening to him. The rain, the wind, the darkness he knew; he understood the bleating of the sheep, and he remembered the pain of his wretchedness and misery210, his heartbroken astonishment211 that it was neither seen nor understood, his dismay at finding all the men angry and all the women fierce. He had approached them as a beggar, it is true, he said; but in his country, even if they gave nothing, they spoke gently to beggars. The children in his country were not taught to throw stones at those who asked for compassion212. Smith’s strategy overcame him completely. The wood-lodge presented the horrible aspect of a dungeon213. What would be done to him next?... No wonder that Amy Foster appeared to his eyes with the aureole of an angel of light. The girl had not been able to sleep for thinking of the poor man, and in the morning, before the Smiths were up, she slipped out across the back yard. Holding the door of the wood-lodge ajar, she looked in and extended to him half a loaf of white bread—‘such bread as the rich eat in my country,’ he used to say.
“At this he got up slowly from amongst all sorts of rubbish, stiff, hungry, trembling, miserable214, and doubtful. ‘Can you eat this?’ she asked in her soft and timid voice. He must have taken her for a ‘gracious lady.’ He devoured215 ferociously216, and tears were falling on the crust. Suddenly he dropped the bread, seized her wrist, and imprinted217 a kiss on her hand. She was not frightened. Through his forlorn condition she had observed that he was good-looking. She shut the door and walked back slowly to the kitchen. Much later on, she told Mrs. Smith, who shuddered218 at the bare idea of being touched by that creature.
“Through this act of impulsive219 pity he was brought back again within the pale of human relations with his new surroundings. He never forgot it—never.
“That very same morning old Mr. Swaffer (Smith’s nearest neighbour) came over to give his advice, and ended by carrying him off. He stood, unsteady on his legs, meek220, and caked over in half-dried mud, while the two men talked around him in an incomprehensible tongue. Mrs. Smith had refused to come downstairs till the madman was off the premises221; Amy Foster, far from within the dark kitchen, watched through the open back door; and he obeyed the signs that were made to him to the best of his ability. But Smith was full of mistrust. ‘Mind, sir! It may be all his cunning,’ he cried repeatedly in a tone of warning. When Mr. Swaffer started the mare222, the deplorable being sitting humbly223 by his side, through weakness, nearly fell out over the back of the high two-wheeled cart. Swaffer took him straight home. And it is then that I come upon the scene.
“I was called in by the simple process of the old man beckoning224 to me with his forefinger225 over the gate of his house as I happened to be driving past. I got down, of course.
“‘I’ve got something here,’ he mumbled226, leading the way to an outhouse at a little distance from his other farm-buildings.
“It was there that I saw him first, in a long low room taken upon the space of that sort of coach-house. It was bare and whitewashed227, with a small square aperture228 glazed229 with one cracked, dusty pane27 at its further end. He was lying on his back upon a straw pallet; they had given him a couple of horse-blankets, and he seemed to have spent the remainder of his strength in the exertion109 of cleaning himself. He was almost speechless; his quick breathing under the blankets pulled up to his chin, his glittering, restless black eyes reminded me of a wild bird caught in a snare230. While I was examining him, old Swaffer stood silently by the door, passing the tips of his fingers along his shaven upper lip. I gave some directions, promised to send a bottle of medicine, and naturally made some inquiries231.
“‘Smith caught him in the stackyard at New Barns,’ said the old chap in his deliberate, unmoved manner, and as if the other had been indeed a sort of wild animal. ‘That’s how I came by him. Quite a curiosity, isn’t he? Now tell me, doctor—you’ve been all over the world—don’t you think that’s a bit of a Hindoo we’ve got hold of here.’
“I was greatly surprised. His long black hair scattered232 over the straw bolster233 contrasted with the olive pallor of his face. It occurred to me he might be a Basque. It didn’t necessarily follow that he should understand Spanish; but I tried him with the few words I know, and also with some French. The whispered sounds I caught by bending my ear to his lips puzzled me utterly234. That afternoon the young ladies from the Rectory (one of them read Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had struggled with Dante for years), coming to see Miss Swaffer, tried their German and Italian on him from the doorway235. They retreated, just the least bit scared by the flood of passionate speech which, turning on his pallet, he let out at them. They admitted that the sound was pleasant, soft, musical—but, in conjunction with his looks perhaps, it was startling—so excitable, so utterly unlike anything one had ever heard. The village boys climbed up the bank to have a peep through the little square aperture. Everybody was wondering what Mr. Swaffer would do with him.
“He simply kept him.
“Swaffer would be called eccentric were he not so much respected. They will tell you that Mr. Swaffer sits up as late as ten o’clock at night to read books, and they will tell you also that he can write a cheque for two hundred pounds without thinking twice about it. He himself would tell you that the Swaffers had owned land between this and Darnford for these three hundred years. He must be eighty-five to-day, but he does not look a bit older than when I first came here. He is a great breeder of sheep, and deals extensively in cattle. He attends market days for miles around in every sort of weather, and drives sitting bowed low over the reins, his lank28 grey hair curling over the collar of his warm coat, and with a green plaid rug round his legs. The calmness of advanced age gives a solemnity to his manner. He is clean-shaved; his lips are thin and sensitive; something rigid120 and monarchal236 in the set of his features lends a certain elevation237 to the character of his face. He has been known to drive miles in the rain to see a new kind of rose in somebody’s garden, or a monstrous238 cabbage grown by a cottager. He loves to hear tell of or to be shown something that he calls ‘outlandish.’ Perhaps it was just that outlandishness of the man which influenced old Swaffer. Perhaps it was only an inexplicable caprice. All I know is that at the end of three weeks I caught sight of Smith’s lunatic digging in Swaffer’s kitchen garden. They had found out he could use a spade. He dug barefooted.
“His black hair flowed over his shoulders. I suppose it was Swaffer who had given him the striped old cotton shirt; but he wore still the national brown cloth trousers (in which he had been washed ashore) fitting to the leg almost like tights; was belted with a broad leathern belt studded with little brass239 discs; and had never yet ventured into the village. The land he looked upon seemed to him kept neatly, like the grounds round a landowner’s house; the size of the cart-horses struck him with astonishment; the roads resembled garden walks, and the aspect of the people, especially on Sundays, spoke of opulence240. He wondered what made them so hardhearted and their children so bold. He got his food at the back door, carried it in both hands carefully to his outhouse, and, sitting alone on his pallet, would make the sign of the cross before he began. Beside the same pallet, kneeling in the early darkness of the short days, he recited aloud the Lord’s Prayer before he slept. Whenever he saw old Swaffer he would bow with veneration241 from the waist, and stand erect242 while the old man, with his fingers over his upper lip, surveyed him silently. He bowed also to Miss Swaffer, who kept house frugally243 for her father—a broad-shouldered, big-boned woman of forty-five, with the pocket of her dress full of keys, and a grey, steady eye. She was Church—as people said (while her father was one of the trustees of the Baptist Chapel)—and wore a little steel cross at her waist. She dressed severely244 in black, in memory of one of the innumerable Bradleys of the neighbourhood, to whom she had been engaged some twenty-five years ago—a young farmer who broke his neck out hunting on the eve of the wedding day. She had the unmoved countenance245 of the deaf, spoke very seldom, and her lips, thin like her father’s, astonished one sometimes by a mysteriously ironic246 curl.
“These were the people to whom he owed allegiance, and an overwhelming loneliness seemed to fall from the leaden sky of that winter without sunshine. All the faces were sad. He could talk to no one, and had no hope of ever understanding anybody. It was as if these had been the faces of people from the other world—dead people—he used to tell me years afterwards. Upon my word, I wonder he did not go mad. He didn’t know where he was. Somewhere very far from his mountains—somewhere over the water. Was this America, he wondered?
“If it hadn’t been for the steel cross at Miss Swaffer’s belt he would not, he confessed, have known whether he was in a Christian country at all. He used to cast stealthy glances at it, and feel comforted. There was nothing here the same as in his country! The earth and the water were different; there were no images of the Redeemer by the roadside. The very grass was different, and the trees. All the trees but the three old Norway pines on the bit of lawn before Swaffer’s house, and these reminded him of his country. He had been detected once, after dusk, with his forehead against the trunk of one of them, sobbing247, and talking to himself. They had been like brothers to him at that time, he affirmed. Everything else was strange. Conceive you the kind of an existence overshadowed, oppressed, by the everyday material appearances, as if by the visions of a nightmare. At night, when he could not sleep, he kept on thinking of the girl who gave him the first piece of bread he had eaten in this foreign land. She had been neither fierce nor angry, nor frightened. Her face he remembered as the only comprehensible face amongst all these faces that were as closed, as mysterious, and as mute as the faces of the dead who are possessed of a knowledge beyond the comprehension of the living. I wonder whether the memory of her compassion prevented him from cutting his throat. But there! I suppose I am an old sentimentalist, and forget the instinctive108 love of life which it takes all the strength of an uncommon248 despair to overcome.
“He did the work which was given him with an intelligence which surprised old Swaffer. By-and-by it was discovered that he could help at the ploughing, could milk the cows, feed the bullocks in the cattle-yard, and was of some use with the sheep. He began to pick up words, too, very fast; and suddenly, one fine morning in spring, he rescued from an untimely death a grand-child of old Swaffer.
“Swaffer’s younger daughter is married to Willcox, a solicitor249 and the Town Clerk of Colebrook. Regularly twice a year they come to stay with the old man for a few days. Their only child, a little girl not three years old at the time, ran out of the house alone in her little white pinafore, and, toddling250 across the grass of a terraced garden, pitched herself over a low wall head first into the horse-pond in the yard below.
“Our man was out with the waggoner and the plough in the field nearest to the house, and as he was leading the team round to begin a fresh furrow251, he saw, through the gap of the gate, what for anybody else would have been a mere252 flutter of something white. But he had straight-glancing, quick, far-reaching eyes, that only seemed to flinch253 and lose their amazing power before the immensity of the sea. He was barefooted, and looking as outlandish as the heart of Swaffer could desire. Leaving the horses on the turn, to the inexpressible disgust of the waggoner he bounded off, going over the ploughed ground in long leaps, and suddenly appeared before the mother, thrust the child into her arms, and strode away.
“The pond was not very deep; but still, if he had not had such good eyes, the child would have perished—miserably suffocated254 in the foot or so of sticky mud at the bottom. Old Swaffer walked out slowly into the field, waited till the plough came over to his side, had a good look at him, and without saying a word went back to the house. But from that time they laid out his meals on the kitchen table; and at first, Miss Swaffer, all in black and with an inscrutable face, would come and stand in the doorway of the living-room to see him make a big sign of the cross before he fell to. I believe that from that day, too, Swaffer began to pay him regular wages.
“I can’t follow step by step his development. He cut his hair short, was seen in the village and along the road going to and fro to his work like any other man. Children ceased to shout after him. He became aware of social differences, but remained for a long time surprised at the bare poverty of the churches among so much wealth. He couldn’t understand either why they were kept shut up on week days. There was nothing to steal in them. Was it to keep people from praying too often? The rectory took much notice of him about that time, and I believe the young ladies attempted to prepare the ground for his conversion255. They could not, however, break him of his habit of crossing himself, but he went so far as to take off the string with a couple of brass medals the size of a sixpence, a tiny metal cross, and a square sort of scapulary which he wore round his neck. He hung them on the wall by the side of his bed, and he was still to be heard every evening reciting the Lord’s Prayer, in incomprehensible words and in a slow, fervent256 tone, as he had heard his old father do at the head of all the kneeling family, big and little, on every evening of his life. And though he wore corduroys at work, and a slop-made pepper-and-salt suit on Sundays, strangers would turn round to look after him on the road. His foreignness had a peculiar62 and indelible stamp. At last people became used to see him. But they never became used to him. His rapid, skimming walk; his swarthy complexion; his hat cocked on the left ear; his habit, on warm evenings, of wearing his coat over one shoulder, like a hussar’s dolman; his manner of leaping over the stiles, not as a feat79 of agility257, but in the ordinary course of progression—all these peculiarities were, as one may say, so many causes of scorn and offence to the inhabitants of the village. They wouldn’t in their dinner hour lie flat on their backs on the grass to stare at the sky. Neither did they go about the fields screaming dismal258 tunes37. Many times have I heard his high-pitched voice from behind the ridge of some sloping sheep-walk, a voice light and soaring, like a lark’s, but with a melancholy human note, over our fields that hear only the song of birds. And I should be startled myself. Ah! He was different: innocent of heart, and full of good will, which nobody wanted, this castaway, that, like a man transplanted into another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future. His quick, fervent utterance positively259 shocked everybody. ‘An excitable devil,’ they called him. One evening, in the tap-room of the Coach and Horses (having drunk some whisky), he upset them all by singing a love song of his country. They hooted260 him down, and he was pained; but Preble, the lame261 wheelwright, and Vincent, the fat blacksmith, and the other notables too, wanted to drink their evening beer in peace. On another occasion he tried to show them how to dance. The dust rose in clouds from the sanded floor; he leaped straight up amongst the deal tables, struck his heels together, squatted262 on one heel in front of old Preble, shooting out the other leg, uttered wild and exulting263 cries, jumped up to whirl on one foot, snapping his fingers above his head—and a strange carter who was having a drink in there began to swear, and cleared out with his half-pint in his hand into the bar. But when suddenly he sprang upon a table and continued to dance among the glasses, the landlord interfered264. He didn’t want any ‘acrobat tricks in the taproom.’ They laid their hands on him. Having had a glass or two, Mr. Swaffer’s foreigner tried to expostulate: was ejected forcibly: got a black eye.
“I believe he felt the hostility265 of his human surroundings. But he was tough—tough in spirit, too, as well as in body. Only the memory of the sea frightened him, with that vague terror that is left by a bad dream. His home was far away; and he did not want now to go to America. I had often explained to him that there is no place on earth where true gold can be found lying ready and to be got for the trouble of the picking up. How then, he asked, could he ever return home with empty hands when there had been sold a cow, two ponies, and a bit of land to pay for his going? His eyes would fill with tears, and, averting266 them from the immense shimmer267 of the sea, he would throw himself face down on the grass. But sometimes, cocking his hat with a little conquering air, he would defy my wisdom. He had found his bit of true gold. That was Amy Foster’s heart; which was ‘a golden heart, and soft to people’s misery,’ he would say in the accents of overwhelming conviction.
“He was called Yanko. He had explained that this meant little John; but as he would also repeat very often that he was a mountaineer (some word sounding in the dialect of his country like Goorall) he got it for his surname. And this is the only trace of him that the succeeding ages may find in the marriage register of the parish. There it stands—Yanko Goorall—in the rector’s handwriting. The crooked268 cross made by the castaway, a cross whose tracing no doubt seemed to him the most solemn part of the whole ceremony, is all that remains269 now to perpetuate270 the memory of his name.
“His courtship had lasted some time—ever since he got his precarious footing in the community. It began by his buying for Amy Foster a green satin ribbon in Darnford. This was what you did in his country. You bought a ribbon at a Jew’s stall on a fair-day. I don’t suppose the girl knew what to do with it, but he seemed to think that his honourable271 intentions could not be mistaken.
“It was only when he declared his purpose to get married that I fully132 understood how, for a hundred futile272 and inappreciable reasons, how—shall I say odious273?—he was to all the countryside. Every old woman in the village was up in arms. Smith, coming upon him near the farm, promised to break his head for him if he found him about again. But he twisted his little black moustache with such a bellicose274 air and rolled such big, black fierce eyes at Smith that this promise came to nothing. Smith, however, told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man who was surely wrong in his head. All the same, when she heard him in the gloaming whistle from beyond the orchard275 a couple of bars of a weird177 and mournful tune36, she would drop whatever she had in her hand—she would leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence—and she would run out to his call. Mrs. Smith called her a shameless hussy. She answered nothing. She said nothing at all to anybody, and went on her way as if she had been deaf. She and I alone all in the land, I fancy, could see his very real beauty. He was very good-looking, and most graceful in his bearing, with that something wild as of a woodland creature in his aspect. Her mother moaned over her dismally276 whenever the girl came to see her on her day out. The father was surly, but pretended not to know; and Mrs. Finn once told her plainly that ‘this man, my dear, will do you some harm some day yet.’ And so it went on. They could be seen on the roads, she tramping stolidly277 in her finery—grey dress, black feather, stout boots, prominent white cotton gloves that caught your eye a hundred yards away; and he, his coat slung278 picturesquely279 over one shoulder, pacing by her side, gallant280 of bearing and casting tender glances upon the girl with the golden heart. I wonder whether he saw how plain she was. Perhaps among types so different from what he had ever seen, he had not the power to judge; or perhaps he was seduced281 by the divine quality of her pity.
“Yanko was in great trouble meantime. In his country you get an old man for an ambassador in marriage affairs. He did not know how to proceed. However, one day in the midst of sheep in a field (he was now Swaffer’s under-shepherd with Foster) he took off his hat to the father and declared himself humbly. ‘I daresay she’s fool enough to marry you,’ was all Foster said. ‘And then,’ he used to relate, ‘he puts his hat on his head, looks black at me as if he wanted to cut my throat, whistles the dog, and off he goes, leaving me to do the work.’ The Fosters, of course, didn’t like to lose the wages the girl earned: Amy used to give all her money to her mother. But there was in Foster a very genuine aversion to that match. He contended that the fellow was very good with sheep, but was not fit for any girl to marry. For one thing, he used to go along the hedges muttering to himself like a dam’ fool; and then, these foreigners behave very queerly to women sometimes. And perhaps he would want to carry her off somewhere—or run off himself. It was not safe. He preached it to his daughter that the fellow might ill-use her in some way. She made no answer. It was, they said in the village, as if the man had done something to her. People discussed the matter. It was quite an excitement, and the two went on ‘walking out’ together in the face of opposition282. Then something unexpected happened.
“I don’t know whether old Swaffer ever understood how much he was regarded in the light of a father by his foreign retainer. Anyway the relation was curiously feudal283. So when Yanko asked formally for an interview—‘and the Miss too’ (he called the severe, deaf Miss Swaffer simply Miss)—it was to obtain their permission to marry. Swaffer heard him unmoved, dismissed him by a nod, and then shouted the intelligence into Miss Swaffer’s best ear. She showed no surprise, and only remarked grimly, in a veiled blank voice, ‘He certainly won’t get any other girl to marry him.’
“It is Miss Swaffer who has all the credit of the munificence284: but in a very few days it came out that Mr. Swaffer had presented Yanko with a cottage (the cottage you’ve seen this morning) and something like an acre of ground—had made it over to him in absolute property. Willcox expedited the deed, and I remember him telling me he had a great pleasure in making it ready. It recited: ‘In consideration of saving the life of my beloved grandchild, Bertha Willcox.’
“Of course, after that no power on earth could prevent them from getting married.
“Her infatuation endured. People saw her going out to meet him in the evening. She stared with unblinking, fascinated eyes up the road where he was expected to appear, walking freely, with a swing from the hip8, and humming one of the love-tunes of his country. When the boy was born, he got elevated at the ‘Coach and Horses,’ essayed again a song and a dance, and was again ejected. People expressed their commiseration285 for a woman married to that Jack-in-the-box. He didn’t care. There was a man now (he told me boastfully) to whom he could sing and talk in the language of his country, and show how to dance by-and-by.
“But I don’t know. To me he appeared to have grown less springy of step, heavier in body, less keen of eye. Imagination, no doubt; but it seems to me now as if the net of fate had been drawn closer round him already.
“One day I met him on the footpath286 over the Talfourd Hill. He told me that ‘women were funny.’ I had heard already of domestic differences. People were saying that Amy Foster was beginning to find out what sort of man she had married. He looked upon the sea with indifferent, unseeing eyes. His wife had snatched the child out of his arms one day as he sat on the doorstep crooning to it a song such as the mothers sing to babies in his mountains. She seemed to think he was doing it some harm. Women are funny. And she had objected to him praying aloud in the evening. Why? He expected the boy to repeat the prayer aloud after him by-and-by, as he used to do after his old father when he was a child—in his own country. And I discovered he longed for their boy to grow up so that he could have a man to talk with in that language that to our ears sounded so disturbing, so passionate, and so bizarre. Why his wife should dislike the idea he couldn’t tell. But that would pass, he said. And tilting287 his head knowingly, he tapped his breastbone to indicate that she had a good heart: not hard, not fierce, open to compassion, charitable to the poor!
“I walked away thoughtfully; I wondered whether his difference, his strangeness, were not penetrating with repulsion that dull nature they had begun by irresistibly288 attracting. I wondered....”
The Doctor came to the window and looked out at the frigid splendour of the sea, immense in the haze289, as if enclosing all the earth with all the hearts lost among the passions of love and fear.
“Physiologically, now,” he said, turning away abruptly, “it was possible. It was possible.”
He remained silent. Then went on—“At all events, the next time I saw him he was ill—lung trouble. He was tough, but I daresay he was not acclimatised as well as I had supposed. It was a bad winter; and, of course, these mountaineers do get fits of home sickness; and a state of depression would make him vulnerable. He was lying half dressed on a couch downstairs.
“A table covered with a dark oilcloth took up all the middle of the little room. There was a wicker cradle on the floor, a kettle spouting290 steam on the hob, and some child’s linen291 lay drying on the fender. The room was warm, but the door opens right into the garden, as you noticed perhaps.
“He was very feverish292, and kept on muttering to himself. She sat on a chair and looked at him fixedly293 across the table with her brown, blurred294 eyes. ‘Why don’t you have him upstairs?’ I asked. With a start and a confused stammer she said, ‘Oh! ah! I couldn’t sit with him upstairs, Sir.’
“I gave her certain directions; and going outside, I said again that he ought to be in bed upstairs. She wrung295 her hands. ‘I couldn’t. I couldn’t. He keeps on saying something—I don’t know what.’ With the memory of all the talk against the man that had been dinned296 into her ears, I looked at her narrowly. I looked into her shortsighted eyes, at her dumb eyes that once in her life had seen an enticing297 shape, but seemed, staring at me, to see nothing at all now. But I saw she was uneasy.
“‘What’s the matter with him?’ she asked in a sort of vacant trepidation298. ‘He doesn’t look very ill. I never did see anybody look like this before....’
“‘I can’t help it, sir,’ she said stolidly. And suddenly she clapped her hands and looked right and left. ‘And there’s the baby. I am so frightened. He wanted me just now to give him the baby. I can’t understand what he says to it.’
“‘Can’t you ask a neighbour to come in tonight?’ I asked.
“‘Please, sir, nobody seems to care to come,’ she muttered, dully resigned all at once.
“I impressed upon her the necessity of the greatest care, and then had to go. There was a good deal of sickness that winter. ‘Oh, I hope he won’t talk!’ she exclaimed softly just as I was going away.
“I don’t know how it is I did not see—but I didn’t. And yet, turning in my trap, I saw her lingering before the door, very still, and as if meditating300 a flight up the miry road.
“Towards the night his fever increased.
“He tossed, moaned, and now and then muttered a complaint. And she sat with the table between her and the couch, watching every movement and every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable301 terror, of that man she could not understand creeping over her. She had drawn the wicker cradle close to her feet. There was nothing in her now but the maternal302 instinct and that unaccountable fear.
“Suddenly coming to himself, parched303, he demanded a drink of water. She did not move. She had not understood, though he may have thought he was speaking in English. He waited, looking at her, burning with fever, amazed at her silence and immobility, and then he shouted impatiently, ‘Water! Give me water!’
“She jumped to her feet, snatched up the child, and stood still. He spoke to her, and his passionate remonstrances304 only increased her fear of that strange man. I believe he spoke to her for a long time, entreating305, wondering, pleading, ordering, I suppose. She says she bore it as long as she could. And then a gust194 of rage came over him.
“He sat up and called out terribly one word—some word. Then he got up as though he hadn’t been ill at all, she says. And as in fevered dismay, indignation, and wonder he tried to get to her round the table, she simply opened the door and ran out with the child in her arms. She heard him call twice after her down the road in a terrible voice—and fled.... Ah! but you should have seen stirring behind the dull, blurred glance of these eyes the spectre of the fear which had hunted her on that night three miles and a half to the door of Foster’s cottage! I did the next day.
“And it was I who found him lying face down and his body in a puddle306, just outside the little wicket-gate.
“I had been called out that night to an urgent case in the village, and on my way home at daybreak passed by the cottage. The door stood open. My man helped me to carry him in. We laid him on the couch. The lamp smoked, the fire was out, the chill of the stormy night oozed307 from the cheerless yellow paper on the wall. ‘Amy!’ I called aloud, and my voice seemed to lose itself in the emptiness of this tiny house as if I had cried in a desert. He opened his eyes. ‘Gone!’ he said distinctly. ‘I had only asked for water—only for a little water....’
“He was muddy. I covered him up and stood waiting in silence, catching308 a painfully gasped309 word now and then. They were no longer in his own language. The fever had left him, taking with it the heat of life. And with his panting breast and lustrous eyes he reminded me again of a wild creature under the net; of a bird caught in a snare. She had left him. She had left him—sick—helpless—thirsty. The spear of the hunter had entered his very soul. ‘Why?’ he cried in the penetrating and indignant voice of a man calling to a responsible Maker310. A gust of wind and a swish of rain answered.
“And as I turned away to shut the door he pronounced the word ‘Merciful!’ and expired.
“Eventually I certified311 heart-failure as the immediate312 cause of death. His heart must have indeed failed him, or else he might have stood this night of storm and exposure, too. I closed his eyes and drove away. Not very far from the cottage I met Foster walking sturdily between the dripping hedges with his collie at his heels.
“‘Do you know where your daughter is?’ I asked.
“‘Don’t I!’ he cried. ‘I am going to talk to him a bit. Frightening a poor woman like this.’
“‘He won’t frighten her any more,’ I said. ‘He is dead.’
“He struck with his stick at the mud.
“‘And there’s the child.’
“Then, after thinking deeply for a while—“‘I don’t know that it isn’t for the best.’
“That’s what he said. And she says nothing at all now. Not a word of him. Never. Is his image as utterly gone from her mind as his lithe and striding figure, his carolling voice are gone from our fields? He is no longer before her eyes to excite her imagination into a passion of love or fear; and his memory seems to have vanished from her dull brain as a shadow passes away upon a white screen. She lives in the cottage and works for Miss Swaffer. She is Amy Foster for everybody, and the child is ‘Amy Foster’s boy.’ She calls him Johnny—which means Little John.
“It is impossible to say whether this name recalls anything to her. Does she ever think of the past? I have seen her hanging over the boy’s cot in a very passion of maternal tenderness. The little fellow was lying on his back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with his big black eyes, with his fluttered air of a bird in a snare. And looking at him I seemed to see again the other one—the father, cast out mysteriously by the sea to perish in the supreme313 disaster of loneliness and despair.”
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1
abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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shingle
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| n.木瓦板；小招牌(尤指医生或律师挂的营业招牌)；v.用木瓦板盖（屋顶）；把（女子头发）剪短 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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spire
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| n.(教堂)尖顶，尖塔，高点 | |
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clump
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| n.树丛，草丛；vi.用沉重的脚步行走 | |
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perpendicular
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| adj.垂直的，直立的；n.垂直线，垂直的位置 | |
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hip
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| n.臀部，髋；屋脊 | |
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mound
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| n.土墩，堤，小山；v.筑堤，用土堆防卫 | |
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10
squat
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| v.蹲坐，蹲下；n.蹲下；adj.矮胖的，粗矮的 | |
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squatting
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| v.像动物一样蹲下( squat的现在分词 )；非法擅自占用（土地或房屋）；为获得其所有权；而占用某片公共用地。 | |
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12
engraved
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| v.在（硬物）上雕刻（字，画等）( engrave的过去式和过去分词 )；将某事物深深印在（记忆或头脑中） | |
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13
ascending
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| adj.上升的，向上的 | |
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14
merging
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| 合并（分类） | |
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15
vista
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| n.远景，深景，展望，回想 | |
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tints
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| 色彩( tint的名词复数 )； 带白的颜色； （淡色）染发剂； 痕迹 | |
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fauna
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| n.(一个地区或时代的)所有动物，动物区系 | |
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flora
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| n.(某一地区的)植物群 | |
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19
penetrating
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| adj.（声音）响亮的，尖锐的adj.（气味）刺激的adj.（思想）敏锐的，有洞察力的 | |
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20
acting
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| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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21
corrosive
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| adj.腐蚀性的；有害的；恶毒的 | |
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twigs
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| 细枝，嫩枝( twig的名词复数 ) | |
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23
hearty
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| adj.热情友好的；衷心的；尽情的，纵情的 | |
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24
attentive
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| adj.注意的，专心的；关心(别人)的，殷勤的 | |
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25
trotted
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| 小跑，急走( trot的过去分词 )； 匆匆忙忙地走 | |
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panes
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| 窗玻璃( pane的名词复数 ) | |
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pane
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| n.窗格玻璃，长方块 | |
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28
lank
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| adj.瘦削的；稀疏的 | |
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29
chestnut
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| n.栗树，栗子 | |
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30
mantling
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| 覆巾 | |
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31
scanty
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| adj.缺乏的，仅有的，节省的，狭小的，不够的 | |
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32
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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33
flicking
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| （尤指用手指或手快速地）轻击( flick的现在分词 )； （用…）轻挥； （快速地）按开关； 向…笑了一下（或瞥了一眼等） | |
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34
inertness
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| n.不活泼，没有生气；惰性；惯量 | |
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35
everlastingly
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| 永久地，持久地 | |
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36
tune
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| n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整 | |
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37
tunes
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| n.曲调，曲子( tune的名词复数 )v.调音( tune的第三人称单数 )；调整；（给收音机、电视等）调谐；使协调 | |
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38
runaway
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| n.逃走的人，逃亡，亡命者；adj.逃亡的，逃走的 | |
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39
apoplectic
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| adj.中风的；愤怒的；n.中风患者 | |
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40
passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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41
passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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42
motive
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| n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的 | |
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43
poignancy
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| n.辛酸事，尖锐 | |
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44
irreconcilable
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| adj.（指人）难和解的，势不两立的 | |
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45
rim
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| n.(圆物的)边，轮缘；边界 | |
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46
speckless
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| adj.无斑点的，无瑕疵的 | |
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47
rosy
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| adj.美好的，乐观的，玫瑰色的 | |
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48
tinge
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| vt.(较淡)着色于，染色；使带有…气息；n.淡淡色彩，些微的气息 | |
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49
toil
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| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
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50
waggon
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| n.运货马车，运货车；敞篷车箱 | |
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51
ridge
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| n.山脊；鼻梁；分水岭 | |
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52
loomed
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| v.隐约出现，阴森地逼近( loom的过去式和过去分词 )；隐约出现，阴森地逼近 | |
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53
triumphantly
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| ad.得意洋洋地；得胜地；成功地 | |
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54
legendary
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| adj.传奇（中）的，闻名遐迩的；n.传奇（文学） | |
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55
plodding
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| a.proceeding in a slow or dull way | |
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56
uncouthness
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57
uncouth
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| adj.无教养的，粗鲁的 | |
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58
discoursed
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| 演说（discourse的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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59
eldest
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| adj.最年长的，最年老的 | |
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60
attentively
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| adv.聚精会神地；周到地；谛；凝神 | |
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61
peculiarity
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| n.独特性，特色；特殊的东西；怪癖 | |
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62
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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63
hesitation
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| n.犹豫，踌躇 | |
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64
utterance
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| n.用言语表达，话语，言语 | |
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65
stammer
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| n.结巴，口吃；v.结结巴巴地说 | |
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66
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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67
devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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68
peculiarities
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| n. 特质, 特性, 怪癖, 古怪 | |
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69
fascination
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| n.令人着迷的事物，魅力，迷恋 | |
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70
shrieked
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| v.尖叫( shriek的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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71
frivolousness
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| n.不重要，不必要 | |
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72
helping
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| n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的 | |
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73
toad
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| n.蟾蜍，癞蛤蟆 | |
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74
unfamiliar
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| adj.陌生的，不熟悉的 | |
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75
aptitude
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| n.(学习方面的)才能，资质，天资 | |
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76
isolated
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| adj.与世隔绝的 | |
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77
farmhouse
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| n.农场住宅（尤指主要住房） | |
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79
feat
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| n.功绩；武艺，技艺；adj.灵巧的，漂亮的，合适的 | |
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80
relaxation
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| n.松弛，放松；休息；消遣；娱乐 | |
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81
obstinately
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| ad.固执地，顽固地 | |
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82
irresistible
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| adj.非常诱人的，无法拒绝的，无法抗拒的 | |
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83
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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84
joyous
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| adj.充满快乐的；令人高兴的 | |
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85
awakened
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| v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
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86
enchantment
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| n.迷惑，妖术，魅力 | |
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87
brute
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| n.野兽，兽性 | |
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88
melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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89
lithe
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| adj.(指人、身体)柔软的，易弯的 | |
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90
supple
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| adj.柔软的，易弯的，逢迎的，顺从的，灵活的；vt.使柔软，使柔顺，使顺从；vi.变柔软，变柔顺 | |
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91
upwards
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| adv.向上，在更高处...以上 | |
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92
vaulted
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| adj.拱状的 | |
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93
elastic
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| n.橡皮圈，松紧带；adj.有弹性的；灵活的 | |
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94
lustrous
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| adj.有光泽的；光辉的 | |
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95
complexion
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| n.肤色；情况，局面；气质，性格 | |
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96
graceful
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| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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98
scent
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| n.气味，香味，香水，线索，嗅觉；v.嗅，发觉 | |
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99
edifice
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| n.宏伟的建筑物(如宫殿，教室) | |
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100
ripple
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| n.涟波，涟漪，波纹，粗钢梳；vt.使...起涟漪，使起波纹； vi.呈波浪状，起伏前进 | |
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101
blur
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| n.模糊不清的事物；vt.使模糊，使看不清楚 | |
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102
foliage
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| n.叶子，树叶，簇叶 | |
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103
wreck
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| n.失事，遇难；沉船；vt.(船等)失事，遇难 | |
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104
emigrant
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| adj.移居的，移民的；n.移居外国的人，移民 | |
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105
ashore
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| adv.在(向)岸上，上岸 | |
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106
dyke
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| n.堤，水坝，排水沟 | |
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107
instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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108
instinctive
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| adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的 | |
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109
exertion
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| n.尽力，努力 | |
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110
exertions
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| n.努力( exertion的名词复数 )；费力；（能力、权力等的）运用；行使 | |
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111
curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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112
gale
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| n.大风，强风，一阵闹声（尤指笑声等） | |
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113
huddled
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| 挤在一起（huddle的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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114
bleating
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| v.（羊，小牛）叫( bleat的现在分词 )；哭诉；发出羊叫似的声音；轻声诉说 | |
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115
reins
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| 感情，激情； 缰( rein的名词复数 )； 控制手段； 掌管； （成人带着幼儿走路以防其走失时用的）保护带 | |
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116
rattled
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| 慌乱的，恼火的 | |
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117
moodiness
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| n.喜怒无常；喜怒无常，闷闷不乐；情绪 | |
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118
scorching
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| adj. 灼热的 | |
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119
frigid
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| adj.寒冷的，凛冽的；冷淡的；拘禁的 | |
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120
rigid
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| adj.严格的，死板的；刚硬的，僵硬的 | |
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121
hazy
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| adj.有薄雾的，朦胧的；不肯定的，模糊的 | |
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122
casement
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| n.竖铰链窗；窗扉 | |
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123
sumptuous
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| adj.豪华的，奢侈的，华丽的 | |
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124
shipwrecks
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| 海难，船只失事( shipwreck的名词复数 )； 沉船 | |
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125
miserably
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| adv.痛苦地；悲惨地；糟糕地；极度地 | |
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126
precarious
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| adj.不安定的，靠不住的；根据不足的 | |
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127
tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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128
Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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129
beheld
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| v.看，注视( behold的过去式和过去分词 )；瞧；看呀；（叙述中用于引出某人意外的出现）哎哟 | |
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130
hustled
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| 催促（hustle的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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131
groaned
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| v.呻吟( groan的过去式和过去分词 )；发牢骚；抱怨；受苦 | |
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132
fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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133
dozing
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| v.打瞌睡,假寐 n.瞌睡 | |
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134
swarmed
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| 密集( swarm的过去式和过去分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
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135
miraculous
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| adj.像奇迹一样的，不可思议的 | |
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136
pious
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| adj.虔诚的；道貌岸然的 | |
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137
vow
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| n.誓(言)，誓约；v.起誓，立誓 | |
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138
stony
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| adj.石头的，多石头的，冷酷的，无情的 | |
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139
chattered
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| （人）喋喋不休( chatter的过去式 )； 唠叨； （牙齿）打战； （机器）震颤 | |
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140
descended
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| a.为...后裔的，出身于...的 | |
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141
ponies
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| 矮种马，小型马( pony的名词复数 )； ￡25 25 英镑 | |
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142
paternal
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| adj.父亲的，像父亲的，父系的，父方的 | |
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143
mirage
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| n.海市蜃楼，幻景 | |
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144
fluency
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| n.流畅，雄辩，善辩 | |
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145
intonation
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| n.语调，声调；发声 | |
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146
instilled
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| v.逐渐使某人获得（某种可取的品质），逐步灌输( instill的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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147
emphatic
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| adj.强调的，着重的；无可置疑的，明显的 | |
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148
abominably
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| adv. 可恶地，可恨地，恶劣地 | |
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149
bunk
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| n.(车、船等倚壁而设的)铺位；废话 | |
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150
unwilling
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| adj.不情愿的 | |
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151
rumour
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| n.谣言，谣传，传闻 | |
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152
rumours
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| n.传闻( rumour的名词复数 )；风闻；谣言；谣传 | |
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153
frenzy
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| n.疯狂，狂热，极度的激动 | |
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154
intimidated
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| v.恐吓；威胁adj.害怕的；受到威胁的 | |
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155
lashed
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| adj.具睫毛的v.鞭打( lash的过去式和过去分词 )；煽动；紧系；怒斥 | |
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156
vents
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| （气体、液体等进出的）孔、口( vent的名词复数 )； （鸟、鱼、爬行动物或小哺乳动物的）肛门； 大衣等的)衩口； 开衩 | |
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157
pony
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| adj.小型的；n.小马 | |
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158
bridle
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| n.笼头，束缚；vt.抑制，约束；动怒 | |
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159
unimpeachable
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| adj.无可指责的；adv.无可怀疑地 | |
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160
testimony
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| n.证词；见证，证明 | |
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161
lurch
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| n.突然向前或旁边倒；v.蹒跚而行 | |
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162
babbling
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| n.胡说，婴儿发出的咿哑声adj.胡说的v.喋喋不休( babble的现在分词 )；作潺潺声（如流水）；含糊不清地说话；泄漏秘密 | |
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163
courageously
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| ad.勇敢地，无畏地 | |
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164
goggles
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| n.护目镜 | |
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165
toils
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| 网 | |
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166
touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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167
stolid
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| adj.无动于衷的，感情麻木的 | |
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168
exasperation
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| n.愤慨 | |
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169
lurking
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| 潜在 | |
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170
filth
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| n.肮脏，污物，污秽；淫猥 | |
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171
apparition
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| n.幽灵，神奇的现象 | |
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172
twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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173
dread
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| vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧 | |
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174
inexplicable
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| adj.无法解释的，难理解的 | |
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175
glistening
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| adj.闪耀的，反光的v.湿物闪耀，闪亮( glisten的现在分词 ) | |
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176
weirdness
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| n.古怪，离奇，不可思议 | |
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177
weird
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| adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的 | |
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178
legitimate
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| adj.合法的，合理的，合乎逻辑的；v.使合法 | |
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179
backwards
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| adv.往回地，向原处，倒，相反，前后倒置地 | |
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180
insanity
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| n.疯狂，精神错乱；极端的愚蠢，荒唐 | |
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181
jabbering
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| v.急切而含混不清地说( jabber的现在分词 )；急促兴奋地说话；结结巴巴 | |
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182
adjured
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| v.（以起誓或诅咒等形式）命令要求( adjure的过去式和过去分词 )；祈求；恳求 | |
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183
lodge
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| v.临时住宿，寄宿，寄存，容纳；n.传达室，小旅馆 | |
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184
maniac
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| n.精神癫狂的人；疯子 | |
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185
sobbed
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| 哭泣，啜泣( sob的过去式和过去分词 )； 哭诉，呜咽地说 | |
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186
wringing
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| 淋湿的，湿透的 | |
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187
irritation
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| n.激怒，恼怒，生气 | |
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188
collapsed
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| adj.倒塌的 | |
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189
amazement
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| n.惊奇，惊讶 | |
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190
vessel
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| n.船舶；容器，器皿；管，导管，血管 | |
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191
appalling
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| adj.骇人听闻的，令人震惊的，可怕的 | |
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192
ragged
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| adj.衣衫褴褛的，粗糙的，刺耳的 | |
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193
slaty
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| 石板一样的，石板色的 | |
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194
gust
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| n.阵风，突然一阵（雨、烟等），（感情的）迸发 | |
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195
gusts
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| 一阵强风( gust的名词复数 )； （怒、笑等的）爆发； （感情的）迸发； 发作 | |
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196
deluge
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| n./vt.洪水，暴雨，使泛滥 | |
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197
rammed
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| v.夯实（土等）( ram的过去式和过去分词 )；猛撞；猛压；反复灌输 | |
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198
divers
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| adj.不同的；种种的 | |
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199
barge
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| n.平底载货船，驳船 | |
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200
hue
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| n.色度；色调；样子 | |
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201
neatly
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| adv.整洁地，干净地，灵巧地，熟练地 | |
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202
celebrity
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| n.名人，名流；著名，名声，名望 | |
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203
distress
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| n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛 | |
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204
surmised
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| v.臆测，推断( surmise的过去式和过去分词 )；揣测；猜想 | |
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205
abreast
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| adv.并排地；跟上(时代)的步伐，与…并进地 | |
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206
foam
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| v./n.泡沫，起泡沫 | |
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207
hatchet
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| n.短柄小斧；v.扼杀 | |
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208
nay
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| adv.不；n.反对票，投反对票者 | |
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209
intelligibly
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| adv.可理解地，明了地，清晰地 | |
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210
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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211
astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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212
compassion
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| n.同情，怜悯 | |
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213
dungeon
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| n.地牢，土牢 | |
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214
miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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215
devoured
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| 吞没( devour的过去式和过去分词 )； 耗尽； 津津有味地看； 狼吞虎咽地吃光 | |
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216
ferociously
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| 野蛮地，残忍地 | |
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217
imprinted
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| v.盖印（imprint的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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218
shuddered
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| v.战栗( shudder的过去式和过去分词 )；发抖；（机器、车辆等）突然震动；颤动 | |
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219
impulsive
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| adj.冲动的，刺激的；有推动力的 | |
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220
meek
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| adj.温顺的，逆来顺受的 | |
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221
premises
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| n.建筑物，房屋 | |
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222
mare
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| n.母马，母驴 | |
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223
humbly
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| adv. 恭顺地，谦卑地 | |
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224
beckoning
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| adj.引诱人的，令人心动的v.（用头或手的动作）示意，召唤( beckon的现在分词 ) | |
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225
forefinger
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| n.食指 | |
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226
mumbled
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| 含糊地说某事，叽咕，咕哝( mumble的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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227
whitewashed
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| 粉饰，美化，掩饰( whitewash的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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228
aperture
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| n.孔，隙，窄的缺口 | |
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229
glazed
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| adj.光滑的，像玻璃的；上过釉的；呆滞无神的v.装玻璃( glaze的过去式)；上釉于，上光；（目光）变得呆滞无神 | |
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230
snare
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| n.陷阱，诱惑，圈套；（去除息肉或者肿瘤的）勒除器；响弦，小军鼓；vt.以陷阱捕获，诱惑 | |
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231
inquiries
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| n.调查( inquiry的名词复数 )；疑问；探究；打听 | |
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232
scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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233
bolster
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| n.枕垫；v.支持，鼓励 | |
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234
utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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235
doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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236
monarchal
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| 国王的，帝王风度的 | |
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237
elevation
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| n.高度；海拔；高地；上升；提高 | |
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238
monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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239
brass
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| n.黄铜；黄铜器，铜管乐器 | |
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240
opulence
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| n.财富，富裕 | |
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241
veneration
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| n.尊敬，崇拜 | |
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242
erect
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| n./v.树立，建立，使竖立；adj.直立的，垂直的 | |
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243
frugally
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| adv. 节约地, 节省地 | |
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244
severely
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| adv.严格地；严厉地；非常恶劣地 | |
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245
countenance
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| n.脸色，面容；面部表情；vt.支持，赞同 | |
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246
ironic
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| adj.讽刺的，有讽刺意味的，出乎意料的 | |
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247
sobbing
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| <主方>Ⅰ adj.湿透的 | |
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248
uncommon
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| adj.罕见的，非凡的，不平常的 | |
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249
solicitor
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| n.初级律师，事务律师 | |
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250
toddling
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| v.（幼儿等）东倒西歪地走( toddle的现在分词 )；蹒跚行走；溜达；散步 | |
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251
furrow
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| n.沟；垄沟；轨迹；车辙；皱纹 | |
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252
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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253
flinch
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| v.畏缩，退缩 | |
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254
suffocated
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| （使某人）窒息而死( suffocate的过去式和过去分词 )； （将某人）闷死； 让人感觉闷热； 憋气 | |
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255
conversion
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| n.转化，转换，转变 | |
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256
fervent
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| adj.热的，热烈的，热情的 | |
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257
agility
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| n.敏捷，活泼 | |
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258
dismal
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| adj.阴沉的，凄凉的，令人忧郁的，差劲的 | |
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259
positively
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| adv.明确地，断然，坚决地；实在，确实 | |
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260
hooted
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| （使）作汽笛声响，作汽车喇叭声( hoot的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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261
lame
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| adj.跛的，(辩解、论据等)无说服力的 | |
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262
squatted
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| v.像动物一样蹲下( squat的过去式和过去分词 )；非法擅自占用（土地或房屋）；为获得其所有权；而占用某片公共用地。 | |
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263
exulting
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| vi. 欢欣鼓舞，狂喜 | |
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interfered
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| v.干预( interfere的过去式和过去分词 )；调停；妨碍；干涉 | |
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hostility
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| n.敌对，敌意；抵制［pl.］交战，战争 | |
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266
averting
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| 防止，避免( avert的现在分词 )； 转移 | |
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267
shimmer
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| v./n.发微光，发闪光；微光 | |
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268
crooked
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| adj.弯曲的；不诚实的，狡猾的，不正当的 | |
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remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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270
perpetuate
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| v.使永存，使永记不忘 | |
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271
honourable
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| adj.可敬的；荣誉的，光荣的 | |
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272
futile
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| adj.无效的，无用的，无希望的 | |
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273
odious
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| adj.可憎的，讨厌的 | |
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274
bellicose
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| adj.好战的；好争吵的 | |
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275
orchard
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| n.果园，果园里的全部果树，(美俚)棒球场 | |
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276
dismally
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| adv.阴暗地，沉闷地 | |
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277
stolidly
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| adv.迟钝地，神经麻木地 | |
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278
slung
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| 抛( sling的过去式和过去分词 )； 吊挂； 遣送； 押往 | |
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picturesquely
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280
gallant
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| adj.英勇的，豪侠的；(向女人)献殷勤的 | |
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281
seduced
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| 诱奸( seduce的过去式和过去分词 )； 勾引； 诱使堕落； 使入迷 | |
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282
opposition
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| n.反对，敌对 | |
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283
feudal
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| adj.封建的，封地的，领地的 | |
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284
munificence
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| n.宽宏大量，慷慨给与 | |
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285
commiseration
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| n.怜悯，同情 | |
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286
footpath
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| n.小路，人行道 | |
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287
tilting
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| 倾斜，倾卸 | |
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288
irresistibly
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| adv.无法抵抗地，不能自持地；极为诱惑人地 | |
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289
haze
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| n.霾，烟雾；懵懂，迷糊；vi.(over)变模糊 | |
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290
spouting
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| n.水落管系统v.（指液体）喷出( spout的现在分词 )；滔滔不绝地讲；喋喋不休地说；喷水 | |
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291
linen
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| n.亚麻布，亚麻线，亚麻制品；adj.亚麻布制的，亚麻的 | |
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292
feverish
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| adj.发烧的，狂热的，兴奋的 | |
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293
fixedly
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| adv.固定地；不屈地，坚定不移地 | |
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294
blurred
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| v.（使）变模糊( blur的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）难以区分；模模糊糊；迷离 | |
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295
wrung
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| 绞( wring的过去式和过去分词 )； 握紧（尤指别人的手）； 把（湿衣服）拧干； 绞掉（水） | |
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296
dinned
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| vt.喧闹（din的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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297
enticing
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| adj.迷人的；诱人的 | |
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298
trepidation
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| n.惊恐，惶恐 | |
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299
shamming
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| 假装，冒充( sham的现在分词 ) | |
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300
meditating
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| a.沉思的，冥想的 | |
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301
unreasonable
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| adj.不讲道理的，不合情理的，过度的 | |
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302
maternal
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| adj.母亲的，母亲般的，母系的，母方的 | |
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303
parched
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| adj.焦干的；极渴的；v.（使）焦干 | |
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304
remonstrances
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| n.抱怨，抗议( remonstrance的名词复数 ) | |
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305
entreating
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| 恳求，乞求( entreat的现在分词 ) | |
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306
puddle
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| n.(雨)水坑，泥潭 | |
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307
oozed
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| v.（浓液等）慢慢地冒出，渗出( ooze的过去式和过去分词 )；使（液体）缓缓流出；（浓液）渗出，慢慢流出 | |
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308
catching
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| adj.易传染的，有魅力的，迷人的，接住 | |
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309
gasped
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| v.喘气( gasp的过去式和过去分词 )；喘息；倒抽气；很想要 | |
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310
maker
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| n.制造者，制造商 | |
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311
certified
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| a.经证明合格的；具有证明文件的 | |
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312
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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313
supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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