Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 by George Henry Borrow
page 44 of 346 (12%)
page 44 of 346 (12%)
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as the man in black calls her, when she is on the point of sinking
beneath our horizon, passing away like the brief music of an aubade. Rapidly, much too rapidly, do we approach that summer dawn when Belle, dressed neatly and plainly, her hair no longer plaited in Romany fashion or floating in the wind, but secured by a comb, uncovered no longer, but wearing a bonnet, her features very pale, allowed her cold hand to be wrung--it was for the last time--by the unconscious Rye. The latter ascended to the plain and thence looked down towards the dingle. "Isopel Berners stood at the mouth, the beams of the early morning sun shone full on her noble face and figure. I waved my hands towards her, she slowly lifted up her right arm; I turned away, and never saw Isopel Berners again." Hardly less forlorn is the reader than the philologist when the latter arrives back at the dingle, after a visit to the tavern two miles away, to find that the tardily recognised treasure is lost to him for ever,--resolved at length, too late, to give over teasing Belle by pretending to teach her Armenian, determined, when the need is past, to regularise his "uncertificated" relations with the glorious damozel, and resigned, when concession is fruitless, to sink those objections to America which Belle had disavowed, but which he had been proud to share with disbanded soldiers, sextons, and excisemen. To this decision his tortuous conferences with Jasper, and his frank soliloquy in the dingle, had bent him fully forty-eight hours before Belle's ultimate departure, unwilling though he was to incur the yoke of matrimony. "I figured myself in America" (says he, in his reverie over the charcoal fire), "in an immense forest, clearing the land destined by my exertions to become a fruitful and smiling plain. Methought I |
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