“Only she—but she!” mutters Lewin Murdock, in a tone of such bitterness, that, as if to drown it, he plucks the pipe out of his mouth, and gulps down the last drop in the glass.
Volume One—Chapter Eleven.
A Weed by the Wyeside.
“Only she—but she!” he repeats, grasping the bottle by the neck, and pouring more brandy into the tumbler.
Though speaking sotto voce, and not supposing himself overheard, he is, nevertheless—by a woman, who, coming forth from the house, has stepped silently behind him, there pausing.
Odd-looking apparition she, seen upon the Wyeside; altogether unlike a native of it, but altogether like one born upon the banks of the Seine, and brought up to tread the Boulevards of Paris—like the latter from the crown of her head to the soles of her high-heeled boots, on whose toes she stands poised and balancing. In front of that ancient English manor-house, she seems grotesquely out of place—as much as a costermonger driving his moke-drawn cart among the Pyramids, or smoking a “Pickwick” by the side of the Sphinx.
For all there is nothing mysterious, or even strange in her presence there. She is Lewin Murdoch’s wife. If he has left his fortune in foreign lands, with the better part of his life and health, he has thence brought her, his better-half.
Physically a fine-looking woman, despite some ravages due to time, and possibly more to crime. Tall and dark as the daughters of the Latinic race, with features beautiful in the past—even still attractive to those not repelled by the beguiling glances of sin.