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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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a mistake, that had made me give it the laudanum? but it’s one of the few things that I’m glad of, now. I am not sorry, to this day; he, at least, is out of pain. What better than death could I give him, poor child! After a while, the cholera came, and Captain Stuart died; everybody died that wanted to live,- and I,- I, though I went down to death’s door,- I lived! Then I was sold, and passed from hand to hand, till I grew faded and wrinkled, and I had a fever; and then this wretch bought me, and brought me here,- and here I am!” The woman stopped. She had hurried on through her story, with a wild, pas- sionate utterance; sometimes seeming to address it to Tom, and sometimes speak- ing as in a soliloquy. So vehement and overpowering was the force with which she spoke, that, for a season, Tom was beguiled even from the pain of his wounds, and, raising himself on one elbow, watched her as she paced restlessly up and down, her long black hair swaying heavily about her, as she moved. “You tell me,” she said, after a pause, “that there is a God,- a God that looks down and sees all these things. May be it’s so. The sisters in the convent used to tell me of a day of judgment, when everything is coming to light; won’t there be vengeance then! “They think it’s nothing, what we suffer,- nothing, what our children suffer! It’s all a small matter; yet I’ve walked the streets when it seemed as if I had mis- ery enough in my one heart to sink the city. I’ve wished the houses would fall on me, or the stones sink under me. Yes! and, in the judgment day, I will stand up be- |
