United States or Christmas Island ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
So, as I said, Mrs. Strathsay sat in her broad bower-window looking down the harbor, and a ship was coming up, and Effie and I stood on its deck, our hearts full of yearning. Mine was, at least, I know.
And still in the nights of clear dark we lean from the broad bower-window and watch the river flowing by, the rafts swimming down with breath of wood-scents and wild life, the small boats rocking on the tide, revivifying our childhood with the strength of our richer years, heart so locked in heart that we have no need of words, Angus and I. And often, as we lean so, over the beautiful silence of lapping ripple and dipping oar there floats a voice rising and falling in slow throbs of tune; it is Mary Strathsay singing some old sanctified chant, and her soul seems to soar with her voice, and both would be lost in heaven but for the tender human sympathies that draw her back to our side again.
She's had the staple wrenched out of the wall now, 't was just below the big bower-window, you remember. And when Mary utterly refused Seavern, Seavern swore he'd wheel his ship round and raze the house to its foundations: he was drunk you see. And Mary laughed in his face.
And I pointed it, and surely that was the old stone gable in its woodbines, and surely, as we crept nearer, the broad bower-window opened before me, and surely a lady sat there, a haughty woman with the clustered curls on her temple, her needle poised above the lace-work in the frame, and she gazing dreamily out, out at the water, the woods, the one ship wafting slowly up, shrouds that had been filled with the airs of half a hemisphere, hull that had ere now been soaked in spicy suns and summers, and all the glad tears gushed over my eyes and darkened me from seeing.
Elspie pleased and important began eagerly to relate long traditions about the Lady Christina Rothesay, who was a witch, and a great friend of "Maister Michael Scott," and how, with spells, she caused her seven step-sons to pine away and die; also the lady Isobel, who let her lover down from her bower-window with the long strings of her golden hair, and how her brother found and slew him; whence she laid a curse on all the line who had golden hair, and such never prospered, but died unmarried and young.
Mrs. Strathsay sat in her broad bower-window, looking down the harbor. A brave great window it was, and I mind me how many a dark summer's night, we two leaned over its edge and watched the soft flow of the River of the Cross, where its shadowy tide came up and lapped the stone foundations of that old house by the water-side, I and Angus.
Word Of The Day