Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: August 19, 2024
No further mention was made of the opium, no hint escaped from the two men of what Barzil Dunsack had said to his son after the evening reading of the Bible. An evidence of the miserable episode was visible for a while in the difficulty of any attempted general conversation; then that died away and everything was seemingly as it had been before.
She told herself, at the tempest of vulgar phrases storming through her consciousness, that what Edward Dunsack had said about her being no better than the tea house girls was true, and she was aghast at the inner treachery capable of such self-betrayal. "I am going into Boston with Captain Dunsack on business connected with his schooners." The girl's grandfather! "Very well."
The fireworks had ceased to have the slightest significance for Nettie; she was luxuriating in the suavity of the Ammidon steps and company. It seemed to her that an actual air of ease rolled out over her from within. Seen from her place of vantage the great throng in the Square was without feature, the passersby on Pleasant Street as Edward Dunsack and herself had been were unimportant.
He, Edward Dunsack, had more brains than Jeremy Ammidon, that stiff old man with a face the color of a damask plum. His niece would go to all the balls at Franklin and Hamilton Halls, the injustice of her position overcome by an impressively increasing fortune. Abstractly he patted her shoulder with a hand as long and gaunt and yellow as his face.
I'll tell you this, too I'd hate to ship afore the mast under you for all you'd have the ensign on the booby hatch with prayers read Sunday morning. I don't wonder you got into weather; I'd have no word for a Creator who didn't blow in your eye." "I'll listen to no blasphemy, Captain Ammidon," Barzil Dunsack said sternly.
At the same time Nettie Vollar was surprisingly near, actual he could see every line and shading of her vivid face; he felt the warm impact of her instant sympathy. He had caught a glimpse of Barzil Dunsack at the funeral; but the other was immediately hidden by the crowd, and Gerrit had been unable to discover whether his son and daughter or Nettie had accompanied him.
Absolutely immobile, her hands folded in her lap, she considered these facts, each in relation to the other: there was wisdom hidden in them for her. If Mr. Dunsack had retained the ordinary blustering Western commercial mind, his knowledge of China confined to the tea houses and streets, he would probably be prosperous and strong to-day.
She knew now that her Uncle Edward had been smoking opium, and that it was a worse vice, more hopeless and destructive, than drink. But she was certain that he'd repel her; he looked on them all, Edward Dunsack, her mother and herself, as sinful, "degenerate plants." Even now, she realized, there was no weakening of his spiritual fibers such as had plainly overtaken his physical being.
It was almost worse when he conversed with her in a palpable effort at an effect of sympathy. She rose and wandered finally to the embankment of the garden. The water shimmered under the full flood of afternoon; she was gazing at the distance in an aimless manner that had lately fastened on her when she heard a stirring of the grass behind her and Edward Dunsack approached.
At first she had tried to put something of her own revived spirit in the older woman but it was like pouring water into a cracked glass: her mother was too utterly broken to hold any resolution whatever. Nettie's feeling for Edward Dunsack became an instinctive deep distrust.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking