Description
Vera
I
When the doctor had gone, and the two women from the village he had been
waiting for were upstairs shut in with her dead father, Lucy went out
into the garden and stood leaning on the gate staring at the sea.
Her father had died at nine o’clock that morning, and it was now twelve.
The sun beat on her bare head; and the burnt-up grass along the top of
the cliff, and the dusty road that passed the gate, and the glittering
sea, and the few white clouds hanging in the sky, all blazed and glared
in an extremity of silent, motionless heat and light.
Into this emptiness Lucy stared, motionless herself, as if she had been
carved in stone. There was not a sail on the sea, nor a line of distant
smoke from any steamer, neither was there once the flash of a bird’s
wing brushing across the sky. Movement seemed smitten rigid. Sound
seemed to have gone to sleep.
Lucy stood staring at the sea, her face as empty of expression as the
bright blank world before her. Her father had been dead three hours, and
she felt nothing.
It was just a week since they had arrived in Cornwall, she and he, full
of hope, full of pleasure in the pretty little furnished house they had
taken for August and September, full of confidence in the good the pure
air was going to do him. But there had always been confidence; there
had never been a moment during the long years of his fragility when
confidence had even been questioned. He was delicate, and she had taken
care of him. She had taken care of him and he had been delicate ever
since she could remember. And ever since she could remember he had been
everything in life to her. She had had no thought since she grew up for
anybody but her father. There was no room for any other thought, so
completely did he fill her heart. They
Product ID: 9781776790609
Sku: 9781776790609
