I
find it lying by my plate when I come down to breakfast. I take it up,
look at the superscription, partly in Catherine's well-known writing,
partly in my landlady's spider scrawl--for it had gone first to my
London rooms. I turn it over, feel it, decide it contains one sheet of
paper only, and put it resolutely down. After breakfast is time enough
to read it; nothing she can say shall ever move me more.
I pour out my coffee; my resolutions waver and dissipate themselves like
the steam rising from my cup. I tear the letter open, and find myself in
Heaven straightway. And these are the winged words that bore me there:--
"Why do you not come and see me? Why are you so blind? It is true I do
not _like_ you! But I love you with all my heart. Ah! could you not
guess? did you not know?"
"PROCTORISED."
What a ghostly train from the forgotten past rises before me as I write
the word that heads this sketch! The memory dwells again upon that
terrible quarter of an hour in the Proctor's antechamber, where the
brooding demon of "fine" and "rustication" seemed to dwell, and where
the disordered imagination so clearly traced above the door Dante's
fearful legend--Abandon hope all ye that enter here.
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