The Argosy — page 398: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

380 Letters from Majorca. ages. It has been as the rending asunder of rocks ; as the shattering of a universe ; as the sun dying out to us, and the stars falling from the heavens. Our house is left unto us desolate. I came out here partly with the restlessness of a spirit endeavouring to flee from itself, seeking release from torture and torment, forgetful- ness of its daily, nightly desolation. I did wrong.. I should have gone to the other ends of the earth; anywhere rather than here. Every familiar object has been as a sharp knife plunged into an open wound, recalling the days that lie behind this great chasm of months, this awful break in our lives, this convulsion of our hearth ; days when, as far as is possible to me, life still held something of happiness. I trod in my old footsteps. By a strange fatality I occupied over and over again the very same rooms in the hotels, where months ago H. C. and I had laughed and sung and, like the poor Princess Amelia, ‘* had thought the world was made for us.” They rang no more with laughter or with song. They were haunted with ghosts far more terrible than those which come to us from the world of spirits. From each place I longed for the hour of departure, and fled as we flee from our deadliest scourge. Oblivion ? That is not for me! Did I not tell you in my last letter from Palma of that strange and awful Something which has come to me occasionally in life, only too surely a prophet of evil, a harbinger of woe? Is it merely a chilling shadow of coming events that passes over me? Or is ita tangible outcome from that world where our destinies are moulded, our deeds recorded, and with which our spirits are linked, however much we may turn themearthwards? Or is it some terrible power of dating forward into the future when a thunderbolt is about to fall? I know not, and it matters not. Enough that it is there; that it needs no explanation; that time is too certainly its own terrible interpreter. Do you remember how you persuaded me against this second visit to Mallorca? How you saw it in the right light, whilst my eyes were blinded? How you said it would never bring me rest and oblivion, but the opposite? How I, who had once been happy here, could see it from no other point of view, but thought I must be, if not happy—how ever be that again ?-—at least less desolate? I would not be persuaded. I went on in my rash, headstrong way, as I have so often done in life—and so often paid the penalty. And then there was A.’s attraction to draw me hither. For, though my journey was to be taken alone, I was coming out here to stay with A.- A., whom we had parted from in Soller; who had come to see us off by the diligence, had warned H. C. against the wiles of that deceitful Delilah; and had no doubt gone back to flirt with Rosita, and be worshipped in secret and afar off by Mariquita. Ay, I know it was so; I saw it in Mariquita’s shy, gazelle eyes; though I now declare it to you for the first time. ; comicbooks.com