This being so, it was not improbable that he would
like me to read his histories, and I began to speculate on what the
author of a history of the French Revolution[1] would think of "Esther
Waters." The colour of the chocolate coat he wears in his picture
fixed itself in my mind's eye, and I began to compare it with the
colour of the brown garment worn by the ghost I had seen in the wood.
Good Heavens, if it were his ghost I had seen!
[Footnote 1: Still unpublished.]
And listening to the lapping of the lake water I imagined a horrible
colloquy in that vault. It all came into my mind, his dialogue and my
dialogue. "Great God," I cried out, "something must be done to
escape!" and my eyes were strained out on the lake, upon the island on
which a Welshman had built a castle. I saw all the woods reaching down
to the water's edge, and the woods I did not see I remembered; all the
larch trees that grew on the hillsides came into my mind suddenly, and
I thought what a splendid pyre might be built out of them. No trees
had been cut for the last thirty years; I might live for another
thirty. What splendid timber there would then be to build a pyre for
me!--a pyre fifty feet high, saturated with scented oils, and me lying
on the top of it with all my books (they would make a nice pillow for
my head).
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