The Lifted Veil | Page 3

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THE LIFTED VEIL
by George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans]
CHAPTER I

The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks of
angina pectoris; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician tells
me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted many months.
Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical constitution, as I
am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I shall not much
longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly existence. If it
were to be otherwise--if I were to live on to the age most men desire
and provide for--I should for once have known whether the miseries of
delusive expectation can outweigh the miseries of true provision. For I
foresee when I shall die, and everything that will happen in my last
moments.
Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting in
this chair, in this study, at ten o'clock at night, longing to die, weary of
incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope.
Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my
lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest. I
shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the
sense of suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell. I know
why. My two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled. My
housekeeper will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours
before, hoping that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself.

Perry is alarmed at last, and is gone out after her. The little
scullery-maid is asleep on a bench: she never answers the bell; it does
not wake her. The sense of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out
with a horrible stench: I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell again.
I long for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst
is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and be weary of it: I am
content. Agony of pain and suffocation--and all the while the earth, the
fields, the pebbly brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent
after the rain, the light of the morning through my chamber-window,
the warmth of the hearth after the frosty air--will darkness close over
them for ever?
Darkness--darkness--no pain--nothing but darkness: but I am passing
on and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but
always with a sense of moving onward . . .
Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease