Read My Heart Laid Bare for Free Online

and smothering banks of dead-white lilies? The wake; the funeral; the burial in the cemetery; so many mourners; so many tear-streaked faces; embraces, handshakes, faltering words of commiseration—! And now, these days of mourning: each hour capricious in its emotions, each hour perilous, for sometimes Warren Stirling contained his grief like a mature young man, and sometimes he succumbed to it weak as a child. Why had God struck his father down? Why so suddenly, so cruelly? At only fifty-two years of age, seemingly in good health; happy in his family, in his work, andin his religion. Mr. Stirling had been an uncommonly good man, loved and admired by many; yet, stricken by a heart attack, he’d died before Warren had arrived home from Williams College, summoned by his mother; this abruptness seemed to Warren God’s most wanton cruelty.
    â€œBefore, even, I could say good-bye to Father!”—Warren spoke aloud, in an anguished young voice. “I cannot forgive God—though I know I must.”
    Away at college in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Warren had fallen under the spell of certain freethinkers and Darwinists among his professors, and had been reading, of his own, such disruptive influences as Thomas Huxley, Walter Pater, Samuel Butler and the sickly versifier Algernon Charles Swinburne; he’d been morbidly excited by Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles , and yet more by Jude the Obscure ; instead of taking exercise in the open air, he spent days sequestered in his room, brooding at the window, contemplating the cobbled street and the little park beyond, where, in his childhood long ago, he’d run in innocent delight under the watchful eye of his nursemaid. “May God strike me dead,” Warren brashly declared, “if ever again I am so unthinkingly happy.”
    Yet this morning, as if against his will, he felt his interest stirred by the mysterious presence of a young girl in the park. She was no one he recognized; not a governess or a nursemaid (for she had no children with her) or a servant girl (for no servant would be free at ten o’clock of a weekday morning), yet judging by her modest dress and her hesitant manner, and the fact of her being so conspicuously alone, clearly not a young lady of his own social class. For some ten or fifteen minutes she walked slowly along the paths, steeling herself against the chill wind and glancing, shyly it seemed, in the direction of the Stirlings’ house. Did she intend to cross the street, to ring the door? Warren found himself pressed close against the windowpane, watching. Though he had but a glancing notion of women’s fashions he suspected that the girl’s long hooded cloak was no longer in style; moreover, it fitted her rather gracelessly, the hem trailing along theground. The hand-me-down costume of a country girl, perhaps, charming in its own way, but out of place in Greenley Square. As the girl’s shy manner seemed out of place, quaint and old-fashioned. At last, she made up her mind to cross the street. Warren, excited, drew back from the window to avoid her glancing up and seeing him. His impression of her was that she was very young; very pretty; very frightened. Like one stepping to the edge of a precipice. In the ill-fitting velveteen cloak, the hood lifting in the wind, she reminded him painfully of one of his father’s favorite paintings: an oil by an eighteenth-century Scots artist that hung in his grandparents’ drawing room called “The Lass of Aviemore,” which depicted a tempestuous sky, a rocky wooded landscape, and in the foreground, in a voluminous ink-black cape, a slender young girl standing with eyes uplifted and hands clasped in passionate prayer. Exceedingly pale, even ethereal, the girl had an innocent, angelic beauty; the artist had given her eyes an unearthly glisten, and her cheeks a light feverish touch; the velvet hood had slipped from her head so that