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GORMENGHAST
by
Mervin Peake
chapter
seventy-five
It was not
that Fuchsia did not struggle against her mounting melancholia.But
the black moods closing in on her ever more frequently were becoming
too much for her.
The emotional, loving, moody child had had small chance of developing
into a happy woman. Had she as a girl been naturally joyous yet
all that had befallen her must surely have driven away the
bright birds, one by one, from her breast. As it was, made
of a more sombre clay, capable of deep happiness, but more easily
drawn to the dark than the light, Fuchsia was even more open
to the cruel wind of circumstances which appeared to have singled
her out for particular punishment.
Her need for love had never been fulfilled; her love for others
had never been suspected, or wanted. Rich as a dusky orchard,
she had never been discovered. Her green boughs had been spread,
but no travellers came and rested in their shade nor tasted the
sweet fruit.
With her mind for ever turning to the past, Fuchsia could see
nothing but the ill-starred of a girl who was, in spite of her
title and all it implied, of little conseguence in the eyes of
the castle, a purposeless misfit of a child, hapless and solitary.
Her deepest loves had been for her old nurse Nannie Slagg, for
her brother for the Doctor, and in a strange way for Flay. Nannie
Slagg and Flay were both dead; Titus had changed. They love one
another still but a wall of cloud lay between them, something
that neither had the power to dispel.
Ther was still Dr Prune. But he had been so heavily overworked
since the flood that she had not seen him. The desire to see
the last of her true friends had weakened with every black depression.
When she most needed the counsel and love of the Doctor, who
would have left the world bleeding to help her, it was
then that she froze within herself and locking herself away,
became ill with the failure of her life, the frustation of her
womanhood, and tossing and turning in her improvised bedroom
twelve feet above the flood, conceived, for the first
time, the idea of suicide.
What was
the darkest of the causes for so terrible a thought it is hard
to know. Her lack of love; her lack of a father or a real mother?
Her loliness. The ghastly disillusion when Steerpike was unmasked,
and the horror of having been fondled by a homicide. The growing
sence of her inferiority in everything but rank. There were many
causes, any one of which might have been alone sufficient to
undermine the will of tougher natures than Fuchsia's.
When the first concept of oblivion flickered through her mind,
she raised her head from her arms. She was shocked and she was
frightened. But she was excited also.
She walked unsteadily on the window. Her thought had taken her
into a realm of possibility so vast, awe-inspiring, final
and noiseless that her knee felt weak and she glanced over
her shoulder although she knew herself to be alone in her room
with the door locked against the world.
When she reached the window she stared out across the water,
but nothing that she saw affected her thought or made any kind
of visual impression on her.
All she knew was that she felt weak, that she was not reading
about all this in a tragic book but that it was true. It was
true that she was standing at a window and that she had thought
of killing herself. She clutched her hands togheter over her
heart and fleeting memory of how a young man had suddenly
appeared at another window many years ago and had left a rose
behind him on her table, passed through her mind and was gone.
It was all true. It wasn't any story. But she could still
pretend. She would pretend that she was the sort of person who
would not only think of killing herself so that the pain in her
heart should be gone for ever, but be the kind of person who
would know how to do it, and be brave enough.
And as
she pondered, she slid moment by moment even deeper into a world
of make-believe, as though she were once more the imaginative
girl of many years ago, aloft in her secret life. She
had become somebody else. She was someone who was young and
beautiful and brave as a lioness. What would such a person
do? Why, such a person would stand upon the window sill above
this water. And
she
would
and as the child in
her was playing the oldest game in the world, her body, following
the course of her imagination, had climbed to the sill of the
window where it stood with its back to the room.
For how long she would have stood there had she not been jerked
back into a sudden consciousness of the world - by the sound
of someone knocking upon the door of her room, it is impossible
to know, but starting at the sound and finding herself
dangerously balanced upon a narrow sill above the deep water,
she trembled uncontrollably, and in trying to turn without
sufficient thought or care, she slipped and clutching
at the face of the wall at her side found nothing to grasp, so
that she fell, striking her dark head on the sill as she
passed, and was already unconscious before the water received
her, and drowned her at its easy.
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