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Northanger Abbey-Part30_Jane Austen(1775-1817)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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it is nothing unusual."

"So much the worse!" thought Catherine; such ill-timed



exercise was of a piece with the strange unseasonableness

of his morning walks, and boded nothing good.



After an evening, the little variety and seeming

length of which made her peculiarly" target="_blank" title="ad.特有地；古怪地">peculiarlysensible of Henry's



importance among them, she was heartily glad to be dismissed;

though it was a look from the general not designed for



her observation which sent his daughter to the bell.

When the butler would have lit his master's candle, however,



he was forbidden. The latter was not going to retire.

"I have many pamphlets to finish," said he to Catherine,



"before I can close my eyes, and perhaps may be poring over

the affairs of the nation for hours after you are asleep.



Can either of us be more meetly employed? My eyes will

be blinding for the good of others, and yours preparing



by rest for future mischief."

But neither the business alleged, nor the magnificent



compliment, could win Catherine from thinking that some

very different object must occasion so serious a delay



of proper repose. To be kept up for hours, after the family

were in bed, by stupid pamphlets was not very likely.



There must be some deeper cause: something was to be done

which could be done only while the household slept;



and the probability that Mrs. Tilney yet lived, shut up

for causes unknown, and receiving from the pitiless



hands of her husband a nightly supply of coarse food,

was the conclusion which necessarily followed.



Shocking as was the idea, it was at least better than

a death unfairly hastened, as, in the natural course



of things, she must ere long be released. The suddenness

of her reputed illness, the absence of her daughter,



and probably of her other children, at the time--all favoured

the supposition of her imprisonment. Its origin--jealousy



perhaps, or wanton cruelty--was yet to be unravelled.

In revolving these matters, while she undressed,



it suddenly struck her as not unlikely that she might

that morning have passed near the very spot of this



unfortunate woman's confinement--might have been within a few

paces of the cell in which she languished out her days;



for what part of the abbey could be more fitted for the

purpose than that which yet bore the traces of monastic



division? In the high-arched passage, paved with stone,

which already she had trodden with peculiar awe,



she well remembered the doors of which the general

had given no account. To what might not those doors



lead? In support of the plausibility of this conjecture,

it further occurred to her that the forbiddengallery,



in which lay the apartments of the unfortunate Mrs. Tilney,

must be, as certainly as her memory could guide her,



exactly over this suspected range of cells, and the staircase

by the side of those apartments of which she had caught



a transientglimpse, communicating by some secret means

with those cells, might well have favoured the barbarous



proceedings of her husband. Down that staircase she

had perhaps been conveyed in a state of well-prepared



insensibility!

Catherine sometimes started at the boldness of her



own surmises, and sometimes hoped or feared that she had

gone too far; but they were supported by such appearances



as made their dismissal impossible.

The side of the quadrangle, in which she supposed



the guilty scene to be acting, being, according to

her belief, just opposite her own, it struck her that,



if judiciously watched, some rays of light from the

general's lamp might glimmer through the lower windows,



as he passed to the prison of his wife; and, twice before

she stepped into bed, she stole gently from her room to the



corresponding window in the gallery, to see if it appeared;




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