Death the Knight and the Lady/Chapter 1
THE BOOK
CHAPTER I
I DESCRIBE MYSELF
I cannot tell you my story unless I tell you who I am and what I am. Oh, it is not for pleasure that I am writing all this down, but just because I—must.
My name is Beatrice Sinclair, and I am the last representative of an old and ruined family. There were Sinclairs in the time of King Charles who were great people at Court—you must accept the statement, for I cannot write much about this family of mine, the very thought of it fills me with a kind of horror. What would all those men with long flowing hair, those women with patches on their faces,—what would they say if they could see me, the last of their race, and could know what I have been?
Perhaps you guess what I mean, perhaps you are sneering at me; you can do so if you please, for I am so very ill that I care for nothing now, and they say I am dying. I know now, oh, I know well why an animal crawls away and hides itself to die: though I am only twenty-three I know more about death than those Egyptians who have been shut up in pyramids alone with him for a thousand years.
From the window where I am sitting now, wrapped up in shawls, I can see the garden; the frost has gone, and I can see a yellow crocus that has pushed its head up through the dark, stiff mould. If it knew what I know of life, it would draw that head back.
You must think me a very gloomy person, and indeed just now I am, for I am thinking of a part of my history of which I shall not speak, but only hint.
Some time, no matter how long ago, I was living at the Bath Hotel. I had plenty of clothes and money, and I thought I was in love. Well, one day I found myself deserted, I found a letter on the breakfast table enclosing a blue strip of paper—a cheque for two hundred pounds. I did not scream and tear my hair as a girl I know said she did when she was deserted, I believe I laughed.
I went to the theatre that night alone, and everybody stared at me. I was beautiful then, I am nearly as beautiful now, but it was only on that night that I first fully recognised how beautiful I was, I could see it in the faces of the men who looked at me, and in the manner of the women,—how women hate one another! and yet some women have been very good to me.
Well, when I got home I found supper waiting for me, and after supper I looked at myself again in the long pier glass opposite the fireplace; then a strange feeling came over me that I had never felt before, I felt a thirst to be admired, I say thirst, for it was so, it was really in the back of my throat that this feeling came, but it was in my head as well; it was not the admiration of ordinary people that I wanted; I craved to see some being as lovely as myself turn its head to gaze at me.
Oh! my beautiful face, how I loved you, oh! the nights I have woken up shivering to think of the dissecting rooms where they take the bodies of the people who have no friends.
At the end of six months my two hundred pounds were nearly gone. I lived innocently, I lived in a kind of dream. Men filled me with a kind of horror, when they looked at me in the streets I shuddered; I shudder still, and I wonder why God ever made such a blind and cruel thing as man.
I moved into furnished rooms: all this is misty now in my mind. If I had died then I might never have gone to heaven, but I would never have seen hell. I got typhoid fever; my rings lay on the dressing table, hoops of sapphires and emeralds; each fortnight a ring went to pay for my rooms and the doctor, who seemed never able to cure me.
I cannot tell you much after this, I can only say that I struggled, mad with pride and mad with hatred. I starved, but why should I pain you, and make more sad a story that is already sad enough?