Susan Fielding

Author : Annie Edwards
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781330688397
Total Pages : 504 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (883 download)

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Download or read book Susan Fielding (Classic Reprint) written by Annie Edwards and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-04 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Susan Fielding It was a drowsy, silent afternoon early in summer. The outlines of the scarce-clad trees showed lifeless against a neutral-tinted sky. The dull white London road, brisk thoroughfare in the old coaching days to all western England, looked duller and whiter than usual, as it stretched away, without a spot of color to break its monotony, across Hounslow Heath. Even the canal seemed to drone in a sleepier voice than was its wont, as it stagnated by, its brief life spent, under the wilderness of poplar, alder, and sycamore that grew around the powder-mills. "Is my life to be like this?" thought Susan, as she leaned across the parapet of the little wayside bridge, and watched, as much as excessively shortsighted eyes can be said to watch, the dreary heath and drearier overshadowed stream. "Have warm suns and cheerful sounds, like love and home, and all other pleasant things, gone clean away from me forever? Oh, papa, if I could see you once - if my watching here meant anything! If I could hear your voice, scolding me, even - there's no one to scold me any more - but hear it. Ah, I'm sick of silence! I want papa's face to kiss; I want his arms to hold me as they used." And now great tears rose slowly in the short-sighted eyes; every tinge of color ebbed from the childish, round cheeks, and, with a passion of pain, the girl realized the irrevocableness of her loss, the emptiness of a world from which her own narrow world of love had been newly blotted. "If he had loved me less I might bear it! Oh, why was I left? What good was it to leave me in this big world, where no one will want me - no one be fond of me again till I die?" Susan Fielding was seventeen years old on this day when I first bring her before you, watching at the spot where, ever since she was a child of six, she had been accustomed to watch for the return of her father across the heath; and knowing that she watched in vain. Mr. Fielding had now been dead three months. April rain and May sunshine had already brought up a thin green covering over his grave in Halfont churchyard. The servants had got new places - the house a new tenant. At midsummer, scarce a fortnight hence, the furniture would be sold and Susan have to seek a home among relations of whose very existence she had not known until her father's death left her desolate. Throughout a lifetime of fifty-four years, Mr. Joseph Fielding had been a man neither possessing nor wanting friends - one of a class rather more numerous, I suspect, than some genial-minded people would have us think. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.