Frankenstein's Bride Read Online Free Page B

slowed my pace and, much in need of warmth and company, I broke my journey at
     the Voyagers' Club in Covent Garden, where I enjoyed, by an encouraging fire, an hour's respite with friends of a like turn
     of mind, speaking of fossils with Knight, and the natural roots of our language with Smith. I mentioned to no one the sight
     I had just seen. It seemed at the time to be one of those scenes one witnesses, a scene that produces a little, momentary
     curiosity and then is done, forgotten.
    Some days later the grim story I must now relate began in earnest, but forgive me if I go back from that figure on the waterfront
     at Chelsea to speak of the previous summer, when the world was still young and I first met my friend Victor Frankenstein.

TWO
    IAND VICTOR MET on a cricket field! Though Swiss and having passed most of his life in that country or in others more remote,
     Victor, having arrived with his wife in this country only a few years earlier, was promptly introduced to the game by Hugo
     Feltham, who had been a fellow student at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany. Hugo had later come on to Oxford, which
     is where we two had met and become friends. Thus it came about that, as soon as I arrived at Hugo's home, Old Hall, at Longtree
     in Kent, I was directed by his mother, on Hugo's instructions, to the village green. Her message was that the annual cricket
     match between Upper and Lower Longtree, always hotly contested, was now taking place. Hugo, she told me, urgently required
     my services as a batsman, one of the team having been enticed away by the other side, yet another having absconded from the
     village with another man's wife.
    Leaving my horse at the house I walked through the pleasant grounds of Old Hall. A small gate in the wall took me through
     the fields of the home farm, where corn was already tall under the July sun. I passed the church and went down the village
     street, a matter of a draper's forge and two inns, and arrived at the village green, where stood a mighty oak of the kind
     always described as having sheltered King Charles I when in flight from his enemies; and beyond that, what a heart-lifting
     sight lay ahead of me! Spread out over the greensward in the sunshine were thirteen men, some in white trousers and shirts,
     others in their day-to-day moleskins, with flannel shirtsleeves rolled up. Even as I stood beneath the massive oak, watching,
     I saw a burly fellow in brown trousers with a white shirt open at the throat swing his bat and send the ball flying high in
     the air, away from where I stood and into a clump of trees on the other side of the green. I heard Hugo's enthusiastic voice—“Well
     played, Simcox.”
    Hugo himself lay extended on the grass in a cluster of spectators and players, which included some ladies in pale dresses
     and straw hats. Spotting me as I walked towards them, Hugo leapt to his feet and came towards me, arms extended, beaming and
     pushing his long fair hair from his face in the way I so well remembered. “Jonathan!” he cried. “Welcome, thrice welcome,
     my dear fellow.”
    “Your mother informs me that you need me,” I responded.
    “We do indeed, my dear,” he told me, “for we're almost out and fifty runs behind. Only three men to go. Those ruffians of
     Lower Longtree have seduced away our blacksmith, who is to marry the daughter of the captain of their team. We lost a second
     player in another affair of the heart, he and his inamorata having left for London on Tuesday. Love has no scruples, as we
     know. At the wicket now is one of our footmen, a sturdy fellow in his father's trousers, which he wears for luck, and our
     local innkeeper, who, you will see, shows all the signs of having over-imbibed his own wares. He describes himself as feeling
     as if struck by a cricket ball, which he shortly will be—“Ah!” he exclaimed as the other team cried out, “There! He's lost
     his wicket. Now it's up to you, Jonathan. We have only you