Let Me Alone Read Online Free Page A

wisp of a woman whom he had beaten, with her head held high in its unbecoming hat, while the loutish Paul followed behind with her meagre possessions.
    But Anna did not smile with him. Dimly, her immature mind was aware of tragedy in that comical dwindling figure; recognized a kind of nobility in that unromantic departure, so that she almost started to run after her, to give her some sign of appreciation and affection, that she might not go away altogether uncomforted. But it was too late. The small, dowdy figure was already disappearing in the rich, dappled green shade of the chestnut-wood; and Paul, with the burdens he carried so easily, was plunging in behind, like a diver entering a sea of purplish shadow and dancing, lucent green.
    So the first bright infantile page of Anna’s life was turned, and before her lay a new page, neither so bright nor so innocent, a page whereon the shadows were already beginning to fall.
    The existence of Mascarat was one of complete, almost incredible isolation. No visitor from the outside world climbed that stony and arduous path that led at length through the whispering chestnut-forest. No stranger entered the grim old house where Seguela, like a bundle of dingy black feathers, flopped perpetually from room to room in clumsy, corvine haste.
    Seguela was one of those women who seem never to have been young, rather tall, but with an ugly stoop, so that on the rare occasions when she stood upright her height came as a surprise. She had a strange, broken way of moving, as though she were deformed, and was always in a frustration of stumbling, purposeless haste. She lived with her son in a dark hole of a room, a sort of den, opening out of the kitchen at the back.
    Nobody knew what Seguela thought of the strange
ménage.
She went on with her work with an obstinate, blank indifference, taking no notice of anyone. But all thetime, out of the bundle of dusty black rags that was her slovenly person, her small, sharp eyes were continually peering about with a cynical gleam of malice that took note of everything.
    Silent and cynical, she watched what went on. But when Miss Wilson had gone, Seguela went limping about as before, busy in her stubborn, aimless, animal sort of way, seeming to have forgotten immediately that the other woman had ever existed.
    Seguela was the chief link between Mascarat and the outer world. Once or twice a month on a fine afternoon she would take off the black triangular shawl that usually covered her thick, dark, greasy hair, and put on instead a full-bottomed cap of some white material. Then she would set out to visit her friends, looking like a dusty, white-headed insect as she toiled awkwardly down the rocky slope.
    It was she who, when any communication became necessary between James Forrester and his neighbours, conveyed the messages and made the arrangements. The peasants disliked James, distrusted him as a foreigner in such circumstances must always be distrusted. But in his case there was something more than hostile suspicion. There was fear and there was profound opposition. A queer, black, half-insolent fear, and a definite, immense opposition, like a mountain that could never be moved.
    But all the same, they came every autumn in due time and at Seguela’s summons to buy the grapes from James’s vineyards and carry them away. But always with the peculiar subterranean malevolence about them, keeping their heads averted. And sometimes the tawny, Spanish-seeming men would look up at James with a dark gleaming ferocity in their eyes, as though they would have liked to destroy him – if they dared.
    It pleased James to see this ferocious glitter; as well as the silent, immovable opposition. It amused him. It gave him an ironic sense of power. Grey-faced and grim, he stood up there on the pedestal of his proud, innate superiority, the inevitable master, while their little slavish hates laid seige to him, trying to drag him down.
    Anna had almost forgotten Miss