—from Dombey and Son(Chapter 18)
Charles Dickens
[1] It was a wet night; and the melancholy rain fell pattering and dropping with a weary sound.A sluggish wind was blowing, and went moaning round the house, as if it were in pain or grief.A shrill noise quivered through the trees.While she sat weeping, it grew late, and dreary midnight tolled out from the steeples.
[2] Florence was little more than a child in years – not yet fourteen—and the loneliness and gloom of such an hour in the great house where Death had lately made its own tremendous devastation, might have set an older fancy brooding on vague terrors.But her innocent imagination was too full of one theme to admit them.Nothing wandered in her thoughts but love—a wandering love, indeed, and castaway—but turning always to her father.There was nothing in the dropping of the rain, the moaning of the wind, the shuddering of the trees, the striking of the solemn clocks, that shook this one thought, or diminished its interest.Her recollections of the dear dead boy—and they were never absent—were itself, the same thing.And oh, to be shut out: to be so lost: never to have looked into her father’s face or touched him, since that hour!
[3] She could not go to bed, poor child, and never had gone yet, since then, without making her nightly pilgrimage to his door.It would have been a strange sad sight, to see her now, stealing lightly down the stairs through the thick gloom, and stopping at it with a beating heart, and blinded eyes, and hair that fell down loosely and unthought of; and touching it outside with her wet cheek.But the night covered it, and no one knew.
[4] The moment that she touched the door on this night, Florence found that it was open.For the first time it stood open, though by but a hair’s breadth: and there was a light within.The first impulse of the timidchild—and she yielded to it—was to retire swiftly.Her next, to go back, and to enter; and this second impulse held her in irresolution on the staircase.