My Enemys Daughter A Novel PDF Download

Excerpt from My Enemy's Daughter: A Novel It is a wet Sunday evening in the leaden heart of London. I am now in the Bloomsbury region; and perhaps I need hardly say that nothing on earth could be more dull, dingy, and unpicturesque in itself than the prospect from my windows. Yet just now, in the deepening gloom of a rainy dusk, I seem to look on something not unlike one of the most picturesque and romantic scenes whereon my eyes have ever rested. "Ich weiss nicht was soll esbedeuten but the ridges of the houses opposite begin to show through the steaming mist fantastically like the outlines of the hills I used to see every day years ago, and the broad blank lying between me and over the way may easily enough seem filled by the stretch of bay I have watched when it lay wild and drear on the wet evenings of late autumn like this. The kindly, loving, artistic fog and rain, which now hide all but the faint and softened outlines of our street, have done this for me; and lo! in Bloomsbury I am looking upon sea and hill once more. The very sounds of London city-life come to help out the illusion. That cry of the oyster-man below is a good deal more like the scream of some sea-bird than most theatrical imitations are like the reality. The church-bells clinking and tolling for evening service are to me now the bell of the church to which I used to be conducted when a boy on Sundays, and with which so many of the associations of my afterlife inevitably connect themselves. It used to be a dreadful ceremonial, that service, to us boys, on the fine Sundays of summer. It was bad enough in winter; but in summer it became unspeakably more torturing. There was a window in the church close to where we used to sit - poor little weary, yawning martyrs - and the branches of an elm flapped unceasingly on the panes. Tantalus-torture was it to watch the tender, lucent leaves, free in the glorious air of May or June, as they flickered across the window, and seemed to whisper of the blue sky and the shingly strand and the waves of transparent emerald which they could see and we could not; while the organ pealed and the clergyman preached the long sermon to which we never listened. I do not know how it is, that when I thus sit alone of nights and do not feel inclined to read, or steadily to go to work at something, every object I see, flame, cloud or even chimney-pot, reminds me in an indescribable, irresistible way, of some object belonging to the dear, dull little sea-port town where I, Emanuel Temple Banks, was born some five-and-thirty years ago. I have now written my full name, but it is long since I have been known otherwise than as Emanuel Temple. I pruned my name down to its present brevity for reasons which shall be explained in due time. I was called "Emanuel Temple" because my mother had a proper womanly objection to commonplace or vulgar names, and since we could call ourselves nothing better than Banks, resolved that we should at least have euphonious and elegant Christian names. Therefore, instead of becoming, as was suggested, John Banks and Peter Banks, my brother and I became Emanuel Temple Banks and Theodore Eustace Banks respectively. I scarcely know by what process Theodore Eustace and myself were brought up. We were the only children - I the elder by a year - and my father died when I was six years old. He had owned fishing-boats, and was doing well, until, at the instigation of my mother, he unfortunately took to immature building speculations, and failed accordingly, fishing-boats and all going down in the land-wreck indeed, my poor father did not remain long after the ruin of his venture, and my mother lad to live by making gloves and trying to let odgings. She had been a genteel woman of her class at one time; and being engaged in ne of the few pretentious millinery shops in our little town, was regarded by her friends as having made quite a sort of mesalliance when she married my father, who was then only a good