The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (6.1895)

The Dead Wall

By H. B. Marriott Watson
The dawn stared raw and yellow out of the east at Rosewarne.
Its bleak and ugly face smouldered through morose vapours.
The wind blew sharp against the windows, shaking them in their
casements. The prospect from that lonely chamber overawed him
with menace ; it glowered upon him. The houses in the square,
wrapped in immitigable gloom, were to him ominous memorials of
death. They frightened him into a formless panic. Anchored in
that soundless sea, they terrified him with their very stillness. In
dreary ranks they rose, a great high wall of doom, lifting their
lank chimneys to the dreadful sky. They obsessed him with rore-
bodings to which he could put no term, for which he could find no
reason. Shrouded under its great terror, his poor mind fell into
deeper depression under the influence of those malign and ugly
signals. He strove to withdraw his thoughts and direct them upon
some different subject. He wrenched them round to the contem-
plation of his room, his walls, his wife. A dull pain throbbed in
the back of his head. He repeated aloud the topics upon which
he would have his mind revolve, but the words rang in his ears
without meaning. He touched the pictures on the wall, he spoke
their names, he covered his face and strained hard to recapture
coherent thought. The subjects mocked him : they were too
nimble