Page 19 of Taming a Beastly Duke
“I do not believe that anything is impossible,” she said. “And I believe it is important to have hope. I believe that there is healing to be found everywhere if we are only willing to see it.”
The duke chuckled, stepping even closer to her, close enough now for her to smell the spice of his perfume.
“And what of redemption?” he asked, still laughing softly. “Do you believe that everyone can be redeemed? Even those with dark souls?”
The furrow in Adelaide’s brow deepened. Was he trying to tell her something? Or was this his indirect way of telling her that he was taunting her after all?
“Yes, I do,” she said with surprising fierceness. “It is one reason why I love to read. There are so many tales, inside and outside of poetry, in which the most impossible circumstances change and the coldest of hearts can be transformed.”
She did not realize he had moved closer still until his jacket brushed her nightgown. She looked into his face, noticing that his stony expression wavered. His eyes danced between the longing hunger she always saw within them and a consideration of something which compromised his carefully constructed air of cold composure. Could her defense of hope and redemption be reaching his concealed heart?
Apart from the hunger in his eyes, his features were harsh and unreadable in the shadows cast by the firelight. She cleared her throat and opened the book she held, turning to a page she believed to be non-invasively pertinent to her opinion about her favorite poet.
“Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all. — I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. — That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense.”
