[Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens]@TWC D-Link bookBarnaby Rudge CHAPTER 5 3/12
You could not take the eyes or mouth, or lines upon the cheek, and say, if this or that were otherwise, it would not be so.
Yet there it always lurked--something for ever dimly seen, but ever there, and never absent for a moment.
It was the faintest, palest shadow of some look, to which an instant of intense and most unutterable horror only could have given birth; but indistinct and feeble as it was, it did suggest what that look must have been, and fixed it in the mind as if it had had existence in a dream. More faintly imaged, and wanting force and purpose, as it were, because of his darkened intellect, there was this same stamp upon the son. Seen in a picture, it must have had some legend with it, and would have haunted those who looked upon the canvas.
They who knew the Maypole story, and could remember what the widow was, before her husband's and his master's murder, understood it well.
They recollected how the change had come, and could call to mind that when her son was born, upon the very day the deed was known, he bore upon his wrist what seemed a smear of blood but half washed out. 'God save you, neighbour!' said the locksmith, as he followed her, with the air of an old friend, into a little parlour where a cheerful fire was burning. 'And you,' she answered smiling.
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