The pleasant scent of the wood, evolved by the hot sun, stole up to my

nostrils, as if I had been an idol in its niche. Many trees mingled

their fragrance into a thousand-fold odor. Possibly there was a

sensual influence in the broad light of noon that lay beneath me. It

may have been the cause, in part, that I suddenly found myself

possessed by a mood of disbelief in moral beauty or heroism, and a

conviction of the folly of attempting to benefit the world. Our

especial scheme of reform, which, from my observatory, I could take in

with the bodily eye, looked so ridiculous that it was impossible not to

laugh aloud.

"But the joke is a little too heavy," thought I. "If I were wise, I

should get out of the scrape with all diligence, and then laugh at my

companions for remaining in it."

While thus musing, I heard with perfect distinctness, somewhere in the

wood beneath, the peculiar laugh which I have described as one of the

disagreeable characteristics of Professor Westervelt. It brought my

thoughts back to our recent interview. I recognized as chiefly due to

this man's influence the sceptical and sneering view which just now had

filled my mental vision in regard to all life's better purposes. And

it was through his eyes, more than my own, that I was looking at

Hollingsworth, with his glorious if impracticable dream, and at the

noble earthliness of Zenobia's character, and even at Priscilla, whose

impalpable grace lay so singularly between disease and beauty. The

essential charm of each had vanished.

There are some spheres the

contact with which inevitably degrades the high, debases the pure,

deforms the beautiful. It must be a mind of uncommon strength, and

little impressibility, that can permit itself the habit of such

intercourse, and not be permanently deteriorated; and yet the

Professor's tone represented that of worldly society at large, where a

cold scepticism smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations, and

makes the rest ridiculous. I detested this kind of man; and all the

more because a part of my own nature showed itself responsive to him.

Voices were now approaching through the region of the wood which lay in

the vicinity of my tree. Soon I caught glimpses of two figures--a

woman and a man--Zenobia and the stranger--earnestly talking together

as they advanced.

Zenobia had a rich though varying color. It was, most of the while, a

flame, and anon a sudden paleness. Her eyes glowed, so that their

light sometimes flashed upward to me, as when the sun throws a dazzle

from some bright object on the ground. Her gestures were free, and

strikingly impressive. The whole woman was alive with a passionate

intensity, which I now perceived to be the phase in which her beauty

culminated. Any passion would have become her well; and passionate

love, perhaps, the best of all. This was not love, but anger, largely

intermixed with scorn. Yet the idea strangely forced itself upon me,

that there was a sort of familiarity between these two companions,

necessarily the result of an intimate love,--on Zenobia's part, at

least,--in days gone by, but which had prolonged itself into as

intimate a hatred, for all futurity. As they passed among the trees,

reckless as her movement was, she took good heed that even the hem of

her garment should not brush against the stranger's person. I wondered

whether there had always been a chasm, guarded so religiously, betwixt

these two.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024