As for Westervelt, he was not a whit more warmed by Zenobia's passion
than a salamander by the heat of its native furnace. He would have
been absolutely statuesque, save for a look of slight perplexity,
tinctured strongly with derision. It was a crisis in which his
intellectual perceptions could not altogether help him out. He failed
to comprehend, and cared but little for comprehending, why Zenobia
should put herself into such a fume; but satisfied his mind that it was
all folly, and only another shape of a woman's manifold absurdity,
which men can never understand. How many a woman's evil fate has yoked
her with a man like this! Nature thrusts some of us into the world
miserably incomplete on the emotional side, with hardly any
sensibilities except what pertain to us as animals.
No passion, save
of the senses; no holy tenderness, nor the delicacy that results from
this. Externally they bear a close resemblance to other men, and have
perhaps all save the finest grace; but when a woman wrecks herself on
such a being, she ultimately finds that the real womanhood within her
has no corresponding part in him. Her deepest voice lacks a response;
the deeper her cry, the more dead his silence. The fault may be none
of his; he cannot give her what never lived within his soul. But the
wretchedness on her side, and the moral deterioration attendant on a
false and shallow life, without strength enough to keep itself sweet,
are among the most pitiable wrongs that mortals suffer.
Now, as I looked down from my upper region at this man and
woman,--outwardly so fair a sight, and wandering like two lovers in the
wood,--I imagined that Zenobia, at an earlier period of youth, might
have fallen into the misfortune above indicated. And when her
passionate womanhood, as was inevitable, had discovered its mistake,
here had ensued the character of eccentricity and defiance which
distinguished the more public portion of her life.
Seeing how aptly matters had chanced thus far, I began to think it the
design of fate to let me into all Zenobia's secrets, and that therefore
the couple would sit down beneath my tree, and carry on a conversation
which would leave me nothing to inquire. No doubt, however, had it so
happened, I should have deemed myself honorably bound to warn them of a
listener's presence by flinging down a handful of unripe grapes, or by
sending an unearthly groan out of my hiding-place, as if this were one
of the trees of Dante's ghostly forest. But real life never arranges
itself exactly like a romance. In the first place, they did not sit
down at all. Secondly, even while they passed beneath the tree,
Zenobia's utterance was so hasty and broken, and Westervelt's so cool
and low, that I hardly could make out an intelligible sentence on
either side. What I seem to remember, I yet suspect, may have been
patched together by my fancy, in brooding over the matter afterwards.