_Jealousy._
Again seven days passed before she revisited me. Indeed, her visits had
always an interval of seven days, or a multiple of seven, between.
Since the last, a maddening jealousy had seized me. For, returning from
those unknown regions into which her soul had wandered away, and where
she had stayed for hours, did she not sometimes awake with a smile? How
could I be sure that she did not lead two distinct existences?--that she
had not some loving spirit, or man, who, like her, had for a time left
the body behind--who was all in all to her in that region, and whom she
forgot when she forsook it, as she forgot me when she entered it? It was
a thought I could not brook. But I put aside its persistency as well as
I could, till she should come again. For this I waited. I could not now
endure the thought of compelling the attendance of her unconscious form;
of making her body, like a living cage, transport to my presence the
unresisting soul. I shrank from it as a true man would shrink from
kissing the lips of a sleeping woman whom he loved, not knowing that she
loved him in return.
It may well be said that to follow such a doubt was to inquire too
curiously; but once the thought had begun, and grown, and been born, how
was I to slay the monster, and be free of its hated presence? Was its
truth not a possibility?--Yet how could even she help me, for she knew
nothing of the matter? How could she vouch for the unknown? What news
can the serene face of the moon, ever the same to us, give of the hidden
half of herself turned ever towards what seems to us but the blind
abysmal darkness, which yet has its own light and its own life? All I
could hope for was to see her, to tell her, to be comforted at least by
her smile.
My saving angel glided blind into my room, lay down upon her bier, and
awaited the resurrection. I sat and awaited mine, panting to untwine
from my heart the cold death-worm that twisted around it, yet picturing
to myself the glow of love on the averted face of the beautiful
spirit--averted from me, and bending on a radiant companion all the
light withdrawn from the lovely form beside me. That light began to
return. “She is coming, she is coming,” I said within me. “Back from its
glowing south travels the sun of my spring, the glory of my summer.”
Floating slowly up from the infinite depths of her being, came the
conscious woman; up--up from the realms of stillness lying deeper than
the plummet of self-knowledge can sound; up from the formless, up into
the known, up into the material, up to the windows that look forth on
the embodied mysteries around. Her eyelids rose. One look of love all
but slew my fear. When I told her my grief, she answered with a smile of
pity, yet half of disdain at the thought.
“If ever I find it so, I will kill myself there, that I may go to my
Hades with you. But if I am dreaming of another, how is it that I always
rise in my vision and come to you? You will go crazy if you fancy such
foolish things,” she added, with a smile of reproof.
The spectral thought vanished, and I was free.
“Shall I tell you,” she resumed, covering her face with her hands, “why
I behaved so proudly to you, from the very first day you entered the
house? It was because, when I passed you on the lawn, before ever you
entered the house, I felt a strange, undefinable attraction towards you,
which continued, although I could not account for it and would not yield
to it. I was heartily annoyed at it. But you see it was of no use--here
I am. That was what made me so fierce, too, when I first found myself in
your room.”
It was indeed long before she came to my room again.