“And will you tell me all?”
“Yes!”
He darted from me while speaking, and the next instant all trace of him was lost.
I must have remained a long time buried in the woods, but I have no remembrance even of my own sensations. So much was crowded on my brain that it seemed stolid to all subjects but the one great wish to learn more. Up to the time I met that strange being, who seemed so familiar and yet so frightful, I had been overwhelmed with tender grief. My father, suffering, perhaps dying—my father so lately found, filled every thought. No doubt entered my mind that he was my father; for months the conviction had gradually settled upon me; but when I remembered the distrust which tortured him, a painful wish to conquer it—to sweep it away, possessed me, not for my own sake—never for a moment did I think of any advantage it might prove to myself—but that he might be satisfied; that the cruel check that made his tenderness for me a torture might be removed.
But now came other feelings, such as I had never known or dreamed of before. I have repeated that man’s conversation word for word, but its effect no power of mine can reveal. Instead of that tender, holy thirst for knowledge that might give my father peace, a fierce curiosity took possession of my soul. I felt not like a child, but an avenger. I would know myself that night; mysteries should henceforth cease to surround me. The blackness would be swept from my brain, and by that man—that man. Was he man or demon? Could anything human, with so little effort, have filled my bosom with bitterness? I was to meet him that night, meet him in secrecy and darkness, in a strange place—I, a young girl, not more than seventeen. It did not frighten me; I panted for the hour to come, though the very thought thrilled me through and through with the idea of a sacrilege performed with a demon. My heart would now and then recoil from the thought, not in fear, but as from something unholy that I had resolved to do.
This thought could not deter me; on the contrary, it imparted ferocious strength to my resolution. I was determined to pluck and eat the fruit of knowledge, though it poisoned me. Toward evening, when I saw the first beams of sunset shooting like golden lances through the chestnut boughs and broken against their stately boles, I awoke from this chaos of thought and went home.
As I mounted the stairs to my room, Maria called after me, begging that I would come down and eat something; but I hurried on, closed the door of my chamber, and bolted it without answering a word. The very idea of seeing any one that night was hateful. She came softly up the stairs and knocked a long time, telling me that Turner had not been at home all day, and that she was so anxious about us both. I took no heed, but sat down by a window, looking with fierce impatience on the west.
A great embankment of clouds, black as chaos, rolled up from where the sun had been, sweeping all its glowing gold and crimson up through their ebon outskirts, where it burned and quivered in folds and fringes of fiery brightness. It was a beautiful sight, but lurid and wild, covering the earth with uncouth shadows, and filling the woods with a pale glare that to me seemed demoniac.
It answered well to the fierce impatience gnawing at my heart! Tented by that dark cloud, I should go forth on my errand with firmness. The more dreary my road became, the better I should like it.
When the cloud had spread and blackened over the whole horizon, I started up and put on my dress of dark cloth and a broad-leaved beaver hat, which I tied firmly on my head with a scarlet silk handkerchief, passed over the crown. I searched for no gloves, but went out, darting like a shadow through the hall, that Maria might not detect me.