He had heard this woman violently abused at the dinner-table below, to be sure; but then the character of the persons who had joined in this cowardly vituperation was, to his mind, evidently such as to prejudice him in her favor; for he had a proud way with him, which never permitted him to judge of the absent by what was said of them, but by who said it. Taking these things together, he would have felt ashamed to have asked any questions concerning the woman, of those whose opinion and opportunities of knowledge he respected.
If she had thrown herself upon him, it had been with perfect frankness, and without any attempt at concealments. She had told him how she was persecuted and slandered by ignorant women, because she had been bold enough to tell them the truth about themselves. He had already heard something of this, and the stories told were of precisely such character as envious, vulgar, and malignant gossip circulates about females who make themselves conspicuous by their virtues or their talents. Besides, had he not, before he knew more of her, been violently prejudiced, too? What more natural than that others should be so, including these ignorant women?
And then this wonderful Clairvoyance! Who can dare to say that he believes nothing of its claims? He held its marvels and miracles in great contempt, and firmly believed, that whatever of truth there was would soon be unveiled of its apparent mystery by the close analysis of science, and shown to proceed from purely natural laws, the exact relations of which had not been heretofore understood.
And then it might have been accident. Ah! and then it might have been—what his thought had long struggled with, as the solution of all such phenomena—it might have been sympathetic! a mere result of the unconscious projection of his stronger vitality through a magnetic or odic medium of sympathy, which had been instantly established through the contact of his hand with the thin and sensitive region on the top of her head.
She might thus have been made to feel him intellectually, if not spiritually; to see, through this sympathetic sense, those images with which his brain was most full, and thus express this startling outline of his life.
Be those things as they may, he was restless and excited; his imagination was aroused, his memory profoundly stirred. He was thus fast hurried past the point where a cool analysis could well avail to rescue him. Tossed to and fro by doubts and dark suspicions, which a generous confidence strove hard to banish with its magnanimous suggestions, backed by self-reliant pride; confounded with the fear of acting with injustice towards a helpless female; with the fear, too, of the soft pluckings at his heart, from those tender memories which she had thus aroused by her offers of maternal sympathy—together with the penetrating light and warmth of that genial and unlucky evening spent with her, amidst the quiet of domestic surroundings—he could form no conclusions, discriminate no clearly definite purpose—could only wander to and fro, restless, in troubled, sad irresolution.
A vague dread of evil in advance afforded apprehension of he knew not what, that always, when the gloaming darkened most, seemed parted to a tremulous, dim light, like summer coming through the morn, and made his pulse go quicker, while those yearning memories faintly glimmered, as if within a shaded reflex of the glowing day.
He kept himself strictly secluded; yet, day by day, those dainty missives crept in upon him by some mysterious agency. At first they were read mechanically, and, amidst his troubled doubts, produced no apparent effect; but, by and by, they grew more chaste, more delicately worded, and more sweetly toned.
Was it that they were really advanced upon the blundering specimens we have seen? or could it be that his fancy had become excited with regard to them—that he was merely idealising unconsciously? or was it that those awkward first attempts at producing imitations of the rhapsodical style peculiar to himself, which had so excited his contempt, as obviously taken from the study of his writings, had now been cunningly improved upon, since personal intercourse had afforded his correspondent a closer insight of his purer and more simple forms of expression?
Had his haughty egotism been touched at last, by a skilful reflex of himself, thrown shrewdly into his eyes, from the dazzling surface of this snowy crow-quilled page?