A month later the young soldier was dead; and something more than ordinary reasoning will be necessary to persuade the two cousins—the younger and more impressive, especially—that their gazing after him did not cast an evil omen on his fate and a blight upon his life. Another near relative has since gone away on the same patriotic errand; but when the farewells were spoken in the lighted room, the two girls escaped at once and hid themselves in another apartment, so that they should not even see him disappear through the door. When last heard from,[10] fever and bullet had yet spared him; and what more is needed to make the two young girls hopelessly superstitious for life, at least in this one regard? They are not the only persons who have seen and felt that fading out in the darkness as an omen; for the same observer who once stood on the bluff at Long Branch, as a heavy night of storm was closing, and saw the "Star of the West" gradually fade away and disappear into that threatening storm and darkness—unconscious that she was to emerge again to play so important a part in the drama of the nation's degradation,—the same observer saw the same omen at Niblo's not long ago, when the poor Jewess of Miss Bateman's wonderful "Leah" fell back step by step into the crowd, as the curtain was dropping, her last hope withered and her last duty done, and nothing remaining but to "follow on with my people."
[10] February 1st, 1863.
And at all such times Proserpine comes back, as she may have cast wistful glances towards the vanishing home of her childhood, when the rude hands of the ravishers were bearing her away from the spot where she was gathering flowers in the vale of Enna; and we think of Orpheus taking that fatal, wistful last look back at Eurydice, with the thought in his eyes that could not give her up even for a moment, when emerging to the outer air from the flames and smoke of Tartarus. Wistful glances back at all we have lost are embodied; and all these long, agonizing appeals of the eye against that fate of separation which cannot be longer combated with tongue or hand, are made over again for our torture.
It has been said that some persons endeavor to deceive themselves with reference to their holding any belief in omens and auguries. And some of those who by position and education should be lifted above gross errors, are quite as liable as others to this self-deception. Quite a large circle of prominent persons may remember an instance in which a leading Doctor of Divinity, renowned for his strong common-sense as well as beloved for his goodness, was joining in a general conversation on human traits and oddities, when one of the company alluded to popular superstitions and acknowledged that he had one, though only one—that of the "moon over the shoulder." Another confessed to another, and still another to another, while the Doctor "pished" and "pshawed" at each until he made him heartily ashamed of his confession. The man of the lunar tendencies, however, had a habit of bearding lions, clerical as well as other, and he at last turned on the Doctor.
"Do you mean to say that you have no superstitions whatever, Doctor?" he asked.
"None whatever," said the Doctor, confidently.
"You have no confidence in supernatural revelations in any relation of life?" pursued the questioner.
"None whatever," repeated the Doctor.
"And you never act—try, now, if you please, to remember—you never act under impression from any omen that does not appeal to reason, or are made more or less comfortable by the existence of one? In other words, is there no occurrence that ever induces you to alter your course of action, when that occurrence has nothing whatever to do with the object in view, and when you can give no such explanation to yourself as you would like to give to the outside world, for the feeling or the change?"
"There is nothing of the kind," replied the Doctor to this long question. Then he suddenly seemed to remember—paused, and colored a little as he went on. "I acknowledge my error, gentlemen," he said. "I have a superstition, though I never before thought of it in the light of one. I am rendered exceedingly uncomfortable, and almost ready to turn back, if a cat, dog or other animal chances to run across the way before me, at the moment when I am starting upon any journey."