THE WHITE OLD MAID
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
This is an admirable example of Hawthorne's point of view and style. Starting with an aim to leave one strong impression on the mind of the reader, instead of the remembrance of a number of related facts, the author not only omits everything that would detract from the unity and strength of this impression, but creates only such scenes and situations as will intensify the effect.
THE WHITE OLD MAID
By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The moonbeams came through two deep and narrow windows and showed a spacious chamber richly furnished in an antique fashion. From one lattice the shadow of the diamond panes was thrown upon the floor; the ghostly light through the other swept upon a bed, falling between the heavy silken curtains and illuminating the face of a young man. But how quietly the slumberer lay! how pale his features! And how like a shroud the sheet was wound about his frame! Yes, it was a corpse in its burial clothes.
Suddenly the fixed features seemed to move with dark emotion. Strange fantasy! It was but the shadow of the fringed curtain waving between the dead face and the moonlight as the door of the chamber opened and a girl stole softly to the bedside. Was there delusion in the moonbeams, or did her gesture and her eye betray a gleam of triumph as she bent over the pale corpse, pale as itself, and pressed her living lips to the cold ones of the dead? As she drew back from that long kiss her features writhed as if a proud heart were fighting with its anguish. Again it seemed that the features of the corpse had moved responsive to her own. Still an illusion. The silken curtains had waved a second time between the dead face and the moonlight as another fair young girl unclosed the door and glided ghostlike to the bedside. There the two maidens stood, both beautiful, with the pale beauty of the dead between them. But she who had first entered was proud and stately, and the other a soft and fragile thing.
"Away!" cried the lofty one. "Thou hadst him living; the dead is mine."
"Thine!" returned the other, shuddering. "Well hast thou spoken; the dead is thine."
The proud girl started and stared into her face with a ghastly look, but a wild and mournful expression passed across the features of the gentle one, and, weak and helpless, she sank down on the bed, her head pillowed beside that of the corpse and her hair mingling with his dark locks. A creature of hope and joy, the first draft of sorrow had bewildered her.