And urge conflicting streams from vein to vein.”
When he saw or thought of her a blessed reassurance tranquillized him; when he heeded the hideous suggestions of his treacherous servant a frozen shudder ran through him. The waves of tenderness and violence chased one another over the mimic scene. At one moment he said,—
“If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself.
I’ll not believe it.”
At another moment he writhed in excruciating anguish under the fearful innuendoes which Iago wound about him. The spectacle was like that of an anaconda winding her tightening coils around a tiger until one can hear the cracking of the bones in his lordly back.
When the fiendish suggestions of Iago first took thorough effect the result startled even him, and he gazed on the awful convulsions in the face of his victim as one might look into the crater of Vesuvius. That which had seemed granite proved to be gunpowder. As with the prairie fire: the traveller lets a spark fall, and the whole earth seems to be one rushing flame. Then swiftly followed those lacerating alternations of contradictory excitements which are the essence of jealousy,—the mixture of intense opposites into an experience of infernal discord. His love lingers on her and gloats over her, and will not believe any evil of her. His suspicion makes him shrink into himself with horror:
“O curse of marriage,
That we can call these delicate creatures ours,
And not their appetites.”
Now he seeks relief in loathing and hating her, trying to tear her dear image out from among his heart-strings. From the crazing agony of this effort he springs wildly into wrath against her traducer. Forrest expressed these sudden and violent transitions from extreme to extreme with exact truth to nature, by that constant interchanging of intense muscles and languid eyes with intense eyes and languid muscles which corresponds with the successive apprehension of a blessing to be embraced and an evil to be abhorred. The change in his appearance and moving too was commensurate with what he had undergone. As he advanced to meet his wife on her arrival in Cyprus, he walked like one inspired, weightless and illumined with joy: