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Page 60
He felt a morbid curiosity to hear what reply would be made to the
question whose answer only he could know. But he was puzzled to
observe that it appeared to throw Nurse into a state of agitation as
great as though she had herself been the perpetrator of Balder's
crime! She stood quaking and irresolute, now peeping for a moment
from behind her screen, then dodging back with an increase of panic.
This display--rendered more uncouth by its voicelessness--revolted the
�sthetic sensibilities of Helwyse. Besides, what was the meaning of
it? Had it actually been Davy Jones with whom he had striven on the
midnight sea? and had his adversary, instead of drowning, spread his
bat-wings for home, and left his supposititious murderer to disquiet
himself in vain? Verily, a practical joke worthy its author!
This conceit revealed others, as a lightning-flash the midnight
landscape. Balder was encircled by witchcraft,--had been ferried by a
real Charon to no imaginary Hades. The quaint secluded beauty of
circumstance was an illusion, soon to be dispelled. Gnulemah
herself--miserable thought!--was perhaps a thing of evil; what if this
very hag were she in another form? Glancing round in the deepening
twilight, Balder fancied the dark, still plants and tropic shrubs
assumed demoniac forms, bending and crowding about him. The old witch
yonder was muttering some infernal spell; already he felt numbness in
his limbs, dizziness in his brain.
The devils are gathering nearer. A heavy, heated atmosphere quivers
before his eyes, or else the witch and her unholy crew are uniting in
a reeling dance. In vain does Balder try to shut his eyes and escape
the giddy spectacle; they stare widely open and see things
supernatural. Nor can he ward off these with his hands, which are
rigid before him, and defy his will. The devilish jig becomes wilder,
and careers through the air, Balder sweeping with it. In mid-whirl, he
sees the crocodile,--cold, motionless, waiting with long, dry
jaws--for what?
A cry breaks from him. With a wrench that strains his heart he bursts
loose from the devil's bonds that confine his limbs. The witch has
vanished, and Helwyse seems to himself to fall headlong from a vast
height, striking the earth at last helpless and broken.
"Gnulemah!"
Gasping out that name, he becomes insensible.
Beneath an outside of respectable composure have turmoiled the tides
of such remorse and pain as only a man at once largely and finely made
can feel. Added to the mental excitement carried through many phases
to the point of distraction, have been bodily exertion and want of
food and sleep. The apparition of unnatural ugliness, of behavior
strange as her looks, coming upon him in this untoward condition,
needed not the heat of the conservatory and stupefying perfume of the
flowers to bring on the brief delirium and final unconsciousness. As
he lies there let us remember that his last word threw back the
unworthy, dark misgiving, that beauty and deformity, good and bad,
could by any jugglery become convertible.
As a mere matter of fact, Nurse was no witch, nor had she, of her own
will and knowledge, done Balder any harm. On the contrary, she was
already at work, with trembling hands and painfully thumping heart, to
relieve his sad case. She was touched and agitated to a singular
degree. It was not the first time in the patient's life that she had
tended him. The reader has guessed her secret,--that she had known
Balder before he knew himself, and cared for him when his only cares
had been to eat and sleep. She knew her baby through his manly stature
and mature features, less from his likeness to his father than from
certain uneffaced traces of infantine form and expression. She was of
gypsy blood, and had looked on few human faces since last seeing his.
He did not recognize her until some time afterwards. All things
considered, it was hardly possible he should do so.
It was curious to observe how awkwardly she now managed emotions that
had once flowed but too readily. She was moved by impulses which she
had long forgotten how to interpret. Her only outlet for tenderness
was her solitary eye, which might well have given way under the strain
thus put upon it.
But by and by the inward heat began to thaw the stiff outward crust,
which had been hardening for so many years. Glimpses there were of the
handy, affectionate, sympathizing woman, emerging from fossilization.
Her withered heart once more hungered and thirsted, and the strange
duality tended to melt back again into unity.
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