Idolatry: Chapter 20

Chapter 20

BETWEEN WAKING AND SLEEPING.

There was an old woman in the house who went by the name of Nurse; her
duties being to cook the meals and preserve a sort of order in such of
the rooms as were occupied by the family. Since the greater part of
the house was uninhabited, and there were only two mouths to feed
beside her own, Nurse was not without leisure moments. How were they
employed?

Not in gossiping, for she had no cronies. Not in millinery and
dressmaking, for there were no admiring eyes to reward such labors.
Not in gadding, for she might not pass the imprisoning wall. Not even
in reading, perhaps because she was not much of a proficient in that
art.

The truth is that--to the outward eye at least--she was uniformly
idle. For years past she had spent many hours of each night in the
corner of the kitchen fireplace, which was as large, roomy, and
smoke-seasoned as any in story-books or medi�val halls. Here sat she,
winter and summer, her body bent forward over her knees, her
disfigured face supported on one hand, while the other lay across her
breast. This was her common position, and she seldom moved to change
it. She hummed tunes to herself sometimes,--not hymn tunes,--but never
was heard to utter an articulate word. Often you might have thought
her asleep,--but no! when you least expected it a shining black eye
was fixed oh you; an eye which, two hundred years ago, would have
convicted its owner of witchcraft. It was the only bright thing about
the poor woman.

Whenever the master of the house came to the kitchen, Nurse's
witch-eye followed him animal-like; no movement of his, no expression,
seemed to escape it. A curious observer might sometimes have remarked
in her, during the few moments after the man's entrance, a muffled
agitation, an irregularity of the breath, an obscure anxiety and
suspense. This, however, would soon subside, and rarely recur during
his stay. The phenomenon had been observable daily for nearly a score
of years, yet nothing had meantime happened to explain or justify it.
Had an original dread--groundless or not--prolonged its phantom
existence precisely because it had never met with justification?

Often for weeks at a time, complete silence would obtain between
master and Nurse. He would enter and ramble hither and thither the
ample kitchen; eat what had been prepared for him, and be off again
without a word or glance of acknowledgment. Or, again, pacing
irregularly to and fro before the fireplace, he would pour forth long
disjointed rhapsodies, wild speculations, hopes, and misgivings; his
mood changing from solemn to gay, and round through gusty passion to
morbid gloom. But never did he address his words to Nurse so much as
to himself or to some imaginary interlocutor; and she for her part
never answered him a syllable, but sat in silence through it all. Yet
was she ever alert to listen, and sometimes the subdued trembling
would come on and the obstruction of breath. But when the talker, in
mid-excitement of speech, snatched his violin and drew from it
melodies weirdly exquisite, soothing his diseased thoughts and
harmonizing them, Nurse would become once more composed; the phantom
danger was again put off, and the violinist would presently fall into
silence,--sometimes into sleep. But still, while he slept, the
witch-eye watched him; though with an expression of yearning, uncouth
intensity which seldom ventured forth while he was awake.

With Gnulemah, Nurse's intercourse became yearly more and more
infrequent. As the child arose to womanhood, she grew apart from the
voiceless creature who had cared for her infancy. It was not
Gnulemah's fault, whose heart was never barren of loving impulses.
But mother, father, were words whose meaning she had never been
taught; and had Nurse comprehended the unconscious thirst and hunger
of the girl's soul,--unconscious, but not therefore harmless,--she
might have tried, by dint of affectionate observances and
companionship, to represent the motherly office which she had filled
in the beginning. But this was not to be. Some hidden agency had
forced the two ever farther asunder. Moreover, Gnulemah developed
rapidly, while Nurse underwent a process of gradual congealment,--her
wits and emotions became torpid. Besides this, she was the victim of
disfigurement, physical as well as spiritual; while Gnulemah, both
naturally and by training, was sensitive to beauty and ugliness. Other
surface causes no doubt there were, in addition to the hidden one,
which was perhaps the most potent of all.

A considerable time had passed since Gnulemah's departure, when Balder
became aware that he was not alone in the conservatory. His thoughts
were all of Gnulemah, and he looked quickly round in expectation of
seeing her. The apparition of a widely different object startled him
to his feet.

A female figure stood before him, wrapped in sad-colored garments of
anomalous description, her head tied up in dark turban-like folds of
cloth. A lock of rusty black hair escaped from beneath this head-dress
and hung down beside her face. She might once have been tall and
erect, but her form now sagged to the left, losing both height and
dignity. Her visage, seamed and furrowed by the scar of some terrible
calamity, had lost its natural contour. The left eye was extinguished,
but the right remained,--the only feature in its original state. It
was dark and bright, and possessed, by very virtue of its disfigured
environment, a repulsive kind of beauty. Its influence was peculiar.
In itself, it postulated an owner in the prime of life, handsome and
graceful. But, one's attention wandering, the woman's actual ugliness
impressed itself with an intensity enhanced by the imaginary contrast.

A grotesque analogy was thus brought to light. The woman was dual. Her
right side lived; the left--blind, inert, and soulless--was dragged
about a dead weight. It was an unnatural emphasizing of the
spiritual-material composition of mankind. Observable, moreover, was
her strange method of disguising emotion. There was no muscular
constraint; she simply turned her blank left side to the spectator,
with an effect like the interposition of a dead wall!

Such, on Balder's perhaps abnormally excited apprehension, was the
impression the nurse produced. She, on her part, was perhaps more
disconcerted than he. Her single eye settled upon him in a panic of
surprise. The dressing of the scene gave Balder a grisly reminder of
the first moments of Gnulemah's eloquent astonishment. There was as
great an apparent difference between the superb Egyptian and this poor
creature, as between good and evil; but there was also the
disagreeable suggestion of a similar kind of relationship. Gnulemah,
withered, stifled, and degraded by some unmentionable curse, might
have become a thing not unlike this woman.

"Have we met before, madam?" asked Helwyse, impelled to the question
by what he took for a bewildered recognition in her eye.

She moved her lips, but made no audible answer.

"I am Balder Helwyse," he added; for he had made up his mind that all
concealments (save one) were unnecessary.

A grotesque quake of emotion travelled through the woman's body, and
she gave utterance to a harsh inarticulate sound. She came confusedly
forwards, groping with hands outstretched. Balder, though not wont to
fail in courtesy to the sorriest hag, could scarce forbear recoiling;
especially because he fancied that an expression of affectionate
interest was struggling to get through the scarred incrustation of the
woman's nature.

Perhaps she marked his inward shrinking, for she checked herself, and,
slowly turning her lifeless screen, hid behind it. It was impotent
deprecation translated into flesh,--at once ludicrous and painful. The
young man found so much difficulty in restraining the manifestation
of his distaste, that he blushed in the twilight at his own rudeness.
He would do his best to redeem himself.

"Doctor Hiero Glyphic is my uncle," said he, moving to get on Nurse's
right side, and speaking in his pleasantest tone. "Is he at home? I
have come a long way to see him."

Preoccupied by his amiable purpose to reassure the woman, Helwyse had
got to the end of this speech before realizing the ghastly mockery
involved in it. Nevertheless, it was well. Even thus falsely and
boldly must he henceforth speak and act. By a happy accident he had
opened the path, and must see to it that his further steps did not
retrograde.

Still Nurse answered not a word, which was the less surprising,
inasmuch as she had been dumb for a quarter of a century past. But
Balder, supposing her silence to proceed from stupidity or deafness,
repeated more loudly and peremptorily,--

"Doctor Glyphic,--is he here? is he alive?"

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.

Balder's attack at length yielded, and a drowsy consciousness
returned, memory and reason being still partly in abeyance. His heavy,
half-closed eyes rested on darkness. A crooning sound was in his
ear,--a nursery lullaby, wordless but soothing. Where was he? Had he
been ill? Was he in his cradle at home? Was Salome sitting by to watch
him and give him his medicine? Yes, very ill he was, but would be
better in the morning; and meanwhile he would be a good boy, and not
cry and make a fuss and trouble Salome.

"Nurse,--Sal!--I say, Sal!"

Salome bent over him as of old.

"Had such a funny dream, Sal! dreamt I was grown up, and--killed a
man! What makes you shake so, Sal? it wasn't true, you know! And I'm
going to be a good boy and go to sleep. Good night! give a kiss from
me--to--my--little--"

So sinks he into slumber, profound as ever wooed his childhood; his
head pillowed in Salome's lap, his funny dream forgotten.

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