Yet, in the wantonness of her despair, Miriam made one more step towards
the friend whom she had lost. "Do not come nearer, Miriam!" said
Hilda. Her look and tone were those of sorrowful entreaty, and yet
they expressed a kind of confidence, as if the girl were conscious of a
safeguard that could not be violated.
"What has happened between us, Hilda?" asked Miriam. "Are we not
friends?"
"No, no!" said Hilda, shuddering.
"At least we have been friends," continued Miriam. "I loved you dearly!
I love you still! You were to me as a younger sister; yes, dearer than
sisters of the same blood; for you and I were so lonely, Hilda, that the
whole world pressed us together by its solitude and strangeness. Then,
will you not touch my hand? Am I not the same as yesterday?"
"Alas! no, Miriam!" said Hilda.
"Yes, the same, the same for you, Hilda," rejoined her lost friend.
"Were you to touch my hand, you would find it as warm to your grasp as
ever. If you were sick or suffering, I would watch night and day for
you. It is in such simple offices that true affection shows itself;
and so I speak of them. Yet now, Hilda, your very look seems to put me
beyond the limits of human kind!"
"It is not I, Miriam," said Hilda; "not I that have done this."
"You, and you only, Hilda," replied Miriam, stirred up to make her own
cause good by the repellent force which her friend opposed to her. "I am
a woman, as I was yesterday; endowed with the same truth of nature, the
same warmth of heart, the same genuine and earnest love, which you
have always known in me. In any regard that concerns yourself, I am not
changed. And believe me, Hilda, when a human being has chosen a friend
out of all the world, it is only some faithlessness between themselves,
rendering true intercourse impossible, that can justify either friend in
severing the bond. Have I deceived you? Then cast me off! Have I wronged
you personally? Then forgive me, if you can. But, have I sinned against
God and man, and deeply sinned? Then be more my friend than ever, for I
need you more."
"Do not bewilder me thus, Miriam!" exclaimed Hilda, who had not forborne
to express, by look and gesture, the anguish which this interview
inflicted on her. "If I were one of God's angels, with a nature
incapable of stain, and garments that never could be spotted, I would
keep ever at your side, and try to lead you upward. But I am a poor,
lonely girl, whom God has set here in an evil world, and given her only
a white robe, and bid her wear it back to Him, as white as when she put
it on. Your powerful magnetism would be too much for me. The pure, white
atmosphere, in which I try to discern what things are good and true,
would be discolored. And therefore, Miriam, before it is too late, I
mean to put faith in this awful heartquake which warns me henceforth to
avoid you."