The Blithedale Romance - Page 128/170

Save for this singular, this melancholy, and

yet beautiful affection, the child could hardly have lived; or, had she

lived, with a heart shrunken for lack of any sentiment to fill it, she

must have yielded to the barren miseries of her position, and have

grown to womanhood characterless and worthless. But now, amid all the

sombre coarseness of her father's outward life, and of her own,

Priscilla had a higher and imaginative life within. Some faint gleam

thereof was often visible upon her face. It was as if, in her spiritual

visits to her brilliant sister, a portion of the latter's brightness

had permeated our dim Priscilla, and still lingered, shedding a faint

illumination through the cheerless chamber, after she came back.

As the child grew up, so pallid and so slender, and with much

unaccountable nervousness, and all the weaknesses of neglected infancy

still haunting her, the gross and simple neighbors whispered strange

things about Priscilla. The big, red, Irish matrons, whose innumerable

progeny swarmed out of the adjacent doors, used to mock at the pale

Western child. They fancied--or, at least, affirmed it, between jest

and earnest--that she was not so solid flesh and blood as other

children, but mixed largely with a thinner element. They called her

ghost-child, and said that she could indeed vanish when she pleased,

but could never, in her densest moments, make herself quite visible.

The sun at midday would shine through her; in the first gray of the

twilight, she lost all the distinctness of her outline; and, if you

followed the dim thing into a dark corner, behold! she was not there.

And it was true that Priscilla had strange ways; strange ways, and

stranger words, when she uttered any words at all. Never stirring out

of the old governor's dusky house, she sometimes talked of distant

places and splendid rooms, as if she had just left them. Hidden things

were visible to her (at least so the people inferred from obscure hints

escaping unawares out of her mouth), and silence was audible. And in

all the world there was nothing so difficult to be endured, by those

who had any dark secret to conceal, as the glance of Priscilla's timid

and melancholy eyes.

Her peculiarities were the theme of continual gossip among the other

inhabitants of the gubernatorial mansion. The rumor spread thence into

a wider circle. Those who knew old Moodie, as he was now called, used

often to jeer him, at the very street-corners, about his daughter's

gift of second-sight and prophecy. It was a period when science

(though mostly through its empirical professors) was bringing forward,

anew, a hoard of facts and imperfect theories, that had partially won

credence in elder times, but which modern scepticism had swept away as

rubbish. These things were now tossed up again, out of the surging

ocean of human thought and experience.