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.