She now produced, out of a work-bag that she had with her, some little
wooden instruments (what they are called I never knew), and proceeded
to knit, or net, an article which ultimately took the shape of a silk
purse. As the work went on, I remembered to have seen just such purses
before; indeed, I was the possessor of one. Their peculiar excellence,
besides the great delicacy and beauty of the manufacture, lay in the
almost impossibility that any uninitiated person should discover the
aperture; although, to a practised touch, they would open as wide as
charity or prodigality might wish. I wondered if it were not a symbol
of Priscilla's own mystery.
Notwithstanding the new confidence with which Zenobia had inspired her,
our guest showed herself disquieted by the storm. When the strong
puffs of wind spattered the snow against the windows and made the oaken
frame of the farmhouse creak, she looked at us apprehensively, as if to
inquire whether these tempestuous outbreaks did not betoken some
unusual mischief in the shrieking blast. She had been bred up, no
doubt, in some close nook, some inauspiciously sheltered court of the
city, where the uttermost rage of a tempest, though it might scatter
down the slates of the roof into the bricked area, could not shake the
casement of her little room.
The sense of vast, undefined space,
pressing from the outside against the black panes of our uncurtained
windows, was fearful to the poor girl, heretofore accustomed to the
narrowness of human limits, with the lamps of neighboring tenements
glimmering across the street. The house probably seemed to her adrift
on the great ocean of the night. A little parallelogram of sky was all
that she had hitherto known of nature, so that she felt the awfulness
that really exists in its limitless extent. Once, while the blast was
bellowing, she caught hold of Zenobia's robe, with precisely the air of
one who hears her own name spoken at a distance, but is unutterably
reluctant to obey the call.
We spent rather an incommunicative evening. Hollingsworth hardly said
a word, unless when repeatedly and pertinaciously addressed. Then,
indeed, he would glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his
meditations like a tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply
possible, and betake himself back into the solitude of his heart and
mind. The poor fellow had contracted this ungracious habit from the
intensity with which he contemplated his own ideas, and the infrequent
sympathy which they met with from his auditors,--a circumstance that
seemed only to strengthen the implicit confidence that he awarded to
them. His heart, I imagine, was never really interested in our
socialist scheme, but was forever busy with his strange, and, as most
people thought it, impracticable plan, for the reformation of criminals
through an appeal to their higher instincts.