第52章 LEAVE-TAKINGS(3)

It needs a wild steersman when we voyage through chaos! The anchor is up, --farewell!"Priscilla, as soon as dinner was over, had betaken herself into a corner, and set to work on a little purse.As I approached her, she let her eyes rest on me with a calm, serious look; for, with all her delicacy of nerves, there was a singular self-possession in Priscilla, and her sensibilities seemed to lie sheltered from ordinary commotion, like the water in a deep well.

"Will you give me that purse, Priscilla," said I, "as a parting keepsake?""Yes," she answered, "if you will wait till it is finished.""I must not wait, even for that," I replied."Shall I find you here, on my return?""I never wish to go away," said she.

"I have sometimes thought," observed I, smiling, "that you, Priscilla, are a little prophetess, or, at least, that you have spiritual intimations respecting matters which are dark to us grosser people.If that be the case, I should like to ask you what is about to happen; for Iam tormented with a strong foreboding that, were I to return even so soon as to-morrow morning, I should find everything changed.Have you any impressions of this nature?""Ah, no," said Priscilla, looking at me apprehensively."If any such misfortune is coming, the shadow has not reached me yet.Heaven forbid!

I should be glad if there might never be any change, but one summer follow another, and all just like this.""No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike," said I, with a degree of Orphic wisdom that astonished myself."Times change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us.Good-by, Priscilla!"I gave her hand a pressure, which, I think, she neither resisted nor returned.Priscilla's heart was deep, but of small compass; it had room but for a very few dearest ones, among whom she never reckoned me.

On the doorstep I met Hollingsworth.I had a momentary impulse to hold out my hand, or at least to give a parting nod, but resisted both.When a real and strong affection has come to an end, it is not well to mock the sacred past with any show of those commonplace civilities that belong to ordinary intercourse.Being dead henceforth to him, and he to me, there could be no propriety in our chilling one another with the touch of two corpse-like hands, or playing at looks of courtesy with eyes that were impenetrable beneath the glaze and the film.We passed, therefore, as if mutually invisible.

I can nowise explain what sort of whim, prank, or perversity it was, that, after all these leave-takings, induced me to go to the pigsty, and take leave of the swine! There they lay, buried as deeply among the straw as they could burrow, four huge black grunters, the very symbols of slothful ease and sensual comfort.They were asleep, drawing short and heavy breaths, which heaved their big sides up and down.Unclosing their eyes, however, at my approach, they looked dimly forth at the outer world, and simultaneously uttered a gentle grunt; not putting themselves to the trouble of an additional breath for that particular purpose, but grunting with their ordinary inhalation.They were involved, and almost stifled and buried alive, in their own corporeal substance.The very unreadiness and oppression wherewith these greasy citizens gained breath enough to keep their life-machinery in sluggish movement appeared to make them only the more sensible of the ponderous and fat satisfaction of their existence.Peeping at me an instant out of their small, red, hardly perceptible eyes, they dropt asleep again; yet not so far asleep but that their unctuous bliss was still present to them, betwixt dream and reality.

"You must come back in season to eat part of a spare-rib," said Silas Foster, giving my hand a mighty squeeze."I shall have these fat fellows hanging up by the heels, heads downward, pretty soon, I tell you!""O cruel Silas, what a horrible ideal" cried I."All the rest of us, men, women, and livestock, save only these four porkers, are bedevilled with one grief or another; they alone are happy,--and you mean to cut their throats and eat them! It would be more for the general comfort to let them eat us; and bitter and sour morsels we should be!"