To me the track had yet another language. An hour before,
as I stood there beside her, the bitter passion of a man solitary and
desperate shaking every faculty before the level rays of her scornful
eye, she had set her embroidered slipper in the ashes, and said,--"Look!
I leave a print there which the first breath of air shall dissipate;
all fire becomes ashes, and ashes blow away,"--and so left me. I stood
before the fire, that had been, still looking at that foot-mark; my
brain was stunned and stupid, my heart beat slow and loud; I knew
nothing, I felt nothing. I was nothing. Presently a bell rang.
The world is full of magicians, transformations, magnetic miracles,
juggling, chemical astonishments, moral gymnastics, hypocrisies, lies of
wonder,--but what is so strange, so marvellous, so inexplicable, as the
power of conventions? One minute found me tempting the blackness of
darkness, every idea astray and reeling, every emotion benumbed; the
next, a bell rang, and I went to the tea-table, sat in my own place,
answered my mother's questions, resumed the politenesses and habits of
daily life, seemed to be myself to those who had known me always,--ate,
drank, jested,--was a man,--no more the trodden ashes under a girl's
foot, no longer the sport of a girl's cool eye, no slave, no writhing
idolater under the car-wheel; and this lasted-half an hour! You have
seen the horses of Pharaoh following the glittering sand-track of the
Judaean host, walled in with curling beryl battlements, over whose
crests the white sea-foam dares no more laugh and threaten? You know
those curved necks clothed with strength, the bent head whose nostrils
flare with pride, the tossed and waving mane, the magnificent grace of
the nervous shoulder, the great, intelligent, expectant eyes? Suddenly
the roar of waves at the farther shore! Look at that head! strong and
quiet no more; terror erects the quivering ears; the nostril sinks and
contracts with fear; the eye glares and glances from side to side, mad
with prescient instinct; the corded veins that twist forkedly from the
lip upward swell to the utmost tension of the fine skin; that sweeping
mane rises in rough undulations, the forelock is tossed back, the
shoulder grows rigid with horror, the chest rises with a long indrawn
breath of dismay.
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