Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/246

 the smoke to a sun,—is it more just to complain, than to reflect that Fate is like the oculist, who, when about to open to a blind eye the world of light, first bandages and darkens the other eye that sees?

But the sorrow does affect me, which I read on Thiennette's pale lips, though do not hear. It is not the distortion of an excruciating agony, nor the burning of a dried-up eye, nor the loud lamenting or violent movement of a tortured frame, that I see in her; but what I am forced to see in her, and what too keenly cuts the sympathizing heart, is a pale, still, unmoved, undistorted face, a pale, bloodless head, which Sorrow is as it were holding up after the stroke, like a head just severed by the axe of the headsman; for oh! on this form the wounds, from which the three-edged dagger had been drawn, are all fallen firmly together, and the blood is flowing from them in secret into the choking heart. Thiennette, go away from the sick-bed, and hide that face which is saying to us: "Now do I know that I shall not have any happiness on Earth; now do I give over hoping,—would this life were but soon done!"

You will not comprehend my sympathy, if you know not what, some hours ago, the too loud lamenting mother told me. Thiennette, who of old had always trembled for his thirty-second year, had encountered this superstition with a nobler one; she had purposely stood farther back at the marriage-altar, and in the bridal-night fallen sooner asleep than he; thereby—as is the popular belief—so to order it that she might also die sooner. Nay, she has determined, if he die, to lay with his corpse a piece of her apparel, that so she may descend the sooner to keep him company in his narrow house. Thou good, thou faithful wife, but thou unhappy One!—