Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/729

 besieged him, and harassed and distracted him; it thrust itself into his mind at the most inopportune moments; it buzzed in his ears and danced among the columns of figures in his great folio account books. Sometimes the young lady's prediction conjoined itself with a prodigious array of numerals, and roamed away from its modest place among the units into the hundreds of thousands. David read himself a million times a husband. But, after all, as he reflected, the oddity was not in his having been predestined, according to the young lady, to marry twice; but in poor Emma having drawn exactly the same lot. It was a conflict of oracles. It would be an interesting inquiry, although now, of course, quite impracticable, to ascertain which of the two was more to be trusted. For how under the sun could both have revealed the truth? The utmost ingenuity was powerless to reconcile their mutual incompatibility. Could either of the soothsayers have made her statement in a figurative sense? It seemed to David that this was to fancy them a grain too wise. The simplest solution—except not to think of the matter at all, which he couldn't bring himself to accomplish—was to fancy that each of the prophecies nullified the other, and that when he became Emma's husband, their counterfeit destinies had been put to confusion.

Emma found it quite impossible to take the matter so easily. She pondered it night and day for a month. She admitted that the prospect of a second marriage was, of necessity, unreal for one of them; but her heart ached to discover for which of them it was real. She had laughed at the folly of the Indian's threat; but she found it impossible to laugh at the extraordinary coincidence of David's promised fate with her own. That it was absurd and illogical made it only the more painful. It filled her life with a horrible uncertainty. It seemed to indicate that whether or no the silly gossip of a couple of jugglers was, on either side, strictly fulfilled; yet there was some dark cloud hanging over their marriage. Why should an honest young couple have such strange things said of them? Why should they be called upon to read such an illegible riddle? Emma repented bitterly of having told her secret. And yet, too, she rejoiced; for it was a dreadful thought that David, unprompted to reveal his own adventure should have kept such a dreadful occurrence locked up in his breast, shedding, Heaven knows what baleful influence, on her life and fortunes. Now she could live it down; she could combat it, laugh at it. And David, too, could do as much for the mysterious prognostic of his own extinction. Never had Emma's fancy been so active. She placed the two faces of her destiny in every conceivable light. At one moment, she imagined that David might succumb to the pressure of his fancied destiny, and leave her a widow, free to marry again; and at another that he would grow enamored of the thought of obeying his own oracle, and crush her to death by the masculine vigor of his will. Then, again, she felt as if her own will were strong, and as if she bore on her head the protecting hand of fate. Love was much, assuredly, but fate was more. And here, indeed, what was fate but love? As she had loved David, so she would love another. She racked her poor little brain to conjure up this future master of her life. But, to do her justice, it was quite in vain. She could not forget David. Nevertheless, she felt guilty. And then she thought of David, and wondered whether he was guilty, too—whether he was dreaming of another woman.

In this way it was that Emma became jealous. That she was a very silly girl I don't pretend to deny. I have expressly said that she was a person of a very simple make; and in proportion to the force of her old straightforward confidence in her husband, was that of her present suspicion and vagaries.