and known, namely, her nights, her joys, often her life, does not bow lower, and with deeper emotion, than in presence of a whole nun-orchestra on their Sahara-desert;—and worse than either is the man for whom his own mother has not made all other mothers venerable.
“It is little serviceable to thee, poor Thiennette,” thought I, “that now, when thy bitter cup of sickness is made to run over, thou must have loud festivities come crowding round thee.” I meant the Investiture and the Ball-raising. My rank, the diploma of which the reader will find stitched in with the Dog-post-days, and which had formerly been hers, brought about my ears a host of repelling, embarrassed, wavering titles of address from her; which people, to whom they have once belonged, are at all times apt to parade before superiors or inferiors, and which it now cost me no little trouble to disperse. Through the whole Saturday and Sunday, I could never get into the right track either with her or him, till the other guests were gone. As for the mother, she acted, like obscure ideas, powerfully and constantly, but out of view: this arose in part from her idolatrous fear of us; and partly also from a slight shade of care (probably springing from the state of her daughter), which had spread over her like a little cloud.
I cruised about, so long as the moon-crescent glimmered in the sky, over the churchyard; and softened my fantasies, which are at any rate too prone to paint with the brown of crumbling mummies, not only by the red of twilight, but also by reflecting how easily our eyes and our hearts can become reconciled even to the ruins of Death; a reflection which the Schoolmaster, whistling as he arranged the charnel-house for the morrow, and the Parson’s maid singing, as she reaped away the grass from the graves, readily enough suggested to me. And why should not this habituation to all forms of Fate in the other world, also, be a gift reserved for us in our nature by the bounty of our great Preserver?—I perused the grave-stones; and I think even now that Superstition[1] is right in connecting with the reading of such things a loss of memory; at all events, one does forget a thousand things belonging to this world. . . . .
- ↑ This Christian superstition is not only a Rabbinical, but also a Roman one. Cicero de Senectute.
