me the worst, and
kill me on the spot. Any thing was better than my present state. I
said, "Is it Mr. C----?" She smiled, and said with gay indifference,
"Mr. C---- was here a very short time." "Well, then, was it Mr. ----?"
She hesitated, and then replied faintly, "No." This was a mere
trick to mislead; one of the profoundnesses of Satan, in which she is an
adept. "But," she added hastily, "she could make no more confidences."
"Then," said I, "you have something to communicate." "No; but she had
once mentioned a thing of the sort, which I had hinted to her mother,
though it signified little." All this while I was in tortures. Every
word, every half-denial, stabbed me. "Had she any tie?" "No, I have no
tie!" "You are not going to be married soon?" "I don't intend ever to
marry at all!" "Can't you be friends with me as of old?" "She could
give no promises." "Would she make her own terms?" "She would make
none."--"I was sadly afraid the LITTLE IMAGE was dethroned from her
heart, as I had dashed it to the ground the other night."--"She was
neither desperate nor violent." I did not answer--"But deliberate and
deadly,"--though I might; and so she vanished in this running fight of
question and answer, in spite of my vain efforts to detain her. The
cockatrice, I said, mocks me: so she has always done. The thought was a
dagger to me. My head reeled, my heart recoiled within me. I was stung
with scorpions; my flesh crawled; I was choked with rage; her scorn
scorched me like flames; her air (her heavenly air) withdrawn from me,
stifled me, and left me gasping for breath and being. It was a fable.
She started up in her own likeness, a serpent in place of a woman. She
had fascinated, she had stung me, and had returned to her proper shape,
gliding from me after inflicting the mortal wound, and instilling deadly
poison into every pore; but her form lost none of its original
brightness by the change of character, but was all glittering,
beauteous, voluptuous grace. Seed of the serpent or of the woman, she
was divine! I felt that she was a witch, and had bewitched me. Fate
had enclosed me round about. _I_ was transformed too, no longer human
(any more than she, to whom I had knit myself) my feelings were marble;
my blood was of molten lead; my thoughts on fire. I was taken out of
myself, wrapt into another sphere, far from the light of day, of hope,
of love. I had no natural affection left; she had slain me,