Six hours before, how beautiful! At midnight,
what a horror! A reflection occurs to me that will show ludicrously,
I doubt not, on my page, but must come in for its sterling truth.
Being the woman that she was, could Zenobia have foreseen all these
ugly circumstances of death,--how ill it would become her, the
altogether unseemly aspect which she must put on, and especially old
Silas Foster's efforts to improve the matter,--she would no more have
committed the dreadful act than have exhibited herself to a public
assembly in a badly fitting garment! Zenobia, I have often thought,
was not quite simple in her death. She had seen pictures, I suppose,
of drowned persons in lithe and graceful attitudes. And she deemed
it well and decorous to die as so many village maidens have, wronged
in their first love, and seeking peace in the bosom of the old
familiar stream,--so familiar that they could not dread it,--where,
in childhood, they used to bathe their little feet, wading mid-leg
deep, unmindful of wet skirts. But in Zenobia's case there was some
tint of the Arcadian affectation that had been visible enough in all
our lives for a few months past.
This, however, to my conception, takes nothing from the tragedy. For,
has not the world come to an awfully sophisticated pass, when, after
a certain degree of acquaintance with it, we cannot even put
ourselves to death in whole-hearted simplicity? Slowly, slowly, with
many a dreary pause,--resting the bier often on some rock or
balancing it across a mossy log, to take fresh hold,--we bore our
burden onward through the moonlight, and at last laid Zenobia on the
floor of the old farmhouse.
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