Fauntleroy was again married.He had taken to wife a forlorn, meek-spirited, feeble young woman, a seamstress, whom he found dwelling with her mother in a contiguous chamber of the old gubernatorial residence.This poor phantom--as the beautiful and noble companion of his former life had done brought him a daughter.And sometimes, as from one dream into another, Fauntleroy looked forth out of his present grimy environment into that past magnificence, and wondered whether the grandee of yesterday or the pauper of to-day were real.But, in my mind, the one and the other were alike impalpable.In truth, it was Fauntleroy's fatality to behold whatever he touched dissolve.After a few years, his second wife (dim shadow that she had always been) faded finally out of the world, and left Fauntleroy to deal as he might with their pale and nervous child.And, by this time, among his distant relatives,--with whom he had grown a weary thought, linked with contagious infamy, and which they were only too willing to get rid of,--he was himself supposed to be no more.
The younger child, like his elder one, might be considered as the true offspring of both parents, and as the reflection of their state.She was a tremulous little creature, shrinking involuntarily from all mankind, but in timidity, and no sour repugnance.There was a lack of human substance in her; it seemed as if, were she to stand up in a sunbeam, it would pass right through her figure, and trace out the cracked and dusty window-panes upon the naked floor.But, nevertheless, the poor child had a heart; and from her mother's gentle character she had inherited a profound and still capacity of affection.And so her life was one of love.She bestowed it partly on her father, but in greater part on an idea.
For Fauntleroy, as they sat by their cheerless fireside,--which was no fireside, in truth, but only a rusty stove,--had often talked to the little girl about his former wealth, the noble loveliness of his first wife, and the beautiful child whom she had given him.Instead of the fairy tales which other parents tell, he told Priscilla this.And, out of the loneliness of her sad little existence, Priscilla's love grew, and tended upward, and twined itself perseveringly around this unseen sister;as a grapevine might strive to clamber out of a gloomy hollow among the rocks, and embrace a young tree standing in the sunny warmth above.It was almost like worship, both in its earnestness and its humility; nor was it the less humble--though the more earnest--because Priscilla could claim human kindred with the being whom she, so devoutly loved.As with worship, too, it gave her soul the refreshment of a purer atmosphere.
Save for this singular, this melancholy, and yet beautiful affection, the child could hardly have lived; or, had she lived, with a heart shrunken for lack of any sentiment to fill it, she must have yielded to the barren miseries of her position, and have grown to womanhood characterless and worthless.But now, amid all the sombre coarseness of her father's outward life, and of her own, Priscilla had a higher and imaginative life within.Some faint gleam thereof was often visible upon her face.It was as if, in her spiritual visits to her brilliant sister, a portion of the latter's brightness had permeated our dim Priscilla, and still lingered, shedding a faint illumination through the cheerless chamber, after she came back.
As the child grew up, so pallid and so slender, and with much unaccountable nervousness, and all the weaknesses of neglected infancy still haunting her, the gross and simple neighbors whispered strange things about Priscilla.The big, red, Irish matrons, whose innumerable progeny swarmed out of the adjacent doors, used to mock at the pale Western child.They fancied--or, at least, affirmed it, between jest and earnest--that she was not so solid flesh and blood as other children, but mixed largely with a thinner element.They called her ghost-child, and said that she could indeed vanish when she pleased, but could never, in her densest moments, make herself quite visible.The sun at midday would shine through her; in the first gray of the twilight, she lost all the distinctness of her outline; and, if you followed the dim thing into a dark corner, behold! she was not there.And it was true that Priscilla had strange ways; strange ways, and stranger words, when she uttered any words at all.Never stirring out of the old governor's dusky house, she sometimes talked of distant places and splendid rooms, as if she had just left them.Hidden things were visible to her (at least so the people inferred from obscure hints escaping unawares out of her mouth), and silence was audible.And in all the world there was nothing so difficult to be endured, by those who had any dark secret to conceal, as the glance of Priscilla's timid and melancholy eyes.
Her peculiarities were the theme of continual gossip among the other inhabitants of the gubernatorial mansion.The rumor spread thence into a wider circle.Those who knew old Moodie, as he was now called, used often to jeer him, at the very street-corners, about his daughter's gift of second-sight and prophecy.It was a period when science (though mostly through its empirical professors) was bringing forward, anew, a hoard of facts and imperfect theories, that had partially won credence in elder times, but which modern scepticism had swept away as rubbish.These things were now tossed up again, out of the surging ocean of human thought and experience.The story of Priscilla's preternatural manifestations, therefore, attracted a kind of notice of which it would have been deemed wholly unworthy a few years earlier.One day a gentleman ascended the creaking staircase, and inquired which was old Moodie's chamber door.And, several times, he came again.He was a marvellously handsome man,--still youthful, too, and fashionably dressed.
