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For one luminous perfect moment he stood face to face with her in the mystic marriage-chamber of the soul; he heard if it were only for a moment the unspeakable epithalamium; he saw incomprehensible things. It had needed some violent appeal to the senses, the spectacle or idea of physical agony, to rouse him to that first passion of pity and tenderness.
When all this was done, still smiling, Betty returned to the marriage-chamber, closing its door behind her, sat her down on a chair near the bed, and waited for the worst struggle of all that struggle on which hung her life. See! Morella stirred. He sat up, gazing about him and rubbing his brow. Presently his eyes lit upon Betty, seated stern and upright in her high chair.
This was Luke Hatton, who, at the very moment that Lanyere appeared, issued from the chamber where the marriage ceremony was being performed. "Be not alarmed, fair maiden," said Lanyere, in a low voice, "you are in no danger; and all your troubles, I trust, are well-nigh ended. I thought you were in the marriage-chamber. Give me your hand.
Bride and bridegroom, with their attendants, march solemnly to the marriage-chamber, where bed and box are decked out in white, with ends of ribbon and artificial flowers, and where on a row of chairs the party solemnly seat themselves. After a time bridesmaid and best man rise, and conduct in with ceremony each individual guest, to wish success and to kiss bride and bridegroom.
He replied, "None but those who are in the third heaven, because to them every representative of love and wisdom becomes real: from them I have heard what I have related to you, and also this particular, that love truly conjugial dwells in the highest region in the midst of mutual love, in the marriage-chamber or apartment of the will, and also in the midst of the perceptions of wisdom in the marriage-chamber or apartment of the understanding, and that they consociate in bed in the chamber which is in front, in the east."
Turn now to the right, pass by that narrow corridor: you are in the marriage-chamber; the windows are closed; tall tapers burn at the foot of the bed. Now go back to that narrow corridor.
How frightful it seemed! that fixed countenance of ashy paleness, amid its decorations of muslin and fine linen, as if a bride were decked for the marriage-chamber, as if death were a bridegroom, and the coffin a bridal bed. Alas that the vanity of dress should extend even to the grave!
Wars, grim wars I discern, and Tiber afoam with streams of blood. Again is an alien bride the source of all that Teucrian woe, again a foreign marriage-chamber. . . . Yield not thou to distresses, but all the bolder go forth to meet them, as thy fortune shall allow thee way. The path of rescue, little as thou deemest it, shall first open from a Grecian town.
I also asked, "Why are there two marriage-chambers?" He said, "The husband is in the marriage-chamber of the understanding, and the wife in that of the will." I then asked, "Since conjugial love dwells there, where then does conjugial cold dwell?"
While they were viewing these things, lo! a door opened from a closet near the marriage-chamber, and six virgins came out, and after them the bridegroom and the bride, holding each other by the hand, and advancing towards a seat placed opposite to the candlestick, on which they seated themselves, the bridegroom on the left hand, and the bride on the right, while the six virgins stood by the seat near the bride.
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