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The Blithedale Romance

by

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Table of Contents

I. OLD MOODIE

II. BLITHEDALE

III. A KNOT OF DREAMERS

IV. THE SUPPER-TABLE

V. UNTIL BEDTIME

VI. COVERDALE'S SICK CHAMBER

VII. THE CONVALESCENT

VIII. A MODERN ARCADIA

IX. HOLLINGSWORTH, ZENOBIA, PRISCILLA

X. A VISITOR FROM TOWN

XI. THE WOOD-PATH

XII. COVERDALE'S HERMITAGE

XIII. ZENOBIA'S LEGEND

XIV. ELIOT'S PULPIT

XV. A CRISIS

XVI. LEAVE-TAKINGS

XVII. THE HOTEL

XVIII. THE BOARDING-HOUSE

XIX. ZENOBIA'S DRAWING-ROOM

XX. THEY VANISH

XXI. AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

XXII. FAUNTLEROY

XXIII. A VILLAGE HALL

XXIV. THE MASQUERADERS

XXV. THE THREE TOGETHER

XXVI. ZENOBIA AND COVERDALE

XXVII. MIDNIGHT

XXVIII. BLITHEDALE PASTURE

XXIX. MILES COVERDALE'S CONFESSION

I. OLD MOODIE

The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my

bachelor apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the

Veiled Lady, when an elderly man of rather shabby appearance met me in

an obscure part of the street.

"Mr. Coverdale," said he softly, "can I speak with you a moment?"

As I have casually alluded to the Veiled Lady, it may not be amiss to

mention, for the benefit of such of my readers as are unacquainted with

her now forgotten celebrity, that she was a phenomenon in the mesmeric

line; one of the earliest that had indicated the birth of a new

science, or the revival of an old humbug. Since those times her

sisterhood have grown too numerous to attract much individual notice;

nor, in fact, has any one of them come before the public under such

skilfully contrived circumstances of stage effect as those which at

once mystified and illuminated the remarkable performances of the lady

in question. Nowadays, in the management of his "subject,"

"clairvoyant," or "medium," the exhibitor affects the simplicity and

openness of scientific experiment; and even if he profess to tread a

step or two across the boundaries of the spiritual world, yet carries

with him the laws of our actual life and extends them over his

preternatural conquests. Twelve or fifteen years ago, on the contrary,

all the arts of mysterious arrangement, of picturesque disposition, and

artistically contrasted light and shade, were made available, in order

to set the apparent miracle in the strongest attitude of opposition to

ordinary facts. In the case of the Veiled Lady, moreover, the interest

of the spectator was further wrought up by the enigma of her identity,

and an absurd rumor (probably set afloat by the exhibitor, and at one

time very prevalent) that a beautiful young lady, of family and

fortune, was enshrouded within the misty drapery of the veil. It was

white, with somewhat of a subdued silver sheen, like the sunny side of

a cloud; and, falling over the wearer from head to foot, was supposed

to insulate her from the material world, from time and space, and to

endow her with many of the privileges of a disembodied spirit.

Her pretensions, however, whether miraculous or otherwise, have little

to do with the present narrative--except, indeed, that I had

propounded, for the Veiled Lady's prophetic solution, a query as to the

success of our Blithedale enterprise. The response, by the bye, was of

the true Sibylline stamp,--nonsensical in its first aspect, yet on

closer study unfolding a variety of interpretations, one of which has

certainly accorded with the event. I was turning over this riddle in

my mind, and trying to catch its slippery purport by the tail, when the

old man above mentioned interrupted me.

"Mr. Coverdale!--Mr. Coverdale!" said he, repeating my name twice, in

order to make up for the hesitating and ineffectual way in which he

uttered it. "I ask your pardon, sir, but I hear you are going to

Blithedale tomorrow."

I knew the pale, elderly face, with the red-tipt nose, and the patch

over one eye; and likewise saw something characteristic in the old

fellow's way of standing under the arch of a gate, only revealing

enough of himself to make me recognize him as an acquaintance. He was

a very shy personage, this Mr. Moodie; and the trait was the more

singular, as his mode of getting his bread necessarily brought him into

the stir and hubbub of the world more than the generality of men.

"Yes, Mr. Moodie," I answered, wondering what interest he could take in

the fact, "it is my intention to go to Blithedale to-morrow. Can I be

of any service to you before my departure?"

"If you pleased, Mr. Coverdale," said he, "you might do me a very great

favor."

"A very great one?" repeated I, in a tone that must have expressed but

little alacrity of beneficence, although I was ready to do the old man

any amount of kindness involving no special trouble to myself. "A very

great favor, do you say? My time is brief, Mr. Moodie, and I have a

good many preparations to make. But be good enough to tell me what you

wish."

"Ah, sir," replied Old Moodie, "I don't quite like to do that; and, on

further thoughts, Mr. Coverdale, perhaps I had better apply to some

older gentleman, or to some lady, if you would have the kindness to

make me known to one, who may happen to be going to Blithedale. You are

a young man, sir!"

"Does that fact lessen my availability for your purpose?" asked I.

"However, if an older man will suit you better, there is Mr.

Hollingsworth, who has three or four years the advantage of me in age,

and is a much more solid character, and a philanthropist to boot. I am

only a poet, and, so the critics tell me, no great affair at that! But

what can this business be, Mr. Moodie? It begins to interest me;

especially since your hint that a lady's influence might be found

desirable. Come, I am really anxious to be of service to you."

But the old fellow, in his civil and demure manner, was both freakish

and obstinate; and he had now taken some notion or other into his head

that made him hesitate in his former design.

"I wonder, sir," said he, "whether you know a lady whom they call

Zenobia?"

"Not personally," I answered, "although I expect that pleasure

to-morrow, as she has got the start of the rest of us, and is already a

resident at Blithedale. But have you a literary turn, Mr. Moodie? or

have you taken up the advocacy of women's rights? or what else can have

interested you in this lady? Zenobia, by the bye, as I suppose you

know, is merely her public name; a sort of mask in which she comes

before the world, retaining all the privileges of privacy,--a

contrivance, in short, like the white drapery of the Veiled Lady, only

a little more transparent. But it is late. Will you tell me what I

can do for you?"

"Please to excuse me to-night, Mr. Coverdale," said Moodie. "You are

very kind; but I am afraid I have troubled you, when, after all, there

may be no need. Perhaps, with your good leave, I will come to your

lodgings to-morrow morning, before you set out for Blithedale. I wish

you a good-night, sir, and beg pardon for stopping you."

And so he slipt away; and, as he did not show himself the next morning,

it was only through subsequent events that I ever arrived at a

plausible conjecture as to what his business could have been. Arriving

at my room, I threw a lump of cannel coal upon the grate, lighted a

cigar, and spent an hour in musings of every hue, from the brightest to

the most sombre; being, in truth, not so very confident as at some

former periods that this final step, which would mix me up irrevocably

with the Blithedale affair, was the wisest that could possibly be

taken. It was nothing short of midnight when I went to bed, after

drinking a glass of particularly fine sherry on which I used to pride

myself in those days. It was the very last bottle; and I finished it,

with a friend, the next forenoon, before setting out for Blithedale.

II. BLITHEDALE

There can hardly remain for me (who am really getting to be a frosty

bachelor, with another white hair, every week or so, in my mustache),

there can hardly flicker up again so cheery a blaze upon the hearth, as

that which I remember, the next day, at Blithedale. It was a wood

fire, in the parlor of an old farmhouse, on an April afternoon, but

with the fitful gusts of a wintry snowstorm roaring in the chimney.

Vividly does that fireside re-create itself, as I rake away the ashes

from the embers in my memory, and blow them up with a sigh, for lack of

more inspiring breath. Vividly for an instant, but anon, with the

dimmest gleam, and with just as little fervency for my heart as for my

finger-ends! The staunch oaken logs were long ago burnt out. Their

genial glow must be represented, if at all, by the merest phosphoric

glimmer, like that which exudes, rather than shines, from damp

fragments of decayed trees, deluding the benighted wanderer through a

forest. Around such chill mockery of a fire some few of us might sit

on the withered leaves, spreading out each a palm towards the imaginary

warmth, and talk over our exploded scheme for beginning the life of

Paradise anew.

Paradise, indeed! Nobody else in the world, I am bold to

affirm--nobody, at least, in our bleak little world of New

England,--had dreamed of Paradise that day except as the pole suggests

the tropic. Nor, with such materials as were at hand, could the most

skilful architect have constructed any better imitation of Eve's bower

than might be seen in the snow hut of an Esquimaux. But we made a

summer of it, in spite of the wild drifts.

It was an April day, as already hinted, and well towards the middle of

the month. When morning dawned upon me, in town, its temperature was

mild enough to be pronounced even balmy, by a lodger, like myself, in

one of the midmost houses of a brick block,--each house partaking of

the warmth of all the rest, besides the sultriness of its individual

furnace--heat. But towards noon there had come snow, driven along the

street by a northeasterly blast, and whitening the roofs and sidewalks

with a business-like perseverance that would have done credit to our

severest January tempest. It set about its task apparently as much in

earnest as if it had been guaranteed from a thaw for months to come.

The greater, surely, was my heroism, when, puffing out a final whiff of

cigar-smoke, I quitted my cosey pair of bachelor-rooms,--with a good

fire burning in the grate, and a closet right at hand, where there was

still a bottle or two in the champagne basket and a residuum of claret

in a box,--quitted, I say, these comfortable quarters, and plunged into

the heart of the pitiless snowstorm, in quest of a better life.

The better life! Possibly, it would hardly look so now; it is enough

if it looked so then. The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the

doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the

truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom to

know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

Yet, after all, let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious, to

follow out one's daydream to its natural consummation, although, if the

vision have been worth the having, it is certain never to be

consummated otherwise than by a failure. And what of that? Its

airiest fragments, impalpable as they may be, will possess a value that

lurks not in the most ponderous realities of any practicable scheme.

They are not the rubbish of the mind. Whatever else I may repent of,

therefore, let it be reckoned neither among my sins nor follies that I

once had faith and force enough to form generous hopes of the world's

destiny--yes!--and to do what in me lay for their accomplishment; even

to the extent of quitting a warm fireside, flinging away a freshly

lighted cigar, and travelling far beyond the strike of city clocks,

through a drifting snowstorm.

There were four of us who rode together through the storm; and

Hollingsworth, who had agreed to be of the number, was accidentally

delayed, and set forth at a later hour alone. As we threaded the

streets, I remember how the buildings on either side seemed to press

too closely upon us, insomuch that our mighty hearts found barely room

enough to throb between them. The snowfall, too, looked inexpressibly

dreary (I had almost called it dingy), coming down through an

atmosphere of city smoke, and alighting on the sidewalk only to be

moulded into the impress of somebody's patched boot or overshoe. Thus

the track of an old conventionalism was visible on what was freshest

from the sky. But when we left the pavements, and our muffled

hoof-tramps beat upon a desolate extent of country road, and were

effaced by the unfettered blast as soon as stamped, then there was

better air to breathe. Air that had not been breathed once and again!

air that had not been spoken into words of falsehood, formality, and

error, like all the air of the dusky city!

"How pleasant it is!" remarked I, while the snowflakes flew into my

mouth the moment it was opened. "How very mild and balmy is this

country air!"

"Ah, Coverdale, don't laugh at what little enthusiasm you have left!"

said one of my companions. "I maintain that this nitrous atmosphere is

really exhilarating; and, at any rate, we can never call ourselves

regenerated men till a February northeaster shall be as grateful to us

as the softest breeze of June!"

So we all of us took courage, riding fleetly and merrily along, by

stone fences that were half buried in the wave-like drifts; and through

patches of woodland, where the tree-trunks opposed a snow-incrusted

side towards the northeast; and within ken of deserted villas, with no

footprints in their avenues; and passed scattered dwellings, whence

puffed the smoke of country fires, strongly impregnated with the

pungent aroma of burning peat. Sometimes, encountering a traveller, we

shouted a friendly greeting; and he, unmuffling his ears to the bluster

and the snow-spray, and listening eagerly, appeared to think our

courtesy worth less than the trouble which it cost him. The churl! He

understood the shrill whistle of the blast, but had no intelligence for

our blithe tones of brotherhood. This lack of faith in our cordial

sympathy, on the traveller's part, was one among the innumerable tokens

how difficult a task we had in hand for the reformation of the world.

We rode on, however, with still unflagging spirits, and made such good

companionship with the tempest that, at our journey's end, we professed

ourselves almost loath to bid the rude blusterer good-by. But, to own

the truth, I was little better than an icicle, and began to be

suspicious that I had caught a fearful cold.

And now we were seated by the brisk fireside of the old farmhouse, the

same fire that glimmers so faintly among my reminiscences at the

beginning of this chapter. There we sat, with the snow melting out of

our hair and beards, and our faces all ablaze, what with the past

inclemency and present warmth. It was, indeed, a right good fire that

we found awaiting us, built up of great, rough logs, and knotty limbs,

and splintered fragments of an oak-tree, such as farmers are wont to

keep for their own hearths, since these crooked and unmanageable boughs

could never be measured into merchantable cords for the market. A

family of the old Pilgrims might have swung their kettle over precisely

such a fire as this, only, no doubt, a bigger one; and, contrasting it

with my coal-grate, I felt so much the more that we had transported

ourselves a world-wide distance from the system of society that

shackled us at breakfast-time.

Good, comfortable Mrs. Foster (the wife of stout Silas Foster, who was

to manage the farm at a fair stipend, and be our tutor in the art of

husbandry) bade us a hearty welcome. At her back--a back of generous

breadth--appeared two young women, smiling most hospitably, but looking

rather awkward withal, as not well knowing what was to be their

position in our new arrangement of the world. We shook hands

affectionately all round, and congratulated ourselves that the blessed

state of brotherhood and sisterhood, at which we aimed, might fairly be

dated from this moment. Our greetings were hardly concluded when the

door opened, and Zenobia--whom I had never before seen, important as

was her place in our enterprise--Zenobia entered the parlor.

This (as the reader, if at all acquainted with our literary biography,

need scarcely be told) was not her real name. She had assumed it, in

the first instance, as her magazine signature; and, as it accorded well

with something imperial which her friends attributed to this lady's

figure and deportment, they half-laughingly adopted it in their

familiar intercourse with her. She took the appellation in good part,

and even encouraged its constant use; which, in fact, was thus far

appropriate, that our Zenobia, however humble looked her new

philosophy, had as much native pride as any queen would have known what

to do with.

III. A KNOT OF DREAMERS

Zenobia bade us welcome, in a fine, frank, mellow voice, and gave each

of us her hand, which was very soft and warm. She had something

appropriate, I recollect, to say to every individual; and what she said

to myself was this:--"I have long wished to know you, Mr. Coverdale,

and to thank you for your beautiful poetry, some of which I have

learned by heart; or rather it has stolen into my memory, without my

exercising any choice or volition about the matter. Of course--permit

me to say you do not think of relinquishing an occupation in which you

have done yourself so much credit. I would almost rather give you up

as an associate, than that the world should lose one of its true poets!"

"Ah, no; there will not be the slightest danger of that, especially

after this inestimable praise from Zenobia," said I, smiling, and

blushing, no doubt, with excess of pleasure. "I hope, on the contrary,

now to produce something that shall really deserve to be called

poetry,--true, strong, natural, and sweet, as is the life which we are

going to lead,--something that shall have the notes of wild birds

twittering through it, or a strain like the wind anthems in the woods,

as the case may be."

"Is it irksome to you to hear your own verses sung?" asked Zenobia,

with a gracious smile. "If so, I am very sorry, for you will certainly

hear me singing them sometimes, in the summer evenings."

"Of all things," answered I, "that is what will delight me most."

While this passed, and while she spoke to my companions, I was taking

note of Zenobia's aspect; and it impressed itself on me so distinctly,

that I can now summon her up, like a ghost, a little wanner than the

life but otherwise identical with it. She was dressed as simply as

possible, in an American print (I think the dry-goods people call it

so), but with a silken kerchief, between which and her gown there was

one glimpse of a white shoulder. It struck me as a great piece of good

fortune that there should be just that glimpse. Her hair, which was

dark, glossy, and of singular abundance, was put up rather soberly and

primly--without curls, or other ornament, except a single flower. It

was an exotic of rare beauty, and as fresh as if the hothouse gardener

had just clipt it from the stem. That flower has struck deep root into

my memory. I can both see it and smell it, at this moment. So

brilliant, so rare, so costly as it must have been, and yet enduring

only for a day, it was more indicative of the pride and pomp which had

a luxuriant growth in Zenobia's character than if a great diamond had

sparkled among her hair.

Her hand, though very soft, was larger than most women would like to

have, or than they could afford to have, though not a whit too large in

proportion with the spacious plan of Zenobia's entire development. It

did one good to see a fine intellect (as hers really was, although its

natural tendency lay in another direction than towards literature) so

fitly cased. She was, indeed, an admirable figure of a woman, just on

the hither verge of her richest maturity, with a combination of

features which it is safe to call remarkably beautiful, even if some

fastidious persons might pronounce them a little deficient in softness

and delicacy. But we find enough of those attributes everywhere.

Preferable--by way of variety, at least--was Zenobia's bloom, health,

and vigor, which she possessed in such overflow that a man might well

have fallen in love with her for their sake only. In her quiet moods,

she seemed rather indolent; but when really in earnest, particularly if

there were a spice of bitter feeling, she grew all alive to her

finger-tips.

"I am the first comer," Zenobia went on to say, while her smile beamed

warmth upon us all; "so I take the part of hostess for to-day, and

welcome you as if to my own fireside. You shall be my guests, too, at

supper. Tomorrow, if you please, we will be brethren and sisters, and

begin our new life from daybreak."

"Have we our various parts assigned?" asked some one.

"Oh, we of the softer sex," responded Zenobia, with her mellow, almost

broad laugh,--most delectable to hear, but not in the least like an

ordinary woman's laugh,--"we women (there are four of us here already)

will take the domestic and indoor part of the business, as a matter of

course. To bake, to boil, to roast, to fry, to stew,--to wash, and

iron, and scrub, and sweep,--and, at our idler intervals, to repose

ourselves on knitting and sewing,--these, I suppose, must be feminine

occupations, for the present. By and by, perhaps, when our individual

adaptations begin to develop themselves, it may be that some of us who

wear the petticoat will go afield, and leave the weaker brethren to

take our places in the kitchen."

"What a pity," I remarked, "that the kitchen, and the housework

generally, cannot be left out of our system altogether! It is odd

enough that the kind of labor which falls to the lot of women is just

that which chiefly distinguishes artificial life--the life of

degenerated mortals--from the life of Paradise. Eve had no dinner-pot,

and no clothes to mend, and no washing-day."

"I am afraid," said Zenobia, with mirth gleaming out of her eyes, "we

shall find some difficulty in adopting the paradisiacal system for at

least a month to come. Look at that snowdrift sweeping past the

window! Are there any figs ripe, do you think? Have the pineapples

been gathered to-day? Would you like a bread-fruit, or a cocoanut?

Shall I run out and pluck you some roses? No, no, Mr. Coverdale; the

only flower hereabouts is the one in my hair, which I got out of a

greenhouse this morning. As for the garb of Eden," added she,

shivering playfully, "I shall not assume it till after May-day!"

Assuredly Zenobia could not have intended it,--the fault must have been

entirely in my imagination. But these last words, together with

something in her manner, irresistibly brought up a picture of that

fine, perfectly developed figure, in Eve's earliest garment. Her free,

careless, generous modes of expression often had this effect of

creating images which, though pure, are hardly felt to be quite

decorous when born of a thought that passes between man and woman. I

imputed it, at that time, to Zenobia's noble courage, conscious of no

harm, and scorning the petty restraints which take the life and color

out of other women's conversation. There was another peculiarity about

her. We seldom meet with women nowadays, and in this country, who

impress us as being women at all,--their sex fades away and goes for

nothing, in ordinary intercourse. Not so with Zenobia. One felt an

influence breathing out of her such as we might suppose to come from

Eve, when she was just made, and her Creator brought her to Adam,

saying, "Behold! here is a woman!" Not that I would convey the idea of

especial gentleness, grace, modesty, and shyness, but of a certain warm

and rich characteristic, which seems, for the most part, to have been

refined away out of the feminine system.

"And now," continued Zenobia, "I must go and help get supper. Do you

think you can be content, instead of figs, pineapples, and all the

other delicacies of Adam's supper-table, with tea and toast, and a

certain modest supply of ham and tongue, which, with the instinct of a

housewife, I brought hither in a basket? And there shall be bread and

milk, too, if the innocence of your taste demands it."

The whole sisterhood now went about their domestic avocations, utterly

declining our offers to assist, further than by bringing wood for the

kitchen fire from a huge pile in the back yard. After heaping up more

than a sufficient quantity, we returned to the sitting-room, drew our

chairs close to the hearth, and began to talk over our prospects.

Soon, with a tremendous stamping in the entry, appeared Silas Foster,

lank, stalwart, uncouth, and grizzly-bearded. He came from foddering

the cattle in the barn, and from the field, where he had been

ploughing, until the depth of the snow rendered it impossible to draw a

furrow. He greeted us in pretty much the same tone as if he were

speaking to his oxen, took a quid from his iron tobacco-box, pulled off

his wet cowhide boots, and sat down before the fire in his

stocking-feet. The steam arose from his soaked garments, so that the

stout yeoman looked vaporous and spectre-like.

"Well, folks," remarked Silas, "you'll be wishing yourselves back to

town again, if this weather holds."

And, true enough, there was a look of gloom, as the twilight fell

silently and sadly out of the sky, its gray or sable flakes

intermingling themselves with the fast-descending snow. The storm, in

its evening aspect, was decidedly dreary. It seemed to have arisen for

our especial behoof,--a symbol of the cold, desolate, distrustful

phantoms that invariably haunt the mind, on the eve of adventurous

enterprises, to warn us back within the boundaries of ordinary life.

But our courage did not quail. We would not allow ourselves to be

depressed by the snowdrift trailing past the window, any more than if

it had been the sigh of a summer wind among rustling boughs. There

have been few brighter seasons for us than that. If ever men might

lawfully dream awake, and give utterance to their wildest visions

without dread of laughter or scorn on the part of the audience,--yes,

and speak of earthly happiness, for themselves and mankind, as an

object to be hopefully striven for, and probably attained, we who made

that little semicircle round the blazing fire were those very men. We

had left the rusty iron framework of society behind us; we had broken

through many hindrances that are powerful enough to keep most people on

the weary treadmill of the established system, even while they feel its

irksomeness almost as intolerable as we did. We had stepped down from

the pulpit; we had flung aside the pen; we had shut up the ledger; we

had thrown off that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence, which is

better, after all, than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp. It

was our purpose--a generous one, certainly, and absurd, no doubt, in

full proportion with its generosity--to give up whatever we had

heretofore attained, for the sake of showing mankind the example of a

life governed by other than the false and cruel principles on which

human society has all along been based.

And, first of all, we had divorced ourselves from pride, and were

striving to supply its place with familiar love. We meant to lessen

the laboring man's great burden of toil, by performing our due share of

it at the cost of our own thews and sinews. We sought our profit by

mutual aid, instead of wresting it by the strong hand from an enemy, or

filching it craftily from those less shrewd than ourselves (if, indeed,

there were any such in New England), or winning it by selfish

competition with a neighbor; in one or another of which fashions every

son of woman both perpetrates and suffers his share of the common evil,

whether he chooses it or no. And, as the basis of our institution, we

purposed to offer up the earnest toil of our bodies, as a prayer no

less than an effort for the advancement of our race.

Therefore, if we built splendid castles (phalansteries perhaps they

might be more fitly called), and pictured beautiful scenes, among the

fervid coals of the hearth around which we were clustering, and if all

went to rack with the crumbling embers and have never since arisen out

of the ashes, let us take to ourselves no shame. In my own behalf, I

rejoice that I could once think better of the world's improvability

than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice in

a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and higher is the nature that can thus

magnanimously persist in error.

Stout Silas Foster mingled little in our conversation; but when he did

speak, it was very much to some practical purpose. For

instance:--"Which man among you," quoth he, "is the best judge of

swine? Some of us must go to the next Brighton fair, and buy half a

dozen pigs."

Pigs! Good heavens! had we come out from among the swinish multitude

for this? And again, in reference to some discussion about raising

early vegetables for the market:--"We shall never make any hand at

market gardening," said Silas Foster, "unless the women folks will

undertake to do all the weeding. We haven't team enough for that and

the regular farm-work, reckoning three of your city folks as worth one

common field-hand. No, no; I tell you, we should have to get up a

little too early in the morning, to compete with the market gardeners

round Boston."

It struck me as rather odd, that one of the first questions raised,

after our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world,

should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the

outside barbarians in their own field of labor. But, to own the truth,

I very soon became sensible that, as regarded society at large, we

stood in a position of new hostility, rather than new brotherhood. Nor

could this fail to be the case, in some degree, until the bigger and

better half of society should range itself on our side. Constituting so

pitiful a minority as now, we were inevitably estranged from the rest

of mankind in pretty fair proportion with the strictness of our mutual

bond among ourselves.

This dawning idea, however, was driven back into my inner consciousness

by the entrance of Zenobia. She came with the welcome intelligence

that supper was on the table. Looking at herself in the glass, and

perceiving that her one magnificent flower had grown rather languid

(probably by being exposed to the fervency of the kitchen fire), she

flung it on the floor, as unconcernedly as a village girl would throw

away a faded violet. The action seemed proper to her character,

although, methought, it would still more have befitted the bounteous

nature of this beautiful woman to scatter fresh flowers from her hand,

and to revive faded ones by her touch. Nevertheless, it was a singular

but irresistible effect; the presence of Zenobia caused our heroic

enterprise to show like an illusion, a masquerade, a pastoral, a

counterfeit Arcadia, in which we grown-up men and women were making a

play-day of the years that were given us to live in. I tried to

analyze this impression, but not with much success.

"It really vexes me," observed Zenobia, as we left the room, "that Mr.

Hollingsworth should be such a laggard. I should not have thought him

at all the sort of person to be turned back by a puff of contrary wind,

or a few snowflakes drifting into his face."

"Do you know Hollingsworth personally?" I inquired.

"No; only as an auditor--auditress, I mean--of some of his lectures,"

said she. "What a voice he has! and what a man he is! Yet not so much

an intellectual man, I should say, as a great heart; at least, he moved

me more deeply than I think myself capable of being moved, except by

the stroke of a true, strong heart against my own. It is a sad pity

that he should have devoted his glorious powers to such a grimy,

unbeautiful, and positively hopeless object as this reformation of

criminals, about which he makes himself and his wretchedly small

audiences so very miserable. To tell you a secret, I never could

tolerate a philanthropist before. Could you?"

"By no means," I answered; "neither can I now."

"They are, indeed, an odiously disagreeable set of mortals," continued

Zenobia. "I should like Mr. Hollingsworth a great deal better if the

philanthropy had been left out. At all events, as a mere matter of

taste, I wish he would let the bad people alone, and try to benefit

those who are not already past his help. Do you suppose he will be

content to spend his life, or even a few months of it, among tolerably

virtuous and comfortable individuals like ourselves?"

"Upon my word, I doubt it," said I. "If we wish to keep him with us, we

must systematically commit at least one crime apiece! Mere peccadillos

will not satisfy him."

Zenobia turned, sidelong, a strange kind of a glance upon me; but,

before I could make out what it meant, we had entered the kitchen,

where, in accordance with the rustic simplicity of our new life, the

supper-table was spread.

IV. THE SUPPER-TABLE

The pleasant firelight! I must still keep harping on it. The kitchen

hearth had an old-fashioned breadth, depth, and spaciousness, far

within which lay what seemed the butt of a good-sized oak-tree, with

the moisture bubbling merrily out at both ends. It was now half an

hour beyond dusk. The blaze from an armful of substantial sticks,

rendered more combustible by brushwood and pine, flickered powerfully

on the smoke-blackened walls, and so cheered our spirits that we cared

not what inclemency might rage and roar on the other side of our

illuminated windows. A yet sultrier warmth was bestowed by a goodly

quantity of peat, which was crumbling to white ashes among the burning

brands, and incensed the kitchen with its not ungrateful fragrance.

The exuberance of this household fire would alone have sufficed to

bespeak us no true farmers; for the New England yeoman, if he have the

misfortune to dwell within practicable distance of a wood-market, is as

niggardly of each stick as if it were a bar of California gold.

But it was fortunate for us, on that wintry eve of our untried life, to

enjoy the warm and radiant luxury of a somewhat too abundant fire. If

it served no other purpose, it made the men look so full of youth, warm

blood, and hope, and the women--such of them, at least, as were anywise

convertible by its magic--so very beautiful, that I would cheerfully

have spent my last dollar to prolong the blaze. As for Zenobia, there

was a glow in her cheeks that made me think of Pandora, fresh from

Vulcan's workshop, and full of the celestial warmth by dint of which he

had tempered and moulded her.

"Take your places, my dear friends all," cried she; "seat yourselves

without ceremony, and you shall be made happy with such tea as not many

of the world's working-people, except yourselves, will find in their

cups to-night. After this one supper, you may drink buttermilk, if you

please. To-night we will quaff this nectar, which, I assure you, could

not be bought with gold."

We all sat down,--grizzly Silas Foster, his rotund helpmate, and the

two bouncing handmaidens, included,--and looked at one another in a

friendly but rather awkward way. It was the first practical trial of

our theories of equal brotherhood and sisterhood; and we people of

superior cultivation and refinement (for as such, I presume, we

unhesitatingly reckoned ourselves) felt as if something were already

accomplished towards the millennium of love. The truth is, however,

that the laboring oar was with our unpolished companions; it being far

easier to condescend than to accept of condescension. Neither did I

refrain from questioning, in secret, whether some of us--and Zenobia

among the rest--would so quietly have taken our places among these good

people, save for the cherished consciousness that it was not by

necessity but choice. Though we saw fit to drink our tea out of

earthen cups to-night, and in earthen company, it was at our own option

to use pictured porcelain and handle silver forks again to-morrow.

This same salvo, as to the power of regaining our former position,

contributed much, I fear, to the equanimity with which we subsequently

bore many of the hardships and humiliations of a life of toil. If ever

I have deserved (which has not often been the case, and, I think,

never), but if ever I did deserve to be soundly cuffed by a fellow

mortal, for secretly putting weight upon some imaginary social

advantage, it must have been while I was striving to prove myself

ostentatiously his equal and no more. It was while I sat beside him on

his cobbler's bench, or clinked my hoe against his own in the

cornfield, or broke the same crust of bread, my earth-grimed hand to

his, at our noontide lunch. The poor, proud man should look at both

sides of sympathy like this.

The silence which followed upon our sitting down to table grew rather

oppressive; indeed, it was hardly broken by a word, during the first

round of Zenobia's fragrant tea.

"I hope," said I, at last, "that our blazing windows will be visible a

great way off. There is nothing so pleasant and encouraging to a

solitary traveller, on a stormy night, as a flood of firelight seen

amid the gloom. These ruddy window panes cannot fail to cheer the

hearts of all that look at them. Are they not warm with the

beacon-fire which we have kindled for humanity?"

"The blaze of that brushwood will only last a minute or two longer,"

observed Silas Foster; but whether he meant to insinuate that our moral

illumination would have as brief a term, I cannot say.

"Meantime," said Zenobia, "it may serve to guide some wayfarer to a

shelter."

And, just as she said this, there came a knock at the house door.

"There is one of the world's wayfarers," said I. "Ay, ay, just so!"

quoth Silas Foster. "Our firelight will draw stragglers, just as a

candle draws dorbugs on a summer night."

Whether to enjoy a dramatic suspense, or that we were selfishly

contrasting our own comfort with the chill and dreary situation of the

unknown person at the threshold, or that some of us city folk felt a

little startled at the knock which came so unseasonably, through night

and storm, to the door of the lonely farmhouse,--so it happened that

nobody, for an instant or two, arose to answer the summons. Pretty

soon there came another knock. The first had been moderately loud; the

second was smitten so forcibly that the knuckles of the applicant must

have left their mark in the door panel.

"He knocks as if he had a right to come in," said Zenobia, laughing.

"And what are we thinking of?--It must be Mr. Hollingsworth!"

Hereupon I went to the door, unbolted, and flung it wide open. There,

sure enough, stood Hollingsworth, his shaggy greatcoat all covered with

snow, so that he looked quite as much like a polar bear as a modern

philanthropist.

"Sluggish hospitality this!" said he, in those deep tones of his, which

seemed to come out of a chest as capacious as a barrel. "It would have

served you right if I had lain down and spent the night on the

doorstep, just for the sake of putting you to shame. But here is a

guest who will need a warmer and softer bed."

And, stepping back to the wagon in which he had journeyed hither,

Hollingsworth received into his arms and deposited on the doorstep a

figure enveloped in a cloak. It was evidently a woman; or,

rather,--judging from the ease with which he lifted her, and the little

space which she seemed to fill in his arms, a slim and unsubstantial

girl. As she showed some hesitation about entering the door,

Hollingsworth, with his usual directness and lack of ceremony, urged

her forward not merely within the entry, but into the warm and strongly

lighted kitchen.

"Who is this?" whispered I, remaining behind with him, while he was

taking off his greatcoat.

"Who? Really, I don't know," answered Hollingsworth, looking at me

with some surprise. "It is a young person who belongs here, however;

and no doubt she had been expected. Zenobia, or some of the women

folks, can tell you all about it."

"I think not," said I, glancing towards the new-comer and the other

occupants of the kitchen. "Nobody seems to welcome her. I should

hardly judge that she was an expected guest."

"Well, well," said Hollingsworth quietly, "We'll make it right."

The stranger, or whatever she were, remained standing precisely on that

spot of the kitchen floor to which Hollingsworth's kindly hand had

impelled her. The cloak falling partly off, she was seen to be a very

young woman dressed in a poor but decent gown, made high in the neck,

and without any regard to fashion or smartness. Her brown hair fell

down from beneath a hood, not in curls but with only a slight wave; her

face was of a wan, almost sickly hue, betokening habitual seclusion

from the sun and free atmosphere, like a flower-shrub that had done its

best to blossom in too scanty light. To complete the pitiableness of

her aspect, she shivered either with cold, or fear, or nervous

excitement, so that you might have beheld her shadow vibrating on the

fire-lighted wall. In short, there has seldom been seen so depressed

and sad a figure as this young girl's; and it was hardly possible to

help being angry with her, from mere despair of doing anything for her

comfort. The fantasy occurred to me that she was some desolate kind of

a creature, doomed to wander about in snowstorms; and that, though the

ruddiness of our window panes had tempted her into a human dwelling,

she would not remain long enough to melt the icicles out of her hair.

Another conjecture likewise came into my mind. Recollecting

Hollingsworth's sphere of philanthropic action, I deemed it possible

that he might have brought one of his guilty patients, to be wrought

upon and restored to spiritual health by the pure influences which our

mode of life would create.

As yet the girl had not stirred. She stood near the door, fixing a

pair of large, brown, melancholy eyes upon Zenobia--only upon

Zenobia!--she evidently saw nothing else in the room save that bright,

fair, rosy, beautiful woman. It was the strangest look I ever

witnessed; long a mystery to me, and forever a memory. Once she seemed

about to move forward and greet her,--I know not with what warmth or

with what words,--but, finally, instead of doing so, she dropped down

upon her knees, clasped her hands, and gazed piteously into Zenobia's

face. Meeting no kindly reception, her head fell on her bosom.

I never thoroughly forgave Zenobia for her conduct on this occasion.

But women are always more cautious in their casual hospitalities than

men.

"What does the girl mean?" cried she in rather a sharp tone. "Is she

crazy? Has she no tongue?"

And here Hollingsworth stepped forward.

"No wonder if the poor child's tongue is frozen in her mouth," said he;

and I think he positively frowned at Zenobia. "The very heart will be

frozen in her bosom, unless you women can warm it, among you, with the

warmth that ought to be in your own!"

Hollingsworth's appearance was very striking at this moment. He was

then about thirty years old, but looked several years older, with his

great shaggy head, his heavy brow, his dark complexion, his abundant

beard, and the rude strength with which his features seemed to have

been hammered out of iron, rather than chiselled or moulded from any

finer or softer material. His figure was not tall, but massive and

brawny, and well befitting his original occupation; which as the reader

probably knows--was that of a blacksmith. As for external polish, or

mere courtesy of manner, he never possessed more than a tolerably

educated bear; although, in his gentler moods, there was a tenderness

in his voice, eyes, mouth, in his gesture, and in every indescribable

manifestation, which few men could resist and no woman. But he now

looked stern and reproachful; and it was with that inauspicious meaning

in his glance that Hollingsworth first met Zenobia's eyes, and began

his influence upon her life.

To my surprise, Zenobia--of whose haughty spirit I had been told so

many examples--absolutely changed color, and seemed mortified and

confused.

"You do not quite do me justice, Mr. Hollingsworth," said she almost

humbly. "I am willing to be kind to the poor girl. Is she a protegee

of yours? What can I do for her?"

"Have you anything to ask of this lady?" said Hollingsworth kindly to

the girl. "I remember you mentioned her name before we left town."

"Only that she will shelter me," replied the girl tremulously. "Only

that she will let me be always near her."

"Well, indeed," exclaimed Zenobia, recovering herself and laughing,

"this is an adventure, and well-worthy to be the first incident in our

life of love and free-heartedness! But I accept it, for the present,

without further question, only," added she, "it would be a convenience

if we knew your name."

"Priscilla," said the girl; and it appeared to me that she hesitated

whether to add anything more, and decided in the negative. "Pray do

not ask me my other name,--at least not yet,--if you will be so kind to

a forlorn creature."

Priscilla!--Priscilla! I repeated the name to myself three or four

times; and in that little space, this quaint and prim cognomen had so

amalgamated itself with my idea of the girl, that it seemed as if no

other name could have adhered to her for a moment. Heretofore the poor

thing had not shed any tears; but now that she found herself received,

and at least temporarily established, the big drops began to ooze out

from beneath her eyelids as if she were full of them. Perhaps it showed

the iron substance of my heart, that I could not help smiling at this

odd scene of unknown and unaccountable calamity, into which our

cheerful party had been entrapped without the liberty of choosing

whether to sympathize or no. Hollingsworth's behavior was certainly a

great deal more creditable than mine.

"Let us not pry further into her secrets," he said to Zenobia and the

rest of us, apart; and his dark, shaggy face looked really beautiful

with its expression of thoughtful benevolence. "Let us conclude that

Providence has sent her to us, as the first-fruits of the world, which

we have undertaken to make happier than we find it. Let us warm her

poor, shivering body with this good fire, and her poor, shivering heart

with our best kindness. Let us feed her, and make her one of us. As

we do by this friendless girl, so shall we prosper. And, in good time,

whatever is desirable for us to know will be melted out of her, as

inevitably as those tears which we see now."

"At least," remarked I, "you may tell us how and where you met with

her."

"An old man brought her to my lodgings," answered Hollingsworth, "and

begged me to convey her to Blithedale, where--so I understood him--she

had friends; and this is positively all I know about the matter."

Grim Silas Foster, all this while, had been busy at the supper-table,

pouring out his own tea and gulping it down with no more sense of its

exquisiteness than if it were a decoction of catnip; helping himself to

pieces of dipt toast on the flat of his knife blade, and dropping half

of it on the table-cloth; using the same serviceable implement to cut

slice after slice of ham; perpetrating terrible enormities with the

butter-plate; and in all other respects behaving less like a civilized

Christian than the worst kind of an ogre. Being by this time fully

gorged, he crowned his amiable exploits with a draught from the water

pitcher, and then favored us with his opinion about the business in

hand. And, certainly, though they proceeded out of an unwiped mouth,

his expressions did him honor.

"Give the girl a hot cup of tea and a thick slice of this first-rate

bacon," said Silas, like a sensible man as he was. "That's what she

wants. Let her stay with us as long as she likes, and help in the

kitchen, and take the cow-breath at milking time; and, in a week or

two, she'll begin to look like a creature of this world."

So we sat down again to supper, and Priscilla along with us.

V. UNTIL BEDTIME

Silas Foster, by the time we concluded our meal, had stript off his

coat, and planted himself on a low chair by the kitchen fire, with a

lapstone, a hammer, a piece of sole leather, and some waxed-ends, in

order to cobble an old pair of cowhide boots; he being, in his own

phrase, "something of a dab" (whatever degree of skill that may imply)

at the shoemaking business. We heard the tap of his hammer at

intervals for the rest of the evening. The remainder of the party

adjourned to the sitting-room. Good Mrs. Foster took her

knitting-work, and soon fell fast asleep, still keeping her needles in

brisk movement, and, to the best of my observation, absolutely footing

a stocking out of the texture of a dream. And a very substantial

stocking it seemed to be. One of the two handmaidens hemmed a towel,

and the other appeared to be making a ruffle, for her Sunday's wear,

out of a little bit of embroidered muslin which Zenobia had probably

given her.

It was curious to observe how trustingly, and yet how timidly, our poor

Priscilla betook herself into the shadow of Zenobia's protection. She

sat beside her on a stool, looking up every now and then with an

expression of humble delight at her new friend's beauty. A brilliant

woman is often an object of the devoted admiration--it might almost be

termed worship, or idolatry--of some young girl, who perhaps beholds

the cynosure only at an awful distance, and has as little hope of

personal intercourse as of climbing among the stars of heaven. We men

are too gross to comprehend it. Even a woman, of mature age, despises

or laughs at such a passion. There occurred to me no mode of

accounting for Priscilla's behavior, except by supposing that she had

read some of Zenobia's stories (as such literature goes everywhere), or

her tracts in defence of the sex, and had come hither with the one

purpose of being her slave. There is nothing parallel to this, I

believe,--nothing so foolishly disinterested, and hardly anything so

beautiful,--in the masculine nature, at whatever epoch of life; or, if

there be, a fine and rare development of character might reasonably be

looked for from the youth who should prove himself capable of such

self-forgetful affection.

Zenobia happening to change her seat, I took the opportunity, in an

undertone, to suggest some such notion as the above.

"Since you see the young woman in so poetical a light," replied she in

the same tone, "you had better turn the affair into a ballad. It is a

grand subject, and worthy of supernatural machinery. The storm, the

startling knock at the door, the entrance of the sable knight

Hollingsworth and this shadowy snow-maiden, who, precisely at the

stroke of midnight, shall melt away at my feet in a pool of ice-cold

water and give me my death with a pair of wet slippers! And when the

verses are written, and polished quite to your mind, I will favor you

with my idea as to what the girl really is."

"Pray let me have it now," said I; "it shall be woven into the ballad."

"She is neither more nor less," answered Zenobia, "than a seamstress

from the city; and she has probably no more transcendental purpose than

to do my miscellaneous sewing, for I suppose she will hardly expect to

make my dresses."

"How can you decide upon her so easily?" I inquired.

"Oh, we women judge one another by tokens that escape the obtuseness of

masculine perceptions!" said Zenobia. "There is no proof which you

would be likely to appreciate, except the needle marks on the tip of

her forefinger. Then, my supposition perfectly accounts for her

paleness, her nervousness, and her wretched fragility. Poor thing! She

has been stifled with the heat of a salamander stove, in a small, close

room, and has drunk coffee, and fed upon doughnuts, raisins, candy, and

all such trash, till she is scarcely half alive; and so, as she has

hardly any physique, a poet like Mr. Miles Coverdale may be allowed to

think her spiritual."

"Look at her now!" whispered I.

Priscilla was gazing towards us with an inexpressible sorrow in her wan

face and great tears running down her cheeks. It was difficult to

resist the impression that, cautiously as we had lowered our voices,

she must have overheard and been wounded by Zenobia's scornful estimate

of her character and purposes.

"What ears the girl must have!" whispered Zenobia, with a look of

vexation, partly comic and partly real. "I will confess to you that I

cannot quite make her out. However, I am positively not an ill-natured

person, unless when very grievously provoked,--and as you, and

especially Mr. Hollingsworth, take so much interest in this odd

creature, and as she knocks with a very slight tap against my own heart

likewise,--why, I mean to let her in. From this moment I will be

reasonably kind to her. There is no pleasure in tormenting a person of

one's own sex, even if she do favor one with a little more love than

one can conveniently dispose of; and that, let me say, Mr. Coverdale,

is the most troublesome offence you can offer to a woman."

"Thank you," said I, smiling; "I don't mean to be guilty of it."

She went towards Priscilla, took her hand, and passed her own rosy

finger-tips, with a pretty, caressing movement, over the girl's hair.

The touch had a magical effect. So vivid a look of joy flushed up

beneath those fingers, that it seemed as if the sad and wan Priscilla

had been snatched away, and another kind of creature substituted in her

place. This one caress, bestowed voluntarily by Zenobia, was evidently

received as a pledge of all that the stranger sought from her, whatever

the unuttered boon might be. From that instant, too, she melted in

quietly amongst us, and was no longer a foreign element. Though always

an object of peculiar interest, a riddle, and a theme of frequent

discussion, her tenure at Blithedale was thenceforth fixed. We no more

thought of questioning it, than if Priscilla had been recognized as a

domestic sprite, who had haunted the rustic fireside of old, before we

had ever been warmed by its blaze.

She now produced, out of a work-bag that she had with her, some little

wooden instruments (what they are called I never knew), and proceeded

to knit, or net, an article which ultimately took the shape of a silk

purse. As the work went on, I remembered to have seen just such purses

before; indeed, I was the possessor of one. Their peculiar excellence,

besides the great delicacy and beauty of the manufacture, lay in the

almost impossibility that any uninitiated person should discover the

aperture; although, to a practised touch, they would open as wide as

charity or prodigality might wish. I wondered if it were not a symbol

of Priscilla's own mystery.

Notwithstanding the new confidence with which Zenobia had inspired her,

our guest showed herself disquieted by the storm. When the strong

puffs of wind spattered the snow against the windows and made the oaken

frame of the farmhouse creak, she looked at us apprehensively, as if to

inquire whether these tempestuous outbreaks did not betoken some

unusual mischief in the shrieking blast. She had been bred up, no

doubt, in some close nook, some inauspiciously sheltered court of the

city, where the uttermost rage of a tempest, though it might scatter

down the slates of the roof into the bricked area, could not shake the

casement of her little room. The sense of vast, undefined space,

pressing from the outside against the black panes of our uncurtained

windows, was fearful to the poor girl, heretofore accustomed to the

narrowness of human limits, with the lamps of neighboring tenements

glimmering across the street. The house probably seemed to her adrift

on the great ocean of the night. A little parallelogram of sky was all

that she had hitherto known of nature, so that she felt the awfulness

that really exists in its limitless extent. Once, while the blast was

bellowing, she caught hold of Zenobia's robe, with precisely the air of

one who hears her own name spoken at a distance, but is unutterably

reluctant to obey the call.

We spent rather an incommunicative evening. Hollingsworth hardly said

a word, unless when repeatedly and pertinaciously addressed. Then,

indeed, he would glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his

meditations like a tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply

possible, and betake himself back into the solitude of his heart and

mind. The poor fellow had contracted this ungracious habit from the

intensity with which he contemplated his own ideas, and the infrequent

sympathy which they met with from his auditors,--a circumstance that

seemed only to strengthen the implicit confidence that he awarded to

them. His heart, I imagine, was never really interested in our

socialist scheme, but was forever busy with his strange, and, as most

people thought it, impracticable plan, for the reformation of criminals

through an appeal to their higher instincts.

Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me many a groan to tolerate him

on this point. He ought to have commenced his investigation of the

subject by perpetrating some huge sin in his proper person, and

examining the condition of his higher instincts afterwards.

The rest of us formed ourselves into a committee for providing our

infant community with an appropriate name,--a matter of greatly more

difficulty than the uninitiated reader would suppose. Blithedale was

neither good nor bad. We should have resumed the old Indian name of

the premises, had it possessed the oil-and-honey flow which the

aborigines were so often happy in communicating to their local

appellations; but it chanced to be a harsh, ill-connected, and

interminable word, which seemed to fill the mouth with a mixture of

very stiff clay and very crumbly pebbles. Zenobia suggested "Sunny

Glimpse," as expressive of a vista into a better system of society.

This we turned over and over for a while, acknowledging its prettiness,

but concluded it to be rather too fine and sentimental a name (a fault

inevitable by literary ladies in such attempts) for sunburnt men to

work under. I ventured to whisper "Utopia," which, however, was

unanimously scouted down, and the proposer very harshly maltreated, as

if he had intended a latent satire. Some were for calling our

institution "The Oasis," in view of its being the one green spot in the

moral sand-waste of the world; but others insisted on a proviso for

reconsidering the matter at a twelvemonths' end, when a final decision

might be had, whether to name it "The Oasis" or "Sahara." So, at last,

finding it impracticable to hammer out anything better, we resolved

that the spot should still be Blithedale, as being of good augury

enough.

The evening wore on, and the outer solitude looked in upon us through

the windows, gloomy, wild, and vague, like another state of existence,

close beside the little sphere of warmth and light in which we were the

prattlers and bustlers of a moment. By and by the door was opened by

Silas Foster, with a cotton handkerchief about his head, and a tallow

candle in his hand.

"Take my advice, brother farmers," said he, with a great, broad,

bottomless yawn, "and get to bed as soon as you can. I shall sound the

horn at daybreak; and we've got the cattle to fodder, and nine cows to

milk, and a dozen other things to do, before breakfast."

Thus ended the first evening at Blithedale. I went shivering to my

fireless chamber, with the miserable consciousness (which had been

growing upon me for several hours past) that I had caught a tremendous

cold, and should probably awaken, at the blast of the horn, a fit

subject for a hospital. The night proved a feverish one. During the

greater part of it, I was in that vilest of states when a fixed idea

remains in the mind, like the nail in Sisera's brain, while innumerable

other ideas go and come, and flutter to and fro, combining constant

transition with intolerable sameness. Had I made a record of that

night's half-waking dreams, it is my belief that it would have

anticipated several of the chief incidents of this narrative, including

a dim shadow of its catastrophe. Starting up in bed at length, I saw

that the storm was past, and the moon was shining on the snowy

landscape, which looked like a lifeless copy of the world in marble.

From the bank of the distant river, which was shimmering in the

moonlight, came the black shadow of the only cloud in heaven, driven

swiftly by the wind, and passing over meadow and hillock, vanishing

amid tufts of leafless trees, but reappearing on the hither side, until

it swept across our doorstep.

How cold an Arcadia was this!

VI. COVERDALE'S SICK-CHAMBER

The horn sounded at daybreak, as Silas Foster had forewarned us, harsh,

uproarious, inexorably drawn out, and as sleep-dispelling as if this

hard-hearted old yeoman had got hold of the trump of doom.

On all sides I could hear the creaking of the bedsteads, as the

brethren of Blithedale started from slumber, and thrust themselves into

their habiliments, all awry, no doubt, in their haste to begin the

reformation of the world. Zenobia put her head into the entry, and

besought Silas Foster to cease his clamor, and to be kind enough to

leave an armful of firewood and a pail of water at her chamber door.

Of the whole household,--unless, indeed, it were Priscilla, for whose

habits, in this particular, I cannot vouch,--of all our apostolic

society, whose mission was to bless mankind, Hollingsworth, I

apprehend, was the only one who began the enterprise with prayer. My

sleeping-room being but thinly partitioned from his, the solemn murmur

of his voice made its way to my ears, compelling me to be an auditor of

his awful privacy with the Creator. It affected me with a deep

reverence for Hollingsworth, which no familiarity then existing, or

that afterwards grew more intimate between us,--no, nor my subsequent

perception of his own great errors,--ever quite effaced. It is so rare,

in these times, to meet with a man of prayerful habits (except, of

course, in the pulpit), that such an one is decidedly marked out by the

light of transfiguration, shed upon him in the divine interview from

which he passes into his daily life.

As for me, I lay abed; and if I said my prayers, it was backward,

cursing my day as bitterly as patient Job himself. The truth was, the

hot-house warmth of a town residence, and the luxurious life in which I

indulged myself, had taken much of the pith out of my physical system;

and the wintry blast of the preceding day, together with the general

chill of our airy old farmhouse, had got fairly into my heart and the

marrow of my bones. In this predicament, I seriously wished--selfish

as it may appear--that the reformation of society had been postponed

about half a century, or, at all events, to such a date as should have

put my intermeddling with it entirely out of the question.

What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society

than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough. My

pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted,

with the bedchamber adjoining; my centre-table, strewn with books and

periodicals; my writing-desk with a half-finished poem, in a stanza of

my own contrivance; my morning lounge at the reading-room or picture

gallery; my noontide walk along the cheery pavement, with the

suggestive succession of human faces, and the brisk throb of human life

in which I shared; my dinner at the Albion, where I had a hundred

dishes at command, and could banquet as delicately as the wizard

Michael Scott when the Devil fed him from the king of France's kitchen;

my evening at the billiard club, the concert, the theatre, or at

somebody's party, if I pleased,--what could be better than all this?

Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations

of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen

cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and

thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose

vocation I had thrust myself? Above all, was it better to have a fever

and die blaspheming, as I was like to do?

In this wretched plight, with a furnace in my heart and another in my

head, by the heat of which I was kept constantly at the boiling point,

yet shivering at the bare idea of extruding so much as a finger into

the icy atmosphere of the room, I kept my bed until breakfast-time,

when Hollingsworth knocked at the door, and entered.

"Well, Coverdale," cried he, "you bid fair to make an admirable farmer!

Don't you mean to get up to-day?"

"Neither to-day nor to-morrow," said I hopelessly. "I doubt if I ever

rise again!"

"What is the matter now?" he asked.

I told him my piteous case, and besought him to send me back to town in

a close carriage.

"No, no!" said Hollingsworth with kindly seriousness. "If you are

really sick, we must take care of you."

Accordingly he built a fire in my chamber, and, having little else to

do while the snow lay on the ground, established himself as my nurse. A

doctor was sent for, who, being homaeopathic, gave me as much medicine,

in the course of a fortnight's attendance, as would have laid on the

point of a needle. They fed me on water-gruel, and I speedily became a

skeleton above ground. But, after all, I have many precious

recollections connected with that fit of sickness.

Hollingsworth's more than brotherly attendance gave me inexpressible

comfort. Most men--and certainly I could not always claim to be one of

the exceptions--have a natural indifference, if not an absolutely

hostile feeling, towards those whom disease, or weakness, or calamity

of any kind causes to falter and faint amid the rude jostle of our

selfish existence. The education of Christianity, it is true, the

sympathy of a like experience and the example of women, may soften and,

possibly, subvert this ugly characteristic of our sex; but it is

originally there, and has likewise its analogy in the practice of our

brute brethren, who hunt the sick or disabled member of the herd from

among them, as an enemy. It is for this reason that the stricken deer

goes apart, and the sick lion grimly withdraws himself into his den.

Except in love, or the attachments of kindred, or other very long and

habitual affection, we really have no tenderness. But there was

something of the woman moulded into the great, stalwart frame of

Hollingsworth; nor was he ashamed of it, as men often are of what is

best in them, nor seemed ever to know that there was such a soft place

in his heart. I knew it well, however, at that time, although

afterwards it came nigh to be forgotten. Methought there could not be

two such men alive as Hollingsworth. There never was any blaze of a

fireside that warmed and cheered me, in the down-sinkings and

shiverings of my spirit, so effectually as did the light out of those

eyes, which lay so deep and dark under his shaggy brows.

Happy the man that has such a friend beside him when he comes to die!

and unless a friend like Hollingsworth be at hand,--as most probably

there will not,--he had better make up his mind to die alone. How many

men, I wonder, does one meet with in a lifetime, whom he would choose

for his deathbed companions! At the crisis of my fever I besought

Hollingsworth to let nobody else enter the room, but continually to

make me sensible of his own presence by a grasp of the hand, a word, a

prayer, if he thought good to utter it; and that then he should be the

witness how courageously I would encounter the worst. It still

impresses me as almost a matter of regret that I did not die then, when

I had tolerably made up my mind to it; for Hollingsworth would have

gone with me to the hither verge of life, and have sent his friendly

and hopeful accents far over on the other side, while I should be

treading the unknown path. Now, were I to send for him, he would

hardly come to my bedside, nor should I depart the easier for his

presence.

"You are not going to die, this time," said he, gravely smiling. "You

know nothing about sickness, and think your case a great deal more

desperate than it is."

"Death should take me while I am in the mood," replied I, with a little

of my customary levity.

"Have you nothing to do in life," asked Hollingsworth, "that you fancy

yourself so ready to leave it?"

"Nothing," answered I; "nothing that I know of, unless to make pretty

verses, and play a part, with Zenobia and the rest of the amateurs, in

our pastoral. It seems but an unsubstantial sort of business, as

viewed through a mist of fever. But, dear Hollingsworth, your own

vocation is evidently to be a priest, and to spend your days and nights

in helping your fellow creatures to draw peaceful dying breaths."

"And by which of my qualities," inquired he, "can you suppose me fitted

for this awful ministry?"

"By your tenderness," I said. "It seems to me the reflection of God's

own love."

"And you call me tender!" repeated Hollingsworth thoughtfully. "I

should rather say that the most marked trait in my character is an

inflexible severity of purpose. Mortal man has no right to be so

inflexible as it is my nature and necessity to be."

"I do not believe it," I replied.

But, in due time, I remembered what he said.

Probably, as Hollingsworth suggested, my disorder was never so serious

as, in my ignorance of such matters, I was inclined to consider it.

After so much tragical preparation, it was positively rather mortifying

to find myself on the mending hand.

All the other members of the Community showed me kindness, according to

the full measure of their capacity. Zenobia brought me my gruel every

day, made by her own hands (not very skilfully, if the truth must be

told), and, whenever I seemed inclined to converse, would sit by my

bedside, and talk with so much vivacity as to add several gratuitous

throbs to my pulse. Her poor little stories and tracts never half did

justice to her intellect. It was only the lack of a fitter avenue that

drove her to seek development in literature. She was made (among a

thousand other things that she might have been) for a stump oratress.

I recognized no severe culture in Zenobia; her mind was full of weeds.

It startled me sometimes, in my state of moral as well as bodily

faint-heartedness, to observe the hardihood of her philosophy. She

made no scruple of oversetting all human institutions, and scattering

them as with a breeze from her fan. A female reformer, in her attacks

upon society, has an instinctive sense of where the life lies, and is

inclined to aim directly at that spot. Especially the relation between

the sexes is naturally among the earliest to attract her notice.

Zenobia was truly a magnificent woman. The homely simplicity of her

dress could not conceal, nor scarcely diminish, the queenliness of her

presence. The image of her form and face should have been multiplied

all over the earth. It was wronging the rest of mankind to retain her

as the spectacle of only a few. The stage would have been her proper

sphere. She should have made it a point of duty, moreover, to sit

endlessly to painters and sculptors, and preferably to the latter;

because the cold decorum of the marble would consist with the utmost

scantiness of drapery, so that the eye might chastely be gladdened with

her material perfection in its entireness. I know not well how to

express that the native glow of coloring in her cheeks, and even the

flesh-warmth over her round arms, and what was visible of her full

bust,--in a word, her womanliness incarnated,--compelled me sometimes

to close my eyes, as if it were not quite the privilege of modesty to

gaze at her. Illness and exhaustion, no doubt, had made me morbidly

sensitive.

I noticed--and wondered how Zenobia contrived it--that she had always a

new flower in her hair. And still it was a hot-house flower,--an

outlandish flower,--a flower of the tropics, such as appeared to have

sprung passionately out of a soil the very weeds of which would be

fervid and spicy. Unlike as was the flower of each successive day to

the preceding one, it yet so assimilated its richness to the rich

beauty of the woman, that I thought it the only flower fit to be worn;

so fit, indeed, that Nature had evidently created this floral gem, in a

happy exuberance, for the one purpose of worthily adorning Zenobia's

head. It might be that my feverish fantasies clustered themselves

about this peculiarity, and caused it to look more gorgeous and

wonderful than if beheld with temperate eyes. In the height of my

illness, as I well recollect, I went so far as to pronounce it

preternatural.

"Zenobia is an enchantress!" whispered I once to Hollingsworth. "She

is a sister of the Veiled Lady. That flower in her hair is a talisman.

If you were to snatch it away, she would vanish, or be transformed into

something else."

"What does he say?" asked Zenobia.

"Nothing that has an atom of sense in it," answered Hollingsworth. "He

is a little beside himself, I believe, and talks about your being a

witch, and of some magical property in the flower that you wear in your

hair."

"It is an idea worthy of a feverish poet," said she, laughing rather

compassionately, and taking out the flower. "I scorn to owe anything

to magic. Here, Mr. Hollingsworth, you may keep the spell while it has

any virtue in it; but I cannot promise you not to appear with a new one

to-morrow. It is the one relic of my more brilliant, my happier days!"

The most curious part of the matter was that, long after my slight

delirium had passed away,--as long, indeed, as I continued to know this

remarkable woman,--her daily flower affected my imagination, though

more slightly, yet in very much the same way. The reason must have

been that, whether intentionally on her part or not, this favorite

ornament was actually a subtile expression of Zenobia's character.

One subject, about which--very impertinently, moreover--I perplexed

myself with a great many conjectures, was, whether Zenobia had ever

been married. The idea, it must be understood, was unauthorized by any

circumstance or suggestion that had made its way to my ears. So young

as I beheld her, and the freshest and rosiest woman of a thousand,

there was certainly no need of imputing to her a destiny already

accomplished; the probability was far greater that her coming years had

all life's richest gifts to bring. If the great event of a woman's

existence had been consummated, the world knew nothing of it, although

the world seemed to know Zenobia well. It was a ridiculous piece of

romance, undoubtedly, to imagine that this beautiful personage, wealthy

as she was, and holding a position that might fairly enough be called

distinguished, could have given herself away so privately, but that

some whisper and suspicion, and by degrees a full understanding of the

fact, would eventually be blown abroad. But then, as I failed not to

consider, her original home was at a distance of many hundred miles.

Rumors might fill the social atmosphere, or might once have filled it,

there, which would travel but slowly, against the wind, towards our

Northeastern metropolis, and perhaps melt into thin air before reaching

it.

There was not--and I distinctly repeat it--the slightest foundation in

my knowledge for any surmise of the kind. But there is a species of

intuition,--either a spiritual lie or the subtile recognition of a

fact,--which comes to us in a reduced state of the corporeal system.

The soul gets the better of the body, after wasting illness, or when a

vegetable diet may have mingled too much ether in the blood. Vapors

then rise up to the brain, and take shapes that often image falsehood,

but sometimes truth. The spheres of our companions have, at such

periods, a vastly greater influence upon our own than when robust

health gives us a repellent and self-defensive energy. Zenobia's

sphere, I imagine, impressed itself powerfully on mine, and transformed

me, during this period of my weakness, into something like a mesmerical

clairvoyant.

Then, also, as anybody could observe, the freedom of her deportment

(though, to some tastes, it might commend itself as the utmost

perfection of manner in a youthful widow or a blooming matron) was not

exactly maiden-like. What girl had ever laughed as Zenobia did? What

girl had ever spoken in her mellow tones? Her unconstrained and

inevitable manifestation, I said often to myself, was that of a woman

to whom wedlock had thrown wide the gates of mystery. Yet sometimes I

strove to be ashamed of these conjectures. I acknowledged it as a

masculine grossness--a sin of wicked interpretation, of which man is

often guilty towards the other sex--thus to mistake the sweet, liberal,

but womanly frankness of a noble and generous disposition. Still, it

was of no avail to reason with myself nor to upbraid myself.

Pertinaciously the thought, "Zenobia is a wife; Zenobia has lived and

loved! There is no folded petal, no latent dewdrop, in this perfectly

developed rose!"--irresistibly that thought drove out all other

conclusions, as often as my mind reverted to the subject.

Zenobia was conscious of my observation, though not, I presume, of the

point to which it led me.

"Mr. Coverdale," said she one day, as she saw me watching her, while

she arranged my gruel on the table, "I have been exposed to a great

deal of eye-shot in the few years of my mixing in the world, but never,

I think, to precisely such glances as you are in the habit of favoring

me with. I seem to interest you very much; and yet--or else a woman's

instinct is for once deceived--I cannot reckon you as an admirer. What

are you seeking to discover in me?"

"The mystery of your life," answered I, surprised into the truth by the

unexpectedness of her attack. "And you will never tell me."

She bent her head towards me, and let me look into her eyes, as if

challenging me to drop a plummet-line down into the depths of her

consciousness.

"I see nothing now," said I, closing my own eyes, "unless it be the

face of a sprite laughing at me from the bottom of a deep well."

A bachelor always feels himself defrauded, when he knows or suspects

that any woman of his acquaintance has given herself away. Otherwise,

the matter could have been no concern of mine. It was purely

speculative, for I should not, under any circumstances, have fallen in

love with Zenobia. The riddle made me so nervous, however, in my

sensitive condition of mind and body, that I most ungratefully began to

wish that she would let me alone. Then, too, her gruel was very

wretched stuff, with almost invariably the smell of pine smoke upon it,

like the evil taste that is said to mix itself up with a witch's best

concocted dainties. Why could not she have allowed one of the other

women to take the gruel in charge? Whatever else might be her gifts,

Nature certainly never intended Zenobia for a cook. Or, if so, she

should have meddled only with the richest and spiciest dishes, and such

as are to be tasted at banquets, between draughts of intoxicating wine.

VII. THE CONVALESCENT

As soon as my incommodities allowed me to think of past occurrences, I

failed not to inquire what had become of the odd little guest whom

Hollingsworth had been the medium of introducing among us. It now

appeared that poor Priscilla had not so literally fallen out of the

clouds, as we were at first inclined to suppose. A letter, which

should have introduced her, had since been received from one of the

city missionaries, containing a certificate of character and an

allusion to circumstances which, in the writer's judgment, made it

especially desirable that she should find shelter in our Community.

There was a hint, not very intelligible, implying either that Priscilla

had recently escaped from some particular peril or irksomeness of

position, or else that she was still liable to this danger or

difficulty, whatever it might be. We should ill have deserved the

reputation of a benevolent fraternity, had we hesitated to entertain a

petitioner in such need, and so strongly recommended to our kindness;

not to mention, moreover, that the strange maiden had set herself

diligently to work, and was doing good service with her needle. But a

slight mist of uncertainty still floated about Priscilla, and kept her,

as yet, from taking a very decided place among creatures of flesh and

blood.

The mysterious attraction, which, from her first entrance on our scene,

she evinced for Zenobia, had lost nothing of its force. I often heard

her footsteps, soft and low, accompanying the light but decided tread

of the latter up the staircase, stealing along the passage-way by her

new friend's side, and pausing while Zenobia entered my chamber.

Occasionally Zenobia would be a little annoyed by Priscilla's too close

attendance. In an authoritative and not very kindly tone, she would

advise her to breathe the pleasant air in a walk, or to go with her

work into the barn, holding out half a promise to come and sit on the

hay with her, when at leisure. Evidently, Priscilla found but scanty

requital for her love. Hollingsworth was likewise a great favorite with

her. For several minutes together sometimes, while my auditory nerves

retained the susceptibility of delicate health, I used to hear a low,

pleasant murmur ascending from the room below; and at last ascertained

it to be Priscilla's voice, babbling like a little brook to

Hollingsworth. She talked more largely and freely with him than with

Zenobia, towards whom, indeed, her feelings seemed not so much to be

confidence as involuntary affection. I should have thought all the

better of my own qualities had Priscilla marked me out for the third

place in her regards. But, though she appeared to like me tolerably

well, I could never flatter myself with being distinguished by her as

Hollingsworth and Zenobia were.

One forenoon, during my convalescence, there came a gentle tap at my

chamber door. I immediately said, "Come in, Priscilla!" with an acute

sense of the applicant's identity. Nor was I deceived. It was really

Priscilla,--a pale, large-eyed little woman (for she had gone far

enough into her teens to be, at least, on the outer limit of girlhood),

but much less wan than at my previous view of her, and far better

conditioned both as to health and spirits. As I first saw her, she had

reminded me of plants that one sometimes observes doing their best to

vegetate among the bricks of an enclosed court, where there is scanty

soil and never any sunshine. At present, though with no approach to

bloom, there were indications that the girl had human blood in her

veins.

Priscilla came softly to my bedside, and held out an article of

snow-white linen, very carefully and smoothly ironed. She did not seem

bashful, nor anywise embarrassed. My weakly condition, I suppose,

supplied a medium in which she could approach me.

"Do not you need this?" asked she. "I have made it for you." It was a

nightcap!

"My dear Priscilla," said I, smiling, "I never had on a nightcap in my

life! But perhaps it will be better for me to wear one, now that I am

a miserable invalid. How admirably you have done it! No, no; I never

can think of wearing such an exquisitely wrought nightcap as this,

unless it be in the daytime, when I sit up to receive company."

"It is for use, not beauty," answered Priscilla. "I could have

embroidered it and made it much prettier, if I pleased."

While holding up the nightcap and admiring the fine needlework, I

perceived that Priscilla had a sealed letter which she was waiting for

me to take. It had arrived from the village post-office that morning.

As I did not immediately offer to receive the letter, she drew it back,

and held it against her bosom, with both hands clasped over it, in a

way that had probably grown habitual to her. Now, on turning my eyes

from the nightcap to Priscilla, it forcibly struck me that her air,

though not her figure, and the expression of her face, but not its

features, had a resemblance to what I had often seen in a friend of

mine, one of the most gifted women of the age. I cannot describe it.

The points easiest to convey to the reader were a certain curve of the

shoulders and a partial closing of the eyes, which seemed to look more

penetratingly into my own eyes, through the narrowed apertures, than if

they had been open at full width. It was a singular anomaly of

likeness coexisting with perfect dissimilitude.

"Will you give me the letter, Priscilla?" said I.

She started, put the letter into my hand, and quite lost the look that

had drawn my notice.

"Priscilla," I inquired, "did you ever see Miss Margaret Fuller?"

"No," she answered.

"Because," said I, "you reminded me of her just now,--and it happens,

strangely enough, that this very letter is from her."

Priscilla, for whatever reason, looked very much discomposed.

"I wish people would not fancy such odd things in me!" she said rather

petulantly. "How could I possibly make myself resemble this lady

merely by holding her letter in my hand?"

"Certainly, Priscilla, it would puzzle me to explain it," I replied;

"nor do I suppose that the letter had anything to do with it. It was

just a coincidence, nothing more."

She hastened out of the room, and this was the last that I saw of

Priscilla until I ceased to be an invalid.

Being much alone during my recovery, I read interminably in Mr.

Emerson's Essays, "The Dial," Carlyle's works, George Sand's romances

(lent me by Zenobia), and other books which one or another of the

brethren or sisterhood had brought with them. Agreeing in little else,

most of these utterances were like the cry of some solitary sentinel,

whose station was on the outposts of the advance guard of human

progression; or sometimes the voice came sadly from among the shattered

ruins of the past, but yet had a hopeful echo in the future. They were

well adapted (better, at least, than any other intellectual products,

the volatile essence of which had heretofore tinctured a printed page)

to pilgrims like ourselves, whose present bivouac was considerably

further into the waste of chaos than any mortal army of crusaders had

ever marched before. Fourier's works, also, in a series of horribly

tedious volumes, attracted a good deal of my attention, from the

analogy which I could not but recognize between his system and our own.

There was far less resemblance, it is true, than the world chose to

imagine, inasmuch as the two theories differed, as widely as the zenith

from the nadir, in their main principles.

I talked about Fourier to Hollingsworth, and translated, for his

benefit, some of the passages that chiefly impressed me.

"When, as a consequence of human improvement," said I, "the globe shall

arrive at its final perfection, the great ocean is to be converted into

a particular kind of lemonade, such as was fashionable at Paris in

Fourier's time. He calls it limonade a cedre. It is positively a

fact! Just imagine the city docks filled, every day, with a flood tide

of this delectable beverage!"

"Why did not the Frenchman make punch of it at once?" asked

Hollingsworth. "The jack-tars would be delighted to go down in ships

and do business in such an element."

I further proceeded to explain, as well as I modestly could, several

points of Fourier's system, illustrating them with here and there a

page or two, and asking Hollingsworth's opinion as to the expediency of

introducing these beautiful peculiarities into our own practice.

"Let me hear no more of it!" cried he, in utter disgust. "I never will

forgive this fellow! He has committed the unpardonable sin; for what

more monstrous iniquity could the Devil himself contrive than to choose

the selfish principle,--the principle of all human wrong, the very

blackness of man's heart, the portion of ourselves which we shudder at,

and which it is the whole aim of spiritual discipline to eradicate,--to

choose it as the master workman of his system? To seize upon and

foster whatever vile, petty, sordid, filthy, bestial, and abominable

corruptions have cankered into our nature, to be the efficient

instruments of his infernal regeneration! And his consummated

Paradise, as he pictures it, would be worthy of the agency which he

counts upon for establishing it. The nauseous villain!"

"Nevertheless," remarked I, "in consideration of the promised delights

of his system,--so very proper, as they certainly are, to be

appreciated by Fourier's countrymen,--I cannot but wonder that

universal France did not adopt his theory at a moment's warning. But

is there not something very characteristic of his nation in Fourier's

manner of putting forth his views? He makes no claim to inspiration.

He has not persuaded himself--as Swedenborg did, and as any other than

a Frenchman would, with a mission of like importance to

communicate--that he speaks with authority from above. He promulgates

his system, so far as I can perceive, entirely on his own

responsibility. He has searched out and discovered the whole counsel

of the Almighty in respect to mankind, past, present, and for exactly

seventy thousand years to come, by the mere force and cunning of his

individual intellect!"

"Take the book out of my sight," said Hollingsworth with great

virulence of expression, "or, I tell you fairly, I shall fling it in

the fire! And as for Fourier, let him make a Paradise, if he can, of

Gehenna, where, as I conscientiously believe, he is floundering at this

moment!"

"And bellowing, I suppose," said I,--not that I felt any ill-will

towards Fourier, but merely wanted to give the finishing touch to

Hollingsworth's image, "bellowing for the least drop of his beloved

limonade a cedre!"

There is but little profit to be expected in attempting to argue with a

man who allows himself to declaim in this manner; so I dropt the

subject, and never took it up again.

But had the system at which he was so enraged combined almost any

amount of human wisdom, spiritual insight, and imaginative beauty, I

question whether Hollingsworth's mind was in a fit condition to receive

it. I began to discern that he had come among us actuated by no real

sympathy with our feelings and our hopes, but chiefly because we were

estranging ourselves from the world, with which his lonely and

exclusive object in life had already put him at odds. Hollingsworth

must have been originally endowed with a great spirit of benevolence,

deep enough and warm enough to be the source of as much disinterested

good as Providence often allows a human being the privilege of

conferring upon his fellows. This native instinct yet lived within

him. I myself had profited by it, in my necessity. It was seen, too,

in his treatment of Priscilla. Such casual circumstances as were here

involved would quicken his divine power of sympathy, and make him seem,

while their influence lasted, the tenderest man and the truest friend

on earth. But by and by you missed the tenderness of yesterday, and

grew drearily conscious that Hollingsworth had a closer friend than

ever you could be; and this friend was the cold, spectral monster which

he had himself conjured up, and on which he was wasting all the warmth

of his heart, and of which, at last,--as these men of a mighty purpose

so invariably do,--he had grown to be the bond-slave. It was his

philanthropic theory.

This was a result exceedingly sad to contemplate, considering that it

had been mainly brought about by the very ardor and exuberance of his

philanthropy. Sad, indeed, but by no means unusual: he had taught his

benevolence to pour its warm tide exclusively through one channel; so

that there was nothing to spare for other great manifestations of love

to man, nor scarcely for the nutriment of individual attachments,

unless they could minister in some way to the terrible egotism which he

mistook for an angel of God. Had Hollingsworth's education been more

enlarged, he might not so inevitably have stumbled into this pitfall.

But this identical pursuit had educated him. He knew absolutely

nothing, except in a single direction, where he had thought so

energetically, and felt to such a depth, that no doubt the entire

reason and justice of the universe appeared to be concentrated

thitherward.

It is my private opinion that, at this period of his life,

Hollingsworth was fast going mad; and, as with other crazy people

(among whom I include humorists of every degree), it required all the

constancy of friendship to restrain his associates from pronouncing him

an intolerable bore. Such prolonged fiddling upon one string--such

multiform presentation of one idea! His specific object (of which he

made the public more than sufficiently aware, through the medium of

lectures and pamphlets) was to obtain funds for the construction of an

edifice, with a sort of collegiate endowment. On this foundation he

purposed to devote himself and a few disciples to the reform and mental

culture of our criminal brethren. His visionary edifice was

Hollingsworth's one castle in the air; it was the material type in

which his philanthropic dream strove to embody itself; and he made the

scheme more definite, and caught hold of it the more strongly, and kept

his clutch the more pertinaciously, by rendering it visible to the

bodily eye. I have seen him, a hundred times, with a pencil and sheet

of paper, sketching the facade, the side-view, or the rear of the

structure, or planning the internal arrangements, as lovingly as

another man might plan those of the projected home where he meant to be

happy with his wife and children. I have known him to begin a model of

the building with little stones, gathered at the brookside, whither we

had gone to cool ourselves in the sultry noon of haying-time. Unlike

all other ghosts, his spirit haunted an edifice, which, instead of

being time-worn, and full of storied love, and joy, and sorrow, had

never yet come into existence.

"Dear friend," said I once to Hollingsworth, before leaving my

sick-chamber, "I heartily wish that I could make your schemes my

schemes, because it would be so great a happiness to find myself

treading the same path with you. But I am afraid there is not stuff in

me stern enough for a philanthropist,--or not in this peculiar

direction,--or, at all events, not solely in this. Can you bear with

me, if such should prove to be the case?"

"I will at least wait awhile," answered Hollingsworth, gazing at me

sternly and gloomily. "But how can you be my life-long friend, except

you strive with me towards the great object of my life?"

Heaven forgive me! A horrible suspicion crept into my heart, and stung

the very core of it as with the fangs of an adder. I wondered whether

it were possible that Hollingsworth could have watched by my bedside,

with all that devoted care, only for the ulterior purpose of making me

a proselyte to his views!

VIII. A MODERN ARCADIA

May-day--I forget whether by Zenobia's sole decree, or by the unanimous

vote of our community--had been declared a movable festival. It was

deferred until the sun should have had a reasonable time to clear away

the snowdrifts along the lee of the stone walls, and bring out a few of

the readiest wild flowers. On the forenoon of the substituted day,

after admitting some of the balmy air into my chamber, I decided that

it was nonsense and effeminacy to keep myself a prisoner any longer.

So I descended to the sitting-room, and finding nobody there, proceeded

to the barn, whence I had already heard Zenobia's voice, and along with

it a girlish laugh which was not so certainly recognizable. Arriving

at the spot, it a little surprised me to discover that these merry

outbreaks came from Priscilla.

The two had been a-maying together. They had found anemones in

abundance, houstonias by the handful, some columbines, a few

long-stalked violets, and a quantity of white everlasting flowers, and

had filled up their basket with the delicate spray of shrubs and trees.

None were prettier than the maple twigs, the leaf of which looks like a

scarlet bud in May, and like a plate of vegetable gold in October.

Zenobia, who showed no conscience in such matters, had also rifled a

cherry-tree of one of its blossomed boughs, and, with all this variety

of sylvan ornament, had been decking out Priscilla. Being done with a

good deal of taste, it made her look more charming than I should have

thought possible, with my recollection of the wan, frost-nipt girl, as

heretofore described. Nevertheless, among those fragrant blossoms, and

conspicuously, too, had been stuck a weed of evil odor and ugly aspect,

which, as soon as I detected it, destroyed the effect of all the rest.

There was a gleam of latent mischief--not to call it deviltry--in

Zenobia's eye, which seemed to indicate a slightly malicious purpose in

the arrangement.

As for herself, she scorned the rural buds and leaflets, and wore

nothing but her invariable flower of the tropics.

"What do you think of Priscilla now, Mr. Coverdale?" asked she,

surveying her as a child does its doll. "Is not she worth a verse or

two?"

"There is only one thing amiss," answered I. Zenobia laughed, and flung

the malignant weed away.

"Yes; she deserves some verses now," said I, "and from a better poet

than myself. She is the very picture of the New England spring;

subdued in tint and rather cool, but with a capacity of sunshine, and

bringing us a few Alpine blossoms, as earnest of something richer,

though hardly more beautiful, hereafter. The best type of her is one

of those anemones."

"What I find most singular in Priscilla, as her health improves,"

observed Zenobia, "is her wildness. Such a quiet little body as she

seemed, one would not have expected that. Why, as we strolled the

woods together, I could hardly keep her from scrambling up the trees,

like a squirrel. She has never before known what it is to live in the

free air, and so it intoxicates her as if she were sipping wine. And

she thinks it such a paradise here, and all of us, particularly Mr.

Hollingsworth and myself, such angels! It is quite ridiculous, and

provokes one's malice almost, to see a creature so happy, especially a

feminine creature."

"They are always happier than male creatures," said I.

"You must correct that opinion, Mr. Coverdale," replied Zenobia

contemptuously, "or I shall think you lack the poetic insight. Did you

ever see a happy woman in your life? Of course, I do not mean a girl,

like Priscilla and a thousand others,--for they are all alike, while on

the sunny side of experience,--but a grown woman. How can she be

happy, after discovering that fate has assigned her but one single

event, which she must contrive to make the substance of her whole life?

A man has his choice of innumerable events."

"A woman, I suppose," answered I, "by constant repetition of her one

event, may compensate for the lack of variety."

"Indeed!" said Zenobia.

While we were talking, Priscilla caught sight of Hollingsworth at a

distance, in a blue frock, and with a hoe over his shoulder, returning

from the field. She immediately set out to meet him, running and

skipping, with spirits as light as the breeze of the May morning, but

with limbs too little exercised to be quite responsive; she clapped her

hands, too, with great exuberance of gesture, as is the custom of young

girls when their electricity overcharges them. But, all at once, midway

to Hollingsworth, she paused, looked round about her, towards the

river, the road, the woods, and back towards us, appearing to listen,

as if she heard some one calling her name, and knew not precisely in

what direction.

"Have you bewitched her?" I exclaimed.

"It is no sorcery of mine," said Zenobia; "but I have seen the girl do

that identical thing once or twice before. Can you imagine what is the

matter with her?"

"No; unless," said I, "she has the gift of hearing those 'airy tongues

that syllable men's names,' which Milton tells about."

From whatever cause, Priscilla's animation seemed entirely to have

deserted her. She seated herself on a rock, and remained there until

Hollingsworth came up; and when he took her hand and led her back to

us, she rather resembled my original image of the wan and spiritless

Priscilla than the flowery May-queen of a few moments ago. These

sudden transformations, only to be accounted for by an extreme nervous

susceptibility, always continued to characterize the girl, though with

diminished frequency as her health progressively grew more robust.

I was now on my legs again. My fit of illness had been an avenue

between two existences; the low-arched and darksome doorway, through

which I crept out of a life of old conventionalisms, on my hands and

knees, as it were, and gained admittance into the freer region that lay

beyond. In this respect, it was like death. And, as with death, too,

it was good to have gone through it. No otherwise could I have rid

myself of a thousand follies, fripperies, prejudices, habits, and other

such worldly dust as inevitably settles upon the crowd along the broad

highway, giving them all one sordid aspect before noon-time, however

freshly they may have begun their pilgrimage in the dewy morning. The

very substance upon my bones had not been fit to live with in any

better, truer, or more energetic mode than that to which I was

accustomed. So it was taken off me and flung aside, like any other

worn-out or unseasonable garment; and, after shivering a little while

in my skeleton, I began to be clothed anew, and much more

satisfactorily than in my previous suit. In literal and physical

truth, I was quite another man. I had a lively sense of the exultation

with which the spirit will enter on the next stage of its eternal

progress after leaving the heavy burden of its mortality in an early

grave, with as little concern for what may become of it as now affected

me for the flesh which I had lost.

Emerging into the genial sunshine, I half fancied that the labors of

the brotherhood had already realized some of Fourier's predictions.

Their enlightened culture of the soil, and the virtues with which they

sanctified their life, had begun to produce an effect upon the material

world and its climate. In my new enthusiasm, man looked strong and

stately,--and woman, oh, how beautiful!--and the earth a green garden,

blossoming with many-colored delights. Thus Nature, whose laws I had

broken in various artificial ways, comported herself towards me as a

strict but loving mother, who uses the rod upon her little boy for his

naughtiness, and then gives him a smile, a kiss, and some pretty

playthings to console the urchin for her severity.

In the interval of my seclusion, there had been a number of recruits to

our little army of saints and martyrs. They were mostly individuals

who had gone through such an experience as to disgust them with

ordinary pursuits, but who were not yet so old, nor had suffered so

deeply, as to lose their faith in the better time to come. On comparing

their minds one with another they often discovered that this idea of a

Community had been growing up, in silent and unknown sympathy, for

years. Thoughtful, strongly lined faces were among them; sombre brows,

but eyes that did not require spectacles, unless prematurely dimmed by

the student's lamplight, and hair that seldom showed a thread of

silver. Age, wedded to the past, incrusted over with a stony layer of

habits, and retaining nothing fluid in its possibilities, would have

been absurdly out of place in an enterprise like this. Youth, too, in

its early dawn, was hardly more adapted to our purpose; for it would

behold the morning radiance of its own spirit beaming over the very

same spots of withered grass and barren sand whence most of us had seen

it vanish. We had very young people with us, it is true,--downy lads,

rosy girls in their first teens, and children of all heights above

one's knee; but these had chiefly been sent hither for education, which

it was one of the objects and methods of our institution to supply.

Then we had boarders, from town and elsewhere, who lived with us in a

familiar way, sympathized more or less in our theories, and sometimes

shared in our labors.

On the whole, it was a society such as has seldom met together; nor,

perhaps, could it reasonably be expected to hold together long. Persons

of marked individuality--crooked sticks, as some of us might be

called--are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a fagot. But, so

long as our union should subsist, a man of intellect and feeling, with

a free nature in him, might have sought far and near without finding so

many points of attraction as would allure him hitherward. We were of

all creeds and opinions, and generally tolerant of all, on every

imaginable subject. Our bond, it seems to me, was not affirmative, but

negative. We had individually found one thing or another to quarrel

with in our past life, and were pretty well agreed as to the

inexpediency of lumbering along with the old system any further. As to

what should be substituted, there was much less unanimity. We did not

greatly care--at least, I never did--for the written constitution under

which our millennium had commenced. My hope was, that, between theory

and practice, a true and available mode of life might be struck out;

and that, even should we ultimately fail, the months or years spent in

the trial would not have been wasted, either as regarded passing

enjoyment, or the experience which makes men wise.

Arcadians though we were, our costume bore no resemblance to the

beribboned doublets, silk breeches and stockings, and slippers fastened

with artificial roses, that distinguish the pastoral people of poetry

and the stage. In outward show, I humbly conceive, we looked rather

like a gang of beggars, or banditti, than either a company of honest

laboring-men, or a conclave of philosophers. Whatever might be our

points of difference, we all of us seemed to have come to Blithedale

with the one thrifty and laudable idea of wearing out our old clothes.

Such garments as had an airing, whenever we strode afield! Coats with

high collars and with no collars, broad-skirted or swallow-tailed, and

with the waist at every point between the hip and arm-pit; pantaloons

of a dozen successive epochs, and greatly defaced at the knees by the

humiliations of the wearer before his lady-love,--in short, we were a

living epitome of defunct fashions, and the very raggedest presentment

of men who had seen better days. It was gentility in tatters. Often

retaining a scholarlike or clerical air, you might have taken us for

the denizens of Grub Street, intent on getting a comfortable livelihood

by agricultural labor; or Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full

experiment; or Candide and his motley associates at work in their

cabbage garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows, and

most clumsily patched in the rear. We might have been sworn comrades

to Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted in other

points of husbandry, every mother's son of us would have served

admirably to stick up for a scarecrow. And the worst of the matter

was, that the first energetic movement essential to one downright

stroke of real labor was sure to put a finish to these poor

habiliments. So we gradually flung them all aside, and took to honest

homespun and linsey-woolsey, as preferable, on the whole, to the plan

recommended, I think, by Virgil,--"Ara nudus; sere nudus, "--which as

Silas Foster remarked, when I translated the maxim, would be apt to

astonish the women-folks.

After a reasonable training, the yeoman life throve well with us. Our

faces took the sunburn kindly; our chests gained in compass, and our

shoulders in breadth and squareness; our great brown fists looked as if

they had never been capable of kid gloves. The plough, the hoe, the

scythe, and the hay-fork grew familiar to our grasp. The oxen

responded to our voices. We could do almost as fair a day's work as

Silas Foster himself, sleep dreamlessly after it, and awake at daybreak

with only a little stiffness of the joints, which was usually quite

gone by breakfast-time.

To be sure, our next neighbors pretended to be incredulous as to our

real proficiency in the business which we had taken in hand. They told

slanderous fables about our inability to yoke our own oxen, or to drive

them afield when yoked, or to release the poor brutes from their

conjugal bond at nightfall. They had the face to say, too, that the

cows laughed at our awkwardness at milking-time, and invariably kicked

over the pails; partly in consequence of our putting the stool on the

wrong side, and partly because, taking offence at the whisking of their

tails, we were in the habit of holding these natural fly-flappers with

one hand and milking with the other. They further averred that we hoed

up whole acres of Indian corn and other crops, and drew the earth

carefully about the weeds; and that we raised five hundred tufts of

burdock, mistaking them for cabbages; and that by dint of unskilful

planting few of our seeds ever came up at all, or, if they did come up,

it was stern-foremost; and that we spent the better part of the month

of June in reversing a field of beans, which had thrust themselves out

of the ground in this unseemly way. They quoted it as nothing more

than an ordinary occurrence for one or other of us to crop off two or

three fingers, of a morning, by our clumsy use of the hay-cutter.

Finally, and as an ultimate catastrophe, these mendacious rogues

circulated a report that we communitarians were exterminated, to the

last man, by severing ourselves asunder with the sweep of our own

scythes! and that the world had lost nothing by this little accident.

But this was pure envy and malice on the part of the neighboring

farmers. The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should fail

in becoming practical agriculturists, but that we should probably cease

to be anything else. While our enterprise lay all in theory, we had

pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of

labor. It was to be our form of prayer and ceremonial of worship.

Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom,

heretofore hidden from the sun. Pausing in the field, to let the wind

exhale the moisture from our foreheads, we were to look upward, and

catch glimpses into the far-off soul of truth. In this point of view,

matters did not turn out quite so well as we anticipated. It is very

true that, sometimes, gazing casually around me, out of the midst of my

toil, I used to discern a richer picturesqueness in the visible scene

of earth and sky. There was, at such moments, a novelty, an unwonted

aspect, on the face of Nature, as if she had been taken by surprise and

seen at unawares, with no opportunity to put off her real look, and

assume the mask with which she mysteriously hides herself from mortals.

But this was all. The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored

and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our

thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor

symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the

evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of

bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar--the yeoman and the man of

finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and

integrity--are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or

welded into one substance.

Zenobia soon saw this truth, and gibed me about it, one evening, as

Hollingsworth and I lay on the grass, after a hard day's work.

"I am afraid you did not make a song today, while loading the

hay-cart," said she, "as Burns did, when he was reaping barley."

"Burns never made a song in haying-time," I answered very positively.

"He was no poet while a farmer, and no farmer while a poet."

"And on the whole, which of the two characters do you like best?" asked

Zenobia. "For I have an idea that you cannot combine them any better

than Burns did. Ah, I see, in my mind's eye, what sort of an

individual you are to be, two or three years hence. Grim Silas Foster

is your prototype, with his palm of sole-leather, and his joints of

rusty iron (which all through summer keep the stiffness of what he

calls his winter's rheumatize), and his brain of--I don't know what his

brain is made of, unless it be a Savoy cabbage; but yours may be

cauliflower, as a rather more delicate variety. Your physical man will

be transmuted into salt beef and fried pork, at the rate, I should

imagine, of a pound and a half a day; that being about the average

which we find necessary in the kitchen. You will make your toilet for

the day (still like this delightful Silas Foster) by rinsing your

fingers and the front part of your face in a little tin pan of water at

the doorstep, and teasing your hair with a wooden pocket-comb before a

seven-by-nine-inch looking-glass. Your only pastime will be to smoke

some very vile tobacco in the black stump of a pipe."

"Pray, spare me!" cried I. "But the pipe is not Silas's only mode of

solacing himself with the weed."

"Your literature," continued Zenobia, apparently delighted with her

description, "will be the 'Farmer's Almanac;' for I observe our friend

Foster never gets so far as the newspaper. When you happen to sit

down, at odd moments, you will fall asleep, and make nasal proclamation

of the fact, as he does; and invariably you must be jogged out of a

nap, after supper, by the future Mrs. Coverdale, and persuaded to go

regularly to bed. And on Sundays, when you put on a blue coat with

brass buttons, you will think of nothing else to do but to go and

lounge over the stone walls and rail fences, and stare at the corn

growing. And you will look with a knowing eye at oxen, and will have a

tendency to clamber over into pigsties, and feel of the hogs, and give

a guess how much they will weigh after you shall have stuck and dressed

them. Already I have noticed you begin to speak through your nose, and

with a drawl. Pray, if you really did make any poetry to-day, let us

hear it in that kind of utterance!"

"Coverdale has given up making verses now," said Hollingsworth, who

never had the slightest appreciation of my poetry. "Just think of him

penning a sonnet with a fist like that! There is at least this good in

a life of toil, that it takes the nonsense and fancy-work out of a man,

and leaves nothing but what truly belongs to him. If a farmer can make

poetry at the plough-tail, it must be because his nature insists on it;

and if that be the case, let him make it, in Heaven's name!"

"And how is it with you?" asked Zenobia, in a different voice; for she

never laughed at Hollingsworth, as she often did at me. "You, I think,

cannot have ceased to live a life of thought and feeling."

"I have always been in earnest," answered Hollingsworth. "I have

hammered thought out of iron, after heating the iron in my heart! It

matters little what my outward toil may be. Were I a slave, at the

bottom of a mine, I should keep the same purpose, the same faith in its

ultimate accomplishment, that I do now. Miles Coverdale is not in

earnest, either as a poet or a laborer."

"You give me hard measure, Hollingsworth," said I, a little hurt. "I

have kept pace with you in the field; and my bones feel as if I had

been in earnest, whatever may be the case with my brain!"

"I cannot conceive," observed Zenobia with great emphasis,--and, no

doubt, she spoke fairly the feeling of the moment,--"I cannot conceive

of being so continually as Mr. Coverdale is within the sphere of a

strong and noble nature, without being strengthened and ennobled by its

influence!"

This amiable remark of the fair Zenobia confirmed me in what I had

already begun to suspect, that Hollingsworth, like many other

illustrious prophets, reformers, and philanthropists, was likely to

make at least two proselytes among the women to one among the men.

Zenobia and Priscilla! These, I believe (unless my unworthy self might

be reckoned for a third), were the only disciples of his mission; and I

spent a great deal of time, uselessly, in trying to conjecture what

Hollingsworth meant to do with them--and they with him!

IX. HOLLINGSWORTH, ZENOBIA, PRISCILLA

It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation to devote

ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women. If

the person under examination be one's self, the result is pretty

certain to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can snatch

a second glance. Or if we take the freedom to put a friend under our

microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations,

magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and of

course patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then,

should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster, which, after

all,--though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real

personage,--may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves.

Thus, as my conscience has often whispered me, I did Hollingsworth a

great wrong by prying into his character; and am perhaps doing him as

great a one, at this moment, by putting faith in the discoveries which

I seemed to make. But I could not help it. Had I loved him less, I

might have used him better. He and Zenobia and Priscilla--both for

their own sakes and as connected with him--were separated from the rest

of the Community, to my imagination, and stood forth as the indices of

a problem which it was my business to solve. Other associates had a

portion of my time; other matters amused me; passing occurrences

carried me along with them, while they lasted. But here was the vortex

of my meditations, around which they revolved, and whitherward they too

continually tended. In the midst of cheerful society, I had often a

feeling of loneliness. For it was impossible not to be sensible that,

while these three characters figured so largely on my private theatre,

I--though probably reckoned as a friend by all--was at best but a

secondary or tertiary personage with either of them.

I loved Hollingsworth, as has already been enough expressed. But it

impressed me, more and more, that there was a stern and dreadful

peculiarity in this man, such as could not prove otherwise than

pernicious to the happiness of those who should be drawn into too

intimate a connection with him. He was not altogether human. There

was something else in Hollingsworth besides flesh and blood, and

sympathies and affections and celestial spirit.

This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an

overruling purpose. It does not so much impel them from without, nor

even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with all

that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else

save that one principle. When such begins to be the predicament, it is

not cowardice, but wisdom, to avoid these victims. They have no heart,

no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend,

unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and

slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more

readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the

second, and the third, and every other step of their terribly strait

path. They have an idol to which they consecrate themselves

high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is

most precious; and never once seem to suspect--so cunning has the Devil

been with them--that this false deity, in whose iron features,

immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and

love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon the

surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the original object,

and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the

probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which

godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.

Of course I am perfectly aware that the above statement is exaggerated,

in the attempt to make it adequate. Professed philanthropists have

gone far; but no originally good man, I presume, ever went quite so far

as this. Let the reader abate whatever he deems fit. The paragraph

may remain, however, both for its truth and its exaggeration, as

strongly expressive of the tendencies which were really operative in

Hollingsworth, and as exemplifying the kind of error into which my mode

of observation was calculated to lead me. The issue was, that in

solitude I often shuddered at my friend. In my recollection of his

dark and impressive countenance, the features grew more sternly

prominent than the reality, duskier in their depth and shadow, and more

lurid in their light; the frown, that had merely flitted across his

brow, seemed to have contorted it with an adamantine wrinkle. On

meeting him again, I was often filled with remorse, when his deep eyes

beamed kindly upon me, as with the glow of a household fire that was

burning in a cave. "He is a man after all," thought I; "his Maker's

own truest image, a philanthropic man!--not that steel engine of the

Devil's contrivance, a philanthropist!" But in my wood-walks, and in my

silent chamber, the dark face frowned at me again.

When a young girl comes within the sphere of such a man, she is as

perilously situated as the maiden whom, in the old classical myths, the

people used to expose to a dragon. If I had any duty whatever, in

reference to Hollingsworth, it was to endeavor to save Priscilla from

that kind of personal worship which her sex is generally prone to

lavish upon saints and heroes. It often requires but one smile out of

the hero's eyes into the girl's or woman's heart, to transform this

devotion, from a sentiment of the highest approval and confidence, into

passionate love. Now, Hollingsworth smiled much upon Priscilla,--more

than upon any other person. If she thought him beautiful, it was no

wonder. I often thought him so, with the expression of tender human

care and gentlest sympathy which she alone seemed to have power to call

out upon his features. Zenobia, I suspect, would have given her eyes,

bright as they were, for such a look; it was the least that our poor

Priscilla could do, to give her heart for a great many of them. There

was the more danger of this, inasmuch as the footing on which we all

associated at Blithedale was widely different from that of conventional

society. While inclining us to the soft affections of the golden age,

it seemed to authorize any individual, of either sex, to fall in love

with any other, regardless of what would elsewhere be judged suitable

and prudent. Accordingly the tender passion was very rife among us, in

various degrees of mildness or virulence, but mostly passing away with

the state of things that had given it origin. This was all well

enough; but, for a girl like Priscilla and a woman like Zenobia to

jostle one another in their love of a man like Hollingsworth, was

likely to be no child's play.

Had I been as cold-hearted as I sometimes thought myself, nothing would

have interested me more than to witness the play of passions that must

thus have been evolved. But, in honest truth, I would really have gone

far to save Priscilla, at least, from the catastrophe in which such a

drama would be apt to terminate.

Priscilla had now grown to be a very pretty girl, and still kept

budding and blossoming, and daily putting on some new charm, which you

no sooner became sensible of than you thought it worth all that she had

previously possessed. So unformed, vague, and without substance, as

she had come to us, it seemed as if we could see Nature shaping out a

woman before our very eyes, and yet had only a more reverential sense

of the mystery of a woman's soul and frame. Yesterday, her cheek was

pale, to-day, it had a bloom. Priscilla's smile, like a baby's first

one, was a wondrous novelty. Her imperfections and shortcomings

affected me with a kind of playful pathos, which was as absolutely

bewitching a sensation as ever I experienced. After she had been a

month or two at Blithedale, her animal spirits waxed high, and kept her

pretty constantly in a state of bubble and ferment, impelling her to

far more bodily activity than she had yet strength to endure. She was

very fond of playing with the other girls out of doors. There is

hardly another sight in the world so pretty as that of a company of

young girls, almost women grown, at play, and so giving themselves up

to their airy impulse that their tiptoes barely touch the ground.

Girls are incomparably wilder and more effervescent than boys, more

untamable and regardless of rule and limit, with an ever-shifting

variety, breaking continually into new modes of fun, yet with a

harmonious propriety through all. Their steps, their voices, appear

free as the wind, but keep consonance with a strain of music inaudible

to us. Young men and boys, on the other hand, play, according to

recognized law, old, traditionary games, permitting no caprioles of

fancy, but with scope enough for the outbreak of savage instincts.

For, young or old, in play or in earnest, man is prone to be a brute.

Especially is it delightful to see a vigorous young girl run a race,

with her head thrown back, her limbs moving more friskily than they

need, and an air between that of a bird and a young colt. But

Priscilla's peculiar charm, in a foot-race, was the weakness and

irregularity with which she ran. Growing up without exercise, except

to her poor little fingers, she had never yet acquired the perfect use

of her legs. Setting buoyantly forth, therefore, as if no rival less

swift than Atalanta could compete with her, she ran falteringly, and

often tumbled on the grass. Such an incident--though it seems too

slight to think of--was a thing to laugh at, but which brought the

water into one's eyes, and lingered in the memory after far greater

joys and sorrows were wept out of it, as antiquated trash. Priscilla's

life, as I beheld it, was full of trifles that affected me in just this

way.

When she had come to be quite at home among us, I used to fancy that

Priscilla played more pranks, and perpetrated more mischief, than any

other girl in the Community. For example, I once heard Silas Foster,

in a very gruff voice, threatening to rivet three horseshoes round

Priscilla's neck and chain her to a post, because she, with some other

young people, had clambered upon a load of hay, and caused it to slide

off the cart. How she made her peace I never knew; but very soon

afterwards I saw old Silas, with his brawny hands round Priscilla's

waist, swinging her to and fro, and finally depositing her on one of

the oxen, to take her first lessons in riding. She met with terrible

mishaps in her efforts to milk a cow; she let the poultry into the

garden; she generally spoilt whatever part of the dinner she took in

charge; she broke crockery; she dropt our biggest water pitcher into

the well; and--except with her needle, and those little wooden

instruments for purse-making--was as unserviceable a member of society

as any young lady in the land. There was no other sort of efficiency

about her. Yet everybody was kind to Priscilla; everybody loved her

and laughed at her to her face, and did not laugh behind her back;

everybody would have given her half of his last crust, or the bigger

share of his plum-cake. These were pretty certain indications that we

were all conscious of a pleasant weakness in the girl, and considered

her not quite able to look after her own interests or fight her battle

with the world. And Hollingsworth--perhaps because he had been the

means of introducing Priscilla to her new abode--appeared to recognize

her as his own especial charge.

Her simple, careless, childish flow of spirits often made me sad. She

seemed to me like a butterfly at play in a flickering bit of sunshine,

and mistaking it for a broad and eternal summer. We sometimes hold

mirth to a stricter accountability than sorrow; it must show good

cause, or the echo of its laughter comes back drearily. Priscilla's

gayety, moreover, was of a nature that showed me how delicate an

instrument she was, and what fragile harp-strings were her nerves. As

they made sweet music at the airiest touch, it would require but a

stronger one to burst them all asunder. Absurd as it might be, I tried

to reason with her, and persuade her not to be so joyous, thinking

that, if she would draw less lavishly upon her fund of happiness, it

would last the longer. I remember doing so, one summer evening, when

we tired laborers sat looking on, like Goldsmith's old folks under the

village thorn-tree, while the young people were at their sports.

"What is the use or sense of being so very gay?" I said to Priscilla,

while she was taking breath, after a great frolic. "I love to see a

sufficient cause for everything, and I can see none for this. Pray

tell me, now, what kind of a world you imagine this to be, which you

are so merry in."

"I never think about it at all," answered Priscilla, laughing. "But

this I am sure of, that it is a world where everybody is kind to me,

and where I love everybody. My heart keeps dancing within me, and all

the foolish things which you see me do are only the motions of my

heart. How can I be dismal, if my heart will not let me?"

"Have you nothing dismal to remember?" I suggested. "If not, then,

indeed, you are very fortunate!"

"Ah!" said Priscilla slowly.

And then came that unintelligible gesture, when she seemed to be

listening to a distant voice.

"For my part," I continued, beneficently seeking to overshadow her with

my own sombre humor, "my past life has been a tiresome one enough; yet

I would rather look backward ten times than forward once. For, little

as we know of our life to come, we may be very sure, for one thing,

that the good we aim at will not be attained. People never do get just

the good they seek. If it come at all, it is something else, which

they never dreamed of, and did not particularly want. Then, again, we

may rest certain that our friends of to-day will not be our friends of

a few years hence; but, if we keep one of them, it will be at the

expense of the others; and most probably we shall keep none. To be

sure, there are more to be had; but who cares about making a new set of

friends, even should they be better than those around us?"

"Not I!" said Priscilla. "I will live and die with these!"

"Well; but let the future go," resumed I. "As for the present moment,

if we could look into the hearts where we wish to be most valued, what

should you expect to see? One's own likeness, in the innermost,

holiest niche? Ah! I don't know! It may not be there at all. It may

be a dusty image, thrust aside into a corner, and by and by to be flung

out of doors, where any foot may trample upon it. If not to-day, then

to-morrow! And so, Priscilla, I do not see much wisdom in being so

very merry in this kind of a world."

It had taken me nearly seven years of worldly life to hive up the

bitter honey which I here offered to Priscilla. And she rejected it!

"I don't believe one word of what you say!" she replied, laughing anew.

"You made me sad, for a minute, by talking about the past; but the past

never comes back again. Do we dream the same dream twice? There is

nothing else that I am afraid of."

So away she ran, and fell down on the green grass, as it was often her

luck to do, but got up again, without any harm.

"Priscilla, Priscilla!" cried Hollingsworth, who was sitting on the

doorstep; "you had better not run any more to-night. You will weary

yourself too much. And do not sit down out of doors, for there is a

heavy dew beginning to fall."

At his first word, she went and sat down under the porch, at

Hollingsworth's feet, entirely contented and happy. What charm was

there in his rude massiveness that so attracted and soothed this

shadow-like girl? It appeared to me, who have always been curious in

such matters, that Priscilla's vague and seemingly causeless flow of

felicitous feeling was that with which love blesses inexperienced

hearts, before they begin to suspect what is going on within them. It

transports them to the seventh heaven; and if you ask what brought them

thither, they neither can tell nor care to learn, but cherish an

ecstatic faith that there they shall abide forever.

Zenobia was in the doorway, not far from Hollingsworth. She gazed at

Priscilla in a very singular way. Indeed, it was a sight worth gazing

at, and a beautiful sight, too, as the fair girl sat at the feet of

that dark, powerful figure. Her air, while perfectly modest, delicate,

and virgin-like, denoted her as swayed by Hollingsworth, attracted to

him, and unconsciously seeking to rest upon his strength. I could not

turn away my own eyes, but hoped that nobody, save Zenobia and myself,

was witnessing this picture. It is before me now, with the evening

twilight a little deepened by the dusk of memory.

"Come hither, Priscilla," said Zenobia. "I have something to say to

you."

She spoke in little more than a whisper. But it is strange how

expressive of moods a whisper may often be. Priscilla felt at once

that something had gone wrong.

"Are you angry with me?" she asked, rising slowly, and standing before

Zenobia in a drooping attitude. "What have I done? I hope you are not

angry!"

"No, no, Priscilla!" said Hollingsworth, smiling. "I will answer for

it, she is not. You are the one little person in the world with whom

nobody can be angry!"

"Angry with you, child? What a silly idea!" exclaimed Zenobia,

laughing. "No, indeed! But, my dear Priscilla, you are getting to be

so very pretty that you absolutely need a duenna; and, as I am older

than you, and have had my own little experience of life, and think

myself exceedingly sage, I intend to fill the place of a maiden aunt.

Every day, I shall give you a lecture, a quarter of an hour in length,

on the morals, manners, and proprieties of social life. When our

pastoral shall be quite played out, Priscilla, my worldly wisdom may

stand you in good stead."

"I am afraid you are angry with me!" repeated Priscilla sadly; for,

while she seemed as impressible as wax, the girl often showed a

persistency in her own ideas as stubborn as it was gentle.

"Dear me, what can I say to the child!" cried Zenobia in a tone of

humorous vexation. "Well, well; since you insist on my being angry,

come to my room this moment, and let me beat you!"

Zenobia bade Hollingsworth good-night very sweetly, and nodded to me

with a smile. But, just as she turned aside with Priscilla into the

dimness of the porch, I caught another glance at her countenance. It

would have made the fortune of a tragic actress, could she have

borrowed it for the moment when she fumbles in her bosom for the

concealed dagger, or the exceedingly sharp bodkin, or mingles the

ratsbane in her lover's bowl of wine or her rival's cup of tea. Not

that I in the least anticipated any such catastrophe,--it being a

remarkable truth that custom has in no one point a greater sway than

over our modes of wreaking our wild passions. And besides, had we been

in Italy, instead of New England, it was hardly yet a crisis for the

dagger or the bowl.

It often amazed me, however, that Hollingsworth should show himself so

recklessly tender towards Priscilla, and never once seem to think of

the effect which it might have upon her heart. But the man, as I have

endeavored to explain, was thrown completely off his moral balance, and

quite bewildered as to his personal relations, by his great excrescence

of a philanthropic scheme. I used to see, or fancy, indications that

he was not altogether obtuse to Zenobia's influence as a woman. No

doubt, however, he had a still more exquisite enjoyment of Priscilla's

silent sympathy with his purposes, so unalloyed with criticism, and

therefore more grateful than any intellectual approbation, which always

involves a possible reserve of latent censure. A man--poet, prophet,

or whatever he may be--readily persuades himself of his right to all

the worship that is voluntarily tendered. In requital of so rich

benefits as he was to confer upon mankind, it would have been hard to

deny Hollingsworth the simple solace of a young girl's heart, which he

held in his hand, and smelled too, like a rosebud. But what if, while

pressing out its fragrance, he should crush the tender rosebud in his

grasp!

As for Zenobia, I saw no occasion to give myself any trouble. With her

native strength, and her experience of the world, she could not be

supposed to need any help of mine. Nevertheless, I was really generous

enough to feel some little interest likewise for Zenobia. With all her

faults (which might have been a great many besides the abundance that I

knew of), she possessed noble traits, and a heart which must, at least,

have been valuable while new. And she seemed ready to fling it away as

uncalculatingly as Priscilla herself. I could not but suspect that, if

merely at play with Hollingsworth, she was sporting with a power which

she did not fully estimate. Or if in earnest, it might chance, between

Zenobia's passionate force and his dark, self-delusive egotism, to turn

out such earnest as would develop itself in some sufficiently tragic

catastrophe, though the dagger and the bowl should go for nothing in it.

Meantime, the gossip of the Community set them down as a pair of

lovers. They took walks together, and were not seldom encountered in

the wood-paths: Hollingsworth deeply discoursing, in tones solemn and

sternly pathetic; Zenobia, with a rich glow on her cheeks, and her eyes

softened from their ordinary brightness, looked so beautiful, that had

her companion been ten times a philanthropist, it seemed impossible but

that one glance should melt him back into a man. Oftener than anywhere

else, they went to a certain point on the slope of a pasture,

commanding nearly the whole of our own domain, besides a view of the

river, and an airy prospect of many distant hills. The bond of our

Community was such, that the members had the privilege of building

cottages for their own residence within our precincts, thus laying a

hearthstone and fencing in a home private and peculiar to all desirable

extent, while yet the inhabitants should continue to share the

advantages of an associated life. It was inferred that Hollingsworth

and Zenobia intended to rear their dwelling on this favorite spot.

I mentioned those rumors to Hollingsworth in a playful way.

"Had you consulted me," I went on to observe, "I should have

recommended a site farther to the left, just a little withdrawn into

the wood, with two or three peeps at the prospect among the trees. You

will be in the shady vale of years long before you can raise any better

kind of shade around your cottage, if you build it on this bare slope."

"But I offer my edifice as a spectacle to the world," said

Hollingsworth, "that it may take example and build many another like

it. Therefore, I mean to set it on the open hillside."

Twist these words how I might, they offered no very satisfactory

import. It seemed hardly probable that Hollingsworth should care about

educating the public taste in the department of cottage architecture,

desirable as such improvement certainly was.

X. A VISITOR FROM TOWN

Hollingsworth and I--we had been hoeing potatoes, that forenoon, while

the rest of the fraternity were engaged in a distant quarter of the

farm--sat under a clump of maples, eating our eleven o'clock lunch,

when we saw a stranger approaching along the edge of the field. He had

admitted himself from the roadside through a turnstile, and seemed to

have a purpose of speaking with us.

And, by the bye, we were favored with many visits at Blithedale,

especially from people who sympathized with our theories, and perhaps

held themselves ready to unite in our actual experiment as soon as

there should appear a reliable promise of its success. It was rather

ludicrous, indeed (to me, at least, whose enthusiasm had insensibly

been exhaled together with the perspiration of many a hard day's toil),

it was absolutely funny, therefore, to observe what a glory was shed

about our life and labors, in the imaginations of these longing

proselytes. In their view, we were as poetical as Arcadians, besides

being as practical as the hardest-fisted husbandmen in Massachusetts.

We did not, it is true, spend much time in piping to our sheep, or

warbling our innocent loves to the sisterhood. But they gave us credit

for imbuing the ordinary rustic occupations with a kind of religious

poetry, insomuch that our very cow-yards and pig-sties were as

delightfully fragrant as a flower garden. Nothing used to please me

more than to see one of these lay enthusiasts snatch up a hoe, as they

were very prone to do, and set to work with a vigor that perhaps

carried him through about a dozen ill-directed strokes. Men are

wonderfully soon satisfied, in this day of shameful bodily enervation,

when, from one end of life to the other, such multitudes never taste

the sweet weariness that follows accustomed toil. I seldom saw the new

enthusiasm that did not grow as flimsy and flaccid as the proselyte's

moistened shirt-collar, with a quarter of an hour's active labor under

a July sun.

But the person now at hand had not at all the air of one of these

amiable visionaries. He was an elderly man, dressed rather shabbily,

yet decently enough, in a gray frock-coat, faded towards a brown hue,

and wore a broad-brimmed white hat, of the fashion of several years

gone by. His hair was perfect silver, without a dark thread in the

whole of it; his nose, though it had a scarlet tip, by no means

indicated the jollity of which a red nose is the generally admitted

symbol. He was a subdued, undemonstrative old man, who would doubtless

drink a glass of liquor, now and then, and probably more than was good

for him,--not, however, with a purpose of undue exhilaration, but in

the hope of bringing his spirits up to the ordinary level of the

world's cheerfulness. Drawing nearer, there was a shy look about him,

as if he were ashamed of his poverty, or, at any rate, for some reason

or other, would rather have us glance at him sidelong than take a full

front view. He had a queer appearance of hiding himself behind the

patch on his left eye.

"I know this old gentleman," said I to Hollingsworth, as we sat

observing him; "that is, I have met him a hundred times in town, and

have often amused my fancy with wondering what he was before he came to

be what he is. He haunts restaurants and such places, and has an odd

way of lurking in corners or getting behind a door whenever

practicable, and holding out his hand with some little article in it

which he wishes you to buy. The eye of the world seems to trouble him,

although he necessarily lives so much in it. I never expected to see

him in an open field."

"Have you learned anything of his history?" asked Hollingsworth.

"Not a circumstance," I answered; "but there must be something curious

in it. I take him to be a harmless sort of a person, and a tolerably

honest one; but his manners, being so furtive, remind me of those of a

rat,--a rat without the mischief, the fierce eye, the teeth to bite

with, or the desire to bite. See, now! He means to skulk along that

fringe of bushes, and approach us on the other side of our clump of

maples."

We soon heard the old man's velvet tread on the grass, indicating that

he had arrived within a few feet of where we Sat.

"Good-morning, Mr. Moodie," said Hollingsworth, addressing the stranger

as an acquaintance; "you must have had a hot and tiresome walk from the

city. Sit down, and take a morsel of our bread and cheese."

The visitor made a grateful little murmur of acquiescence, and sat down

in a spot somewhat removed; so that, glancing round, I could see his

gray pantaloons and dusty shoes, while his upper part was mostly hidden

behind the shrubbery. Nor did he come forth from this retirement

during the whole of the interview that followed. We handed him such

food as we had, together with a brown jug of molasses and water (would

that it had been brandy, or some thing better, for the sake of his

chill old heart!), like priests offering dainty sacrifice to an

enshrined and invisible idol. I have no idea that he really lacked

sustenance; but it was quite touching, nevertheless, to hear him

nibbling away at our crusts.

"Mr. Moodie," said I, "do you remember selling me one of those very

pretty little silk purses, of which you seem to have a monopoly in the

market? I keep it to this day, I can assure you."

"Ah, thank you," said our guest. "Yes, Mr. Coverdale, I used to sell a

good many of those little purses."

He spoke languidly, and only those few words, like a watch with an

inelastic spring, that just ticks a moment or two and stops again. He

seemed a very forlorn old man. In the wantonness of youth, strength,

and comfortable condition,--making my prey of people's individualities,

as my custom was,--I tried to identify my mind with the old fellow's,

and take his view of the world, as if looking through a smoke-blackened

glass at the sun. It robbed the landscape of all its life. Those

pleasantly swelling slopes of our farm, descending towards the wide

meadows, through which sluggishly circled the brimful tide of the

Charles, bathing the long sedges on its hither and farther shores; the

broad, sunny gleam over the winding water; that peculiar

picturesqueness of the scene where capes and headlands put themselves

boldly forth upon the perfect level of the meadow, as into a green

lake, with inlets between the promontories; the shadowy woodland, with

twinkling showers of light falling into its depths; the sultry

heat-vapor, which rose everywhere like incense, and in which my soul

delighted, as indicating so rich a fervor in the passionate day, and in

the earth that was burning with its love,--I beheld all these things as

through old Moodie's eyes. When my eyes are dimmer than they have yet

come to be, I will go thither again, and see if I did not catch the

tone of his mind aright, and if the cold and lifeless tint of his

perceptions be not then repeated in my own.

Yet it was unaccountable to myself, the interest that I felt in him.

"Have you any objection," said I, "to telling me who made those little

purses?"

"Gentlemen have often asked me that," said Moodie slowly; "but I shake

my head, and say little or nothing, and creep out of the way as well as

I can. I am a man of few words; and if gentlemen were to be told one

thing, they would be very apt, I suppose, to ask me another. But it

happens just now, Mr. Coverdale, that you can tell me more about the

maker of those little purses than I can tell you."

"Why do you trouble him with needless questions, Coverdale?"

interrupted Hollingsworth. "You must have known, long ago, that it was

Priscilla. And so, my good friend, you have come to see her? Well, I

am glad of it. You will find her altered very much for the better,

since that winter evening when you put her into my charge. Why,

Priscilla has a bloom in her cheeks, now!"

"Has my pale little girl a bloom?" repeated Moodie with a kind of slow

wonder. "Priscilla with a bloom in her cheeks! Ah, I am afraid I

shall not know my little girl. And is she happy?"

"Just as happy as a bird," answered Hollingsworth.

"Then, gentlemen," said our guest apprehensively, "I don't think it

well for me to go any farther. I crept hitherward only to ask about

Priscilla; and now that you have told me such good news, perhaps I can

do no better than to creep back again. If she were to see this old

face of mine, the child would remember some very sad times which we

have spent together. Some very sad times, indeed! She has forgotten

them, I know,--them and me,--else she could not be so happy, nor have a

bloom in her cheeks. Yes--yes--yes," continued he, still with the same

torpid utterance; "with many thanks to you, Mr. Hollingsworth, I will

creep back to town again."

"You shall do no such thing, Mr. Moodie," said Hollingsworth bluffly.

"Priscilla often speaks of you; and if there lacks anything to make her

cheeks bloom like two damask roses, I'll venture to say it is just the

sight of your face. Come,--we will go and find her."

"Mr. Hollingsworth!" said the old man in his hesitating way.

"Well," answered Hollingsworth.

"Has there been any call for Priscilla?" asked Moodie; and though his

face was hidden from us, his tone gave a sure indication of the

mysterious nod and wink with which he put the question. "You know, I

think, sir, what I mean."

"I have not the remotest suspicion what you mean, Mr. Moodie," replied

Hollingsworth; "nobody, to my knowledge, has called for Priscilla,

except yourself. But come; we are losing time, and I have several

things to say to you by the way."

"And, Mr. Hollingsworth!" repeated Moodie.

"Well, again!" cried my friend rather impatiently. "What now?"

"There is a lady here," said the old man; and his voice lost some of

its wearisome hesitation. "You will account it a very strange matter

for me to talk about; but I chanced to know this lady when she was but

a little child. If I am rightly informed, she has grown to be a very

fine woman, and makes a brilliant figure in the world, with her beauty,

and her talents, and her noble way of spending her riches. I should

recognize this lady, so people tell me, by a magnificent flower in her

hair."

"What a rich tinge it gives to his colorless ideas, when he speaks of

Zenobia!" I whispered to Hollingsworth. "But how can there possibly

be any interest or connecting link between him and her?"

"The old man, for years past," whispered Hollingsworth, "has been a

little out of his right mind, as you probably see."

"What I would inquire," resumed Moodie, "is whether this beautiful lady

is kind to my poor Priscilla."

"Very kind," said Hollingsworth.

"Does she love her?" asked Moodie.

"It should seem so," answered my friend. "They are always together."

"Like a gentlewoman and her maid-servant, I fancy?" suggested the old

man.

There was something so singular in his way of saying this, that I could

not resist the impulse to turn quite round, so as to catch a glimpse of

his face, almost imagining that I should see another person than old

Moodie. But there he sat, with the patched side of his face towards me.

"Like an elder and younger sister, rather," replied Hollingsworth.

"Ah!" said Moodie more complacently, for his latter tones had harshness

and acidity in them,--"it would gladden my old heart to witness that.

If one thing would make me happier than another, Mr. Hollingsworth, it

would be to see that beautiful lady holding my little girl by the hand."

"Come along," said Hollingsworth, "and perhaps you may."

After a little more delay on the part of our freakish visitor, they set

forth together, old Moodie keeping a step or two behind Hollingsworth,

so that the latter could not very conveniently look him in the face. I

remained under the tuft of maples, doing my utmost to draw an inference

from the scene that had just passed. In spite of Hollingsworth's

off-hand explanation, it did not strike me that our strange guest was

really beside himself, but only that his mind needed screwing up, like

an instrument long out of tune, the strings of which have ceased to

vibrate smartly and sharply. Methought it would be profitable for us,

projectors of a happy life, to welcome this old gray shadow, and

cherish him as one of us, and let him creep about our domain, in order

that he might be a little merrier for our sakes, and we, sometimes, a

little sadder for his. Human destinies look ominous without some

perceptible intermixture of the sable or the gray. And then, too,

should any of our fraternity grow feverish with an over-exulting sense

of prosperity, it would be a sort of cooling regimen to slink off into

the woods, and spend an hour, or a day, or as many days as might be

requisite to the cure, in uninterrupted communion with this deplorable

old Moodie!

Going homeward to dinner, I had a glimpse of him, behind the trunk of a

tree, gazing earnestly towards a particular window of the farmhouse;

and by and by Priscilla appeared at this window, playfully drawing

along Zenobia, who looked as bright as the very day that was blazing

down upon us, only not, by many degrees, so well advanced towards her

noon. I was convinced that this pretty sight must have been purposely

arranged by Priscilla for the old man to see. But either the girl held

her too long, or her fondness was resented as too great a freedom; for

Zenobia suddenly put Priscilla decidedly away, and gave her a haughty

look, as from a mistress to a dependant. Old Moodie shook his head;

and again and again I saw him shake it, as he withdrew along the road;

and at the last point whence the farmhouse was visible, he turned and

shook his uplifted staff.

XI. THE WOOD-PATH

Not long after the preceding incident, in order to get the ache of too

constant labor out of my bones, and to relieve my spirit of the

irksomeness of a settled routine, I took a holiday. It was my purpose

to spend it all alone, from breakfast-time till twilight, in the

deepest wood-seclusion that lay anywhere around us. Though fond of

society, I was so constituted as to need these occasional retirements,

even in a life like that of Blithedale, which was itself characterized

by a remoteness from the world. Unless renewed by a yet further

withdrawal towards the inner circle of self-communion, I lost the

better part of my individuality. My thoughts became of little worth,

and my sensibilities grew as arid as a tuft of moss (a thing whose life

is in the shade, the rain, or the noontide dew), crumbling in the

sunshine after long expectance of a shower. So, with my heart full of

a drowsy pleasure, and cautious not to dissipate my mood by previous

intercourse with any one, I hurried away, and was soon pacing a

wood-path, arched overhead with boughs, and dusky-brown beneath my feet.

At first I walked very swiftly, as if the heavy flood tide of social

life were roaring at my heels, and would outstrip and overwhelm me,

without all the better diligence in my escape. But, threading the more

distant windings of the track, I abated my pace, and looked about me

for some side-aisle, that should admit me into the innermost sanctuary

of this green cathedral, just as, in human acquaintanceship, a casual

opening sometimes lets us, all of a sudden, into the long-sought

intimacy of a mysterious heart. So much was I absorbed in my

reflections,--or, rather, in my mood, the substance of which was as yet

too shapeless to be called thought,--that footsteps rustled on the

leaves, and a figure passed me by, almost without impressing either the

sound or sight upon my consciousness.

A moment afterwards, I heard a voice at a little distance behind me,

speaking so sharply and impertinently that it made a complete discord

with my spiritual state, and caused the latter to vanish as abruptly as

when you thrust a finger into a soap-bubble.

"Halloo, friend!" cried this most unseasonable voice. "Stop a moment,

I say! I must have a word with you!"

I turned about, in a humor ludicrously irate. In the first place, the

interruption, at any rate, was a grievous injury; then, the tone

displeased me. And finally, unless there be real affection in his

heart, a man cannot,--such is the bad state to which the world has

brought itself,--cannot more effectually show his contempt for a

brother mortal, nor more gallingly assume a position of superiority,

than by addressing him as "friend." Especially does the misapplication

of this phrase bring out that latent hostility which is sure to animate

peculiar sects, and those who, with however generous a purpose, have

sequestered themselves from the crowd; a feeling, it is true, which may

be hidden in some dog-kennel of the heart, grumbling there in the

darkness, but is never quite extinct, until the dissenting party have

gained power and scope enough to treat the world generously. For my

part, I should have taken it as far less an insult to be styled

"fellow," "clown," or "bumpkin." To either of these appellations my

rustic garb (it was a linen blouse, with checked shirt and striped

pantaloons, a chip hat on my head, and a rough hickory stick in my

hand) very fairly entitled me. As the case stood, my temper darted at

once to the opposite pole; not friend, but enemy!

"What do you want with me?" said I, facing about.

"Come a little nearer, friend," said the stranger, beckoning.

"No," answered I. "If I can do anything for you without too much

trouble to myself, say so. But recollect, if you please, that you are

not speaking to an acquaintance, much less a friend!"

"Upon my word, I believe not!" retorted he, looking at me with some

curiosity; and, lifting his hat, he made me a salute which had enough

of sarcasm to be offensive, and just enough of doubtful courtesy to

render any resentment of it absurd. "But I ask your pardon! I

recognize a little mistake. If I may take the liberty to suppose it,

you, sir, are probably one of the aesthetic--or shall I rather say

ecstatic?--laborers, who have planted themselves hereabouts. This is

your forest of Arden; and you are either the banished Duke in person,

or one of the chief nobles in his train. The melancholy Jacques,

perhaps? Be it so. In that case, you can probably do me a favor."

I never, in my life, felt less inclined to confer a favor on any man.

"I am busy," said I.

So unexpectedly had the stranger made me sensible of his presence, that

he had almost the effect of an apparition; and certainly a less

appropriate one (taking into view the dim woodland solitude about us)

than if the salvage man of antiquity, hirsute and cinctured with a

leafy girdle, had started out of a thicket. He was still young,

seemingly a little under thirty, of a tall and well-developed figure,

and as handsome a man as ever I beheld. The style of his beauty,

however, though a masculine style, did not at all commend itself to my

taste. His countenance--I hardly know how to describe the

peculiarity--had an indecorum in it, a kind of rudeness, a hard,

coarse, forth-putting freedom of expression, which no degree of

external polish could have abated one single jot. Not that it was

vulgar. But he had no fineness of nature; there was in his eyes

(although they might have artifice enough of another sort) the naked

exposure of something that ought not to be left prominent. With these

vague allusions to what I have seen in other faces as well as his, I

leave the quality to be comprehended best--because with an intuitive

repugnance--by those who possess least of it.

His hair, as well as his beard and mustache, was coal-black; his eyes,

too, were black and sparkling, and his teeth remarkably brilliant. He

was rather carelessly but well and fashionably dressed, in a

summer-morning costume. There was a gold chain, exquisitely wrought,

across his vest. I never saw a smoother or whiter gloss than that upon

his shirt-bosom, which had a pin in it, set with a gem that glimmered,

in the leafy shadow where he stood, like a living tip of fire. He

carried a stick with a wooden head, carved in vivid imitation of that

of a serpent. I hated him, partly, I do believe, from a comparison of

my own homely garb with his well-ordered foppishness.

"Well, sir," said I, a little ashamed of my first irritation, but still

with no waste of civility, "be pleased to speak at once, as I have my

own business in hand."

"I regret that my mode of addressing you was a little unfortunate,"

said the stranger, smiling; for he seemed a very acute sort of person,

and saw, in some degree, how I stood affected towards him. "I intended

no offence, and shall certainly comport myself with due ceremony

hereafter. I merely wish to make a few inquiries respecting a lady,

formerly of my acquaintance, who is now resident in your Community,

and, I believe, largely concerned in your social enterprise. You call

her, I think, Zenobia."

"That is her name in literature," observed I; "a name, too, which

possibly she may permit her private friends to know and address her

by,--but not one which they feel at liberty to recognize when used of

her personally by a stranger or casual acquaintance."

"Indeed!" answered this disagreeable person; and he turned aside his

face for an instant with a brief laugh, which struck me as a noteworthy

expression of his character. "Perhaps I might put forward a claim, on

your own grounds, to call the lady by a name so appropriate to her

splendid qualities. But I am willing to know her by any cognomen that

you may suggest."

Heartily wishing that he would be either a little more offensive, or a

good deal less so, or break off our intercourse altogether, I mentioned

Zenobia's real name.

"True," said he; "and in general society I have never heard her called

otherwise. And, after all, our discussion of the point has been

gratuitous. My object is only to inquire when, where, and how this

lady may most conveniently be seen."

"At her present residence, of course," I replied. "You have but to go

thither and ask for her. This very path will lead you within sight of

the house; so I wish you good-morning."

"One moment, if you please," said the stranger. "The course you

indicate would certainly be the proper one, in an ordinary morning

call. But my business is private, personal, and somewhat peculiar.

Now, in a community like this, I should judge that any little

occurrence is likely to be discussed rather more minutely than would

quite suit my views. I refer solely to myself, you understand, and

without intimating that it would be other than a matter of entire

indifference to the lady. In short, I especially desire to see her in

private. If her habits are such as I have known them, she is probably

often to be met with in the woods, or by the river-side; and I think

you could do me the favor to point out some favorite walk, where, about

this hour, I might be fortunate enough to gain an interview."

I reflected that it would be quite a supererogatory piece of Quixotism

in me to undertake the guardianship of Zenobia, who, for my pains,

would only make me the butt of endless ridicule, should the fact ever

come to her knowledge. I therefore described a spot which, as often as

any other, was Zenobia's resort at this period of the day; nor was it

so remote from the farmhouse as to leave her in much peril, whatever

might be the stranger's character.

"A single word more," said he; and his black eyes sparkled at me,

whether with fun or malice I knew not, but certainly as if the Devil

were peeping out of them. "Among your fraternity, I understand, there

is a certain holy and benevolent blacksmith; a man of iron, in more

senses than one; a rough, cross-grained, well-meaning individual,

rather boorish in his manners, as might be expected, and by no means of

the highest intellectual cultivation. He is a philanthropical

lecturer, with two or three disciples, and a scheme of his own, the

preliminary step in which involves a large purchase of land, and the

erection of a spacious edifice, at an expense considerably beyond his

means; inasmuch as these are to be reckoned in copper or old iron much

more conveniently than in gold or silver. He hammers away upon his one

topic as lustily as ever he did upon a horseshoe! Do you know such a

person?" I shook my head, and was turning away. "Our friend," he

continued, "is described to me as a brawny, shaggy, grim, and

ill-favored personage, not particularly well calculated, one would say,

to insinuate himself with the softer sex. Yet, so far has this honest

fellow succeeded with one lady whom we wot of, that he anticipates,

from her abundant resources, the necessary funds for realizing his plan

in brick and mortar!"

Here the stranger seemed to be so much amused with his sketch of

Hollingsworth's character and purposes, that he burst into a fit of

merriment, of the same nature as the brief, metallic laugh already

alluded to, but immensely prolonged and enlarged. In the excess of his

delight, he opened his mouth wide, and disclosed a gold band around the

upper part of his teeth, thereby making it apparent that every one of

his brilliant grinders and incisors was a sham. This discovery

affected me very oddly.

I felt as if the whole man were a moral and physical humbug; his

wonderful beauty of face, for aught I knew, might be removable like a

mask; and, tall and comely as his figure looked, he was perhaps but a

wizened little elf, gray and decrepit, with nothing genuine about him

save the wicked expression of his grin. The fantasy of his spectral

character so wrought upon me, together with the contagion of his

strange mirth on my sympathies, that I soon began to laugh as loudly as

himself.

By and by, he paused all at once; so suddenly, indeed, that my own

cachinnation lasted a moment longer.

"Ah, excuse me!" said he. "Our interview seems to proceed more merrily

than it began."

"It ends here," answered I. "And I take shame to myself that my folly

has lost me the right of resenting your ridicule of a friend."

"Pray allow me," said the stranger, approaching a step nearer, and

laying his gloved hand on my sleeve. "One other favor I must ask of

you. You have a young person here at Blithedale, of whom I have

heard,--whom, perhaps, I have known,--and in whom, at all events, I

take a peculiar interest. She is one of those delicate, nervous young

creatures, not uncommon in New England, and whom I suppose to have

become what we find them by the gradual refining away of the physical

system among your women. Some philosophers choose to glorify this

habit of body by terming it spiritual; but, in my opinion, it is rather

the effect of unwholesome food, bad air, lack of outdoor exercise, and

neglect of bathing, on the part of these damsels and their female

progenitors, all resulting in a kind of hereditary dyspepsia. Zenobia,

even with her uncomfortable surplus of vitality, is far the better

model of womanhood. But--to revert again to this young person--she

goes among you by the name of Priscilla. Could you possibly afford me

the means of speaking with her?"

"You have made so many inquiries of me," I observed, "that I may at

least trouble you with one. What is your name?"

He offered me a card, with "Professor Westervelt" engraved on it. At

the same time, as if to vindicate his claim to the professorial

dignity, so often assumed on very questionable grounds, he put on a

pair of spectacles, which so altered the character of his face that I

hardly knew him again. But I liked the present aspect no better than

the former one.

"I must decline any further connection with your affairs," said I,

drawing back. "I have told you where to find Zenobia. As for

Priscilla, she has closer friends than myself, through whom, if they

see fit, you can gain access to her."

"In that case," returned the Professor, ceremoniously raising his hat,

"good-morning to you."

He took his departure, and was soon out of sight among the windings of

the wood-path. But after a little reflection, I could not help

regretting that I had so peremptorily broken off the interview, while

the stranger seemed inclined to continue it. His evident knowledge of

matters affecting my three friends might have led to disclosures or

inferences that would perhaps have been serviceable. I was

particularly struck with the fact that, ever since the appearance of

Priscilla, it had been the tendency of events to suggest and establish

a connection between Zenobia and her. She had come, in the first

instance, as if with the sole purpose of claiming Zenobia's protection.

Old Moodie's visit, it appeared, was chiefly to ascertain whether this

object had been accomplished. And here, to-day, was the questionable

Professor, linking one with the other in his inquiries, and seeking

communication with both.

Meanwhile, my inclination for a ramble having been balked, I lingered

in the vicinity of the farm, with perhaps a vague idea that some new

event would grow out of Westervelt's proposed interview with Zenobia.

My own part in these transactions was singularly subordinate. It

resembled that of the Chorus in a classic play, which seems to be set

aloof from the possibility of personal concernment, and bestows the

whole measure of its hope or fear, its exultation or sorrow, on the

fortunes of others, between whom and itself this sympathy is the only

bond. Destiny, it may be,--the most skilful of stage managers,--seldom

chooses to arrange its scenes, and carry forward its drama, without

securing the presence of at least one calm observer. It is his office

to give applause when due, and sometimes an inevitable tear, to detect

the final fitness of incident to character, and distil in his

long-brooding thought the whole morality of the performance.

Not to be out of the way in case there were need of me in my vocation,

and, at the same time, to avoid thrusting myself where neither destiny

nor mortals might desire my presence, I remained pretty near the verge

of the woodlands. My position was off the track of Zenobia's customary

walk, yet not so remote but that a recognized occasion might speedily

have brought me thither.

XII. COVERDALE'S HERMITAGE

Long since, in this part of our circumjacent wood, I had found out for

myself a little hermitage. It was a kind of leafy cave, high upward

into the air, among the midmost branches of a white-pine tree. A wild

grapevine, of unusual size and luxuriance, had twined and twisted

itself up into the tree, and, after wreathing the entanglement of its

tendrils around almost every bough, had caught hold of three or four

neighboring trees, and married the whole clump with a perfectly

inextricable knot of polygamy. Once, while sheltering myself from a

summer shower, the fancy had taken me to clamber up into this seemingly

impervious mass of foliage. The branches yielded me a passage, and

closed again beneath, as if only a squirrel or a bird had passed. Far

aloft, around the stem of the central pine, behold a perfect nest for

Robinson Crusoe or King Charles! A hollow chamber of rare seclusion

had been formed by the decay of some of the pine branches, which the

vine had lovingly strangled with its embrace, burying them from the

light of day in an aerial sepulchre of its own leaves. It cost me but

little ingenuity to enlarge the interior, and open loopholes through

the verdant walls. Had it ever been my fortune to spend a honeymoon, I

should have thought seriously of inviting my bride up thither, where

our next neighbors would have been two orioles in another part of the

clump.

It was an admirable place to make verses, tuning the rhythm to the

breezy symphony that so often stirred among the vine leaves; or to

meditate an essay for "The Dial," in which the many tongues of Nature

whispered mysteries, and seemed to ask only a little stronger puff of

wind to speak out the solution of its riddle. Being so pervious to

air-currents, it was just the nook, too, for the enjoyment of a cigar.

This hermitage was my one exclusive possession while I counted myself a

brother of the socialists. It symbolized my individuality, and aided

me in keeping it inviolate. None ever found me out in it, except,

once, a squirrel. I brought thither no guest, because, after

Hollingsworth failed me, there was no longer the man alive with whom I

could think of sharing all. So there I used to sit, owl-like, yet not

without liberal and hospitable thoughts. I counted the innumerable

clusters of my vine, and fore-reckoned the abundance of my vintage. It

gladdened me to anticipate the surprise of the Community, when, like an

allegorical figure of rich October, I should make my appearance, with

shoulders bent beneath the burden of ripe grapes, and some of the

crushed ones crimsoning my brow as with a bloodstain.

Ascending into this natural turret, I peeped in turn out of several of

its small windows. The pine-tree, being ancient, rose high above the

rest of the wood, which was of comparatively recent growth. Even where

I sat, about midway between the root and the topmost bough, my position

was lofty enough to serve as an observatory, not for starry

investigations, but for those sublunary matters in which lay a lore as

infinite as that of the planets. Through one loophole I saw the river

lapsing calmly onward, while in the meadow, near its brink, a few of

the brethren were digging peat for our winter's fuel. On the interior

cart-road of our farm I discerned Hollingsworth, with a yoke of oxen

hitched to a drag of stones, that were to be piled into a fence, on

which we employed ourselves at the odd intervals of other labor. The

harsh tones of his voice, shouting to the sluggish steers, made me

sensible, even at such a distance, that he was ill at ease, and that

the balked philanthropist had the battle-spirit in his heart.

"Haw, Buck!" quoth he. "Come along there, ye lazy ones! What are ye

about, now? Gee!"

"Mankind, in Hollingsworth's opinion," thought I, "is but another yoke

of oxen, as stubborn, stupid, and sluggish as our old Brown and Bright.

He vituperates us aloud, and curses us in his heart, and will begin to

prick us with the goad-stick, by and by. But are we his oxen? And

what right has he to be the driver? And why, when there is enough else

to do, should we waste our strength in dragging home the ponderous load

of his philanthropic absurdities? At my height above the earth, the

whole matter looks ridiculous!"

Turning towards the farmhouse, I saw Priscilla (for, though a great way

off, the eye of faith assured me that it was she) sitting at Zenobia's

window, and making little purses, I suppose; or, perhaps, mending the

Community's old linen. A bird flew past my tree; and, as it clove its

way onward into the sunny atmosphere, I flung it a message for

Priscilla.

"Tell her," said I, "that her fragile thread of life has inextricably

knotted itself with other and tougher threads, and most likely it will

be broken. Tell her that Zenobia will not be long her friend. Say that

Hollingsworth's heart is on fire with his own purpose, but icy for all

human affection; and that, if she has given him her love, it is like

casting a flower into a sepulchre. And say that if any mortal really

cares for her, it is myself; and not even I for her realities,--poor

little seamstress, as Zenobia rightly called her!--but for the

fancy-work with which I have idly decked her out!"

The pleasant scent of the wood, evolved by the hot sun, stole up to my

nostrils, as if I had been an idol in its niche. Many trees mingled

their fragrance into a thousand-fold odor. Possibly there was a

sensual influence in the broad light of noon that lay beneath me. It

may have been the cause, in part, that I suddenly found myself

possessed by a mood of disbelief in moral beauty or heroism, and a

conviction of the folly of attempting to benefit the world. Our

especial scheme of reform, which, from my observatory, I could take in

with the bodily eye, looked so ridiculous that it was impossible not to

laugh aloud.

"But the joke is a little too heavy," thought I. "If I were wise, I

should get out of the scrape with all diligence, and then laugh at my

companions for remaining in it."

While thus musing, I heard with perfect distinctness, somewhere in the

wood beneath, the peculiar laugh which I have described as one of the

disagreeable characteristics of Professor Westervelt. It brought my

thoughts back to our recent interview. I recognized as chiefly due to

this man's influence the sceptical and sneering view which just now had

filled my mental vision in regard to all life's better purposes. And

it was through his eyes, more than my own, that I was looking at

Hollingsworth, with his glorious if impracticable dream, and at the

noble earthliness of Zenobia's character, and even at Priscilla, whose

impalpable grace lay so singularly between disease and beauty. The

essential charm of each had vanished. There are some spheres the

contact with which inevitably degrades the high, debases the pure,

deforms the beautiful. It must be a mind of uncommon strength, and

little impressibility, that can permit itself the habit of such

intercourse, and not be permanently deteriorated; and yet the

Professor's tone represented that of worldly society at large, where a

cold scepticism smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations, and

makes the rest ridiculous. I detested this kind of man; and all the

more because a part of my own nature showed itself responsive to him.

Voices were now approaching through the region of the wood which lay in

the vicinity of my tree. Soon I caught glimpses of two figures--a

woman and a man--Zenobia and the stranger--earnestly talking together

as they advanced.

Zenobia had a rich though varying color. It was, most of the while, a

flame, and anon a sudden paleness. Her eyes glowed, so that their

light sometimes flashed upward to me, as when the sun throws a dazzle

from some bright object on the ground. Her gestures were free, and

strikingly impressive. The whole woman was alive with a passionate

intensity, which I now perceived to be the phase in which her beauty

culminated. Any passion would have become her well; and passionate

love, perhaps, the best of all. This was not love, but anger, largely

intermixed with scorn. Yet the idea strangely forced itself upon me,

that there was a sort of familiarity between these two companions,

necessarily the result of an intimate love,--on Zenobia's part, at

least,--in days gone by, but which had prolonged itself into as

intimate a hatred, for all futurity. As they passed among the trees,

reckless as her movement was, she took good heed that even the hem of

her garment should not brush against the stranger's person. I wondered

whether there had always been a chasm, guarded so religiously, betwixt

these two.

As for Westervelt, he was not a whit more warmed by Zenobia's passion

than a salamander by the heat of its native furnace. He would have

been absolutely statuesque, save for a look of slight perplexity,

tinctured strongly with derision. It was a crisis in which his

intellectual perceptions could not altogether help him out. He failed

to comprehend, and cared but little for comprehending, why Zenobia

should put herself into such a fume; but satisfied his mind that it was

all folly, and only another shape of a woman's manifold absurdity,

which men can never understand. How many a woman's evil fate has yoked

her with a man like this! Nature thrusts some of us into the world

miserably incomplete on the emotional side, with hardly any

sensibilities except what pertain to us as animals. No passion, save

of the senses; no holy tenderness, nor the delicacy that results from

this. Externally they bear a close resemblance to other men, and have

perhaps all save the finest grace; but when a woman wrecks herself on

such a being, she ultimately finds that the real womanhood within her

has no corresponding part in him. Her deepest voice lacks a response;

the deeper her cry, the more dead his silence. The fault may be none

of his; he cannot give her what never lived within his soul. But the

wretchedness on her side, and the moral deterioration attendant on a

false and shallow life, without strength enough to keep itself sweet,

are among the most pitiable wrongs that mortals suffer.

Now, as I looked down from my upper region at this man and

woman,--outwardly so fair a sight, and wandering like two lovers in the

wood,--I imagined that Zenobia, at an earlier period of youth, might

have fallen into the misfortune above indicated. And when her

passionate womanhood, as was inevitable, had discovered its mistake,

here had ensued the character of eccentricity and defiance which

distinguished the more public portion of her life.

Seeing how aptly matters had chanced thus far, I began to think it the

design of fate to let me into all Zenobia's secrets, and that therefore

the couple would sit down beneath my tree, and carry on a conversation

which would leave me nothing to inquire. No doubt, however, had it so

happened, I should have deemed myself honorably bound to warn them of a

listener's presence by flinging down a handful of unripe grapes, or by

sending an unearthly groan out of my hiding-place, as if this were one

of the trees of Dante's ghostly forest. But real life never arranges

itself exactly like a romance. In the first place, they did not sit

down at all. Secondly, even while they passed beneath the tree,

Zenobia's utterance was so hasty and broken, and Westervelt's so cool

and low, that I hardly could make out an intelligible sentence on

either side. What I seem to remember, I yet suspect, may have been

patched together by my fancy, in brooding over the matter afterwards.

"Why not fling the girl off," said Westervelt, "and let her go?"

"She clung to me from the first," replied Zenobia. "I neither know nor

care what it is in me that so attaches her. But she loves me, and I

will not fail her."

"She will plague you, then," said he, "in more ways than one."

"The poor child!" exclaimed Zenobia. "She can do me neither good nor

harm. How should she?"

I know not what reply Westervelt whispered; nor did Zenobia's

subsequent exclamation give me any clew, except that it evidently

inspired her with horror and disgust.

"With what kind of a being am I linked?" cried she. "If my Creator

cares aught for my soul, let him release me from this miserable bond!"

"I did not think it weighed so heavily," said her companion..

"Nevertheless," answered Zenobia, "it will strangle me at last!"

And then I heard her utter a helpless sort of moan; a sound which,

struggling out of the heart of a person of her pride and strength,

affected me more than if she had made the wood dolorously vocal with a

thousand shrieks and wails.

Other mysterious words, besides what are above written, they spoke

together; but I understood no more, and even question whether I fairly

understood so much as this. By long brooding over our recollections,

we subtilize them into something akin to imaginary stuff, and hardly

capable of being distinguished from it. In a few moments they were

completely beyond ear-shot. A breeze stirred after them, and awoke the

leafy tongues of the surrounding trees, which forthwith began to

babble, as if innumerable gossips had all at once got wind of Zenobia's

secret. But, as the breeze grew stronger, its voice among the branches

was as if it said, "Hush! Hush!" and I resolved that to no mortal

would I disclose what I had heard. And, though there might be room for

casuistry, such, I conceive, is the most equitable rule in all similar

conjunctures.

XIII. ZENOBIA'S LEGEND

The illustrious Society of Blithedale, though it toiled in downright

earnest for the good of mankind, yet not unfrequently illuminated its

laborious life with an afternoon or evening of pastime. Picnics under

the trees were considerably in vogue; and, within doors, fragmentary

bits of theatrical performance, such as single acts of tragedy or

comedy, or dramatic proverbs and charades. Zenobia, besides, was fond

of giving us readings from Shakespeare, and often with a depth of

tragic power, or breadth of comic effect, that made one feel it an

intolerable wrong to the world that she did not at once go upon the

stage. Tableaux vivants were another of our occasional modes of

amusement, in which scarlet shawls, old silken robes, ruffs, velvets,

furs, and all kinds of miscellaneous trumpery converted our familiar

companions into the people of a pictorial world. We had been thus

engaged on the evening after the incident narrated in the last chapter.

Several splendid works of art--either arranged after engravings from

the old masters, or original illustrations of scenes in history or

romance--had been presented, and we were earnestly entreating Zenobia

for more.

She stood with a meditative air, holding a large piece of gauze, or

some such ethereal stuff, as if considering what picture should next

occupy the frame; while at her feet lay a heap of many-colored

garments, which her quick fancy and magic skill could so easily convert

into gorgeous draperies for heroes and princesses.

"I am getting weary of this," said she, after a moment's thought. "Our

own features, and our own figures and airs, show a little too

intrusively through all the characters we assume. We have so much

familiarity with one another's realities, that we cannot remove

ourselves, at pleasure, into an imaginary sphere. Let us have no more

pictures to-night; but, to make you what poor amends I can, how would

you like to have me trump up a wild, spectral legend, on the spur of

the moment?"

Zenobia had the gift of telling a fanciful little story, off-hand, in a

way that made it greatly more effective than it was usually found to be

when she afterwards elaborated the same production with her pen. Her

proposal, therefore, was greeted with acclamation.

"Oh, a story, a story, by all means!" cried the young girls. "No

matter how marvellous; we will believe it, every word. And let it be a

ghost story, if you please."

"No, not exactly a ghost story," answered Zenobia; "but something so

nearly like it that you shall hardly tell the difference. And,

Priscilla, stand you before me, where I may look at you, and get my

inspiration out of your eyes. They are very deep and dreamy to-night."

I know not whether the following version of her story will retain any

portion of its pristine character; but, as Zenobia told it wildly and

rapidly, hesitating at no extravagance, and dashing at absurdities

which I am too timorous to repeat,--giving it the varied emphasis of

her inimitable voice, and the pictorial illustration of her mobile

face, while through it all we caught the freshest aroma of the

thoughts, as they came bubbling out of her mind,--thus narrated, and

thus heard, the legend seemed quite a remarkable affair. I scarcely

knew, at the time, whether she intended us to laugh or be more

seriously impressed. From beginning to end, it was undeniable

nonsense, but not necessarily the worse for that.

THE SILVERY VEIL

You have heard, my dear friends, of the Veiled Lady, who grew suddenly

so very famous, a few months ago. And have you never thought how

remarkable it was that this marvellous creature should vanish, all at

once, while her renown was on the increase, before the public had grown

weary of her, and when the enigma of her character, instead of being

solved, presented itself more mystically at every exhibition? Her last

appearance, as you know, was before a crowded audience. The next

evening,--although the bills had announced her, at the corner of every

street, in red letters of a gigantic size,--there was no Veiled Lady to

be seen! Now, listen to my simple little tale, and you shall hear the

very latest incident in the known life--(if life it may be called,

which seemed to have no more reality than the candle-light image of

one's self which peeps at us outside of a dark windowpane)--the life of

this shadowy phenomenon.

A party of young gentlemen, you are to understand, were enjoying

themselves, one afternoon,--as young gentlemen are sometimes fond of

doing,--over a bottle or two of champagne; and, among other ladies less

mysterious, the subject of the Veiled Lady, as was very natural,

happened to come up before them for discussion. She rose, as it were,

with the sparkling effervescence of their wine, and appeared in a more

airy and fantastic light on account of the medium through which they

saw her. They repeated to one another, between jest and earnest, all

the wild stories that were in vogue; nor, I presume, did they hesitate

to add any small circumstance that the inventive whim of the moment

might suggest, to heighten the marvellousness of their theme.

"But what an audacious report was that," observed one, "which pretended

to assert the identity of this strange creature with a young

lady,"--and here he mentioned her name,--"the daughter of one of our

most distinguished families!"

"Ah, there is more in that story than can well be accounted for,"

remarked another. "I have it on good authority, that the young lady in

question is invariably out of sight, and not to be traced, even by her

own family, at the hours when the Veiled Lady is before the public; nor

can any satisfactory explanation be given of her disappearance. And

just look at the thing: Her brother is a young fellow of spirit. He

cannot but be aware of these rumors in reference to his sister. Why,

then, does he not come forward to defend her character, unless he is

conscious that an investigation would only make the matter worse?"

It is essential to the purposes of my legend to distinguish one of

these young gentlemen from his companions; so, for the sake of a soft

and pretty name (such as we of the literary sisterhood invariably

bestow upon our heroes), I deem it fit to call him Theodore.

"Pshaw!" exclaimed Theodore; "her brother is no such fool! Nobody,

unless his brain be as full of bubbles as this wine, can seriously

think of crediting that ridiculous rumor. Why, if my senses did not

play me false (which never was the case yet), I affirm that I saw that

very lady, last evening, at the exhibition, while this veiled

phenomenon was playing off her juggling tricks! What can you say to

that?"

"Oh, it was a spectral illusion that you saw!" replied his friends,

with a general laugh. "The Veiled Lady is quite up to such a thing."

However, as the above-mentioned fable could not hold its ground against

Theodore's downright refutation, they went on to speak of other stories

which the wild babble of the town had set afloat. Some upheld that the

veil covered the most beautiful countenance in the world; others,--and

certainly with more reason, considering the sex of the Veiled

Lady,--that the face was the most hideous and horrible, and that this

was her sole motive for hiding it. It was the face of a corpse; it was

the head of a skeleton; it was a monstrous visage, with snaky locks,

like Medusa's, and one great red eye in the centre of the forehead.

Again, it was affirmed that there was no single and unchangeable set of

features beneath the veil; but that whosoever should be bold enough to

lift it would behold the features of that person, in all the world, who

was destined to be his fate; perhaps he would be greeted by the tender

smile of the woman whom he loved, or, quite as probably, the deadly

scowl of his bitterest enemy would throw a blight over his life. They

quoted, moreover, this startling explanation of the whole affair: that

the magician who exhibited the Veiled Lady--and who, by the bye, was

the handsomest man in the whole world--had bartered his own soul for

seven years' possession of a familiar fiend, and that the last year of

the contract was wearing towards its close.

If it were worth our while, I could keep you till an hour beyond

midnight listening to a thousand such absurdities as these. But

finally our friend Theodore, who prided himself upon his common-sense,

found the matter getting quite beyond his patience.

"I offer any wager you like," cried he, setting down his glass so

forcibly as to break the stem of it, "that this very evening I find out

the mystery of the Veiled Lady!"

Young men, I am told, boggle at nothing over their wine; so, after a

little more talk, a wager of considerable amount was actually laid, the

money staked, and Theodore left to choose his own method of settling

the dispute.

How he managed it I know not, nor is it of any great importance to this

veracious legend. The most natural way, to be sure, was by bribing the

doorkeeper,--or possibly he preferred clambering in at the window.

But, at any rate, that very evening, while the exhibition was going

forward in the hall, Theodore contrived to gain admittance into the

private withdrawing-room whither the Veiled Lady was accustomed to

retire at the close of her performances. There he waited, listening, I

suppose, to the stifled hum of the great audience; and no doubt he

could distinguish the deep tones of the magician, causing the wonders

that he wrought to appear more dark and intricate, by his mystic

pretence of an explanation. Perhaps, too, in the intervals of the wild

breezy music which accompanied the exhibition, he might hear the low

voice of the Veiled Lady, conveying her sibylline responses. Firm as

Theodore's nerves might be, and much as he prided himself on his sturdy

perception of realities, I should not be surprised if his heart

throbbed at a little more than its ordinary rate.

Theodore concealed himself behind a screen. In due time the

performance was brought to a close, and whether the door was softly

opened, or whether her bodiless presence came through the wall, is more

than I can say, but, all at once, without the young man's knowing how

it happened, a veiled figure stood in the centre of the room. It was

one thing to be in presence of this mystery in the hall of exhibition,

where the warm, dense life of hundreds of other mortals kept up the

beholder's courage, and distributed her influence among so many; it was

another thing to be quite alone with her, and that, too, with a

hostile, or, at least, an unauthorized and unjustifiable purpose. I

further imagine that Theodore now began to be sensible of something

more serious in his enterprise than he had been quite aware of while he

sat with his boon-companions over their sparkling wine.

Very strange, it must be confessed, was the movement with which the

figure floated to and fro over the carpet, with the silvery veil

covering her from head to foot; so impalpable, so ethereal, so without

substance, as the texture seemed, yet hiding her every outline in an

impenetrability like that of midnight. Surely, she did not walk! She

floated, and flitted, and hovered about the room; no sound of a

footstep, no perceptible motion of a limb; it was as if a wandering

breeze wafted her before it, at its own wild and gentle pleasure. But,

by and by, a purpose began to be discernible, throughout the seeming

vagueness of her unrest. She was in quest of something. Could it be

that a subtile presentiment had informed her of the young man's

presence? And if so, did the Veiled Lady seek or did she shun him?

The doubt in Theodore's mind was speedily resolved; for, after a moment

or two of these erratic flutterings, she advanced more decidedly, and

stood motionless before the screen.

"Thou art here!" said a soft, low voice. "Come forth, Theodore!" Thus

summoned by his name, Theodore, as a man of courage, had no choice. He

emerged from his concealment, and presented himself before the Veiled

Lady, with the wine-flush, it may be, quite gone out of his cheeks.

"What wouldst thou with me?" she inquired, with the same gentle

composure that was in her former utterance.

"Mysterious creature," replied Theodore, "I would know who and what you

are!"

"My lips are forbidden to betray the secret," said the Veiled Lady.

"At whatever risk, I must discover it," rejoined Theodore.

"Then," said the Mystery, "there is no way save to lift my veil."

And Theodore, partly recovering his audacity, stept forward on the

instant, to do as the Veiled Lady had suggested. But she floated

backward to the opposite side of the room, as if the young man's breath

had possessed power enough to waft her away.

"Pause, one little instant," said the soft, low voice, "and learn the

conditions of what thou art so bold to undertake. Thou canst go hence,

and think of me no more; or, at thy option, thou canst lift this

mysterious veil, beneath which I am a sad and lonely prisoner, in a

bondage which is worse to me than death. But, before raising it, I

entreat thee, in all maiden modesty, to bend forward and impress a kiss

where my breath stirs the veil; and my virgin lips shall come forward

to meet thy lips; and from that instant, Theodore, thou shalt be mine,

and I thine, with never more a veil between us. And all the felicity

of earth and of the future world shall be thine and mine together. So

much may a maiden say behind the veil. If thou shrinkest from this,

there is yet another way." "And what is that?" asked Theodore. "Dost

thou hesitate," said the Veiled Lady, "to pledge thyself to me, by

meeting these lips of mine, while the veil yet hides my face? Has not

thy heart recognized me? Dost thou come hither, not in holy faith, nor

with a pure and generous purpose, but in scornful scepticism and idle

curiosity? Still, thou mayest lift the veil! But, from that instant,

Theodore, I am doomed to be thy evil fate; nor wilt thou ever taste

another breath of happiness!"

There was a shade of inexpressible sadness in the utterance of these

last words. But Theodore, whose natural tendency was towards

scepticism, felt himself almost injured and insulted by the Veiled

Lady's proposal that he should pledge himself, for life and eternity,

to so questionable a creature as herself; or even that she should

suggest an inconsequential kiss, taking into view the probability that

her face was none of the most bewitching. A delightful idea, truly,

that he should salute the lips of a dead girl, or the jaws of a

skeleton, or the grinning cavity of a monster's mouth! Even should she

prove a comely maiden enough in other respects, the odds were ten to

one that her teeth were defective; a terrible drawback on the

delectableness of a kiss.

"Excuse me, fair lady," said Theodore, and I think he nearly burst into

a laugh, "if I prefer to lift the veil first; and for this affair of

the kiss, we may decide upon it afterwards."

"Thou hast made thy choice," said the sweet, sad voice behind the veil;

and there seemed a tender but unresentful sense of wrong done to

womanhood by the young man's contemptuous interpretation of her offer.

"I must not counsel thee to pause, although thy fate is still in thine

own hand!"

Grasping at the veil, he flung it upward, and caught a glimpse of a

pale, lovely face beneath; just one momentary glimpse, and then the

apparition vanished, and the silvery veil fluttered slowly down and lay

upon the floor. Theodore was alone. Our legend leaves him there. His

retribution was, to pine forever and ever for another sight of that

dim, mournful face,--which might have been his life-long household

fireside joy,--to desire, and waste life in a feverish quest, and never

meet it more.

But what, in good sooth, had become of the Veiled Lady? Had all her

existence been comprehended within that mysterious veil, and was she

now annihilated? Or was she a spirit, with a heavenly essence, but

which might have been tamed down to human bliss, had Theodore been

brave and true enough to claim her? Hearken, my sweet friends,--and

hearken, dear Priscilla,--and you shall learn the little more that

Zenobia can tell you.

Just at the moment, so far as can be ascertained, when the Veiled Lady

vanished, a maiden, pale and shadowy, rose up amid a knot of visionary

people, who were seeking for the better life. She was so gentle and so

sad,--a nameless melancholy gave her such hold upon their

sympathies,--that they never thought of questioning whence she came.

She might have heretofore existed, or her thin substance might have

been moulded out of air at the very instant when they first beheld her.

It was all one to them; they took her to their hearts. Among them was a

lady to whom, more than to all the rest, this pale, mysterious girl

attached herself.

But one morning the lady was wandering in the woods, and there met her

a figure in an Oriental robe, with a dark beard, and holding in his

hand a silvery veil. He motioned her to stay. Being a woman of some

nerve, she did not shriek, nor run away, nor faint, as many ladies

would have been apt to do, but stood quietly, and bade him speak. The

truth was, she had seen his face before, but had never feared it,

although she knew him to be a terrible magician.

"Lady," said he, with a warning gesture, "you are in peril!" "Peril!"

she exclaimed. "And of what nature?"

"There is a certain maiden," replied the magician, "who has come out of

the realm of mystery, and made herself your most intimate companion.

Now, the fates have so ordained it, that, whether by her own will or

no, this stranger is your deadliest enemy. In love, in worldly

fortune, in all your pursuit of happiness, she is doomed to fling a

blight over your prospects. There is but one possibility of thwarting

her disastrous influence."

"Then tell me that one method," said the lady.

"Take this veil," he answered, holding forth the silvery texture. "It

is a spell; it is a powerful enchantment, which I wrought for her sake,

and beneath which she was once my prisoner. Throw it, at unawares,

over the head of this secret foe, stamp your foot, and cry, 'Arise,

Magician! Here is the Veiled Lady!' and immediately I will rise up

through the earth, and seize her; and from that moment you are safe!"

So the lady took the silvery veil, which was like woven air, or like

some substance airier than nothing, and that would float upward and be

lost among the clouds, were she once to let it go. Returning homeward,

she found the shadowy girl amid the knot of visionary

transcendentalists, who were still seeking for the better life. She

was joyous now, and had a rose-bloom in her cheeks, and was one of the

prettiest creatures, and seemed one of the happiest, that the world

could show. But the lady stole noiselessly behind her and threw the

veil over her head. As the slight, ethereal texture sank inevitably

down over her figure, the poor girl strove to raise it, and met her

dear friend's eyes with one glance of mortal terror, and deep, deep

reproach. It could not change her purpose.

"Arise, Magician!" she exclaimed, stamping her foot upon the earth.

"Here is the Veiled Lady!"

At the word, up rose the bearded man in the Oriental robes,--the

beautiful, the dark magician, who had bartered away his soul! He threw

his arms around the Veiled Lady, and she was his bond-slave for

evermore!

Zenobia, all this while, had been holding the piece of gauze, and so

managed it as greatly to increase the dramatic effect of the legend at

those points where the magic veil was to be described. Arriving at the

catastrophe, and uttering the fatal words, she flung the gauze over

Priscilla's head; and for an instant her auditors held their breath,

half expecting, I verily believe, that the magician would start up

through the floor, and carry off our poor little friend before our eyes.

As for Priscilla, she stood droopingly in the midst of us, making no

attempt to remove the veil.

"How do you find yourself, my love?" said Zenobia, lifting a corner of

the gauze, and peeping beneath it with a mischievous smile. "Ah, the

dear little soul! Why, she is really going to faint! Mr. Coverdale,

Mr. Coverdale, pray bring a glass of water!"

Her nerves being none of the strongest, Priscilla hardly recovered her

equanimity during the rest of the evening. This, to be sure, was a

great pity; but, nevertheless, we thought it a very bright idea of

Zenobia's to bring her legend to so effective a conclusion.

XIV. ELIOT'S PULPIT

Our Sundays at Blithedale were not ordinarily kept with such rigid

observance as might have befitted the descendants of the Pilgrims,

whose high enterprise, as we sometimes flattered ourselves, we had

taken up, and were carrying it onward and aloft, to a point which they

never dreamed of attaining.

On that hallowed day, it is true, we rested from our labors. Our oxen,

relieved from their week-day yoke, roamed at large through the pasture;

each yoke-fellow, however, keeping close beside his mate, and

continuing to acknowledge, from the force of habit and sluggish

sympathy, the union which the taskmaster had imposed for his own hard

ends. As for us human yoke-fellows, chosen companions of toil, whose

hoes had clinked together throughout the week, we wandered off, in

various directions, to enjoy our interval of repose. Some, I believe,

went devoutly to the village church. Others, it may be, ascended a

city or a country pulpit, wearing the clerical robe with so much

dignity that you would scarcely have suspected the yeoman's frock to

have been flung off only since milking-time. Others took long rambles

among the rustic lanes and by-paths, pausing to look at black old

farmhouses, with their sloping roofs; and at the modern cottage, so

like a plaything that it seemed as if real joy or sorrow could have no

scope within; and at the more pretending villa, with its range of

wooden columns supporting the needless insolence of a great portico.

Some betook themselves into the wide, dusky barn, and lay there for

hours together on the odorous hay; while the sunstreaks and the shadows

strove together,--these to make the barn solemn, those to make it

cheerful,--and both were conquerors; and the swallows twittered a

cheery anthem, flashing into sight, or vanishing as they darted to and

fro among the golden rules of sunshine. And others went a little way

into the woods, and threw themselves on mother earth, pillowing their

heads on a heap of moss, the green decay of an old log; and, dropping

asleep, the bumblebees and mosquitoes sung and buzzed about their ears,

causing the slumberers to twitch and start, without awaking.

With Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla, and myself, it grew to be a

custom to spend the Sabbath afternoon at a certain rock. It was known

to us under the name of Eliot's pulpit, from a tradition that the

venerable Apostle Eliot had preached there, two centuries gone by, to

an Indian auditory. The old pine forest, through which the Apostle's

voice was wont to sound, had fallen an immemorial time ago. But the

soil, being of the rudest and most broken surface, had apparently never

been brought under tillage; other growths, maple and beech and birch,

had succeeded to the primeval trees; so that it was still as wild a

tract of woodland as the great-great-great-great grandson of one of

Eliot's Indians (had any such posterity been in existence) could have

desired for the site and shelter of his wigwam. These after-growths,

indeed, lose the stately solemnity of the original forest. If left in

due neglect, however, they run into an entanglement of softer wildness,

among the rustling leaves of which the sun can scatter cheerfulness as

it never could among the dark-browed pines.

The rock itself rose some twenty or thirty feet, a shattered granite

bowlder, or heap of bowlders, with an irregular outline and many

fissures, out of which sprang shrubs, bushes, and even trees; as if the

scanty soil within those crevices were sweeter to their roots than any

other earth. At the base of the pulpit, the broken bowlders inclined

towards each other, so as to form a shallow cave, within which our

little party had sometimes found protection from a summer shower. On

the threshold, or just across it, grew a tuft of pale columbines, in

their season, and violets, sad and shadowy recluses, such as Priscilla

was when we first knew her; children of the sun, who had never seen

their father, but dwelt among damp mosses, though not akin to them. At

the summit, the rock was overshadowed by the canopy of a birch-tree,

which served as a sounding-board for the pulpit. Beneath this shade

(with my eyes of sense half shut and those of the imagination widely

opened) I used to see the holy Apostle of the Indians, with the

sunlight flickering down upon him through the leaves, and glorifying

his figure as with the half-perceptible glow of a transfiguration.

I the more minutely describe the rock, and this little Sabbath

solitude, because Hollingsworth, at our solicitation, often ascended

Eliot's pulpit, and not exactly preached, but talked to us, his few

disciples, in a strain that rose and fell as naturally as the wind's

breath among the leaves of the birch-tree. No other speech of man has

ever moved me like some of those discourses. It seemed most pitiful--a

positive calamity to the world--that a treasury of golden thoughts

should thus be scattered, by the liberal handful, down among us three,

when a thousand hearers might have been the richer for them; and

Hollingsworth the richer, likewise, by the sympathy of multitudes.

After speaking much or little, as might happen, he would descend from

his gray pulpit, and generally fling himself at full length on the

ground, face downward. Meanwhile, we talked around him on such topics

as were suggested by the discourse.

Since her interview with Westervelt, Zenobia's continual inequalities

of temper had been rather difficult for her friends to bear. On the

first Sunday after that incident, when Hollingsworth had clambered down

from Eliot's pulpit, she declaimed with great earnestness and passion,

nothing short of anger, on the injustice which the world did to women,

and equally to itself, by not allowing them, in freedom and honor, and

with the fullest welcome, their natural utterance in public.

"It shall not always be so!" cried she. "If I live another year, I

will lift up my own voice in behalf of woman's wider liberty!"

She perhaps saw me smile.

"What matter of ridicule do you find in this, Miles Coverdale?"

exclaimed Zenobia, with a flash of anger in her eyes. "That smile,

permit me to say, makes me suspicious of a low tone of feeling and

shallow thought. It is my belief--yes, and my prophecy, should I die

before it happens--that, when my sex shall achieve its rights, there

will be ten eloquent women where there is now one eloquent man. Thus

far, no woman in the world has ever once spoken out her whole heart and

her whole mind. The mistrust and disapproval of the vast bulk of

society throttles us, as with two gigantic hands at our throats! We

mumble a few weak words, and leave a thousand better ones unsaid. You

let us write a little, it is true, on a limited range of subjects. But

the pen is not for woman. Her power is too natural and immediate. It

is with the living voice alone that she can compel the world to

recognize the light of her intellect and the depth of her heart!"

Now,--though I could not well say so to Zenobia,--I had not smiled from

any unworthy estimate of woman, or in denial of the claims which she is

beginning to put forth. What amused and puzzled me was the fact, that

women, however intellectually superior, so seldom disquiet themselves

about the rights or wrongs of their sex, unless their own individual

affections chance to lie in idleness, or to be ill at ease. They are

not natural reformers, but become such by the pressure of exceptional

misfortune. I could measure Zenobia's inward trouble by the animosity

with which she now took up the general quarrel of woman against man.

"I will give you leave, Zenobia," replied I, "to fling your utmost

scorn upon me, if you ever hear me utter a sentiment unfavorable to the

widest liberty which woman has yet dreamed of. I would give her all

she asks, and add a great deal more, which she will not be the party to

demand, but which men, if they were generous and wise, would grant of

their own free motion. For instance, I should love dearly--for the

next thousand years, at least--to have all government devolve into the

hands of women. I hate to be ruled by my own sex; it excites my

jealousy, and wounds my pride. It is the iron sway of bodily force

which abases us, in our compelled submission. But how sweet the free,

generous courtesy with which I would kneel before a woman-ruler!"

"Yes, if she were young and beautiful," said Zenobia, laughing. "But

how if she were sixty, and a fright?"

"Ah! it is you that rate womanhood low," said I. "But let me go on. I

have never found it possible to suffer a bearded priest so near my

heart and conscience as to do me any spiritual good. I blush at the

very thought! Oh, in the better order of things, Heaven grant that the

ministry of souls may be left in charge of women! The gates of the

Blessed City will be thronged with the multitude that enter in, when

that day comes! The task belongs to woman. God meant it for her. He

has endowed her with the religious sentiment in its utmost depth and

purity, refined from that gross, intellectual alloy with which every

masculine theologist--save only One, who merely veiled himself in

mortal and masculine shape, but was, in truth, divine--has been prone

to mingle it. I have always envied the Catholics their faith in that

sweet, sacred Virgin Mother, who stands between them and the Deity,

intercepting somewhat of his awful splendor, but permitting his love to

stream upon the worshipper more intelligibly to human comprehension

through the medium of a woman's tenderness. Have I not said enough,

Zenobia?"

"I cannot think that this is true," observed Priscilla, who had been

gazing at me with great, disapproving eyes. "And I am sure I do not

wish it to be true!"

"Poor child!" exclaimed Zenobia, rather contemptuously. "She is the

type of womanhood, such as man has spent centuries in making it. He is

never content unless he can degrade himself by stooping towards what he

loves. In denying us our rights, he betrays even more blindness to his

own interests than profligate disregard of ours!"

"Is this true?" asked Priscilla with simplicity, turning to

Hollingsworth. "Is it all true, that Mr. Coverdale and Zenobia have

been saying?"

"No, Priscilla!" answered Hollingsworth with his customary bluntness.

"They have neither of them spoken one true word yet."

"Do you despise woman?" said Zenobia.

"Ah, Hollingsworth, that would be most ungrateful!"

"Despise her? No!" cried Hollingsworth, lifting his great shaggy head

and shaking it at us, while his eyes glowed almost fiercely. "She is

the most admirable handiwork of God, in her true place and character.

Her place is at man's side. Her office, that of the sympathizer; the

unreserved, unquestioning believer; the recognition, withheld in every

other manner, but given, in pity, through woman's heart, lest man

should utterly lose faith in himself; the echo of God's own voice,

pronouncing, 'It is well done!' All the separate action of woman is,

and ever has been, and always shall be, false, foolish, vain,

destructive of her own best and holiest qualities, void of every good

effect, and productive of intolerable mischiefs! Man is a wretch

without woman; but woman is a monster--and, thank Heaven, an almost

impossible and hitherto imaginary monster--without man as her

acknowledged principal! As true as I had once a mother whom I loved,

were there any possible prospect of woman's taking the social stand

which some of them,--poor, miserable, abortive creatures, who only

dream of such things because they have missed woman's peculiar

happiness, or because nature made them really neither man nor

woman!--if there were a chance of their attaining the end which these

petticoated monstrosities have in view, I would call upon my own sex to

use its physical force, that unmistakable evidence of sovereignty, to

scourge them back within their proper bounds! But it will not be

needful. The heart of time womanhood knows where its own sphere is,

and never seeks to stray beyond it!"

Never was mortal blessed--if blessing it were--with a glance of such

entire acquiescence and unquestioning faith, happy in its completeness,

as our little Priscilla unconsciously bestowed on Hollingsworth. She

seemed to take the sentiment from his lips into her heart, and brood

over it in perfect content. The very woman whom he pictured--the

gentle parasite, the soft reflection of a more powerful existence--sat

there at his feet.

I looked at Zenobia, however, fully expecting her to resent--as I felt,

by the indignant ebullition of my own blood, that she ought this

outrageous affirmation of what struck me as the intensity of masculine

egotism. It centred everything in itself, and deprived woman of her

very soul, her inexpressible and unfathomable all, to make it a mere

incident in the great sum of man. Hollingsworth had boldly uttered

what he, and millions of despots like him, really felt. Without

intending it, he had disclosed the wellspring of all these troubled

waters. Now, if ever, it surely behooved Zenobia to be the champion of

her sex.

But, to my surprise, and indignation too, she only looked humbled. Some

tears sparkled in her eyes, but they were wholly of grief, not anger.

"Well, be it so," was all she said. "I, at least, have deep cause to

think you right. Let man be but manly and godlike, and woman is only

too ready to become to him what you say!"

I smiled--somewhat bitterly, it is true--in contemplation of my own

ill-luck. How little did these two women care for me, who had freely

conceded all their claims, and a great deal more, out of the fulness of

my heart; while Hollingsworth, by some necromancy of his horrible

injustice, seemed to have brought them both to his feet!

"Women almost invariably behave thus," thought I. "What does the fact

mean? Is it their nature? Or is it, at last, the result of ages of

compelled degradation? And, in either case, will it be possible ever

to redeem them?"

An intuition now appeared to possess all the party, that, for this

time, at least, there was no more to be said. With one accord, we

arose from the ground, and made our way through the tangled undergrowth

towards one of those pleasant wood-paths that wound among the

overarching trees. Some of the branches hung so low as partly to

conceal the figures that went before from those who followed. Priscilla

had leaped up more lightly than the rest of us, and ran along in

advance, with as much airy activity of spirit as was typified in the

motion of a bird, which chanced to be flitting from tree to tree, in

the same direction as herself. Never did she seem so happy as that

afternoon. She skipt, and could not help it, from very playfulness of

heart.

Zenobia and Hollingsworth went next, in close contiguity, but not with

arm in arm. Now, just when they had passed the impending bough of a

birch-tree, I plainly saw Zenobia take the hand of Hollingsworth in

both her own, press it to her bosom, and let it fall again!

The gesture was sudden, and full of passion; the impulse had evidently

taken her by surprise; it expressed all! Had Zenobia knelt before him,

or flung herself upon his breast, and gasped out, "I love you,

Hollingsworth!" I could not have been more certain of what it meant.

They then walked onward, as before. But, methought, as the declining

sun threw Zenobia's magnified shadow along the path, I beheld it

tremulous; and the delicate stem of the flower which she wore in her

hair was likewise responsive to her agitation.

Priscilla--through the medium of her eyes, at least could not possibly

have been aware of the gesture above described. Yet, at that instant,

I saw her droop. The buoyancy, which just before had been so

bird-like, was utterly departed; the life seemed to pass out of her,

and even the substance of her figure to grow thin and gray. I almost

imagined her a shadow, tiding gradually into the dimness of the wood.

Her pace became so slow that Hollingsworth and Zenobia passed by, and

I, without hastening my footsteps, overtook her.

"Come, Priscilla," said I, looking her intently in the face, which was

very pale and sorrowful, "we must make haste after our friends. Do you

feel suddenly ill? A moment ago, you flitted along so lightly that I

was comparing you to a bird. Now, on the contrary, it is as if you had

a heavy heart, and a very little strength to bear it with. Pray take my

arm!"

"No," said Priscilla, "I do not think it would help me. It is my

heart, as you say, that makes me heavy; and I know not why. Just now,

I felt very happy."

No doubt it was a kind of sacrilege in me to attempt to come within her

maidenly mystery; but, as she appeared to be tossed aside by her other

friends, or carelessly let fall, like a flower which they had done

with, I could not resist the impulse to take just one peep beneath her

folded petals.

"Zenobia and yourself are dear friends of late," I remarked. "At

first,--that first evening when you came to us,--she did not receive

you quite so warmly as might have been wished."

"I remember it," said Priscilla. "No wonder she hesitated to love me,

who was then a stranger to her, and a girl of no grace or beauty,--she

being herself so beautiful!"

"But she loves you now, of course?" suggested I. "And at this very

instant you feel her to be your dearest friend?"

"Why do you ask me that question?" exclaimed Priscilla, as if

frightened at the scrutiny into her feelings which I compelled her to

make. "It somehow puts strange thoughts into my mind. But I do love

Zenobia dearly! If she only loves me half as well, I shall be happy!"

"How is it possible to doubt that, Priscilla?" I rejoined. "But

observe how pleasantly and happily Zenobia and Hollingsworth are

walking together. I call it a delightful spectacle. It truly rejoices

me that Hollingsworth has found so fit and affectionate a friend! So

many people in the world mistrust him,--so many disbelieve and

ridicule, while hardly any do him justice, or acknowledge him for the

wonderful man he is,--that it is really a blessed thing for him to have

won the sympathy of such a woman as Zenobia. Any man might be proud of

that. Any man, even if he be as great as Hollingsworth, might love so

magnificent a woman. How very beautiful Zenobia is! And Hollingsworth

knows it, too."

There may have been some petty malice in what I said. Generosity is a

very fine thing, at a proper time and within due limits. But it is an

insufferable bore to see one man engrossing every thought of all the

women, and leaving his friend to shiver in outer seclusion, without

even the alternative of solacing himself with what the more fortunate

individual has rejected. Yes, it was out of a foolish bitterness of

heart that I had spoken.

"Go on before," said Priscilla abruptly, and with true feminine

imperiousness, which heretofore I had never seen her exercise. "It

pleases me best to loiter along by myself. I do not walk so fast as

you."

With her hand she made a little gesture of dismissal. It provoked me;

yet, on the whole, was the most bewitching thing that Priscilla had

ever done. I obeyed her, and strolled moodily homeward, wondering--as

I had wondered a thousand times already--how Hollingsworth meant to

dispose of these two hearts, which (plainly to my perception, and, as I

could not but now suppose, to his) he had engrossed into his own huge

egotism.

There was likewise another subject hardly less fruitful of speculation.

In what attitude did Zenobia present herself to Hollingsworth? Was it

in that of a free woman, with no mortgage on her affections nor

claimant to her hand, but fully at liberty to surrender both, in

exchange for the heart and hand which she apparently expected to

receive? But was it a vision that I had witnessed in the wood? Was

Westervelt a goblin? Were those words of passion and agony, which

Zenobia had uttered in my hearing, a mere stage declamation? Were they

formed of a material lighter than common air? Or, supposing them to

bear sterling weight, was it a perilous and dreadful wrong which she

was meditating towards herself and Hollingsworth?

Arriving nearly at the farmhouse, I looked back over the long slope of

pasture land, and beheld them standing together, in the light of

sunset, just on the spot where, according to the gossip of the

Community, they meant to build their cottage. Priscilla, alone and

forgotten, was lingering in the shadow of the wood.

XV. A CRISIS

Thus the summer was passing away,--a summer of toil, of interest, of

something that was not pleasure, but which went deep into my heart, and

there became a rich experience. I found myself looking forward to

years, if not to a lifetime, to be spent on the same system. The

Community were now beginning to form their permanent plans. One of our

purposes was to erect a Phalanstery (as I think we called it, after

Fourier; but the phraseology of those days is not very fresh in my

remembrance), where the great and general family should have its

abiding-place. Individual members, too, who made it a point of

religion to preserve the sanctity of an exclusive home, were selecting

sites for their cottages, by the wood-side, or on the breezy swells, or

in the sheltered nook of some little valley, according as their taste

might lean towards snugness or the picturesque. Altogether, by

projecting our minds outward, we had imparted a show of novelty to

existence, and contemplated it as hopefully as if the soil beneath our

feet had not been fathom-deep with the dust of deluded generations, on

every one of which, as on ourselves, the world had imposed itself as a

hitherto unwedded bride.

Hollingsworth and myself had often discussed these prospects. It was

easy to perceive, however, that he spoke with little or no fervor, but

either as questioning the fulfilment of our anticipations, or, at any

rate, with a quiet consciousness that it was no personal concern of

his. Shortly after the scene at Eliot's pulpit, while he and I were

repairing an old stone fence, I amused myself with sallying forward

into the future time.

"When we come to be old men," I said, "they will call us uncles, or

fathers,--Father Hollingsworth and Uncle Coverdale,--and we will look

back cheerfully to these early days, and make a romantic story for the

young People (and if a little more romantic than truth may warrant, it

will be no harm) out of our severe trials and hardships. In a century

or two, we shall, every one of us, be mythical personages, or

exceedingly picturesque and poetical ones, at all events. They will

have a great public hall, in which your portrait, and mine, and twenty

other faces that are living now, shall be hung up; and as for me, I

will be painted in my shirtsleeves, and with the sleeves rolled up, to

show my muscular development. What stories will be rife among them

about our mighty strength!" continued I, lifting a big stone and

putting it into its place, "though our posterity will really be far

stronger than ourselves, after several generations of a simple,

natural, and active life. What legends of Zenobia's beauty, and

Priscilla's slender and shadowy grace, and those mysterious qualities

which make her seem diaphanous with spiritual light! In due course of

ages, we must all figure heroically in an epic poem; and we will

ourselves--at least, I will--bend unseen over the future poet, and lend

him inspiration while he writes it."

"You seem," said Hollingsworth, "to be trying how much nonsense you can

pour out in a breath."

"I wish you would see fit to comprehend," retorted I, "that the

profoundest wisdom must be mingled with nine tenths of nonsense, else

it is not worth the breath that utters it. But I do long for the

cottages to be built, that the creeping plants may begin to run over

them, and the moss to gather on the walls, and the trees--which we will

set out--to cover them with a breadth of shadow. This spick-and-span

novelty does not quite suit my taste. It is time, too, for children to

be born among us. The first-born child is still to come. And I shall

never feel as if this were a real, practical, as well as poetical

system of human life, until somebody has sanctified it by death."

"A pretty occasion for martyrdom, truly!" said Hollingsworth.

"As good as any other," I replied. "I wonder, Hollingsworth, who, of

all these strong men, and fair women and maidens, is doomed the first

to die. Would it not be well, even before we have absolute need of it,

to fix upon a spot for a cemetery? Let us choose the rudest, roughest,

most uncultivable spot, for Death's garden ground; and Death shall

teach us to beautify it, grave by grave. By our sweet, calm way of

dying, and the airy elegance out of which we will shape our funeral

rites, and the cheerful allegories which we will model into tombstones,

the final scene shall lose its terrors; so that hereafter it may be

happiness to live, and bliss to die. None of us must die young. Yet,

should Providence ordain it so, the event shall not be sorrowful, but

affect us with a tender, delicious, only half-melancholy, and almost

smiling pathos!"

"That is to say," muttered Hollingsworth, "you will die like a heathen,

as you certainly live like one. But, listen to me, Coverdale. Your

fantastic anticipations make me discern all the more forcibly what a

wretched, unsubstantial scheme is this, on which we have wasted a

precious summer of our lives. Do you seriously imagine that any such

realities as you, and many others here, have dreamed of, will ever be

brought to pass?"

"Certainly I do," said I. "Of course, when the reality comes, it will

wear the every-day, commonplace, dusty, and rather homely garb that

reality always does put on. But, setting aside the ideal charm, I hold

that our highest anticipations have a solid footing on common sense."

"You only half believe what you say," rejoined Hollingsworth; "and as

for me, I neither have faith in your dream, nor would care the value of

this pebble for its realization, were that possible. And what more do

you want of it? It has given you a theme for poetry. Let that content

you. But now I ask you to be, at last, a man of sobriety and

earnestness, and aid me in an enterprise which is worth all our

strength, and the strength of a thousand mightier than we."

There can be no need of giving in detail the conversation that ensued.

It is enough to say that Hollingsworth once more brought forward his

rigid and unconquerable idea,--a scheme for the reformation of the

wicked by methods moral, intellectual, and industrial, by the sympathy

of pure, humble, and yet exalted minds, and by opening to his pupils

the possibility of a worthier life than that which had become their

fate. It appeared, unless he overestimated his own means, that

Hollingsworth held it at his choice (and he did so choose) to obtain

possession of the very ground on which we had planted our Community,

and which had not yet been made irrevocably ours, by purchase. It was

just the foundation that he desired. Our beginnings might readily be

adapted to his great end. The arrangements already completed would

work quietly into his system. So plausible looked his theory, and, more

than that, so practical,--such an air of reasonableness had he, by

patient thought, thrown over it,--each segment of it was contrived to

dovetail into all the rest with such a complicated applicability, and

so ready was he with a response for every objection, that, really, so

far as logic and argument went, he had the matter all his own way.

"But," said I, "whence can you, having no means of your own, derive the

enormous capital which is essential to this experiment? State Street,

I imagine, would not draw its purser strings very liberally in aid of

such a speculation."

"I have the funds--as much, at least, as is needed for a

commencement--at command," he answered. "They can be produced within a

month, if necessary."

My thoughts reverted to Zenobia. It could only be her wealth which

Hollingsworth was appropriating so lavishly. And on what conditions

was it to be had? Did she fling it into the scheme with the

uncalculating generosity that characterizes a woman when it is her

impulse to be generous at all? And did she fling herself along with

it? But Hollingsworth did not volunteer an explanation.

"And have you no regrets," I inquired, "in overthrowing this fair

system of our new life, which has been planned so deeply, and is now

beginning to flourish so hopefully around us? How beautiful it is,

and, so far as we can yet see, how practicable! The ages have waited

for us, and here we are, the very first that have essayed to carry on

our mortal existence in love and mutual help! Hollingsworth, I would

be loath to take the ruin of this enterprise upon my conscience."

"Then let it rest wholly upon mine!" he answered, knitting his black

brows. "I see through the system. It is full of

defects,--irremediable and damning ones!--from first to last, there is

nothing else! I grasp it in my hand, and find no substance whatever.

There is not human nature in it."

"Why are you so secret in your operations?" I asked. "God forbid that

I should accuse you of intentional wrong; but the besetting sin of a

philanthropist, it appears to me, is apt to be a moral obliquity. His

sense of honor ceases to be the sense of other honorable men. At some

point of his course--I know not exactly when or where--he is tempted to

palter with the right, and can scarcely forbear persuading himself that

the importance of his public ends renders it allowable to throw aside

his private conscience. Oh, my dear friend, beware this error! If you

meditate the overthrow of this establishment, call together our

companions, state your design, support it with all your eloquence, but

allow them an opportunity of defending themselves."

"It does not suit me," said Hollingsworth. "Nor is it my duty to do

so."

"I think it is," replied I.

Hollingsworth frowned; not in passion, but, like fate, inexorably.

"I will not argue the point," said he. "What I desire to know of you

is,--and you can tell me in one word,--whether I am to look for your

cooperation in this great scheme of good? Take it up with me! Be my

brother in it! It offers you (what you have told me, over and over

again, that you most need) a purpose in life, worthy of the extremest

self-devotion,--worthy of martyrdom, should God so order it! In this

view, I present it to you. You can greatly benefit mankind. Your

peculiar faculties, as I shall direct them, are capable of being so

wrought into this enterprise that not one of them need lie idle. Strike

hands with me, and from this moment you shall never again feel the

languor and vague wretchedness of an indolent or half-occupied man.

There may be no more aimless beauty in your life; but, in its stead,

there shall be strength, courage, immitigable will,--everything that a

manly and generous nature should desire! We shall succeed! We shall

have done our best for this miserable world; and happiness (which never

comes but incidentally) will come to us unawares."

It seemed his intention to say no more. But, after he had quite broken

off, his deep eyes filled with tears, and he held out both his hands to

me.

"Coverdale," he murmured, "there is not the man in this wide world whom

I can love as I could you. Do not forsake me!"

As I look back upon this scene, through the coldness and dimness of so

many years, there is still a sensation as if Hollingsworth had caught

hold of my heart, and were pulling it towards him with an almost

irresistible force. It is a mystery to me how I withstood it. But, in

truth, I saw in his scheme of philanthropy nothing but what was odious.

A loathsomeness that was to be forever in my daily work! A great black

ugliness of sin, which he proposed to collect out of a thousand human

hearts, and that we should spend our lives in an experiment of

transmuting it into virtue! Had I but touched his extended hand,

Hollingsworth's magnetism would perhaps have penetrated me with his own

conception of all these matters. But I stood aloof. I fortified

myself with doubts whether his strength of purpose had not been too

gigantic for his integrity, impelling him to trample on considerations

that should have been paramount to every other.

"Is Zenobia to take a part in your enterprise?" I asked.

"She is," said Hollingsworth.

"She!--the beautiful!--the gorgeous!" I exclaimed. "And how have you

prevailed with such a woman to work in this squalid element?"

"Through no base methods, as you seem to suspect," he answered; "but by

addressing whatever is best and noblest in her."

Hollingsworth was looking on the ground. But, as he often did

so,--generally, indeed, in his habitual moods of thought,--I could not

judge whether it was from any special unwillingness now to meet my

eyes. What it was that dictated my next question, I cannot precisely

say. Nevertheless, it rose so inevitably into my mouth, and, as it

were, asked itself so involuntarily, that there must needs have been an

aptness in it.

"What is to become of Priscilla?"

Hollingsworth looked at me fiercely, and with glowing eyes. He could

not have shown any other kind of expression than that, had he meant to

strike me with a sword.

"Why do you bring in the names of these women?" said he, after a moment

of pregnant silence. "What have they to do with the proposal which I

make you? I must have your answer! Will you devote yourself, and

sacrifice all to this great end, and be my friend of friends forever?"

"In Heaven's name, Hollingsworth," cried I, getting angry, and glad to

be angry, because so only was it possible to oppose his tremendous

concentrativeness and indomitable will, "cannot you conceive that a man

may wish well to the world, and struggle for its good, on some other

plan than precisely that which you have laid down? And will you cast

off a friend for no unworthiness, but merely because he stands upon his

right as an individual being, and looks at matters through his own

optics, instead of yours?"

"Be with me," said Hollingsworth, "or be against me! There is no third

choice for you."

"Take this, then, as my decision," I answered. "I doubt the wisdom of

your scheme. Furthermore, I greatly fear that the methods by which you

allow yourself to pursue it are such as cannot stand the scrutiny of an

unbiassed conscience."

"And you will not join me?"

"No!"

I never said the word--and certainly can never have it to say

hereafter--that cost me a thousandth part so hard an effort as did that

one syllable. The heart-pang was not merely figurative, but an

absolute torture of the breast. I was gazing steadfastly at

Hollingsworth. It seemed to me that it struck him, too, like a bullet.

A ghastly paleness--always so terrific on a swarthy face--overspread

his features. There was a convulsive movement of his throat, as if he

were forcing down some words that struggled and fought for utterance.

Whether words of anger, or words of grief, I cannot tell; although many

and many a time I have vainly tormented myself with conjecturing which

of the two they were. One other appeal to my friendship,--such as

once, already, Hollingsworth had made,--taking me in the revulsion that

followed a strenuous exercise of opposing will, would completely have

subdued me. But he left the matter there. "Well!" said he.

And that was all! I should have been thankful for one word more, even

had it shot me through the heart, as mine did him. But he did not

speak it; and, after a few moments, with one accord, we set to work

again, repairing the stone fence. Hollingsworth, I observed, wrought

like a Titan; and, for my own part, I lifted stones which at this

day--or, in a calmer mood, at that one--I should no more have thought

it possible to stir than to carry off the gates of Gaza on my back.

XVI. LEAVE-TAKINGS

A few days after the tragic passage-at-arms between Hollingsworth and

me, I appeared at the dinner-table actually dressed in a coat, instead

of my customary blouse; with a satin cravat, too, a white vest, and

several other things that made me seem strange and outlandish to

myself. As for my companions, this unwonted spectacle caused a great

stir upon the wooden benches that bordered either side of our homely

board.

"What's in the wind now, Miles?" asked one of them. "Are you deserting

us?"

"Yes, for a week or two," said I. "It strikes me that my health demands

a little relaxation of labor, and a short visit to the seaside, during

the dog-days."

"You look like it!" grumbled Silas Foster, not greatly pleased with the

idea of losing an efficient laborer before the stress of the season was

well over. "Now, here's a pretty fellow! His shoulders have broadened

a matter of six inches since he came among us; he can do his day's

work, if he likes, with any man or ox on the farm; and yet he talks

about going to the seashore for his health! Well, well, old woman,"

added he to his wife, "let me have a plateful of that pork and cabbage!

I begin to feel in a very weakly way. When the others have had their

turn, you and I will take a jaunt to Newport or Saratoga!"

"Well, but, Mr. Foster," said I, "you must allow me to take a little

breath."

"Breath!" retorted the old yeoman. "Your lungs have the play of a pair

of blacksmith's bellows already. What on earth do you want more? But

go along! I understand the business. We shall never see your face

here again. Here ends the reformation of the world, so far as Miles

Coverdale has a hand in it!"

"By no means," I replied. "I am resolute to die in the last ditch, for

the good of the cause."

"Die in a ditch!" muttered gruff Silas, with genuine Yankee intolerance

of any intermission of toil, except on Sunday, the Fourth of July, the

autumnal cattle-show, Thanksgiving, or the annual Fast,--"die in a

ditch! I believe, in my conscience, you would, if there were no

steadier means than your own labor to keep you out of it!"

The truth was, that an intolerable discontent and irksomeness had come

over me. Blithedale was no longer what it had been. Everything was

suddenly faded. The sunburnt and arid aspect of our woods and

pastures, beneath the August sky, did but imperfectly symbolize the

lack of dew and moisture, that, since yesterday, as it were, had

blighted my fields of thought, and penetrated to the innermost and

shadiest of my contemplative recesses. The change will be recognized

by many, who, after a period of happiness, have endeavored to go on

with the same kind of life, in the same scene, in spite of the

alteration or withdrawal of some principal circumstance. They discover

(what heretofore, perhaps, they had not known) that it was this which

gave the bright color and vivid reality to the whole affair.

I stood on other terms than before, not only with Hollingsworth, but

with Zenobia and Priscilla. As regarded the two latter, it was that

dreamlike and miserable sort of change that denies you the privilege to

complain, because you can assert no positive injury, nor lay your

finger on anything tangible. It is a matter which you do not see, but

feel, and which, when you try to analyze it, seems to lose its very

existence, and resolve itself into a sickly humor of your own. Your

understanding, possibly, may put faith in this denial. But your heart

will not so easily rest satisfied. It incessantly remonstrates,

though, most of the time, in a bass-note, which you do not separately

distinguish; but, now and then, with a sharp cry, importunate to be

heard, and resolute to claim belief. "Things are not as they were!" it

keeps saying. "You shall not impose on me! I will never be quiet! I

will throb painfully! I will be heavy, and desolate, and shiver with

cold! For I, your deep heart, know when to be miserable, as once I

knew when to be happy! All is changed for us! You are beloved no

more!" And were my life to be spent over again, I would invariably

lend my ear to this Cassandra of the inward depths, however clamorous

the music and the merriment of a more superficial region.

My outbreak with Hollingsworth, though never definitely known to our

associates, had really an effect upon the moral atmosphere of the

Community. It was incidental to the closeness of relationship into

which we had brought ourselves, that an unfriendly state of feeling

could not occur between any two members without the whole society being

more or less commoted and made uncomfortable thereby. This species of

nervous sympathy (though a pretty characteristic enough, sentimentally

considered, and apparently betokening an actual bond of love among us)

was yet found rather inconvenient in its practical operation, mortal

tempers being so infirm and variable as they are. If one of us happened

to give his neighbor a box on the ear, the tingle was immediately felt

on the same side of everybody's head. Thus, even on the supposition

that we were far less quarrelsome than the rest of the world, a great

deal of time was necessarily wasted in rubbing our ears.

Musing on all these matters, I felt an inexpressible longing for at

least a temporary novelty. I thought of going across the Rocky

Mountains, or to Europe, or up the Nile; of offering myself a volunteer

on the Exploring Expedition; of taking a ramble of years, no matter in

what direction, and coming back on the other side of the world. Then,

should the colonists of Blithedale have established their enterprise on

a permanent basis, I might fling aside my pilgrim staff and dusty

shoon, and rest as peacefully here as elsewhere. Or, in case

Hollingsworth should occupy the ground with his School of Reform, as he

now purposed, I might plead earthly guilt enough, by that time, to give

me what I was inclined to think the only trustworthy hold on his

affections. Meanwhile, before deciding on any ultimate plan, I

determined to remove myself to a little distance, and take an exterior

view of what we had all been about.

In truth, it was dizzy work, amid such fermentation of opinions as was

going on in the general brain of the Community. It was a kind of

Bedlam, for the time being, although out of the very thoughts that were

wildest and most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm, and pure,

and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a noble and

happy life. But, as matters now were, I felt myself (and, having a

decided tendency towards the actual, I never liked to feel it) getting

quite out of my reckoning, with regard to the existing state of the

world. I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind of a world it

was, among innumerable schemes of what it might or ought to be. It was

impossible, situated as we were, not to imbibe the idea that everything

in nature and human existence was fluid, or fast becoming so; that the

crust of the earth in many places was broken, and its whole surface

portentously upheaving; that it was a day of crisis, and that we

ourselves were in the critical vortex. Our great globe floated in the

atmosphere of infinite space like an unsubstantial bubble. No

sagacious man will long retain his sagacity, if he live exclusively

among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning

into the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new

observation from that old standpoint.

It was now time for me, therefore, to go and hold a little talk with

the conservatives, the writers of "The North American Review," the

merchants, the politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those

respectable old blockheads who still, in this intangibility and

mistiness of affairs, kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had

not come into vogue since yesterday morning.

The brethren took leave of me with cordial kindness; and as for the

sisterhood, I had serious thoughts of kissing them all round, but

forbore to do so, because, in all such general salutations, the penance

is fully equal to the pleasure. So I kissed none of them; and nobody,

to say the truth, seemed to expect it.

"Do you wish me," I said to Zenobia, "to announce in town, and at the

watering-places, your purpose to deliver a course of lectures on the

rights of women?"

"Women possess no rights," said Zenobia, with a half-melancholy smile;

"or, at all events, only little girls and grandmothers would have the

force to exercise them."

She gave me her hand freely and kindly, and looked at me, I thought,

with a pitying expression in her eyes; nor was there any settled light

of joy in them on her own behalf, but a troubled and passionate flame,

flickering and fitful.

"I regret, on the whole, that you are leaving us," she said; "and all

the more, since I feel that this phase of our life is finished, and can

never be lived over again. Do you know, Mr. Coverdale, that I have

been several times on the point of making you my confidant, for lack of

a better and wiser one? But you are too young to be my father

confessor; and you would not thank me for treating you like one of

those good little handmaidens who share the bosom secrets of a

tragedy-queen."

"I would, at least, be loyal and faithful," answered I; "and would

counsel you with an honest purpose, if not wisely."

"Yes," said Zenobia, "you would be only too wise, too honest. Honesty

and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person's expense!"

"Ah, Zenobia," I exclaimed, "if you would but let me speak!"

"By no means," she replied, "especially when you have just resumed the

whole series of social conventionalisms, together with that

strait-bodied coat. I would as lief open my heart to a lawyer or a

clergyman! No, no, Mr. Coverdale; if I choose a counsellor, in the

present aspect of my affairs, it must be either an angel or a madman;

and I rather apprehend that the latter would be likeliest of the two to

speak the fitting word. It needs a wild steersman when we voyage

through chaos! The anchor is up,--farewell!"

Priscilla, as soon as dinner was over, had betaken herself into a

corner, and set to work on a little purse. As I approached her, she

let her eyes rest on me with a calm, serious look; for, with all her

delicacy of nerves, there was a singular self-possession in Priscilla,

and her sensibilities seemed to lie sheltered from ordinary commotion,

like the water in a deep well.

"Will you give me that purse, Priscilla," said I, "as a parting

keepsake?"

"Yes," she answered, "if you will wait till it is finished."

"I must not wait, even for that," I replied. "Shall I find you here,

on my return?"

"I never wish to go away," said she.

"I have sometimes thought," observed I, smiling, "that you, Priscilla,

are a little prophetess, or, at least, that you have spiritual

intimations respecting matters which are dark to us grosser people. If

that be the case, I should like to ask you what is about to happen; for

I am tormented with a strong foreboding that, were I to return even so

soon as to-morrow morning, I should find everything changed. Have you

any impressions of this nature?"

"Ah, no," said Priscilla, looking at me apprehensively. "If any such

misfortune is coming, the shadow has not reached me yet. Heaven

forbid! I should be glad if there might never be any change, but one

summer follow another, and all just like this."

"No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike," said I,

with a degree of Orphic wisdom that astonished myself. "Times change,

and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much

the worse for us. Good-by, Priscilla!"

I gave her hand a pressure, which, I think, she neither resisted nor

returned. Priscilla's heart was deep, but of small compass; it had

room but for a very few dearest ones, among whom she never reckoned me.

On the doorstep I met Hollingsworth. I had a momentary impulse to hold

out my hand, or at least to give a parting nod, but resisted both.

When a real and strong affection has come to an end, it is not well to

mock the sacred past with any show of those commonplace civilities that

belong to ordinary intercourse. Being dead henceforth to him, and he

to me, there could be no propriety in our chilling one another with the

touch of two corpse-like hands, or playing at looks of courtesy with

eyes that were impenetrable beneath the glaze and the film. We passed,

therefore, as if mutually invisible.

I can nowise explain what sort of whim, prank, or perversity it was,

that, after all these leave-takings, induced me to go to the pigsty,

and take leave of the swine! There they lay, buried as deeply among

the straw as they could burrow, four huge black grunters, the very

symbols of slothful ease and sensual comfort. They were asleep,

drawing short and heavy breaths, which heaved their big sides up and

down. Unclosing their eyes, however, at my approach, they looked dimly

forth at the outer world, and simultaneously uttered a gentle grunt;

not putting themselves to the trouble of an additional breath for that

particular purpose, but grunting with their ordinary inhalation. They

were involved, and almost stifled and buried alive, in their own

corporeal substance. The very unreadiness and oppression wherewith

these greasy citizens gained breath enough to keep their life-machinery

in sluggish movement appeared to make them only the more sensible of

the ponderous and fat satisfaction of their existence. Peeping at me

an instant out of their small, red, hardly perceptible eyes, they dropt

asleep again; yet not so far asleep but that their unctuous bliss was

still present to them, betwixt dream and reality.

"You must come back in season to eat part of a spare-rib," said Silas

Foster, giving my hand a mighty squeeze. "I shall have these fat

fellows hanging up by the heels, heads downward, pretty soon, I tell

you!"

"O cruel Silas, what a horrible idea!" cried I. "All the rest of us,

men, women, and livestock, save only these four porkers, are bedevilled

with one grief or another; they alone are happy,--and you mean to cut

their throats and eat them! It would be more for the general comfort

to let them eat us; and bitter and sour morsels we should be!"

XVII. THE HOTEL

Arriving in town (where my bachelor-rooms, long before this time, had

received some other occupant), I established myself, for a day or two,

in a certain, respectable hotel. It was situated somewhat aloof from

my former track in life; my present mood inclining me to avoid most of

my old companions, from whom I was now sundered by other interests, and

who would have been likely enough to amuse themselves at the expense of

the amateur workingman. The hotel-keeper put me into a back room of

the third story of his spacious establishment. The day was lowering,

with occasional gusts of rain, and an ugly tempered east wind, which

seemed to come right off the chill and melancholy sea, hardly mitigated

by sweeping over the roofs, and amalgamating itself with the dusky

element of city smoke. All the effeminacy of past days had returned

upon me at once. Summer as it still was, I ordered a coal fire in the

rusty grate, and was glad to find myself growing a little too warm with

an artificial temperature.

My sensations were those of a traveller, long sojourning in remote

regions, and at length sitting down again amid customs once familiar.

There was a newness and an oldness oddly combining themselves into one

impression. It made me acutely sensible how strange a piece of

mosaic-work had lately been wrought into my life. True, if you look at

it in one way, it had been only a summer in the country. But,

considered in a profounder relation, it was part of another age, a

different state of society, a segment of an existence peculiar in its

aims and methods, a leaf of some mysterious volume interpolated into

the current history which time was writing off. At one moment, the

very circumstances now surrounding me--my coal fire and the dingy room

in the bustling hotel--appeared far off and intangible; the next

instant Blithedale looked vague, as if it were at a distance both in

time and space, and so shadowy that a question might be raised whether

the whole affair had been anything more than the thoughts of a

speculative man. I had never before experienced a mood that so robbed

the actual world of its solidity. It nevertheless involved a charm, on

which--a devoted epicure of my own emotions--I resolved to pause, and

enjoy the moral sillabub until quite dissolved away.

Whatever had been my taste for solitude and natural scenery, yet the

thick, foggy, stifled element of cities, the entangled life of many men

together, sordid as it was, and empty of the beautiful, took quite as

strenuous a hold upon my mind. I felt as if there could never be

enough of it. Each characteristic sound was too suggestive to be

passed over unnoticed. Beneath and around me, I heard the stir of the

hotel; the loud voices of guests, landlord, or bar-keeper; steps

echoing on the staircase; the ringing of a bell, announcing arrivals or

departures; the porter lumbering past my door with baggage, which he

thumped down upon the floors of neighboring chambers; the lighter feet

of chambermaids scudding along the passages;--it is ridiculous to think

what an interest they had for me! From the street came the tumult of

the pavements, pervading the whole house with a continual uproar, so

broad and deep that only an unaccustomed ear would dwell upon it. A

company of the city soldiery, with a full military band, marched in

front of the hotel, invisible to me, but stirringly audible both by its

foot-tramp and the clangor of its instruments. Once or twice all the

city bells jangled together, announcing a fire, which brought out the

engine-men and their machines, like an army with its artillery rushing

to battle. Hour by hour the clocks in many steeples responded one to

another.

In some public hall, not a great way off, there seemed to be an

exhibition of a mechanical diorama; for three times during the day

occurred a repetition of obstreperous music, winding up with the rattle

of imitative cannon and musketry, and a huge final explosion. Then

ensued the applause of the spectators, with clap of hands and thump of

sticks, and the energetic pounding of their heels. All this was just

as valuable, in its way, as the sighing of the breeze among the

birch-trees that overshadowed Eliot's pulpit.

Yet I felt a hesitation about plunging into this muddy tide of human

activity and pastime. It suited me better, for the present, to linger

on the brink, or hover in the air above it. So I spent the first day,

and the greater part of the second, in the laziest manner possible, in

a rocking-chair, inhaling the fragrance of a series of cigars, with my

legs and slippered feet horizontally disposed, and in my hand a novel

purchased of a railroad bibliopolist. The gradual waste of my cigar

accomplished itself with an easy and gentle expenditure of breath. My

book was of the dullest, yet had a sort of sluggish flow, like that of

a stream in which your boat is as often aground as afloat. Had there

been a more impetuous rush, a more absorbing passion of the narrative,

I should the sooner have struggled out of its uneasy current, and have

given myself up to the swell and subsidence of my thoughts. But, as it

was, the torpid life of the book served as an unobtrusive accompaniment

to the life within me and about me. At intervals, however, when its

effect grew a little too soporific,--not for my patience, but for the

possibility of keeping my eyes open, I bestirred myself, started from

the rocking-chair, and looked out of the window.

A gray sky; the weathercock of a steeple that rose beyond the opposite

range of buildings, pointing from the eastward; a sprinkle of small,

spiteful-looking raindrops on the window-pane. In that ebb-tide of my

energies, had I thought of venturing abroad, these tokens would have

checked the abortive purpose.

After several such visits to the window, I found myself getting pretty

well acquainted with that little portion of the backside of the

universe which it presented to my view. Over against the hotel and its

adjacent houses, at the distance of forty or fifty yards, was the rear

of a range of buildings which appeared to be spacious, modern, and

calculated for fashionable residences. The interval between was

apportioned into grass-plots, and here and there an apology for a

garden, pertaining severally to these dwellings. There were

apple-trees, and pear and peach trees, too, the fruit on which looked

singularly large, luxuriant, and abundant, as well it might, in a

situation so warm and sheltered, and where the soil had doubtless been

enriched to a more than natural fertility. In two or three places

grapevines clambered upon trellises, and bore clusters already purple,

and promising the richness of Malta or Madeira in their ripened juice.

The blighting winds of our rigid climate could not molest these trees

and vines; the sunshine, though descending late into this area, and too

early intercepted by the height of the surrounding houses, yet lay

tropically there, even when less than temperate in every other region.

Dreary as was the day, the scene was illuminated by not a few sparrows

and other birds, which spread their wings, and flitted and fluttered,

and alighted now here, now there, and busily scratched their food out

of the wormy earth. Most of these winged people seemed to have their

domicile in a robust and healthy buttonwood-tree. It aspired upward,

high above the roofs of the houses, and spread a dense head of foliage

half across the area.

There was a cat--as there invariably is in such places--who evidently

thought herself entitled to the privileges of forest life in this close

heart of city conventionalisms. I watched her creeping along the low,

flat roofs of the offices, descending a flight of wooden steps, gliding

among the grass, and besieging the buttonwood-tree, with murderous

purpose against its feathered citizens. But, after all, they were

birds of city breeding, and doubtless knew how to guard themselves

against the peculiar perils of their position.

Bewitching to my fancy are all those nooks and crannies where Nature,

like a stray partridge, hides her head among the long-established

haunts of men! It is likewise to be remarked, as a general rule, that

there is far more of the picturesque, more truth to native and

characteristic tendencies, and vastly greater suggestiveness in the

back view of a residence, whether in town or country, than in its

front. The latter is always artificial; it is meant for the world's

eye, and is therefore a veil and a concealment. Realities keep in the

rear, and put forward an advance guard of show and humbug. The

posterior aspect of any old farmhouse, behind which a railroad has

unexpectedly been opened, is so different from that looking upon the

immemorial highway, that the spectator gets new ideas of rural life and

individuality in the puff or two of steam-breath which shoots him past

the premises. In a city, the distinction between what is offered to

the public and what is kept for the family is certainly not less

striking.

But, to return to my window at the back of the hotel. Together with a

due contemplation of the fruit-trees, the grapevines, the

buttonwood-tree, the cat, the birds, and many other particulars, I

failed not to study the row of fashionable dwellings to which all these

appertained. Here, it must be confessed, there was a general sameness.

From the upper story to the first floor, they were so much alike, that

I could only conceive of the inhabitants as cut out on one identical

pattern, like little wooden toy-people of German manufacture. One

long, united roof, with its thousands of slates glittering in the rain,

extended over the whole. After the distinctness of separate characters

to which I had recently been accustomed, it perplexed and annoyed me

not to be able to resolve this combination of human interests into

well-defined elements. It seemed hardly worth while for more than one

of those families to be in existence, since they all had the same

glimpse of the sky, all looked into the same area, all received just

their equal share of sunshine through the front windows, and all

listened to precisely the same noises of the street on which they

boarded. Men are so much alike in their nature, that they grow

intolerable unless varied by their circumstances.

Just about this time a waiter entered my room. The truth was, I had

rung the bell and ordered a sherry-cobbler.

"Can you tell me," I inquired, "what families reside in any of those

houses opposite?"

"The one right opposite is a rather stylish boarding-house," said the

waiter. "Two of the gentlemen boarders keep horses at the stable of

our establishment. They do things in very good style, sir, the people

that live there."

I might have found out nearly as much for myself, on examining the

house a little more closely, in one of the upper chambers I saw a young

man in a dressing-gown, standing before the glass and brushing his hair

for a quarter of an hour together. He then spent an equal space of

time in the elaborate arrangement of his cravat, and finally made his

appearance in a dress-coat, which I suspected to be newly come from the

tailor's, and now first put on for a dinner-party. At a window of the

next story below, two children, prettily dressed, were looking out. By

and by a middle-aged gentleman came softly behind them, kissed the

little girl, and playfully pulled the little boy's ear. It was a papa,

no doubt, just come in from his counting-room or office; and anon

appeared mamma, stealing as softly behind papa as he had stolen behind

the children, and laying her hand on his shoulder to surprise him.

Then followed a kiss between papa and mamma; but a noiseless one, for

the children did not turn their heads.

"I bless God for these good folks!" thought I to myself. "I have not

seen a prettier bit of nature, in all my summer in the country, than

they have shown me here, in a rather stylish boarding-house. I will

pay them a little more attention by and by."

On the first floor, an iron balustrade ran along in front of the tall

and spacious windows, evidently belonging to a back drawing-room; and

far into the interior, through the arch of the sliding-doors, I could

discern a gleam from the windows of the front apartment. There were no

signs of present occupancy in this suite of rooms; the curtains being

enveloped in a protective covering, which allowed but a small portion

of their crimson material to be seen. But two housemaids were

industriously at work; so that there was good prospect that the

boarding-house might not long suffer from the absence of its most

expensive and profitable guests. Meanwhile, until they should appear,

I cast my eyes downward to the lower regions. There, in the dusk that

so early settles into such places, I saw the red glow of the kitchen

range. The hot cook, or one of her subordinates, with a ladle in her

hand, came to draw a cool breath at the back door. As soon as she

disappeared, an Irish man-servant, in a white jacket, crept slyly

forth, and threw away the fragments of a china dish, which,

unquestionably, he had just broken. Soon afterwards, a lady, showily

dressed, with a curling front of what must have been false hair, and

reddish-brown, I suppose, in hue,--though my remoteness allowed me only

to guess at such particulars,--this respectable mistress of the

boarding-house made a momentary transit across the kitchen window, and

appeared no more. It was her final, comprehensive glance, in order to

make sure that soup, fish, and flesh were in a proper state of

readiness, before the serving up of dinner.

There was nothing else worth noticing about the house, unless it be

that on the peak of one of the dormer windows which opened out of the

roof sat a dove, looking very dreary and forlorn; insomuch that I

wondered why she chose to sit there, in the chilly rain, while her

kindred were doubtless nestling in a warm and comfortable dove-cote.

All at once this dove spread her wings, and, launching herself in the

air, came flying so straight across the intervening space, that I fully

expected her to alight directly on my window-sill. In the latter part

of her course, however, she swerved aside, flew upward, and vanished,

as did, likewise, the slight, fantastic pathos with which I had

invested her.

XVIII. THE BOARDING-HOUSE

The next day, as soon as I thought of looking again towards the

opposite house, there sat the dove again, on the peak of the same

dormer window! It was by no means an early hour, for the preceding

evening I had ultimately mustered enterprise enough to visit the

theatre, had gone late to bed, and slept beyond all limit, in my

remoteness from Silas Foster's awakening horn. Dreams had tormented me

throughout the night. The train of thoughts which, for months past,

had worn a track through my mind, and to escape which was one of my

chief objects in leaving Blithedale, kept treading remorselessly to and

fro in their old footsteps, while slumber left me impotent to regulate

them. It was not till I had quitted my three friends that they first

began to encroach upon my dreams. In those of the last night,

Hollingsworth and Zenobia, standing on either side of my bed, had bent

across it to exchange a kiss of passion. Priscilla, beholding

this,--for she seemed to be peeping in at the chamber window,--had

melted gradually away, and left only the sadness of her expression in

my heart. There it still lingered, after I awoke; one of those

unreasonable sadnesses that you know not how to deal with, because it

involves nothing for common-sense to clutch.

It was a gray and dripping forenoon; gloomy enough in town, and still

gloomier in the haunts to which my recollections persisted in

transporting me. For, in spite of my efforts to think of something

else, I thought how the gusty rain was drifting over the slopes and

valleys of our farm; how wet must be the foliage that overshadowed the

pulpit rock; how cheerless, in such a day, my hermitage--the

tree-solitude of my owl-like humors--in the vine-encircled heart of the

tall pine! It was a phase of homesickness. I had wrenched myself too

suddenly out of an accustomed sphere. There was no choice, now, but to

bear the pang of whatever heartstrings were snapt asunder, and that

illusive torment (like the ache of a limb long ago cut off) by which a

past mode of life prolongs itself into the succeeding one. I was full

of idle and shapeless regrets. The thought impressed itself upon me

that I had left duties unperformed. With the power, perhaps, to act in

the place of destiny and avert misfortune from my friends, I had

resigned them to their fate. That cold tendency, between instinct and

intellect, which made me pry with a speculative interest into people's

passions and impulses, appeared to have gone far towards unhumanizing

my heart.

But a man cannot always decide for himself whether his own heart is

cold or warm. It now impresses me that, if I erred at all in regard to

Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla, it was through too much

sympathy, rather than too little.

To escape the irksomeness of these meditations, I resumed my post at

the window. At first sight, there was nothing new to be noticed. The

general aspect of affairs was the same as yesterday, except that the

more decided inclemency of to-day had driven the sparrows to shelter,

and kept the cat within doors; whence, however, she soon emerged,

pursued by the cook, and with what looked like the better half of a

roast chicken in her mouth. The young man in the dress-coat was

invisible; the two children, in the story below, seemed to be romping

about the room, under the superintendence of a nursery-maid. The

damask curtains of the drawing-room, on the first floor, were now fully

displayed, festooned gracefully from top to bottom of the windows,

which extended from the ceiling to the carpet. A narrower window, at

the left of the drawing-room, gave light to what was probably a small

boudoir, within which I caught the faintest imaginable glimpse of a

girl's figure, in airy drapery. Her arm was in regular movement, as if

she were busy with her German worsted, or some other such pretty and

unprofitable handiwork.

While intent upon making out this girlish shape, I became sensible that

a figure had appeared at one of the windows of the drawing-room. There

was a presentiment in my mind; or perhaps my first glance, imperfect

and sidelong as it was, had sufficed to convey subtile information of

the truth. At any rate, it was with no positive surprise, but as if I

had all along expected the incident, that, directing my eyes

thitherward, I beheld--like a full-length picture, in the space between

the heavy festoons of the window curtains--no other than Zenobia! At

the same instant, my thoughts made sure of the identity of the figure

in the boudoir. It could only be Priscilla.

Zenobia was attired, not in the almost rustic costume which she had

heretofore worn, but in a fashionable morning-dress. There was,

nevertheless, one familiar point. She had, as usual, a flower in her

hair, brilliant and of a rare variety, else it had not been Zenobia.

After a brief pause at the window, she turned away, exemplifying, in

the few steps that removed her out of sight, that noble and beautiful

motion which characterized her as much as any other personal charm. Not

one woman in a thousand could move so admirably as Zenobia. Many women

can sit gracefully; some can stand gracefully; and a few, perhaps, can

assume a series of graceful positions. But natural movement is the

result and expression of the whole being, and cannot be well and nobly

performed unless responsive to something in the character. I often

used to think that music--light and airy, wild and passionate, or the

full harmony of stately marches, in accordance with her varying

mood--should have attended Zenobia's footsteps.

I waited for her reappearance. It was one peculiarity, distinguishing

Zenobia from most of her sex, that she needed for her moral well-being,

and never would forego, a large amount of physical exercise. At

Blithedale, no inclemency of sky or muddiness of earth had ever impeded

her daily walks. Here in town, she probably preferred to tread the

extent of the two drawing-rooms, and measure out the miles by spaces of

forty feet, rather than bedraggle her skirts over the sloppy pavements.

Accordingly, in about the time requisite to pass through the arch of

the sliding-doors to the front window, and to return upon her steps,

there she stood again, between the festoons of the crimson curtains.

But another personage was now added to the scene. Behind Zenobia

appeared that face which I had first encountered in the wood-path; the

man who had passed, side by side with her, in such mysterious

familiarity and estrangement, beneath my vine curtained hermitage in

the tall pine-tree. It was Westervelt. And though he was looking

closely over her shoulder, it still seemed to me, as on the former

occasion, that Zenobia repelled him,--that, perchance, they mutually

repelled each other, by some incompatibility of their spheres.

This impression, however, might have been altogether the result of

fancy and prejudice in me. The distance was so great as to obliterate

any play of feature by which I might otherwise have been made a

partaker of their counsels.

There now needed only Hollingsworth and old Moodie to complete the knot

of characters, whom a real intricacy of events, greatly assisted by my

method of insulating them from other relations, had kept so long upon

my mental stage, as actors in a drama. In itself, perhaps, it was no

very remarkable event that they should thus come across me, at the

moment when I imagined myself free. Zenobia, as I well knew, had

retained an establishment in town, and had not unfrequently withdrawn

herself from Blithedale during brief intervals, on one of which

occasions she had taken Priscilla along with her. Nevertheless, there

seemed something fatal in the coincidence that had borne me to this one

spot, of all others in a great city, and transfixed me there, and

compelled me again to waste my already wearied sympathies on affairs

which were none of mine, and persons who cared little for me. It

irritated my nerves; it affected me with a kind of heart-sickness.

After the effort which it cost me to fling them off,--after

consummating my escape, as I thought, from these goblins of flesh and

blood, and pausing to revive myself with a breath or two of an

atmosphere in which they should have no share,--it was a positive

despair to find the same figures arraying themselves before me, and

presenting their old problem in a shape that made it more insoluble

than ever.

I began to long for a catastrophe. If the noble temper of

Hollingsworth's soul were doomed to be utterly corrupted by the too

powerful purpose which had grown out of what was noblest in him; if the

rich and generous qualities of Zenobia's womanhood might not save her;

if Priscilla must perish by her tenderness and faith, so simple and so

devout, then be it so! Let it all come! As for me, I would look on,

as it seemed my part to do, understandingly, if my intellect could

fathom the meaning and the moral, and, at all events, reverently and

sadly. The curtain fallen, I would pass onward with my poor individual

life, which was now attenuated of much of its proper substance, and

diffused among many alien interests.

Meanwhile, Zenobia and her companion had retreated from the window.

Then followed an interval, during which I directed my eves towards the

figure in the boudoir. Most certainly it was Priscilla, although

dressed with a novel and fanciful elegance. The vague perception of

it, as viewed so far off, impressed me as if she had suddenly passed

out of a chrysalis state and put forth wings. Her hands were not now

in motion. She had dropt her work, and sat with her head thrown back,

in the same attitude that I had seen several times before, when she

seemed to be listening to an imperfectly distinguished sound.

Again the two figures in the drawing-room became visible. They were

now a little withdrawn from the window, face to face, and, as I could

see by Zenobia's emphatic gestures, were discussing some subject in

which she, at least, felt a passionate concern. By and by she broke

away, and vanished beyond my ken. Westervelt approached the window,

and leaned his forehead against a pane of glass, displaying the sort of

smile on his handsome features which, when I before met him, had let me

into the secret of his gold-bordered teeth. Every human being, when

given over to the Devil, is sure to have the wizard mark upon him, in

one form or another. I fancied that this smile, with its peculiar

revelation, was the Devil's signet on the Professor.

This man, as I had soon reason to know, was endowed with a cat-like

circumspection; and though precisely the most unspiritual quality in

the world, it was almost as effective as spiritual insight in making

him acquainted with whatever it suited him to discover. He now proved

it, considerably to my discomfiture, by detecting and recognizing me,

at my post of observation. Perhaps I ought to have blushed at being

caught in such an evident scrutiny of Professor Westervelt and his

affairs. Perhaps I did blush. Be that as it might, I retained

presence of mind enough not to make my position yet more irksome by the

poltroonery of drawing back.

Westervelt looked into the depths of the drawing-room, and beckoned.

Immediately afterwards Zenobia appeared at the window, with color much

heightened, and eyes which, as my conscience whispered me, were

shooting bright arrows, barbed with scorn, across the intervening

space, directed full at my sensibilities as a gentleman. If the truth

must be told, far as her flight-shot was, those arrows hit the mark.

She signified her recognition of me by a gesture with her head and

hand, comprising at once a salutation and dismissal. The next moment

she administered one of those pitiless rebukes which a woman always has

at hand, ready for any offence (and which she so seldom spares on due

occasion), by letting down a white linen curtain between the festoons

of the damask ones. It fell like the drop-curtain of a theatre, in the

interval between the acts.

Priscilla had disappeared from the boudoir. But the dove still kept

her desolate perch on the peak of the attic window.

XIX. ZENOBIA'S DRAWING-ROOM

The remainder of the day, so far as I was concerned, was spent in

meditating on these recent incidents. I contrived, and alternately

rejected, innumerable methods of accounting for the presence of Zenobia

and Priscilla, and the connection of Westervelt with both. It must be

owned, too, that I had a keen, revengeful sense of the insult inflicted

by Zenobia's scornful recognition, and more particularly by her letting

down the curtain; as if such were the proper barrier to be interposed

between a character like hers and a perceptive faculty like mine. For,

was mine a mere vulgar curiosity? Zenobia should have known me better

than to suppose it. She should have been able to appreciate that

quality of the intellect and the heart which impelled me (often against

my own will, and to the detriment of my own comfort) to live in other

lives, and to endeavor--by generous sympathies, by delicate intuitions,

by taking note of things too slight for record, and by bringing my

human spirit into manifold accordance with the companions whom God

assigned me--to learn the secret which was hidden even from themselves.

Of all possible observers, methought a woman like Zenobia and a man

like Hollingsworth should have selected me. And now when the event has

long been past, I retain the same opinion of my fitness for the office.

True, I might have condemned them. Had I been judge as well as

witness, my sentence might have been stern as that of destiny itself.

But, still, no trait of original nobility of character, no struggle

against temptation,--no iron necessity of will, on the one hand, nor

extenuating circumstance to be derived from passion and despair, on the

other,--no remorse that might coexist with error, even if powerless to

prevent it,--no proud repentance that should claim retribution as a

meed,--would go unappreciated. True, again, I might give my full

assent to the punishment which was sure to follow. But it would be

given mournfully, and with undiminished love. And, after all was

finished, I would come as if to gather up the white ashes of those who

had perished at the stake, and to tell the world--the wrong being now

atoned for--how much had perished there which it had never yet known

how to praise.

I sat in my rocking-chair, too far withdrawn from the window to expose

myself to another rebuke like that already inflicted. My eyes still

wandered towards the opposite house, but without effecting any new

discoveries. Late in the afternoon, the weathercock on the church

spire indicated a change of wind; the sun shone dimly out, as if the

golden wine of its beams were mingled half-and-half with water.

Nevertheless, they kindled up the whole range of edifices, threw a glow

over the windows, glistened on the wet roofs, and, slowly withdrawing

upward, perched upon the chimney-tops; thence they took a higher

flight, and lingered an instant on the tip of the spire, making it the

final point of more cheerful light in the whole sombre scene. The next

moment, it was all gone. The twilight fell into the area like a shower

of dusky snow, and before it was quite dark, the gong of the hotel

summoned me to tea.

When I returned to my chamber, the glow of an astral lamp was

penetrating mistily through the white curtain of Zenobia's

drawing-room. The shadow of a passing figure was now and then cast

upon this medium, but with too vague an outline for even my adventurous

conjectures to read the hieroglyphic that it presented.

All at once, it occurred to me how very absurd was my behavior in thus

tormenting myself with crazy hypotheses as to what was going on within

that drawing-room, when it was at my option to be personally present

there, My relations with Zenobia, as yet unchanged,--as a familiar

friend, and associated in the same life-long enterprise,--gave me the

right, and made it no more than kindly courtesy demanded, to call on

her. Nothing, except our habitual independence of conventional rules

at Blithedale, could have kept me from sooner recognizing this duty.

At all events, it should now be performed.

In compliance with this sudden impulse, I soon found myself actually

within the house, the rear of which, for two days past, I had been so

sedulously watching. A servant took my card, and, immediately

returning, ushered me upstairs. On the way, I heard a rich, and, as it

were, triumphant burst of music from a piano, in which I felt Zenobia's

character, although heretofore I had known nothing of her skill upon

the instrument. Two or three canary-birds, excited by this gush of

sound, sang piercingly, and did their utmost to produce a kindred

melody. A bright illumination streamed through, the door of the front

drawing-room; and I had barely stept across the threshold before

Zenobia came forward to meet me, laughing, and with an extended hand.

"Ah, Mr. Coverdale," said she, still smiling, but, as I thought, with a

good deal of scornful anger underneath, "it has gratified me to see the

interest which you continue to take in my affairs! I have long

recognized you as a sort of transcendental Yankee, with all the native

propensity of your countrymen to investigate matters that come within

their range, but rendered almost poetical, in your case, by the refined

methods which you adopt for its gratification. After all, it was an

unjustifiable stroke, on my part,--was it not?--to let down the window

curtain!"

"I cannot call it a very wise one," returned I, with a secret

bitterness, which, no doubt, Zenobia appreciated. "It is really

impossible to hide anything in this world, to say nothing of the next.

All that we ought to ask, therefore, is, that the witnesses of our

conduct, and the speculators on our motives, should be capable of

taking the highest view which the circumstances of the case may admit.

So much being secured, I, for one, would be most happy in feeling

myself followed everywhere by an indefatigable human sympathy."

"We must trust for intelligent sympathy to our guardian angels, if any

there be," said Zenobia. "As long as the only spectator of my poor

tragedy is a young man at the window of his hotel, I must still claim

the liberty to drop the curtain."

While this passed, as Zenobia's hand was extended, I had applied the

very slightest touch of my fingers to her own. In spite of an external

freedom, her manner made me sensible that we stood upon no real terms

of confidence. The thought came sadly across me, how great was the

contrast betwixt this interview and our first meeting. Then, in the

warm light of the country fireside, Zenobia had greeted me cheerily and

hopefully, with a full sisterly grasp of the hand, conveying as much

kindness in it as other women could have evinced by the pressure of

both arms around my neck, or by yielding a cheek to the brotherly

salute. The difference was as complete as between her appearance at

that time--so simply attired, and with only the one superb flower in

her hair--and now, when her beauty was set off by all that dress and

ornament could do for it. And they did much. Not, indeed, that they

created or added anything to what Nature had lavishly done for Zenobia.

But, those costly robes which she had on, those flaming jewels on her

neck, served as lamps to display the personal advantages which required

nothing less than such an illumination to be fully seen. Even her

characteristic flower, though it seemed to be still there, had

undergone a cold and bright transfiguration; it was a flower

exquisitely imitated in jeweller's work, and imparting the last touch

that transformed Zenobia into a work of art.

"I scarcely feel," I could not forbear saying, "as if we had ever met

before. How many years ago it seems since we last sat beneath Eliot's

pulpit, with Hollingsworth extended on the fallen leaves, and Priscilla

at his feet! Can it be, Zenobia, that you ever really numbered

yourself with our little band of earnest, thoughtful, philanthropic

laborers?"

"Those ideas have their time and place," she answered coldly. "But I

fancy it must be a very circumscribed mind that can find room for no

other."

Her manner bewildered me. Literally, moreover, I was dazzled by the

brilliancy of the room. A chandelier hung down in the centre, glowing

with I know not how many lights; there were separate lamps, also, on

two or three tables, and on marble brackets, adding their white

radiance to that of the chandelier. The furniture was exceedingly

rich. Fresh from our old farmhouse, with its homely board and benches

in the dining-room, and a few wicker chairs in the best parlor, it

struck me that here was the fulfilment of every fantasy of an

imagination revelling in various methods of costly self-indulgence and

splendid ease. Pictures, marbles, vases,--in brief, more shapes of

luxury than there could be any object in enumerating, except for an

auctioneer's advertisement,--and the whole repeated and doubled by the

reflection of a great mirror, which showed me Zenobia's proud figure,

likewise, and my own. It cost me, I acknowledge, a bitter sense of

shame, to perceive in myself a positive effort to bear up against the

effect which Zenobia sought to impose on me. I reasoned against her,

in my secret mind, and strove so to keep my footing. In the

gorgeousness with which she had surrounded herself,--in the redundance

of personal ornament, which the largeness of her physical nature and

the rich type of her beauty caused to seem so suitable,--I malevolently

beheld the true character of the woman, passionate, luxurious, lacking

simplicity, not deeply refined, incapable of pure and perfect taste.

But, the next instant, she was too powerful for all my opposing

struggles. I saw how fit it was that she should make herself as

gorgeous as she pleased, and should do a thousand things that would

have been ridiculous in the poor, thin, weakly characters of other

women. To this day, however, I hardly know whether I then beheld

Zenobia in her truest attitude, or whether that were the truer one in

which she had presented herself at Blithedale. In both, there was

something like the illusion which a great actress flings around her.

"Have you given up Blithedale forever?" I inquired.

"Why should you think so?" asked she.

"I cannot tell," answered I; "except that it appears all like a dream

that we were ever there together."

"It is not so to me," said Zenobia. "I should think it a poor and

meagre nature that is capable of but one set of forms, and must convert

all the past into a dream merely because the present happens to be

unlike it. Why should we be content with our homely life of a few

months past, to the exclusion of all other modes? It was good; but

there are other lives as good, or better. Not, you will understand,

that I condemn those who give themselves up to it more entirely than I,

for myself, should deem it wise to do."

It irritated me, this self-complacent, condescending, qualified

approval and criticism of a system to which many individuals--perhaps

as highly endowed as our gorgeous Zenobia--had contributed their all of

earthly endeavor, and their loftiest aspirations. I determined to make

proof if there were any spell that would exorcise her out of the part

which she seemed to be acting. She should be compelled to give me a

glimpse of something true; some nature, some passion, no matter whether

right or wrong, provided it were real.

"Your allusion to that class of circumscribed characters who can live

only in one mode of life," remarked I coolly, "reminds me of our poor

friend Hollingsworth. Possibly he was in your thoughts when you spoke

thus. Poor fellow! It is a pity that, by the fault of a narrow

education, he should have so completely immolated himself to that one

idea of his, especially as the slightest modicum of common-sense would

teach him its utter impracticability. Now that I have returned into

the world, and can look at his project from a distance, it requires

quite all my real regard for this respectable and well-intentioned man

to prevent me laughing at him,--as I find society at large does."

Zenobia's eyes darted lightning, her cheeks flushed, the vividness of

her expression was like the effect of a powerful light flaming up

suddenly within her. My experiment had fully succeeded. She had shown

me the true flesh and blood of her heart, by thus involuntarily

resenting my slight, pitying, half-kind, half-scornful mention of the

man who was all in all with her. She herself probably felt this; for

it was hardly a moment before she tranquillized her uneven breath, and

seemed as proud and self-possessed as ever.

"I rather imagine," said she quietly, "that your appreciation falls

short of Mr. Hollingsworth's just claims. Blind enthusiasm, absorption

in one idea, I grant, is generally ridiculous, and must be fatal to the

respectability of an ordinary man; it requires a very high and powerful

character to make it otherwise. But a great man--as, perhaps, you do

not know--attains his normal condition only through the inspiration of

one great idea. As a friend of Mr. Hollingsworth, and, at the same

time, a calm observer, I must tell you that he seems to me such a man.

But you are very pardonable for fancying him ridiculous. Doubtless, he

is so--to you! There can be no truer test of the noble and heroic, in

any individual, than the degree in which he possesses the faculty of

distinguishing heroism from absurdity."

I dared make no retort to Zenobia's concluding apothegm. In truth, I

admired her fidelity. It gave me a new sense of Hollingsworth's native

power, to discover that his influence was no less potent with this

beautiful woman here, in the midst of artificial life, than it had been

at the foot of the gray rock, and among the wild birch-trees of the

wood-path, when she so passionately pressed his hand against her heart.

The great, rude, shaggy, swarthy man! And Zenobia loved him!

"Did you bring Priscilla with you?" I resumed. "Do you know I have

sometimes fancied it not quite safe, considering the susceptibility of

her temperament, that she should be so constantly within the sphere of

a man like Hollingsworth. Such tender and delicate natures, among your

sex, have often, I believe, a very adequate appreciation of the heroic

element in men. But then, again, I should suppose them as likely as

any other women to make a reciprocal impression. Hollingsworth could

hardly give his affections to a person capable of taking an independent

stand, but only to one whom he might absorb into himself. He has

certainly shown great tenderness for Priscilla."

Zenobia had turned aside. But I caught the reflection of her face in

the mirror, and saw that it was very pale,--as pale, in her rich

attire, as if a shroud were round her.

"Priscilla is here," said she, her voice a little lower than usual.

"Have not you learnt as much from your chamber window? Would you like

to see her?"

She made a step or two into the back drawing-room, and

called,--"Priscilla! Dear Priscilla!"

XX. THEY VANISH

Priscilla immediately answered the summons, and made her appearance

through the door of the boudoir. I had conceived the idea, which I now

recognized as a very foolish one, that Zenobia would have taken

measures to debar me from an interview with this girl, between whom and

herself there was so utter an opposition of their dearest interests,

that, on one part or the other, a great grief, if not likewise a great

wrong, seemed a matter of necessity. But, as Priscilla was only a leaf

floating on the dark current of events, without influencing them by her

own choice or plan, as she probably guessed not whither the stream was

bearing her, nor perhaps even felt its inevitable movement,--there

could be no peril of her communicating to me any intelligence with

regard to Zenobia's purposes.

On perceiving me, she came forward with great quietude of manner; and

when I held out my hand, her own moved slightly towards it, as if

attracted by a feeble degree of magnetism.

"I am glad to see you, my dear Priscilla," said I, still holding her

hand; "but everything that I meet with nowadays makes me wonder whether

I am awake. You, especially, have always seemed like a figure in a

dream, and now more than ever."

"Oh, there is substance in these fingers of mine," she answered, giving

my hand the faintest possible pressure, and then taking away her own.

"Why do you call me a dream? Zenobia is much more like one than I; she

is so very, very beautiful! And, I suppose," added Priscilla, as if

thinking aloud, "everybody sees it, as I do."

But, for my part, it was Priscilla's beauty, not Zenobia's, of which I

was thinking at that moment. She was a person who could be quite

obliterated, so far as beauty went, by anything unsuitable in her

attire; her charm was not positive and material enough to bear up

against a mistaken choice of color, for instance, or fashion. It was

safest, in her case, to attempt no art of dress; for it demanded the

most perfect taste, or else the happiest accident in the world, to give

her precisely the adornment which she needed. She was now dressed in

pure white, set off with some kind of a gauzy fabric, which--as I bring

up her figure in my memory, with a faint gleam on her shadowy hair, and

her dark eyes bent shyly on mine, through all the vanished years--seems

to be floating about her like a mist. I wondered what Zenobia meant by

evolving so much loveliness out of this poor girl. It was what few

women could afford to do; for, as I looked from one to the other, the

sheen and splendor of Zenobia's presence took nothing from Priscilla's

softer spell, if it might not rather be thought to add to it.

"What do you think of her?" asked Zenobia.

I could not understand the look of melancholy kindness with which

Zenobia regarded her. She advanced a step, and beckoning Priscilla

near her, kissed her cheek; then, with a slight gesture of repulse, she

moved to the other side of the room. I followed.

"She is a wonderful creature," I said. "Ever since she came among us,

I have been dimly sensible of just this charm which you have brought

out. But it was never absolutely visible till now. She is as lovely

as a flower!"

"Well, say so if you like," answered Zenobia. "You are a poet,--at

least, as poets go nowadays,--and must be allowed to make an

opera-glass of your imagination, when you look at women. I wonder, in

such Arcadian freedom of falling in love as we have lately enjoyed, it

never occurred to you to fall in love with Priscilla. In society,

indeed, a genuine American never dreams of stepping across the

inappreciable air-line which separates one class from another. But

what was rank to the colonists of Blithedale?"

"There were other reasons," I replied, "why I should have demonstrated

myself an ass, had I fallen in love with Priscilla. By the bye, has

Hollingsworth ever seen her in this dress?"

"Why do you bring up his name at every turn?" asked Zenobia in an

undertone, and with a malign look which wandered from my face to

Priscilla's. "You know not what you do! It is dangerous, sir, believe

me, to tamper thus with earnest human passions, out of your own mere

idleness, and for your sport. I will endure it no longer! Take care

that it does not happen again! I warn you!"

"You partly wrong me, if not wholly," I responded. "It is an uncertain

sense of some duty to perform, that brings my thoughts, and therefore

my words, continually to that one point."

"Oh, this stale excuse of duty!" said Zenobia, in a whisper so full of

scorn that it penetrated me like the hiss of a serpent. "I have often

heard it before, from those who sought to interfere with me, and I know

precisely what it signifies. Bigotry; self-conceit; an insolent

curiosity; a meddlesome temper; a cold-blooded criticism, founded on a

shallow interpretation of half-perceptions; a monstrous scepticism in

regard to any conscience or any wisdom, except one's own; a most

irreverent propensity to thrust Providence aside, and substitute one's

self in its awful place,--out of these, and other motives as miserable

as these, comes your idea of duty! But, beware, sir! With all your

fancied acuteness, you step blindfold into these affairs. For any

mischief that may follow your interference, I hold you responsible!"

It was evident that, with but a little further provocation, the lioness

would turn to bay; if, indeed, such were not her attitude already. I

bowed, and not very well knowing what else to do, was about to

withdraw. But, glancing again towards Priscilla, who had retreated

into a corner, there fell upon my heart an intolerable burden of

despondency, the purport of which I could not tell, but only felt it to

bear reference to her. I approached and held out my hand; a gesture,

however, to which she made no response. It was always one of her

peculiarities that she seemed to shrink from even the most friendly

touch, unless it were Zenobia's or Hollingsworth's. Zenobia, all this

while, stood watching us, but with a careless expression, as if it

mattered very little what might pass.

"Priscilla," I inquired, lowering my voice, "when do you go back to

Blithedale?"

"Whenever they please to take me," said she.

"Did you come away of your own free will?" I asked.

"I am blown about like a leaf," she replied. "I never have any free

will."

"Does Hollingsworth know that you are here?" said I.

"He bade me come," answered Priscilla.

She looked at me, I thought, with an air of surprise, as if the idea

were incomprehensible that she should have taken this step without his

agency.

"What a gripe this man has laid upon her whole being!" muttered I

between my teeth.

"Well, as Zenobia so kindly intimates, I have no more business here. I

wash my hands of it all. On Hollingsworth's head be the consequences!

Priscilla," I added aloud, "I know not that ever we may meet again.

Farewell!"

As I spoke the word, a carriage had rumbled along the street, and stopt

before the house. The doorbell rang, and steps were immediately

afterwards heard on the staircase. Zenobia had thrown a shawl over her

dress.

"Mr. Coverdale," said she, with cool courtesy, "you will perhaps excuse

us. We have an engagement, and are going out."

"Whither?" I demanded.

"Is not that a little more than you are entitled to inquire?" said she,

with a smile. "At all events, it does not suit me to tell you."

The door of the drawing-room opened, and Westervelt appeared. I

observed that he was elaborately dressed, as if for some grand

entertainment. My dislike for this man was infinite. At that moment

it amounted to nothing less than a creeping of the flesh, as when,

feeling about in a dark place, one touches something cold and slimy,

and questions what the secret hatefulness may be. And still I could

not but acknowledge that, for personal beauty, for polish of manner,

for all that externally befits a gentleman, there was hardly another

like him. After bowing to Zenobia, and graciously saluting Priscilla

in her corner, he recognized me by a slight but courteous inclination.

"Come, Priscilla," said Zenobia; "it is time. Mr. Coverdale,

good-evening."

As Priscilla moved slowly forward, I met her in the middle of the

drawing-room.

"Priscilla," said I, in the hearing of them all, "do you know whither

you are going?"

"I do not know," she answered.

"Is it wise to go, and is it your choice to go?" I asked. "If not, I

am your friend, and Hollingsworth's friend. Tell me so, at once."

"Possibly," observed Westervelt, smiling, "Priscilla sees in me an

older friend than either Mr. Coverdale or Mr. Hollingsworth. I shall

willingly leave the matter at her option."

While thus speaking, he made a gesture of kindly invitation, and

Priscilla passed me, with the gliding movement of a sprite, and took

his offered arm. He offered the other to Zenobia; but she turned her

proud and beautiful face upon him with a look which--judging from what

I caught of it in profile--would undoubtedly have smitten the man dead,

had he possessed any heart, or had this glance attained to it. It

seemed to rebound, however, from his courteous visage, like an arrow

from polished steel. They all three descended the stairs; and when I

likewise reached the street door, the carriage was already rolling away.

XXI. AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

Thus excluded from everybody's confidence, and attaining no further, by

my most earnest study, than to an uncertain sense of something hidden

from me, it would appear reasonable that I should have flung off all

these alien perplexities. Obviously, my best course was to betake

myself to new scenes. Here I was only an intruder. Elsewhere there

might be circumstances in which I could establish a personal interest,

and people who would respond, with a portion of their sympathies, for

so much as I should bestow of mine.

Nevertheless, there occurred to me one other thing to be done.

Remembering old Moodie, and his relationship with Priscilla, I

determined to seek an interview, for the purpose of ascertaining

whether the knot of affairs was as inextricable on that side as I found

it on all others. Being tolerably well acquainted with the old man's

haunts, I went, the next day, to the saloon of a certain establishment

about which he often lurked. It was a reputable place enough,

affording good entertainment in the way of meat, drink, and fumigation;

and there, in my young and idle days and nights, when I was neither

nice nor wise, I had often amused myself with watching the staid humors

and sober jollities of the thirsty souls around me.

At my first entrance, old Moodie was not there. The more patiently to

await him, I lighted a cigar, and establishing myself in a corner, took

a quiet, and, by sympathy, a boozy kind of pleasure in the customary

life that was going forward. The saloon was fitted up with a good deal

of taste. There were pictures on the walls, and among them an

oil-painting of a beefsteak, with such an admirable show of juicy

tenderness, that the beholder sighed to think it merely visionary, and

incapable of ever being put upon a gridiron. Another work of high art

was the lifelike representation of a noble sirloin; another, the

hindquarters of a deer, retaining the hoofs and tawny fur; another, the

head and shoulders of a salmon; and, still more exquisitely finished, a

brace of canvasback ducks, in which the mottled feathers were depicted

with the accuracy of a daguerreotype. Some very hungry painter, I

suppose, had wrought these subjects of still-life, heightening his

imagination with his appetite, and earning, it is to be hoped, the

privilege of a daily dinner off whichever of his pictorial viands he

liked best.

Then there was a fine old cheese, in which you could almost discern the

mites; and some sardines, on a small plate, very richly done, and

looking as if oozy with the oil in which they had been smothered. All

these things were so perfectly imitated, that you seemed to have the

genuine article before you, and yet with an indescribable, ideal charm;

it took away the grossness from what was fleshiest and fattest, and

thus helped the life of man, even in its earthliest relations, to

appear rich and noble, as well as warm, cheerful, and substantial.

There were pictures, too, of gallant revellers, those of the old time,

Flemish, apparently, with doublets and slashed sleeves, drinking their

wine out of fantastic, long-stemmed glasses; quaffing joyously,

quaffing forever, with inaudible laughter and song; while the champagne

bubbled immortally against their moustaches, or the purple tide of

Burgundy ran inexhaustibly down their throats.

But, in an obscure corner of the saloon, there was a little Picture

excellently done, moreover of a ragged, bloated, New England toper,

stretched out on a bench, in the heavy, apoplectic sleep of

drunkenness. The death-in-life was too well portrayed. You smelt the

fumy liquor that had brought on this syncope. Your only comfort lay in

the forced reflection, that, real as he looked, the poor caitiff was

but imaginary, a bit of painted canvass, whom no delirium tremens, nor

so much as a retributive headache, awaited, on the morrow.

By this time, it being past eleven o'clock, the two bar-keepers of the

saloon were in pretty constant activity. One of these young men had a

rare faculty in the concoction of gin-cocktails. It was a spectacle to

behold, how, with a tumbler in each hand, he tossed the contents from

one to the other. Never conveying it awry, nor spilling the least

drop, he compelled the frothy liquor, as it seemed to me, to spout

forth from one glass and descend into the other, in a great parabolic

curve, as well-defined and calculable as a planet's orbit. He had a

good forehead, with a particularly large development just above the

eyebrows; fine intellectual gifts, no doubt, which he had educated to

this profitable end; being famous for nothing but gin-cocktails, and

commanding a fair salary by his one accomplishment. These cocktails,

and other artificial combinations of liquor, (of which there were at

least a score, though mostly, I suspect, fantastic in their

differences,) were much in favor with the younger class of customers,

who, at farthest, had only reached the second stage of potatory life.

The staunch, old soakers, on the other hand men who, if put on tap,

would have yielded a red alcoholic liquor, by way of blood usually

confined themselves to plain brandy-and-water, gin, or West India rum;

and, oftentimes, they prefaced their dram with some medicinal remark as

to the wholesomeness and stomachic qualities of that particular drink.

Two or three appeared to have bottles of their own behind the counter;

and, winking one red eye to the bar-keeper, he forthwith produced these

choicest and peculiar cordials, which it was a matter of great interest

and favor, among their acquaintances, to obtain a sip of.

Agreeably to the Yankee habit, under whatever circumstances, the

deportment of all these good fellows, old or young, was decorous and

thoroughly correct. They grew only the more sober in their cups; there

was no confused babble nor boisterous laughter. They sucked in the

joyous fire of the decanters and kept it smouldering in their inmost

recesses, with a bliss known only to the heart which it warmed and

comforted. Their eyes twinkled a little, to be sure; they hemmed

vigorously after each glass, and laid a hand upon the pit of the

stomach, as if the pleasant titillation there was what constituted the

tangible part of their enjoyment. In that spot, unquestionably, and

not in the brain, was the acme of the whole affair. But the true

purpose of their drinking--and one that will induce men to drink, or do

something equivalent, as long as this weary world shall endure--was the

renewed youth and vigor, the brisk, cheerful sense of things present

and to come, with which, for about a quarter of an hour, the dram

permeated their systems. And when such quarters of an hour can be

obtained in some mode less baneful to the great sum of a man's

life,--but, nevertheless, with a little spice of impropriety, to give

it a wild flavor,--we temperance people may ring out our bells for

victory!

The prettiest object in the saloon was a tiny fountain, which threw up

its feathery jet through the counter, and sparkled down again into an

oval basin, or lakelet, containing several goldfishes. There was a bed

of bright sand at the bottom, strewn with coral and rock-work; and the

fishes went gleaming about, now turning up the sheen of a golden side,

and now vanishing into the shadows of the water, like the fanciful

thoughts that coquet with a poet in his dream. Never before, I

imagine, did a company of water-drinkers remain so entirely

uncontaminated by the bad example around them; nor could I help

wondering that it had not occurred to any freakish inebriate to empty a

glass of liquor into their lakelet. What a delightful idea! Who would

not be a fish, if he could inhale jollity with the essential element of

his existence!

I had begun to despair of meeting old Moodie, when, all at once, I

recognized his hand and arm protruding from behind a screen that was

set up for the accommodation of bashful topers. As a matter of course,

he had one of Priscilla's little purses, and was quietly insinuating it

under the notice of a person who stood near. This was always old

Moodie's way. You hardly ever saw him advancing towards you, but

became aware of his proximity without being able to guess how he had

come thither. He glided about like a spirit, assuming visibility close

to your elbow, offering his petty trifles of merchandise, remaining

long enough for you to purchase, if so disposed, and then taking

himself off, between two breaths, while you happened to be thinking of

something else.

By a sort of sympathetic impulse that often controlled me in those more

impressible days of my life, I was induced to approach this old man in

a mode as undemonstrative as his own. Thus, when, according to his

custom, he was probably just about to vanish, he found me at his elbow.

"Ah!" said he, with more emphasis than was usual with him. "It is Mr.

Coverdale!"

"Yes, Mr. Moodie, your old acquaintance," answered I. "It is some time

now since we ate luncheon together at Blithedale, and a good deal

longer since our little talk together at the street corner."

"That was a good while ago," said the old man.

And he seemed inclined to say not a word more. His existence looked so

colorless and torpid,--so very faintly shadowed on the canvas of

reality,--that I was half afraid lest he should altogether disappear,

even while my eyes were fixed full upon his figure. He was certainly

the wretchedest old ghost in the world, with his crazy hat, the dingy

handkerchief about his throat, his suit of threadbare gray, and

especially that patch over his right eye, behind which he always seemed

to be hiding himself. There was one method, however, of bringing him

out into somewhat stronger relief. A glass of brandy would effect it.

Perhaps the gentler influence of a bottle of claret might do the same.

Nor could I think it a matter for the recording angel to write down

against me, if--with my painful consciousness of the frost in this old

man's blood, and the positive ice that had congealed about his heart--I

should thaw him out, were it only for an hour, with the summer warmth

of a little wine. What else could possibly be done for him? How else

could he be imbued with energy enough to hope for a happier state

hereafter? How else be inspired to say his prayers? For there are

states of our spiritual system when the throb of the soul's life is too

faint and weak to render us capable of religious aspiration.

"Mr. Moodie," said I, "shall we lunch together? And would you like to

drink a glass of wine?"

His one eye gleamed. He bowed; and it impressed me that he grew to be

more of a man at once, either in anticipation of the wine, or as a

grateful response to my good fellowship in offering it.

"With pleasure," he replied.

The bar-keeper, at my request, showed us into a private room, and soon

afterwards set some fried oysters and a bottle of claret on the table;

and I saw the old man glance curiously at the label of the bottle, as

if to learn the brand.

"It should be good wine," I remarked, "if it have any right to its

label."

"You cannot suppose, sir," said Moodie, with a sigh, "that a poor old

fellow like me knows any difference in wines."

And yet, in his way of handling the glass, in his preliminary snuff at

the aroma, in his first cautious sip of the wine, and the gustatory

skill with which he gave his palate the full advantage of it, it was

impossible not to recognize the connoisseur.

"I fancy, Mr. Moodie," said I, "you are a much better judge of wines

than I have yet learned to be. Tell me fairly,--did you never drink it

where the grape grows?"

"How should that have been, Mr. Coverdale?" answered old Moodie shyly;

but then he took courage, as it were, and uttered a feeble little

laugh. "The flavor of this wine," added he, "and its perfume still

more than its taste, makes me remember that I was once a young man."

"I wish, Mr. Moodie," suggested I,--not that I greatly cared about it,

however, but was only anxious to draw him into some talk about

Priscilla and Zenobia,--"I wish, while we sit over our wine, you would

favor me with a few of those youthful reminiscences."

"Ah," said he, shaking his head, "they might interest you more than you

suppose. But I had better be silent, Mr. Coverdale. If this good

wine,--though claret, I suppose, is not apt to play such a trick,--but

if it should make my tongue run too freely, I could never look you in

the face again."

"You never did look me in the face, Mr. Moodie," I replied, "until this

very moment."

"Ah!" sighed old Moodie.

It was wonderful, however, what an effect the mild grape-juice wrought

upon him. It was not in the wine, but in the associations which it

seemed to bring up. Instead of the mean, slouching, furtive, painfully

depressed air of an old city vagabond, more like a gray kennel-rat than

any other living thing, he began to take the aspect of a decayed

gentleman. Even his garments--especially after I had myself quaffed a

glass or two--looked less shabby than when we first sat down. There

was, by and by, a certain exuberance and elaborateness of gesture and

manner, oddly in contrast with all that I had hitherto seen of him.

Anon, with hardly any impulse from me, old Moodie began to talk. His

communications referred exclusively to a long-past and more fortunate

period of his life, with only a few unavoidable allusions to the

circumstances that had reduced him to his present state. But, having

once got the clew, my subsequent researches acquainted me with the main

facts of the following narrative; although, in writing it out, my pen

has perhaps allowed itself a trifle of romantic and legendary license,

worthier of a small poet than of a grave biographer.

XXII. FAUNTLEROY

Five-and-twenty years ago, at the epoch of this story, there dwelt in

one of the Middle States a man whom we shall call Fauntleroy; a man of

wealth, and magnificent tastes, and prodigal expenditure. His home

might almost be styled a palace; his habits, in the ordinary sense,

princely. His whole being seemed to have crystallized itself into an

external splendor, wherewith he glittered in the eyes of the world, and

had no other life than upon this gaudy surface. He had married a

lovely woman, whose nature was deeper than his own. But his affection

for her, though it showed largely, was superficial, like all his other

manifestations and developments; he did not so truly keep this noble

creature in his heart, as wear her beauty for the most brilliant

ornament of his outward state. And there was born to him a child, a

beautiful daughter, whom he took from the beneficent hand of God with

no just sense of her immortal value, but as a man already rich in gems

would receive another jewel. If he loved her, it was because she shone.

After Fauntleroy had thus spent a few empty years, coruscating

continually an unnatural light, the source of it--which was merely his

gold--began to grow more shallow, and finally became exhausted. He saw

himself in imminent peril of losing all that had heretofore

distinguished him; and, conscious of no innate worth to fall back upon,

he recoiled from this calamity with the instinct of a soul shrinking

from annihilation. To avoid it,--wretched man!--or rather to defer it,

if but for a month, a day, or only to procure himself the life of a few

breaths more amid the false glitter which was now less his own than

ever,--he made himself guilty of a crime. It was just the sort of

crime, growing out of its artificial state, which society (unless it

should change its entire constitution for this man's unworthy sake)

neither could nor ought to pardon. More safely might it pardon murder.

Fauntleroy's guilt was discovered. He fled; his wife perished, by the

necessity of her innate nobleness, in its alliance with a being so

ignoble; and betwixt her mother's death and her father's ignominy, his

daughter was left worse than orphaned.

There was no pursuit after Fauntleroy. His family connections, who had

great wealth, made such arrangements with those whom he had attempted

to wrong as secured him from the retribution that would have overtaken

an unfriended criminal. The wreck of his estate was divided among his

creditors: His name, in a very brief space, was forgotten by the

multitude who had passed it so diligently from mouth to mouth. Seldom,

indeed, was it recalled, even by his closest former intimates. Nor

could it have been otherwise. The man had laid no real touch on any

mortal's heart. Being a mere image, an optical delusion, created by

the sunshine of prosperity, it was his law to vanish into the shadow of

the first intervening cloud. He seemed to leave no vacancy; a

phenomenon which, like many others that attended his brief career, went

far to prove the illusiveness of his existence.

Not, however, that the physical substance of Fauntleroy had literally

melted into vapor. He had fled northward to the New England

metropolis, and had taken up his abode, under another name, in a

squalid street or court of the older portion of the city. There he

dwelt among poverty-stricken wretches, sinners, and forlorn good

people, Irish, and whomsoever else were neediest. Many families were

clustered in each house together, above stairs and below, in the little

peaked garrets, and even in the dusky cellars. The house where

Fauntleroy paid weekly rent for a chamber and a closet had been a

stately habitation in its day. An old colonial governor had built it,

and lived there, long ago, and held his levees in a great room where

now slept twenty Irish bedfellows; and died in Fauntleroy's chamber,

which his embroidered and white-wigged ghost still haunted. Tattered

hangings, a marble hearth, traversed with many cracks and fissures, a

richly carved oaken mantelpiece, partly hacked away for kindling-stuff,

a stuccoed ceiling, defaced with great, unsightly patches of the naked

laths,--such was the chamber's aspect, as if, with its splinters and

rags of dirty splendor, it were a kind of practical gibe at this poor,

ruined man of show.

At first, and at irregular intervals, his relatives allowed Fauntleroy

a little pittance to sustain life; not from any love, perhaps, but lest

poverty should compel him, by new offences, to add more shame to that

with which he had already stained them. But he showed no tendency to

further guilt. His character appeared to have been radically changed

(as, indeed, from its shallowness, it well might) by his miserable

fate; or, it may be, the traits now seen in him were portions of the

same character, presenting itself in another phase. Instead of any

longer seeking to live in the sight of the world, his impulse was to

shrink into the nearest obscurity, and to be unseen of men, were it

possible, even while standing before their eyes. He had no pride; it

was all trodden in the dust. No ostentation; for how could it survive,

when there was nothing left of Fauntleroy, save penury and shame! His

very gait demonstrated that he would gladly have faded out of view, and

have crept about invisibly, for the sake of sheltering himself from the

irksomeness of a human glance. Hardly, it was averred, within the

memory of those who knew him now, had he the hardihood to show his full

front to the world. He skulked in corners, and crept about in a sort

of noonday twilight, making himself gray and misty, at all hours, with

his morbid intolerance of sunshine.

In his torpid despair, however, he had done an act which that condition

of the spirit seems to prompt almost as often as prosperity and hope.

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. Except that Priscilla, in those days, had no beauty, and, in

the languor of her existence, had not yet blossomed into womanhood,

there would have been rich food for scandal in these visits; for the

girl was unquestionably their sole object, although her father was

supposed always to be present. But, it must likewise be added, there

was something about Priscilla that calumny could not meddle with; and

thus far was she privileged, either by the preponderance of what was

spiritual, or the thin and watery blood that left her cheek so pallid.

Yet, if the busy tongues of the neighborhood spared Priscilla in one

way, they made themselves amends by renewed and wilder babble on

another score. They averred that the strange gentleman was a wizard,

and that he had taken advantage of Priscilla's lack of earthly

substance to subject her to himself, as his familiar spirit, through

whose medium he gained cognizance of whatever happened, in regions near

or remote. The boundaries of his power were defined by the verge of

the pit of Tartarus on the one hand, and the third sphere of the

celestial world on the other. Again, they declared their suspicion

that the wizard, with all his show of manly beauty, was really an aged

and wizened figure, or else that his semblance of a human body was only

a necromantic, or perhaps a mechanical contrivance, in which a demon

walked about. In proof of it, however, they could merely instance a

gold band around his upper teeth, which had once been visible to

several old women, when he smiled at them from the top of the

governor's staircase. Of course this was all absurdity, or mostly so.

But, after every possible deduction, there remained certain very

mysterious points about the stranger's character, as well as the

connection that he established with Priscilla. Its nature at that

period was even less understood than now, when miracles of this kind

have grown so absolutely stale, that I would gladly, if the truth

allowed, dismiss the whole matter from my narrative.

We must now glance backward, in quest of the beautiful daughter of

Fauntleroy's prosperity. What had become of her? Fauntleroy's only

brother, a bachelor, and with no other relative so near, had adopted

the forsaken child. She grew up in affluence, with native graces

clustering luxuriantly about her. In her triumphant progress towards

womanhood, she was adorned with every variety of feminine

accomplishment. But she lacked a mother's care. With no adequate

control, on any hand (for a man, however stern, however wise, can never

sway and guide a female child), her character was left to shape itself.

There was good in it, and evil. Passionate, self-willed, and

imperious, she had a warm and generous nature; showing the richness of

the soil, however, chiefly by the weeds that flourished in it, and

choked up the herbs of grace. In her girlhood her uncle died. As

Fauntleroy was supposed to be likewise dead, and no other heir was

known to exist, his wealth devolved on her, although, dying suddenly,

the uncle left no will. After his death there were obscure passages in

Zenobia's history. There were whispers of an attachment, and even a

secret marriage, with a fascinating and accomplished but unprincipled

young man. The incidents and appearances, however, which led to this

surmise soon passed away, and were forgotten.

Nor was her reputation seriously affected by the report. In fact, so

great was her native power and influence, and such seemed the careless

purity of her nature, that whatever Zenobia did was generally

acknowledged as right for her to do. The world never criticised her so

harshly as it does most women who transcend its rules. It almost

yielded its assent, when it beheld her stepping out of the common path,

and asserting the more extensive privileges of her sex, both

theoretically and by her practice. The sphere of ordinary womanhood

was felt to be narrower than her development required.

A portion of Zenobia's more recent life is told in the foregoing pages.

Partly in earnest,--and, I imagine, as was her disposition, half in a

proud jest, or in a kind of recklessness that had grown upon her, out

of some hidden grief,--she had given her countenance, and promised

liberal pecuniary aid, to our experiment of a better social state. And

Priscilla followed her to Blithedale. The sole bliss of her life had

been a dream of this beautiful sister, who had never so much as known

of her existence. By this time, too, the poor girl was enthralled in

an intolerable bondage, from which she must either free herself or

perish. She deemed herself safest near Zenobia, into whose large heart

she hoped to nestle.

One evening, months after Priscilla's departure, when Moodie (or shall

we call him Fauntleroy?) was sitting alone in the state-chamber of the

old governor, there came footsteps up the staircase. There was a pause

on the landing-place. A lady's musical yet haughty accents were heard

making an inquiry from some denizen of the house, who had thrust a head

out of a contiguous chamber. There was then a knock at Moodie's door.

"Come in!" said he.

And Zenobia entered. The details of the interview that followed being

unknown to me,--while, notwithstanding, it would be a pity quite to

lose the picturesqueness of the situation,--I shall attempt to sketch

it, mainly from fancy, although with some general grounds of surmise in

regard to the old man's feelings.

She gazed wonderingly at the dismal chamber. Dismal to her, who beheld

it only for an instant; and how much more so to him, into whose brain

each bare spot on the ceiling, every tatter of the paper-hangings, and

all the splintered carvings of the mantelpiece, seen wearily through

long years, had worn their several prints! Inexpressibly miserable is

this familiarity with objects that have been from the first disgustful.

"I have received a strange message," said Zenobia, after a moment's

silence, "requesting, or rather enjoining it upon me, to come hither.

Rather from curiosity than any other motive,--and because, though a

woman, I have not all the timidity of one,--I have complied. Can it be

you, sir, who thus summoned me?"

"It was," answered Moodie.

"And what was your purpose?" she continued. "You require charity,

perhaps? In that case, the message might have been more fitly worded.

But you are old and poor, and age and poverty should be allowed their

privileges. Tell me, therefore, to what extent you need my aid."

"Put up your purse," said the supposed mendicant, with an inexplicable

smile. "Keep it,--keep all your wealth,--until I demand it all, or

none! My message had no such end in view. You are beautiful, they

tell me; and I desired to look at you."

He took the one lamp that showed the discomfort and sordidness of his

abode, and approaching Zenobia held it up, so as to gain the more

perfect view of her, from top to toe. So obscure was the chamber, that

you could see the reflection of her diamonds thrown upon the dingy

wall, and flickering with the rise and fall of Zenobia's breath. It was

the splendor of those jewels on her neck, like lamps that burn before

some fair temple, and the jewelled flower in her hair, more than the

murky, yellow light, that helped him to see her beauty. But he beheld

it, and grew proud at heart; his own figure, in spite of his mean

habiliments, assumed an air of state and grandeur.

"It is well," cried old Moodie. "Keep your wealth. You are right

worthy of it. Keep it, therefore, but with one condition only."

Zenobia thought the old man beside himself, and was moved with pity.

"Have you none to care for you?" asked she. "No daughter?--no

kind-hearted neighbor?--no means of procuring the attendance which you

need? Tell me once again, can I do nothing for you?"

"Nothing," he replied. "I have beheld what I wished. Now leave me.

Linger not a moment longer, or I may be tempted to say what would bring

a cloud over that queenly brow. Keep all your wealth, but with only

this one condition: Be kind--be no less kind than sisters are--to my

poor Priscilla!"

And, it may be, after Zenobia withdrew, Fauntleroy paced his gloomy

chamber, and communed with himself as follows,--or, at all events, it

is the only solution which I can offer of the enigma presented in his

character:--"I am unchanged,--the same man as of yore!" said he. "True,

my brother's wealth--he dying intestate--is legally my own. I know it;

yet of my own choice, I live a beggar, and go meanly clad, and hide

myself behind a forgotten ignominy. Looks this like ostentation? Ah!

but in Zenobia I live again! Beholding her, so beautiful,--so fit to

be adorned with all imaginable splendor of outward state,--the cursed

vanity, which, half a lifetime since, dropt off like tatters of once

gaudy apparel from my debased and ruined person, is all renewed for her

sake. Were I to reappear, my shame would go with me from darkness into

daylight. Zenobia has the splendor, and not the shame. Let the world

admire her, and be dazzled by her, the brilliant child of my

prosperity! It is Fauntleroy that still shines through her!" But

then, perhaps, another thought occurred to him.

"My poor Priscilla! And am I just to her, in surrendering all to this

beautiful Zenobia? Priscilla! I love her best,--I love her only!--but

with shame, not pride. So dim, so pallid, so shrinking,--the daughter

of my long calamity! Wealth were but a mockery in Priscilla's hands.

What is its use, except to fling a golden radiance around those who

grasp it? Yet let Zenobia take heed! Priscilla shall have no wrong!"

But, while the man of show thus meditated,--that very evening, so far

as I can adjust the dates of these strange incidents,--Priscilla poor,

pallid flower!--was either snatched from Zenobia's hand, or flung

wilfully away!

XXIII. A VILLAGE HALL

Well, I betook myself away, and wandered up and down, like an exorcised

spirit that had been driven from its old haunts after a mighty

struggle. It takes down the solitary pride of man, beyond most other

things, to find the impracticability of flinging aside affections that

have grown irksome. The bands that were silken once are apt to become

iron fetters when we desire to shake them off. Our souls, after all,

are not our own. We convey a property in them to those with whom we

associate; but to what extent can never be known, until we feel the

tug, the agony, of our abortive effort to resume an exclusive sway over

ourselves. Thus, in all the weeks of my absence, my thoughts

continually reverted back, brooding over the bygone months, and

bringing up incidents that seemed hardly to have left a trace of

themselves in their passage. I spent painful hours in recalling these

trifles, and rendering them more misty and unsubstantial than at first

by the quantity of speculative musing thus kneaded in with them.

Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla! These three had absorbed my life

into themselves. Together with an inexpressible longing to know their

fortunes, there was likewise a morbid resentment of my own pain, and a

stubborn reluctance to come again within their sphere.

All that I learned of them, therefore, was comprised in a few brief and

pungent squibs, such as the newspapers were then in the habit of

bestowing on our socialist enterprise. There was one paragraph, which

if I rightly guessed its purport bore reference to Zenobia, but was too

darkly hinted to convey even thus much of certainty. Hollingsworth,

too, with his philanthropic project, afforded the penny-a-liners a

theme for some savage and bloody minded jokes; and, considerably to my

surprise, they affected me with as much indignation as if we had still

been friends.

Thus passed several weeks; time long enough for my brown and

toil-hardened hands to reaccustom themselves to gloves. Old habits,

such as were merely external, returned upon me with wonderful

promptitude. My superficial talk, too, assumed altogether a worldly

tone. Meeting former acquaintances, who showed themselves inclined to

ridicule my heroic devotion to the cause of human welfare, I spoke of

the recent phase of my life as indeed fair matter for a jest. But, I

also gave them to understand that it was, at most, only an experiment,

on which I had staked no valuable amount of hope or fear. It had

enabled me to pass the summer in a novel and agreeable way, had

afforded me some grotesque specimens of artificial simplicity, and

could not, therefore, so far as I was concerned, be reckoned a failure.

In no one instance, however, did I voluntarily speak of my three

friends. They dwelt in a profounder region. The more I consider

myself as I then was, the more do I recognize how deeply my connection

with those three had affected all my being.

As it was already the epoch of annihilated space, I might in the time I

was away from Blithedale have snatched a glimpse at England, and been

back again. But my wanderings were confined within a very limited

sphere. I hopped and fluttered, like a bird with a string about its

leg, gyrating round a small circumference, and keeping up a restless

activity to no purpose. Thus it was still in our familiar

Massachusetts--in one of its white country villages--that I must next

particularize an incident.

The scene was one of those lyceum halls, of which almost every village

has now its own, dedicated to that sober and pallid, or rather

drab-colored, mode of winter-evening entertainment, the lecture. Of

late years this has come strangely into vogue, when the natural

tendency of things would seem to be to substitute lettered for oral

methods of addressing the public. But, in halls like this, besides the

winter course of lectures, there is a rich and varied series of other

exhibitions. Hither comes the ventriloquist, with all his mysterious

tongues; the thaumaturgist, too, with his miraculous transformations of

plates, doves, and rings, his pancakes smoking in your hat, and his

cellar of choice liquors represented in one small bottle. Here, also,

the itinerant professor instructs separate classes of ladies and

gentlemen in physiology, and demonstrates his lessons by the aid of

real skeletons, and manikins in wax, from Paris. Here is to be heard

the choir of Ethiopian melodists, and to be seen the diorama of Moscow

or Bunker Hill, or the moving panorama of the Chinese wall. Here is

displayed the museum of wax figures, illustrating the wide catholicism

of earthly renown, by mixing up heroes and statesmen, the pope and the

Mormon prophet, kings, queens, murderers, and beautiful ladies; every

sort of person, in short, except authors, of whom I never beheld even

the most famous done in wax. And here, in this many-purposed hall

(unless the selectmen of the village chance to have more than their

share of the Puritanism, which, however diversified with later

patchwork, still gives its prevailing tint to New England

character),--here the company of strolling players sets up its little

stage, and claims patronage for the legitimate drama.

But, on the autumnal evening which I speak of, a number of printed

handbills--stuck up in the bar-room, and on the sign-post of the hotel,

and on the meeting-house porch, and distributed largely through the

village--had promised the inhabitants an interview with that celebrated

and hitherto inexplicable phenomenon, the Veiled Lady!

The hall was fitted up with an amphitheatrical descent of seats towards

a platform, on which stood a desk, two lights, a stool, and a capacious

antique chair. The audience was of a generally decent and respectable

character: old farmers, in their Sunday black coats, with shrewd, hard,

sun-dried faces, and a cynical humor, oftener than any other

expression, in their eyes; pretty girls, in many-colored attire; pretty

young men,--the schoolmaster, the lawyer, or student at law, the

shop-keeper,--all looking rather suburban than rural. In these days,

there is absolutely no rusticity, except when the actual labor of the

soil leaves its earth-mould on the person. There was likewise a

considerable proportion of young and middle-aged women, many of them

stern in feature, with marked foreheads, and a very definite line of

eyebrow; a type of womanhood in which a bold intellectual development

seems to be keeping pace with the progressive delicacy of the physical

constitution. Of all these people I took note, at first, according to

my custom. But I ceased to do so the moment that my eyes fell on an

individual who sat two or three seats below me, immovable, apparently

deep in thought, with his back, of course, towards me, and his face

turned steadfastly upon the platform.

After sitting awhile in contemplation of this person's familiar

contour, I was irresistibly moved to step over the intervening benches,

lay my hand on his shoulder, put my mouth close to his ear, and address

him in a sepulchral, melodramatic whisper: "Hollingsworth! where have

you left Zenobia?"

His nerves, however, were proof against my attack. He turned half

around, and looked me in the face with great sad eyes, in which there

was neither kindness nor resentment, nor any perceptible surprise.

"Zenobia, when I last saw her," he answered, "was at Blithedale."

He said no more. But there was a great deal of talk going on near me,

among a knot of people who might be considered as representing the

mysticism, or rather the mystic sensuality, of this singular age. The

nature of the exhibition that was about to take place had probably

given the turn to their conversation.

I heard, from a pale man in blue spectacles, some stranger stories than

ever were written in a romance; told, too, with a simple, unimaginative

steadfastness, which was terribly efficacious in compelling the auditor

to receive them into the category of established facts. He cited

instances of the miraculous power of one human being over the will and

passions of another; insomuch that settled grief was but a shadow

beneath the influence of a man possessing this potency, and the strong

love of years melted away like a vapor. At the bidding of one of these

wizards, the maiden, with her lover's kiss still burning on her lips,

would turn from him with icy indifference; the newly made widow would

dig up her buried heart out of her young husband's grave before the

sods had taken root upon it; a mother with her babe's milk in her bosom

would thrust away her child. Human character was but soft wax in his

hands; and guilt, or virtue, only the forms into which he should see

fit to mould it. The religious sentiment was a flame which he could

blow up with his breath, or a spark that he could utterly extinguish.

It is unutterable, the horror and disgust with which I listened, and

saw that, if these things were to be believed, the individual soul was

virtually annihilated, and all that is sweet and pure in our present

life debased, and that the idea of man's eternal responsibility was

made ridiculous, and immortality rendered at once impossible, and not

worth acceptance. But I would have perished on the spot sooner than

believe it.

The epoch of rapping spirits, and all the wonders that have followed in

their train,--such as tables upset by invisible agencies, bells

self-tolled at funerals, and ghostly music performed on

jew's-harps,--had not yet arrived. Alas, my countrymen, methinks we

have fallen on an evil age! If these phenomena have not humbug at the

bottom, so much the worse for us. What can they indicate, in a

spiritual way, except that the soul of man is descending to a lower

point than it has ever before reached while incarnate? We are pursuing

a downward course in the eternal march, and thus bring ourselves into

the same range with beings whom death, in requital of their gross and

evil lives, has degraded below humanity! To hold intercourse with

spirits of this order, we must stoop and grovel in some element more

vile than earthly dust. These goblins, if they exist at all, are but

the shadows of past mortality, outcasts, mere refuse stuff, adjudged

unworthy of the eternal world, and, on the most favorable supposition,

dwindling gradually into nothingness. The less we have to say to them

the better, lest we share their fate!

The audience now began to be impatient; they signified their desire for

the entertainment to commence by thump of sticks and stamp of

boot-heels. Nor was it a great while longer before, in response to

their call, there appeared a bearded personage in Oriental robes,

looking like one of the enchanters of the Arabian Nights. He came upon

the platform from a side door, saluted the spectators, not with a

salaam, but a bow, took his station at the desk, and first blowing his

nose with a white handkerchief, prepared to speak. The environment of

the homely village hall, and the absence of many ingenious contrivances

of stage effect with which the exhibition had heretofore been set off,

seemed to bring the artifice of this character more openly upon the

surface. No sooner did I behold the bearded enchanter, than, laying my

hand again on Hollingsworth's shoulder, I whispered in his ear, "Do you

know him?"

"I never saw the man before," he muttered, without turning his head.

But I had seen him three times already.

Once, on occasion of my first visit to the Veiled Lady; a second time,

in the wood-path at Blithedale; and lastly, in Zenobia's drawing-room.

It was Westervelt. A quick association of ideas made me shudder from

head to foot; and again, like an evil spirit, bringing up reminiscences

of a man's sins, I whispered a question in Hollingsworth's ear,--"What

have you done with Priscilla?"

He gave a convulsive start, as if I had thrust a knife into him,

writhed himself round on his seat, glared fiercely into my eyes, but

answered not a word.

The Professor began his discourse, explanatory of the psychological

phenomena, as he termed them, which it was his purpose to exhibit to

the spectators. There remains no very distinct impression of it on my

memory. It was eloquent, ingenious, plausible, with a delusive show of

spirituality, yet really imbued throughout with a cold and dead

materialism. I shivered, as at a current of chill air issuing out of a

sepulchral vault, and bringing the smell of corruption along with it.

He spoke of a new era that was dawning upon the world; an era that

would link soul to soul, and the present life to what we call futurity,

with a closeness that should finally convert both worlds into one

great, mutually conscious brotherhood. He described (in a strange,

philosophical guise, with terms of art, as if it were a matter of

chemical discovery) the agency by which this mighty result was to be

effected; nor would it have surprised me, had he pretended to hold up a

portion of his universally pervasive fluid, as he affirmed it to be, in

a glass phial.

At the close of his exordium, the Professor beckoned with his

hand,--once, twice, thrice,--and a figure came gliding upon the

platform, enveloped in a long veil of silvery whiteness. It fell about

her like the texture of a summer cloud, with a kind of vagueness, so

that the outline of the form beneath it could not be accurately

discerned. But the movement of the Veiled Lady was graceful, free, and

unembarrassed, like that of a person accustomed to be the spectacle of

thousands; or, possibly, a blindfold prisoner within the sphere with

which this dark earthly magician had surrounded her, she was wholly

unconscious of being the central object to all those straining eyes.

Pliant to his gesture (which had even an obsequious courtesy, but at

the same time a remarkable decisiveness), the figure placed itself in

the great chair. Sitting there, in such visible obscurity, it was,

perhaps, as much like the actual presence of a disembodied spirit as

anything that stage trickery could devise. The hushed breathing of the

spectators proved how high-wrought were their anticipations of the

wonders to be performed through the medium of this incomprehensible

creature. I, too, was in breathless suspense, but with a far different

presentiment of some strange event at hand.

"You see before you the Veiled Lady," said the bearded Professor,

advancing to the verge of the platform. "By the agency of which I have

just spoken, she is at this moment in communion with the spiritual

world. That silvery veil is, in one sense, an enchantment, having been

dipped, as it were, and essentially imbued, through the potency of my

art, with the fluid medium of spirits. Slight and ethereal as it

seems, the limitations of time and space have no existence within its

folds. This hall--these hundreds of faces, encompassing her within so

narrow an amphitheatre--are of thinner substance, in her view, than the

airiest vapor that the clouds are made of. She beholds the Absolute!"

As preliminary to other and far more wonderful psychological

experiments, the exhibitor suggested that some of his auditors should

endeavor to make the Veiled Lady sensible of their presence by such

methods--provided only no touch were laid upon her person--as they

might deem best adapted to that end. Accordingly, several deep-lunged

country fellows, who looked as if they might have blown the apparition

away with a breath, ascended the platform. Mutually encouraging one

another, they shouted so close to her ear that the veil stirred like a

wreath of vanishing mist; they smote upon the floor with bludgeons;

they perpetrated so hideous a clamor, that methought it might have

reached, at least, a little way into the eternal sphere. Finally, with

the assent of the Professor, they laid hold of the great chair, and

were startled, apparently, to find it soar upward, as if lighter than

the air through which it rose. But the Veiled Lady remained seated and

motionless, with a composure that was hardly less than awful, because

implying so immeasurable a distance betwixt her and these rude

persecutors.

"These efforts are wholly without avail," observed the Professor, who

had been looking on with an aspect of serene indifference. "The roar

of a battery of cannon would be inaudible to the Veiled Lady. And yet,

were I to will it, sitting in this very hall, she could hear the desert

wind sweeping over the sands as far off as Arabia; the icebergs

grinding one against the other in the polar seas; the rustle of a leaf

in an East Indian forest; the lowest whispered breath of the

bashfullest maiden in the world, uttering the first confession of her

love. Nor does there exist the moral inducement, apart from my own

behest, that could persuade her to lift the silvery veil, or arise out

of that chair."

Greatly to the Professor's discomposure, however, just as he spoke

these words, the Veiled Lady arose. There was a mysterious tremor that

shook the magic veil. The spectators, it may be, imagined that she was

about to take flight into that invisible sphere, and to the society of

those purely spiritual beings with whom they reckoned her so near akin.

Hollingsworth, a moment ago, had mounted the platform, and now stood

gazing at the figure, with a sad intentness that brought the whole

power of his great, stern, yet tender soul into his glance.

"Come," said he, waving his hand towards her. "You are safe!"

She threw off the veil, and stood before that multitude of people pale,

tremulous, shrinking, as if only then had she discovered that a

thousand eyes were gazing at her. Poor maiden! How strangely had she

been betrayed! Blazoned abroad as a wonder of the world, and

performing what were adjudged as miracles,--in the faith of many, a

seeress and a prophetess; in the harsher judgment of others, a

mountebank,--she had kept, as I religiously believe, her virgin reserve

and sanctity of soul throughout it all. Within that encircling veil,

though an evil hand had flung it over her, there was as deep a

seclusion as if this forsaken girl had, all the while, been sitting

under the shadow of Eliot's pulpit, in the Blithedale woods, at the

feet of him who now summoned her to the shelter of his arms. And the

true heart-throb of a woman's affection was too powerful for the

jugglery that had hitherto environed her. She uttered a shriek, and

fled to Hollingsworth, like one escaping from her deadliest enemy, and

was safe forever.

XXIV. THE MASQUERADERS

Two nights had passed since the foregoing occurrences, when, in a

breezy September forenoon, I set forth from town, on foot, towards

Blithedale. It was the most delightful of all days for a walk, with a

dash of invigorating ice-temper in the air, but a coolness that soon

gave place to the brisk glow of exercise, while the vigor remained as

elastic as before. The atmosphere had a spirit and sparkle in it.

Each breath was like a sip of ethereal wine, tempered, as I said, with

a crystal lump of ice. I had started on this expedition in an

exceedingly sombre mood, as well befitted one who found himself tending

towards home, but was conscious that nobody would be quite overjoyed to

greet him there. My feet were hardly off the pavement, however, when

this morbid sensation began to yield to the lively influences of air

and motion. Nor had I gone far, with fields yet green on either side,

before my step became as swift and light as if Hollingsworth were

waiting to exchange a friendly hand-grip, and Zenobia's and Priscilla's

open arms would welcome the wanderer's reappearance. It has happened

to me on other occasions, as well as this, to prove how a state of

physical well-being can create a kind of joy, in spite of the

profoundest anxiety of mind.

The pathway of that walk still runs along, with sunny freshness,

through my memory. I know not why it should be so. But my mental eye

can even now discern the September grass, bordering the pleasant

roadside with a brighter verdure than while the summer heats were

scorching it; the trees, too, mostly green, although here and there a

branch or shrub has donned its vesture of crimson and gold a week or

two before its fellows. I see the tufted barberry-bushes, with their

small clusters of scarlet fruit; the toadstools, likewise,--some

spotlessly white, others yellow or red,--mysterious growths, springing

suddenly from no root or seed, and growing nobody can tell how or

wherefore. In this respect they resembled many of the emotions in my

breast. And I still see the little rivulets, chill, clear, and bright,

that murmured beneath the road, through subterranean rocks, and

deepened into mossy pools, where tiny fish were darting to and fro, and

within which lurked the hermit frog. But no,--I never can account for

it, that, with a yearning interest to learn the upshot of all my story,

and returning to Blithedale for that sole purpose, I should examine

these things so like a peaceful-bosomed naturalist. Nor why, amid all

my sympathies and fears, there shot, at times, a wild exhilaration

through my frame.

Thus I pursued my way along the line of the ancient stone wall that

Paul Dudley built, and through white villages, and past orchards of

ruddy apples, and fields of ripening maize, and patches of woodland,

and all such sweet rural scenery as looks the fairest, a little beyond

the suburbs of a town. Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla! They glided

mistily before me, as I walked. Sometimes, in my solitude, I laughed

with the bitterness of self-scorn, remembering how unreservedly I had

given up my heart and soul to interests that were not mine. What had I

ever had to do with them? And why, being now free, should I take this

thraldom on me once again? It was both sad and dangerous, I whispered

to myself, to be in too close affinity with the passions, the errors,

and the misfortunes of individuals who stood within a circle of their

own, into which, if I stept at all, it must be as an intruder, and at a

peril that I could not estimate.

Drawing nearer to Blithedale, a sickness of the spirits kept

alternating with my flights of causeless buoyancy. I indulged in a

hundred odd and extravagant conjectures. Either there was no such

place as Blithedale, nor ever had been, nor any brotherhood of

thoughtful laborers, like what I seemed to recollect there, or else it

was all changed during my absence. It had been nothing but dream work

and enchantment. I should seek in vain for the old farmhouse, and for

the greensward, the potato-fields, the root-crops, and acres of Indian

corn, and for all that configuration of the land which I had imagined.

It would be another spot, and an utter strangeness.

These vagaries were of the spectral throng so apt to steal out of an

unquiet heart. They partly ceased to haunt me, on my arriving at a

point whence, through the trees, I began to catch glimpses of the

Blithedale farm. That surely was something real. There was hardly a

square foot of all those acres on which I had not trodden heavily, in

one or another kind of toil. The curse of Adam's posterity--and, curse

or blessing be it, it gives substance to the life around us--had first

come upon me there. In the sweat of my brow I had there earned bread

and eaten it, and so established my claim to be on earth, and my

fellowship with all the sons of labor. I could have knelt down, and

have laid my breast against that soil. The red clay of which my frame

was moulded seemed nearer akin to those crumbling furrows than to any

other portion of the world's dust. There was my home, and there might

be my grave.

I felt an invincible reluctance, nevertheless, at the idea of

presenting myself before my old associates, without first ascertaining

the state in which they were. A nameless foreboding weighed upon me.

Perhaps, should I know all the circumstances that had occurred, I might

find it my wisest course to turn back, unrecognized, unseen, and never

look at Blithedale more. Had it been evening, I would have stolen

softly to some lighted window of the old farmhouse, and peeped darkling

in, to see all their well-known faces round the supper-board. Then,

were there a vacant seat, I might noiselessly unclose the door, glide

in, and take my place among them, without a word. My entrance might be

so quiet, my aspect so familiar, that they would forget how long I had

been away, and suffer me to melt into the scene, as a wreath of vapor

melts into a larger cloud. I dreaded a boisterous greeting. Beholding

me at table, Zenobia, as a matter of course, would send me a cup of

tea, and Hollingsworth fill my plate from the great dish of pandowdy,

and Priscilla, in her quiet way, would hand the cream, and others help

me to the bread and butter. Being one of them again, the knowledge of

what had happened would come to me without a shock. For still, at

every turn of my shifting fantasies, the thought stared me in the face

that some evil thing had befallen us, or was ready to befall.

Yielding to this ominous impression, I now turned aside into the woods,

resolving to spy out the posture of the Community as craftily as the

wild Indian before he makes his onset. I would go wandering about the

outskirts of the farm, and, perhaps, catching sight of a solitary

acquaintance, would approach him amid the brown shadows of the trees (a

kind of medium fit for spirits departed and revisitant, like myself),

and entreat him to tell me how all things were.

The first living creature that I met was a partridge, which sprung up

beneath my feet, and whirred away; the next was a squirrel, who

chattered angrily at me from an overhanging bough. I trod along by the

dark, sluggish river, and remember pausing on the bank, above one of

its blackest and most placid pools (the very spot, with the barkless

stump of a tree aslantwise over the water, is depicting itself to my

fancy at this instant), and wondering how deep it was, and if any

overladen soul had ever flung its weight of mortality in thither, and

if it thus escaped the burden, or only made it heavier. And perhaps the

skeleton of the drowned wretch still lay beneath the inscrutable depth,

clinging to some sunken log at the bottom with the gripe of its old

despair. So slight, however, was the track of these gloomy ideas, that

I soon forgot them in the contemplation of a brood of wild ducks, which

were floating on the river, and anon took flight, leaving each a bright

streak over the black surface. By and by, I came to my hermitage, in

the heart of the white-pine tree, and clambering up into it, sat down

to rest. The grapes, which I had watched throughout the summer, now

dangled around me in abundant clusters of the deepest purple,

deliciously sweet to the taste, and, though wild, yet free from that

ungentle flavor which distinguishes nearly all our native and

uncultivated grapes. Methought a wine might be pressed out of them

possessing a passionate zest, and endowed with a new kind of

intoxicating quality, attended with such bacchanalian ecstasies as the

tamer grapes of Madeira, France, and the Rhine are inadequate to

produce. And I longed to quaff a great goblet of it that moment!

While devouring the grapes, I looked on all sides out of the peep-holes

of my hermitage, and saw the farmhouse, the fields, and almost every

part of our domain, but not a single human figure in the landscape.

Some of the windows of the house were open, but with no more signs of

life than in a dead man's unshut eyes. The barn-door was ajar, and

swinging in the breeze. The big old dog,--he was a relic of the former

dynasty of the farm,--that hardly ever stirred out of the yard, was

nowhere to be seen. What, then, had become of all the fraternity and

sisterhood? Curious to ascertain this point, I let myself down out of

the tree, and going to the edge of the wood, was glad to perceive our

herd of cows chewing the cud or grazing not far off. I fancied, by

their manner, that two or three of them recognized me (as, indeed, they

ought, for I had milked them and been their chamberlain times without

number); but, after staring me in the face a little while, they

phlegmatically began grazing and chewing their cuds again. Then I grew

foolishly angry at so cold a reception, and flung some rotten fragments

of an old stump at these unsentimental cows.

Skirting farther round the pasture, I heard voices and much laughter

proceeding from the interior of the wood. Voices, male and feminine;

laughter, not only of fresh young throats, but the bass of grown

people, as if solemn organ-pipes should pour out airs of merriment. Not

a voice spoke, but I knew it better than my own; not a laugh, but its

cadences were familiar. The wood, in this portion of it, seemed as

full of jollity as if Comus and his crew were holding their revels in

one of its usually lonesome glades. Stealing onward as far as I durst,

without hazard of discovery, I saw a concourse of strange figures

beneath the overshadowing branches. They appeared, and vanished, and

came again, confusedly with the streaks of sunlight glimmering down

upon them.

Among them was an Indian chief, with blanket, feathers, and war-paint,

and uplifted tomahawk; and near him, looking fit to be his woodland

bride, the goddess Diana, with the crescent on her head, and attended

by our big lazy dog, in lack of any fleeter hound. Drawing an arrow

from her quiver, she let it fly at a venture, and hit the very tree

behind which I happened to be lurking. Another group consisted of a

Bavarian broom-girl, a negro of the Jim Crow order, one or two

foresters of the Middle Ages, a Kentucky woodsman in his trimmed

hunting-shirt and deerskin leggings, and a Shaker elder, quaint,

demure, broad-brimmed, and square-skirted. Shepherds of Arcadia, and

allegoric figures from the "Faerie Queen," were oddly mixed up with

these. Arm in arm, or otherwise huddled together in strange

discrepancy, stood grim Puritans, gay Cavaliers, and Revolutionary

officers with three-cornered cocked hats, and queues longer than their

swords. A bright-complexioned, dark-haired, vivacious little gypsy,

with a red shawl over her head, went from one group to another, telling

fortunes by palmistry; and Moll Pitcher, the renowned old witch of

Lynn, broomstick in hand, showed herself prominently in the midst, as

if announcing all these apparitions to be the offspring of her

necromantic art. But Silas Foster, who leaned against a tree near by,

in his customary blue frock and smoking a short pipe, did more to

disenchant the scene, with his look of shrewd, acrid, Yankee

observation, than twenty witches and necromancers could have done in

the way of rendering it weird and fantastic.

A little farther off, some old-fashioned skinkers and drawers, all with

portentously red noses, were spreading a banquet on the leaf-strewn

earth; while a horned and long-tailed gentleman (in whom I recognized

the fiendish musician erst seen by Tam O'Shanter) tuned his fiddle, and

summoned the whole motley rout to a dance, before partaking of the

festal cheer. So they joined hands in a circle, whirling round so

swiftly, so madly, and so merrily, in time and tune with the Satanic

music, that their separate incongruities were blended all together, and

they became a kind of entanglement that went nigh to turn one's brain

with merely looking at it. Anon they stopt all of a sudden, and

staring at one another's figures, set up a roar of laughter; whereat a

shower of the September leaves (which, all day long, had been

hesitating whether to fall or no) were shaken off by the movement of

the air, and came eddying down upon the revellers.

Then, for lack of breath, ensued a silence, at the deepest point of

which, tickled by the oddity of surprising my grave associates in this

masquerading trim, I could not possibly refrain from a burst of

laughter on my own separate account.

"Hush!" I heard the pretty gypsy fortuneteller say. "Who is that

laughing?"

"Some profane intruder!" said the goddess Diana. "I shall send an

arrow through his heart, or change him into a stag, as I did Actaeon,

if he peeps from behind the trees!"

"Me take his scalp!" cried the Indian chief, brandishing his tomahawk,

and cutting a great caper in the air.

"I'll root him in the earth with a spell that I have at my tongue's

end!" squeaked Moll Pitcher. "And the green moss shall grow all over

him, before he gets free again!"

"The voice was Miles Coverdale's," said the fiendish fiddler, with a

whisk of his tail and a toss of his horns. "My music has brought him

hither. He is always ready to dance to the Devil's tune!"

Thus put on the right track, they all recognized the voice at once, and

set up a simultaneous shout.

"Miles! Miles! Miles Coverdale, where are you?" they cried. "Zenobia!

Queen Zenobia! here is one of your vassals lurking in the wood.

Command him to approach and pay his duty!"

The whole fantastic rabble forthwith streamed off in pursuit of me, so

that I was like a mad poet hunted by chimeras. Having fairly the start

of them, however, I succeeded in making my escape, and soon left their

merriment and riot at a good distance in the rear. Its fainter tones

assumed a kind of mournfulness, and were finally lost in the hush and

solemnity of the wood. In my haste, I stumbled over a heap of logs and

sticks that had been cut for firewood, a great while ago, by some

former possessor of the soil, and piled up square, in order to be

carted or sledded away to the farmhouse. But, being forgotten, they

had lain there perhaps fifty years, and possibly much longer; until, by

the accumulation of moss, and the leaves falling over them, and

decaying there, from autumn to autumn, a green mound was formed, in

which the softened outline of the woodpile was still perceptible. In

the fitful mood that then swayed my mind, I found something strangely

affecting in this simple circumstance. I imagined the long-dead

woodman, and his long-dead wife and children, coming out of their chill

graves, and essaying to make a fire with this heap of mossy fuel!

From this spot I strayed onward, quite lost in reverie, and neither

knew nor cared whither I was going, until a low, soft, well-remembered

voice spoke, at a little distance.

"There is Mr. Coverdale!"

"Miles Coverdale!" said another voice,--and its tones were very stern.

"Let him come forward, then!"

"Yes, Mr. Coverdale," cried a woman's voice,--clear and melodious, but,

just then, with something unnatural in its chord,--"you are welcome!

But you come half an hour too late, and have missed a scene which you

would have enjoyed!"

I looked up and found myself nigh Eliot's pulpit, at the base of which

sat Hollingsworth, with Priscilla at his feet and Zenobia standing

before them.

XXV. THE THREE TOGETHER

Hollingsworth was in his ordinary working-dress. Priscilla wore a

pretty and simple gown, with a kerchief about her neck, and a calash,

which she had flung back from her head, leaving it suspended by the

strings. But Zenobia (whose part among the maskers, as may be

supposed, was no inferior one) appeared in a costume of fanciful

magnificence, with her jewelled flower as the central ornament of what

resembled a leafy crown, or coronet. She represented the Oriental

princess by whose name we were accustomed to know her. Her attitude

was free and noble; yet, if a queen's, it was not that of a queen

triumphant, but dethroned, on trial for her life, or, perchance,

condemned already. The spirit of the conflict seemed, nevertheless, to

be alive in her. Her eyes were on fire; her cheeks had each a crimson

spot, so exceedingly vivid, and marked with so definite an outline,

that I at first doubted whether it were not artificial. In a very

brief space, however, this idea was shamed by the paleness that ensued,

as the blood sunk suddenly away. Zenobia now looked like marble.

One always feels the fact, in an instant, when he has intruded on those

who love, or those who hate, at some acme of their passion that puts

them into a sphere of their own, where no other spirit can pretend to

stand on equal ground with them. I was confused,--affected even with a

species of terror,--and wished myself away. The intenseness of their

feelings gave them the exclusive property of the soil and atmosphere,

and left me no right to be or breathe there.

"Hollingsworth,--Zenobia,--I have just returned to Blithedale," said I,

"and had no thought of finding you here. We shall meet again at the

house. I will retire."

"This place is free to you," answered Hollingsworth.

"As free as to ourselves," added Zenobia. "This long while past, you

have been following up your game, groping for human emotions in the

dark corners of the heart. Had you been here a little sooner, you

might have seen them dragged into the daylight. I could even wish to

have my trial over again, with you standing by to see fair play! Do

you know, Mr. Coverdale, I have been on trial for my life?"

She laughed, while speaking thus. But, in truth, as my eyes wandered

from one of the group to another, I saw in Hollingsworth all that an

artist could desire for the grim portrait of a Puritan magistrate

holding inquest of life and death in a case of witchcraft; in Zenobia,

the sorceress herself, not aged, wrinkled, and decrepit, but fair

enough to tempt Satan with a force reciprocal to his own; and, in

Priscilla, the pale victim, whose soul and body had been wasted by her

spells. Had a pile of fagots been heaped against the rock, this hint

of impending doom would have completed the suggestive picture.

"It was too hard upon me," continued Zenobia, addressing Hollingsworth,

"that judge, jury, and accuser should all be comprehended in one man!

I demur, as I think the lawyers say, to the jurisdiction. But let the

learned Judge Coverdale seat himself on the top of the rock, and you

and me stand at its base, side by side, pleading our cause before him!

There might, at least, be two criminals instead of one."

"You forced this on me," replied Hollingsworth, looking her sternly in

the face. "Did I call you hither from among the masqueraders yonder?

Do I assume to be your judge? No; except so far as I have an

unquestionable right of judgment, in order to settle my own line of

behavior towards those with whom the events of life bring me in

contact. True, I have already judged you, but not on the world's

part,--neither do I pretend to pass a sentence!"

"Ah, this is very good!" cried Zenobia with a smile. "What strange

beings you men are, Mr. Coverdale!--is it not so? It is the simplest

thing in the world with you to bring a woman before your secret

tribunals, and judge and condemn her unheard, and then tell her to go

free without a sentence. The misfortune is, that this same secret

tribunal chances to be the only judgment-seat that a true woman stands

in awe of, and that any verdict short of acquittal is equivalent to a

death sentence!"

The more I looked at them, and the more I heard, the stronger grew my

impression that a crisis had just come and gone. On Hollingsworth's

brow it had left a stamp like that of irrevocable doom, of which his

own will was the instrument. In Zenobia's whole person, beholding her

more closely, I saw a riotous agitation; the almost delirious

disquietude of a great struggle, at the close of which the vanquished

one felt her strength and courage still mighty within her, and longed

to renew the contest. My sensations were as if I had come upon a

battlefield before the smoke was as yet cleared away.

And what subjects had been discussed here? All, no doubt, that for so

many months past had kept my heart and my imagination idly feverish.

Zenobia's whole character and history; the true nature of her

mysterious connection with Westervelt; her later purposes towards

Hollingsworth, and, reciprocally, his in reference to her; and,

finally, the degree in which Zenobia had been cognizant of the plot

against Priscilla, and what, at last, had been the real object of that

scheme. On these points, as before, I was left to my own conjectures.

One thing, only, was certain. Zenobia and Hollingsworth were friends

no longer. If their heartstrings were ever intertwined, the knot had

been adjudged an entanglement, and was now violently broken.

But Zenobia seemed unable to rest content with the matter in the

posture which it had assumed.

"Ah! do we part so?" exclaimed she, seeing Hollingsworth about to

retire.

"And why not?" said he, with almost rude abruptness. "What is there

further to be said between us?"

"Well, perhaps nothing," answered Zenobia, looking him in the face, and

smiling. "But we have come many times before to this gray rock, and we

have talked very softly among the whisperings of the birch-trees. They

were pleasant hours! I love to make the latest of them, though not

altogether so delightful, loiter away as slowly as may be. And,

besides, you have put many queries to me at this, which you design to

be our last interview; and being driven, as I must acknowledge, into a

corner, I have responded with reasonable frankness. But now, with your

free consent, I desire the privilege of asking a few questions, in my

turn."

"I have no concealments," said Hollingsworth.

"We shall see," answered Zenobia. "I would first inquire whether you

have supposed me to be wealthy?"

"On that point," observed Hollingsworth, "I have had the opinion which

the world holds."

"And I held it likewise," said Zenobia. "Had I not, Heaven is my

witness the knowledge should have been as free to you as me. It is

only three days since I knew the strange fact that threatens to make me

poor; and your own acquaintance with it, I suspect, is of at least as

old a date. I fancied myself affluent. You are aware, too, of the

disposition which I purposed making of the larger portion of my

imaginary opulence,--nay, were it all, I had not hesitated. Let me ask

you, further, did I ever propose or intimate any terms of compact, on

which depended this--as the world would consider it--so important

sacrifice?"

"You certainly spoke of none," said Hollingsworth.

"Nor meant any," she responded. "I was willing to realize your dream

freely,--generously, as some might think,--but, at all events, fully,

and heedless though it should prove the ruin of my fortune. If, in your

own thoughts, you have imposed any conditions of this expenditure, it

is you that must be held responsible for whatever is sordid and

unworthy in them. And now one other question. Do you love this girl?"

"O Zenobia!" exclaimed Priscilla, shrinking back, as if longing for the

rock to topple over and hide her.

"Do you love her?" repeated Zenobia.

"Had you asked me that question a short time since," replied

Hollingsworth, after a pause, during which, it seemed to me, even the

birch-trees held their whispering breath, "I should have told

you--'No!' My feelings for Priscilla differed little from those of an

elder brother, watching tenderly over the gentle sister whom God has

given him to protect."

"And what is your answer now?" persisted Zenobia.

"I do love her!" said Hollingsworth, uttering the words with a deep

inward breath, instead of speaking them outright. "As well declare it

thus as in any other way. I do love her!"

"Now, God be judge between us," cried Zenobia, breaking into sudden

passion, "which of us two has most mortally offended Him! At least, I

am a woman, with every fault, it may be, that a woman ever had,--weak,

vain, unprincipled (like most of my sex; for our virtues, when we have

any, are merely impulsive and intuitive), passionate, too, and pursuing

my foolish and unattainable ends by indirect and cunning, though

absurdly chosen means, as an hereditary bond-slave must; false,

moreover, to the whole circle of good, in my reckless truth to the

little good I saw before me,--but still a woman! A creature whom only

a little change of earthly fortune, a little kinder smile of Him who

sent me hither, and one true heart to encourage and direct me, might

have made all that a woman can be! But how is it with you? Are you a

man? No; but a monster! A cold, heartless, self-beginning and

self-ending piece of mechanism!"

"With what, then, do you charge me!" asked Hollingsworth, aghast, and

greatly disturbed by this attack. "Show me one selfish end, in all I

ever aimed at, and you may cut it out of my bosom with a knife!"

"It is all self!" answered Zenobia with still intenser bitterness.

"Nothing else; nothing but self, self, self! The fiend, I doubt not,

has made his choicest mirth of you these seven years past, and

especially in the mad summer which we have spent together. I see it

now! I am awake, disenchanted, disinthralled! Self, self, self! You

have embodied yourself in a project. You are a better masquerader than

the witches and gypsies yonder; for your disguise is a self-deception.

See whither it has brought you! First, you aimed a death-blow, and a

treacherous one, at this scheme of a purer and higher life, which so

many noble spirits had wrought out. Then, because Coverdale could not

be quite your slave, you threw him ruthlessly away. And you took me,

too, into your plan, as long as there was hope of my being available,

and now fling me aside again, a broken tool! But, foremost and

blackest of your sins, you stifled down your inmost consciousness!--you

did a deadly wrong to your own heart!--you were ready to sacrifice this

girl, whom, if God ever visibly showed a purpose, He put into your

charge, and through whom He was striving to redeem you!"

"This is a woman's view," said Hollingsworth, growing deadly pale,--"a

woman's, whose whole sphere of action is in the heart, and who can

conceive of no higher nor wider one!"

"Be silent!" cried Zenobia imperiously. "You know neither man nor

woman! The utmost that can be said in your behalf--and because I would

not be wholly despicable in my own eyes, but would fain excuse my

wasted feelings, nor own it wholly a delusion, therefore I say it--is,

that a great and rich heart has been ruined in your breast. Leave me,

now. You have done with me, and I with you. Farewell!"

"Priscilla," said Hollingsworth, "come." Zenobia smiled; possibly I

did so too. Not often, in human life, has a gnawing sense of injury

found a sweeter morsel of revenge than was conveyed in the tone with

which Hollingsworth spoke those two words. It was the abased and

tremulous tone of a man whose faith in himself was shaken, and who

sought, at last, to lean on an affection. Yes; the strong man bowed

himself and rested on this poor Priscilla! Oh, could she have failed

him, what a triumph for the lookers-on!

And, at first, I half imagined that she was about to fail him. She

rose up, stood shivering like the birch leaves that trembled over her

head, and then slowly tottered, rather than walked, towards Zenobia.

Arriving at her feet, she sank down there, in the very same attitude

which she had assumed on their first meeting, in the kitchen of the old

farmhouse. Zenobia remembered it.

"Ah, Priscilla!" said she, shaking her head, "how much is changed since

then! You kneel to a dethroned princess. You, the victorious one!

But he is waiting for you. Say what you wish, and leave me."

"We are sisters!" gasped Priscilla.

I fancied that I understood the word and action. It meant the offering

of herself, and all she had, to be at Zenobia's disposal. But the

latter would not take it thus.

"True, we are sisters!" she replied; and, moved by the sweet word, she

stooped down and kissed Priscilla; but not lovingly, for a sense of

fatal harm received through her seemed to be lurking in Zenobia's

heart. "We had one father! You knew it from the first; I, but a

little while,--else some things that have chanced might have been

spared you. But I never wished you harm. You stood between me and an

end which I desired. I wanted a clear path. No matter what I meant.

It is over now. Do you forgive me?"

"O Zenobia," sobbed Priscilla, "it is I that feel like the guilty one!"

"No, no, poor little thing!" said Zenobia, with a sort of contempt.

"You have been my evil fate, but there never was a babe with less

strength or will to do an injury. Poor child! Methinks you have but a

melancholy lot before you, sitting all alone in that wide, cheerless

heart, where, for aught you know,--and as I, alas! believe,--the fire

which you have kindled may soon go out. Ah, the thought makes me

shiver for you! What will you do, Priscilla, when you find no spark

among the ashes?"

"Die!" she answered.

"That was well said!" responded Zenobia, with an approving smile.

"There is all a woman in your little compass, my poor sister.

Meanwhile, go with him, and live!"

She waved her away with a queenly gesture, and turned her own face to

the rock. I watched Priscilla, wondering what judgment she would pass

between Zenobia and Hollingsworth; how interpret his behavior, so as to

reconcile it with true faith both towards her sister and herself; how

compel her love for him to keep any terms whatever with her sisterly

affection! But, in truth, there was no such difficulty as I imagined.

Her engrossing love made it all clear. Hollingsworth could have no

fault. That was the one principle at the centre of the universe. And

the doubtful guilt or possible integrity of other people, appearances,

self-evident facts, the testimony of her own senses,--even

Hollingsworth's self-accusation, had he volunteered it,--would have

weighed not the value of a mote of thistledown on the other side. So

secure was she of his right, that she never thought of comparing it

with another's wrong, but left the latter to itself.

Hollingsworth drew her arm within his, and soon disappeared with her

among the trees. I cannot imagine how Zenobia knew when they were out

of sight; she never glanced again towards them. But, retaining a proud

attitude so long as they might have thrown back a retiring look, they

were no sooner departed,--utterly departed,--than she began slowly to

sink down. It was as if a great, invisible, irresistible weight were

pressing her to the earth. Settling upon her knees, she leaned her

forehead against the rock, and sobbed convulsively; dry sobs they

seemed to be, such as have nothing to do with tears.

XXVI. ZENOBIA AND COVERDALE

Zenobia had entirely forgotten me. She fancied herself alone with her

great grief. And had it been only a common pity that I felt for

her,--the pity that her proud nature would have repelled, as the one

worst wrong which the world yet held in reserve,--the sacredness and

awfulness of the crisis might have impelled me to steal away silently,

so that not a dry leaf should rustle under my feet. I would have left

her to struggle, in that solitude, with only the eye of God upon her.

But, so it happened, I never once dreamed of questioning my right to be

there now, as I had questioned it just before, when I came so suddenly

upon Hollingsworth and herself, in the passion of their recent debate.

It suits me not to explain what was the analogy that I saw or imagined

between Zenobia's situation and mine; nor, I believe, will the reader

detect this one secret, hidden beneath many a revelation which perhaps

concerned me less. In simple truth, however, as Zenobia leaned her

forehead against the rock, shaken with that tearless agony, it seemed

to me that the self-same pang, with hardly mitigated torment, leaped

thrilling from her heartstrings to my own. Was it wrong, therefore, if

I felt myself consecrated to the priesthood by sympathy like this, and

called upon to minister to this woman's affliction, so far as mortal

could?

But, indeed, what could mortal do for her? Nothing! The attempt would

be a mockery and an anguish. Time, it is true, would steal away her

grief, and bury it and the best of her heart in the same grave. But

Destiny itself, methought, in its kindliest mood, could do no better

for Zenobia, in the way of quick relief; than to cause the impending

rock to impend a little farther, and fall upon her head. So I leaned

against a tree, and listened to her sobs, in unbroken silence. She was

half prostrate, half kneeling, with her forehead still pressed against

the rock. Her sobs were the only sound; she did not groan, nor give

any other utterance to her distress. It was all involuntary.

At length she sat up, put back her hair, and stared about her with a

bewildered aspect, as if not distinctly recollecting the scene through

which she had passed, nor cognizant of the situation in which it left

her. Her face and brow were almost purple with the rush of blood.

They whitened, however, by and by, and for some time retained this

deathlike hue. She put her hand to her forehead, with a gesture that

made me forcibly conscious of an intense and living pain there.

Her glance, wandering wildly to and fro, passed over me several times,

without appearing to inform her of my presence. But, finally, a look

of recognition gleamed from her eyes into mine.

"Is it you, Miles Coverdale?" said she, smiling. "Ah, I perceive what

you are about! You are turning this whole affair into a ballad. Pray

let me hear as many stanzas as you happen to have ready."

"Oh, hush, Zenobia!" I answered. "Heaven knows what an ache is in my

soul!"

"It is genuine tragedy, is it not?" rejoined Zenobia, with a sharp,

light laugh. "And you are willing to allow, perhaps, that I have had

hard measure. But it is a woman's doom, and I have deserved it like a

woman; so let there be no pity, as, on my part, there shall be no

complaint. It is all right, now, or will shortly be so. But, Mr.

Coverdale, by all means write this ballad, and put your soul's ache

into it, and turn your sympathy to good account, as other poets do, and

as poets must, unless they choose to give us glittering icicles instead

of lines of fire. As for the moral, it shall be distilled into the

final stanza, in a drop of bitter honey."

"What shall it be, Zenobia?" I inquired, endeavoring to fall in with

her mood.

"Oh, a very old one will serve the purpose," she replied. "There are

no new truths, much as we have prided ourselves on finding some. A

moral? Why, this: That, in the battlefield of life, the downright

stroke, that would fall only on a man's steel headpiece, is sure to

light on a woman's heart, over which she wears no breastplate, and

whose wisdom it is, therefore, to keep out of the conflict. Or, this:

That the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and Providence, or

Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one

hair's-breadth out of the beaten track. Yes; and add (for I may as

well own it, now) that, with that one hair's-breadth, she goes all

astray, and never sees the world in its true aspect afterwards."

"This last is too stern a moral," I observed. "Cannot we soften it a

little?"

"Do it if you like, at your own peril, not on my responsibility," she

answered. Then, with a sudden change of subject, she went on: "After

all, he has flung away what would have served him better than the poor,

pale flower he kept. What can Priscilla do for him? Put passionate

warmth into his heart, when it shall be chilled with frozen hopes?

Strengthen his hands, when they are weary with much doing and no

performance? No! but only tend towards him with a blind, instinctive

love, and hang her little, puny weakness for a clog upon his arm! She

cannot even give him such sympathy as is worth the name. For will he

never, in many an hour of darkness, need that proud intellectual

sympathy which he might have had from me?--the sympathy that would

flash light along his course, and guide, as well as cheer him? Poor

Hollingsworth! Where will he find it now?"

"Hollingsworth has a heart of ice!" said I bitterly. "He is a wretch!"

"Do him no wrong," interrupted Zenobia, turning haughtily upon me.

"Presume not to estimate a man like Hollingsworth. It was my fault,

all along, and none of his. I see it now! He never sought me. Why

should he seek me? What had I to offer him? A miserable, bruised, and

battered heart, spoilt long before he met me. A life, too, hopelessly

entangled with a villain's! He did well to cast me off. God be

praised, he did it! And yet, had he trusted me, and borne with me a

little longer, I would have saved him all this trouble."

She was silent for a time, and stood with her eyes fixed on the ground.

Again raising them, her look was more mild and calm.

"Miles Coverdale!" said she.

"Well, Zenobia," I responded. "Can I do you any service?"

"Very little," she replied. "But it is my purpose, as you may well

imagine, to remove from Blithedale; and, most likely, I may not see

Hollingsworth again. A woman in my position, you understand, feels

scarcely at her ease among former friends. New faces,--unaccustomed

looks,--those only can she tolerate. She would pine among familiar

scenes; she would be apt to blush, too, under the eyes that knew her

secret; her heart might throb uncomfortably; she would mortify herself,

I suppose, with foolish notions of having sacrificed the honor of her

sex at the foot of proud, contumacious man. Poor womanhood, with its

rights and wrongs! Here will be new matter for my course of lectures,

at the idea of which you smiled, Mr. Coverdale, a month or two ago.

But, as you have really a heart and sympathies, as far as they go, and

as I shall depart without seeing Hollingsworth, I must entreat you to

be a messenger between him and me."

"Willingly," said I, wondering at the strange way in which her mind

seemed to vibrate from the deepest earnest to mere levity. "What is

the message?"

"True,--what is it?" exclaimed Zenobia. "After all, I hardly know. On

better consideration, I have no message. Tell him,--tell him something

pretty and pathetic, that will come nicely and sweetly into your

ballad,--anything you please, so it be tender and submissive enough.

Tell him he has murdered me! Tell him that I'll haunt him! "--She

spoke these words with the wildest energy.--"And give him--no, give

Priscilla--this!"

Thus saying, she took the jewelled flower out of her hair; and it

struck me as the act of a queen, when worsted in a combat, discrowning

herself, as if she found a sort of relief in abasing all her pride.

"Bid her wear this for Zenobia's sake," she continued. "She is a

pretty little creature, and will make as soft and gentle a wife as the

veriest Bluebeard could desire. Pity that she must fade so soon! These

delicate and puny maidens always do. Ten years hence, let

Hollingsworth look at my face and Priscilla's, and then choose betwixt

them. Or, if he pleases, let him do it now."

How magnificently Zenobia looked as she said this! The effect of her

beauty was even heightened by the over-consciousness and

self-recognition of it, into which, I suppose, Hollingsworth's scorn

had driven her. She understood the look of admiration in my face;

and--Zenobia to the last--it gave her pleasure.

"It is an endless pity," said she, "that I had not bethought myself of

winning your heart, Mr. Coverdale, instead of Hollingsworth's. I think

I should have succeeded, and many women would have deemed you the

worthier conquest of the two. You are certainly much the handsomest

man. But there is a fate in these things. And beauty, in a man, has

been of little account with me since my earliest girlhood, when, for

once, it turned my head. Now, farewell!"

"Zenobia, whither are you going?" I asked.

"No matter where," said she. "But I am weary of this place, and sick

to death of playing at philanthropy and progress. Of all varieties of

mock-life, we have surely blundered into the very emptiest mockery in

our effort to establish the one true system. I have done with it; and

Blithedale must find another woman to superintend the laundry, and you,

Mr. Coverdale, another nurse to make your gruel, the next time you fall

ill. It was, indeed, a foolish dream! Yet it gave us some pleasant

summer days, and bright hopes, while they lasted. It can do no more;

nor will it avail us to shed tears over a broken bubble. Here is my

hand! Adieu!"

She gave me her hand with the same free, whole-souled gesture as on the

first afternoon of our acquaintance, and, being greatly moved, I

bethought me of no better method of expressing my deep sympathy than to

carry it to my lips. In so doing, I perceived that this white hand--so

hospitably warm when I first touched it, five months since--was now

cold as a veritable piece of snow.

"How very cold!" I exclaimed, holding it between both my own, with the

vain idea of warming it. "What can be the reason? It is really

deathlike!"

"The extremities die first, they say," answered Zenobia, laughing. "And

so you kiss this poor, despised, rejected hand! Well, my dear friend,

I thank you. You have reserved your homage for the fallen. Lip of man

will never touch my hand again. I intend to become a Catholic, for the

sake of going into a nunnery. When you next hear of Zenobia, her face

will be behind the black veil; so look your last at it now,--for all is

over. Once more, farewell!"

She withdrew her hand, yet left a lingering pressure, which I felt long

afterwards. So intimately connected as I had been with perhaps the

only man in whom she was ever truly interested, Zenobia looked on me as

the representative of all the past, and was conscious that, in bidding

me adieu, she likewise took final leave of Hollingsworth, and of this

whole epoch of her life. Never did her beauty shine out more

lustrously than in the last glimpse that I had of her. She departed,

and was soon hidden among the trees. But, whether it was the strong

impression of the foregoing scene, or whatever else the cause, I was

affected with a fantasy that Zenobia had not actually gone, but was

still hovering about the spot and haunting it. I seemed to feel her

eyes upon me. It was as if the vivid coloring of her character had

left a brilliant stain upon the air. By degrees, however, the

impression grew less distinct. I flung myself upon the fallen leaves

at the base of Eliot's pulpit. The sunshine withdrew up the tree

trunks and flickered on the topmost boughs; gray twilight made the wood

obscure; the stars brightened out; the pendent boughs became wet with

chill autumnal dews. But I was listless, worn out with emotion on my

own behalf and sympathy for others, and had no heart to leave my

comfortless lair beneath the rock.

I must have fallen asleep, and had a dream, all the circumstances of

which utterly vanished at the moment when they converged to some

tragical catastrophe, and thus grew too powerful for the thin sphere of

slumber that enveloped them. Starting from the ground, I found the

risen moon shining upon the rugged face of the rock, and myself all in

a tremble.

XXVII. MIDNIGHT

It could not have been far from midnight when I came beneath

Hollingsworth's window, and, finding it open, flung in a tuft of grass

with earth at the roots, and heard it fall upon the floor. He was

either awake or sleeping very lightly; for scarcely a moment had gone

by before he looked out and discerned me standing in the moonlight.

"Is it you, Coverdale?" he asked. "What is the matter?"

"Come down to me, Hollingsworth!" I answered. "I am anxious to speak

with you."

The strange tone of my own voice startled me, and him, probably, no

less. He lost no time, and soon issued from the house-door, with his

dress half arranged.

"Again, what is the matter?" he asked impatiently.

"Have you seen Zenobia," said I, "since you parted from her at Eliot's

pulpit?"

"No," answered Hollingsworth; "nor did I expect it."

His voice was deep, but had a tremor in it,

Hardly had he spoken, when Silas Foster thrust his head, done up in a

cotton handkerchief, out of another window, and took what he called as

it literally was--a squint at us.

"Well, folks, what are ye about here?" he demanded. "Aha! are you

there, Miles Coverdale? You have been turning night into day since you

left us, I reckon; and so you find it quite natural to come prowling

about the house at this time o' night, frightening my old woman out of

her wits, and making her disturb a tired man out of his best nap. In

with you, you vagabond, and to bed!"

"Dress yourself quickly, Foster," said I. "We want your assistance."

I could not, for the life of me, keep that strange tone out of my

voice. Silas Foster, obtuse as were his sensibilities, seemed to feel

the ghastly earnestness that was conveyed in it as well as

Hollingsworth did. He immediately withdrew his head, and I heard him

yawning, muttering to his wife, and again yawning heavily, while he

hurried on his clothes. Meanwhile I showed Hollingsworth a delicate

handkerchief, marked with a well-known cipher, and told where I had

found it, and other circumstances, which had filled me with a suspicion

so terrible that I left him, if he dared, to shape it out for himself.

By the time my brief explanation was finished, we were joined by Silas

Foster in his blue woollen frock.

"Well, boys," cried he peevishly, "what is to pay now?"

"Tell him, Hollingsworth," said I.

Hollingsworth shivered perceptibly, and drew in a hard breath betwixt

his teeth. He steadied himself, however, and, looking the matter more

firmly in the face than I had done, explained to Foster my suspicions,

and the grounds of them, with a distinctness from which, in spite of my

utmost efforts, my words had swerved aside. The tough-nerved yeoman,

in his comment, put a finish on the business, and brought out the

hideous idea in its full terror, as if he were removing the napkin from

the face of a corpse.

"And so you think she's drowned herself?" he cried. I turned away my

face.

"What on earth should the young woman do that for?" exclaimed Silas,

his eyes half out of his head with mere surprise. "Why, she has more

means than she can use or waste, and lacks nothing to make her

comfortable, but a husband, and that's an article she could have, any

day. There's some mistake about this, I tell you!"

"Come," said I, shuddering; "let us go and ascertain the truth."

"Well, well," answered Silas Foster; "just as you say. We'll take the

long pole, with the hook at the end, that serves to get the bucket out

of the draw-well when the rope is broken. With that, and a couple of

long-handled hay-rakes, I'll answer for finding her, if she's anywhere

to be found. Strange enough! Zenobia drown herself! No, no; I don't

believe it. She had too much sense, and too much means, and enjoyed

life a great deal too well."

When our few preparations were completed, we hastened, by a shorter

than the customary route, through fields and pastures, and across a

portion of the meadow, to the particular spot on the river-bank which I

had paused to contemplate in the course of my afternoon's ramble. A

nameless presentiment had again drawn me thither, after leaving Eliot's

pulpit. I showed my companions where I had found the handkerchief, and

pointed to two or three footsteps, impressed into the clayey margin,

and tending towards the water. Beneath its shallow verge, among the

water-weeds, there were further traces, as yet unobliterated by the

sluggish current, which was there almost at a standstill. Silas Foster

thrust his face down close to these footsteps, and picked up a shoe

that had escaped my observation, being half imbedded in the mud.

"There's a kid shoe that never was made on a Yankee last," observed he.

"I know enough of shoemaker's craft to tell that. French manufacture;

and see what a high instep! and how evenly she trod in it! There never

was a woman that stept handsomer in her shoes than Zenobia did. Here,"

he added, addressing Hollingsworth, "would you like to keep the shoe?"

Hollingsworth started back.

"Give it to me, Foster," said I.

I dabbled it in the water, to rinse off the mud, and have kept it ever

since. Not far from this spot lay an old, leaky punt, drawn up on the

oozy river-side, and generally half full of water. It served the

angler to go in quest of pickerel, or the sportsman to pick up his wild

ducks. Setting this crazy bark afloat, I seated myself in the stern

with the paddle, while Hollingsworth sat in the bows with the hooked

pole, and Silas Foster amidships with a hay-rake.

"It puts me in mind of my young days," remarked Silas, "when I used to

steal out of bed to go bobbing for hornpouts and eels.

Heigh-ho!--well, life and death together make sad work for us all!

Then I was a boy, bobbing for fish; and now I am getting to be an old

fellow, and here I be, groping for a dead body! I tell you what, lads;

if I thought anything had really happened to Zenobia, I should feel

kind o' sorrowful."

"I wish, at least, you would hold your tongue," muttered I.

The moon, that night, though past the full, was still large and oval,

and having risen between eight and nine o'clock, now shone aslantwise

over the river, throwing the high, opposite bank, with its woods, into

deep shadow, but lighting up the hither shore pretty effectually. Not a

ray appeared to fall on the river itself. It lapsed imperceptibly

away, a broad, black, inscrutable depth, keeping its own secrets from

the eye of man, as impenetrably as mid-ocean could.

"Well, Miles Coverdale," said Foster, "you are the helmsman. How do

you mean to manage this business?"

"I shall let the boat drift, broadside foremost, past that stump," I

replied. "I know the bottom, having sounded it in fishing. The shore,

on this side, after the first step or two, goes off very abruptly; and

there is a pool, just by the stump, twelve or fifteen feet deep. The

current could not have force enough to sweep any sunken object, even if

partially buoyant, out of that hollow."

"Come, then," said Silas; "but I doubt whether I can touch bottom with

this hay-rake, if it's as deep as you say. Mr. Hollingsworth, I think

you'll be the lucky man to-night, such luck as it is."

We floated past the stump. Silas Foster plied his rake manfully,

poking it as far as he could into the water, and immersing the whole

length of his arm besides. Hollingsworth at first sat motionless, with

the hooked pole elevated in the air. But, by and by, with a nervous

and jerky movement, he began to plunge it into the blackness that

upbore us, setting his teeth, and making precisely such thrusts,

methought, as if he were stabbing at a deadly enemy. I bent over the

side of the boat. So obscure, however, so awfully mysterious, was that

dark stream, that--and the thought made me shiver like a leaf--I might

as well have tried to look into the enigma of the eternal world, to

discover what had become of Zenobia's soul, as into the river's depths,

to find her body. And there, perhaps, she lay, with her face upward,

while the shadow of the boat, and my own pale face peering downward,

passed slowly betwixt her and the sky!

Once, twice, thrice, I paddled the boat upstream, and again suffered it

to glide, with the river's slow, funereal motion, downward. Silas

Foster had raked up a large mass of stuff, which, as it came towards

the surface, looked somewhat like a flowing garment, but proved to be a

monstrous tuft of water-weeds. Hollingsworth, with a gigantic effort,

upheaved a sunken log. When once free of the bottom, it rose partly

out of water,--all weedy and slimy, a devilish-looking object, which

the moon had not shone upon for half a hundred years,--then plunged

again, and sullenly returned to its old resting-place, for the remnant

of the century.

"That looked ugly!" quoth Silas. "I half thought it was the Evil One,

on the same errand as ourselves,--searching for Zenobia."

"He shall never get her," said I, giving the boat a strong impulse.

"That's not for you to say, my boy," retorted the yeoman. "Pray God he

never has, and never may. Slow work this, however! I should really be

glad to find something! Pshaw! What a notion that is, when the only

good luck would be to paddle, and drift, and poke, and grope,

hereabouts, till morning, and have our labor for our pains! For my

part, I shouldn't wonder if the creature had only lost her shoe in the

mud, and saved her soul alive, after all. My stars! how she will laugh

at us, to-morrow morning!"

It is indescribable what an image of Zenobia--at the breakfast-table,

full of warm and mirthful life--this surmise of Silas Foster's brought

before my mind. The terrible phantasm of her death was thrown by it

into the remotest and dimmest background, where it seemed to grow as

improbable as a myth.

"Yes, Silas, it may be as you say," cried I. The drift of the stream

had again borne us a little below the stump, when I felt--yes, felt,

for it was as if the iron hook had smote my breast--felt

Hollingsworth's pole strike some object at the bottom of the river!

He started up, and almost overset the boat.

"Hold on!" cried Foster; "you have her!"

Putting a fury of strength into the effort, Hollingsworth heaved amain,

and up came a white swash to the surface of the river. It was the flow

of a woman's garments. A little higher, and we saw her dark hair

streaming down the current. Black River of Death, thou hadst yielded

up thy victim! Zenobia was found!

Silas Foster laid hold of the body; Hollingsworth likewise grappled

with it; and I steered towards the bank, gazing all the while at

Zenobia, whose limbs were swaying in the current close at the boat's

side. Arriving near the shore, we all three stept into the water, bore

her out, and laid her on the ground beneath a tree.

"Poor child!" said Foster,--and his dry old heart, I verily believe,

vouchsafed a tear, "I'm sorry for her!"

Were I to describe the perfect horror of the spectacle, the reader

might justly reckon it to me for a sin and shame. For more than twelve

long years I have borne it in my memory, and could now reproduce it as

freshly as if it were still before my eyes. Of all modes of death,

methinks it is the ugliest. Her wet garments swathed limbs of terrible

inflexibility. She was the marble image of a death-agony. Her arms

had grown rigid in the act of struggling, and were bent before her with

clenched hands; her knees, too, were bent, and--thank God for it!--in

the attitude of prayer. Ah, that rigidity! It is impossible to bear

the terror of it. It seemed,--I must needs impart so much of my own

miserable idea,--it seemed as if her body must keep the same position

in the coffin, and that her skeleton would keep it in the grave; and

that when Zenobia rose at the day of judgment, it would be in just the

same attitude as now!

One hope I had, and that too was mingled half with fear. She knelt as

if in prayer. With the last, choking consciousness, her soul, bubbling

out through her lips, it may be, had given itself up to the Father,

reconciled and penitent. But her arms! They were bent before her, as

if she struggled against Providence in never-ending hostility. Her

hands! They were clenched in immitigable defiance. Away with the

hideous thought. The flitting moment after Zenobia sank into the dark

pool--when her breath was gone, and her soul at her lips was as long,

in its capacity of God's infinite forgiveness, as the lifetime of the

world!

Foster bent over the body, and carefully examined it.

"You have wounded the poor thing's breast," said he to Hollingsworth,

"close by her heart, too!"

"Ha!" cried Hollingsworth with a start.

And so he had, indeed, both before and after death!

"See!" said Foster. "That's the place where the iron struck her. It

looks cruelly, but she never felt it!"

He endeavored to arrange the arms of the corpse decently by its side.

His utmost strength, however, scarcely sufficed to bring them down; and

rising again, the next instant, they bade him defiance, exactly as

before. He made another effort, with the same result.

"In God's name, Silas Foster," cried I with bitter indignation, "let

that dead woman alone!"

"Why, man, it's not decent!" answered he, staring at me in amazement.

"I can't bear to see her looking so! Well, well," added he, after a

third effort, "'tis of no use, sure enough; and we must leave the women

to do their best with her, after we get to the house. The sooner

that's done, the better."

We took two rails from a neighboring fence, and formed a bier by laying

across some boards from the bottom of the boat. And thus we bore

Zenobia homeward. 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.

By and by came three or four withered women and stood whispering around

the corpse, peering at it through their spectacles, holding up their

skinny hands, shaking their night-capped heads, and taking counsel of

one another's experience what was to be done.

With those tire-women we left Zenobia.

XXVIII. BLITHEDALE PASTURE

Blithedale, thus far in its progress, had never found the necessity of

a burial-ground. There was some consultation among us in what spot

Zenobia might most fitly be laid. It was my own wish that she should

sleep at the base of Eliot's pulpit, and that on the rugged front of

the rock the name by which we familiarly knew her, Zenobia,--and not

another word, should be deeply cut, and left for the moss and lichens

to fill up at their long leisure. But Hollingsworth (to whose ideas on

this point great deference was due) made it his request that her grave

might be dug on the gently sloping hillside, in the wide pasture,

where, as we once supposed, Zenobia and he had planned to build their

cottage. And thus it was done, accordingly.

She was buried very much as other people have been for hundreds of

years gone by. In anticipation of a death, we Blithedale colonists had

sometimes set our fancies at work to arrange a funereal ceremony, which

should be the proper symbolic expression of our spiritual faith and

eternal hopes; and this we meant to substitute for those customary

rites which were moulded originally out of the Gothic gloom, and by

long use, like an old velvet pall, have so much more than their first

death-smell in them. But when the occasion came we found it the

simplest and truest thing, after all, to content ourselves with the old

fashion, taking away what we could, but interpolating no novelties, and

particularly avoiding all frippery of flowers and cheerful emblems.

The procession moved from the farmhouse. Nearest the dead walked an

old man in deep mourning, his face mostly concealed in a white

handkerchief, and with Priscilla leaning on his arm. Hollingsworth and

myself came next. We all stood around the narrow niche in the cold

earth; all saw the coffin lowered in; all heard the rattle of the

crumbly soil upon its lid,--that final sound, which mortality awakens

on the utmost verge of sense, as if in the vain hope of bringing an

echo from the spiritual world.

I noticed a stranger,--a stranger to most of those present, though

known to me,--who, after the coffin had descended, took up a handful of

earth and flung it first into the grave. I had given up

Hollingsworth's arm, and now found myself near this man.

"It was an idle thing--a foolish thing--for Zenobia to do," said he.

"She was the last woman in the world to whom death could have been

necessary. It was too absurd! I have no patience with her."

"Why so?" I inquired, smothering my horror at his cold comment, in my

eager curiosity to discover some tangible truth as to his relation with

Zenobia. "If any crisis could justify the sad wrong she offered to

herself, it was surely that in which she stood. Everything had failed

her; prosperity in the world's sense, for her opulence was gone,--the

heart's prosperity, in love. And there was a secret burden on her, the

nature of which is best known to you. Young as she was, she had tried

life fully, had no more to hope, and something, perhaps, to fear. Had

Providence taken her away in its own holy hand, I should have thought

it the kindest dispensation that could be awarded to one so wrecked."

"You mistake the matter completely," rejoined Westervelt.

"What, then, is your own view of it?" I asked.

"Her mind was active, and various in its powers," said he. "Her heart

had a manifold adaptation; her constitution an infinite buoyancy, which

(had she possessed only a little patience to await the reflux of her

troubles) would have borne her upward triumphantly for twenty years to

come. Her beauty would not have waned--or scarcely so, and surely not

beyond the reach of art to restore it--in all that time. She had

life's summer all before her, and a hundred varieties of brilliant

success. What an actress Zenobia might have been! It was one of her

least valuable capabilities. How forcibly she might have wrought upon

the world, either directly in her own person, or by her influence upon

some man, or a series of men, of controlling genius! Every prize that

could be worth a woman's having--and many prizes which other women are

too timid to desire--lay within Zenobia's reach."

"In all this," I observed, "there would have been nothing to satisfy

her heart."

"Her heart!" answered Westervelt contemptuously. "That troublesome

organ (as she had hitherto found it) would have been kept in its due

place and degree, and have had all the gratification it could fairly

claim. She would soon have established a control over it. Love had

failed her, you say. Had it never failed her before? Yet she survived

it, and loved again,--possibly not once alone, nor twice either. And

now to drown herself for yonder dreamy philanthropist!"

"Who are you," I exclaimed indignantly, "that dare to speak thus of the

dead? You seem to intend a eulogy, yet leave out whatever was noblest

in her, and blacken while you mean to praise. I have long considered

you as Zenobia's evil fate. Your sentiments confirm me in the idea,

but leave me still ignorant as to the mode in which you have influenced

her life. The connection may have been indissoluble, except by death.

Then, indeed,--always in the hope of God's infinite mercy,--I cannot

deem it a misfortune that she sleeps in yonder grave!"

"No matter what I was to her," he answered gloomily, yet without actual

emotion. "She is now beyond my reach. Had she lived, and hearkened to

my counsels, we might have served each other well. But there Zenobia

lies in yonder pit, with the dull earth over her. Twenty years of a

brilliant lifetime thrown away for a mere woman's whim!"

Heaven deal with Westervelt according to his nature and deserts!--that

is to say, annihilate him. He was altogether earthy, worldly, made for

time and its gross objects, and incapable--except by a sort of dim

reflection caught from other minds--of so much as one spiritual idea.

Whatever stain Zenobia had was caught from him; nor does it seldom

happen that a character of admirable qualities loses its better life

because the atmosphere that should sustain it is rendered poisonous by

such breath as this man mingled with Zenobia's. Yet his reflections

possessed their share of truth. It was a woeful thought, that a woman

of Zenobia's diversified capacity should have fancied herself

irretrievably defeated on the broad battlefield of life, and with no

refuge, save to fall on her own sword, merely because Love had gone

against her. It is nonsense, and a miserable wrong,--the result, like

so many others, of masculine egotism,--that the success or failure of

woman's existence should be made to depend wholly on the affections,

and on one species of affection, while man has such a multitude of

other chances, that this seems but an incident. For its own sake, if

it will do no more, the world should throw open all its avenues to the

passport of a woman's bleeding heart.

As we stood around the grave, I looked often towards Priscilla,

dreading to see her wholly overcome with grief. And deeply grieved, in

truth, she was. But a character so simply constituted as hers has room

only for a single predominant affection. No other feeling can touch

the heart's inmost core, nor do it any deadly mischief. Thus, while we

see that such a being responds to every breeze with tremulous

vibration, and imagine that she must be shattered by the first rude

blast, we find her retaining her equilibrium amid shocks that might

have overthrown many a sturdier frame. So with Priscilla; her one

possible misfortune was Hollingsworth's unkindness; and that was

destined never to befall her, never yet, at least, for Priscilla has

not died.

But Hollingsworth! After all the evil that he did, are we to leave him

thus, blest with the entire devotion of this one true heart, and with

wealth at his disposal to execute the long-contemplated project that

had led him so far astray? What retribution is there here? My mind

being vexed with precisely this query, I made a journey, some years

since, for the sole purpose of catching a last glimpse of

Hollingsworth, and judging for myself whether he were a happy man or

no. I learned that he inhabited a small cottage, that his way of life

was exceedingly retired, and that my only chance of encountering him or

Priscilla was to meet them in a secluded lane, where, in the latter

part of the afternoon, they were accustomed to walk. I did meet them,

accordingly. As they approached me, I observed in Hollingsworth's face

a depressed and melancholy look, that seemed habitual; the powerfully

built man showed a self-distrustful weakness, and a childlike or

childish tendency to press close, and closer still, to the side of the

slender woman whose arm was within his. In Priscilla's manner there

was a protective and watchful quality, as if she felt herself the

guardian of her companion; but, likewise, a deep, submissive,

unquestioning reverence, and also a veiled happiness in her fair and

quiet countenance.

Drawing nearer, Priscilla recognized me, and gave me a kind and

friendly smile, but with a slight gesture, which I could not help

interpreting as an entreaty not to make myself known to Hollingsworth.

Nevertheless, an impulse took possession of me, and compelled me to

address him.

"I have come, Hollingsworth," said I, "to view your grand edifice for

the reformation of criminals. Is it finished yet?"

"No, nor begun," answered he, without raising his eyes. "A very small

one answers all my purposes."

Priscilla threw me an upbraiding glance. But I spoke again, with a

bitter and revengeful emotion, as if flinging a poisoned arrow at

Hollingsworth's heart.

"Up to this moment," I inquired, "how many criminals have you reformed?"

"Not one," said Hollingsworth, with his eyes still fixed on the ground.

"Ever since we parted, I have been busy with a single murderer."

Then the tears gushed into my eyes, and I forgave him; for I remembered

the wild energy, the passionate shriek, with which Zenobia had spoken

those words, "Tell him he has murdered me! Tell him that I'll haunt

him!"--and I knew what murderer he meant, and whose vindictive shadow

dogged the side where Priscilla was not.

The moral which presents itself to my reflections, as drawn from

Hollingsworth's character and errors, is simply this, that, admitting

what is called philanthropy, when adopted as a profession, to be often

useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, it is perilous to

the individual whose ruling passion, in one exclusive channel, it thus

becomes. It ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the heart, the rich

juices of which God never meant should be pressed violently out and

distilled into alcoholic liquor by an unnatural process, but should

render life sweet, bland, and gently beneficent, and insensibly

influence other hearts and other lives to the same blessed end. I see

in Hollingsworth an exemplification of the most awful truth in Bunyan's

book of such, from the very gate of heaven there is a by-way to the pit!

But, all this while, we have been standing by Zenobia's grave. I have

never since beheld it, but make no question that the grass grew all the

better, on that little parallelogram of pasture land, for the decay of

the beautiful woman who slept beneath. How Nature seems to love us!

And how readily, nevertheless, without a sigh or a complaint, she

converts us to a meaner purpose, when her highest one--that of a

conscious intellectual life and sensibility has been untimely balked!

While Zenobia lived, Nature was proud of her, and directed all eyes

upon that radiant presence, as her fairest handiwork. Zenobia

perished. Will not Nature shed a tear? Ah, no!--she adopts the

calamity at once into her system, and is just as well pleased, for

aught we can see, with the tuft of ranker vegetation that grew out of

Zenobia's heart, as with all the beauty which has bequeathed us no

earthly representative except in this crop of weeds. It is because the

spirit is inestimable that the lifeless body is so little valued.

XXIX. MILES COVERDALE'S CONFESSION

It remains only to say a few words about myself. Not improbably, the

reader might be willing to spare me the trouble; for I have made but a

poor and dim figure in my own narrative, establishing no separate

interest, and suffering my colorless life to take its hue from other

lives. But one still retains some little consideration for one's self;

so I keep these last two or three pages for my individual and sole

behoof.

But what, after all, have I to tell? Nothing, nothing, nothing! I

left Blithedale within the week after Zenobia's death, and went back

thither no more. The whole soil of our farm, for a long time

afterwards, seemed but the sodded earth over her grave. I could not

toil there, nor live upon its products. Often, however, in these years

that are darkening around me, I remember our beautiful scheme of a

noble and unselfish life; and how fair, in that first summer, appeared

the prospect that it might endure for generations, and be perfected, as

the ages rolled away, into the system of a people and a world! Were my

former associates now there,--were there only three or four of those

true-hearted men still laboring in the sun,--I sometimes fancy that I

should direct my world-weary footsteps thitherward, and entreat them to

receive me, for old friendship's sake. More and more I feel that we

had struck upon what ought to be a truth. Posterity may dig it up, and

profit by it. The experiment, so far as its original projectors were

concerned, proved, long ago, a failure; first lapsing into Fourierism,

and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher

spirit. Where once we toiled with our whole hopeful hearts, the town

paupers, aged, nerveless, and disconsolate, creep sluggishly afield.

Alas, what faith is requisite to bear up against such results of

generous effort!

My subsequent life has passed,--I was going to say happily, but, at all

events, tolerably enough. I am now at middle age, well, well, a step

or two beyond the midmost point, and I care not a fig who knows it!--a

bachelor, with no very decided purpose of ever being otherwise. I have

been twice to Europe, and spent a year or two rather agreeably at each

visit. Being well to do in the world, and having nobody but myself to

care for, I live very much at my ease, and fare sumptuously every day.

As for poetry, I have given it up, notwithstanding that Dr.

Griswold--as the reader, of course, knows--has placed me at a fair

elevation among our minor minstrelsy, on the strength of my pretty

little volume, published ten years ago. As regards human progress (in

spite of my irrepressible yearnings over the Blithedale reminiscences),

let them believe in it who can, and aid in it who choose. If I could

earnestly do either, it might be all the better for my comfort. As

Hollingsworth once told me, I lack a purpose. How strange! He was

ruined, morally, by an overplus of the very same ingredient, the want

of which, I occasionally suspect, has rendered my own life all an

emptiness. I by no means wish to die. Yet, were there any cause, in

this whole chaos of human struggle, worth a sane man's dying for, and

which my death would benefit, then--provided, however, the effort did

not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble--methinks I might be bold

to offer up my life. If Kossuth, for example, would pitch the

battlefield of Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and

choose a mild, sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflict, Miles

Coverdale would gladly be his man, for one brave rush upon the levelled

bayonets. Further than that, I should be loath to pledge myself.

I exaggerate my own defects. The reader must not take my own word for

it, nor believe me altogether changed from the young man who once hoped

strenuously, and struggled not so much amiss. Frostier heads than mine

have gained honor in the world; frostier hearts have imbibed new

warmth, and been newly happy. Life, however, it must be owned, has

come to rather an idle pass with me. Would my friends like to know

what brought it thither? There is one secret,--I have concealed it all

along, and never meant to let the least whisper of it escape,--one

foolish little secret, which possibly may have had something to do with

these inactive years of meridian manhood, with my bachelorship, with

the unsatisfied retrospect that I fling back on life, and my listless

glance towards the future. Shall I reveal it? It is an absurd thing

for a man in his afternoon,--a man of the world, moreover, with these

three white hairs in his brown mustache and that deepening track of a

crow's-foot on each temple,--an absurd thing ever to have happened, and

quite the absurdest for an old bachelor, like me, to talk about. But

it rises to my throat; so let it come.

I perceive, moreover, that the confession, brief as it shall be, will

throw a gleam of light over my behavior throughout the foregoing

incidents, and is, indeed, essential to the full understanding of my

story. The reader, therefore, since I have disclosed so much, is

entitled to this one word more. As I write it, he will charitably

suppose me to blush, and turn away my face:

I--I myself--was in love--with--Priscilla!

End of Project Gutenberg's The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne