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




The Blithedale Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne



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 redtipt 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 butterplate;
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 t 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 hayingtime.
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 longstalked 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, frostnipt 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 soleleather, 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 pocketcomb 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 cowyards and pigsties 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, wellmeaning 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 father imagine that Theodore
now began robe 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 thee 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-greatgrandson 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 abidingplace.  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
woodside, 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 commonsense."

"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
selfdevotion,--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 ideal" 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 wellbeing,
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 commonsense 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 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 m 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
earthmould 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 whitepine 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?  Amiserable, 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, "'t is 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!