XXII FAUNTLEROY

The Blithedale Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

XXII FAUNTLEROY, THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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.