XXVI ZENOBIA AND COVERDALE

The Blithedale Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

XXVI ZENOBIA AND COVERDALE, THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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.