 19 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 endeavour 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, me thought a woman like Zenobia and a man like Hollingsworth should have selected me. And now, when the event has long been passed, 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 mead, 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, but 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 I sat in my rocking chair, too far withdrawn from the window, to expose myself to another rebuke like that already inflicted.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, without affecting 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 through 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 somber 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 behaviour 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 lifelong 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 Glythdale 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 stepped 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 past, 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 jeweler'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 Elliot'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 reveling 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 Blythdale. In both there was something like the illusion which a great actress flings around her. Have you given up Blythdale for ever, I inquired? Why should you think so, don't 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 meager 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 endeavour 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, Cooley, reminds me of our poor friend Hollingsworth. Perhaps he was in your thoughts when you spoke thus. Poor fellow, it is a pity that by the fault of a narrow education he should have so completely immolated himself to that one idea of his, especially as the slightest modicum of common sense, would teach him its utter impracticability. Now that I have returned into the world and can look at his project from a distance, it requires quite all my real regard for this respectable and well-intentioned man to prevent me from 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 tranquilized 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 apatham. 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 woodpath 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 you not 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. End of Chapter 19 Chapter 20 of the Blythe Dale Romance Priscilla immediately answered the summons and made her appearance through the door of the Boudoir. I had conceived the idea, which I now recognise 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 fear of her. There 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 whither 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 as 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 colour, 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 splendour 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 airline which separates one class from another, but what was ranked to the colonists of Blythedale. There were other reasons, I replied, why I should have demonstrated myself an ass had I fallen in love with Priscilla. By the by 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 him a line 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, and insolent curiosity, a meddlesome temper, a cold-blooded criticism founded on a shallow interpretation of half-perceptions, a monstrous skepticism in regard to any conscience or any wisdom except one's own, a most irreverent propensity to thrust Providence aside and substitute oneself 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 Halling's words. 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 Blythdale? 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 Halling's worth 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 Halling's worth'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 stopped 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. Wither 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. CHAPTER 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 be take 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 be stow of mine. Nevertheless there occurred to me one other thing to be done. Remembering old Moody 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 humours and sober jollities of the thirsty souls around me. At my first entrance old Moody 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 beef steak 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 hind quarters 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 canvas-backed ducks in which the mottled feathers were depicted with the accuracy of a daguerreotype. Some very hungry painter I suppose had wrought these subjects of still life, heightening his imagination with his appetite and earning it is to be hoped the privilege of a daily dinner off whichever of his pictorial viands he liked best. Then there was a fine old cheese in which you could almost discern the mites and some sardines on a small plate very richly done and looking as if oozy with the oil in which they had been smothered. All these things were so perfectly imitated that you seemed to have the genuine article before you and yet with an indescribable ideal charm. It took away the grossness from what was fleshiest and fattest and thus helped the life of man even in its earthliest relations to appear rich and noble as well as warm, cheerful and substantial. There were pictures, too, of gallant revelers those of the old time, Flemish apparently with doublets and slashed sleeves, drinking their wine out of fantastic long-stemmed glasses, quaffing joyously, quaffing forever with inaudible laughter and song, while the champagne bubbled immortally against their moustaches, or the purple tide of burgundy ran inexhaustibly down their throats. But in an obscure corner of the saloon there was a little picture, excellently done, moreover, of a ragged, bloated, New England topper stretched out on a bench in the heavy apoplectic sleep of drunkenness. The death in life was too well portrayed. You smelt the fuming liquor that had brought on this syncope. Your only comfort lay in the forced reflection that, real as he looked, the poor Catef was but imaginary, a bit of painted canvas whom no delirium tremors, nor so much as a retributive headache awaited on the morrow. By this time it being past eleven o'clock the two barkeepers of the saloon were in pretty constant activity. One of these young men had a rare faculty in the concoction of gin cocktails. It was a spectacle to behold how, with a tumbler in each hand, he tossed the contents from one to the other. Never conveying it a rye nor spilling the least drop, he compelled the frothy liquor, as it seemed to me, to spout forth from one glass and descend into the other in a great parabolic curve as well-defined and calculable as a planet's orbit. He had a good forehead, with a particularly large development just above the eyebrows, fine intellectual gifts, no doubt, which he had educated to this profitable end, being famous for nothing but gin cocktails and commanding a fair salary by his one accomplishment. These cocktails and other artificial combinations of liquor, of which there were at least a score, though mostly I suspect fantastic in their differences, were much in favour with the younger class of customers who at farthest had only reached the second stage of potatory life. The staunch old soakers, on the other hand, men who, if put on tap, would have yielded a red alcoholic liquor by way of blood, usually confined themselves to plain brandy and water, gin or West India rum, and often times they prefaced their dram with some medicinal remark as to the wholesomeness and stomatic 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 barkeeper, he forthwith produced these choicestant peculiar cordials which it was a matter of great interest and favour 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 smoldering 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 wring 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 rockwork, 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 coquette 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 Moody 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 Moody'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 irrepressible 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. Moody, your old acquaintance answered I. It is some time now since we ate luncheon together at Blythdale, 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 colourless 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 grey, 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 affect 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. Moody 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 barkeeper 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 had any right to its label. You cannot suppose, sir, said Moody, 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. Moody 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 Moody shyly? But then he took courage as it were, and uttered a feeble little laugh. The flavour 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. Moody 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 favour 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 clared 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. Moody, I replied, till this very moment. Ah! sighed old Moody. 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 grey 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 Moody began to talk. His communications referred exclusively to a long past and more fortunate period of his life, with only a few unavoidable illusions to the circumstances that had reduced him to his present state. But having once got the clue, 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 licence, worthier of a small poet than of a grave biographer. CHAPTER XXII 5 and twenty years ago at the epic of this story there dwelt in one of the middle states a man whom we shall call Fontleroy, 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 splendour 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 were 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 Fontleroy had thus spent a few empty years, corresponding 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 here to foredistinguished 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. Fontleroy'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 Fontleroy. 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. Or 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 elusiveness of his existence. Not, however, that the physical substance of Fontleroy 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 Fontleroy 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 levies in a great room where now slept twenty Irish bedfellows and died in Fontleroy'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 laughs. Such was the chamber's aspect, as if with its splinters and rags of dirty splendor it were a kind of practical jibe at this poor ruined man of show. At first and at irregular intervals his relatives allowed Fontleroy 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 Fontleroy 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 a bird within the memory of those who knew him now had he the hardy-hood to show his full front to the world. He sculpted 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. Fontleroy 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, Fontleroy looked forth out of his present grimy environment into that past magnificence and wondered whether the grandeur of yesterday or the popper of today were real. But in my mind the one and the other were alike impalpable. In truth it was Fontleroy'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 Fontleroy 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 sun-beam, it would pass right through her figure and trace out the cracked and dusty window-pains 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 Fontleroy, 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 clamour 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 in 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 weakness 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 rumour spread thence into a wider circle. Those who knew Old Moody, 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 horde of facts and imperfect theories that had partially won credence in elder times but which modern skepticism 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 Moody's chamber door, and several times he came again. He was a marvelously 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 cheeks 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 Fontleroi's prosperity, what had become of her. Fontleroi'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 luxuriously 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 Fontleroi 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 Zanobia'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 Zanobia 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 Zanobia'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 Blythdale. 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 Zanobia into whose large heart she hoped to nestle. One evening, months after Priscilla's departure, when Moody, or shall we call him Fontleroi, 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 ahead out of a contiguous chamber. There was then a knock at Moody's door. "'Come in,' said he. And Zanobia entered. The details of the interview that followed being unknown to me, while notwithstanding it would be a pity quite to lose the picturesqueness of the situation, I shall attempt to sketch it, mainly from fancy, although with some general grounds of surmise in regard to the old man's feelings. She gazed wonderingly at the dismal chamber, dismal to her who beheld it only for an instant, and how much more so to him into whose brain each bear 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 Zanobia 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 Moody. "'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 jeweled 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 heir of state and grandeur. "'It is well,' cried old Moody. 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 neighbour? 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, Fontleroy 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 yours,' said he. True my brother's wealth, he dying in testate, 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 dropped off like tatters of once gaudy apparel from my debased and ruined person, is all renewed for her sake. Where 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 bedazzled by her the brilliant child of my prosperity. It is fontleroy that still shines through her. But then perhaps another thought occurred to him. My poor Priscilla, 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 willfully away. CHAPTER XXIII A VILLAGE HALL Well I betook myself away and wandered up and down like an exercised 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 impractic ability 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 needed 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 aligners 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. This passed several weeks, time long enough for my brown and toil-hardened hands to recustom 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 epic of annihilated space, I might in the time I was away from Blythdale 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 thomitor gist, 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 mannequins 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 selectman of the village chants 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 hand-bills stuck up in the bar room and on the signpost 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 sundy black coats with shrewd, hard, and 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 shopkeeper, all looking rather suburban than rural. In these days there is absolutely no rusticity except when the actual labour of the soil leaves its earth-mold 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 a while 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 Zanobia? 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. Zanobia, when I last saw her, he answered, was at Blythdale. 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 in so much 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 babes 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 mold 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 epic of rapping spirits and all the wonders that have followed in their train, such as tables upset by invisible agencies, bells self-told at funerals, and ghostly music performed on Jews' harps, had not yet arrived. Alas, my countrymen, me thinks 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, a judged unworthy of the eternal world, and on the most favourable 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 bootheels. 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 salam but with 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 Blythdale, 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 affected. 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 file. At the close of his exhortium the professor beckoned with his hand once, twice, thrice, and a figure became 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 amphitheater, are of thinner substance in her view than the ariest 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 clamour that methodite might have reached, at least a little way, into the eternal sphere. Finally, with the ascent 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 bashfulest 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 a rise 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 cirrus, a prophetess, in the harsher judgment of others a mount-bank. 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 Elliot's pulpit in the Blythe Dale Woods at the feet of him who now summoned her to the shelter of his arms. And the true heartthrob 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 for ever. CHAPTER 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 Blythe Dale. 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 vigour remained as elastic as before. The atmosphere had a spirit and a 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 somber 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 the 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 Zenobias 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 verger 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 Barbary 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 Blythdale for that sole purpose I should examine these things so like a peaceful bosomed naturalist, nor why amid all my sympathies and fears their 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 mystily 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 thralldom 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 stepped at all, it must be as an intruder and at a peril that I could not estimate. Drawing nearer to Blythdale 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 Blythdale nor ever had been, nor any brotherhood of thoughtful labourers 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 green suede, 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 wence through the trees. I began to catch glimpses of the Blythdale 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 labour. 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 unrecognised, unseen, and never look at Blythdale 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 helped 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 bow. 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 a slant wise over the water, is depicting itself to my fancy at this instant. And wondering how deep it was, and if any overladen soul had ever flung its weight of mortality in thither, and if it thus escaped the burden, or only made it heavier. And perhaps the skeleton of the drowned wretch still lay beneath the inscrutable depth, clinging to some sunken log at the bottom with the gripe of its old despair. So slight, however, was the track of these gloomy ideas, that I soon forgot them in the contemplation of a brood of wild ducks which were floating on the river, and anon took flight, leaving each a bright streak over the black surface. By and by I came to my hermitage in the heart of the white pine-tree, and clamoring 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 the wild, yet free from that un-gentle flavor which distinguishes nearly all our native and uncultivated grapes. Me thought 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 at 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 flagmatically 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 base of grown people, as if solemn pipe organs 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 fleet or 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 fairy 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 Malpitcher, 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 nearby 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 Tamashanter, tuned his fiddle, and summoned the whole motley route to a dance, before partaking of the festival 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 altogether, and they became a kind of entanglement that went nigh to turn one's brain with merely looking at it. Anon they stopped all of a sudden, and staring at one another's figures, set up a roar of laughter, where at 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 revelers. 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 fortune teller 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 Acteon, 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 maul 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 cord, 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 Nye Elliot's pulpit, at the base of which sat Hollingsworth with Priscilla at his feet, and Zenobia standing before them.