 CHAPTER XIII The illustrious society of Blythdale, though it toiled in downright earnest for the good of mankind, yet not unfrequently illuminated its laborious life with an afternoon or evening of pastime. Picnics under the trees were considerably in vogue, and within doors fragmentary bits of theatrical performance such as single acts of tragedy or comedy, or dramatic proverbs and charades. Zenobia besides was fond of giving us readings from Shakespeare and often with a depth of tragic power or breadth of comic effect that made one feel it an intolerable wrong to the world that she did not at once go upon the stage. Tableau vivant were another of our occasional modes of amusement in which scarlet shawls, old silken robes, ruffs, velvets, furs, and all kinds of miscellaneous trumpery converted our familiar companions into the people of a pictorial world. We had been thus engaged on the evening after the incident narrated in the last chapter. Several splendid works of art either arranged after engravings from the Old Masters or original illustrations of scenes in history or romance had been presented, and we were earnestly in treating Zenobia for more. She stood with a meditative air holding a large piece of gauze or some such ethereal stuff as if considering what picture should next occupy the frame while at her feet lay a heap of many-colored garments which her quick fancy and magic skill could so easily convert into gorgeous draperies for heroes and princesses. I am getting weary of this, said she, after a moment's thought. Our own features and our own figures and heirs show a little too intrusively through all the characters we assume. We have so much familiarity with one another's realities that we cannot remove ourselves at pleasure into an imaginary sphere. Let us have no more pictures tonight, but to make you what poor amends I can, how would you like to have me trump up a wild spectral legend on the spur of the moment? Zenobia had the gift of telling a fanciful little story offhand in a way that made it greatly more effective than it was usually found to be when she afterwards elaborated the same production with her pen. Her proposal, therefore, was greeted with acclamation. Oh! a story, a story by all means, cried the young girls, no matter how marvelous we will believe it every word and let it be a ghost story, if you please. No, not exactly a ghost story, answered Zenobia, but something so nearly like it that you shall hardly tell the difference. And Priscilla, stand you before me where I may look at you and get my inspiration out of your eyes. They are very deep and dreamy tonight. I know not whether the following version of her story will retain any portion of its pristine character, but as Zenobia told it wildly and rapidly, hesitating at no extravagance, and dashing at absurdities which I am too timorous to repeat, giving it the varied emphasis of her inimitable voice and the pictorial illustration of her mobile face, while through it all we caught the freshest aroma of the thoughts as they came bubbling out of her mind. Thus narrated and thus heard, the legend seemed quite a remarkable affair. I scarcely knew at the time whether she intended us to laugh or be more seriously impressed. From beginning to end it was undeniable nonsense, but not necessarily the worse for that. THE SILVERY VALE You have heard, my dear friends, of the veiled lady who grew suddenly so very famous a few months ago. And have you never thought how remarkable it was that this marvelous creature should vanish all at once while her renown was on the increase, before the public had grown weary of her, and when the enigma of her character, instead of being solved, presented itself more mystically at every exhibition? Your last appearance, as you know, was before a crowded audience. The next evening, although the bills had announced her at the corner of every street, in red letters of a gigantic size, there was no veiled lady to be seen. Now listen to my simple little tale, and you shall hear the very latest incident in the known life, if life it may be called, which seemed to have no more reality than the candlelight image of one's self, which peeps at us outside of a dark window pain, the life of this shadowy phenomenon. A party of young gentlemen you are to understand were enjoying themselves one afternoon, as young gentlemen are sometimes fond of doing, over a bottle or two of champagne, and among other ladies, less mysterious, the subject of the veiled lady, as was very natural, happened to come up before them for discussion. She rose as it were with the sparkling effervescence of their wine, and appeared in a more airy and fantastic light on account of the medium through which they saw her. They repeated to one another between jest and earnest, all the wild stories that were in vogue. Nor I presumed they hesitate to add any small circumstance that the inventive whim of the moment might suggest, to heighten the marvellousness of their theme. But what an audacious report was that observed one which pretended to assert the identity of this strange creature with a young lady, and here he mentioned her name, the daughter of one of our most distinguished families. Ah, there is more in that story than can well be accounted for, remarked another, I have it on good authority that the young lady in question is invariably out of sight and not to be traced, even by her own family, at the hours when the veiled lady is before the public, nor can any satisfactory explanation be given of her disappearance. And just look at the thing. Her brother is a young fellow of spirit. He cannot but be aware of these rumours in reference to his sister. Why then does he not come forward to defend her character, unless he is conscious that an investigation would only make the matter worse? It is essential to the purposes of my legend to distinguish one of these young gentlemen from his companions, so for the sake of a soft and pretty name, such as we of the literary sisterhood invariably bestow upon our heroes, I deem it fit to call him Theodore. Pasha exclaimed Theodore, her brother is no such fool. Nobody, unless his brain be as full of bubbles as this wine, can seriously think of crediting that ridiculous rumour. Why if my senses did not play me false, which never was the case yet, I affirm that I saw that very lady last evening at the exhibition while this veiled phenomenon was playing off her juggling tricks. What can you say to that? Oh, it was a spectral illusion that you saw replied his friends with a general laugh. The veiled lady is quite up to such a thing. However, as the above-mentioned fable could not hold its ground against Theodore's downright refutation, they went on to speak of other stories which the wild babble of the town had set afloat. Some upheld that the veil covered the most beautiful countenance in the world, others and certainly with more reason considering the sex of the veiled lady, that the face was the most hideous and horrible, and that this was her sole motive for hiding it. It was the face of a corpse, it was the head of a skeleton, it was a monstrous visage with snaky locks like Medusa's, and one great red eye in the centre of the forehead. Again it was affirmed that there was no single and unchangeable set of features beneath the veil, but that whosoever should be bold enough to lift it would behold the features of that person in all the world who was destined to be his fate. Perhaps he would be greeted by the tender smile of the woman whom he loved, or quite as probably the deadly scowl of his bitterest enemy would throw a blight over his life. They quoted moreover this startling explanation of the whole affair that the magician who exhibited the veiled lady and who by the by was the handsomest man in the whole world had bartered his own soul for seven years' possession of a familiar fiend and that the last year of the contract was wearing towards its clothes. If it were worth our while I could keep you till an hour beyond midnight listening to a thousand such absurdities as these, but finally our friend Theodore who prided himself upon his common sense found the matter getting quite beyond his patience. I offer any wager you like, cried he, setting down his glass so forcibly as to break the stem of it that this very evening I find out the mystery of the veiled lady. Young men I am told boggle at nothing over their wine, so after a little more talk a wager of considerable amount was actually laid, the money staked, and Theodore left to choose his own method of settling the dispute. How he managed did I know not, nor is it of any great importance to this voracious legend. The most natural way to be sure was by bribing the doorkeeper, or possibly he preferred clamoring in at the window. But at any rate that very evening while the exhibition was going forward in the hall Theodore contrived to gain admittance into the private withdrawing room whither the veiled lady was accustomed to retire at the close of her performances. There he waited, listening I suppose to the stifled hum of the great audience, and no doubt he could distinguish the deep tones of the magician, causing the wonders that he wrought to appear more dark and intricate by his mystic pretense of an explanation. Perhaps, too, in the intervals of the wild, breezy music which accompanied the exhibition, he might hear the low voice of the veiled lady conveying her sibling responses. Firm as Theodore's nerves might be, and much as he prided himself on his sturdy perception of realities, I should not be surprised if his heart throbbed at a little more than its ordinary rate. Theodore concealed himself behind a screen. In due time the performance was brought to a close, and whether the door was softly opened, or whether her bodyless presence came through the wall is more than I can say. But all at once without the young man's knowing how it happened, a veiled figure stood in the centre of the room. It is one thing to be in the presence of this mystery in the hall of exhibition where the warm, dense life of hundreds of other mortals kept up the beholder's courage and distributed her influence among so many. It was another thing to be quite alone with her, and that, too, with a hostile or at least an unauthorised and unjustifiable purpose. I further imagine that Theodore now began to be sensible of something more serious in his enterprise than he had been quite aware of while he sat with his boon companions over their sparkling wine. Very strange it must be confessed was the movement with which the figure floated to and fro over the carpet, with the silvery veil covering her from head to foot. So impalpable, so ethereal, so without substance as the texture seemed, yet hiding her every outline in an impenetrability like that of midnight. Surely she did not walk. She floated and flitted and hovered about the room. No sound of a footstep, no perceptible motion of a limb. It was as if a wandering breeze wafted her before it at its own wild and gentle pleasure. But by and by a purpose began to be discernible throughout the seeming vagueness of her unrest. She was in quest of something. Could it be that a subtle pre-sentiment had informed her of the young man's presence? And if so, did the veiled lady seek, or did she shun him? The doubt in Theodore's mind was speedily resolved, for after a moment or two of these erratic flutterings she advanced more decidedly and stood motionless before the screen. Thou art here, said a soft, low voice. Come forth, Theodore. Thus summoned by his name Theodore as a man of courage had no choice. He emerged from his concealment and presented himself before the veiled lady with the wine flush it may be quite gone out of his cheeks. What wits thou with me, she inquired, with the same gentle composure that was in her former utterance? Mysterious creature replied Theodore, I would know who and what you are. My lips are forbidden to betray the secret, said the veiled lady. At whatever risk I must discover it, rejoined Theodore. Then, said the mystery, there is no way save to lift my veil. And Theodore, partly recovering his audacity, stepped forward on the instant to do as the veiled lady had suggested. But she floated backward to the opposite side of the room as if the young man's breath had possessed power enough to waft her away. Pause one little instant, said the soft, low voice, and learn the conditions of what thou art so bold to undertake. Thou canst go hence and think of me no more, or at thy option thou canst lift this mysterious veil beneath which I am a sad and lonely prisoner, in a bondage which is worse to me than death. But before raising it I entreat thee in all maiden modesty to bend forward and impress a kiss where my breath stirs the veil, and my virgin lips shall come forward to meet thy lips. And from that instant, Theodore, thou shalt be mine, and I thine, with never more a veil between us. And all the felicity of earth and of the future world shall be thine and mine together. So much may a maiden say behind the veil. If thou shrinkest from this, there is yet another way. And what is that, asked Theodore? Dost thou hesitate, said the veiled lady, to pledge thyself to me by meeting these lips of mine, while the veil yet hides my face? Has not thy heart recognized me? Does thou come hither, not in holy faith, nor with a pure and generous purpose, but in scornful skepticism and idle curiosity? Still thou mayest lift the veil, but from that instant, Theodore, I am doomed to be thy evil fate, nor wilt thou ever taste another breath of happiness. There was a shade of inexpressible sadness in the utterance of these last words. But Theodore, whose natural tendency was toward skepticism, felt himself almost injured and insulted by the veiled lady's proposal that he should pledge himself, for life and eternity, to so questionable a creature as herself. Or even that she should suggest an inconsequential kiss, taking in to view the probability that her face was none of the most bewitching. A delightful idea truly that he should salute the lips of a dead girl, or the jaws of a skeleton, or the grinning cavity of a monster's mouth. Even should she prove a comely maiden enough in other respects, the odds were ten to one that her teeth were defective, a terrible drawback on the delectableness of a kiss. Excuse me, fair lady, said Theodore, and I think he nearly burst into a laugh, if I prefer to lift the veil first, and for this affair of the kiss we may decide upon it afterwards. Thou hast made thy choice, said the sweet, sad voice behind the veil, and there seemed a tender but unresentful sense of wrong done to womanhood by the young man's contemptuous interpretation of her offer. I must not counsel thee to pause, although thy fate is still in thine own hand. Grasping at the veil he flung it upward, and caught a glimpse of a pale lovely face beneath, just one momentary glimpse, and then the apparition vanished, and the silvery veil fluttered slowly down, and lay upon the floor. Theodore was alone. Our legend leaves him there. His retribution was to pine for ever and ever for another sight of that dim, mournful face which might have been his lifelong household fireside joy, to desire and waste life in a feverish quest, and never meet it more. But what in good sooth had become of the veiled lady? Had all her existence been comprehended within that mysterious veil, and was she now annihilated? Or was she a spirit with a heavenly essence, but which might have been tamed down to human bliss, had Theodore been brave and true enough to claim her? Harken, my sweet friends, and harken, dear Priscilla, and you shall learn the little more that Zenobia can tell you. Just at the moment, so far as can be ascertained, when the veiled lady vanished, a maiden, pale and shadowy, rose up amid a knot of visionary people who were seeking for the better life. She was so gentle and so sad, a nameless melancholy gave her such hold upon their sympathies that they never thought of questioning whence she came. She might have here to fore existed, or her thin substance might have been molded out of air at the very instant when they first beheld her. It was all one to them, they took her to their hearts. Among them was a lady to whom, more than to all the rest, this pale, mysterious girl attached herself. But one morning the lady was wandering in the woods, and there met her a figure in an oriental robe with a dark beard, and holding in his hand a silvery veil. He motioned her to stay. Being a woman of some nerve she did not shriek nor run away nor faint as many ladies would have been apt to do, but stood quietly and bade him speak. The truth was she had seen his face before but had never feared it, although she knew him to be a terrible magician. Lady said he, with a warning gesture, you are in peril. Peril, she exclaimed, and of what nature? There is a certain maiden, replied the magician, who has come out of the realm of mystery and made herself your most intimate companion. Now the fates have so ordained it that whether by her own will or no, this stranger is your deadliest enemy. In love, in worldly fortune, in all your pursuit of happiness, she is doomed to fling a blight over your prospects. There is but one possibility of thwarting her disastrous influence. Then tell me that one method, said the lady. Take this veil, he answered, holding forth the silvery texture. It is a spell, it is a powerful enchantment which I wrought for her sake, and beneath which she was once my prisoner. Throw it at unawares over the head of this secret foe. Stamp your foot and cry, arise, magician, here is the veiled lady, and immediately I will rise up through the earth and seize her, and from that moment you are safe. So the lady took the silvery veil which was like woven air or like some substance airier than nothing and that would float upward and be lost among the clouds where she wants to let it go. Returning homeward she found the shadowy girl amid the knot of visionary transcendentalists who were still seeking for the better life. She was joyous now and had a rose bloom in her cheeks and was one of the prettiest creatures and seemed one of the happiest that the world could show. But the lady stole noiselessly behind her and threw the veil over her head. As the slight ethereal texture sank inevitably down over her figure the poor girl strove to raise it and met her dear friend's eyes with one glance of mortal terror and deep, deep reproach. It could not change her purpose. Arise, magician, she exclaimed, stamping her foot upon the earth, here is the veiled lady. At the word up rose the bearded man in the oriental robes, the beautiful, the dark magician who had bartered away his soul. He threw his arms around the veiled lady and she was his bond slave for evermore. Zanobia all this while had been holding the piece of gauze and so managed it as greatly to increase the dramatic effect of the legend at those points where the magic veil was to be described. Arriving at the catastrophe and uttering the fatal words she flung the gauze over Priscilla's head and for an instant her auditors held their breath, half expecting I verily believe that the magician would start up through the floor and carry off our poor little friend before our eyes. As for Priscilla she stood droopingly in the midst of us, making no attempt to remove the veil. How do you find yourself, my love, said Zanobia, lifting a corner of the gauze and peeping beneath it with a mischievous smile? Ah, the dear little soul, why she is really going to faint. Mr. Coverdale, Mr. Coverdale, pray bring a glass of water. Her nerves, being none of the strongest, Priscilla hardly recovered her equanimity during the rest of the evening. This, to be sure, was a great pity, but nevertheless we thought at a very bright idea of Zanobia's to bring her legend to so effective a conclusion. The Blythe Dale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne Chapter 14 Eliot's Pulpit Our Sundays at Blythe Dale were not ordinarily kept with such rigid observance as might have befitted the descendants of the pilgrims whose high enterprise as we sometimes flattered ourselves we had taken up and were carrying it onward and aloft to a point which they never dreamed of attaining. On that hallowed day it is true we rested from our labours. Our oxen, relieved from their weak day yoke, roamed at large through the pasture, each yoke fellow, however, keeping close beside his mate and continuing to acknowledge from the force of habit and sluggish sympathy the union which the taskmaster had imposed for his own hard ends. As for us human yoke fellows, chosen companions of toil, whose hose had clinked together throughout the week, we wandered off in various directions to enjoy our interval of repose. Some, I believe, went devoutly to the village church. Others, it may be, ascended a city or a country pulpit, wearing the clerical robe with so much dignity that you would scarcely have suspected the yeomans frock to have been flung off only since milking time. Others took long rambles among the rustic lanes and bypass, pausing to look at black old farmhouses with their sloping roofs, and at the modern cottage, so like a plaything that it seemed as if real joy or sorrow could have no scope within, and at the more pretending villa with its range of wooden columns supporting the needless insolence of a great portico. Some betook themselves into the wide dusky barn and lay there for hours together on the odorous hay, while the sunstreaks and the shadows strove together, these to make the barn solemn, those to make it cheerful, and both were conquerors, and the swallows twittered a cheery anthem, flashing into sight or vanishing as they darted to and fro among the golden rules of sunshine. And others went a little way into the woods and threw themselves on Mother Earth, pillowing their heads on a heap of moss, the green decay of an old log, and dropping asleep the bumblebees and mosquitoes sang and buzzed about their ears, causing the slumbers to twitch and start without awaking. With Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla, and myself it grew to be a custom to spend the Sabbath afternoon at a certain rock. It was known to us under the name of Eliot's Pulpit, from a tradition that the venerable Apostle Eliot had preached there two centuries gone by to an Indian auditory. The old pine forest through which the Apostle's voice was wont to sound had fallen an immemorial time ago, but the soil being of the rudest and most broken surface had apparently never been brought under tillage. Other growths, maple and beech and birch had succeeded to the primeval trees so that it was still as wild attractive woodland as the great great great great grandson of one of Eliot's Indians had any such posterity been in existence, could have desired for the sight and shelter of his weak womb. These after-growths indeed lose the stately solemnity of the original forest. If left in do neglect, however, they run into an entanglement of softer wildness, among the rustling leaves of which the sun can scatter cheerfulness as it never could among the dark-browed pines. The rock itself rose some twenty or thirty feet, a shattered granite boulder or heap of boulders, with an irregular outline and many fissures out of which sprang shrubs, bushes and even trees as if the scanty soil within those crevices were sweeter to their roots than any other earth. At the base of the pulpit the broken boulders inclined towards each other so as to form a shallow cave within which our little party had sometimes found protection from a summer shower. On the threshold or just across it grew a tuft of pale column-bines in their season, and violets, sad and shadowy recluses such as Priscilla was when we first knew her. Children of the sun who had never seen their father but dwelt among damp mosses though not akin to them. At the summit the rock was overshadowed by the canopy of a birch tree which served as a sounding board for the pulpit. Beneath this shade, with my eyes of sense half shut and those of the imagination widely opened, I used to see the holy apostle of the Indians with the sunlight flickering down upon him through the leaves and glorifying his figure as with the half-perceptible glow of a transfiguration. I, the more minutely described the rock and this little Sabbath's solitude, because Hollings' worth at our solicitation often ascended Eliot's pulpit and not exactly preached but talked to us, his few disciples, in a strain that rose and fell as naturally as the wind's breath among the leaves of the birch tree. No other speech of man has ever moved me like some of those discourses. It seemed most pitiful, a positive calamity to the world, that a treasury of golden thoughts should thus be scattered by the liberal handful down among us three when a thousand hearers might have been the richer for them and Hollings' worth the richer likewise by the sympathy of the multitudes. After speaking much or little as might happen, he would descend from his grey pulpit and generally fling himself at full length on the ground face downward. Meanwhile, we talked around him on such topics as were suggested by the discourse. Since her interview with Westervelt, Zenobia's continual inequalities of temper had been rather difficult for her friends to bear. On the first Sunday after that incident, when Hollings' worth had clamored down from Eliot's pulpit, she declaimed with great earnestness and passion, nothing short of anger, on the injustice which the world did to women and equally to itself by not allowing them in freedom and honour and with the fullest welcome, their natural utterance in public. It shall not always be so, cried she, if I live another year I will lift up my own voice in behalf of women's wider liberty. She perhaps saw me smile. What matter of ridicule do you find in this, Miles Coverdale exclaimed Zenobia with a flash of anger in her eyes? That smile permit me to say makes me suspicious of a low tone of feeling and shallow thought. It is my belief, yes and my prophecy, should I die before it happens, that when my sex shall achieve its rights, there will be ten eloquent women where there is now one eloquent man. Thus far no woman in the world has ever spoken out her whole heart and her whole mind. The mistrust and disapproval of the vast bulk of society throttles us as with two gigantic hands at our throats. We mumble a few weak words and leave a thousand better ones unsaid. You let us write a little, it is true, on a limited range of subjects, but the pen is not for women, her power is too natural and immediate, it is with the living voice alone that she can compel the world to recognize the light of her intellect and the depth of her heart. Now, though I could not well say so to Zenobia, I had not smiled from any unworthy estimate of woman or in denial of the claims which she is beginning to put forth. What amused and puzzled me was the fact that women, however intellectually superior, so seldom disquiet themselves about the rights or wrongs of their sex, unless their own individual affections chance to lie in idleness or to be ill at ease. They are not natural reformers, but become such by the pressure of exceptional misfortune. I could measure Zenobia's inward trouble by the animosity with which she now took up the general quarrel of woman against man. I will give you leave, Zenobia, replied I, to fling your utmost scorn upon me if you ever hear me utter a sentiment unfavorable to the widest liberty which woman has yet dreamed of. I would give her all she asks and add a great deal more, which she will not be the party to demand, but which men, if they were generous and wise, would grant of their own free motion. For instance, I should love dearly, for the next thousand years at least, to have all government devolve into the hands of women. I hate to be ruled by my own sex. It excites my jealousy and wounds my pride. It is the iron sway of bodily force which abases us in our compelled submission. But how sweet the free generous courtesy with which I would kneel before a woman ruler. Yes, if she were young and beautiful, said Zenobia, laughing, but how if she were sixty and a fright? Ah, it is you that rate womanhood low, said I, but let me go on. I have never found it possible to suffer a bearded priest so near my heart and conscience as to do me any spiritual good. I blush at the very thought. Oh, in the better order of things, heaven grant that the ministry of souls may be left in charge of women. The gates of the blessed city will be thronged with the multitude that enter in when that day comes. The task belongs to woman. God meant it for her. He has endowed her with a religious sentiment in its utmost depth and purity, refined from that gross intellectual alloy with which every masculine theologist, save only one, who merely veiled himself in mortal and masculine shape, but was in truth divine, has been prone to mingle it. I have always envied the Catholics their faith in that sweet sacred virgin mother who stands between them and the deity, intercepting somewhat of his awful splendor, but permitting his love to stream upon the worshipper more intelligibly to human comprehension through the medium of a woman's tenderness. Have I not said enough, Zenobia? I cannot think that this is true-observed Priscilla, who had been gazing at me with great disapproving eyes, and I am sure I do not wish it to be true. Poor child exclaimed Zenobia rather contemptuously. She is the type of womanhood such as man has spent centuries in making it. He is never content unless he can degrade himself by stooping towards what he loves. In denying us our rights, he betrays even more blindness to his own interest than profligate disregard of ours. Is this true, asked Priscilla with simplicity turning to Hollingsworth? Is it all true that Mr. Coverdale and Zenobia have been saying? No Priscilla answered Hollingsworth with his customary bluntness. They haven't neither of them spoken one true word yet. Do you despise woman, said Zenobia? Ah, Hollingsworth, that would be most ungrateful. Despise her? No, cried Hollingsworth, lifting his great shaggy head and shaking it at us, while his eyes glowed almost fiercely. She is the most admirable, handiwork of God in her true place and character. Her place is at man's side, her office that of the sympathizer, the unreserved, unquestioning believer, the recognition withheld in every other manner, but given in pity through woman's heart, lest man should utterly lose faith in himself. The echo of God's own voice, pronouncing, it is well done. All the separate action of woman is and ever has been and always shall be false, foolish, vain, destructive of her own best and holiest qualities, void of every good effect, and productive of intolerable mischiefs. Man is a wretch without woman, but woman is a monster, and thank heaven an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster without man as her acknowledged principle. As true as I had once a mother whom I loved, were there any possible prospect of women's taking the social stand which some of them poor, miserable, abortive creatures, who only dream of such things because they have missed woman's peculiar happiness, or because nature made them really neither man nor woman? If there were a chance of there attaining the end which these petticoated monstrosities have in view, I would call upon my own sex to use its physical force, that unmistakable evidence of sovereignty, to scourge them back within their proper bounds. But it will not be needful. The heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere is, and never seeks to stray beyond it. Never was mortal blessed, if blessing it were, with a glance of such entire acquiescence and unquestioning faith, happy in its completeness, as our little Priscilla unconsciously bestowed on Hollingsworth. She seemed to take the sentiment from his lips into her heart, and brood over it in perfect content. The very woman whom he pictured, the gentle parasite, the soft reflection of a more powerful existence, sat there at his feet. I looked at Zenobia, however, fully expecting her to resent, as I felt by the indignant ebullition of my own blood that she ought, this outrageous affirmation of what struck me as the intensity of masculine egotism. It centred everything in itself, and deprived woman of her very soul, her inexpressible and unfathomable all, to make it a mere incident in the great sum of man. Hollingsworth had boldly uttered what he and millions of despots like him really felt. Without intending it he had disclosed the wellspring of all these troubled waters. Now if ever it surely behooved Zenobia to be the champion of her sex. But to my surprise and indignation, too, she only looked humbled. Some tears sparkled in her eyes, but they were wholly of grief, not anger. Well, be it so was all she said, I at least have deep cause to think you right. Let man be but manly and godlike, and woman is only too ready to become to him what you say. I smiled somewhat bitterly at his true, in contemplation of my own ill luck. How little did these two women care for me, who had freely conceded all their claims and a great deal more out of the fullness of my heart, while Hollingsworth by some necromancy of his horrible injustice seemed to have brought them both to his feet. Women almost invariably behave thus, thought I. What does the fact mean? Is it their nature, or is it at last the result of ages of compelled degradation, and in either case will it be possible ever to redeem them? An intuition now appeared to possess all the party that for this time, at least, there was no more to be said. With one accord we arose from the ground and made our way through the tangled undergrowth towards one of those pleasant wood paths that wound among the overarching trees. Some of the branches hung so low as partly to conceal the figures that went before from those who followed. Priscilla had leaped up more lightly than the rest of us and ran along in advance, with as much airy activity of spirit as was typified in the motion of a bird which chanced to be flitting from tree to tree in the same direction as herself. Never did she seem so happy as that afternoon. She skipped and could not help it from very playfulness of heart. Zenobia and Hollingsworth went next in close contiguity but not with arm in arm. Now, just when they had passed the impending bow of the birch tree, I plainly saw Zenobia take the hand of Hollingsworth in both her own, press it to her bosom, and let it fall again. The gesture was sudden and full of passion. The impulse had evidently taken her by surprise. It expressed all. Had Zenobia knelt before him or flung herself upon his breast and gasped out, I love you, Hollingsworth. I could not have been more certain of what it meant. They then walked onward as before. But, me thought, as the declining sun threw Zenobia's magnified shadow along the path, I beheld it tremulous, and the delicate stem of the flower which she wore in her hair was likewise responsive to her agitation. Priscilla, through the medium of her eyes at least, could not possibly have been aware of the gesture above described. Yet at that instant I saw her droop. The buoyancy, which just before had been so birdlike, was utterly departed. The life seemed to pass out of her and even the substance of her figure to grow thin and gray. I almost imagined her a shadow tidying gradually into the dimness of the wood. Her pace became so slow that Hollingsworth and Zenobia passed by, and I, without hastening my footsteps, overtook her. Come, Priscilla, said I, looking her intently in the face, which was very pale and sorrowful, we must make haste after our friends. Do you feel suddenly ill? A moment ago you flitted along so lightly that I was comparing you to a bird. Now, on the contrary, it is as if you had a heavy heart and a very little strength to bear it with. Pray take my arm. No, said Priscilla, I do not think it would help me. It is my heart, as you say, that makes me heavy, and I know not why. Just now I felt very happy. No doubt it was a kind of sacrilege in me to attempt to come within her maidenly mystery, but as she appeared to be tossed aside by her other friends, or carelessly let fall like a flower which they had done with, I could not resist the impulse to take just one peep beneath her folded petals. Zenobia and yourself are dear friends of late, I remarked. At first, that first evening when you came to us, she did not receive you quite so warmly as might have been wished. I remember it, said Priscilla. No wonder she hesitated to love me, who was then a stranger to her, and a girl of no grace or beauty, she being herself so beautiful. But she loves you now, of course, suggested I, and at this very instant you feel her to be your dearest friend? Why do you ask me that question, exclaimed Priscilla, as if frightened at the scrutiny into her feelings which I compelled her to make? It somehow put strange thoughts into my mind. But I do love Zenobia dearly, if she only loves me half as well I shall be happy. How is it possible to doubt that, Priscilla, I rejoined, but observe how pleasantly and happily Zenobia and Hollingsworth are walking together. I call it a delightful spectacle. It truly rejoices me that Hollingsworth has found so fit and affectionate a friend. So many people in the world mistrust him, so many disbelieve and ridicule, while hardly any do him justice, or acknowledge him for the wonderful man he is, that it is really a blessed thing for him to have won the sympathy of such a woman as Zenobia. Any man might be proud of that. Any man, even if he be as great as Hollingsworth, might love so magnificent a woman. How very beautiful Zenobia is. And Hollingsworth knows it, too. There may have been some petty malice in what I said. Generosity is a very fine thing at a proper time and within due limits, but it is an insufferable bore to see one man engrossing every thought of all the women, and leaving his friend to shiver in outer seclusion without even the alternative of solacing himself with what the more fortunate individual has rejected. Yes, it was out of a foolish bitterness of heart that I had spoken. Go on before, said Priscilla abruptly, and with true feminine imperiousness, which heretofore I had never seen her exercise. It pleases me best to loiter along by myself. I do not walk so fast as you. With her hand she made a little gesture of dismissal. It provoked me, yet on the whole was the most bewitching thing that Priscilla had ever done. I obeyed her, and strolled moodily homeward, wondering, as I had wondered a thousand times already, how Hollingsworth meant to dispose of these two hearts, which plainly to my perception, and as I could not but now suppose to his, he had engrossed into his own huge egotism. There was likewise another subject hardly less fruitful of speculation. In what attitude did Zenobia present herself to Hollingsworth? Was it in that of a free woman, with no mortgage on her affections nor claimant to her hand, but fully at liberty to surrender both in exchange for the heart and hand which she apparently expected to receive? But was it a vision that I had witnessed in the wood? Was Westervelt a goblin? Were those words of passion and agony which Zenobia had uttered in my hearing a mere staged declamation, were they formed of a material lighter than common air? Or supposing them to bear sterling weight? Was it a perilous and dreadful wrong which she was meditating towards herself and Hollingsworth? Arriving nearly at the farmhouse I looked back over the long slope of pasture land, and beheld them standing together in the light of sunset, just on the spot where, according to the gossip of the community, they meant to build their cottage. Priscilla, alone and forgotten, was lingering in the shadow of the wood. Thus the summer was passing away, a summer of toil, of interest, of something that was not pleasure, but which went deep into my heart, and there became a rich experience. I found myself looking forward to years, if not to a lifetime, to be spent on the same system. The community were now beginning to form their permanent plans. One of our purposes was to erect a phalanstery, as I think we called it after Fourier, but the phraseology of those days is not very fresh in my remembrance, where the great and general family should have its abiding place. Individual members, too, who made it a point of religion to preserve the sanctity of an exclusive home, were selecting sites for their cottages by the woodside, or on the breezy swells, or in the sheltered nook of some little valley, according as their taste might lean towards snugness or the picturesque. Altogether by projecting our minds outward, we had imparted a show of novelty to existence, and contemplated it as hopefully as if the soil beneath our feet had not been fathomed deep with the dust of deluded generations, on every one of which, as on ourselves, the world had imposed itself as a hitherto unwetted bride. Hollingsworth and myself had often discussed these prospects. It was easy to perceive, however, that he spoke with little or no fervour, but either as questioning the fulfilment of our anticipations, or at any rate with a quiet consciousness that it was no personal concern of his. Shortly after the scene at Elliot's pulpit, while he and I were repairing an old stone fence, I amused myself with sallying forward into the future time. When we come to be old men, I said, they will call us uncles or fathers, Father Hollingsworth and Uncle Coverdale, and we will look back cheerfully to these early days and make a romantic story for the young people, and if a little more romantic than truth may warrant it will be no harm, out of our severe trials and hardships. In a century or two we shall, every one of us, be mythical personages, or exceedingly picturesque and poetical ones at all events. They will have a great public hall in which your portrait and mine and twenty other faces that are living now shall be hung up, and as for me, I will be painted in my shirt sleeves and with the sleeves rolled up to show my muscular development. What stories will be rife among them about our mighty strength-continued eye lifting a big stone and putting it into its place, though our posterity will really be far stronger than ourselves after several generations of a simple, natural and active life? What legends of Zenobia's beauty and Priscilla's slender and shadowy grace, and those mysterious qualities which make her seem diaphanous with spiritual light? In due course of ages we must all figure heroically in an epic poem, and we will ourselves, at least I will, bend unseen over the future poet and lend him inspiration while he writes it. You seem, said Hollingsworth, to be trying how much nonsense you can pour out in a breath. I wish you would see fit to comprehend, retorted eye, that the profoundest wisdom must be mingled with nine-tenths of nonsense, else it is not worth the breath that utters it. But I do long for the cottages to be built, that the creeping plants may begin to run over them and the moss to gather on the walls and the trees, which we will set out, to cover them with a breadth of shadow. This spick-and-span novelty does not quite suit my taste. It is time, too, for children to be born among us. The firstborn child is still to come, and I shall never feel as if this were a real practical as well as poetical system of human life until somebody has sanctified it by death. A pretty occasion for martyrdom truly, said Hollingsworth. As good as any other, I replied, I wonder Hollingsworth who of all these strong men and fair women and maidens is doomed the first to die. Would it not be well, even before we have absolute need of it, to fix upon a spot for a cemetery? Let us choose the rudest, roughest, most uncultivable spot for death's garden ground, and death shall teach us to beautify it grave by grave. By our sweet, calm way of dying, and the airy elegance out of which we will shape our funeral rites, and the cheerful allegories which we will model into tombstones, the final scene shall lose its terrors, so that hereafter it may be happiness to live and bliss to die. None of us must die young, yet should Providence ordain it so, the event shall not be sorrowful but affect us with a tender, delicious, only half melancholy and almost smiling pathos. That is to say, Muddered Hollingsworth, you will die like a heathen as you certainly live like one. But listen to me, Coverdale, your fantastic anticipations make me discern all the more forcibly what a wretched, unsubstantial scheme is this, on which we have wasted a precious summer of our lives. Do you seriously imagine that any such realities as you and many others here have dreamed of will ever be brought to pass? Certainly I do, said I. Of course when the reality comes it will wear the everyday, commonplace, dusty and rather homely garb that reality always does put on, but setting aside the ideal charm I hope that our highest anticipations have a solid footing on common sense. You only half believe what you say, rejoined Hollingsworth, and as for me I neither have faith in your dream nor would care the value of this pebble for its realization were that possible. And what more do you want of it? It has given you a theme for poetry, let that content you, but now I ask you to be at last a man of sobriety and earnestness, and aid me in an enterprise which is worth all our strength, and the strength of a thousand mightier than we. There can be no need of giving in detail the conversation that ensued, it is enough to say that Hollingsworth once more brought forward his rigid and unconquerable idea, a scheme for the reformation of the wicked by methods moral, intellectual, and industrial, by the sympathy of pure, humble, and yet exalted minds, and by opening to his pupils the possibility of a worthier life than that which had become their fate. It appeared, unless he overestimated his own means, that Hollingsworth held it as his choice, and he did so choose, to obtain possession of the very ground on which we had planted our community, and which had not yet been made irrevocably ours by purchase. It was just the foundation that he desired. Our beginnings might readily be adapted to his great end. The arrangements already completed would work quietly into his system. So plausible looked his theory, and more than that so practical, such an air of reasonableness had he by patience thought thrown over it, each segment of it was contrived to dovetail into all the rest, with such a complicated applicability, and so ready was he with a response for every objection, that really so far as logic and argument went, he had the matter all his own way. What, said I, whence can you, having no means of your own, derive the enormous capital which is essential to this experiment? State Street, I imagine, would not draw its purser strings very liberally in aid of such a speculation. I have the funds, as much at least as is needed for a commencement, at command, he answered. They can be produced within a month if necessary. My thoughts reverted to Zoonobia. It could only be her wealth which Hollingsworth was appropriating so lavishly. And on what conditions was it to be had? Did she fling it into the scheme with the uncalculating generosity that characterizes a woman when it is her impulse to be generous at all? And did she fling herself along with it? But Hollingsworth did not volunteer an explanation. And have you no regrets, I inquired, in overthrowing this fair system of our new life, which has been planned so deeply and is now beginning to flourish so hopefully around us? How beautiful it is, and so far as we can yet see, how practicable! The ages have waited for us, and here we are, the very first that have essayed to carry on our mortal existence in love and mutual help. Hollingsworth I would be loath to take the ruin of this enterprise upon my conscience. Then let it rest wholly upon mine, he answered, knitting his black brows. I see through the system. It is full of defects, irremediable and damning ones. From first to last there is nothing else. I grasp it in my hand and find no substance whatever. There is not human nature in it. Why are you so secret in your operations, I asked? God forbid that I should accuse you of intentional wrong, but the besetting sin of a philanthropist it appears to me is apt to be a moral obliquity. His sense of honor ceases to be the sense of other honorable men. At some point of his course I know not exactly when or where he is tempted to paltre with the right, and can scarcely forbear persuading himself that the importance of his public ends renders it allowable to throw aside his private conscience. Oh, my dear friend, beware this error. If you meditate the overthrow of this establishment, call together our companions, state your design, support it with all your eloquence, but allow them an opportunity of defending themselves. It does not suit me, said Hollingsworth, nor is it my duty to do so. I think it is, replied I. Hollingsworth frowned, not in passion, but like fate, inexorably. I will not argue the point, said he. What I desire to know of you is, and you can tell me in one word, whether I am to look for your cooperation in this great scheme of good. Take it up with me. Be my brother in it. It offers you what you have told me over and over again that you most need a purpose in life, worthy of the extremist self-devotion, worthy of martyrdom should God so order it. In this view I present it to you. You can greatly benefit mankind. Your peculiar faculties, as I shall direct them, are capable of being so wrought into this enterprise that not one of them need lie idle. Strike hands with me, and from this moment you shall never again feel the langer and vague wretchedness of an indolent or half-occupied man. There may be no more aimless beauty in your life, but in its stead there shall be strength, courage, immitable will, everything that a manly and generous nature should desire. We shall succeed, we shall have done our best for this miserable world, and happiness, which never comes but incidentally, will come to us unawares. It seemed his intention to say no more, but after he had quite broken off his deep eyes filled with tears, and he held out both his hands to me. Coverdale, he murmured, there is not the man in this wide world whom I can love as I could you. Do not forsake me. As I look back upon this scene through the coldness and dimness of so many years, there is still a sensation as if Hollingsworth had caught hold of my heart and were pulling it towards him with an almost irresistible force. It is a mystery to me how I withstood it, but in truth I saw in his scheme of philanthropy nothing but what was odious. A loathesomeness that was to be forever in my daily work, a great black ugliness of sin which he proposed to collect out of a thousand human hearts, and that we should spend our lives in an experiment of transmuting it into virtue. Had I but touched his extended hand, Hollingsworth's magnetism would perhaps have penetrated me with his own conception of all these matters. But I stood aloof. I fortified myself with doubts whether his strength of purpose had not been too gigantic for his integrity, impelling him to trample on considerations that should have been paramount to every other. Is Zenobia to take a part in your enterprise, I asked? She is, said Hollingsworth. She, the beautiful, the gorgeous, I exclaimed. And how have you prevailed with such a woman to work in this squalid element? Through no base methods, as you seem to suspect, he answered, but by addressing whatever is best and noblest in her. Hollingsworth was looking on the ground, but as he often did so, generally indeed in his habitual moods of thought, I could not judge whether it was from any special unwillingness now to meet my eyes. What it was that dictated my next question I cannot precisely say. Nevertheless, it rose so inevitably into my mouth and, as it were, asked itself so involuntarily that there must needs have been an aptness in it. What is to become of Priscilla? Hollingsworth looked at me fiercely and with glowing eyes. He could not have shown any other kind of expression than that had he meant to strike me with a sword. Why do you bring in the names of these women, said he, after a moment of pregnant silence? What have they to do with the proposal which I make you? I must have your answer. Will you devote yourself and sacrifice all to this great end and be my friend of friends forever? In heaven's name Hollingsworth cried I, getting angry and glad to be angry, because so only was it possible to oppose his tremendous concentrativeness and indomitable will. Cannot you conceive that a man may wish well to the world and struggle for its good on some other plan than precisely that which you have laid down? And will you cast off a friend for no unworthiness, but merely because he stands upon his right as an individual being and looks at matters through his own optics instead of yours? Be with me, said Hollingsworth, or be against me. There is no third choice for you. Take this, then, as my decision, I answered. I doubt the wisdom of your scheme. Furthermore, I greatly fear that the methods by which you allow yourself to pursue it are such as cannot stand the scrutiny of an unbiased conscience. And you will not join me? No. I never said the word and certainly can never have to say it hereafter, that cost me a thousandth part so hard an effort as did that one syllable. The heart-pang was not merely figurative, but an absolute torture of the breast. I was gazing steadfastly at Hollingsworth. It seemed to me that it struck him too like a bullet. A ghastly paleness, always so terrific on a swarthy face, overspread his features. There was a convulsive movement of his throat as if he were forcing down some words that struggled and fought for utterance. Whether words of anger or words of grief, I cannot tell, although many and many a time I have vainly tormented myself with conjecturing which of the two they were. One other appeal to my friendship, such as once already Hollingsworth had made, taking me in the revulsion that followed a strenuous exercise of opposing will, would completely have subdued me. But he left the matter there. Well, said he. And that was all. I should have been thankful for one word more, even had it shot me through the heart as mine did him. But he did not speak it, and after a few moments with one accord we set to work again repairing the stone fence. Hollingsworth I observed wrought like a titan, and for my own part I lifted stones which at this day, or in a calmer mood at that one, I should no more have thought it possible to stir than to carry off the gates of Gaza on my back. A few days after the tragic passage at arms between Hollingsworth and me, I appeared at the dinner table actually dressed in a coat instead of my customary blouse, with a satin cravat, too, a white vest, and several other things that made me seem strange and outlandish to myself. As for my companions, this unwanted spectacle caused a great stir upon the wooden benches that bordered either side of our homely board. What's in the wind now, Myles, asked one of them, are you deserting us? Yes, for a week or two, said I, it strikes me that my health demands a little relaxation of labour and a short visit to the seaside during the dog days. You look like it grumbled Silas Foster, not greatly pleased with the idea of losing an efficient labourer before the stress of the season was well over. Now here's a pretty fellow, his shoulders have broadened a matter of six inches since he came among us. He can do his day's work if he likes, with any man or ox on the farm, and yet he talks about going to the seashore for his health. Well, well, old woman, added he to his wife, let me have a plateful of that pork and cabbage I begin to feel in a very weakly way. When the others have had their turn, you and I will take a jaunt to Newport or Saratoga. Well, but Mr. Foster said I, you must allow me to take a little breath. Breath, retorted the old yeoman, your lungs have the play of a pair of blacksmith's bellows already, what on earth do you want more? But go along, I understand the business, we shall never see your face here again. Here ends the reformation of the world so far as Myles Coverdale has a hand in it. By no means, I replied, I am resolute to die in the last ditch for the good of the cause. Die in a ditch, muttered gruff Silas, with genuine Yankee intolerance of any intermission of toil, except on Sunday the Fourth of July the autumnal cattle show, Thanksgiving or the annual fast. Die in a ditch. I believe in my conscience you would if there were no steadier means than your own labor to keep you out of it. The truth was that an intolerable discontent and irksomeness had come over me. Blithedale was no longer what it had been. Everything was suddenly faded. The sunburnt and arid aspect of our woods and pastures beneath the August sky did but imperfectly symbolize the lack of dew and moisture that since yesterday as it were had blighted My fields of thought and penetrated to the innermost and shadiest of My contemplative recesses. The change will be recognized by many who, after a period of happiness, have endeavored to go on with the same kind of life in the same scene in spite of the alteration or withdrawal of some principal circumstance. They discover what heretofore perhaps they had not known, that it was this which gave the bright color and vivid reality to the whole affair. I stood on other terms than before, not only with Hollingsworth, but with Zenobia and Priscilla. As regarded the two latter, it was that dreamlike and miserable sort of change that denies you the privilege to complain because you can assert no positive injury nor lay your finger on anything tangible. It is a matter which you do not see but feel, and which when you try to analyze it seems to lose its very existence and resolve itself into a sickly humor of your own. Your understanding possibly may put faith in this denial, but your heart will not so easily rest satisfied. It incessantly remonstrates though most of the time in a base note which you do not separately distinguish, but now and then with a sharp cry, importunate to be heard and resolute to claim belief. Things are not as they were it, keeps saying. You shall not impose on me. I will never be quiet. I will throb painfully. I will be heavy and desolate and shiver with cold. For I, your deep heart, know when to be miserable, because once I knew when to be happy. All is changed for us. You are beloved, no more. And were my life to be spent over again, I would invariably lend my ear to this Cassandra of the inward depths, however clamorous the music and the merriment of a more superficial region. My outbreak with Hollingsworth, though never definitely known to our associates, had really any effect upon the moral atmosphere of the community. It was incidental to the closeness of relationship into which we had brought ourselves that an unfriendly state of feeling could not occur between any two members without the whole society being more or less commoted and made uncomfortable thereby. This species of nervous sympathy, though a pretty characteristic enough sentimentally considered and apparently betokening an actual bond of love among us, was yet found rather inconvenient in its practical operation, mortal tempers being so in firm and variable as they are. If one of us happened to give his neighbor a box on the ear, the tingle was immediately felt on the same side of everybody's head. Thus, even on the supposition that we were far less quarrelsome than the rest of the world, a great deal of time was necessarily wasted in rubbing our ears. Musing on all these matters, I felt an inexpressible longing for at least a temporary novelty. I thought of going across the Rocky Mountains, or to Europe, or up the Nile, of offering myself a volunteer on the exploring expedition, of taking a ramble of years no matter in what direction, and coming back on the other side of the world. Then should the colonists of Blythdale have established their enterprise on a permanent basis, I might fling aside my pilgrim staff and dusty shun, and rest as peacefully here as elsewhere. Or, in case Hollingsworth should occupy the ground with his school of reform as he now purposed, I might plead earthly guilt enough by that time to give me what I was inclined to think the only trustworthy hold on his affections. Meanwhile, before deciding on any ultimate plan, I determined to remove myself to a little distance and take an exterior view of what we had all been about. In truth it was dizzy work amid such fermentation of opinions as was going on in the general brain of the community. It was a kind of bedlam for the time being, although out of the very thoughts that were wildest and most destructive, might grow a wisdom, holy, calm, and pure, and that should incarnate itself into the substance of a noble and happy life. But as matters now were, I felt myself, and having a decided tendency towards the actual I never liked to feel it, getting quite out of my reckoning with regard to the existing state of the world. I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind of a world it was among innumerable schemes of what it might or ought to be. It was impossible, situated as we were, not to imbibe the idea that everything in nature and human existence was fluid or fast becoming so, that the crust of the earth in many places was broken and its whole surface portentously upheaving, that it was a day of crisis and that we ourselves were in the critical vortex. Our great globe floated in the atmosphere of infinite space like an unsubstantial bubble. No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people without periodically returning into the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old standpoint. It was now time for me, therefore, to go and hold a little talk with the conservatives, the writers of the North American review, the merchants, the politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those respectable old blockheads who still, in this intangibility and mistiness of affairs, kept a death grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue since yesterday morning. The brethren took leave of me with cordial kindness, and as for the sisterhood I had serious thoughts of kissing them all around, but for bore to do so, because in all such general salutations the penance is fully equal to the pleasure. So I kissed none of them, and nobody to say the truth seemed to expect it. Do you wish me, I said to Zenobia, to announce in town and at the watering-places your purpose to deliver a course of lectures on the rights of women? Women possess no rights, said Zenobia, with a half-melancholy smile, or at all events only little girls and grandmothers would have the force to exercise them. She gave me her hand freely and kindly, and looked at me, I thought, with a pitying expression in her eyes. Nor was there any settled light of joy in them on her own behalf, but a troubled and passionate flame, flickering and fitful. I regret on the hold that you are leaving us, she said, and all the more since I feel that this phase of our life is finished and can never be lived over again. Do you know, Mr. Coverdale, that I have been several times on the point of making you my confidant for lack of a better and wiser one? But you are too young to be my father confessor, and you would not thank me for treating you like one of those good little handmaidens who share the bosom secrets of a tragedy queen. I would at least be loyal and faithful, answered I, and would counsel you with an honest purpose, if not wisely. Yes, said Zenobia, you would be only too wise, too honest. Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime at another person's expense. Ah, Zenobia, I exclaimed, if you would but let me speak. By no means, she replied, especially when you have just resumed the whole series of social conventionalisms together with that straight-bodied coat. I would as leaf open my heart to a lawyer or a clergyman. No, no, Mr. Coverdale, if I choose a counselor in the present aspect of my affairs, it must be either an angel or a madman. And I rather apprehend that the latter would be the likeliest of the two to speak the fitting word. It needs a wild steersman when we voyage through chaos. The anchor is up. Farewell. Priscilla, as soon as dinner was over, had be taken herself into a corner and set to work on a little purse. As I approached her, she let her eyes rest on me with a calm, serious look. For with all her delicacy of nerves there was a singular self-possession in Priscilla, and her sensibilities seemed to lie sheltered from ordinary commotion, like the water in a deep well. Will you give me that purse, Priscilla, said I, as a parting keepsake? Yes, she answered, if you will wait till it is finished. I must not wait even for that, I replied. Shall I find you here on my return? I never wished to go away, said she. I have sometimes thought, observed I, smiling, that you, Priscilla, are a little prophetess, or at least that you have spiritual intimations respecting matters which are dark to us grosser people. If that be the case, I should like to ask you what is about to happen, for I am tormented with a strong foreboding that were I to return even so soon as to-morrow morning I should find everything changed. Have you any impressions of this nature? Ah, no, said Priscilla, looking at me apprehensively. If any such misfortune is coming the shadow has not reached me yet, heaven forbid, I should be glad if there might never be any change, but one summer follow another, and all just like this. No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike, said I, with a degree of orphic wisdom that astonished myself. Times change and people change, and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us. Goodbye, Priscilla. I gave her hand a pressure which I think she neither resisted nor returned. Priscilla's heart was deep, but of small compass. It had room but for a very few dearest ones, among whom she never reckoned me. On the doorstep I met Hollingsworth. I had a momentary impulse to hold out my hand, or at least to give a parting nod, but resisted both. When a real and strong affection has come to an end, it is not well to mock the sacred past with any show of those commonplace civilities that belong to ordinary intercourse. Being dead henceforth to him and he to me, there could be no propriety in our chilling one another with the touch of two corpse-like hands, or playing at looks of courtesy, with eyes that were impenetrable beneath the glaze and the film. We passed, therefore, as if mutually invisible. I can no wise explain what sort of whim, prank, or perversity it was that after all these leave-takings induced me to go to the pigsty and take leave of the swine. There they lay buried as deeply among the straw as they could burrow, four huge black grunters, the very symbols of slothful ease and sensual comfort. They were asleep, drawing short and heavy breaths, which heaved their big sides up and down. Unclosing their eyes, however, at my approach, they looked dimly forth at the outer world and simultaneously uttered a gentle grunt, not putting themselves to the trouble of an additional breath for that particular purpose, but grunting with their ordinary inhalation. They were involved and almost stifled and buried alive in their own corporeal substance. The very unreadiness and depression wherewith these greasy citizens gained breath enough to keep their life machinery and sluggish movement appeared to make them only the more sensible of the ponderous and fat satisfaction of their existence. Peeping at me an instant out of their small, red, hardly perceptible eyes, they dropped asleep again, yet not so far asleep, but that their unctuous bliss was still present to them, betwixt dream and reality. You must come back in season to eat part of a spare rib, said Silas Foster, giving my hand a mighty squeeze. I shall have these fat fellows hanging up by the heels, heads downward pretty soon, I tell you. Oh, cruel Silas, what a horrible idea, cried I. All the rest of us men, women, and livestock, save only these four porcars, are bedeviled with one grief or another. They alone are happy, and you mean to cut their throats and eat them. It would be more for the general comfort to let them eat us, and bitter and sour morsels we should be. CHAPTER XVII. Arriving in town where my bachelor rooms long before this time had received some other occupant, I established myself for a day or two in a certain respectable hotel. It was situated somewhat aloof from my former track in life, my present mood inclining me to avoid most of my old companions from whom I was now sundered by other interests, and who would have been likely enough to amuse themselves at the expense of the amateur working man. The hotelkeeper put me into a back room of the third story of his spacious establishment. The day was lowering with occasional gusts of rain, and an ugly temperate east wind which seemed to come right off the chill and melancholy sea, hardly mitigated by sweeping over the roofs, and amalgamating itself with the dusky element of city smoke. All the effeminacy of past days had returned upon me at once. Summer as it still was I ordered a coal fire in the rusty grate, and was glad to find myself growing a little too warm with an artificial temperature. My sensations were those of a traveller, long so journeying in remote regions, and at length sitting down again amid customs once familiar. There was a newness and an oldness oddly combining themselves into one impression. It made me acutely sensible how strange a piece of mosaic work had lately been wrought into my life. True, if you look at it in one way it had been only a summer in the country, but considered in a profounder relation it was part of another age, a different state of society, a segment of an existence peculiar in its aims and methods, a leaf of some mysterious volume interpolated into the current history which time was writing off. At one moment the very circumstances now surrounding me, my coal fire and the dingy room in the bustling hotel, appeared far off and intangible. The next instant Blythdale looked vague as if it were at a distance both in time and space, and so shadowy that a question might be raised whether the whole affair had been anything more than the thoughts of a speculative man. I had never before experienced a mood that so robbed the actual world of its solidity. It nevertheless involved a charm on which, a devoted epicure of my own emotions, I resolved to pause and enjoy the moral syllabub until quite dissolved away. Whatever had been my taste for solitude and natural scenery, yet the thick, foggy, stifled element of cities, the entangled life of many men together, sordid as it was, and empty of the beautiful, took quite as strenuous a hold upon my mind. I felt as if there could never be enough of it. Each characteristic sound was too suggestive to be passed over unnoticed. Beneath and around me I heard the stir of the hotel, the loud voices of guests, landlord or barkeeper, steps echoing on the staircase, the ringing of a bell announcing arrivals or departures, the porter lumbering past my door with baggage which he thumbed down upon the floors of neighboring chambers, the lighter feet of chambermaids scutting along the passages. It is ridiculous to think what an interest they had for me. From the street came the tumult of the pavements pervading the whole house with a continual uproar so broad and deep that only an unaccustomed ear would dwell upon it. A company of the city's soldiery with a full military band marched in front of the hotel, invisible to me, but stirringly audible both by its foot-tramp and the clanger of its instruments. Once or twice all the city bells jangled together announcing a fire which brought out the enginemen and their machines like an army with its artillery rushing to battle. Over by hour the clocks in many steeples responded one to another. In some public hall, not a great way off, there seemed to be an exhibition of a mechanical diorama. For three times during the day occurred a repetition of obstreperous music, winding up with the rattle of imitative cannon and musketry, and a huge final explosion. Then ensued the applause of the spectators with clap of hands and thump of sticks and the energetic pounding of their heels. All this was just as valuable in its way as the sighing of the breeze among the birch trees that overshadowed Elliot's pulpit. Yet I felt a hesitation about plunging into this muddy tide of human activity and pastime. It suited me better for the present to linger on the brink or hover in the air above it. So I spent the first day and the greater part of the second in the laziest manner possible in a rocking chair, inhaling the fragrance of a series of cigars with my legs and slippered feet horizontally disposed, and in my hand a novel purchased of a railroad bibliopolis. The gradual waste of my cigar accomplished itself with an easy and gentle expenditure of breath. My book was of the dullest yet had a sort of sluggish flow like that of a stream in which your boat is as often a ground as a float. Had there been a more impetuous rush, a more absorbing passion of the narrative I should the sooner have struggled out of its uneasy current and have given myself up to the swell and subsidence of my thoughts. But as it was the torpid life of the book served as an unobtrusive accompaniment to the life within me and about me. At intervals, however, when its effect grew a little too soporific, not for my patience, but for the possibility of keeping my eyes open, I bestirred myself, started from the rocking chair, and looked out of the window. A gray sky, the weather cock of a steeple that rose beyond the opposite range of buildings pointing from the eastward, a sprinkle of small spiteful-looking raindrops on the window pane. In that ebb tide of my energies, had I thought of venturing abroad, these tokens would have checked the abortive purpose. After several such visits to the window, I found myself getting pretty well acquainted with that little portion of the backside of the universe which it presented to my view. Over against the hotel and its adjacent houses, at the distance of forty or fifty yards, was the rear of a range of buildings which appeared to be spacious, modern, and calculated for fashionable residences. The interval between was apportioned into grass plots, and here and there an apology for a garden, pertaining severally to these dwellings. There were apple trees and pear and peach trees, too, the fruit on which looked singularly large, luxuriant and abundant, as well it might in a situation so warm and sheltered, and where the soil had doubtless been enriched to a more than natural fertility. In two or three places grapevines clamored upon trellises, and bore clusters already purple and promising the richness of Malta or Madeira in their ripened juice. The blighting winds of our rigid climate could not molest these trees and vines, the sunshine though descending late into this area, and too early intercepted by the height of the surrounding houses, yet lay tropically there even when less than temperate in every other region. Dreary as was the day the scene was illuminated by not a few sparrows and other birds, which spread their wings and flitted and fluttered, and alighted now here, now there, and busily scratched their food out of the wormy earth. Most of these winged people seemed to have their domicile in a robust and healthy button-wood tree. It aspired upward, high above the roofs of the houses, and spread a dense head of foliage half across the area. There was a cat, as there invariably is in such places, who evidently thought herself entitled to the privileges of forest life in this close heart of city conventionalisms. I watched her creeping along the low flat roofs of the offices, descending a flight of wooden steps, gliding among the grass, and besieging the button-wood tree with murderous purpose against its feathered citizens. But after all they were birds of city breeding, and doubtless knew how to guard themselves against the peculiar perils of their position. The witching to my fancy are all those nooks and crannies where nature, like a stray partridge, hides her head among the long-established haunts of men. It is likewise to be remarked as a general rule that there is far more of the picturesque, more truth to native and characteristic tendencies, and vastly greater suggestiveness in the back view of a residence, whether in town or country, than in its front. The latter is always artificial, it is meant for the world's eye, and is therefore a veil and a concealment. Realities keep in the rear, and put forward an advanced guard of show and humbug. The posterior aspect of any old farmhouse, behind which a railroad has unexpectedly been opened, is so different from that looking upon the immemorial highway that the spectator gets new ideas of rural life and individuality in the puff or two of steam-breath which shoots him past the premises. In a city, the distinction between what is offered to the public and what is kept for the family is certainly not less striking. But to return to my window at the back of the hotel, together with a due contemplation of the fruit trees, the grapevines, the buttonwood tree, the cat, the birds, and many other particulars, I failed not to study the row of fashionable dwellings to which all these appertained. Here it must be confessed there was a general sameness. From the upper story to the first floor, they were so much alike that I could only conceive of the inhabitants as cut out on one identical pattern, like little wooden toy people of German manufacture. One long, united roof, with its thousands of slates glittering in the rain, extended over the whole. After the distinctness of separate characters to which I had recently been accustomed, it perplexed and annoyed me not to be able to resolve this combination of human interests into well-defined elements. It seemed hardly worthwhile for more than one of those families to be in existence, since they all had the same glimpse of the sky, all looked into the same area, all received just their equal share of sunshine through the front windows, and all listened to precisely the same noises of the street on which they boarded. Men are so much alike in their nature that they grow intolerable unless varied by their circumstances. Just about this time a waiter entered my room. The truth was I had rung the bell and ordered a sherry cobbler. Can you tell me I inquired what families reside in any of those houses opposite? The one right opposite is a rather stylish boarding house, said the waiter. Two of the gentlemen boarders keep horses at the stable of our establishment. They do things in very good style, sir, the people that live there. I might have found out nearly as much for myself. On examining the house a little more closely, in one of the upper chambers I saw a young man in a dressing gown standing before the glass and brushing his hair for a quarter of an hour together. He then spent an equal space of time in the elaborate arrangement of his cravat, and finally made his appearance in a dress coat, which I suspected to be newly come from the tailors and now first put on for a dinner party. At a window of the next story below, two children, prettily dressed, were looking out. By and by a middle-aged gentleman came softly behind them, kissed the little girl, and playfully pulled the little boy's ear. It was a papa, no doubt, just come in from his counting room or office, and a nun appeared mama, stealing as softly behind papa as he had stolen behind the children and laying her hand on his shoulder to surprise him. Then followed a kiss between papa and mama, but a noiseless one, for the children did not turn their heads. I bless God for these good folks, thought I, to myself. I have not seen a prettier bit of a nature in all my summer in the country than they have shown me here in a rather stylish boarding house. I will pay them a little more attention by and by. On the first floor, an iron balustrade ran along in front of the tall and spacious windows, evidently belonging to a back drawing room, and far into the interior through the arch of the sliding doors I could discern a gleam from the windows of the front apartment. There were no signs of present occupancy in this suite of rooms, the curtains being enveloped in a protective covering which allowed but a small portion of their crimson material to be seen. But two housemaids were industriously at work, so that there was good prospect that the boarding house might not long suffer from the absence of its most expensive and profitable guests. Meanwhile, until they should appear, I cast my eyes downward to the lower regions. There, in the dusk that so early settles into such places, I saw the red glow of the kitchen range. The hot cook, or one of her subordinates with a ladle in her hand, came to draw a cool breath at the back door. As soon as she disappeared, an Irish man's servant in a white jacket crept slyly forth and threw away the fragments of a china dish which unquestionably he had just broken. Soon afterwards a lady, showily dressed, with a curling front of what must have been false hair and reddish brown, I suppose, in hue, though my remoteness allowed me only to guess at such particulars, this respectable mistress of the boarding house made a momentary transit across the kitchen window and appeared no more. It was her final, comprehensive glance in order to make sure that soup, fish, and flesh were in a proper state of readiness before the serving up of dinner. There was nothing else worth noticing about the house, unless it be that on the peak of one of the dormer windows which opened out of the roof, sat a dove, looking very dreary and forlorn, in so much that I wondered why she chose to sit there in the chilly rain while her kindred were doubtless nestling in a warm and comfortable dove-coat. All at once this dove spread her wings and, launching herself in the air, came flying so straight across the intervening space that I fully expected her to alight directly on my windowsill. In the latter part of her course, however, she swerved aside, flew upward, and vanished, as did likewise the slight fantastic pathos with which I had invested her. CHAPTER XVIII. THE BOARDING HOUSE The next day, as soon as I thought of looking again towards the opposite house, there sat the dove again on the peak of the same dormer window. It was by no means an early hour for the preceding evening I had ultimately mustered enterprise enough to visit the theatre, had gone late to bed, and slept beyond all limit in my remoteness from Silas Foster's awakening horn. Others had tormented me throughout the night. The train of thoughts which for months passed had worn a track through my mind, and to escape which was one of my chief objects in Leaving Blythdale kept treading remorselessly to and fro in their old footsteps while slumber left me impotent to regulate them. It was not till I had quitted my three friends that they first began to encroach upon my dreams. In those of the last night, Hollingsworth and Zenobia, standing on either side of my bed, had bent across it to exchange a kiss of passion. Priscilla, beholding this, for she seemed to be peeping in at the chamber window, had melted gradually away and left only the sadness of her expression in my heart. There it still lingered after I awoke, one of those unreasonable sadnesses that you know not how to deal with because it involves nothing for common sense to clutch. It was a gray and dripping forenoon, gloomy enough in town, and still gloomier in the haunts to which my recollections persisted in transporting me. For in spite of my efforts to think of something else, I thought how the gusty rain was drifting over the slopes and valleys of our farm, how wet must be the foliage that overshadowed the pulpit rock, how cheerless in such a day my hermitage, the tree solitude of my owl-like humours in the vine encircled heart of the tall pine. It was a phase of homesickness. I had wrenched myself too suddenly out of an accustomed sphere. There was no choice now but to bear the pang of whatever heart strings were snapped asunder and that elusive torment like the ache of a limb long ago cut off by which a past mode of life prolongs itself into the succeeding one. I was full of idle and shapeless regrets. The thought impressed itself upon me that I had left duties unperformed. With the power perhaps to act in the place of destiny and divert misfortune from my friends, I had resigned them to their fate. That cold tendency between instinct and intellect which made me pry with a speculative interest into people's passions and impulses appeared to have gone far towards unhumanizing my heart. But a man cannot always decide for himself whether his own heart is cold or warm. It now impresses me that if I aired at all in regard to Hollingsworth's Zenobia and Priscilla it was through too much sympathy rather than too little. To escape the irksomeness of these meditations I resumed my post at the window. At first sight there was nothing new to be noticed. The general aspect of affairs was the same as yesterday except that the more decided inclemency of today had driven the sparrows to shelter and kept the cat within doors. Wents, however, she soon emerged pursued by the cook and with what looked like the better half of a roast chicken in her mouth. The young man in the dress-coat was invisible. The two children in the story below seemed to be romping about the room under the superintendents of a nursery maid. The damask curtains of the drawing room on the first floor were now fully displayed, festooned gracefully from top to bottom of the windows which extended from the ceiling to the carpet. A narrower window at the left of the drawing room gave light to what was probably a small boudoir within which I caught the faintest imaginable glimpse of a girl's figure in airy drapery. Her arm was in regular movement as if she were busy with her German worsted or some other such pretty and unprofitable handiwork. While intent upon making out this girlish shape I became sensible that a figure had appeared at one of the windows of the drawing room. There was a presentiment in my mind, or perhaps my first glance imperfect and side-long as it was had suffice to convey subtle information of the truth. At any rate it was with no positive surprise but as if I had all along expected the incident that directing my eyes thitherward I beheld like a full-length picture in the space between the heavy festoons of the window curtains, no other than Zenobia. At the same instant my thoughts made sure of the identity of the figure in the boudoir. It could only be Priscilla. Zenobia was attired not in the almost rustic costume which she had here to forewarn, but in a fashionable morning dress. There was nevertheless one familiar point. She had as usual a flower in her hair, brilliant and of a rare variety else it had not been Zenobia. After a brief pause at the window she turned away, exemplifying in the few steps that removed her out of sight that noble and beautiful motion which characterized her as much as any other personal charm. Not one woman in a thousand could move so admirably as Zenobia. Many women can sit gracefully, some can stand gracefully, and a few perhaps can assume a series of graceful positions. But natural movement is the result and expression of the whole being and cannot be well and nobly performed unless responsive to something in the character. I often used to think that music, light and airy, wild and passionate, or the full harmony of stately marches in accordance with her varying mood, should have attended Zenobia's footsteps. I waited for her reappearance. It was one peculiarity distinguishing Zenobia from most of her sex that she needed for her moral well-being and never would forego a large amount of physical exercise. At Blythdale no inclemency of sky or muddiness of earth had ever impeded her daily walks. Here in town she probably preferred to tread the extent of the two drawing rooms and measure out the miles by spaces of forty feet rather than bedraggle her skirts over the sloppy pavements. Accordingly in about the time requisite to pass through the arch of the sliding doors to the front window and to return upon her steps, there she stood again between the festoons of the crimson curtains. But another personage was now added to the scene. Behind Zenobia appeared that face which I had first encountered in the Woodpath, the man who had passed side by side with her in such mysterious familiarity and estrangement beneath my vine-curtained hermitage in the tall pine tree. It was Westervelt, and though he was looking closely over her shoulder, it still seemed to me as on the former occasion that Zenobia repelled him, that perchance they mutually repelled each other by some incompatibility of their spheres. This impression, however, might have been altogether the result of fancy and prejudice in me. The distance was so great as to obliterate any play of feature by which I might otherwise have been made a partaker of their councils. There now needed only Hollingsworth and old Moody to complete the knot of characters whom a real intricacy of events greatly assisted by my method of insulating them from other relations had kept so long upon my mental stage as actors in a drama. In itself perhaps it was no very remarkable event that they should thus come across me at the moment when I imagined myself free. Zenobia, as I well knew, had retained an establishment in town and had not unfrequently withdrawn herself from Blythdale during brief intervals on one of which occasion she had taken Priscilla along with her. Nevertheless, there seemed something fatal in the coincidence that had borne me to this one spot of all others in a great city and transfixed me there and compelled me again to waste my already wearied sympathies on affairs which were none of mine and persons who cared little for me. It irritated my nerves, it affected me with a kind of heart sickness, after the effort which it cost me to fling them off, after consummating my escape as I thought from these goblins of flesh and blood and pausing to revive myself with a breath or two of an atmosphere in which they should have no share, it was a positive despair to find the same figures arraying themselves before me and presenting their old problem in a shape that made it more insoluble than ever. I began to long for a catastrophe if the noble temper of Hollingsworth's soul were doomed to be utterly corrupted by the too powerful purpose which had grown out of what was noblest in him. If the rich and generous qualities of Zenobia's womanhood might not save her, if Priscilla must perish by her tenderness and faith so simple and so devout, then be it so, let it all come. As for me I would look on as it seemed my part to do, understandingly if my intellect could fathom the meaning and the moral, and at all events reverently and sadly. The curtain fallen I would pass onward with my poor individual life which was now attenuated of much of its proper substance and diffused among many alien interests. Meanwhile, Zenobia and her companion had retreated from the window, then followed an interval during which I directed my eyes towards the figure in the Boudoir. Most certainly it was Priscilla, although dressed with a novel and fanciful elegance. The vague perception of it as viewed so far off impressed me as if she had suddenly passed out of a chrysalis state and put forth wings. Her hands were not now in motion. She had dropped her work and sat with her head thrown back in the same attitude that I had seen several times before when she seemed to be listening to an imperfectly distinguished sound. Again the two figures in the drawing room became visible. They were now a little withdrawn from the window, face to face, and as I could see by Zenobia's emphatic gestures were discussing some subject in which she at least felt a passionate concern. By and by she broke away and vanished beyond my ken. Westervelt approached the window and leaned his forehead against a pane of glass, displaying the sort of smile on his handsome features which when I before met him had led me into the secret of his gold bordered teeth. Every human being, when given over to the devil, is sure to have the wizard mark upon him in one form or another. I fancied that this smile, with its peculiar revelation, was the devil's signet on the professor. This man, as I had soon reason to know, was endowed with a cat-like circumspection and though precisely the most unspiritual quality in the world, it was almost as effective as spiritual insight in making him acquainted with whatever it suited him to discover. He now proved it considerably to my discomforture by detecting and recognizing me at my post of observation. Perhaps I ought to have blushed at being caught in such an evident scrutiny of Professor Westervelt and his affairs. Perhaps I did blush. Be that as it might, I retained presence of mind enough not to make my position yet more irksome by the poultrynery of drawing back. Westervelt looked into the depths of the drawing-room and beckoned. Immediately afterwards Zenobia appeared at the window with color much heightened and eyes which, as my conscience whispered me, were shooting bright arrows barbed with scorn across the intervening space, directed full at my sensibilities as a gentleman. If the truth must be told, far as her flight shot was, those arrows hit the mark. She signified her recognition of me by a gesture with her head and hand, comprising at once a salutation and dismissal. The next moment she administered one of those pitiless rebukes which a woman always has at hand, ready for any offense, and which she so seldom spares on due occasion by letting down the white linen curtain between the festoons of the Damasque ones. It fell like the drop curtain of a theater in the interval between the acts. Priscilla had disappeared from the boudoir, but the dove still kept her desolate perch on the peak of the attic window.