 CHAPTER 25 THE THREE TOGETHER Hollingsworth was in his ordinary working-dress. Priscilla wore a pretty and simple gown with a kerchief about her neck, and a collage which she had flung back from her head, leaving it suspended by the strings. But Zenobia, whose part among the maskers as may be supposed was no inferior one, appeared in a costume of fanciful magnificence, with her jeweled flower as the central ornament of what resembled a leafy crown or coronet. She represented the Oriental Princess by whose name we were accustomed to know her. Her attitude was free and noble, yet if a queen's, it was not that of a queen triumphant, but dethroned, on trial for her life or perchance, condemned already. The spirit of the conflict seemed nevertheless to be alive in her. Her eyes were on fire, her cheeks had each a crimson spot, so exceedingly vivid and marked with so definite an outline that I at first doubted whether it were not artificial. In a very brief space, however, this idea was shamed by the paleness that ensued as the blood sunk suddenly away. Zenobia now looked like marble. One always feels the fact in an instant when he is intruded on those who love or those who hate at some acme of their passion that puts them into a sphere of their own where no other spirit can pretend to stand on equal ground with them. I was confused, affected even with a species of terror and wished myself away. The intenseness of their feelings gave them the exclusive property of the soil and atmosphere, and left me no right to be or breathe there. Hollingsworth, Zenobia, I have just returned to Blythdale, said I, and had no thought of finding you here. We shall meet again at the house. I will retire. This place is free to you, answered Hollingsworth. As free as to ourselves, added Zenobia, this long while past you have been following up your game, groping for human emotions in the dark corners of the heart. Had you been here a little sooner, you might have seen them dragged into the daylight. I could even wish to have my trial over again with you standing by to see fair play. Do you know, Mr. Coverdale, I have been on trial for my life? She laughed while speaking thus, but in truth as my eyes wandered from one of the group to another, I saw in Hollingsworth all that an artist could desire for the grim portrait of a Puritan magistrate holding inquest of life and death in a case of witchcraft. In Zenobia the sorceress herself, not aged, wrinkled, and decrepit, but fair enough to tempt Satan with a force reciprocal to his own, and in Priscilla the pale victim whose soul and body had been wasted by her spells. Had a pile of faggots been heaped against the rock, this hint of impending doom would have completed the suggestive picture. It was too hard upon me continued Zenobia addressing Hollingsworth that judge, jury, and accuser should all be comprehended in one man. I demure as I think the lawyers say to the jurisdiction, but let the learned judge Coverdale seat himself on the top of the rock and you and me stand at its base side by side pleading our cause before him. There might at least be two criminals instead of one. You forced this on me, replied Hollingsworth, looking her sternly in the face. Did I call you hither from among the masqueraders yonder? Do I assume to be your judge? No, except as far as I have an unquestionable right of judgment in order to settle my own line of behaviour towards those with whom the events of life bring me in contact. True I have already judged you, but not on the world's part. Neither do I pretend to pass a sentence. Ah, this is very good, cried Zenobia, with a smile. What strange beings you men are, Mr. Coverdale, is it not so? It is the simplest thing in the world with you to bring a woman before your secret tribunals and judge and condemn her unheard, and then tell her to go free without a sentence. The misfortune is that this same secret tribunal chances to be the only judgment seat that a true woman stands in awe of, and that any verdict short of acquittal is equivalent to a death sentence. The more I looked at them, and the more I heard, the stronger grew my impression that a crisis had just come and gone. On Hollingsworth's brow it had left a stamp like that of irrevocable doom, of which his own will was the instrument. In Zenobia's whole person, beholding her more closely, I saw a riotous agitation, the almost delirious disquietude of a great struggle, at the close of which the vanquished one felt her strength and courage still mighty within her, and longed to renew the contest. My sensations were as if I had come upon a battlefield before the smoke was as yet cleared away. And what subjects had been discussed here? All no doubt that for so many months past had kept my heart and my imagination idly feverish. Zenobia's whole character and history, the true nature of her mysterious connection with Westervelt, her later purposes towards Hollingsworth and reciprocally his in reference to her, and finally the degree in which Zenobia had been cognizant of the plot against Priscilla and what at last had been the real object of that scheme. On these points as before I was left to my own conjectures. One thing only was certain. Zenobia and Hollingsworth were friends no longer. If their heartstrings were ever intertwined, the knot had been adjudged an entanglement and was now violently broken. But Zenobia seemed unable to rest content with the matter in the posture which it had assumed. Ah, do we part so exclaimed she seeing Hollingsworth about to retire? And why not, said he, with almost rude abruptness, what is there further to be said between us? Well, perhaps nothing answered Zenobia, looking him in the face and smiling, but we have come many times before to this grey rock, and we have talked very softly among the whisperings of the birch trees. They were pleasant hours. I love to make the latest of them, though not altogether so delightful, loiter away as slowly as may be. And besides, you have put many queries to me at this which you designed to be our last interview, and being driven as I must acknowledge into a corner, I have responded with reasonable frankness. But now, with your free consent, I desire the privilege of asking a few questions in my turn. I have no concealment, said Hollingsworth. We shall see, answered Zenobia, I would first inquire whether you have supposed me to be wealthy. On that point, observed Hollingsworth, I have had the opinion which the world holds. And I held it likewise, said Zenobia, had I not, heaven is my witness, the knowledge should have been as free to you as me. It is only three days since I knew the strange fact that threatens to make me poor, and your own acquaintance with it, I suspect, is of at least as old a date. I fancied myself affluent. You are aware, too, of the disposition which I purposed making of the larger portion of my imaginary opulence. Nay, were at all, I had not hesitated. Let me ask you further, did I ever propose or intimate any terms of compact on which depended this, as the world would consider it, so important sacrifice? You certainly spoke of none, said Hollingsworth. Nor meant any, she responded. I was willing to realize your dream freely, generously as some might think, but at all events fully, and heedless though it should prove the ruin of my fortune. If in your own thoughts you have imposed any conditions of this expenditure, it is you that must be held responsible for whatever is sordid and unworthy in them. And now one other question. Do you love this girl? O Zenobia exclaimed Priscilla, shrinking back as if looking for the rock to topple over and hide her. Do you love her? repeated Zenobia. Had you asked me that question a short time since, replied Hollingsworth, after a pause, during which it seemed to me even the birch trees held their whispering breath. I should have told you no. My feelings for Priscilla differed little from those of an elder brother watching tenderly over the gentle sister whom God has given him to protect. And what is your answer now, persisted Zenobia? I do love her, said Hollingsworth, uttering the words with a deep inward breath instead of speaking them outright. As well declare it thus as in any other way. I do love her. Now God be judged between us, cried Zenobia, breaking into sudden passion, which of us too has most mortally offended him. At least I am a woman with every fault it may be that a woman ever had, weak, vain, unprincipled, like most of my sex, for our virtues when we have any are merely impulsive and intuitive, passionate too, and pursuing my foolish and unattainable ends by indirect and cunning, though absurdly chosen, means, as an hereditary bond slave must. False moreover to the whole circle of good in my reckless truth to the little good I saw before me. But still a woman, a creature whom only a little change of earthly fortune, a little kinder smile of him who sent me hither, and one true heart to encourage and direct me, might have made all that a woman can be. But how is it with you? Are you a man? No, but a monster, a cold, heartless, self-beginning and self-ending piece of mechanism. With what, then, do you charge me, asked Hollingsworth, aghast, and greatly disturbed by this attack? Show me one selfish end in all I ever aimed at, and you may cut it out of my bosom with a knife. It is all self-answered, Zenobia, with still intense her bitterness. Nothing else, nothing but self, self, self. The fiend, I doubt not, has made his choicest mirth of you these seven years past, and especially in the mad summer which we have spent together. I see it now. I am awake, disenchanted, disenthralled. Self, self, self. You have embodied yourself in a project. You are a better masquerader than the witches and gypsies yonder, for your disguise is a self-deception. See whether it has brought you. First you aimed a death-blow and a treacherous one, at this scheme of a pure and higher life, which so many noble spirits had wrought out. Then, because Coverdale could not be quite your slave, you threw him ruthlessly away. And you took me too into your plan as long as there was hope of my being available, and now fling me aside again a broken tool. At foremost and blackest of your sins, you stifled down your inmost consciousness. You did a deadly wrong to your own heart. You were ready to sacrifice this girl, whom, if God ever visibly showed a purpose, he put into your charge, and through whom he was striving to redeem you. This is a woman's view, said Hollingsworth, growing deadly pale, a woman's whose whole sphere of action is in the heart, and who can conceive of no higher nor wider one? Be silent, cried Zenobia imperiously. You know neither man nor woman. The utmost that can be said in your behalf, and because I would not be wholly despicable in my own eyes, but would feign excuse my wasted feelings, nor own it wholly a delusion, therefore I say it, is that a great and rich heart has been ruined in your breast. Forgive me now, you have done with me and I with you. Farewell. Priscilla said Hollingsworth, come. Zenobia smiled, possibly I did so too. Not often in human life has a gnawing sense of injury found a sweeter morsel of revenge than was conveyed in the tone with which Hollingsworth spoke those two words. It was the abased and tremulous tone of a man whose faith in himself was shaken and who sought at last to lean on an affection. Yes, the strong man bowed himself and rested on this poor Priscilla. Oh, could she have failed him? What a triumph for the looker's on! And at first I half imagined that she was about to fail him. She rose up, stood shivering like the birch leaves that trembled over her head and then slowly tottered rather than walked towards Zenobia. Arriving at her feet she sank down there in the very same attitude which she had assumed on their first meeting in the kitchen of the old farmhouse. Zenobia remembered it. Ah, Priscilla said she is shaking her head how much has changed since then. You kneel to a dethroned princess, you the victorious one. But he is waiting for you. Say what you wish and leave me. We are sisters, gasped Priscilla. I fancied that I understood the word and action. It meant the offering of herself and all she had to be at Zenobia's disposal. But the latter would not take it thus. True we are sisters, she replied, and moved by the sweet word she stooped down and kissed Priscilla, but not lovingly, for a sense of fatal harm received through her seemed to be lurking in Zenobia's heart. We had one father. You knew it from the first. I but a little while. Else some things that have chanced might have been spared you. But I never wished you harm. You stood between me and an end which I desired. I wanted a clear path. No matter what I meant, it is over now. Do you forgive me? Oh, Zenobia sobbed Priscilla, it is I that feel like the guilty one. No, no, poor little thing said Zenobia with a sort of contempt. You have been my evil fate, but there never was a babe with less strength or will to do an injury. Poor child, me thinks you have but a melancholy lot before you, sitting all alone in that wide, cheerless heart, wherefore ought you know, and as I alas believe, the fire which you have kindled may soon go out. Ah, the thought makes me shiver for you. What will you do, Priscilla, when you find no spark among the ashes? Die, she answered. That was well said, responded Zenobia with an approving smile. There is all a woman in your little compass, my poor sister. Meanwhile, go with him and live. She waved her away with a queenly gesture and turned her own face to the rock. I watched Priscilla wondering what judgment she would pass between Zenobia and Hollingsworth, how interpret his behavior so as to reconcile it with true faith both towards her sister and herself, how compel her love for him to keep any terms whatever with her sisterly affection. But in truth there was no such difficulty as I imagined. Her engrossing love made it all clear. Hollingsworth could have no fault. That was the one principle at the center of the universe. And the doubtful guilt or possible integrity of other people, appearances, self-evident facts, the testimony of her own senses, even Hollingsworth's self-accusation had he volunteered it, would have weighed not the value of a mote of thistle down on the other side. So secure was she of his right that she never thought of comparing it with another's wrong, but left the latter to itself. Hollingsworth drew her arm within his and soon disappeared with her among the trees. I cannot imagine how Zenobia knew when they were out of sight she never glanced again towards them. But retaining a proud attitude so long as they might have thrown back a retiring look, they were no sooner departed, utterly departed, than she began slowly to sink down. It was as if a great invisible irresistible weight were pressing her to the earth. Settling upon her knees she leaned her forehead against the rock and sobbed convulsively, dry sobs they seemed to be, such as have nothing to do with tears. CHAPTER 26 ZENOBIA AND COVERDALE Zenobia had entirely forgotten me. She fancied herself alone with her great grief. And had it been only a common pity that I felt for her, the pity that her proud nature would have repelled as the one worst wrong which the world yet held in reserve, the sacredness and awfulness of the crisis might have impelled me to steal away silently so that not a dry leaf should rustle under my feet, I would have left her there to struggle in that solitude with only the eye of God upon her. But so it happened I never once dreamed of questioning my right to be there now as I had questioned it just before when I came so suddenly upon Hollingsworth and herself in the passion of their recent debate. It suits me not to explain what was the analogy that I saw or imagined between Zenobia's situation and mine, nor I believe will the reader detect this one secret hidden beneath many a revelation which perhaps concerned me less. In simple truth, however, as Zenobia leaned her forehead against the rock, shaken with that tearless agony, it seemed to me that the self-same pang with hardly mitigated torment leaped thrilling from her heartstrings to my own. Was it wrong, therefore, if I felt myself consecrated to the priesthood by sympathy like this and called upon to minister to this woman's affliction so far as mortal could? But indeed what could mortal do for her? Nothing, the attempt would be a mockery and an anguish. Time it is true would steal away her grief and bury it and the best of her heart in the same grave. That destiny itself, me thought, in its kindliest mood could do no better for Zenobia in the way of quick relief than to cause the impending rock to impend a little farther and fall upon her head, so I leaned against a tree and listened to her sobs in unbroken silence. She was half prostrate, half kneeling, with her forehead still pressed against the rock. Her sobs were the only sound. She did not groan nor give any other utterance to her distress. It was all involuntary. At length she sat up, put back her hair, and stared about her with a bewildered aspect as if not distinctly recollecting the scene through which she had passed, nor cognizant of the situation in which it left her. Her face and brow were almost purple with the rush of blood. They whitened, however, by and by, and for some time retained this death-like hue. She put her hand to her forehead, with a gesture that made me forcibly conscious of an intense and living pain there. Her glance, wandering wildly to and fro, passed over me several times without appearing to inform her of my presence. But finally a look of recognition gleamed from her eyes into mine. Is it you, Miles Coverdale, said she, smiling? Ah, I perceive what you are about. You are turning this whole affair into a ballad. Pray let me hear as many stanzas as you happen to have ready. Oh, hush, Zenobia, I answered. Heaven knows what an ache is in my soul. It is genuine tragedy as it not rejoins Zenobia with a sharp, light laugh. And you are willing to allow perhaps that I have had hard measure? But it is a woman's doom, and I have deserved it like a woman. So let there be no pity, as on my part there shall be no complaint. It is all right now, or will shortly be so. But Mr. Coverdale, by all means, write this ballad and put your soul's ache into it, and turn your sympathy to good account as other poets do, and as poets must unless they choose to give us glittering icicles instead of lines of fire, as for the moral it shall be distilled into the final stanza in a drop of bitter honey. What shall it be, Zenobia, I inquired, endeavouring to fall in with her mood? Oh, a very old one will serve the purpose, she replied. There are no new truths, much as we have prided ourselves on finding some. A moral, why this, that in the battlefield of life the downright stroke that would fall only on a man's steel headpiece is sure to light on a woman's heart over which she wears no breastplate, and whose wisdom it is therefore to keep out of the conflict? Or this, that the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and providence or destiny to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one hair's breadth out of the beaten track? Yes, and add, for I may as well own it now, that with that one hair's breadth she goes all astray, and never sees the world in its true aspect afterwards. This last is too stern a moral I observed, cannot we soften it a little? Do it if you like at your own peril, not on my responsibility, she answered. Then with a sudden change of subject she went on. After all, he has flung away what would have served him better than the poor pale flower he kept. What can Priscilla do for him? Put passionate warmth into his heart when it shall be chilled with frozen hopes? Strengthen his hands when they are weary with much doing and no performance? No, but only tend towards him with a blind instinctive love and hang her little puny weakness for a clog upon his arm. She cannot even give him such sympathy as is worth the name, for will he never in many an hour of darkness need that proud intellectual sympathy which he might have had from me, the sympathy that would flash light along his course and guide as well as cheer him? Poor Hollingsworth, where will he find it now? Hollingsworth has a heart of ice, said I bitterly. He is a wretch. Do him no wrong interrupted Zenobia turning haughtily upon me. Presume not to estimate a man like Hollingsworth. It was my fault all along and none of his. I see it now. He never sought me. Why should he seek me? What had I to offer him? A miserable, bruised and battered heart, spoiled long before he met me. A life too hopelessly entangled with the villains. He did well to cast me off. God be praised, he did it. And yet had he trusted me and borne with me a little longer I would have saved him all this trouble. She was silent for a time and stood with her eyes fixed on the ground, again raising them her look was more mild and calm. Miles Coverdale, said she. Well, Zenobia, I responded, can I do you any service? Very little, she replied, but it is my purpose, as you may well imagine, to remove from Blythdale and most likely I may not see Hollingsworth again. A woman in my position you understand feels scarcely at her ease among former friends. New faces, unaccustomed looks, those only can she tolerate. She would pine among familiar scenes. She would be apt to blush, too, under the eyes that knew her secret. Her heart might throb uncomfortably. She would mortify herself, I suppose, with foolish notions of having sacrificed the honour of her sex at the foot of proud, contumacious man. Poor womanhood with its rights and wrongs. Here will be new matter for my course of lectures at the idea of which you smiled, Mr. Coverdale, a month or two ago. But as you have really a heart and sympathies as far as they go, and as I shall depart without seeing Hollingsworth, I must entreat you to be a messenger between him and me. Willingly, said I, wondering at the strange way in which her mind seemed to vibrate from the deepest earnest to mere levity, what is the message? True, what is it, exclaimed Zenobia? After all, I hardly know. On better consideration I have no message. Tell him, tell him something pretty and pathetic that will come nicely and sweetly into your ballad. Can you please, so it be tender and submissive enough? Tell him he has murdered me. Tell him that I'll haunt him. She spoke these words with the wildest energy. And give him—no, give Priscilla this. Thus saying, she took the jeweled flower out of her hair, and it struck me as the act of a queen when worsted in combat, discrowning herself, as if she found a sort of relief in abasing all her pride. Bid her wear this for Zenobia's sake, she continued. She is a pretty little creature, and will make as soft and gentle a wife as the various bluebeard could desire. Pity that she must fade so soon, these delicate and puny maidens always do. Ten years hence let Hollingsworth look at my face and Priscilla's, and then choose betwixt them, or if he pleases, let him do it now. How magnificently Zenobia looked as she said this. The effect of her beauty was even heightened by the over-consciousness and self-recognition of it into which I suppose Hollingsworth's scorn had driven her. She understood the look of admiration in my face, and Zenobia to the last it gave her pleasure. It is an endless pity, said she, that I had not be thought myself of winning your heart, Mr. Coverdale, instead of Hollingsworth's. I think I should have succeeded, and many women would have deemed you the worthier conquest of the two. You are certainly much the handsomest man. But there is a fate in these things, and beauty in a man has been of little account with me since my earliest girlhood, when for once it turned my head. Now, farewell. Zenobia, whither are you going, I asked? No matter where, said she, but I am weary of this place and sick to death of playing at philanthropy and progress. Of all varieties of mock life we have surely blundered into the very emptiest mockery in our effort to establish the one true system. I have done with it, and Blythdale must find another woman to superintend the laundry, and you, Mr. Coverdale, another nurse to make your gruel the next time you fall ill. It was indeed a foolish dream, yet it gave us some pleasant summer days and bright hopes while they lasted. It can do no more, nor will it avail us to shed tears over a broken bubble. Here is my hand, adieu. She gave me her hand with the same free, whole-sold gesture as on the first afternoon of our acquaintance, and being greatly moved, I bethought me of no better method of expressing my deep sympathy than to carry it to my lips. In so doing I perceived that this white hand, so hospitably warm when I first touched it five months since, was now cold as a veritable piece of snow. How very cold I exclaimed, holding it between both my own with the vain idea of warming it. What can be the reason? It is really deathlike. The extremities die first, they say, answered Zinobia, laughing, and so you kiss this poor, despised, rejected hand. Well, my dear friend, I thank you. You have reserved your homage for the fallen. Lip of man will never touch my hand again. I intend to become a Catholic for the sake of going into a nunnery. When you next hear of Zinobia, her face will be behind the black veil, so look your last at it now, for all is over. Once more, farewell. She withdrew her hand, yet left a lingering pressure which I felt long afterwards. So intimately connected as I had been with perhaps the only man in whom she was ever truly interested, Zinobia looked on me as the representative of all the past, and was conscious that in bidding me adieu she likewise took final leave of Hollingsworth and of this whole epoch of her life. Never did her beauty shine out more lustrously than in the last glimpse that I had of her. She departed and was soon hidden among the trees. But whether it was the strong impression of the foregoing scene or whatever else the cause, I was affected with a fantasy that Zinobia had not actually gone but was still hovering about the spot and haunting it. I seemed to feel her eyes upon me. It was as if the vivid colouring of her character had left a brilliant stain upon the air. By degrees, however, the impression grew less distinct. I flung myself upon the fallen leaves at the base of Elliot's pulpit. The sunshine withdrew up the tree-trunks and flickered on the topmost boughs. Grey twilight made the wood obscure. The stars brightened out, the pendant bows became wet with chill autumnal dues. But I was listless, worn out with emotion on my own behalf and sympathy for others, and had no heart to leave my comfortless layer beneath the rock. I must have fallen asleep and had a dream, all the circumstances of which utterly vanished at the moment when they converged to some tragical catastrophe, and thus grew too powerful for the thin sphere of slumber that enveloped them. Starting from the ground I found the risen moon shining upon the rugged face of the rock and myself all in a tremble. CHAPTER 27 MIDNIGHT It could not have been far from midnight when I came beneath Hollingsworth's window, and finding it open, flung in a tuft of grass with earth at the roots and heard it fall upon the floor. He was either awake or sleeping very lightly, for scarcely a moment had gone by before he looked out and discerned me standing in the moonlight. "'Is it you, Coverdale?' he asked. "'What is the matter? Come down to me, Hollingsworth,' I answered. I am anxious to speak with you.' The strange tone of my own voice startled me, and him probably no less. He lost no time and soon issued from the house door with his dress half arranged. "'Again, what is the matter?' he asked impatiently. "'Have you seen Zenobia,' said I, since you parted from her at Elliot's pulpit? No answered Hollingsworth, nor did I expect it. His voice was deep but had a tremor in it. Hardly had he spoken when Silas Foster thrust his head done up in a cotton handkerchief out of another window, and took what he called, as it literally was, a squint at us. "'Well, folks, what are ye about here?' he demanded. "'Aha! Are you there, Myles, Coverdale? You have been turning night in to day since you left us, I reckon, and so you find it quite natural to come prowling about the house at this time of night, frightening my old woman out of her wits, and making her disturb a tired man out of his best nap. In with you, you vagabond and to bed. Dress yourself quickly, Foster, said I, we want your assistance. I could not, for the life of me, keep that strange tone out of my voice. Silas Foster, obtuse as were his sensibilities, seemed to feel the ghastly earnestness that was conveyed in it as well as Hollingsworth did. He immediately withdrew his head, and I heard him yawning, flattering to his wife and again yawning heavily, while he hurried on his clothes. Meanwhile I showed Hollingsworth a delicate handkerchief, marked with a well-known cipher, and told him where I found it, and other circumstances which had filled me with a suspicion so terrible that I left him, if he dared, to shape it out for himself. By the time my brief explanation was finished we were joined by Silas Foster in his blue woollen frock. Well boys cried he peevishly what is to pay now. Tell him Hollingsworth, said I. Hollingsworth shivered perceptibly, and drew in a hard breath betwixt his teeth. He steadied himself, however, and looking the matter more firmly in the face than I had done, explained to Foster my suspicions and the grounds of them, with a distinctness from which in spite of my utmost efforts my words had swerved aside. The tough-nerved yeoman in his comment put a finish on the business and brought out the hideous idea in its full terror as if he were removing the napkin from the face of a corpse. And so you think she's drowned herself, he cried. I turned away my face. What on earth should the young woman do that for? exclaimed Silas, his eyes half out of his head with mere surprise? Why, she has more means than she can use or waste, and lacks nothing to make her comfortable but a husband, and that's an article she could have any day. There's some mistake about this, I tell you. Come, said I, shuddering, let us go and ascertain the truth. Well, well, answered Silas Foster, just as you say, we'll take the long pole with the hook at the end that serves to get the bucket out of the drawer well when the rope is broken. With that and a couple of long-handled hay-rakes I'll answer for finding her if she's anywhere to be found. Strange enough, Zenobia drowned herself. No, no, I don't believe it. She had too much sense and too much means and enjoyed life a great deal too well. When our few preparations were completed we hastened, by a shorter than the customary route, through fields and pastures and across a portion of the meadow, to the particular spot on the river bank which I had paused to contemplate in the course of my afternoon's ramble. A nameless presentiment had again drawn me thither after leaving Elliot's pulpit. I showed my companions where I had found the handkerchief, and pointed to two or three footsteps impressed into the clayy margin and tending towards the water. Beneath its shallow verge among the water-weeds there were further traces as yet unobliterated by the sluggish current which was there almost at a stand still. Silas Foster thrust his face down close to these footsteps and picked up a shoe that had escaped my observation being half embedded in the mud. There's a kid's shoe that never was made on a Yankee last observed he. I know enough of Shoemaker's craft to tell that. French manufacture, and see what a high instep, and how evenly she trod in it. There never was a woman that stepped handsomer in her shoes than Zenobia did. Here he added, addressing Hollingsworth, would you like to keep the shoe? Hollingsworth started back. Give it to me, Foster said I. I dabbled it in the water to rinse off the mud and have kept it ever since. Not far from this spot lay an old leaky punt drawn up on the Uzi River-side and generally half full of water. It served the angler to go in quest of Pickerel or the sportsman to pick up his wild ducks. Setting this crazy bark afloat I seated myself in the stern with the paddle while Hollingsworth sat in the boughs with the hooked pole and Silas Foster amid ships with a hay rake. It puts me in mind of my young days remarked Silas when I used to steal out of bed to go bobbing for hornpouts and eels. Hey, ho! Well, life and death together makes sad work for us all. Then I was a boy bobbing for fish, and now I'm getting to be an old fellow and here I be groping for a dead body. I tell you what, lads, if I thought anything had really happened to Zenobia I should feel kind of sorrowful. I wish at least you would hold your tongue, muttered I. The moon that night, though past the full, was still large and oval and having risen between eight and nine o'clock, now shown as slant-wise over the river, throwing the high opposite bank with its woods into deep shadow, but lighting up the hither shore pretty effectually. Not a ray appeared to fall on the river itself. It lapsed imperceptibly away, a broad, black, inscrutable depth, keeping its own secrets from the eye of man as impenetrably as mid-ocean could. Well, Miles Coverdale said foster, you are the helmsman, how do you mean to manage this business? I shall let the boat drift broadside foremost past that stump, I replied. I know the bottom having sounded it in fishing. The shore on this side after the first step or two goes off very abruptly, and there is a pool just by that stump twelve or fifteen feet deep. The current could not have force enough to sweep any sunken object, even if partially buoyant, out of that hollow. Come, then, said Silas, but I doubt whether I can touch bottom with this hay rake if it's as deep as you say. Mr. Hollingsworth, I think you'll be the lucky man tonight, such luck as it is. We floated past the stump. Silas Foster plied his rake manfully, poking it as far as he could into the water and immersing the whole length of his arm besides. Hollingsworth at first sat motionless with hooked pole elevated in the air, but by and by with a nervous and jerky movement he began to plunge it into the blackness that up bore us, setting his teeth and making precisely such thrusts, me thought, as if he were stabbing at a deadly enemy. I bent over the side of the boat, so obscure, however, so awfully mysterious was that dark stream that, and the thought made me shiver like a leaf, I might as well have tried to look into the enigma of the eternal world to discover what had become of Zenobia's soul as into the river depths to find her body, and there perhaps she lay with her face upward while the shadow of the boat and my own pale face peering downward passed slowly betwixt her and the sky. Once, twice, thrice, I paddled the boat upstream and again suffered it to glide with the river's slow, funerial motion downward. Silas Foster had raked up a large mass of stuff which, as it came towards the surface, looked somewhat like a flowing garment, but proved to be a monstrous tuft of water-weeds. Hollingsworth, with a gigantic effort, upheaved a sunken log. When once free of the bottom it rose partly out of water, all weedy and slimy, a devilish-looking object which the moon had not shone upon for half a hundred years, then plunged again and sullenly returned to its old resting place for the remnant of the century. That looked ugly, quote Silas. I half thought it was the evil one on the same errand as ourselves searching for Zenobia. He shall never get her, said I, giving the boat a strong impulse. That's not for you to say, my boy, retorted the omen. Pray God he never has and never may. Slow work this, however. I should really be glad to find something. Pshaw, what a notion that is when the only good luck would be to paddle and drift and poke and grope hereabouts till morning and have our labour for our pains. For my part I shouldn't wonder if the creature had only lost her shoe in the mud and saved her soul alive after all. My stars, how she will laugh at us tomorrow morning. It is indescribable what an image of Zenobia at the breakfast-table full of warmth and mirthful life this surmise of Silas Foster's brought before my mind. The terrible phantasm of her death was thrown by it into the remotest and dimmest background where it seemed to grow as improbable as a myth. Yes, Silas, it may be as you say, cried I. The drift of the stream had again borne us a little below the stump when I felt, yes, felt, for it was as if the iron hook had smote my breast, felt Hollingsworth's poles strike some object at the bottom of the river. He started up and almost overset the boat. Hold on, cried Foster, you have her. Putting a fury of strength into the effort, Hollingsworth heaved domain, and up came a white swash to the surface of the river. It was the flow of a woman's garments, a little higher, and we saw her dark hair streaming down the current. Black river of death, thou hath yielded up thy victim. Zenobia was found. Silas Foster laid hold of the body. Hollingsworth likewise grappled with it, and I steered towards the bank, gazing all the while at Zenobia, whose limbs were swaying in the current close at the boat's side. Arriving near the shore, we all three stepped into the water, bore her out, and laid her on the ground beneath a tree. Poor child cried Foster, and his dry old heart, I verily believe, vouchsafed a tear. I'm sorry for her. Were I to describe the perfect horror of the spectacle, the reader might justly reckon it to me for a sin and shame. For more than twelve long years I have borne it in my memory, and could now reproduce it as freshly as if it were still before my eyes. Of all modes of death me thinks it is the ugliest. Her wet garments swathed limbs of terrible inflexibility. She was the marble image of a death agony. Her arms had grown rigid in the act of struggling, and were bent before her with clenched hands. Her knees, too, were bent, and thank God for it in the attitude of prayer. Ah, that rigidity, it is impossible to bear the terror of it. It seemed I must needs impart so much of my own miserable idea. It seemed as if her body must keep the same position in the coffin, and that her skeleton would keep it in the grave, and that when Zenobia rose at the day of engagement it would be in just the same attitude as now. One hope I had, and that, too, was mingled half with fear. She knelt as if in prayer, with the last choking consciousness her soul bubbling out through her lips it may be, had given itself up to the Father reconciled and penitent. But her arms, they were bent before her as if she struggled against providence in never-ending hostility. Her hands, they were clenched in immitable defiance. Away with the hideous thought, the flitting moment after Zenobia sank into the dark pool when her breath was gone and her soul at her lips was as long in its capacity of God's infinite forgiveness as the lifetime of the world. Foster bent over the body and carefully examined it. You have wounded the poor thing's breast, said he to Hollingsworth, close by her heart, too. Ha! cried Hollingsworth with a start, and so he had indeed both before and after death. See! said Foster, that's the place where the iron struck her. It looks cruelly, but she never felt it. He endeavored to change the arms of the corpse decently by its side. His utmost strength, however, scarcely sufficed to bring them down and rising again the next instant they bade him defiance, exactly as before. He made another effort with the same result. In God's name, Silas Foster, cried I with bitter indignation, let that dead woman alone. Why, man, it's not decent, answered he, staring at me in amazement. I can't bear to see her looking so. Well, well, added he, after a third effort, tis of no use sure enough, and we must leave the women to do their best with her after we get to the house. The sooner that's done, the better. We took two rails from a neighboring fence and formed a beer by laying across some boards from the bottom of the boat, and thus we bore Zenobia homeward. Six hours before, how beautiful, at midnight, what a horror. A reflection occurs to me that will show ludicrously I doubt not on my page, but must come in for its sterling truth. Being the woman that she was, could Zenobia have foreseen all these ugly circumstances of death, how ill it would become her, the altogether unseemly aspect which she must put on, and especially Old Silas Foster's efforts to improve the matter, she would no more have committed the dreadful act than have exhibited herself to a public assembly in a badly fitting garment. Zenobia, I have often thought, was not quite simple in her death. She had seen pictures, I suppose, of drowned persons in lithe and graceful attitudes, and she deemed it well and decorous to die as so many village maidens have wronged in their first love and seeking peace in the bosom of the old familiar stream, so familiar that they could not dread it, wherein childhood they used to bathe their little feet, wading mid-leg deep, unmindful of wet skirts. But in Zenobia's case there was some tint of the Arcadian affectation that had been visible enough in all our lives for a few months past. This, however, to my conception takes nothing from the tragedy, for has not the world come to an awfully sophisticated pass when after a certain degree of acquaintance with it we cannot even put ourselves to death in wholehearted simplicity? Slowly, slowly, with many a dreary pause, resting the beer often on some rock or balancing it across a mossy log to take fresh hold, we bore our burden onward through the moonlight and at last laid Zenobia on the floor of the old farmhouse. By and by came three or four withered women and stood whispering around the corpse, peering at it through their spectacles, holding up their skinny hands, shaking their night-capped heads, and taking counsel of one another's experience what was to be done. With those tire-women we left Zenobia. There was some consultation among us in what spot Zenobia might most fitly be laid. It was my own wish that she should sleep at the base of Elliot's pulpit and that on the rugged front of the rock the name by which we familiarly knew her, Zenobia, and not another word, should be deeply cut and left for the moss and lichens to fill up at their long leisure. But Hollingsworth to whose ideas on this point great deference was due made it his request that her grave might be dug on the gently sloping hillside in the wide pasture where, as we once supposed, Zenobia and he had planned to build their cottage, and thus it was done accordingly. She was buried very much as other people have been for hundreds of years gone by. In anticipation of death we Leithdale colonists had sometimes set our fancies at work to arrange a funerial ceremony which should be the proper symbolic expression of our spiritual faith and eternal hopes, and this we meant to substitute for those customary rites which were molded originally out of the Gothic gloom and by long use like an old velvet pall have so much more than their first death-smell in them. When the occasion came we found it the simplest and truest thing after all to content ourselves with the old fashion taking away what we could, but interpolating no novelties and particularly avoiding all frippery of flowers and cheerful emblems. The procession moved from the farmhouse. Nearest the dead walked an old man in deep mourning, his face mostly concealed in a white handkerchief and with Priscilla leaning on his arm. Hollingsworth and myself came next. We all stood around the narrow niche in the cold earth, all saw the coffin lowered in, all heard the rattle of the crumbly soil upon its lid, that final sound which mortality awakens on the utmost verge of sense, as if in the vain hope of bringing an echo from the spiritual world. I noticed a stranger, a stranger to most of those present though known to me, who after the coffin had descended took up a handful of earth and flung it first into the grave. I had given up Hollingsworth's arm and now found myself near this man. It was an idle thing, a foolish thing for Zenobia to do, said he. She was the last woman in the world to whom death could have been necessary. It was too absurd. I have no patience with her. Why so I inquired, smothering my horror at his cold comment, in my eager curiosity to discover some tangible truth as to his relation with Zenobia. If any crisis could justify the sad wrong she offered to herself, it was surely that in which she stood. Everything had failed her, prosperity in the world's sense for her opulence was gone, the heart's prosperity in love, and there was a secret burden on her, the nature of which is best known to you. Young as she was, she had tried life fully, had no more to hope, and something perhaps to fear. Had Providence taken her away in its own holy hand I should have thought it the kindest dispensation that could be awarded to one so wrecked. You mistake the matter completely, rejoined Westervelt. What, then, is your own view of it, I asked? Her mind was active, and various in its powers, said he. Her heart had a manifold adaptation, her constitution and infinite buoyancy, which, had she possessed only a little patience to await the reflux of her troubles, would have borne her upward triumphantly for twenty years to come. Her beauty would not have waned or scarcely so, and surely not beyond the reach of art to restore it, in all that time. She had life's summer all before her and a hundred varieties of brilliant success. What an actress Sinobia might have been. It was one of her least valuable capabilities. How forcibly she might have wrought upon the world, either directly her own person, or by her influence upon some man, or a series of men, of controlling genius. Every prize that could be worth a woman's having, and many prizes which other women are too timid to desire, lay within Sinobia's reach. In all this I observed there would have been nothing to satisfy her heart. Her heart answered Westervelt contemptuously. That troublesome organ as she had hitherto found it, would have been kept in its due place and degree, and have had all the gratification it could fairly claim. She would soon have established a control over it. Love had failed her, you say. Had it never failed her before, yet she survived it, and loved again. Possibly not once alone, nor twice either. And now to drown herself for yonder dreamy philanthropist. Who are you I exclaimed indignantly, that dare to speak thus of the dead? You seem to intend a eulogy, yet leave out whatever was noblest in her, and blacken while you mean to praise. I have long considered you as Sinobia's evil fate. Your sentiments confirm me in the idea, but leave me still ignorant as to the mode in which you have influenced her life. The connection may have been valuable, except by death. Then indeed, always in the hope of God's infinite mercy, I cannot deem it a misfortune that she sleeps in yonder grave. No matter what I was to her, he answered gloomily, yet without actual emotion. She is now beyond my reach. Had she lived and hearkened to my counsels, we might have served each other well. But there's the nobia lies in yonder pit with the dull earth over her. Twenty years of a brilliant lifetime thrown away for a mere woman's whim. Heaven deal with Westervelt according to his nature and desserts, that is to say annihilate him. He was altogether earthy, worldly, made for time and its gross objects, and incapable except by a sort of dim reflection caught from other minds, of so much as one spiritual idea. Whatever stain Zenobia had was caught from him, nor does its seldom happen that a character of admirable qualities loses its better life because the atmosphere that should sustain it is rendered poisonous by such breath as this man mingled with Zenobias. Yet his reflections possessed their share of truth. It was a woeful thought that a woman of Zenobia's diversified capacity should have fancied herself irretrievably defeated on the broad battlefield of life and with no refuge saved to fall on her own sword merely because love had gone against her. It is nonsense and a miserable wrong, the result like so many others of masculine egotism, that the success or failure of woman's existence should be made to depend wholly on the affections and on one species of affection, while man has such a multitude of other chances that this seems but an incident. For its own sake, if it will do no more, the world should throw open all its avenues to the passport of a woman's bleeding heart. As we stood around the grave I looked often towards Priscilla dreading to see her wholly overcome with grief and deeply grieved in truth she was, but a character so simply constituted as hers has room only for a single predominant affection. No other feeling can touch the heart's inmost core nor do it any deadly mischief. Thus while we see that such a being responds to every breeze with tremulous vibration and imagine that she must be shattered by the first rude blast, we find her retaining her equilibrium amid shocks that might have overthrown many a sturdier frame. So with Priscilla, her one possible misfortune was Hollingsworth's unkindness and that was destined never to befall her, never yet at least for Priscilla has not died. But Hollingsworth, after all the evil that he did, are we to leave him thus blessed with the entire devotion of this one true heart and with wealth at his disposal to execute the long-contemplated project that had led him so far astray? What retribution is there here? My mind being vexed with precisely this query I made a journey some years since for the sole purpose of catching a last glimpse of Hollingsworth and judging for myself whether he were a happy man or no. I learned that he inhabited a small cottage, that his way of life was exceedingly retired, and that my only chance of encountering him or Priscilla was to meet them in a secluded lane where in the latter part of the afternoon they were accustomed to walk. I did meet them accordingly. As they approached me I observed in Hollingsworth's face a depressed and melancholy look that seemed habitual. The powerfully built man showed a self- distrustful weakness and a childlike or childish tendency to press close and closer still to the side of the slender woman whose arm was within his. In Priscilla's manner there was a protective and watchful quality as if she felt herself the guardian of her companion, but likewise a deep, submissive, unquestioning reverence and also availed happiness in her fair and quiet countenance. Drawing nearer Priscilla recognized me and gave me a kind and friendly smile but with a slight gesture which I could not help interpreting as an entreaty not to make myself known to Hollingsworth. Nevertheless an impulse took possession of me and compelled me to address him. I have come, Hollingsworth, said I, to view your grand edifice for the reformation of criminals. Is it finished yet? No, nor begun, answered he without raising his eyes. A very small one answers all my purposes. Priscilla threw me an upgrading glance, but I spoke again with a bitter and revengeful emotion as if flinging a poisoned arrow at Hollingsworth's heart. Up to this moment I inquired how many criminals have you reformed? Not one, said Hollingsworth, with his eyes still fixed on the ground. Ever since we parted I have been busy with a single murderer. Then the tears gushed into my eyes and I forgave him, for I remembered the wild energy, the passionate shriek with which Zanobia had spoken those words. Tell him he has murdered me, tell him that I'll haunt him, and I knew what murderer he meant and whose vindictive shadow dogged the side where Priscilla was not. The moral which presents itself to my reflections as drawn from Hollingsworth's character and errors is simply this, that admitting what is called philanthropy when adopted as a profession, to be often useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, it is perilous to the individual whose ruling passion in one exclusive channel it thus becomes. It ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the heart, the rich juices of which God never meant should be pressed violently out and distilled into alcoholic liquor by an unnatural process, but should render life sweet, bland and gently beneficent, and insensibly influence other hearts and other lives to the same blessed end. I see in Hollingsworth an exemplification of the most awful truth in Bunyan's book of such. From the very gate of heaven there is a byway to the pit. But all this while we have been standing by Zanobia's grave. I have never since beheld it, but make no question that the grass grew all the better on that little parallelogram of pasture land for the decay of the beautiful woman who slept beneath. How nature seems to love us, and how readily nevertheless without a sigh or a complaint she converts us to a meaner purpose, when her highest one, that of a conscious intellectual life and sensibility, has been timely balked. While Zanobia lived, nature was proud of her and directed all eyes upon that radiant presence as her fairest handiwork. Zanobia perished, will not nature shed a tear? Ah, no, she adopts the calamity at once into her system, and is just as well pleased for what we can see with the tuft of rancor vegetation that grew out of Zanobia's heart as with all the beauty which has bequeathed us no earthly representative except in this crop of weeds. It is because the spirit is inestimable that the lifeless body is so little valued. CHAPTER XXIX It remains only to say a few words about myself. Not improbably the reader might be willing to spare me the trouble, for I have made but a poor and dim figure in my own narrative, establishing no separate interest and suffering my colorless life to take its hue from other lives. But one still retains some little consideration for oneself, so I keep these last two or three pages for my individual and soul behoof. But what, after all, have I to tell? Nothing, nothing, nothing. I left Blythdale within the week after Zanobia's death and went back thither no more. The whole soil of our farm for a long time afterwards seemed but the sodded earth over her grave. I could not toil there nor live upon its products. Often, however, in these years that are darkening around me, I remember our beautiful scheme of a noble and unselfish life, and how fair in that first summer appeared the prospect that it might endure for generations, and be perfected as the ages rolled away into the system of a people and a world. Were my former associates now there, were there only three or four of those true-hearted men still laboring in the sun, I sometimes fancy that I should direct my world weary footsteps thitherward and entreat them to receive me for old friendship's sake. More and more I feel that we had struck upon what ought to be a truth. Posterity may dig it up and profit by it. The experiment so far as its original projectors were concerned proved long ago a failure, first lapsing into Fourierism and dying as it well deserved for this infidelity to its own higher spirit. Where once we toiled with our whole hopeful hearts, the town paupers, aged, nervous and disconsolate, creep sluggishly afield. Alas, what faith is requisite to bear up against such results of generous effort? My subsequent life has passed, I was going to say happily, but at all events tolerably enough. I am now at middle-age—well, well, a step or two beyond the midmost point, and I care not a fig, who knows it. A bachelor, with no very decided purpose of ever being otherwise. I have been twice to Europe and spent a year or two rather agreeably at each visit. Being well to do in the world and having nobody but myself to care for, I live very much at my ease and fair sumptuously every day. As for poetry I have given it up, notwithstanding that Dr. Griswald, as the reader of course knows, has placed me at a fair elevation among our minor minstrelsy, on the strength of my pretty little volume published ten years ago. As regards human progress, in spite of my irrepressible yearnings over the Blithedale reminiscences, let them believe in it who can and aid in it who choose. If I could earnestly do either, it might be all the better for my comfort. As Hollingsworth once told me, I lack a purpose. How strange. He was ruined morally by an over-plus of the very same ingredient, the want of which I occasionally suspect, has rendered my own life all in emptiness. I by no means wish to die, yet were there any cause in this whole chaos of human struggle worth a sane man's dying for, and which my death would benefit, then, provided however the effort did not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble, me thinks I might be bold to offer up my life. If Kossuth, for example, would pitch the battlefield of Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and choose a mild sunny morning after breakfast for the conflict, Miles Coverdale would gladly be his man for one brave rush upon the leveled bayonets. Further than that I should be loathed to pledge myself. I exaggerate my own defects. The reader must not take my own word for it, nor believe me altogether changed from the young man who once hoped strenuously and struggled not so much amiss. Frostier heads than mine have gained honour in the world. Frostier hearts have imbibed new warmth and been newly happy. Life, however, it must be owned, has come to a rather idle pass with me. Would my friends like to know what brought it thither? There is one secret I have concealed it all along, and never meant to let the least whisper of it escape. One foolish little secret which possibly may have had something to do with these inactive years of meridian manhood, with my bachelorship, with the unsatisfied retrospect that I fling back on life and my listless glance towards the future. Shall I reveal it? It is an absurd thing for a man in his afternoon, a man of the world more over, with these three white hairs in his brown mustache and that deepening track of a crow's foot on each temple. An absurd thing ever to have happened and quite the absurdist for an old bachelor like me to talk about. But it rises to my throat, so let it come. I perceive moreover that the confession brief as it shall be, will throw a gleam of light over my behaviour throughout the foregoing incidents, and is indeed essential to the full understanding of my story. The reader therefore, since I have disclosed so much, is entitled to this one word more. As I write it he will charitably suppose me to blush and turn away my face. I, I myself, was in love with Priscilla.