“It is genuine tragedy, is it not?” rejoined Zenobia, with a sharp, light laugh. “And you are willing to allow, perhaps, that I have had hard measure. But it is a woman’s doom, and I have deserved it like a woman; so let there be no pity, as, on my part, there shall be no complaint. It is all right now, or will shortly be so. But, Mr. Coverdale, by all means, write this ballad, and put your soul’s ache into it, and turn your sympathy to good account, as other poets do, and as poets must, unless they choose to give us glittering icicles instead of lines of fire. As for the moral, it shall be distilled into the final stanza, in a drop of bitter honey.”
“What shall it be, Zenobia?” I inquired, endeavoring to fall in with her mood.
“Oh, a very old one will serve the purpose,” she replied. “There are no new truths, much as we have prided ourselves on finding some. A moral? Why, this:—that, in the battle-field of life, the downright stroke, that would fall only on a man’s steel head-piece, 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, spoilt long before he met me! A life, too, hopelessly entangled with a villain’s! He did well to cast me off. God be praised he did it! And yet, had he trusted me, and borne with me a little longer, I would have saved him all this trouble.”
She was silent, for a time, and stood with her eyes fixed on the ground. Again raising them, her look was more mild and calm.
“Miles Coverdale!” said she.
“Well, Zenobia!” I responded. “Can I do you any service?”
“Very little,” she replied. “But it is my purpose, as you may well imagine, to remove from Blithedale; and, most likely, I may not see Hollingsworth again. A woman in my position, you understand, feels scarcely at her ease among former friends. New faces—unaccustomed looks—those only can she tolerate. She would pine, among familiar scenes; she would be apt to blush, too, under the eyes that knew her secret; her heart might throb uncomfortably; she would mortify herself, I suppose, with foolish notions of having sacrificed the honor of her sex, at the foot of proud, contumacious man. Poor womanhood, with its rights and wrongs! Here will be new matter for my course of lectures, at the idea of which you smiled, Mr. Coverdale, a month or two ago. But, as you have really a heart and sympathies, as far as they go, and as I shall depart without seeing Hollingsworth, I must entreat you to be a messenger between him and me.”
“Willingly,” said I, wondering at the strange way in which her mind seemed to vibrate from the deepest earnest to mere levity. “What is the message?”
“True;—what is it?” exclaimed Zenobia. “After all, I hardly know. On better consideration, I have no message. Tell him—tell him something pretty and pathetic, that will come nicely and sweetly into your ballad—anything you please, so it be tender and submissive enough. Tell him he has murdered me! Tell him that I’ll haunt him!”—she spoke these words with the wildest energy—“And give him—no, give Priscilla—this!”
Thus saying, she took the jewelled flower out of her hair; and it struck me as the act of a queen, when worsted in a combat, discrowning herself, as if she found a sort of relief in abasing all her pride.
“Bid her wear this for Zenobia’s sake,” she continued. “She is a pretty little creature, and will make as soft and gentle a wife as the veriest Bluebeard113 could desire. Pity that she must fade so soon! These delicate and puny maidens always do. Ten years hence, let Hollingsworth look at my face and Priscilla’s, and then choose betwixt them. Or, if he pleases, let him do it now!”
How magnificently Zenobia looked, as she said this! The effect of her beauty was even heightened by the over-consciousness and self-recognition of it, into which, I suppose, Hollingsworth’s scorn had driven her. She understood the look of admiration in my face; and—Zenobia to the last—it gave her pleasure.
“It is an endless pity,” said she, “that I had not bethought myself of winning your heart, Mr. Coverdale, instead of Hollingsworth’s. I think I should have succeeded; and many women would have deemed you the worthier conquest of the two. You are certainly much the handsomest man. But there is a fate in these things. And beauty, in a man, has been of little account with me, since my earliest girlhood, when, for once, it turned my head. Now, farewell!”
“Zenobia, whither are you going?” I asked.
“No matter where,” said she. “But I am weary of this place, and sick to death of playing at philanthropy and progress. Of all varieties of mock-life, we have surely blundered into the very emptiest mockery, in our effort to establish the one true system. I have done with it; and Blithedale must find another woman to superintend the laundry, and you, Mr. Coverdale, another nurse to make your gruel, the next time you fall ill. It was, indeed, a foolish dream! Yet it gave us some pleasant summer days, and bright hopes, while they lasted. It can do no more; nor will it avail us to shed tears over a broken bubble. Here is my hand! Adieu!”
She gave me her hand, with the same free, whole-souled gesture as on the first afternoon of our acquaintance; and being greatly moved, I bethought me of no better method of expressing my deep sympathy than to carry it to my lips. In so doing, I perceived that this white hand—so hospitably warm when I first touched it, five months since—was now cold as a veritable piece of snow.
“How very cold!” I exclaimed, holding it between both my own, with the vain idea of warming it. “What can be the reason? It is really deathlike!”
“The extremities die first, they say,” answered Zenobia, laughing. “And so you kiss this poor, despised, rejected hand! Well, my dear friend, I thank you! You have reserved your homage for the fallen. Lip of man will never touch my hand again. I intend to become a Catholic, for the sake of going into a nunnery. When you next hear of Zenobia, her face will be behind the black-veil; so look your last at it now—for all is over! Once more, farewell!”
She withdrew her hand, yet left a lingering pressure, which I felt long afterwards. So intimately connected, as I had been, with perhaps the only man in whom she was ever truly interested, Zenobia looked on me as the representative of all the past, and was conscious that, in bidding me adieu, she likewise took final leave of Hollingsworth, and of this whole epoch of her life. Never did her beauty shine out more lustrously, than in the last glimpse that I had of her. She departed, and was soon hidden among the trees.
But, whether it was the strong impression of the foregoing scene, or whatever
else the cause, I was affected with a fantasy that Zenobia had not actually gone, but was still hovering about the spot, and haunting it. I seemed to feel her eyes upon me. It was as if the vivid coloring of her character had left a brilliant stain upon the air. By degrees, however, the impression grew less distinct. I flung myself upon the fallen leaves, at the base of Eliot’s pulpit. The sunshine withdrew up the tree-trunks, and flickered on the topmost boughs; gray twilight made the wood obscure; the stars brightened out; the pendent boughs became wet with chill autumnal dews. But I was listless, worn-out with emotion on my own behalf, and sympathy for others, and had no heart to leave my comfortless lair, beneath the rock.
I must have fallen asleep, and had a dream, all the circumstances of which utterly vanished at the moment when they converged to some tragical catastrophe, and thus grew too powerful for the thin sphere of slumber that enveloped them. Starting from the ground, I found the risen moon shining upon the rugged face of the rock, and myself all in a tremble.
XXVII
MIDNIGHT
IT COULD not have been far from midnight, when I came beneath Hollingsworth’s window, and finding it open, flung in a tuft of grass, with earth at the roots, and heard it fall upon the floor. He was either awake, or sleeping very lightly; for scarcely a moment had gone by, before he looked out and discerned me standing in the moonlight.
“Is it you, Coverdale?” he asked. “What is the matter?”
“Come down to me, Hollingsworth!” I answered. “I am anxious to speak with you.”
The strange tone of my own voice startled me, and him, probably, no less. He lost no time, and soon issued from the house-door, with his dress half-arranged.
“Again, what is the matter?” he asked, impatiently.
“Have you seen Zenobia,” said I, “since you parted from her, at Eliot’s pulpit?”
“No,” answered Hollingsworth; “nor did I expect it.”
His voice,was deep, but had a tremor in it. Hardly had he spoken, when Silas Foster thrust his head, done up in a cotton handkerchief, out of another window, and took what he called—as it literally was—a squint at us.
“Well, folks, what are ye about here?” he demanded. “Aha, are you there, Miles Coverdale? You have been turning night into day, since you left us, I reckon; and so you find it quite natural to come prowling about the house, at this time o’ night, frightening my old woman out of her wits, and making her disturb a tired man out of his best nap. In with you, you vagabond, and to bed!”
“Dress yourself quietly, Foster,” said I. “We want your assistance.”
I could not, for the life of me, keep that strange tone out of my voice. Silas Foster, obtuse as were his sensibilities, seemed to feel the ghastly earnestness that was conveyed in it, as well as Hollingsworth did. He immediately withdrew his head, and I heard him yawning, muttering to his wife, and again yawning heavily, while he hurried on his clothes. Meanwhile, I showed Hollingsworth a delicate handkerchief, marked with a well-known cypher, and told where I had found it, and other circumstances which had filled me with a suspicion so terrible, that I left him, if he dared, to shape it out for himself. By the time my brief explanation was finished, we were joined by Silas Foster, in his blue woollen frock.
“Well, boys,” cried he, peevishly, “what is to pay now?”
“Tell him, Hollingsworth!” said I.
Hollingsworth shivered, perceptibly, and drew in a hard breath betwixt his teeth. He steadied himself, however, and looking the matter more firmly in the face than I had done, explained to Foster my suspicions and the grounds of them, with a distinctness from which, in spite of my utmost efforts, my words had swerved aside. The tough-nerved yeoman, in his comment, put a finish on the business, and brought out the hideous idea in its full terror, as if he were removing the napkin from the face of a corpse.
“And so you think she’s drowned herself!” he cried.
I turned away my face.
“What on earth should the young woman do that for?” exclaimed Silas, his eyes half out of his head with mere surprise. “Why, she has more means than she can use or waste, and lacks nothing to make her comfortable, but a husband—and that’s an article she could have, any day! There’s some mistake about this, I tell you!”
“Come,” said I, shuddering. “Let us go and ascertain the truth.”
“Well, well,” answered Silas Foster, “just as you say. We’ll take the long pole, with the hook at the end, that serves to get the bucket out of the draw-well, when the rope is broken. With that, and a couple of long-handled hay-rakes, I’ll answer for finding her, if she’s anywhere to be found. Strange enough! Zenobia drown herself! No, no, I don’t believe it. She had too much sense, and too much means, and enjoyed life a great deal too well.”
When our few preparations were completed, we hastened, by a shorter than the customary route, through fields and pastures, and across a portion of the meadow, to the particular spot, on the river-bank, which I had paused to contemplate, in the course of my afternoon’s ramble. A nameless presentiment had again drawn me thither, after leaving Eliot’s pulpit. I showed my companions where I had found the handkerchief, and pointed to two or three footsteps, impressed into the clayey margin, and tending towards the water. Beneath its shallow verge, among the water-weeds, there were further traces, as yet unobliterated by the sluggish current, which was there almost at a stand-still. Silas Foster thrust his face down close to these footsteps, and picked up a shoe, that had escaped my observation, being half imbedded in the mud.
“There’s a kid-shoe that never was made on a Yankee last,” observed he. “I know enough of shoemaker’s craft to tell that. French manufacture; and see what a high instep!—and how evenly she trod in it! There never was a woman that stept handsomer in her shoes than Zenobia did. Here,” he added, addressing Hollingsworth, “would you like to keep the shoe?”
Hollingsworth started back.
“Give it to me, Foster,” said I.
I dabbled it in the water, to rinse off the mud, and have kept it ever since. Not far from this spot, lay an old, leaky punt, drawn up on the oozy river-side, and generally half-full of water. It served the angler to go in quest of pickerel, or the sportsman to pick up his wild-ducks. Setting this crazy barque afloat, I seated myself in the stern, with the paddle, while Hollingsworth sat in the bows, with the hooked pole, and Silas Foster amidships, with a hay-rake.
“It puts me in mind of my young days,” remarked Silas, “when I used to steal out of bed to go bobbing for horn-pouts114 and eels. Heigh-ho!-well!-life and death together make sad work for us all. Then, I was a boy, bobbing for fish; and now I am getting to be an old fellow, and here I be, groping for a dead body! I tell you what, lads, if I thought anything had really happened to Zenobia, I should feel kind o’ sorrowful.”
“I wish, at least, you would hold your tongue!” muttered I.
The moon that night, though past the full, was still large and oval, and having risen between eight and nine o’‘clock, now shone aslantwise over the river, throwing the high, opposite bank, with its woods, into deep shadow, but lighting up the hither shore pretty effectually. Not a ray appeared to fall on the river itself. It lapsed imperceptibly away, a broad, black, inscrutable depth, keeping its own secrets from the eye of man, as impenetrably as mid-ocean could.
“Well, Miles Coverdale,” said Foster, “you are the helmsman. How do you mean to manage this business?”
“I shall let the boat drift, broadside foremost, past that stump,” I replied. “I know the bottom, having sounded it in fishing. The shore, on this side, after the first step or two, goes off very abruptly; and there is a pool, just by the stump, twelve or fifteen feet deep. The current could not have force enough to sweep any sunken object—even if partially buoyant —out of that hollow.”
“Come, then,” said Silas. “But I doubt whether I can touch bottom with this hay-rake, if it’s as deep as you say. Mr. Hollingsworth, I think you’ll be the lucky man, to-night, such
luck as it is!”
We floated past the stump. Silas Foster plied his rake manfully, poking it as far as he could into the water, and immersing the whole length of his arm besides. Hollingsworth at first sat motionless, with the hooked-pole elevated in the air. But, by-and-by, with a nervous and jerky movement, he began to plunge it into the blackness that upbore us, setting his teeth, and making precisely such thrusts, methought, as if he were stabbing at a deadly enemy. I bent over the side of the boat. So obscure, however, so awfully mysterious, was that dark stream, that—and the thought made me shiver like a leaf—I might as well have tried to look into the enigma of the eternal world, to discover what had become of Zenobia’s soul, as into the river’s depths, to find her body. And there, perhaps, she lay, with her face upward, while the shadow of the boat, and my own pale face peering downward, passed slowly betwixt her and the sky.
Once, twice, thrice, I paddled the boat up stream, and again suffered it to glide, with the river’s slow, funereal motion, downward. Silas Foster had raked up a large mass of stuff, which, as it came towards the surface, looked somewhat like a flowing garment, but proved to be a monstrous tuft of water-weeds. Hollingsworth, with a gigantic effort, upheaved a sunken log. When once free of the bottom, it rose partly out of water—all weedy and slimy, a devilish-looking object, which the moon had not shone upon for half a hundred years —then plunged again, and sullenly returned to its old resting-place, for the remnant of the century.
“That looked ugly!” quoth Silas. “I half thought it was the Evil One on the same errand as ourselves—searching for Zenobia!”
“He shall never get her!” said I, giving the boat a strong impulse.
“That’s not for you to say, my boy!” retorted the yeoman. “Pray God he never has, and never may! Slow work this, however! I should really be glad to find something. Pshaw! What a notion that is, when the only good-luck would be, to paddle, and drift and poke, and grope, hereabouts, till morning, and have our labor for our pains! For my part, I shouldn’t wonder if the creature had only lost her shoe in the mud, and saved her soul alive, after all. My stars, how she will laugh at us, tomorrow morning!”