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_ Silas Foster, by the time we concluded our meal, had stript off his
coat, and planted himself on a low chair by the kitchen fire, with a
lapstone, a hammer, a piece of sole leather, and some waxed-ends, in
order to cobble an old pair of cowhide boots; he being, in his own
phrase, "something of a dab" (whatever degree of skill that may
imply) at the shoemaking business. We heard the tap of his hammer at
intervals for the rest of the evening. The remainder of the party
adjourned to the sitting-room. Good Mrs. Foster took her
knitting-work, and soon fell fast asleep, still keeping her needles
in brisk movement, and, to the best of my observation, absolutely
footing a stocking out of the texture of a dream. And a very
substantial stocking it seemed to be. One of the two handmaidens
hemmed a towel, and the other appeared to be making a ruffle, for her
Sunday's wear, out of a little bit of embroidered muslin which
Zenobia had probably given her.
It was curious to observe how trustingly, and yet how timidly, our
poor Priscilla betook herself into the shadow of Zenobia's protection.
She sat beside her on a stool, looking up every now and then with
an expression of humble delight at her new friend's beauty. A
brilliant woman is often an object of the devoted admiration--it
might almost be termed worship, or idolatry--of some young girl, who
perhaps beholds the cynosure only at an awful distance, and has as
little hope of personal intercourse as of climbing among the stars of
heaven. We men are too gross to comprehend it. Even a woman, of
mature age, despises or laughs at such a passion. There occurred to
me no mode of accounting for Priscilla's behavior, except by
supposing that she had read some of Zenobia's stories (as such
literature goes everywhere), or her tracts in defence of the sex, and
had come hither with the one purpose of being her slave. There is
nothing parallel to this, I believe,--nothing so foolishly
disinterested, and hardly anything so beautiful,--in the masculine
nature, at whatever epoch of life; or, if there be, a fine and rare
development of character might reasonably be looked for from the
youth who should prove himself capable of such self-forgetful
affection.
Zenobia happening to change her seat, I took the opportunity, in an
undertone, to suggest some such notion as the above.
"Since you see the young woman in so poetical a light," replied she
in the same tone, "you had better turn the affair into a ballad. It
is a
grand subject, and worthy of supernatural machinery. The storm, the
startling knock at the door, the entrance of the sable knight
Hollingsworth and this shadowy snow-maiden, who, precisely at the
stroke of midnight, shall melt away at my feet in a pool of ice-cold
water and give me my death with a pair of wet slippers! And when the
verses are written, and polished quite to your mind, I will favor you
with my idea as to what the girl really is."
"Pray let me have it now," said I; "it shall be woven into the ballad."
"She is neither more nor less," answered Zenobia, "than a seamstress
from the city; and she has probably no more transcendental purpose
than to do my miscellaneous sewing, for I suppose she will hardly
expect to make my dresses."
"How can you decide upon her so easily?" I inquired.
"Oh, we women judge one another by tokens that escape the obtuseness
of masculine perceptions!" said Zenobia. "There is no proof which
you would be likely to appreciate, except the needle marks on the tip
of her forefinger. Then, my supposition perfectly accounts for her
paleness, her nervousness, and her wretched fragility. Poor thing!
She has been stifled with the heat of a salamander stove, in a small,
close room, and has drunk coffee, and fed upon doughnuts, raisins,
candy, and all such trash, till she is scarcely half alive; and so,
as she has hardly any physique, a poet like Mr. Miles Coverdale may
be allowed to think her spiritual."
"Look at her now!" whispered I.
Priscilla was gazing towards us with an inexpressible sorrow in her
wan face and great tears running down her cheeks. It was difficult
to resist the impression that, cautiously as we had lowered our
voices, she must have overheard and been wounded by Zenobia's
scornful estimate of her character and purposes.
"What ears the girl must have!" whispered Zenobia, with a look of
vexation, partly comic and partly real. "I will confess to you that
I cannot quite make her out. However, I am positively not an
ill-natured person, unless when very grievously provoked,--and as you,
and especially Mr. Hollingsworth, take so much interest in this odd
creature, and as she knocks with a very slight tap against my own
heart likewise,--why, I mean to let her in. From this moment I will
be reasonably kind to her. There is no pleasure in tormenting a
person of one's own sex, even if she do favor one with a little more
love than one can conveniently dispose of; and that, let me say, Mr.
Coverdale, is the most troublesome offence you can offer to a woman."
"Thank you," said I, smiling; "I don't mean to be guilty of it."
She went towards Priscilla, took her hand, and passed her own rosy
finger-tips, with a pretty, caressing movement, over the girl's hair.
The touch had a magical effect. So vivid a look of joy flushed up
beneath those fingers, that it seemed as if the sad and wan Priscilla
had been snatched away, and another kind of creature substituted in
her place. This one caress, bestowed voluntarily by Zenobia, was
evidently received as a pledge of all that the stranger sought from
her, whatever the unuttered boon might be. From that instant, too,
she melted in quietly amongst us, and was no longer a foreign element.
Though always an object of peculiar interest, a riddle, and a theme
of frequent discussion, her tenure at Blithedale was thenceforth
fixed. We no more thought of questioning it, than if Priscilla had
been recognized as a domestic sprite, who had haunted the rustic
fireside of old, before we had ever been warmed by its blaze.
She now produced, out of a work-bag that she had with her, some
little wooden instruments (what they are called I never knew), and
proceeded to knit, or net, an article which ultimately took the shape
of a silk purse. As the work went on, I remembered to have seen just
such purses before; indeed, I was the possessor of one. Their
peculiar excellence, besides the great delicacy and beauty of the
manufacture, lay in the almost impossibility that any uninitiated
person should discover the aperture; although, to a practised touch,
they would open as wide as charity or prodigality might wish. I
wondered if it were not a symbol of Priscilla's own mystery.
Notwithstanding the new confidence with which Zenobia had inspired
her, our guest showed herself disquieted by the storm. When the
strong puffs of wind spattered the snow against the windows and made
the oaken frame of the farmhouse creak, she looked at us
apprehensively, as if to inquire whether these tempestuous outbreaks
did not betoken some unusual mischief in the shrieking blast. She
had been bred up, no doubt, in some close nook, some inauspiciously
sheltered court of the city, where the uttermost rage of a tempest,
though it might scatter down the slates of the roof into the bricked
area, could not shake the casement of her little room. The sense of
vast, undefined space, pressing from the outside against the black
panes of our uncurtained windows, was fearful to the poor girl,
heretofore accustomed to the narrowness of human limits, with the
lamps of neighboring tenements glimmering across the street. The
house probably seemed to her adrift on the great ocean of the night.
A little parallelogram of sky was all that she had hitherto known of
nature, so that she felt the awfulness that really exists in its
limitless extent. Once, while the blast was bellowing, she caught
hold of Zenobia's robe, with precisely the air of one who hears her
own name spoken at a distance, but is unutterably reluctant to obey
the call.
We spent rather an incommunicative evening. Hollingsworth hardly
said a word, unless when repeatedly and pertinaciously addressed.
Then, indeed, he would glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his
meditations like a tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply
possible, and betake himself back into the solitude of his heart and
mind. The poor fellow had contracted this ungracious habit from the
intensity with which he contemplated his own ideas, and the
infrequent sympathy which they met with from his auditors,--a
circumstance that seemed only to strengthen the implicit confidence
that he awarded to them. His heart, I imagine, was never really
interested in our socialist scheme, but was forever busy with his
strange, and, as most people thought it, impracticable plan, for the
reformation of criminals through an appeal to their higher instincts.
Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me many a groan to tolerate
him on this point. He ought to have commenced his investigation of
the subject by perpetrating some huge sin in his proper person, and
examining the condition of his higher instincts afterwards.
The rest of us formed ourselves into a committee for providing our
infant community with an appropriate name,--a matter of greatly more
difficulty than the uninitiated reader would suppose. Blithedale was
neither good nor bad. We should have resumed the old Indian name of
the premises, had it possessed the oil-and-honey flow which the
aborigines were so often happy in communicating to their local
appellations; but it chanced to be a harsh, ill-connected, and
interminable word, which seemed to fill the mouth with a mixture of
very stiff clay and very crumbly pebbles. Zenobia suggested "Sunny
Glimpse," as expressive of a vista into a better system of society.
This we turned over and over for a while, acknowledging its
prettiness, but concluded it to be rather too fine and sentimental a
name (a fault inevitable by literary ladies in such attempts) for
sunburnt men to work under. I ventured to whisper "Utopia," which,
however, was unanimously scouted down, and the proposer very harshly
maltreated, as if he had intended a latent satire. Some were for
calling our institution "The Oasis," in view of its being the one
green spot in the moral sand-waste of the world; but others insisted
on a proviso for reconsidering the matter at a twelvemonths' end,
when a final decision might be had, whether to name it "The Oasis" or
"Sahara." So, at last, finding it impracticable to hammer out
anything better, we resolved that the spot should still be Blithedale,
as being of good augury enough.
The evening wore on, and the outer solitude looked in upon us through
the windows, gloomy, wild, and vague, like another state of existence,
close beside the little sphere of warmth and light in which we were
the prattlers and bustlers of a moment. By and by the door was
opened by Silas Foster, with a cotton handkerchief about his head,
and a tallow candle in his hand.
"Take my advice, brother farmers," said he, with a great, broad,
bottomless yawn, "and get to bed as soon as you can. I shall sound
the horn at daybreak; and we've got the cattle to fodder, and nine
cows to milk, and a dozen other things to do, before breakfast."
Thus ended the first evening at Blithedale. I went shivering to my
fireless chamber, with the miserable consciousness (which had been
growing upon me for several hours past) that I had caught a
tremendous cold, and should probably awaken, at the blast of the horn,
a fit subject for a hospital. The night proved a feverish one.
During the greater part of it, I was in that vilest of states when a
fixed idea remains in the mind, like the nail in Sisera's brain,
while innumerable other ideas go and come, and flutter to and fro,
combining constant transition with intolerable sameness. Had I made
a record of that night's half-waking dreams, it is my belief that it
would have anticipated several of the chief incidents of this
narrative, including a dim shadow of its catastrophe. Starting up in
bed at length, I saw that the storm was past, and the moon was
shining on the snowy landscape, which looked like a lifeless copy of
the world in marble.
From the bank of the distant river, which was shimmering in the
moonlight, came the black shadow of the only cloud in heaven, driven
swiftly by the wind, and passing over meadow and hillock, vanishing
amid tufts of leafless trees, but reappearing on the hither side,
until it swept across our doorstep.
How cold an Arcadia was this! _
Read next: CHAPTER VI - COVERDALE'S SICK CHAMBER
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