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_ The horn sounded at daybreak, as Silas Foster had forewarned us,
harsh, uproarious, inexorably drawn out, and as sleep-dispelling as
if this hard-hearted old yeoman had got hold of the trump of doom.
On all sides I could hear the creaking of the bedsteads, as the
brethren of Blithedale started from slumber, and thrust themselves
into their habiliments, all awry, no doubt, in their haste to begin
the reformation of the world. Zenobia put her head into the entry,
and besought Silas Foster to cease his clamor, and to be kind enough
to leave an armful of firewood and a pail of water at her chamber
door. Of the whole household,--unless, indeed, it were Priscilla,
for whose habits, in this particular, I cannot vouch,--of all our
apostolic society, whose mission was to bless mankind, Hollingsworth,
I apprehend, was the only one who began the enterprise with prayer.
My sleeping-room being but thinly partitioned from his, the solemn
murmur of his voice made its way to my ears, compelling me to be an
auditor of his awful privacy with the Creator. It affected me with a
deep reverence for Hollingsworth, which no familiarity then existing,
or that afterwards grew more intimate between us,--no, nor my
subsequent perception of his own great errors,--ever quite effaced.
It is so rare, in these times, to meet with a man of prayerful habits
(except, of course, in the pulpit), that such an one is decidedly
marked out by the light of transfiguration, shed upon him in the
divine interview from which he passes into his daily life.
As for me, I lay abed; and if I said my prayers, it was backward,
cursing my day as bitterly as patient Job himself. The truth was,
the hot-house warmth of a town residence, and the luxurious life in
which I indulged myself, had taken much of the pith out of my
physical system; and the wintry blast of the preceding day, together
with the general chill of our airy old farmhouse, had got fairly into
my heart and the marrow of my bones. In this predicament, I
seriously wished--selfish as it may appear--that the reformation of
society had been postponed about half a century, or, at all events,
to such a date as should have put my intermeddling with it entirely
out of the question.
What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better
society than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough.
My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and
carpeted, with the bedchamber adjoining; my centre-table, strewn with
books and periodicals; my writing-desk with a half-finished poem, in
a stanza of my own contrivance; my morning lounge at the reading-room
or picture gallery; my
noontide walk along the cheery pavement, with the suggestive
succession of human faces, and the brisk throb of human life in which
I shared; my dinner at the Albion, where I had a hundred dishes at
command, and could banquet as delicately as the wizard Michael Scott
when the Devil fed him from the king of France's kitchen; my evening
at the billiard club, the concert, the theatre, or at somebody's
party, if I pleased,--what could be better than all this? Was it
better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a
barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows;
to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and thereby
take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose vocation
I had thrust myself? Above all, was it better to have a fever and
die blaspheming, as I was like to do?
In this wretched plight, with a furnace in my heart and another in my
head, by the heat of which I was kept constantly at the boiling point,
yet shivering at the bare idea of extruding so much as a finger into
the icy atmosphere of the room, I kept my bed until breakfast-time,
when Hollingsworth knocked at the door, and entered.
"Well, Coverdale," cried he, "you bid fair to make an admirable
farmer! Don't you mean to get up to-day?"
"Neither to-day nor to-morrow," said I hopelessly. "I doubt if I
ever rise again!"
"What is the matter now?" he asked.
I told him my piteous case, and besought him to send me back to town
in a close carriage.
"No, no!" said Hollingsworth with kindly seriousness. "If you are
really sick, we must take care of you."
Accordingly he built a fire in my chamber, and, having little else to
do while the snow lay on the ground, established himself as my nurse.
A doctor was sent for, who, being homaeopathic, gave me as much
medicine, in the course of a fortnight's attendance, as would have
laid on the point of a needle. They fed me on water-gruel, and I
speedily became a skeleton above ground. But, after all, I have many
precious recollections connected with that fit of sickness.
Hollingsworth's more than brotherly attendance gave me inexpressible
comfort. Most men--and certainly I could not always claim to be one
of the exceptions--have a natural indifference, if not an absolutely
hostile feeling, towards those whom disease, or weakness, or calamity
of any kind causes to falter and faint amid the rude jostle of our
selfish existence. The education of Christianity, it is true, the
sympathy of a like
experience and the example of women, may soften and, possibly,
subvert this ugly characteristic of our sex; but it is originally
there, and has likewise its analogy in the practice of our brute
brethren, who hunt the sick or disabled member of the herd from among
them, as an enemy. It is for this reason that the stricken deer goes
apart, and the sick lion grimly withdraws himself into his den.
Except in love, or the attachments of kindred, or other very long and
habitual affection, we really have no tenderness. But there was
something of the woman moulded into the great, stalwart frame of
Hollingsworth; nor was he ashamed of it, as men often are of what is
best in them, nor seemed ever to know that there was such a soft
place in his heart. I knew it well, however, at that time, although
afterwards it came nigh to be forgotten. Methought there could not
be two such men alive as Hollingsworth. There never was any blaze of
a fireside that warmed and cheered me, in the down-sinkings and
shiverings of my spirit, so effectually as did the light out of those
eyes, which lay so deep and dark under his shaggy brows.
Happy the man that has such a friend beside him when he comes to die!
and unless a friend like Hollingsworth be at hand,--as most probably
there will not,--he had better make up his mind to die alone. How
many men, I wonder, does one meet with in a lifetime, whom he would
choose for his deathbed companions! At the crisis of my fever I
besought Hollingsworth to let nobody else enter the room, but
continually to make me sensible of his own presence by a grasp of the
hand, a word, a prayer, if he thought good to utter it; and that then
he should be the witness how courageously I would encounter the worst.
It still impresses me as almost a matter of regret that I did not
die then, when I had tolerably made up my mind to it; for
Hollingsworth would have gone with me to the hither verge of life,
and have sent his friendly and hopeful accents far over on the other
side, while I should be treading the unknown path. Now, were I to
send for him, he would hardly come to my bedside, nor should I depart
the easier for his presence.
"You are not going to die, this time," said he, gravely smiling.
"You know nothing about sickness, and think your case a great deal
more desperate than it is."
"Death should take me while I am in the mood," replied I, with a
little of my customary levity.
"Have you nothing to do in life," asked Hollingsworth, "that you
fancy yourself so ready to leave it?"
"Nothing," answered I; "nothing that I know of, unless to make pretty
verses, and play a part, with Zenobia and the rest of the amateurs,
in our pastoral. It seems but an unsubstantial sort of business, as
viewed through a mist of fever. But, dear Hollingsworth, your own
vocation is evidently to be a priest, and to spend your days and
nights in helping your fellow creatures to draw peaceful dying
breaths."
"And by which of my qualities," inquired he, "can you suppose me
fitted for this awful ministry?"
"By your tenderness," I said. "It seems to me the reflection of
God's own love."
"And you call me tender!" repeated Hollingsworth thoughtfully. "I
should rather say that the most marked trait in my character is an
inflexible severity of purpose. Mortal man has no right to be so
inflexible as it is my nature and necessity to be."
"I do not believe it," I replied.
But, in due time, I remembered what he said.
Probably, as Hollingsworth suggested, my disorder was never so
serious as, in my ignorance of such matters, I was inclined to
consider it. After so much tragical preparation, it was positively
rather mortifying to find myself on the mending hand.
All the other members of the Community showed me kindness, according
to the full measure of their capacity. Zenobia brought me my gruel
every day, made by her own hands (not very skilfully, if the truth
must be told), and, whenever I seemed inclined to converse, would sit
by my bedside, and talk with so much vivacity as to add several
gratuitous throbs to my pulse. Her poor little stories and tracts
never half did justice to her intellect. It was only the lack of a
fitter avenue that drove her to seek development in literature. She
was made (among a thousand other things that she might have been) for
a stump oratress. I recognized no severe culture in Zenobia; her
mind was full of weeds. It startled me sometimes, in my state of
moral as well as bodily faint-heartedness, to observe the hardihood
of her philosophy. She made no scruple of oversetting all human
institutions, and scattering them as with a breeze from her fan. A
female reformer, in her attacks upon society, has an instinctive
sense of where the life lies, and is inclined to aim directly at that
spot. Especially the relation between the sexes is naturally among
the earliest to attract her notice.
Zenobia was truly a magnificent woman. The homely simplicity of her
dress could not conceal, nor scarcely diminish, the queenliness of
her presence. The image of her form and face should have been
multiplied all over the earth. It was wronging the rest of mankind
to retain her as the spectacle of only a few. The stage would have
been her proper sphere. She should have made it a point of duty,
moreover, to sit endlessly to painters and sculptors, and preferably
to the latter; because the cold decorum of the marble would consist
with the utmost scantiness of drapery, so that the eye might chastely
be gladdened with her material perfection in its entireness. I know
not well how to express that the native glow of coloring in her
cheeks, and even the flesh-warmth over her round arms, and what was
visible of her full bust,--in a word, her womanliness incarnated,--
compelled me sometimes to close my eyes, as if it were not quite
the privilege of modesty to gaze at her. Illness and exhaustion, no
doubt, had made me morbidly sensitive.
I noticed--and wondered how Zenobia contrived it--that she had always
a new flower in her hair. And still it was a hot-house flower,--an
outlandish flower,--a flower of the tropics, such as appeared to have
sprung passionately out of a soil the very weeds of which would be
fervid and spicy. Unlike as was the flower of each successive day to
the preceding one, it yet so assimilated its richness to the rich
beauty of the woman, that I thought it the only flower fit to be worn;
so fit, indeed, that Nature had evidently created this floral gem,
in a happy exuberance, for the one purpose of worthily adorning
Zenobia's head. It might be that my feverish fantasies clustered
themselves about this peculiarity, and caused it to look more
gorgeous and wonderful than if beheld with temperate eyes. In the
height of my illness, as I well recollect, I went so far as to
pronounce it preternatural.
"Zenobia is an enchantress!" whispered I once to Hollingsworth. "She
is a sister of the Veiled Lady. That flower in her hair is a
talisman. If you were to snatch it away, she would vanish, or be
transformed into something else."
"What does he say?" asked Zenobia.
"Nothing that has an atom of sense in it," answered Hollingsworth.
"He is a little beside himself, I believe, and talks about your being
a witch, and of some magical property in the flower that you wear in
your hair."
"It is an idea worthy of a feverish poet," said she, laughing rather
compassionately, and taking out the flower. "I scorn to owe anything
to magic. Here, Mr. Hollingsworth, you may keep the spell while it
has any virtue in it; but I cannot promise you not to appear with a
new one to-morrow. It is the one relic of my more brilliant, my
happier days!"
The most curious part of the matter was that, long after my slight
delirium had passed away,--as long, indeed, as I continued to know
this remarkable woman,--her daily flower affected my imagination,
though more slightly, yet in very much the same way. The reason must
have been that, whether intentionally on her part or not, this
favorite ornament was actually a subtile expression of Zenobia's
character.
One subject, about which--very impertinently, moreover--I perplexed
myself with a great many conjectures, was, whether Zenobia had ever
been married. The idea, it must be understood, was unauthorized by
any circumstance or suggestion that had made its way to my ears. So
young as I beheld her, and the freshest and rosiest woman of a
thousand, there was certainly no need of imputing to her a destiny
already accomplished; the probability was far greater that her coming
years had all life's richest gifts to bring. If the great event of a
woman's existence had been consummated, the world knew nothing of it,
although the world seemed to know Zenobia well. It was a ridiculous
piece of romance, undoubtedly, to imagine that this beautiful
personage, wealthy as she was, and holding a position that might
fairly enough be called distinguished, could have given herself away
so privately, but that some whisper and suspicion, and by degrees a
full understanding of the fact, would eventually be blown abroad.
But then, as I failed not to consider, her original home was at a
distance of many hundred miles. Rumors might fill the social
atmosphere, or might once have filled it, there, which would travel
but slowly, against the wind, towards our Northeastern metropolis,
and perhaps melt into thin air before reaching it.
There was not--and I distinctly repeat it--the slightest foundation
in my knowledge for any surmise of the kind. But there is a species
of intuition,--either a spiritual lie or the subtile recognition of a
fact,--which comes to us in a reduced state of the corporeal system.
The soul gets the better of the body, after wasting illness, or when
a vegetable diet may have mingled too much ether in the blood.
Vapors then rise up to the brain, and take shapes that often image
falsehood, but sometimes truth. The spheres of our companions have,
at such periods, a vastly greater influence upon our own than when
robust health gives us a repellent and self-defensive energy.
Zenobia's sphere, I imagine, impressed itself powerfully on mine, and
transformed me, during this period of my weakness, into something
like a mesmerical clairvoyant.
Then, also, as anybody could observe, the freedom of her deportment
(though, to some tastes, it might commend itself as the utmost
perfection of manner in a youthful widow or a blooming matron) was
not exactly maiden-like. What girl had ever laughed as Zenobia did?
What girl had ever spoken in her mellow tones? Her unconstrained and
inevitable manifestation, I said often to myself, was that of a woman
to whom wedlock had thrown wide the gates of mystery. Yet sometimes
I strove to be ashamed of these conjectures. I acknowledged it as a
masculine grossness--a sin of wicked interpretation, of which man is
often guilty towards the other sex--thus to mistake the sweet,
liberal, but womanly frankness of a noble and generous disposition.
Still, it was of no avail to reason with myself nor to upbraid myself.
Pertinaciously the thought, "Zenobia is a wife; Zenobia has lived
and loved! There is no folded petal, no latent dewdrop, in this
perfectly developed rose!"--irresistibly that thought drove out all
other conclusions, as often as my mind reverted to the subject.
Zenobia was conscious of my observation, though not, I presume, of
the point to which it led me.
"Mr. Coverdale," said she one day, as she saw me watching her, while
she arranged my gruel on the table, "I have been exposed to a great
deal of eye-shot in the few years of my mixing in the world, but
never, I think, to precisely such glances as you are in the habit of
favoring me with. I seem to interest you very much; and yet--or else
a woman's instinct is for once deceived--I cannot reckon you as an
admirer. What are you seeking to discover in me?"
"The mystery of your life," answered I, surprised into the truth by
the unexpectedness of her attack. "And you will never tell me."
She bent her head towards me, and let me look into her eyes, as if
challenging me to drop a plummet-line down into the depths of her
consciousness.
"I see nothing now," said I, closing my own eyes, "unless it be the
face of a sprite laughing at me from the bottom of a deep well."
A bachelor always feels himself defrauded, when he knows or suspects
that any woman of his acquaintance has given herself away. Otherwise,
the matter could have been no concern of mine. It was purely
speculative, for I should not, under any circumstances, have fallen
in love with Zenobia. The riddle made me so nervous, however, in my
sensitive condition of mind and body, that I most ungratefully began
to wish that she would let me alone. Then, too, her gruel was very
wretched stuff, with almost invariably the smell of pine smoke upon
it, like the evil taste that is said to mix itself up with a witch's
best concocted dainties. Why could not she have allowed one of the
other women to take the gruel in charge? Whatever else might be her
gifts, Nature certainly never intended Zenobia for a cook. Or, if so,
she should have meddled only with the richest and spiciest dishes,
and such as are to be tasted at banquets, between draughts of
intoxicating wine. _
Read next: CHAPTER VII - THE CONVALESCENT
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