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_ Blithedale, thus far in its progress, had never found the necessity
of a burial-ground. 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 Eliot'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 a death, we Blithedale colonists
had sometimes set our fancies at work to arrange a funereal 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 moulded 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. But 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 an 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 Zenobia might have
been! It was one of her least valuable capabilities. How forcibly
she might have wrought upon the world, either directly in 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 Zenobia'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 Zenobia'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 indissoluble,
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 Zenobia 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 deserts!--
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 it 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 Zenobia's.
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, save 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, blest 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 a veiled 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 upbraiding 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 Zenobia
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 by-way to the pit!
But, all this while, we have been standing by Zenobia'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
untimely balked! While Zenobia lived, Nature was proud of her, and
directed all eyes upon that radiant presence, as her fairest
handiwork. Zenobia 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 aught we can see, with the tuft of ranker
vegetation that grew out of Zenobia'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. _
Read next: CHAPTER XXIX - MILES COVERDALE'S CONFESSION
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