الفصل الفصل 5 · COVERDALE'S SICK-CHAMBER

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.

VII.