Chương Chương 27 · BLITHEDALE PASTURE

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.

XXIX.