 | V.
UNTIL BED-TIME. The Blithedale romance |  |
5. V.
UNTIL BED-TIME.
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 cow-hide 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
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 under tone, 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.
“O, 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 fore-finger. 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 dough-nuts,
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.
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
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 farm-house 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
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
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 sun-burnt 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 twelve-month's
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
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 reäppearing on the hither side, until
it swept across our door-step.
How cold an Arcadia was this!
| V.
UNTIL BED-TIME. The Blithedale romance | |