University of Virginia Library

12. XII.
COVERDALE'S HERMITAGE.

Long since, in this part of our circumjacent wood, I
had found out for myself a little hermitage. It was a
kind of leafy cave, high upward into the air, among the
midmost branches of a white-pine tree. A wild grape-vine,
of unusual size and luxuriance, had twined and
twisted itself up into the tree, and, after wreathing the
entanglement of its tendrils almost around every bough,
had caught hold of three or four neighboring trees, and
married the whole clump with a perfectly inextricable
knot of polygamy. Once, while sheltering myself from
a summer shower, the fancy had taken me to clamber up
into this seemingly impervious mass of foliage. The
branches yielded me a passage, and closed again beneath,
as if only a squirrel or a bird had passed. Far aloft,
around the stem of the central pine, behold a perfect nest
for Robinson Crusoe or King Charles! A hollow chamber
of rare seclusion had been formed by the decay of
some of the pine branches, which the vine had lovingly
strangled with its embrace, burying them from the light
of day in an aërial sepulchre of its own leaves. It cost
me but little ingenuity to enlarge the interior, and open
loop-holes through the verdant walls. Had it ever been
my fortune to spend a honey-moon, I should have thought
seriously of inviting my bride up thither, where our

next neighbors would have been two orioles in another
part of the clump.

It was an admirable place to make verses, tuning the
rhythm to the breezy symphony that so often stirred
among the vine-leaves; or to meditate an essay for the
Dial, in which the many tongues of Nature whispered
mysteries, and seemed to ask only a little stronger puff
of wind to speak out the solution of its riddle. Being so
pervious to air-currents, it was just the nook, too, for the
enjoyment of a cigar. This hermitage was my one
exclusive possession while I counted myself a brother of
the socialists. It symbolized my individuality, and aided
me in keeping it inviolate. None ever found me out in
it, except, once, a squirrel. I brought thither no guest,
because, after Hollingsworth failed me, there was no
longer the man alive with whom I could think of sharing
all. So there I used to sit, owl-like, yet not without liberal
and hospitable thoughts. I counted the innumerable
clusters of my vine, and fore-reckoned the abundance
of my vintage. It gladdened me to anticipate the surprise
of the Community, when, like an allegorical figure
of rich October, I should make my appearance, with
shoulders bent beneath the burthen of ripe grapes, and
some of the crushed ones crimsoning my brow as with a
blood-stain.

Ascending into this natural turret, I peeped in turn
out of several of its small windows. The pine-tree, being
ancient, rose high above the rest of the wood, which was
of comparatively recent growth. Even where I sat,
about midway between the root and the topmost bough,
my position was lofty enough to serve as an observatory,
not for starry investigations, but for those sublunary

matters in which lay a lore as infinite as that of the
planets. Through one loop-hole I saw the river lapsing
calmly onward, while in the meadow, near its brink, a
few of the brethren were digging peat for our winter's
fuel. On the interior cart-road of our farm, I discerned
Hollingsworth, with a yoke of oxen hitched to a drag of
stones, that were to be piled into a fence, on which we
employed ourselves at the odd intervals of other labor.
The harsh tones of his voice, shouting to the sluggish
steers, made me sensible, even at such a distance, that
he was ill at ease, and that the balked philanthropist
had the battle-spirit in his heart.

“Haw, Buck!” quoth he. “Come along there, ye
lazy ones! What are ye about, now? Gee!”

“Mankind, in Hollingsworth's opinion,” thought I,
“is but another yoke of oxen, as stubborn, stupid, and
sluggish, as our old Brown and Bright. He vituperates
us aloud, and curses us in his heart, and will begin to
prick us with the goad-stick, by and by. But are we
his oxen? And what right has he to be the driver?
And why, when there is enough else to do, should we
waste our strength in dragging home the ponderous load
of his philanthropic absurdities? At my height above
the earth, the whole matter looks ridiculous!”

Turning towards the farm-house, I saw Priscilla (for,
though a great way off, the eye of faith assured me that
it was she) sitting at Zenobia's window, and making
little purses, I suppose; or, perhaps, mending the Community's
old linen. A bird flew past my tree; and, as it
clove its way onward into the sunny atmosphere, I flung
it a message for Priscilla.

“Tell her,” said I, “that her fragile thread of life has

inextricably knotted itself with other and tougher threads,
and most likely it will be broken. Tell her that Zenobia
will not be long her friend. Say that Hollingsworth's
heart is on fire with his own purpose, but icy
for all human affection; and that, if she has given him
her love, it is like casting a flower into a sepulchre.
And say that if any mortal really cares for her, it is
myself; and not even I, for her realities, — poor little
seamstress, as Zenobia rightly called her! — but for the
fancy-work with which I have idly decked her out!”

The pleasant scent of the wood, evolved by the hot
sun, stole up to my nostrils, as if I had been an idol in
its niche. Many trees mingled their fragrance into a
thousand-fold odor. Possibly there was a sensual influence
in the broad light of noon that lay beneath me. It
may have been the cause, in part, that I suddenly found
myself possessed by a mood of disbelief in moral beauty
or heroism, and a conviction of the folly of attempting to
benefit the world. Our especial scheme of reform, which,
from my observatory, I could take in with the bodily eye,
looked so ridiculous that it was impossible not to laugh
aloud.

“But the joke is a little too heavy,” thought I. “If
I were wise, I should get out of the scrape with all diligence,
and then laugh at my companions for remaining
in it.”

While thus musing, I heard, with perfect distinctness,
somewhere in the wood beneath, the peculiar laugh
which I have described as one of the disagreeable characteristics
of Professor Westervelt. It brought my
thoughts back to our recent interview. I recognized as
chiefly due to this man's influence the sceptical and

sneering view which, just now, had filled my mental
vision, in regard to all life's better purpose. And it
was through his eyes, more than my own, that I was
looking at Hollingsworth, with his glorious, if impracticable
dream, and at the noble earthliness of Zenobia's
character, and even at Priscilla, whose impalpable
grace lay so singularly between disease and beauty.
The essential charm of each had vanished. There are
some spheres the contact with which inevitably degrades
the high, debases the pure, deforms the beautiful. It
must be a mind of uncommon strength, and little impressibility,
that can permit itself the habit of such intercourse,
and not be permanently deteriorated; and yet
the Professor's tone represented that of worldly society
at large, where a cold scepticism smothers what it can
of our spiritual aspirations, and makes the rest ridiculous.
I detested this kind of man; and all the more
because a part of my own nature showed itself responsive
to him.

Voices were now approaching through the region of
the wood which lay in the vicinity of my tree. Soon I
caught glimpses of two figures — a woman and a man —
Zenobia and the stranger — earnestly talking together
as they advanced.

Zenobia had a rich, though varying color. It was,
most of the while, a flame, and anon a sudden paleness.
Her eyes glowed, so that their light sometimes flashed
upward to me, as when the sun throws a dazzle from
some bright object on the ground. Her gestures were
free, and strikingly impressive. The whole woman was
alive with a passionate intensity, which I now perceived
to be the phase in which her beauty culminated. Any

passion would have become her well; and passionate
love, perhaps, the best of all. This was not love, but
anger, largely intermixed with scorn. Yet the idea
strangely forced itself upon me, that there was a sort of
familiarity between these two companions, necessarily
the result of an intimate love, — on Zenobia's part, at
least, — in days gone by, but which had prolonged itself
into as intimate a hatred, for all futurity. As they
passed among the trees, reckless as her movement was,
she took good heed that even the hem of her garment
should not brush against the stranger's person. I wondered
whether there had always been a chasm, guarded
so religiously, betwixt these two.

As for Westervelt, he was not a whit more warmed
by Zenobia's passion than a salamander by the heat of
its native furnace. He would have been absolutely
statuesque, save for a look of slight perplexity, tinctured
strongly with derision. It was a crisis in which his intellectual
perceptions could not altogether help him out.
He failed to comprehend, and cared but little for comprehending,
why Zenobia should put herself into such a
fume; but satisfied his mind that it was all folly, and
only another shape of a woman's manifold absurdity,
which men can never understand. How many a
woman's evil fate has yoked her with a man like this!
Nature thrusts some of us into the world miserably
incomplete on the emotional side, with hardly any sensibilities
except what pertain to us as animals. No passion,
save of the senses; no holy tenderness, nor the
delicacy that results from this. Externally they bear a
close resemblance to other men, and have perhaps all
save the finest grace; but when a woman wrecks herself

on such a being, she ultimately finds that the real
womanhood within her has no corresponding part in
him. Her deepest voice lacks a response; the deeper
her cry, the more dead his silence. The fault may be
none of his; he cannot give her what never lived within
his soul. But the wretchedness on her side, and the
moral deterioration attendant on a false and shallow
life, without strength enough to keep itself sweet, are
among the most pitiable wrongs that mortals suffer.

Now, as I looked down from my upper region at this
man and woman, — outwardly so fair a sight, and wandering
like two lovers in the wood, — I imagined that
Zenobia, at an earlier period of youth, might have fallen
into the misfortune above indicated. And when her
passionate womanhood, as was inevitable, had discovered
its mistake, there had ensued the character of
eccentricity and defiance which distinguished the more
public portion of her life.

Seeing how aptly matters had chanced thus far, I
began to think it the design of fate to let me into all
Zenobia's secrets, and that therefore the couple would
sit down beneath my tree, and carry on a conversation
which would leave me nothing to inquire. No doubt,
however, had it so happened, I should have deemed
myself honorably bound to warn them of a listener's
presence, by flinging down a handful of unripe grapes, or
by sending an unearthly groan out of my hiding-place,
as if this were one of the trees of Dante's ghostly forest.
But real life never arranges itself exactly like a romance.
In the first place, they did not sit down at all. Secondly,
even while they passed beneath the tree, Zenobia's utterance
was so hasty and broken, and Westervelt's so cool

and low, that I hardly could make out an intelligible
sentence, on either side. What I seem to remember, I
yet suspect, may have been patched together by my
fancy, in brooding over the matter, afterwards.

“Why not fling the girl off,” said Westervelt, “and
let her go?”

“She clung to me from the first,” replied Zenobia.
“I neither know nor care what it is in me that so
attaches her. But she loves me, and I will not fail
her.”

“She will plague you, then,” said he, “in more ways
than one.”

“The poor child!” exclaimed Zenobia. “She can
do me neither good nor harm. How should she?”

I know not what reply Westervelt whispered; nor did
Zenobia's subsequent exclamation give me any clue,
except that it evidently inspired her with horror and
disgust.

“With what kind of a being am I linked?” cried she.
“If my Creator cares aught for my soul, let him release
me from this miserable bond!”

“I did not think it weighed so heavily,” said her
companion.

“Nevertheless,” answered Zenobia, “it will strangle
me, at last!”

And then I heard her utter a helpless sort of moan;
a sound which, struggling out of the heart of a person
of her pride and strength, affected me more than if she
had made the wood dolorously vocal with a thousand
shrieks and wails.

Other mysterious words, besides what are above
written, they spoke together; but I understood no more,

and even question whether I fairly understood so much
as this. By long brooding over our recollections, we
subtilize them into something akin to imaginary stuff,
and hardly capable of being distinguished from it. In a
few moments, they were completely beyond ear-shot. A
breeze stirred after them, and awoke the leafy tongues
of the surrounding trees, which forthwith began to
babble, as if innumerable gossips had all at once got
wind of Zenobia's secret. But, as the breeze grew
stronger, its voice among the branches was as if it said,
“Hush! Hush!” and I resolved that to no mortal
would I disclose what I had heard. And, though there
might be room for casuistry, such, I conceive, is the
most equitable rule in all similar conjunctures.