 | XXIV.
THE MASQUERADERS. The Blithedale romance |  |
24. XXIV.
THE MASQUERADERS.
Two nights had passed since the foregoing occurrences,
when, in a breezy September forenoon, I set forth
from town, on foot, towards Blithedale.
It was the most delightful of all days for a walk, with
a dash of invigorating ice-temper in the air, but a coolness
that soon gave place to the brisk glow of exercise,
while the vigor remained as elastic as before. The
atmosphere had a spirit and sparkle in it. Each breath
was like a sip of ethereal wine, tempered, as I said, with
a crystal lump of ice. I had started on this expedition
in an exceedingly sombre mood, as well befitted one who
found himself tending towards home, but was conscious
that nobody would be quite overjoyed to greet him
there. My feet were hardly off the pavement, however,
when this morbid sensation began to yield to the lively
influences of air and motion. Nor had I gone far, with
fields yet green on either side, before my step became
as swift and light as if Hollingsworth were waiting
to exchange a friendly hand-grip, and Zenobia's and
Priscilla's open arms would welcome the wanderer's reappearance.
It has happened to me, on other occasions,
as well as this, to prove how a state of physical well-being
can create a kind of joy, in spite of the profoundest
anxiety of mind.
The pathway of that walk still runs along, with sunny
should be so. But my mental eye can even now discern
the September grass, bordering the pleasant road-side
with a brighter verdure than while the summer
heats were scorching it; the trees, too, mostly green,
although here and there a branch or shrub has donned
its vesture of crimson and gold a week or two before its
fellows. I see the tufted barberry-bushes, with their
small clusters of scarlet fruit; the toadstools, likewise, —
some spotlessly white, others yellow or red, — mysterious
growths, springing suddenly from no root or seed, and
growing nobody can tell how or wherefore. In this respect
they resembled many of the emotions in my breast.
And I still see the little rivulets, chill, clear and bright,
that murmured beneath the road, through subterranean
rocks, and deepened into mossy pools, where tiny fish
were darting to and fro, and within which lurked the
hermit-frog. But no, — I never can account for it,
that, with a yearning interest to learn the upshot of all
my story, and returning to Blithedale for that sole purpose,
I should examine these things so like a peacefulbosomed
naturalist. Nor why, amid all my sympathies
and fears, there shot, at times, a wild exhilaration
through my frame.
Thus I pursued my way along the line of the ancient
stone wall that Paul Dudley built, and through white
villages, and past orchards of ruddy apples, and fields of
ripening maize, and patches of woodland, and all such
sweet rural scenery as looks the fairest, a little beyond
the suburbs of a town. Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla!
They glided mistily before me, as I walked.
Sometimes, in my solitude, I laughed with the bitterness
up my heart and soul to interests that were not mine.
What had I ever had to do with them? And why,
being now free, should I take this thraldom on me once
again? It was both sad and dangerous, I whispered to
myself, to be in too close affinity with the passions, the
errors and the misfortunes, of individuals who stood
within a circle of their own, into which, if I stept at all,
it must be as an intruder, and at a peril that I could not
estimate.
Drawing nearer to Blithedale, a sickness of the spirits
kept alternating with my flights of causeless buoyancy.
I indulged in a hundred odd and extravagant conjectures.
Either there was no such place as Blithedale, nor ever
had been, nor any brotherhood of thoughtful laborers
like what I seemed to recollect there, or else it was all
changed during my absence. It had been nothing but
dream-work and enchantment. I should seek in vain
for the old farm-house, and for the green-sward, the
potato-fields, the root-crops, and acres of Indian corn,
and for all that configuration of the land which I had
imagined. It would be another spot, and an utter
strangeness.
These vagaries were of the spectral throng so apt to
steal out of an unquiet heart. They partly ceased to
haunt me, on my arriving at a point whence, through
the trees, I began to catch glimpses of the Blithedale
farm. That surely was something real. There was
hardly a square foot of all those acres on which I had
not trodden heavily, in one or another kind of toil. The
curse of Adam's posterity — and, curse or blessing be it,
it gives substance to the life around us — had first come
earned bread and eaten it, and so established my claim
to be on earth, and my fellowship with all the sons of
labor. I could have knelt down, and have laid my
breast against that soil. The red clay of which my
frame was moulded seemed nearer akin to those crumbling
furrows than to any other portion of the world's
dust. There was my home, and there might be my
grave.
I felt an invincible reluctance, nevertheless, at the
idea of presenting myself before my old associates, without
first ascertaining the state in which they were. A
nameless foreboding weighed upon me. Perhaps, should
I know all the circumstances that had occurred, I might
find it my wisest course to turn back, unrecognized, unseen,
and never look at Blithedale more. Had it been
evening, I would have stolen softly to some lighted window
of the old farm-house, and peeped darkling in, to see
all their well-known faces round the supper-board. Then,
were there a vacant seat, I might noiselessly unclose the
door, glide in, and take my place among them, without
a word. My entrance might be so quiet, my aspect so
familiar, that they would forget how long I had been
away, and suffer me to melt into the scene, as a wreath
of vapor melts into a larger cloud. I dreaded a boisterous
greeting. Beholding me at table, Zenobia, as a
matter of course, would send me a cup of tea, and Hollingsworth
fill my plate from the great dish of pandowdy,
and Priscilla, in her quiet way, would hand the
cream, and others help me to the bread and butter. Being
one of them again, the knowledge of what had happened
would come to me without a shock. For still, at
me in the face that some evil thing had befallen us, or
was ready to befall.
Yielding to this ominous impression, I now turned
aside into the woods, resolving to spy out the posture of
the Community, as craftily as the wild Indian before he
makes his onset. I would go wandering about the outskirts
of the farm, and, perhaps, catching sight of a solitary
acquaintance, would approach him amid the brown
shadows of the trees (a kind of medium fit for spirits
departed and revisitant, like myself), and entreat him to
tell me how all things were.
The first living creature that I met was a partridge
which sprung up beneath my feet, and whirred away;
the next was a squirrel, who chattered angrily at me
from an overhanging bough. I trod along by the dark,
sluggish river, and remember pausing on the bank, above
one of its blackest and most placid pools — (the very spot,
with the barkless stump of a tree aslantwise over the
water, is depicting itself to my fancy at this instant), —
and wondering how deep it was, and if any over-laden
soul had ever flung its weight of mortality in thither,
and if it thus escaped the burthen, or only made it
heavier. And perhaps the skeleton of the drowned
wretch still lay beneath the inscrutable depth, clinging
to some sunken log at the bottom with the gripe of its
old despair. So slight, however, was the track of these
gloomy ideas, that I soon forgot them in the contemplation
of a brood of wild ducks, which were floating on
the river, and anon took flight, leaving each a bright
streak over the black surface. By and by, I came to my
hermitage, in the heart of the white-pine tree, and clambering
had watched throughout the summer, now dangled around
me in abundant clusters of the deepest purple, deliciously
sweet to the taste, and, though wild, yet free from that
ungentle flavor which distinguishes nearly all our native
and uncultivated grapes. Methought a wine might be
pressed out of them possessing a passionate zest, and
endowed with a new kind of intoxicating quality, attended
with such bacchanalian ecstacies as the tamer
grapes of Madeira, France, and the Rhine, are inadequate
to produce. And I longed to quaff a great goblet
of it at that moment!
While devouring the grapes, I looked on all sides out
of the peep-holes of my hermitage, and saw the farm-house,
the fields, and almost every part of our domain,
but not a single human figure in the landscape. Some
of the windows of the house were open, but with no
more signs of life than in a dead man's unshut eyes.
The barn-door was ajar, and swinging in the breeze.
The big old dog, — he was a relic of the former dynasty
of the farm, — that hardly ever stirred out of the yard,
was nowhere to be seen. What, then, had become of
all the fraternity and sisterhood? Curious to ascertain
this point, I let myself down out of the tree, and going
to the edge of the wood, was glad to perceive our herd
of cows chewing the cud or grazing not far off. I fancied,
by their manner, that two or three of them recognized
me (as, indeed, they ought, for I had milked them
and been their chamberlain times without number); but,
after staring me in the face a little while, they phlegmatically
began grazing and chewing their cuds again.
Then I grew foolishly angry at so cold a reception, and
unsentimental cows.
Skirting further round the pasture, I heard voices and
much laughter proceeding from the interior of the wood.
Voices, male and feminine; laughter, not only of fresh
young throats, but the bass of grown people, as if solemn
organ-pipes should pour out airs of merriment. Not a
voice spoke, but I knew it better than my own; not a
laugh, but its cadences were familiar. The wood, in
this portion of it, seemed as full of jollity as if Comus
and his crew were holding their revels in one of its usually
lonesome glades. Stealing onward as far as I durst,
without hazard of discovery, I saw a concourse of strange
figures beneath the overshadowing branches. They appeared,
and vanished, and came again, confusedly, with
the streaks of sunlight glimmering down upon them.
Among them was an Indian chief, with blanket, feathers
and war-paint, and uplifted tomahawk; and near
him, looking fit to be his woodland-bride, the goddess
Diana, with the crescent on her head, and attended by
our big lazy dog, in lack of any fleeter hound. Drawing
an arrow from her quiver, she let it fly at a venture,
and hit the very tree behind which I happened to be lurking.
Another group consisted of a Bavarian broom-girl,
a negro of the Jim Crow order, one or two foresters of
the middle ages, a Kentucky woodsman in his trimmed
hunting-shirt and deerskin leggings, and a Shaker elder,
quaint, demure, broad-brimmed, and square-skirted.
Shepherds of Arcadia, and allegoric figures from the
Faerie Queen, were oddly mixed up with these. Arm
in arm, or otherwise huddled together in strange discrepancy,
stood grim Puritans, gay Cavaliers, and Revolutionary
queues longer than their swords. A bright-complexioned,
dark-haired, vivacious little gypsy, with a red
shawl over her head, went from one group to another,
telling fortunes by palmistry; and Moll Pitcher, the
renowned old witch of Lynn, broomstick in hand, showed
herself prominently in the midst, as if announcing all
these apparitions to be the offspring of her necromantic
art. But Silas Foster, who leaned against a tree near
by, in his customary blue frock, and smoking a short
pipe, did more to disenchant the scene, with his look of
shrewd, acrid, Yankee observation, than twenty witches
and necromancers could have done in the way of rendering
it weird and fantastic.
A little further off, some old-fashioned skinkers and
drawers, all with portentously red noses, were spreading
a banquet on the leaf-strewn earth; while a horned
and long-tailed gentleman (in whom I recognized the
fiendish musician erst seen by Tam O'Shanter) tuned
his fiddle, and summoned the whole motley rout to a
dance, before partaking of the festal cheer. So they
joined hands in a circle, whirling round so swiftly, so
madly, and so merrily, in time and tune with the Satanic
music, that their separate incongruities were
blended all together, and they became a kind of entanglement
that went nigh to turn one's brain with
merely looking at it. Anon they stopt all of a sudden,
and staring at one another's figures, set up a roar of
laughter; whereat a shower of the September leaves
(which, all day long, had been hesitating whether to fall
or no) were shaken off by the movement of the air, and
came eddying down upon the revellers.
Then, for lack of breath, ensued a silence; at the
deepest point of which, tickled by the oddity of surprising
my grave associates in this masquerading trim, I could
not possibly refrain from a burst of laughter on my own
separate account.
“Hush!” I heard the pretty gypsy fortune-teller say.
“Who is that laughing?”
“Some profane intruder!” said the goddess Diana.
“I shall send an arrow through his heart, or change him
into a stag, as I did Actæon, if he peeps from behind the
trees!”
“Me take his scalp!” cried the Indian chief, brandishing
his tomahawk, and cutting a great caper in the air.
“I 'll root him in the earth with a spell that I have
at my tongue's end!” squeaked Moll Pitcher. “And the
green moss shall grow all over him, before he gets free
again!”
“The voice was Miles Coverdale's,” said the fiendish
fiddler, with a whisk of his tail and a toss of his horns.
“My music has brought him hither. He is always
ready to dance to the devil's tune!”
Thus put on the right track, they all recognized the
voice at once, and set up a simultaneous shout.
“Miles! Miles! Miles Coverdale, where are you?”
they cried. “Zenobia! Queen Zenobia! here is one of
your vassals lurking in the wood. Command him to
approach, and pay his duty!”
The whole fantastic rabble forthwith streamed off in
pursuit of me, so that I was like a mad poet hunted by
chimeras. Having fairly the start of them, however, I
succeeded in making my escape, and soon left their
merriment and riot at a good distance in the rear. Its
finally lost in the hush and solemnity of the wood. In
my haste, I stumbled over a heap of logs and sticks that
had been cut for fire-wood, a great while ago, by some
former possessor of the soil, and piled up square, in
order to be carted or sledded away to the farm-house.
But, being forgotten, they had lain there perhaps fifty
years, and possibly much longer; until, by the accumulation
of moss, and the leaves falling over them and
decaying there, from autumn to autumn, a green mound
was formed, in which the softened outline of the woodpile
was still perceptible. In the fitful mood that then
swayed my mind, I found something strangely affecting
in this simple circumstance. I imagined the long-dead
woodman, and his long-dead wife and children, coming
out of their chill graves, and essaying to make a fire with
this heap of mossy fuel!
From this spot I strayed onward, quite lost in reverie,
and neither knew nor cared whither I was going, until
a low, soft, well-remembered voice spoke, at a little
distance.
“There is Mr. Coverdale!”
“Miles Coverdale!” said another voice, — and its
tones were very stern. “Let him come forward, then!”
“Yes, Mr. Coverdale,” cried a woman's voice, — clear
and melodious, but, just then, with something unnatural
in its chord, — “you are welcome! But you come half
an hour too late, and have missed a scene which you
would have enjoyed!”
I looked up, and found myself nigh Eliot's pulpit, at
the base of which sat Hollingsworth, with Priscilla at
his feet, and Zenobia standing before them.
| XXIV.
THE MASQUERADERS. The Blithedale romance | |