 | XXVII.
MIDNIGHT. The Blithedale romance |  |
27. XXVII.
MIDNIGHT.
It could not have been far from midnight when I
came beneath Hollingsworth's window, and, finding it
open, flung in a tuft of grass with earth at the roots, and
heard it fall upon the floor. He was either awake or
sleeping very lightly; for scarcely a moment had gone
by, before he looked out, and discerned me standing in
the moonlight.
“Is it you, Coverdale?” he asked. “What is the
matter?”
“Come down to me, Hollingsworth!” I answered.
“I am anxious to speak with you.”
The strange tone of my own voice startled me, and
him, probably, no less. He lost no time, and soon issued
from the house-door, with his dress half arranged.
“Again, what is the matter?” he asked, impatiently.
“Have you seen Zenobia,” said I, “since you parted
from her, at Eliot's pulpit?”
“No,” answered Hollingsworth; “nor did I expect
it.”
His voice was deep, but had a tremor in it. Hardly
had he spoken, when Silas Foster thrust his head, done
up in a cotton handkerchief, out of another window, and
took what he called — as it literally was — a squint at
us.
“Well, folks, what are ye about here?” he demanded.
been turning night into day, since you left us, I reckon;
and so you find it quite natural to come prowling about
the house at this time o' night, frightening my old
woman out of her wits, and making her disturb a tired
man out of his best nap. In with you, you vagabond,
and to bed!”
“Dress yourself quietly, Foster,” said I. “We want
your assistance.”
I could not, for the life of me, keep that strange tone
out of my voice. Silas Foster, obtuse as were his sensibilities,
seemed to feel the ghastly earnestness that was
conveyed in it as well as Hollingsworth did. He
immediately withdrew his head, and I heard him yawning,
muttering to his wife, and again yawning heavily,
while he hurried on his clothes. Meanwhile, I showed
Hollingsworth a delicate handkerchief, marked with a
well-known cipher, and told where I had found it, and
other circumstances, which had filled me with a suspicion
so terrible that I left him, if he dared, to shape it out for
himself. By the time my brief explanation was finished,
we were joined by Silas Foster, in his blue woollen
frock.
“Well, boys,” cried he, peevishly, “what is to pay
now?”
“Tell him, Hollingsworth,” said I.
Hollingsworth shivered, perceptibly, and drew in a
hard breath betwixt his teeth. He steadied himself,
however, and, looking the matter more firmly in the
face than I had done, explained to Foster my suspicions,
and the grounds of them, with a distinctness from which,
in spite of my utmost efforts, my words had swerved
a finish on the business, and brought out the hideous
idea in its full terror, as if he were removing the napkin
from the face of a corpse.
“And so you think she 's drowned herself?” he cried.
I turned away my face.
“What on earth should the young woman do that
for?” exclaimed Silas, his eyes half out of his head with
mere surprise. “Why, she has more means than she
can use or waste, and lacks nothing to make her comfortable,
but a husband, and that 's an article she could
have, any day. There 's some mistake about this, I tell
you!”
“Come,” said I, shuddering; “let us go and ascertain
the truth.”
“Well, well,” answered Silas Foster; “just as you
say. We 'll take the long pole, with the hook at the
end, that serves to get the bucket out of the draw-well,
when the rope is broken. With that, and a couple of
long-handled hay-rakes, I 'll answer for finding her, if
she 's anywhere to be found. Strange enough! Zenobia
drown herself! No, no; I don't believe it. She had
too much sense, and too much means, and enjoyed life a
great deal too well.”
When our few preparations were completed, we
hastened, by a shorter than the customary route, through
fields and pastures, and across a portion of the meadow,
to the particular spot on the river-bank which I had
paused to contemplate in the course of my afternoon's
ramble. A nameless presentiment had again drawn me
thither, after leaving Eliot's pulpit. I showed my companions
where I had found the handkerchief, and pointed
and tending towards the water. Beneath its shallow
verge, among the water-weeds, there were further
traces, as yet unobliterated by the sluggish current,
which was there almost at a stand-still. Silas Foster
thrust his face down close to these footsteps, and picked
up a shoe that had escaped my observation, being half
imbedded in the mud.
“There 's a kid shoe that never was made on a Yankee
last,” observed he. “I know enough of shoemaker's
craft to tell that. French manufacture; and, see what a
high instep! and how evenly she trod in it! There
never was a woman that stept handsomer in her shoes
than Zenobia did. Here,” he added, addressing Hollingsworth;
“would you like to keep the shoe?”
Hollingsworth started back.
“Give it to me, Foster,” said I.
I dabbled it in the water, to rinse off the mud, and
have kept it ever since. Not far from this spot lay an
old, leaky punt, drawn up on the oozy river-side, and
generally half full of water. It served the angler to go
in quest of pickerel, or the sportsman to pick up his wild
ducks. Setting this crazy bark afloat, I seated myself
in the stern with the paddle, while Hollingsworth sat in
the bows with the hooked pole, and Silas Foster amidships
with a hay-rake.
“It puts me in mind of my young days,” remarked
Silas, “when I used to steal out of bed to go bobbing for
horn-pouts and eels. Heigh-ho! — well, life and death
together make sad work for us all! Then I was a boy,
bobbing for fish; and now I am getting to be an old fellow,
and here I be, groping for a dead body! I tell you
Zenobia, I should feel kind o' sorrowful.”
“I wish, at least, you would hold your tongue,” muttered
I.
The moon, that night, though past the full, was still
large and oval, and having risen between eight and nine
o'clock, now shone aslantwise over the river, throwing
the high, opposite bank, with its woods, into deep
shadow, but lighting up the hither shore pretty effectually.
Not a ray appeared to fall on the river itself. It
lapsed imperceptibly away, a broad, black, inscrutable
depth, keeping its own secrets from the eye of man, as
impenetrably as mid-ocean could.
“Well, Miles Coverdale,” said Foster, “you are the
helmsman. How do you mean to manage this business?”
“I shall let the boat drift, broadside foremost, past
that stump,” I replied. “I know the bottom, having
sounded it in fishing. The shore, on this side, after the
first step or two, goes off very abruptly; and there is a
pool, just by the stump, twelve or fifteen feet deep.
The current could not have force enough to sweep any
sunken object, even if partially buoyant, out of that hollow.”
“Come, then,” said Silas; “but I doubt whether I
can touch bottom with this hay-rake, if it 's as deep as
you say. Mr. Hollingsworth, I think you 'll be the
lucky man to-night, such luck as it is.”
We floated past the stump. Silas Foster plied his
rake manfully, poking it as far as he could into the
water, and immersing the whole length of his arm
besides. Hollingsworth at first sat motionless, with the
nervous and jerky movement, he began to plunge it into
the blackness that upbore us, setting his teeth, and making
precisely such thrusts, methought, as if he were
stabbing at a deadly enemy. I bent over the side of the
boat. So obscure, however, so awfully mysterious, was
that dark stream, that — and the thought made me
shiver like a leaf — I might as well have tried to look
into the enigma of the eternal world, to discover what
had become of Zenobia's soul, as into the river's depths,
to find her body. And there, perhaps, she lay, with her
face upward, while the shadow of the boat, and my
own pale face peering downward, passed slowly betwixt
her and the sky!
Once, twice, thrice, I paddled the boat up stream, and
again suffered it to glide, with the river's slow, funereal
motion, downward. Silas Foster had raked up a large
mass of stuff, which, as it came towards the surface,
looked somewhat like a flowing garment, but proved to
be a monstrous tuft of water-weeds. Hollingsworth,
with a gigantic effort, upheaved a sunken log. When
once free of the bottom, it rose partly out of water, — all
weedy and slimy, a devilish-looking object, which the
moon had not shone upon for half a hundred years, —
then plunged again, and sullenly returned to its old
resting-place, for the remnant of the century.
“That looked ugly!” quoth Silas. “I half thought
it was the evil one, on the same errand as ourselves, —
searching for Zenobia.”
“He shall never get her,” said I, giving the boat a
strong impulse.
“That's not for you to say, my boy,” retorted the
Slow work this, however! I should really be glad to
find something! Pshaw! What a notion that is, when
the only good luck would be to paddle, and drift, and
poke, and grope, hereabouts, till morning, and have our
labor for our pains! For my part, I should n't wonder
if the creature had only lost her shoe in the mud, and
saved her soul alive, after all. My stars! how she will
laugh at us, to-morrow morning!”
It is indescribable what an image of Zenobia — at the
breakfast-table, full of warm and mirthful life — this surmise
of Silas Foster's brought before my mind. The
terrible phantasm of her death was thrown by it into the
remotest and dimmest back-ground, where it seemed to
grow as improbable as a myth.
“Yes, Silas, it may be as you say,” cried I.
The drift of the stream had again borne us a little
below the stump, when I felt, — yes, felt, for it
was as if the iron hook had smote my breast, — felt
Hollingsworth's pole strike some object at the bottom
of the river! He started up, and almost overset the
boat.
“Hold on!” cried Foster; “you have her!”
Putting a fury of strength into the effort, Hollingsworth
heaved amain, and up came a white swash to
the surface of the river. It was the flow of a woman's
garments. A little higher, and we saw her dark hair
streaming down the current. Black River of Death,
thou hadst yielded up thy victim! Zenobia was found!
Silas Foster laid hold of the body; Hollingsworth,
likewise, grappled with it; and I steered towards the
bank, gazing all the white at Zenobia, whose limbs were
near the shore, we all three step into the water,
bore her out, and laid her on the ground beneath a
tree.
“Poor child!” said Foster, — and his dry old heart,
I verily believe, vouchsafed a tear, — “I 'm sorry for
her!”
Were I to describe the perfect horror of the spectacle,
the reader might justly reckon it to me for a sin and
shame. For more than twelve long years I have borne
it in my memory, and could now reproduce it as freshly
as if it were still before my eyes. Of all modes of
death, methinks it is the ugliest. Her wet garments
swathed limbs of terrible inflexibility. She was the
marble image of a death-agony. Her arms had grown
rigid in the act of struggling, and were bent before her
with clenched hands; her knees, too, were bent, and —
thank God for it! — in the attitude of prayer. Ah, that
rigidity! It is impossible to bear the terror of it. It
seemed, — I must needs impart so much of my own miserable
idea, — it seemed as if her body must keep the
same position in the coffin, and that her skeleton would
keep it in the grave; and that when Zenobia rose at the
day of judgment, it would be in just the same attitude
as now!
One hope I had; and that, too, was mingled half with
fear. She knelt, as if in prayer. With the last, choking
consciousness, her soul, bubbling out through her
lips, it may be, had given itself up to the Father, reconciled
and penitent. But her arms! They were bent
before her, as if she struggled against Providence in
in immitigable defiance. Away with the hideous thought!
The flitting moment after Zenobia sank into the dark
pool — when her breath was gone, and her soul at her
lips — was as long, in its capacity of God's infinite forgiveness,
as the lifetime of the world!
Foster bent over the body, and carefully examined it.
“You have wounded the poor thing's breast,” said he
to Hollingsworth; “close by her heart, too!”
“Ha!” cried Hollingsworth, with a start.
And so he had, indeed, both before and after death!
“See!” said Foster. “That 's the place where the
iron struck her. It looks cruelly, but she never felt
it!”
He endeavored to arrange the arms of the corpse
decently by its side. His utmost strength, however,
scarcely sufficed to bring them down; and rising again,
the next instant, they bade him defiance, exactly as
before. He made another effort, with the same result.
“In God's name, Silas Foster,” cried I, with bitter
indignation, “let that dead woman alone!”
“Why, man, it 's not decent!” answered he, staring
at me in amazement. “I can't bear to see her looking
so! Well, well,” added he, after a third effort, “'t is of
no use, sure enough; and we must leave the women to
do their best with her, after we get to the house. The
sooner that 's done, the better.”
We took two rails from a neighboring fence, and
formed a bier by laying across some boards from the bottom
of the boat. And thus we bore Zenobia homeward.
Six hours before, how beautiful! At midnight,
what a horror! A reflection occurs to me that will
come in, for its sterling truth. Being the woman that
she was, could Zenobia have foreseen all these ugly circumstances
of death, — how ill it would become her, the
altogether unseemly aspect which she must put on, and
especially old Silas Foster's efforts to improve the matter,
— she would no more have committed the dreadful
act than have exhibited herself to a public assembly in a
badly-fitting garment! Zenobia, I have often thought,
was not quite simple in her death. She had seen pictures,
I suppose, of drowned persons in lithe and graceful
attitudes. And she deemed it well and decorous to
die as so many village maidens have, wronged in their
first love, and seeking peace in the bosom of the old,
familiar stream, — so familiar that they could not dread
it, — where, in childhood, they used to bathe their little
feet, wading mid-leg deep, unmindful of wet skirts. But
in Zenobia's case there was some tint of the Arcadian
affectation that had been visible enough in all our lives,
for a few months past.
This, however, to my conception, takes nothing from
the tragedy. For, has not the world come to an awfully
sophisticated pass, when, after a certain degree of acquaintance
with it, we cannot even put ourselves to
death in whole-hearted simplicity?
Slowly, slowly, with many a dreary pause, — resting
the bier often on some rock, or balancing it across a
mossy log, to take fresh hold, — we bore our burthen
onward through the moonlight, and at last laid Zenobia
on the floor of the old farm-house. By and by came
three or four withered women, and stood whispering
around the corpse, peering at it through their spectacles,
heads, and taking counsel of one another's experience
what was to be done.
With those tire-women we left Zenobia!
| XXVII.
MIDNIGHT. The Blithedale romance | |