“This last is too stern a moral,” I observed. “Cannot we soften it a little?”
“Do it if you like, at your own peril, not on my responsibility,” she answered. Then, with a sudden change of subject, she went on: “After all, he has flung away what would have served him better than the poor, pale flower he kept. What can Priscilla do for him? Put passionate warmth into his heart, when it shall be chilled with frozen hopes? Strengthen his hands, when they are weary with much doing and no performance? No! but only tend towards him with a blind, instinctive love, and hang her little, puny weakness for a clog upon his arm! She cannot even give him such sympathy as is worth the name. For will he never, in many an hour of darkness, need that proud intellectual sympathy which he might have had from me?—the sympathy that would flash light along his course, and guide, as well as cheer him? Poor Hollingsworth! Where will he find it now?”
“Hollingsworth has a heart of ice!” said I bitterly. “He is a wretch!”
“Do him no wrong,” interrupted Zenobia, turning haughtily upon me. “Presume not to estimate a man like Hollingsworth. It was my fault, all along, and none of his. I see it now! He never sought me. Why should he seek me? What had I to offer him? A miserable, bruised, and battered heart, spoilt long before he met me. A life, too, hopelessly entangled with a villain’s! He did well to cast me off. God be praised, he did it! And yet, had he trusted me, and borne with me a little longer, I would have saved him all this trouble.”
She was silent for a time, and stood with her eyes fixed on the ground. Again raising them, her look was more mild and calm.
“Miles Coverdale!” said she.
“Well, Zenobia,” I responded. “Can I do you any service?”
“Very little,” she replied. “But it is my purpose, as you may well imagine, to remove from Blithedale; and, most likely, I may not see Hollingsworth again. A woman in my position, you understand, feels scarcely at her ease among former friends. New faces—unaccustomed looks—those only can she tolerate. She would pine among familiar scenes; she would be apt to blush, too, under the eyes that knew her secret; her heart might throb uncomfortably; she would mortify herself, I suppose, with foolish notions of having sacrificed the honor of her sex at the foot of proud, contumacious man. Poor womanhood, with its rights and wrongs! Here will be new matter for my course of lectures, at the idea of which you smiled, Mr. Coverdale, a month or two ago. But, as you have really a heart and sympathies, as far as they go, and as I shall depart without seeing Hollingsworth, I must entreat you to be a messenger between him and me.”
“Willingly,” said I, wondering at the strange way in which her mind seemed to vibrate from the deepest earnest to mere levity. “What is the message?”
“True—what is it?” exclaimed Zenobia. “After all, I hardly know. On better consideration, I have no message. Tell him—tell him something pretty and pathetic, that will come nicely and sweetly into your ballad—anything you please, so it be tender and submissive enough. Tell him he has murdered me! Tell him that I’ll haunt him!”—she spoke these words with the wildest energy.—“And give him—no, give Priscilla—this!”
Thus saying, she took the jewelled flower out of her hair; and it struck me as the act of a queen, when worsted in a combat, discrowning herself, as if she found a sort of relief in abasing all her pride.
“Bid her wear this for Zenobia’s sake,” she continued. “She is a pretty little creature, and will make as soft and gentle a wife as the veriest Bluebeard could desire. Pity that she must fade so soon! These delicate and puny maidens always do. Ten years hence, let Hollingsworth look at my face and Priscilla’s, and then choose betwixt them. Or, if he pleases, let him do it now.”
How magnificently Zenobia looked as she said this! The effect of her beauty was even heightened by the over-consciousness and self-recognition of it, into which, I suppose, Hollingsworth’s scorn had driven her. She understood the look of admiration in my face; and—Zenobia to the last—it gave her pleasure.
“It is an endless pity,” said she, “that I had not bethought myself of winning your heart, Mr. Coverdale, instead of Hollingsworth’s. I think I should have succeeded, and many women would have deemed you the worthier conquest of the two. You are certainly much the handsomest man. But there is a fate in these things. And beauty, in a man, has been of little account with me since my earliest girlhood, when, for once, it turned my head. Now, farewell!”
“Zenobia, whither are you going?” I asked.
“No matter where,” said she. “But I am weary of this place, and sick to death of playing at philanthropy and progress. Of all varieties of mock-life, we have surely blundered into the very emptiest mockery in our effort to establish the one true system. I have done with it; and Blithedale must find another woman to superintend the laundry, and you, Mr. Coverdale, another nurse to make your gruel, the next time you fall ill. It was, indeed, a foolish dream! Yet it gave us some pleasant summer days, and bright hopes, while they lasted. It can do no more; nor will it avail us to shed tears over a broken bubble. Here is my hand! Adieu!”
She gave me her hand with the same free, whole-souled gesture as on the first afternoon of our acquaintance, and, being greatly moved, I bethought me of no better method of expressing my deep sympathy than to carry it to my lips. In so doing, I perceived that this white hand—so hospitably warm when I first touched it, five months since—was now cold as a veritable
