Five-and-twenty years ago, at the epoch of this story, there dwelt in
one of the Middle States a man whom we shall call Fauntleroy; a man of
wealth, and magnificent tastes, and prodigal expenditure.  His home
might almost be styled a palace; his habits, in the ordinary sense,
princely.  His whole being seemed to have crystallized itself into an
external splendor, wherewith he glittered in the eyes of the world, and
had no other life than upon this gaudy surface.  He had married a
lovely woman, whose nature was deeper than his own.  But his affection
for her, though it showed largely, was superficial, like all his other
manifestations and developments; he did not so truly keep this noble
creature in his heart, as wear her beauty for the most brilliant
ornament of his outward state.  And there was born to him a child, a
beautiful daughter, whom he took from the beneficent hand of God with
no just sense of her immortal value, but as a man already rich in gems
would receive another jewel.  If he loved her, it was because she shone.

After Fauntleroy had thus spent a few empty years, coruscating
continually an unnatural light, the source of it--which was merely his
gold--began to grow more shallow, and finally became exhausted. He saw
himself in imminent peril of losing all that had heretofore
distinguished him; and, conscious of no innate worth to fall back upon,
he recoiled from this calamity with the instinct of a soul shrinking
from annihilation.  To avoid it,--wretched man!--or rather to defer it,
if but for a month, a day, or only to procure himself the life of a few
breaths more amid the false glitter which was now less his own than
ever,--he made himself guilty of a crime.  It was just the sort of
crime, growing out of its artificial state, which society (unless it
should change its entire constitution for this man's unworthy sake)
neither could nor ought to pardon.  More safely might it pardon murder.
Fauntleroy's guilt was discovered.  He fled; his wife perished, by the
necessity of her innate nobleness, in its alliance with a being so
ignoble; and betwixt her mother's death and her father's ignominy, his
daughter was left worse than orphaned.

There was no pursuit after Fauntleroy.  His family connections, who had
great wealth, made such arrangements with those whom he had attempted
to wrong as secured him from the retribution that would have overtaken
an unfriended criminal.  The wreck of his estate was divided among his
creditors: His name, in a very brief space, was forgotten by the
multitude who had passed it so diligently from mouth to mouth.  Seldom,
indeed, was it recalled, even by his closest former intimates.  Nor
could it have been otherwise.  The man had laid no real touch on any
mortal's heart.  Being a mere image, an optical delusion, created by
the sunshine of prosperity, it was his law to vanish into the shadow of
the first intervening cloud.  He seemed to leave no vacancy; a
phenomenon which, like many others that attended his brief career, went
far to prove the illusiveness of his existence.

Not, however, that the physical substance of Fauntleroy had literally
melted into vapor.  He had fled northward to the New England
metropolis, and had taken up his abode, under another name, in a
squalid street or court of the older portion of the city.  There he
dwelt among poverty-stricken wretches, sinners, and forlorn good
people, Irish, and whomsoever else were neediest.  Many families were
clustered in each house together, above stairs and below, in the little
peaked garrets, and even in the dusky cellars.  The house where
Fauntleroy paid weekly rent for a chamber and a closet had been a
stately habitation in its day.  An old colonial governor had built it,
and lived there, long ago, and held his levees in a great room where
now slept twenty Irish bedfellows; and died in Fauntleroy's chamber,
which his embroidered and white-wigged ghost still haunted. Tattered
hangings, a marble hearth, traversed with many cracks and fissures, a
richly carved oaken mantelpiece, partly hacked away for kindling-stuff,
a stuccoed ceiling, defaced with great, unsightly patches of the naked
laths,--such was the chamber's aspect, as if, with its splinters and
rags of dirty splendor, it were a kind of practical gibe at this poor,
ruined man of show.

At first, and at irregular intervals, his relatives allowed Fauntleroy
a little pittance to sustain life; not from any love, perhaps, but lest
poverty should compel him, by new offences, to add more shame to that
with which he had already stained them.  But he showed no tendency to
further guilt.  His character appeared to have been radically changed
(as, indeed, from its shallowness, it well might) by his miserable
fate; or, it may be, the traits now seen in him were portions of the
same character, presenting itself in another phase.  Instead of any
longer seeking to live in the sight of the world, his impulse was to
shrink into the nearest obscurity, and to be unseen of men, were it
possible, even while standing before their eyes.  He had no pride; it
was all trodden in the dust.  No ostentation; for how could it survive,
when there was nothing left of Fauntleroy, save penury and shame!  His
very gait demonstrated that he would gladly have faded out of view, and
have crept about invisibly, for the sake of sheltering himself from the
irksomeness of a human glance.  Hardly, it was averred, within the
memory of those who knew him now, had he the hardihood to show his full
front to the world.  He skulked in corners, and crept about in a sort
of noonday twilight, making himself gray and misty, at all hours, with
his morbid intolerance of sunshine.

In his torpid despair, however, he had done an act which that condition
of the spirit seems to prompt almost as often as prosperity and hope.
Fauntleroy was again married.  He had taken to wife a forlorn,
meek-spirited, feeble young woman, a seamstress, whom he found dwelling
with her mother in a contiguous chamber of the old gubernatorial
residence.  This poor phantom--as the beautiful and noble companion of
his former life had done brought him a daughter. And sometimes, as from
one dream into another, Fauntleroy looked forth out of his present
grimy environment into that past magnificence, and wondered whether the
grandee of yesterday or the pauper of to-day were real.  But, in my
mind, the one and the other were alike impalpable.  In truth, it was
Fauntleroy's fatality to behold whatever he touched dissolve.  After a
few years, his second wife (dim shadow that she had always been) faded
finally out of the world, and left Fauntleroy to deal as he might with
their pale and nervous child.  And, by this time, among his distant
relatives,--with whom he had grown a weary thought, linked with
contagious infamy, and which they were only too willing to get rid
of,--he was himself supposed to be no more.

The younger child, like his elder one, might be considered as the true
offspring of both parents, and as the reflection of their state. She
was a tremulous little creature, shrinking involuntarily from all
mankind, but in timidity, and no sour repugnance.  There was a lack of
human substance in her; it seemed as if, were she to stand up in a
sunbeam, it would pass right through her figure, and trace out the
cracked and dusty window-panes upon the naked floor.  But,
nevertheless, the poor child had a heart; and from her mother's gentle
character she had inherited a profound and still capacity of affection.
And so her life was one of love.  She bestowed it partly on her father,
but in greater part on an idea.

For Fauntleroy, as they sat by their cheerless fireside,--which was no
fireside, in truth, but only a rusty stove,--had often talked to the
little girl about his former wealth, the noble loveliness of his first
wife, and the beautiful child whom she had given him.  Instead of the
fairy tales which other parents tell, he told Priscilla this. And, out
of the loneliness of her sad little existence, Priscilla's love grew,
and tended upward, and twined itself perseveringly around this unseen
sister; as a grapevine might strive to clamber out of a gloomy hollow
among the rocks, and embrace a young tree standing in the sunny warmth
above.  It was almost like worship, both in its earnestness and its
humility; nor was it the less humble--though the more earnest--because
Priscilla could claim human kindred with the being whom she, so
devoutly loved.  As with worship, too, it gave her soul the refreshment
of a purer atmosphere.  Save for this singular, this melancholy, and
yet beautiful affection, the child could hardly have lived; or, had she
lived, with a heart shrunken for lack of any sentiment to fill it, she
must have yielded to the barren miseries of her position, and have
grown to womanhood characterless and worthless. But now, amid all the
sombre coarseness of her father's outward life, and of her own,
Priscilla had a higher and imaginative life within.  Some faint gleam
thereof was often visible upon her face. It was as if, in her spiritual
visits to her brilliant sister, a portion of the latter's brightness
had permeated our dim Priscilla, and still lingered, shedding a faint
illumination through the cheerless chamber, after she came back.

As the child grew up, so pallid and so slender, and with much
unaccountable nervousness, and all the weaknesses of neglected infancy
still haunting her, the gross and simple neighbors whispered strange
things about Priscilla.  The big, red, Irish matrons, whose innumerable
progeny swarmed out of the adjacent doors, used to mock at the pale
Western child.  They fancied--or, at least, affirmed it, between jest
and earnest--that she was not so solid flesh and blood as other
children, but mixed largely with a thinner element.  They called her
ghost-child, and said that she could indeed vanish when she pleased,
but could never, in her densest moments, make herself quite visible.
The sun at midday would shine through her; in the first gray of the
twilight, she lost all the distinctness of her outline; and, if you
followed the dim thing into a dark corner, behold! she was not there.
And it was true that Priscilla had strange ways; strange ways, and
stranger words, when she uttered any words at all.  Never stirring out
of the old governor's dusky house, she sometimes talked of distant
places and splendid rooms, as if she had just left them.  Hidden things
were visible to her (at least so the people inferred from obscure hints
escaping unawares out of her mouth), and silence was audible.  And in
all the world there was nothing so difficult to be endured, by those
who had any dark secret to conceal, as the glance of Priscilla's timid
and melancholy eyes.

Her peculiarities were the theme of continual gossip among the other
inhabitants of the gubernatorial mansion.  The rumor spread thence into
a wider circle.  Those who knew old Moodie, as he was now called, used
often to jeer him, at the very street-corners, about his daughter's
gift of second-sight and prophecy.  It was a period when science
(though mostly through its empirical professors) was bringing forward,
anew, a hoard of facts and imperfect theories, that had partially won
credence in elder times, but which modern scepticism had swept away as
rubbish.  These things were now tossed up again, out of the surging
ocean of human thought and experience.  The story of Priscilla's
preternatural manifestations, therefore, attracted a kind of notice of
which it would have been deemed wholly unworthy a few years earlier.
One day a gentleman ascended the creaking staircase, and inquired which
was old Moodie's chamber door.  And, several times, he came again.  He
was a marvellously handsome man,--still youthful, too, and fashionably
dressed.  Except that Priscilla, in those days, had no beauty, and, in
the languor of her existence, had not yet blossomed into womanhood,
there would have been rich food for scandal in these visits; for the
girl was unquestionably their sole object, although her father was
supposed always to be present.  But, it must likewise be added, there
was something about Priscilla that calumny could not meddle with; and
thus far was she privileged, either by the preponderance of what was
spiritual, or the thin and watery blood that left her cheek so pallid.

Yet, if the busy tongues of the neighborhood spared Priscilla in one
way, they made themselves amends by renewed and wilder babble on
another score.  They averred that the strange gentleman was a wizard,
and that he had taken advantage of Priscilla's lack of earthly
substance to subject her to himself, as his familiar spirit, through
whose medium he gained cognizance of whatever happened, in regions near
or remote.  The boundaries of his power were defined by the verge of
the pit of Tartarus on the one hand, and the third sphere of the
celestial world on the other.  Again, they declared their suspicion
that the wizard, with all his show of manly beauty, was really an aged
and wizened figure, or else that his semblance of a human body was only
a necromantic, or perhaps a mechanical contrivance, in which a demon
walked about.  In proof of it, however, they could merely instance a
gold band around his upper teeth, which had once been visible to
several old women, when he smiled at them from the top of the
governor's staircase.  Of course this was all absurdity, or mostly so.
But, after every possible deduction, there remained certain very
mysterious points about the stranger's character, as well as the
connection that he established with Priscilla.  Its nature at that
period was even less understood than now, when miracles of this kind
have grown so absolutely stale, that I would gladly, if the truth
allowed, dismiss the whole matter from my narrative.

We must now glance backward, in quest of the beautiful daughter of
Fauntleroy's prosperity.  What had become of her?  Fauntleroy's only
brother, a bachelor, and with no other relative so near, had adopted
the forsaken child.  She grew up in affluence, with native graces
clustering luxuriantly about her.  In her triumphant progress towards
womanhood, she was adorned with every variety of feminine
accomplishment.  But she lacked a mother's care.  With no adequate
control, on any hand (for a man, however stern, however wise, can never
sway and guide a female child), her character was left to shape itself.
There was good in it, and evil.  Passionate, self-willed, and
imperious, she had a warm and generous nature; showing the richness of
the soil, however, chiefly by the weeds that flourished in it, and
choked up the herbs of grace.  In her girlhood her uncle died.  As
Fauntleroy was supposed to be likewise dead, and no other heir was
known to exist, his wealth devolved on her, although, dying suddenly,
the uncle left no will.  After his death there were obscure passages in
Zenobia's history.  There were whispers of an attachment, and even a
secret marriage, with a fascinating and accomplished but unprincipled
young man.  The incidents and appearances, however, which led to this
surmise soon passed away, and were forgotten.

Nor was her reputation seriously affected by the report.  In fact, so
great was her native power and influence, and such seemed the careless
purity of her nature, that whatever Zenobia did was generally
acknowledged as right for her to do.  The world never criticised her so
harshly as it does most women who transcend its rules.  It almost
yielded its assent, when it beheld her stepping out of the common path,
and asserting the more extensive privileges of her sex, both
theoretically and by her practice.  The sphere of ordinary womanhood
was felt to be narrower than her development required.

A portion of Zenobia's more recent life is told in the foregoing pages.
Partly in earnest,--and, I imagine, as was her disposition, half in a
proud jest, or in a kind of recklessness that had grown upon her, out
of some hidden grief,--she had given her countenance, and promised
liberal pecuniary aid, to our experiment of a better social state.  And
Priscilla followed her to Blithedale.  The sole bliss of her life had
been a dream of this beautiful sister, who had never so much as known
of her existence.  By this time, too, the poor girl was enthralled in
an intolerable bondage, from which she must either free herself or
perish.  She deemed herself safest near Zenobia, into whose large heart
she hoped to nestle.

One evening, months after Priscilla's departure, when Moodie (or shall
we call him Fauntleroy?) was sitting alone in the state-chamber of the
old governor, there came footsteps up the staircase.  There was a pause
on the landing-place.  A lady's musical yet haughty accents were heard
making an inquiry from some denizen of the house, who had thrust a head
out of a contiguous chamber.  There was then a knock at Moodie's door.
"Come in!" said he.

And Zenobia entered.  The details of the interview that followed being
unknown to me,--while, notwithstanding, it would be a pity quite to
lose the picturesqueness of the situation,--I shall attempt to sketch
it, mainly from fancy, although with some general grounds of surmise in
regard to the old man's feelings.

She gazed wonderingly at the dismal chamber.  Dismal to her, who beheld
it only for an instant; and how much more so to him, into whose brain
each bare spot on the ceiling, every tatter of the paper-hangings, and
all the splintered carvings of the mantelpiece, seen wearily through
long years, had worn their several prints! Inexpressibly miserable is
this familiarity with objects that have been from the first disgustful.

"I have received a strange message," said Zenobia, after a moment's
silence, "requesting, or rather enjoining it upon me, to come hither.
Rather from curiosity than any other motive,--and because, though a
woman, I have not all the timidity of one,--I have complied.  Can it be
you, sir, who thus summoned me?"

"It was," answered Moodie.

"And what was your purpose?" she continued.  "You require charity,
perhaps?  In that case, the message might have been more fitly worded.
But you are old and poor, and age and poverty should be allowed their
privileges.  Tell me, therefore, to what extent you need my aid."

"Put up your purse," said the supposed mendicant, with an inexplicable
smile.  "Keep it,--keep all your wealth,--until I demand it all, or
none!  My message had no such end in view.  You are beautiful, they
tell me; and I desired to look at you."

He took the one lamp that showed the discomfort and sordidness of his
abode, and approaching Zenobia held it up, so as to gain the more
perfect view of her, from top to toe.  So obscure was the chamber, that
you could see the reflection of her diamonds thrown upon the dingy
wall, and flickering with the rise and fall of Zenobia's breath. It was
the splendor of those jewels on her neck, like lamps that burn before
some fair temple, and the jewelled flower in her hair, more than the
murky, yellow light, that helped him to see her beauty. But he beheld
it, and grew proud at heart; his own figure, in spite of his mean
habiliments, assumed an air of state and grandeur.

"It is well," cried old Moodie.  "Keep your wealth.  You are right
worthy of it.  Keep it, therefore, but with one condition only."

Zenobia thought the old man beside himself, and was moved with pity.

"Have you none to care for you?" asked she.  "No daughter?--no
kind-hearted neighbor?--no means of procuring the attendance which you
need?  Tell me once again, can I do nothing for you?"

"Nothing," he replied.  "I have beheld what I wished.  Now leave me.
Linger not a moment longer, or I may be tempted to say what would bring
a cloud over that queenly brow.  Keep all your wealth, but with only
this one condition: Be kind--be no less kind than sisters are--to my
poor Priscilla!"

And, it may be, after Zenobia withdrew, Fauntleroy paced his gloomy
chamber, and communed with himself as follows,--or, at all events, it
is the only solution which I can offer of the enigma presented in his
character:--"I am unchanged,--the same man as of yore!" said he. "True,
my brother's wealth--he dying intestate--is legally my own.  I know it;
yet of my own choice, I live a beggar, and go meanly clad, and hide
myself behind a forgotten ignominy.  Looks this like ostentation?  Ah!
but in Zenobia I live again!  Beholding her, so beautiful,--so fit to
be adorned with all imaginable splendor of outward state,--the cursed
vanity, which, half a lifetime since, dropt off like tatters of once
gaudy apparel from my debased and ruined person, is all renewed for her
sake.  Were I to reappear, my shame would go with me from darkness into
daylight.  Zenobia has the splendor, and not the shame.  Let the world
admire her, and be dazzled by her, the brilliant child of my
prosperity!  It is Fauntleroy that still shines through her!"  But
then, perhaps, another thought occurred to him.

"My poor Priscilla!  And am I just to her, in surrendering all to this
beautiful Zenobia?  Priscilla!  I love her best,--I love her only!--but
with shame, not pride.  So dim, so pallid, so shrinking,--the daughter
of my long calamity!  Wealth were but a mockery in Priscilla's hands.
What is its use, except to fling a golden radiance around those who
grasp it?  Yet let Zenobia take heed! Priscilla shall have no wrong!"
But, while the man of show thus meditated,--that very evening, so far
as I can adjust the dates of these strange incidents,--Priscilla poor,
pallid flower!--was either snatched from Zenobia's hand, or flung
wilfully away!

XXIII. A VILLAGE HALL

Well, I betook myself away, and wandered up and down, like an exorcised
spirit that had been driven from its old haunts after a mighty
struggle.  It takes down the solitary pride of man, beyond most other
things, to find the impracticability of flinging aside affections that
have grown irksome.  The bands that were silken once are apt to become
iron fetters when we desire to shake them off.  Our souls, after all,
are not our own.  We convey a property in them to those with whom we
associate; but to what extent can never be known, until we feel the
tug, the agony, of our abortive effort to resume an exclusive sway over
ourselves.  Thus, in all the weeks of my absence, my thoughts
continually reverted back, brooding over the bygone months, and
bringing up incidents that seemed hardly to have left a trace of
themselves in their passage.  I spent painful hours in recalling these
trifles, and rendering them more misty and unsubstantial than at first
by the quantity of speculative musing thus kneaded in with them.
Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla!  These three had absorbed my life
into themselves.  Together with an inexpressible longing to know their
fortunes, there was likewise a morbid resentment of my own pain, and a
stubborn reluctance to come again within their sphere.

All that I learned of them, therefore, was comprised in a few brief and
pungent squibs, such as the newspapers were then in the habit of
bestowing on our socialist enterprise.  There was one paragraph, which
if I rightly guessed its purport bore reference to Zenobia, but was too
darkly hinted to convey even thus much of certainty. Hollingsworth,
too, with his philanthropic project, afforded the penny-a-liners a
theme for some savage and bloody minded jokes; and, considerably to my
surprise, they affected me with as much indignation as if we had still
been friends.

Thus passed several weeks; time long enough for my brown and
toil-hardened hands to reaccustom themselves to gloves.  Old habits,
such as were merely external, returned upon me with wonderful
promptitude.  My superficial talk, too, assumed altogether a worldly
tone.  Meeting former acquaintances, who showed themselves inclined to
ridicule my heroic devotion to the cause of human welfare, I spoke of
the recent phase of my life as indeed fair matter for a jest.  But, I
also gave them to understand that it was, at most, only an experiment,
on which I had staked no valuable amount of hope or fear. It had
enabled me to pass the summer in a novel and agreeable way, had
afforded me some grotesque specimens of artificial simplicity, and
could not, therefore, so far as I was concerned, be reckoned a failure.
In no one instance, however, did I voluntarily speak of my three
friends.  They dwelt in a profounder region.  The more I consider
myself as I then was, the more do I recognize how deeply my connection
with those three had affected all my being.

As it was already the epoch of annihilated space, I might in the time I
was away from Blithedale have snatched a glimpse at England, and been
back again.  But my wanderings were confined within a very limited
sphere.  I hopped and fluttered, like a bird with a string about its
leg, gyrating round a small circumference, and keeping up a restless
activity to no purpose.  Thus it was still in our familiar
Massachusetts--in one of its white country villages--that I must next
particularize an incident.

The scene was one of those lyceum halls, of which almost every village
has now its own, dedicated to that sober and pallid, or rather
drab-colored, mode of winter-evening entertainment, the lecture.  Of
late years this has come strangely into vogue, when the natural
tendency of things would seem to be to substitute lettered for oral
methods of addressing the public.  But, in halls like this, besides the
winter course of lectures, there is a rich and varied series of other
exhibitions.  Hither comes the ventriloquist, with all his mysterious
tongues; the thaumaturgist, too, with his miraculous transformations of
plates, doves, and rings, his pancakes smoking in your hat, and his
cellar of choice liquors represented in one small bottle.  Here, also,
the itinerant professor instructs separate classes of ladies and
gentlemen in physiology, and demonstrates his lessons by the aid of
real skeletons, and manikins in wax, from Paris.  Here is to be heard
the choir of Ethiopian melodists, and to be seen the diorama of Moscow
or Bunker Hill, or the moving panorama of the Chinese wall.  Here is
displayed the museum of wax figures, illustrating the wide catholicism
of earthly renown, by mixing up heroes and statesmen, the pope and the
Mormon prophet, kings, queens, murderers, and beautiful ladies; every
sort of person, in short, except authors, of whom I never beheld even
the most famous done in wax.  And here, in this many-purposed hall
(unless the selectmen of the village chance to have more than their
share of the Puritanism, which, however diversified with later
patchwork, still gives its prevailing tint to New England
character),--here the company of strolling players sets up its little
stage, and claims patronage for the legitimate drama.

But, on the autumnal evening which I speak of, a number of printed
handbills--stuck up in the bar-room, and on the sign-post of the hotel,
and on the meeting-house porch, and distributed largely through the
village--had promised the inhabitants an interview with that celebrated
and hitherto inexplicable phenomenon, the Veiled Lady!

The hall was fitted up with an amphitheatrical descent of seats towards
a platform, on which stood a desk, two lights, a stool, and a capacious
antique chair.  The audience was of a generally decent and respectable
character: old farmers, in their Sunday black coats, with shrewd, hard,
sun-dried faces, and a cynical humor, oftener than any other
expression, in their eyes; pretty girls, in many-colored attire; pretty
young men,--the schoolmaster, the lawyer, or student at law, the
shop-keeper,--all looking rather suburban than rural.  In these days,
there is absolutely no rusticity, except when the actual labor of the
soil leaves its earth-mould on the person.  There was likewise a
considerable proportion of young and middle-aged women, many of them
stern in feature, with marked foreheads, and a very definite line of
eyebrow; a type of womanhood in which a bold intellectual development
seems to be keeping pace with the progressive delicacy of the physical
constitution.  Of all these people I took note, at first, according to
my custom.  But I ceased to do so the moment that my eyes fell on an
individual who sat two or three seats below me, immovable, apparently
deep in thought, with his back, of course, towards me, and his face
turned steadfastly upon the platform.

After sitting awhile in contemplation of this person's familiar
contour, I was irresistibly moved to step over the intervening benches,
lay my hand on his shoulder, put my mouth close to his ear, and address
him in a sepulchral, melodramatic whisper: "Hollingsworth! where have
you left Zenobia?"

His nerves, however, were proof against my attack.  He turned half
around, and looked me in the face with great sad eyes, in which there
was neither kindness nor resentment, nor any perceptible surprise.

"Zenobia, when I last saw her," he answered, "was at Blithedale."

He said no more.  But there was a great deal of talk going on near me,
among a knot of people who might be considered as representing the
mysticism, or rather the mystic sensuality, of this singular age. The
nature of the exhibition that was about to take place had probably
given the turn to their conversation.

I heard, from a pale man in blue spectacles, some stranger stories than
ever were written in a romance; told, too, with a simple, unimaginative
steadfastness, which was terribly efficacious in compelling the auditor
to receive them into the category of established facts.  He cited
instances of the miraculous power of one human being over the will and
passions of another; insomuch that settled grief was but a shadow
beneath the influence of a man possessing this potency, and the strong
love of years melted away like a vapor.  At the bidding of one of these
wizards, the maiden, with her lover's kiss still burning on her lips,
would turn from him with icy indifference; the newly made widow would
dig up her buried heart out of her young husband's grave before the
sods had taken root upon it; a mother with her babe's milk in her bosom
would thrust away her child.  Human character was but soft wax in his
hands; and guilt, or virtue, only the forms into which he should see
fit to mould it. The religious sentiment was a flame which he could
blow up with his breath, or a spark that he could utterly extinguish.
It is unutterable, the horror and disgust with which I listened, and
saw that, if these things were to be believed, the individual soul was
virtually annihilated, and all that is sweet and pure in our present
life debased, and that the idea of man's eternal responsibility was
made ridiculous, and immortality rendered at once impossible, and not
worth acceptance.  But I would have perished on the spot sooner than
believe it.

The epoch of rapping spirits, and all the wonders that have followed in
their train,--such as tables upset by invisible agencies, bells
self-tolled at funerals, and ghostly music performed on
jew's-harps,--had not yet arrived.  Alas, my countrymen, methinks we
have fallen on an evil age!  If these phenomena have not humbug at the
bottom, so much the worse for us.  What can they indicate, in a
spiritual way, except that the soul of man is descending to a lower
point than it has ever before reached while incarnate?  We are pursuing
a downward course in the eternal march, and thus bring ourselves into
the same range with beings whom death, in requital of their gross and
evil lives, has degraded below humanity!  To hold intercourse with
spirits of this order, we must stoop and grovel in some element more
vile than earthly dust.  These goblins, if they exist at all, are but
the shadows of past mortality, outcasts, mere refuse stuff, adjudged
unworthy of the eternal world, and, on the most favorable supposition,
dwindling gradually into nothingness.  The less we have to say to them
the better, lest we share their fate!

The audience now began to be impatient; they signified their desire for
the entertainment to commence by thump of sticks and stamp of
boot-heels.  Nor was it a great while longer before, in response to
their call, there appeared a bearded personage in Oriental robes,
looking like one of the enchanters of the Arabian Nights.  He came upon
the platform from a side door, saluted the spectators, not with a
salaam, but a bow, took his station at the desk, and first blowing his
nose with a white handkerchief, prepared to speak.  The environment of
the homely village hall, and the absence of many ingenious contrivances
of stage effect with which the exhibition had heretofore been set off,
seemed to bring the artifice of this character more openly upon the
surface.  No sooner did I behold the bearded enchanter, than, laying my
hand again on Hollingsworth's shoulder, I whispered in his ear, "Do you
know him?"

"I never saw the man before," he muttered, without turning his head.

But I had seen him three times already.

Once, on occasion of my first visit to the Veiled Lady; a second time,
in the wood-path at Blithedale; and lastly, in Zenobia's drawing-room.
It was Westervelt.  A quick association of ideas made me shudder from
head to foot; and again, like an evil spirit, bringing up reminiscences
of a man's sins, I whispered a question in Hollingsworth's ear,--"What
have you done with Priscilla?"

He gave a convulsive start, as if I had thrust a knife into him,
writhed himself round on his seat, glared fiercely into my eyes, but
answered not a word.

The Professor began his discourse, explanatory of the psychological
phenomena, as he termed them, which it was his purpose to exhibit to
the spectators.  There remains no very distinct impression of it on my
memory.  It was eloquent, ingenious, plausible, with a delusive show of
spirituality, yet really imbued throughout with a cold and dead
materialism.  I shivered, as at a current of chill air issuing out of a
sepulchral vault, and bringing the smell of corruption along with it.
He spoke of a new era that was dawning upon the world; an era that
would link soul to soul, and the present life to what we call futurity,
with a closeness that should finally convert both worlds into one
great, mutually conscious brotherhood.  He described (in a strange,
philosophical guise, with terms of art, as if it were a matter of
chemical discovery) the agency by which this mighty result was to be
effected; nor would it have surprised me, had he pretended to hold up a
portion of his universally pervasive fluid, as he affirmed it to be, in
a glass phial.

At the close of his exordium, the Professor beckoned with his
hand,--once, twice, thrice,--and a figure came gliding upon the
platform, enveloped in a long veil of silvery whiteness.  It fell about
her like the texture of a summer cloud, with a kind of vagueness, so
that the outline of the form beneath it could not be accurately
discerned. But the movement of the Veiled Lady was graceful, free, and
unembarrassed, like that of a person accustomed to be the spectacle of
thousands; or, possibly, a blindfold prisoner within the sphere with
which this dark earthly magician had surrounded her, she was wholly
unconscious of being the central object to all those straining eyes.

Pliant to his gesture (which had even an obsequious courtesy, but at
the same time a remarkable decisiveness), the figure placed itself in
the great chair.  Sitting there, in such visible obscurity, it was,
perhaps, as much like the actual presence of a disembodied spirit as
anything that stage trickery could devise.  The hushed breathing of the
spectators proved how high-wrought were their anticipations of the
wonders to be performed through the medium of this incomprehensible
creature.  I, too, was in breathless suspense, but with a far different
presentiment of some strange event at hand.

"You see before you the Veiled Lady," said the bearded Professor,
advancing to the verge of the platform.  "By the agency of which I have
just spoken, she is at this moment in communion with the spiritual
world.  That silvery veil is, in one sense, an enchantment, having been
dipped, as it were, and essentially imbued, through the potency of my
art, with the fluid medium of spirits.  Slight and ethereal as it
seems, the limitations of time and space have no existence within its
folds.  This hall--these hundreds of faces, encompassing her within so
narrow an amphitheatre--are of thinner substance, in her view, than the
airiest vapor that the clouds are made of.  She beholds the Absolute!"

As preliminary to other and far more wonderful psychological
experiments, the exhibitor suggested that some of his auditors should
endeavor to make the Veiled Lady sensible of their presence by such
methods--provided only no touch were laid upon her person--as they
might deem best adapted to that end.  Accordingly, several deep-lunged
country fellows, who looked as if they might have blown the apparition
away with a breath, ascended the platform.  Mutually encouraging one
another, they shouted so close to her ear that the veil stirred like a
wreath of vanishing mist; they smote upon the floor with bludgeons;
they perpetrated so hideous a clamor, that methought it might have
reached, at least, a little way into the eternal sphere.  Finally, with
the assent of the Professor, they laid hold of the great chair, and
were startled, apparently, to find it soar upward, as if lighter than
the air through which it rose.  But the Veiled Lady remained seated and
motionless, with a composure that was hardly less than awful, because
implying so immeasurable a distance betwixt her and these rude
persecutors.

"These efforts are wholly without avail," observed the Professor, who
had been looking on with an aspect of serene indifference.  "The roar
of a battery of cannon would be inaudible to the Veiled Lady.  And yet,
were I to will it, sitting in this very hall, she could hear the desert
wind sweeping over the sands as far off as Arabia; the icebergs
grinding one against the other in the polar seas; the rustle of a leaf
in an East Indian forest; the lowest whispered breath of the
bashfullest maiden in the world, uttering the first confession of her
love.  Nor does there exist the moral inducement, apart from my own
behest, that could persuade her to lift the silvery veil, or arise out
of that chair."

Greatly to the Professor's discomposure, however, just as he spoke
these words, the Veiled Lady arose.  There was a mysterious tremor that
shook the magic veil.  The spectators, it may be, imagined that she was
about to take flight into that invisible sphere, and to the society of
those purely spiritual beings with whom they reckoned her so near akin.
Hollingsworth, a moment ago, had mounted the platform, and now stood
gazing at the figure, with a sad intentness that brought the whole
power of his great, stern, yet tender soul into his glance.

"Come," said he, waving his hand towards her.  "You are safe!"

She threw off the veil, and stood before that multitude of people pale,
tremulous, shrinking, as if only then had she discovered that a
thousand eyes were gazing at her.  Poor maiden!  How strangely had she
been betrayed!  Blazoned abroad as a wonder of the world, and
performing what were adjudged as miracles,--in the faith of many, a
seeress and a prophetess; in the harsher judgment of others, a
mountebank,--she had kept, as I religiously believe, her virgin reserve
and sanctity of soul throughout it all.  Within that encircling veil,
though an evil hand had flung it over her, there was as deep a
seclusion as if this forsaken girl had, all the while, been sitting
under the shadow of Eliot's pulpit, in the Blithedale woods, at the
feet of him who now summoned her to the shelter of his arms. And the
true heart-throb of a woman's affection was too powerful for the
jugglery that had hitherto environed her.  She uttered a shriek, and
fled to Hollingsworth, like one escaping from her deadliest enemy, and
was safe forever.

Many years ago a wealthy man named Fauntleroy had a wife and young daughter, but his life was empty and he committed a crime to feel alive. He was exiled and lost his family, and lived in an old ruin of a house in a New England town. He never did anything illegal again but lived a colorless existence. He married again and had another daughter, but his wife died and he was left alone with the child. The daughter, Priscilla, was tremulous, shy, and a waif. The only thing that sustained her was hearing stories of her older, half-sister. Neighbors said strange things of Priscilla, connecting her to the supernatural. It was believed she had the second sight and gifts of prophecy. One day they saw a handsome, well-dressed man enter their house to speak with Priscilla and Moodie. Rumors sprung up around him as well, suggesting he was a wizard. As for the other daughter, she grew up in affluence and wanted for nothing, save a mother's hand to curb her wild ways. Some said she had a secret marriage to an "unprincipled" young man. Her reputation was not damaged, though, as "the sphere of ordinary womanhood was felt to be narrower than her development required". One day, Fauntleroy, now called "Moodie," was visited by Zenobia, who had a message saying he wanted to see her. He was impressed by her beauty but did not tell her who he was. He only asked her to be good to a young woman named Priscilla. After she left he wondered if it was right to let her have all his fortune and not give any to Priscilla, but he knew it would not be good for the latter


Well, I betook myself away, and wandered up and down, like an exorcised
spirit that had been driven from its old haunts after a mighty
struggle.  It takes down the solitary pride of man, beyond most other
things, to find the impracticability of flinging aside affections that
have grown irksome.  The bands that were silken once are apt to become
iron fetters when we desire to shake them off.  Our souls, after all,
     are not our own.  We convey a property in them to those with whom we
     associate; but to what extent can never be known, until we feel the
     tug, the agony, of our abortive effort to resume an exclusive sway over
     ourselves.  Thus, in all the weeks of my absence, my thoughts
     continually reverted back, brooding over the bygone months, and
     bringing up incidents that seemed hardly to have left a trace of
     themselves in their passage.  I spent painful hours in recalling these
     trifles, and rendering them more misty and unsubstantial than at first
     by the quantity of speculative musing thus kneaded in with them.
     Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla!  These three had absorbed my life
     into themselves.  Together with an inexpressible longing to know their
     fortunes, there was likewise a morbid resentment of my own pain, and a
     stubborn reluctance to come again within their sphere.

     All that I learned of them, therefore, was comprised in a few brief and
     pungent squibs, such as the newspapers were then in the habit of
     bestowing on our socialist enterprise.  There was one paragraph, which
     if I rightly guessed its purport bore reference to Zenobia, but was too
     darkly hinted to convey even thus much of certainty. Hollingsworth,
     too, with his philanthropic project, afforded the penny-a-liners a
     theme for some savage and bloody minded jokes; and, considerably to my
     surprise, they affected me with as much indignation as if we had still
     been friends.

     Thus passed several weeks; time long enough for my brown and
     toil-hardened hands to reaccustom themselves to gloves.  Old habits,
     such as were merely external, returned upon me with wonderful
     promptitude.  My superficial talk, too, assumed altogether a worldly
     tone.  Meeting former acquaintances, who showed themselves inclined to
     ridicule my heroic devotion to the cause of human welfare, I spoke of
     the recent phase of my life as indeed fair matter for a jest.  But, I
     also gave them to understand that it was, at most, only an experiment,
     on which I had staked no valuable amount of hope or fear. It had
     enabled me to pass the summer in a novel and agreeable way, had
     afforded me some grotesque specimens of artificial simplicity, and
     could not, therefore, so far as I was concerned, be reckoned a failure.
     In no one instance, however, did I voluntarily speak of my three
     friends.  They dwelt in a profounder region.  The more I consider
     myself as I then was, the more do I recognize how deeply my connection
     with those three had affected all my being.

     As it was already the epoch of annihilated space, I might in the time I
     was away from Blithedale have snatched a glimpse at England, and been
     back again.  But my wanderings were confined within a very limited
     sphere.  I hopped and fluttered, like a bird with a string about its
     leg, gyrating round a small circumference, and keeping up a restless
     activity to no purpose.  Thus it was still in our familiar
     Massachusetts--in one of its white country villages--that I must next
     particularize an incident.

     The scene was one of those lyceum halls, of which almost every village
     has now its own, dedicated to that sober and pallid, or rather
     drab-colored, mode of winter-evening entertainment, the lecture.  Of
     late years this has come strangely into vogue, when the natural
     tendency of things would seem to be to substitute lettered for oral
     methods of addressing the public.  But, in halls like this, besides the
     winter course of lectures, there is a rich and varied series of other
     exhibitions.  Hither comes the ventriloquist, with all his mysterious
     tongues; the thaumaturgist, too, with his miraculous transformations of
     plates, doves, and rings, his pancakes smoking in your hat, and his
     cellar of choice liquors represented in one small bottle.  Here, also,
     the itinerant professor instructs separate classes of ladies and
     gentlemen in physiology, and demonstrates his lessons by the aid of
     real skeletons, and manikins in wax, from Paris.  Here is to be heard
     the choir of Ethiopian melodists, and to be seen the diorama of Moscow
     or Bunker Hill, or the moving panorama of the Chinese wall.  Here is
     displayed the museum of wax figures, illustrating the wide catholicism
     of earthly renown, by mixing up heroes and statesmen, the pope and the
     Mormon prophet, kings, queens, murderers, and beautiful ladies; every
     sort of person, in short, except authors, of whom I never beheld even
     the most famous done in wax.  And here, in this many-purposed hall
     (unless the selectmen of the village chance to have more than their
      share of the Puritanism, which, however diversified with later
      patchwork, still gives its prevailing tint to New England
      character),--here the company of strolling players sets up its little
     stage, and claims patronage for the legitimate drama.

     But, on the autumnal evening which I speak of, a number of printed
     handbills--stuck up in the bar-room, and on the sign-post of the hotel,
     and on the meeting-house porch, and distributed largely through the
     village--had promised the inhabitants an interview with that celebrated
     and hitherto inexplicable phenomenon, the Veiled Lady!

     The hall was fitted up with an amphitheatrical descent of seats towards
     a platform, on which stood a desk, two lights, a stool, and a capacious
     antique chair.  The audience was of a generally decent and respectable
     character: old farmers, in their Sunday black coats, with shrewd, hard,
     sun-dried faces, and a cynical humor, oftener than any other
     expression, in their eyes; pretty girls, in many-colored attire; pretty
     young men,--the schoolmaster, the lawyer, or student at law, the
     shop-keeper,--all looking rather suburban than rural.  In these days,
     there is absolutely no rusticity, except when the actual labor of the
     soil leaves its earth-mould on the person.  There was likewise a
     considerable proportion of young and middle-aged women, many of them
     stern in feature, with marked foreheads, and a very definite line of
     eyebrow; a type of womanhood in which a bold intellectual development
     seems to be keeping pace with the progressive delicacy of the physical
     constitution.  Of all these people I took note, at first, according to
     my custom.  But I ceased to do so the moment that my eyes fell on an
     individual who sat two or three seats below me, immovable, apparently
     deep in thought, with his back, of course, towards me, and his face
     turned steadfastly upon the platform.

     After sitting awhile in contemplation of this person's familiar
     contour, I was irresistibly moved to step over the intervening benches,
     lay my hand on his shoulder, put my mouth close to his ear, and address
     him in a sepulchral, melodramatic whisper: "Hollingsworth! where have
     you left Zenobia?"

     His nerves, however, were proof against my attack.  He turned half
     around, and looked me in the face with great sad eyes, in which there
     was neither kindness nor resentment, nor any perceptible surprise.

     "Zenobia, when I last saw her," he answered, "was at Blithedale."

     He said no more.  But there was a great deal of talk going on near me,
     among a knot of people who might be considered as representing the
     mysticism, or rather the mystic sensuality, of this singular age. The
     nature of the exhibition that was about to take place had probably
     given the turn to their conversation.

     I heard, from a pale man in blue spectacles, some stranger stories than
     ever were written in a romance; told, too, with a simple, unimaginative
     steadfastness, which was terribly efficacious in compelling the auditor
     to receive them into the category of established facts.  He cited
     instances of the miraculous power of one human being over the will and
     passions of another; insomuch that settled grief was but a shadow
     beneath the influence of a man possessing this potency, and the strong
     love of years melted away like a vapor.  At the bidding of one of these
     wizards, the maiden, with her lover's kiss still burning on her lips,
     would turn from him with icy indifference; the newly made widow would
     dig up her buried heart out of her young husband's grave before the
     sods had taken root upon it; a mother with her babe's milk in her bosom
     would thrust away her child.  Human character was but soft wax in his
     hands; and guilt, or virtue, only the forms into which he should see
     fit to mould it. The religious sentiment was a flame which he could
     blow up with his breath, or a spark that he could utterly extinguish.
     It is unutterable, the horror and disgust with which I listened, and
     saw that, if these things were to be believed, the individual soul was
     virtually annihilated, and all that is sweet and pure in our present
     life debased, and that the idea of man's eternal responsibility was
     made ridiculous, and immortality rendered at once impossible, and not
     worth acceptance.  But I would have perished on the spot sooner than
     believe it.

     The epoch of rapping spirits, and all the wonders that have followed in
     their train,--such as tables upset by invisible agencies, bells
     self-tolled at funerals, and ghostly music performed on
     jew's-harps,--had not yet arrived.  Alas, my countrymen, methinks we
     have fallen on an evil age!  If these phenomena have not humbug at the
     bottom, so much the worse for us.  What can they indicate, in a
     spiritual way, except that the soul of man is descending to a lower
     point than it has ever before reached while incarnate?  We are pursuing
     a downward course in the eternal march, and thus bring ourselves into
     the same range with beings whom death, in requital of their gross and
     evil lives, has degraded below humanity!  To hold intercourse with
     spirits of this order, we must stoop and grovel in some element more
     vile than earthly dust.  These goblins, if they exist at all, are but
     the shadows of past mortality, outcasts, mere refuse stuff, adjudged
     unworthy of the eternal world, and, on the most favorable supposition,
     dwindling gradually into nothingness.  The less we have to say to them
     the better, lest we share their fate!

     The audience now began to be impatient; they signified their desire for
     the entertainment to commence by thump of sticks and stamp of
     boot-heels.  Nor was it a great while longer before, in response to
     their call, there appeared a bearded personage in Oriental robes,
     looking like one of the enchanters of the Arabian Nights.  He came upon
     the platform from a side door, saluted the spectators, not with a
     salaam, but a bow, took his station at the desk, and first blowing his
     nose with a white handkerchief, prepared to speak.  The environment of
     the homely village hall, and the absence of many ingenious contrivances
     of stage effect with which the exhibition had heretofore been set off,
     seemed to bring the artifice of this character more openly upon the
     surface.  No sooner did I behold the bearded enchanter, than, laying my
     hand again on Hollingsworth's shoulder, I whispered in his ear, "Do you
     know him?"

     "I never saw the man before," he muttered, without turning his head.

     But I had seen him three times already.

     Once, on occasion of my first visit to the Veiled Lady; a second time,
     in the wood-path at Blithedale; and lastly, in Zenobia's drawing-room.
     It was Westervelt.  A quick association of ideas made me shudder from
     head to foot; and again, like an evil spirit, bringing up reminiscences
     of a man's sins, I whispered a question in Hollingsworth's ear,--"What
     have you done with Priscilla?"

     He gave a convulsive start, as if I had thrust a knife into him,
     writhed himself round on his seat, glared fiercely into my eyes, but
     answered not a word.

     The Professor began his discourse, explanatory of the psychological
     phenomena, as he termed them, which it was his purpose to exhibit to
     the spectators.  There remains no very distinct impression of it on my
     memory.  It was eloquent, ingenious, plausible, with a delusive show of
     spirituality, yet really imbued throughout with a cold and dead
     materialism.  I shivered, as at a current of chill air issuing out of a
     sepulchral vault, and bringing the smell of corruption along with it.
     He spoke of a new era that was dawning upon the world; an era that
     would link soul to soul, and the present life to what we call futurity,
     with a closeness that should finally convert both worlds into one
     great, mutually conscious brotherhood.  He described (in a strange,
             philosophical guise, with terms of art, as if it were a matter of
             chemical discovery) the agency by which this mighty result was to be
     effected; nor would it have surprised me, had he pretended to hold up a
     portion of his universally pervasive fluid, as he affirmed it to be, in
     a glass phial.

     At the close of his exordium, the Professor beckoned with his
     hand,--once, twice, thrice,--and a figure came gliding upon the
     platform, enveloped in a long veil of silvery whiteness.  It fell about
     her like the texture of a summer cloud, with a kind of vagueness, so
     that the outline of the form beneath it could not be accurately
     discerned. But the movement of the Veiled Lady was graceful, free, and
     unembarrassed, like that of a person accustomed to be the spectacle of
     thousands; or, possibly, a blindfold prisoner within the sphere with
     which this dark earthly magician had surrounded her, she was wholly
     unconscious of being the central object to all those straining eyes.

     Pliant to his gesture (which had even an obsequious courtesy, but at
             the same time a remarkable decisiveness), the figure placed itself in
     the great chair.  Sitting there, in such visible obscurity, it was,
     perhaps, as much like the actual presence of a disembodied spirit as
     anything that stage trickery could devise.  The hushed breathing of the
     spectators proved how high-wrought were their anticipations of the
     wonders to be performed through the medium of this incomprehensible
     creature.  I, too, was in breathless suspense, but with a far different
     presentiment of some strange event at hand.

     "You see before you the Veiled Lady," said the bearded Professor,
     advancing to the verge of the platform.  "By the agency of which I have
     just spoken, she is at this moment in communion with the spiritual
     world.  That silvery veil is, in one sense, an enchantment, having been
     dipped, as it were, and essentially imbued, through the potency of my
     art, with the fluid medium of spirits.  Slight and ethereal as it
     seems, the limitations of time and space have no existence within its
     folds.  This hall--these hundreds of faces, encompassing her within so
     narrow an amphitheatre--are of thinner substance, in her view, than the
     airiest vapor that the clouds are made of.  She beholds the Absolute!"

     As preliminary to other and far more wonderful psychological
     experiments, the exhibitor suggested that some of his auditors should
     endeavor to make the Veiled Lady sensible of their presence by such
     methods--provided only no touch were laid upon her person--as they
     might deem best adapted to that end.  Accordingly, several deep-lunged
     country fellows, who looked as if they might have blown the apparition
     away with a breath, ascended the platform.  Mutually encouraging one
     another, they shouted so close to her ear that the veil stirred like a
     wreath of vanishing mist; they smote upon the floor with bludgeons;
     they perpetrated so hideous a clamor, that methought it might have
     reached, at least, a little way into the eternal sphere.  Finally, with
     the assent of the Professor, they laid hold of the great chair, and
     were startled, apparently, to find it soar upward, as if lighter than
     the air through which it rose.  But the Veiled Lady remained seated and
     motionless, with a composure that was hardly less than awful, because
     implying so immeasurable a distance betwixt her and these rude
     persecutors.

     "These efforts are wholly without avail," observed the Professor, who
     had been looking on with an aspect of serene indifference.  "The roar
     of a battery of cannon would be inaudible to the Veiled Lady.  And yet,
     were I to will it, sitting in this very hall, she could hear the desert
     wind sweeping over the sands as far off as Arabia; the icebergs
     grinding one against the other in the polar seas; the rustle of a leaf
     in an East Indian forest; the lowest whispered breath of the
     bashfullest maiden in the world, uttering the first confession of her
     love.  Nor does there exist the moral inducement, apart from my own
     behest, that could persuade her to lift the silvery veil, or arise out
     of that chair."

     Greatly to the Professor's discomposure, however, just as he spoke
     these words, the Veiled Lady arose.  There was a mysterious tremor that
     shook the magic veil.  The spectators, it may be, imagined that she was
     about to take flight into that invisible sphere, and to the society of
     those purely spiritual beings with whom they reckoned her so near akin.
     Hollingsworth, a moment ago, had mounted the platform, and now stood
     gazing at the figure, with a sad intentness that brought the whole
     power of his great, stern, yet tender soul into his glance.

     "Come," said he, waving his hand towards her.  "You are safe!"

     She threw off the veil, and stood before that multitude of people pale,
     tremulous, shrinking, as if only then had she discovered that a
     thousand eyes were gazing at her.  Poor maiden!  How strangely had she
     been betrayed!  Blazoned abroad as a wonder of the world, and
     performing what were adjudged as miracles,--in the faith of many, a
     seeress and a prophetess; in the harsher judgment of others, a
     mountebank,--she had kept, as I religiously believe, her virgin reserve
     and sanctity of soul throughout it all.  Within that encircling veil,
     though an evil hand had flung it over her, there was as deep a
     seclusion as if this forsaken girl had, all the while, been sitting
     under the shadow of Eliot's pulpit, in the Blithedale woods, at the
     feet of him who now summoned her to the shelter of his arms. And the
     true heart-throb of a woman's affection was too powerful for the
     jugglery that had hitherto environed her.  She uttered a shriek, and
     fled to Hollingsworth, like one escaping from her deadliest enemy, and
     was safe forever.

Coverdale wanders about, ruminating on what he has heard. He spends many hours thinking about the three people -Priscilla, Hollingsworth, Zenobia -who loom so large in his life. He stays away from Blithedale, his hands losing their coarseness. He begins to think of Blithedale as another life, and allows himself to joke about it with outsiders. He does not wander far, though, staying in town. One night he attends a Lyceum-Hall performance of the Veiled Lady. The crowd gathers and seats themselves. Coverdale notices Hollingsworth before him and whispers dramatically in his ear, asking where he left Zenobia. He says sadly that he left her at Blithedale. People near Coverdale talk of mesmerism and strange, romantic stories. Coverdale scoffs at them, and thinks, "we have fallen on an evil age. The audience grows impatient. A man comes out, dressed in Oriental clothing; it is Westervelt, whom Coverdale recognizes. After being asked, Hollingsworth says he does not know who the man is. The Professor speaks of psychological phenomena, a new era for the world. The Veiled Lady comes out, moving gracefully and freely. He claims her veil has been dipped in "the fluid medium of spirits". He suggests the crowd try to disconcert her; they attempt to do this by yelling, but she remains motionless and collected. As he is talking, she rises, apparently without his consent. Coverdale notices Hollingsworth on the platform. He looks to the Veiled Lady and announces she is safe, and she must come with him. Priscilla, the Veiled Lady, throws off the veil and looks startled at those around her. Coverdale says, "the true heart-throb of a woman's affection was too powerful for the jugglery that had hitherto environed her". She runs to Hollingsworth with a scream, and "was safe forever"

This set of chapters features incredible revelations : Priscilla is the Veiled Lady; Priscilla and Zenobia are sisters; Hollingsworth chooses Priscilla over Zenobia; Westervelt's role as manipulative mesmerist is made clear. Coverdale also reveals himself as an unreliable narrator, and the tone of the work shifts markedly into one that is more fragmented and dreamlike. Coverdale is one of critics' favorite topics, and with good reason. He is a voyeur, looking out panoptically, part of the action to an extent but more a watcher and a commenter. His preoccupation with his friends is unhealthy; he is jealous and embittered by their triangle and thus we cannot totally trust his observations. Kelley Griffith Jr. writes, "the narrator is biased, unreliable, unlikeable, and he distorts his characters" and that he has "a highly sensitive, ironical, intelligent, though disturbed mind". His narrative is reminiscent of those of postmodern writers in that it is like an interior monologue. The dream is the primary device Hawthorne uses to give form to the novel. While the first half of the novel moves logically, the second half starting from Coverdale's removal to the city is dreamlike, with "chaotic ordering of events and  refusal to fructify many of the crucial developments in the first half." Griffith notes three types of dreams -the utopian dream of the Blithedalers; the dream created by imagination and memory; and the dream one has when sleeping. Coverdale has the second two quite often, and threads the first part of his narrative with references to daydreams and dreams. Hawthorne also "equates Coverdale's fits of imagination with a dream state"; the meeting with Westervelt can come under scrutiny. Coverdale's dreams cannot be trusted, especially as they intrude on his daily life. There is certainly a shift in the second part of the novel, which Griffith calls "literally a different story" and "a voyage through chaos - mental chaos". Coverdale falls into the same stupefied state as the pigs he marvels at on his way out; his total lack of surprise at seeing his friends in the boarding house across the way is also consistent with a dream rather than reality. His sluggish, languid existence is dreamlike to say the least, and we cannot fully trust what he is recounting. The episode with Moodie-as-Fauntleroy is also suspicious. Griffith writes, "the saloon contains art works which either idealize reality or overemphasize it". Moodie's story is told while drunk, and Coverdale admits to some artistic license. Coverdale's return to Blithedale is also dreamlike and hellish, a phantasmagoria of strange creatures and interludes. Overall, Coverdale works his friends and their situations up in his imagination and "brings in his own guilt resulting from his moral obligation to them ." John Harmon McElroy and Edward L. McDonald agree, writing in their article that the coincidences in the second half of the novel defy rationality. Coverdale knew Zenobia had an apartment in the city, yet he marvels that he manages to look right into it from his hotel. Anther "coincidence" is that he happens to be at the Lyceum hall where Hollingsworth is. There are many questions about Coverdale's role in passing along information, such as Moodie's plan to take the money from Zenobia and give it to Priscilla. The authors also find it odd that Coverdale has such a somber attitude about visiting Blithedale again when he is there ostensibly to visit friends. Finally, mesmerism was something that Hawthorne despised, and its ridiculousness and dangerousness are revealed in the chapter with Priscilla-as-the-Veiled-Lady. Westervelt, with consent from Moodie, brought her into it against her will, and it seems likely that Zenobia and Hollingsworth helped push her back into it. Hollingsworth then becomes her savior, but it is likely that that happens because he knows he can use her fortune  to build his visionary edifice.


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 freshness,
through my memory.  I know not why it should be so.  But my mental eye
can even now discern the September grass, bordering the pleasant
roadside 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 peaceful-bosomed 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 of self-scorn, remembering how unreservedly I had
given 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 farmhouse, and for
the greensward, 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 upon me there.  In the sweat of my brow I had there 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 farmhouse, 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
every turn of my shifting fantasies, the thought stared 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
overladen soul had ever flung its weight of mortality in thither, and
if it thus escaped the burden, 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 up into it, sat down
to rest.  The grapes, which I 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 ecstasies as the
tamer grapes of Madeira, France, and the Rhine are inadequate to
produce.  And I longed to quaff a great goblet of it that moment!

While devouring the grapes, I looked on all sides out of the peep-holes
of my hermitage, and saw the farmhouse, 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 flung some rotten fragments
of an old stump at these unsentimental cows.

Skirting farther 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
officers with three-cornered cocked hats, and 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 farther 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 fortuneteller 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 Actaeon,
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 fainter tones
assumed a kind of mournfulness, and were 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 firewood, 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 farmhouse.  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.

On a brisk fall day Coverdale heads to Blithedale. He feels both wild exhilaration and nervousness, as there is a sense of foreboding in the air. Sometimes he had laughed at how much he was interested in the three of his friends, but could not help guessing about them and their occupations. He begins to catch glimpses of the farm, thinking of it as his home and perhaps even his grave. The scene is quiet, and he wonders if an evil thing has happened or is about to happen. The only living creatures around are animals, quick and skittish. He comes upon his hermitage and sits in it to rest. The landscape and buildings are quiet; not even the barn dog is there. He leaves the hermitage and walks further; he finally hears voices and moves closer to investigate. He finds a group of Blithedale residents, all dressed in strange costumes. There is an Indian chief, Diana, a Jim Crow Negro, shepherds, fairies, and more. Only Silas Foster is not dressed up, and looks at the crowd with derision. The group dances and plays music, all engaged in passionate revelry. Coverdale cannot resist a laugh, and the group espies him and begins to tease him and call him over. Someone calls out to Zenobia that Coverdale is there. Coverdale runs away, stumbling on a bunch of sticks cut for firewood. Another voice calls to him from Eliot's pulpit -it is Zenobia, laughing that he welcome but should have come a half hour before. He sees Hollingsworth and Priscilla at his feet