Hollingsworth was in his ordinary working-dress.  Priscilla wore a
pretty and simple gown, with a kerchief about her neck, and a calash,
which she had flung back from her head, leaving it suspended by the
strings.  But Zenobia (whose part among the maskers, as may be
supposed, was no inferior one) appeared in a costume of fanciful
magnificence, with her jewelled flower as the central ornament of what
resembled a leafy crown, or coronet.  She represented the Oriental
princess by whose name we were accustomed to know her.  Her attitude
was free and noble; yet, if a queen's, it was not that of a queen
triumphant, but dethroned, on trial for her life, or, perchance,
condemned already.  The spirit of the conflict seemed, nevertheless, to
be alive in her.  Her eyes were on fire; her cheeks had each a crimson
spot, so exceedingly vivid, and marked with so definite an outline,
that I at first doubted whether it were not artificial.  In a very
brief space, however, this idea was shamed by the paleness that ensued,
as the blood sunk suddenly away.  Zenobia now looked like marble.

One always feels the fact, in an instant, when he has intruded on those
who love, or those who hate, at some acme of their passion that puts
them into a sphere of their own, where no other spirit can pretend to
stand on equal ground with them.  I was confused,--affected even with a
species of terror,--and wished myself away. The intenseness of their
feelings gave them the exclusive property of the soil and atmosphere,
and left me no right to be or breathe there.

"Hollingsworth,--Zenobia,--I have just returned to Blithedale," said I,
"and had no thought of finding you here.  We shall meet again at the
house.  I will retire."

"This place is free to you," answered Hollingsworth.

"As free as to ourselves," added Zenobia.  "This long while past, you
have been following up your game, groping for human emotions in the
dark corners of the heart.  Had you been here a little sooner, you
might have seen them dragged into the daylight.  I could even wish to
have my trial over again, with you standing by to see fair play!  Do
you know, Mr. Coverdale, I have been on trial for my life?"

She laughed, while speaking thus.  But, in truth, as my eyes wandered
from one of the group to another, I saw in Hollingsworth all that an
artist could desire for the grim portrait of a Puritan magistrate
holding inquest of life and death in a case of witchcraft; in Zenobia,
the sorceress herself, not aged, wrinkled, and decrepit, but fair
enough to tempt Satan with a force reciprocal to his own; and, in
Priscilla, the pale victim, whose soul and body had been wasted by her
spells.  Had a pile of fagots been heaped against the rock, this hint
of impending doom would have completed the suggestive picture.

"It was too hard upon me," continued Zenobia, addressing Hollingsworth,
"that judge, jury, and accuser should all be comprehended in one man!
I demur, as I think the lawyers say, to the jurisdiction.  But let the
learned Judge Coverdale seat himself on the top of the rock, and you
and me stand at its base, side by side, pleading our cause before him!
There might, at least, be two criminals instead of one."

"You forced this on me," replied Hollingsworth, looking her sternly in
the face.  "Did I call you hither from among the masqueraders yonder?
Do I assume to be your judge?  No; except so far as I have an
unquestionable right of judgment, in order to settle my own line of
behavior towards those with whom the events of life bring me in
contact.  True, I have already judged you, but not on the world's
part,--neither do I pretend to pass a sentence!"

"Ah, this is very good!" cried Zenobia with a smile.  "What strange
beings you men are, Mr. Coverdale!--is it not so?  It is the simplest
thing in the world with you to bring a woman before your secret
tribunals, and judge and condemn her unheard, and then tell her to go
free without a sentence.  The misfortune is, that this same secret
tribunal chances to be the only judgment-seat that a true woman stands
in awe of, and that any verdict short of acquittal is equivalent to a
death sentence!"

The more I looked at them, and the more I heard, the stronger grew my
impression that a crisis had just come and gone.  On Hollingsworth's
brow it had left a stamp like that of irrevocable doom, of which his
own will was the instrument.  In Zenobia's whole person, beholding her
more closely, I saw a riotous agitation; the almost delirious
disquietude of a great struggle, at the close of which the vanquished
one felt her strength and courage still mighty within her, and longed
to renew the contest.  My sensations were as if I had come upon a
battlefield before the smoke was as yet cleared away.

And what subjects had been discussed here?  All, no doubt, that for so
many months past had kept my heart and my imagination idly feverish.
Zenobia's whole character and history; the true nature of her
mysterious connection with Westervelt; her later purposes towards
Hollingsworth, and, reciprocally, his in reference to her; and,
finally, the degree in which Zenobia had been cognizant of the plot
against Priscilla, and what, at last, had been the real object of that
scheme.  On these points, as before, I was left to my own conjectures.
One thing, only, was certain.  Zenobia and Hollingsworth were friends
no longer.  If their heartstrings were ever intertwined, the knot had
been adjudged an entanglement, and was now violently broken.

But Zenobia seemed unable to rest content with the matter in the
posture which it had assumed.

"Ah! do we part so?" exclaimed she, seeing Hollingsworth about to
retire.

"And why not?" said he, with almost rude abruptness.  "What is there
further to be said between us?"

"Well, perhaps nothing," answered Zenobia, looking him in the face, and
smiling.  "But we have come many times before to this gray rock, and we
have talked very softly among the whisperings of the birch-trees.  They
were pleasant hours!  I love to make the latest of them, though not
altogether so delightful, loiter away as slowly as may be.  And,
besides, you have put many queries to me at this, which you design to
be our last interview; and being driven, as I must acknowledge, into a
corner, I have responded with reasonable frankness.  But now, with your
free consent, I desire the privilege of asking a few questions, in my
turn."

"I have no concealments," said Hollingsworth.

"We shall see," answered Zenobia.  "I would first inquire whether you
have supposed me to be wealthy?"

"On that point," observed Hollingsworth, "I have had the opinion which
the world holds."

"And I held it likewise," said Zenobia.  "Had I not, Heaven is my
witness the knowledge should have been as free to you as me.  It is
only three days since I knew the strange fact that threatens to make me
poor; and your own acquaintance with it, I suspect, is of at least as
old a date.  I fancied myself affluent.  You are aware, too, of the
disposition which I purposed making of the larger portion of my
imaginary opulence,--nay, were it all, I had not hesitated.  Let me ask
you, further, did I ever propose or intimate any terms of compact, on
which depended this--as the world would consider it--so important
sacrifice?"

"You certainly spoke of none," said Hollingsworth.

"Nor meant any," she responded.  "I was willing to realize your dream
freely,--generously, as some might think,--but, at all events, fully,
and heedless though it should prove the ruin of my fortune. If, in your
own thoughts, you have imposed any conditions of this expenditure, it
is you that must be held responsible for whatever is sordid and
unworthy in them.  And now one other question.  Do you love this girl?"

"O Zenobia!" exclaimed Priscilla, shrinking back, as if longing for the
rock to topple over and hide her.

"Do you love her?" repeated Zenobia.

"Had you asked me that question a short time since," replied
Hollingsworth, after a pause, during which, it seemed to me, even the
birch-trees held their whispering breath, "I should have told
you--'No!' My feelings for Priscilla differed little from those of an
elder brother, watching tenderly over the gentle sister whom God has
given him to protect."

"And what is your answer now?" persisted Zenobia.

"I do love her!" said Hollingsworth, uttering the words with a deep
inward breath, instead of speaking them outright.  "As well declare it
thus as in any other way.  I do love her!"

"Now, God be judge between us," cried Zenobia, breaking into sudden
passion, "which of us two has most mortally offended Him!  At least, I
am a woman, with every fault, it may be, that a woman ever had,--weak,
vain, unprincipled (like most of my sex; for our virtues, when we have
any, are merely impulsive and intuitive), passionate, too, and pursuing
my foolish and unattainable ends by indirect and cunning, though
absurdly chosen means, as an hereditary bond-slave must; false,
moreover, to the whole circle of good, in my reckless truth to the
little good I saw before me,--but still a woman!  A creature whom only
a little change of earthly fortune, a little kinder smile of Him who
sent me hither, and one true heart to encourage and direct me, might
have made all that a woman can be! But how is it with you?  Are you a
man?  No; but a monster!  A cold, heartless, self-beginning and
self-ending piece of mechanism!"

"With what, then, do you charge me!" asked Hollingsworth, aghast, and
greatly disturbed by this attack.  "Show me one selfish end, in all I
ever aimed at, and you may cut it out of my bosom with a knife!"

"It is all self!" answered Zenobia with still intenser bitterness.
"Nothing else; nothing but self, self, self!  The fiend, I doubt not,
has made his choicest mirth of you these seven years past, and
especially in the mad summer which we have spent together.  I see it
now!  I am awake, disenchanted, disinthralled!  Self, self, self! You
have embodied yourself in a project.  You are a better masquerader than
the witches and gypsies yonder; for your disguise is a self-deception.
See whither it has brought you!  First, you aimed a death-blow, and a
treacherous one, at this scheme of a purer and higher life, which so
many noble spirits had wrought out.  Then, because Coverdale could not
be quite your slave, you threw him ruthlessly away.  And you took me,
too, into your plan, as long as there was hope of my being available,
and now fling me aside again, a broken tool!  But, foremost and
blackest of your sins, you stifled down your inmost consciousness!--you
did a deadly wrong to your own heart!--you were ready to sacrifice this
girl, whom, if God ever visibly showed a purpose, He put into your
charge, and through whom He was striving to redeem you!"

"This is a woman's view," said Hollingsworth, growing deadly pale,--"a
woman's, whose whole sphere of action is in the heart, and who can
conceive of no higher nor wider one!"

"Be silent!" cried Zenobia imperiously.  "You know neither man nor
woman!  The utmost that can be said in your behalf--and because I would
not be wholly despicable in my own eyes, but would fain excuse my
wasted feelings, nor own it wholly a delusion, therefore I say it--is,
that a great and rich heart has been ruined in your breast. Leave me,
now.  You have done with me, and I with you.  Farewell!"

"Priscilla," said Hollingsworth, "come."  Zenobia smiled; possibly I
did so too.  Not often, in human life, has a gnawing sense of injury
found a sweeter morsel of revenge than was conveyed in the tone with
which Hollingsworth spoke those two words.  It was the abased and
tremulous tone of a man whose faith in himself was shaken, and who
sought, at last, to lean on an affection.  Yes; the strong man bowed
himself and rested on this poor Priscilla!  Oh, could she have failed
him, what a triumph for the lookers-on!

And, at first, I half imagined that she was about to fail him.  She
rose up, stood shivering like the birch leaves that trembled over her
head, and then slowly tottered, rather than walked, towards Zenobia.
Arriving at her feet, she sank down there, in the very same attitude
which she had assumed on their first meeting, in the kitchen of the old
farmhouse.  Zenobia remembered it.

"Ah, Priscilla!" said she, shaking her head, "how much is changed since
then!  You kneel to a dethroned princess.  You, the victorious one!
But he is waiting for you.  Say what you wish, and leave me."

"We are sisters!" gasped Priscilla.

I fancied that I understood the word and action.  It meant the offering
of herself, and all she had, to be at Zenobia's disposal. But the
latter would not take it thus.

"True, we are sisters!" she replied; and, moved by the sweet word, she
stooped down and kissed Priscilla; but not lovingly, for a sense of
fatal harm received through her seemed to be lurking in Zenobia's
heart.  "We had one father!  You knew it from the first; I, but a
little while,--else some things that have chanced might have been
spared you.  But I never wished you harm.  You stood between me and an
end which I desired.  I wanted a clear path.  No matter what I meant.
It is over now.  Do you forgive me?"

"O Zenobia," sobbed Priscilla, "it is I that feel like the guilty one!"

"No, no, poor little thing!" said Zenobia, with a sort of contempt.
"You have been my evil fate, but there never was a babe with less
strength or will to do an injury.  Poor child!  Methinks you have but a
melancholy lot before you, sitting all alone in that wide, cheerless
heart, where, for aught you know,--and as I, alas! believe,--the fire
which you have kindled may soon go out.  Ah, the thought makes me
shiver for you!  What will you do, Priscilla, when you find no spark
among the ashes?"

"Die!" she answered.

"That was well said!" responded Zenobia, with an approving smile.
"There is all a woman in your little compass, my poor sister.
Meanwhile, go with him, and live!"

She waved her away with a queenly gesture, and turned her own face to
the rock.  I watched Priscilla, wondering what judgment she would pass
between Zenobia and Hollingsworth; how interpret his behavior, so as to
reconcile it with true faith both towards her sister and herself; how
compel her love for him to keep any terms whatever with her sisterly
affection!  But, in truth, there was no such difficulty as I imagined.
Her engrossing love made it all clear.  Hollingsworth could have no
fault.  That was the one principle at the centre of the universe.  And
the doubtful guilt or possible integrity of other people, appearances,
self-evident facts, the testimony of her own senses,--even
Hollingsworth's self-accusation, had he volunteered it,--would have
weighed not the value of a mote of thistledown on the other side.  So
secure was she of his right, that she never thought of comparing it
with another's wrong, but left the latter to itself.

Hollingsworth drew her arm within his, and soon disappeared with her
among the trees.  I cannot imagine how Zenobia knew when they were out
of sight; she never glanced again towards them.  But, retaining a proud
attitude so long as they might have thrown back a retiring look, they
were no sooner departed,--utterly departed,--than she began slowly to
sink down.  It was as if a great, invisible, irresistible weight were
pressing her to the earth.  Settling upon her knees, she leaned her
forehead against the rock, and sobbed convulsively; dry sobs they
seemed to be, such as have nothing to do with tears.

While Priscilla and Hollingsworth are adorned in simple clothes, Zenobia is radiant like an Oriental princess. Coverdale feels as if he has intruded on a scene of strong emotion or passion and that he ought to leave, but Zenobia says he can stay. Coverdale equates Hollingsworth to a Puritan magistrate, Zenobia to a sorceress, and Priscilla to a pale victim. Zenobia tells Hollingsworth it is hard for her that her judge, jury, and executioner should all be wrapped up in Coverdale. He is certain some crisis has just come and gone, wondering if all of their secrets were laid bare. He can tell Hollingsworth and Zenobia are friends no longer, and they engage a few more allusive, pointed word. Zenobia announces that she knows that she is actually poor and that her life is not what she thought. She asks if he loves Priscilla, and he says he does now. Zenobia scoffs that they ought to ask who has mortally offended God more -she is a foolish, passionate woman with all the vices of her sex, but he is a cold, heartless monster. Hollingsworth seems shocked by the vitriol in her voice. She spits out that all he cares about is himself, that he threw Coverdale away, and that he would now make a sacrifice of Priscilla. The pale Hollingsworth demurs, and asks Priscilla to come with him. Coverdale watches with bated breath, but the young girl complies. Before she leaves she falls at Zenobia's feet, at which the latter says she is kneeling to a dethroned princess. Priscilla cries out that they are sisters. Zenobia kisses her and says they are, but Priscilla once stood before her goals and she resented her. Finally Zenobia orders her to go with Hollingsworth and live. Coverdale knew that Priscilla's love for her sister could not match that of her dedication to Hollingsworth. After they leave, the cold and imperious Zenobia breaks down, convulsively sobbing

The novel comes to a close with the startling but not at all surprising death of Zenobia; the marriage of Hollingsworth and Priscilla; and Coverdale's permanent absence from Blithedale. Coverdale's obsession with his friends is clearly not over, as the mere construction of his narrative makes clear. The first thing to address is Zenobia's death, which has been substantially alluded to and foreshadowed. Coverdale cannot resist sowing the seeds of this coming event right before it happens, as when he mentions how cold her hands were. Ffrangcon Lewis discusses Zenobia's death in the context of the ever-present theme of theatricality, concluding that "Coverdale comes to resemble a grotesque version of Professor Westervelt, the exhibitor of the veiled lady, as he paddles out three necromantic passes with his boat above the concealed body of the drowned Zenobia." There is the same spiritual and sexual theater present in this moment; it is also the consummating event in the theatrical performance going on in Coverdale's head. It is unknown how much Zenobia controlled the perception of the tragedy of her death; she certainly did sow seeds that could allude to her suicide, always wont to speak and act melodramatically. And as is made clear many times by her admirers, she was fit for the stage. Lewis notes, "Hawthorne's grim satirical implication is that Hollingsworth's and Coverdale's sins are to be remembered in the sepulchral orisons of the dead Zenobia, and that Zenobia's final gesture is indeed an eloquent piece of self-conscious self-dramatization." Both Zenobia and Priscilla warrant more analysis, as they are complicated characters that do not remain within the neat boundaries they may be assumed to inhabit. Allan and Barbara Lefcowitz call them both "chiaroscuric", and in particular find Priscilla fascinating. They point to her little silk purses as emblematic of her secretiveness and covert sexuality, which contrast with the open, bold flower of Zenobia. Priscilla's eyes are often closed, and she can hear things no one else can. At one point she clutches a letter to her bosom guiltily, tying her to Hawthorne's Hester Prynne. The authors speculate that she may have even had a past as a prostitute. Moodie, as a morally bankrupt and impoverished man, sells her purses in a way that suggests he may pimp her body out as well. The veiled lady "may have been merely a safe Puritanical cover  for the sinister facts of Priscilla's true past identity". Allusions to her terrible, unsavory, and disreputable past are common; there were "contemporary associations between the seamstress profession and of the prostitute or fallen women" and "links between mesmerism and sexual exploitation." This theory obviously can't be definitively proven, but it is certainly wroth considering. The authors also note that Zenobia and Priscilla do not actually seem that different from each other, identifying them as "the major and minor key of the same melody, or the manifest and latent content of the same dream" rather than just the "white" and "dark" lady. Both are associated with plants, albeit different ones. Both are secretive, both are involved with masks. Hawthorne seems sympathetic to both, but as the novel proceeds, Priscilla loses some of her nuance and mystique, " increasingly ethereal, pallid, and passive, more the flimsy paradigm of some vague principle of floating good." At the end of the novel she is merely Hollingsworth's guardian, and the perhaps indirect and unfortunate cause of rendering him depressed, empty, and defeated. Hollingsworth's choice, then, is not because he loves Priscilla; indeed, the sexual attraction between him and Zenobia is quite palpable. He chooses her because of her money, which used to be Zenobia's. His project to build the edifice truly did consume him and ruin lives in the process, as Coverdale often chides him. As for Coverdale, he remains away from Blithedale, content with his bachelor lifestyle and creature comforts. He is a failed poet, and a failed utopian experimenter. He abandoned Blithedale, and abandoned Zenobia. His narrative reveals a man obsessive, less-than-circumspect, and perhaps complicit in the problematic events he narrates. Some critics propose that Coverdale was a lot more implicated in Zenobia's death than he would like to share, or even remember. McElroy and McDonald suggest that he may have returned to Blithedale with certain expectations about Zenobia after ensuring that she did not get to be with Hollingsworth , but that when she spurned him again he murdered her. They write that perhaps "his mind refuses to remember what he did, though he half-suspects himself." It is obvious that he is obsessed with her sexually, given his ruminations on her married and virginal state, and his allusions to being jealous of Hollingsworth. The position of her dead body suggests strangling, and there are other clues, such as her hands looking as if she struggled against Providence and her having referred to Coverdale as such earlier in the text. The writers conclude that "By strangling Zenobia, 'Judge Coverdale' meted out 'justice' to a 'fallen' woman who disdained his affection, and he also punished her lover, whose life is destroyed by guilt for her death." This theory is certainly provocative and not commonly agreed upon, but it indicates just how rife with interpretations the novel is - how rich, how deep, how ambiguous and complex it is.


Zenobia had entirely forgotten me.  She fancied herself alone with her
great grief.  And had it been only a common pity that I felt for
her,--the pity that her proud nature would have repelled, as the one
worst wrong which the world yet held in reserve,--the sacredness and
awfulness of the crisis might have impelled me to steal away silently,
so that not a dry leaf should rustle under my feet.  I would have left
her to struggle, in that solitude, with only the eye of God upon her.
But, so it happened, I never once dreamed of questioning my right to be
there now, as I had questioned it just before, when I came so suddenly
upon Hollingsworth and herself, in the passion of their recent debate.
It suits me not to explain what was the analogy that I saw or imagined
between Zenobia's situation and mine; nor, I believe, will the reader
detect this one secret, hidden beneath many a revelation which perhaps
concerned me less.  In simple truth, however, as Zenobia leaned her
forehead against the rock, shaken with that tearless agony, it seemed
to me that the self-same pang, with hardly mitigated torment, leaped
thrilling from her heartstrings to my own.  Was it wrong, therefore, if
I felt myself consecrated to the priesthood by sympathy like this, and
called upon to minister to this woman's affliction, so far as mortal
could?

But, indeed, what could mortal do for her?  Nothing!  The attempt would
be a mockery and an anguish.  Time, it is true, would steal away her
grief, and bury it and the best of her heart in the same grave.  But
Destiny itself, methought, in its kindliest mood, could do no better
for Zenobia, in the way of quick relief; than to cause the impending
rock to impend a little farther, and fall upon her head. So I leaned
against a tree, and listened to her sobs, in unbroken silence.  She was
half prostrate, half kneeling, with her forehead still pressed against
the rock.  Her sobs were the only sound; she did not groan, nor give
any other utterance to her distress.  It was all involuntary.

At length she sat up, put back her hair, and stared about her with a
bewildered aspect, as if not distinctly recollecting the scene through
which she had passed, nor cognizant of the situation in which it left
her.  Her face and brow were almost purple with the rush of blood.
They whitened, however, by and by, and for some time retained this
deathlike hue.  She put her hand to her forehead, with a gesture that
made me forcibly conscious of an intense and living pain there.

Her glance, wandering wildly to and fro, passed over me several times,
without appearing to inform her of my presence.  But, finally, a look
of recognition gleamed from her eyes into mine.

"Is it you, Miles Coverdale?" said she, smiling.  "Ah, I perceive what
you are about!  You are turning this whole affair into a ballad. Pray
let me hear as many stanzas as you happen to have ready."

"Oh, hush, Zenobia!"  I answered.  "Heaven knows what an ache is in my
soul!"

"It is genuine tragedy, is it not?" rejoined Zenobia, with a sharp,
light laugh.  "And you are willing to allow, perhaps, that I have had
hard measure.  But it is a woman's doom, and I have deserved it like a
woman; so let there be no pity, as, on my part, there shall be no
complaint.  It is all right, now, or will shortly be so.  But, Mr.
Coverdale, by all means write this ballad, and put your soul's ache
into it, and turn your sympathy to good account, as other poets do, and
as poets must, unless they choose to give us glittering icicles instead
of lines of fire.  As for the moral, it shall be distilled into the
final stanza, in a drop of bitter honey."

"What shall it be, Zenobia?"  I inquired, endeavoring to fall in with
her mood.

"Oh, a very old one will serve the purpose," she replied.  "There are
no new truths, much as we have prided ourselves on finding some.  A
moral?  Why, this: That, in the battlefield of life, the downright
stroke, that would fall only on a man's steel headpiece, is sure to
light on a woman's heart, over which she wears no breastplate, and
whose wisdom it is, therefore, to keep out of the conflict.  Or, this:
That the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and Providence, or
Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one
hair's-breadth out of the beaten track.  Yes; and add (for I may as
well own it, now) that, with that one hair's-breadth, she goes all
astray, and never sees the world in its true aspect afterwards."

"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 piece of snow.

"How very cold!"  I exclaimed, holding it between both my own, with the
vain idea of warming it.  "What can be the reason?  It is really
deathlike!"

"The extremities die first, they say," answered Zenobia, laughing. "And
so you kiss this poor, despised, rejected hand!  Well, my dear friend,
I thank you.  You have reserved your homage for the fallen. Lip of man
will never touch my hand again.  I intend to become a Catholic, for the
sake of going into a nunnery.  When you next hear of Zenobia, her face
will be behind the black veil; so look your last at it now,--for all is
over.  Once more, farewell!"

She withdrew her hand, yet left a lingering pressure, which I felt long
afterwards.  So intimately connected as I had been with perhaps the
only man in whom she was ever truly interested, Zenobia looked on me as
the representative of all the past, and was conscious that, in bidding
me adieu, she likewise took final leave of Hollingsworth, and of this
whole epoch of her life.  Never did her beauty shine out more
lustrously than in the last glimpse that I had of her.  She departed,
and was soon hidden among the trees.  But, whether it was the strong
impression of the foregoing scene, or whatever else the cause, I was
affected with a fantasy that Zenobia had not actually gone, but was
still hovering about the spot and haunting it.  I seemed to feel her
eyes upon me.  It was as if the vivid coloring of her character had
left a brilliant stain upon the air.  By degrees, however, the
impression grew less distinct.  I flung myself upon the fallen leaves
at the base of Eliot's pulpit.  The sunshine withdrew up the tree
trunks and flickered on the topmost boughs; gray twilight made the wood
obscure; the stars brightened out; the pendent boughs became wet with
chill autumnal dews.  But I was listless, worn out with emotion on my
own behalf and sympathy for others, and had no heart to leave my
comfortless lair beneath the rock.

I must have fallen asleep, and had a dream, all the circumstances of
which utterly vanished at the moment when they converged to some
tragical catastrophe, and thus grew too powerful for the thin sphere of
slumber that enveloped them.  Starting from the ground, I found the
risen moon shining upon the rugged face of the rock, and myself all in
a tremble.

Coverdale watches Zenobia cry, wondering if she has forgotten him, or if he is supposed to be her priest. Finally she sits up, deathlike in her pallor. She laughs that Coverdale is turning this into a ballad, but that this is a woman's doom. She continues, saying, "the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and Providence, and Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one hair's breath out of the beaten track". Coverdale tries to disagree. Zenobia laments that Hollingsworth threw away a woman who could have served him better than Priscilla with her "blind, instinctive love" could. It was not his fault, though, as she should have known he would never want her broken, useless heart. She says she will leave Blithedale and hopes Coverdale will give him a message. A moment later she changes her mind and says she has none. Taking the flower out of her hair, she says she is weary of this place and that it was a foolish dream. Her hand is cold when Coverdale touches it. Her plan is to go into a nunnery, and she says farewell and walks away. Her spirit seems to hang over the place. Coverdale flings himself down on the ground. He falls asleep and has strange, tragic dreams before he wakes


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.  "Aha! are you
there, Miles Coverdale?  You have 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 quickly, 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 aside.  The tough-nerved yeoman,
in his comment, put 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 to two or three footsteps, impressed into the clayey margin,
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 standstill.  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 hornpouts 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 what, lads;
if I thought anything had really happened to 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 hooked pole elevated in the air.  But, by and by, with a 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 upstream, 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 yeoman.  "Pray God he
never has, and never may.  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 shouldn'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 background, 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 while at
Zenobia, whose limbs were swaying in the current close at the boat's
side.  Arriving near the shore, we all three stept 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 never-ending hostility.  Her
hands!  They were clenched 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, "'tis 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 show ludicrously, I
doubt not, on my page, but must 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 burden onward through the
moonlight, and at last laid Zenobia on the floor of the old farmhouse.
By and by came three or four withered women and stood whispering around
the corpse, peering at it through their spectacles, holding up their
skinny hands, shaking their night-capped heads, and taking counsel of
one another's experience what was to be done.

With those tire-women we left Zenobia.

Coverdale rushes to Hollingsworth's window and asks if he has seen Zenobia, to which he replies he has not since he left. Silas Foster hears this and gruffly asks what is going on, and something in Coverdale's voice alerts him to the gravity of the situation. Coverdale shows them a handkerchief he came upon, and Foster bursts out that he thinks she has drowned herself. He thinks she has too much sense to do that, and enjoyed life too well. They head out into the night, heading down to the river, where they find a shoe that belonged to Zenobia. Coverdale still has that shoe today, he adds. The river is dark, opaque, and inscrutable in its secrets. They get into a boat and glide down the murky stream. Coverdale imagines her body with her face upward, gliding under them. Hollingsworth pokes the stream with his pole until he finally hits something. Zenobia's flowing garments and hair reveal themselves. The men pull the body up and Coverdale is shocked at the agonies of death present in her form. He notices her hands bent in a penitential gesture, but one of struggle and doubt. Foster says Hollingsworth wounded her by her heart , and the man starts. Coverdale wonders if Zenobia saw pictures of drowned women in graceful poses and was inspired by them. The men bring the body back and leave her with a few old women


Blithedale, thus far in its progress, had never found the necessity of
a burial-ground.  There was some consultation among us in what spot
Zenobia might most fitly be laid.  It was my own wish that she should
sleep at the base of Eliot's pulpit, and that on the rugged front of
the rock the name by which we familiarly knew her, Zenobia,--and not
another word, should be deeply cut, and left for the moss and lichens
to fill up at their long leisure.  But Hollingsworth (to whose ideas on
this point great deference was due) made it his request that her grave
might be dug on the gently sloping hillside, in the wide pasture,
where, as we once supposed, Zenobia and he had planned to build their
cottage.  And thus it was done, accordingly.

She was buried very much as other people have been for hundreds of
years gone by.  In anticipation of a death, we Blithedale colonists had
sometimes set our fancies at work to arrange a funereal ceremony, which
should be the proper symbolic expression of our spiritual faith and
eternal hopes; and this we meant to substitute for those customary
rites which were moulded originally out of the Gothic gloom, and by
long use, like an old velvet pall, have so much more than their first
death-smell in them.  But when the occasion came we found it the
simplest and truest thing, after all, to content ourselves with the old
fashion, taking away what we could, but interpolating no novelties, and
particularly avoiding all frippery of flowers and cheerful emblems.
The procession moved from the farmhouse.  Nearest the dead walked an
old man in deep mourning, his face mostly concealed in a white
handkerchief, and with Priscilla leaning on his arm.  Hollingsworth and
myself came next.  We all stood around the narrow niche in the cold
earth; all saw the coffin lowered in; all heard the rattle of the
crumbly soil upon its lid,--that final sound, which mortality awakens
on the utmost verge of sense, as if in the vain hope of bringing an
echo from the spiritual world.

I noticed a stranger,--a stranger to most of those present, though
known to me,--who, after the coffin had descended, took up a handful of
earth and flung it first into the grave.  I had given up
Hollingsworth's arm, and now found myself near this man.

"It was an idle thing--a foolish thing--for Zenobia to do," said he.
"She was the last woman in the world to whom death could have been
necessary.  It was too absurd!  I have no patience with her."

"Why so?"  I inquired, smothering my horror at his cold comment, in my
eager curiosity to discover some tangible truth as to his relation with
Zenobia.  "If any crisis could justify the sad wrong she offered to
herself, it was surely that in which she stood.  Everything had failed
her; prosperity in the world's sense, for her opulence was gone,--the
heart's prosperity, in love.  And there was a secret burden on her, the
nature of which is best known to you.  Young as she was, she had tried
life fully, had no more to hope, and something, perhaps, to fear.  Had
Providence taken her away in its own holy hand, I should have thought
it the kindest dispensation that could be awarded to one so wrecked."

"You mistake the matter completely," rejoined Westervelt.

"What, then, is your own view of it?"  I asked.

"Her mind was active, and various in its powers," said he.  "Her heart
had a manifold adaptation; her constitution an infinite buoyancy, which
(had she possessed only a little patience to await the reflux of her
troubles) would have borne her upward triumphantly for twenty years to
come.  Her beauty would not have waned--or scarcely so, and surely not
beyond the reach of art to restore it--in all that time.  She had
life's summer all before her, and a hundred varieties of brilliant
success.  What an actress Zenobia might have been!  It was one of her
least valuable capabilities.  How forcibly she might have wrought upon
the world, either directly in her own person, or by her influence upon
some man, or a series of men, of controlling genius!  Every prize that
could be worth a woman's having--and many prizes which other women are
too timid to desire--lay within Zenobia's reach."

"In all this," I observed, "there would have been nothing to satisfy
her heart."

"Her heart!" answered Westervelt contemptuously.  "That troublesome
organ (as she had hitherto found it) would have been kept in its due
place and degree, and have had all the gratification it could fairly
claim.  She would soon have established a control over it.  Love had
failed her, you say.  Had it never failed her before?  Yet she survived
it, and loved again,--possibly not once alone, nor twice either.  And
now to drown herself for yonder dreamy philanthropist!"

"Who are you," I exclaimed indignantly, "that dare to speak thus of the
dead?  You seem to intend a eulogy, yet leave out whatever was noblest
in her, and blacken while you mean to praise.  I have long considered
you as Zenobia's evil fate.  Your sentiments confirm me in the idea,
but leave me still ignorant as to the mode in which you have influenced
her life.  The connection may have been indissoluble, except by death.
Then, indeed,--always in the hope of God's infinite mercy,--I cannot
deem it a misfortune that she sleeps in yonder grave!"

"No matter what I was to her," he answered gloomily, yet without actual
emotion.  "She is now beyond my reach.  Had she lived, and hearkened to
my counsels, we might have served each other well.  But there Zenobia
lies in yonder pit, with the dull earth over her. Twenty years of a
brilliant lifetime thrown away for a mere woman's whim!"

Heaven deal with Westervelt according to his nature and deserts!--that
is to say, annihilate him.  He was altogether earthy, worldly, made for
time and its gross objects, and incapable--except by a sort of dim
reflection caught from other minds--of so much as one spiritual idea.
Whatever stain Zenobia had was caught from him; nor does it seldom
happen that a character of admirable qualities loses its better life
because the atmosphere that should sustain it is rendered poisonous by
such breath as this man mingled with Zenobia's. Yet his reflections
possessed their share of truth.  It was a woeful thought, that a woman
of Zenobia's diversified capacity should have fancied herself
irretrievably defeated on the broad battlefield of life, and with no
refuge, save to fall on her own sword, merely because Love had gone
against her.  It is nonsense, and a miserable wrong,--the result, like
so many others, of masculine egotism,--that the success or failure of
woman's existence should be made to depend wholly on the affections,
and on one species of affection, while man has such a multitude of
other chances, that this seems but an incident.  For its own sake, if
it will do no more, the world should throw open all its avenues to the
passport of a woman's bleeding heart.

As we stood around the grave, I looked often towards Priscilla,
dreading to see her wholly overcome with grief.  And deeply grieved, in
truth, she was.  But a character so simply constituted as hers has room
only for a single predominant affection.  No other feeling can touch
the heart's inmost core, nor do it any deadly mischief.  Thus, while we
see that such a being responds to every breeze with tremulous
vibration, and imagine that she must be shattered by the first rude
blast, we find her retaining her equilibrium amid shocks that might
have overthrown many a sturdier frame.  So with Priscilla; her one
possible misfortune was Hollingsworth's unkindness; and that was
destined never to befall her, never yet, at least, for Priscilla has
not died.

But Hollingsworth!  After all the evil that he did, are we to leave him
thus, blest with the entire devotion of this one true heart, and with
wealth at his disposal to execute the long-contemplated project that
had led him so far astray?  What retribution is there here?  My mind
being vexed with precisely this query, I made a journey, some years
since, for the sole purpose of catching a last glimpse of
Hollingsworth, and judging for myself whether he were a happy man or
no.  I learned that he inhabited a small cottage, that his way of life
was exceedingly retired, and that my only chance of encountering him or
Priscilla was to meet them in a secluded lane, where, in the latter
part of the afternoon, they were accustomed to walk.  I did meet them,
accordingly.  As they approached me, I observed in Hollingsworth's face
a depressed and melancholy look, that seemed habitual; the powerfully
built man showed a self-distrustful weakness, and a childlike or
childish tendency to press close, and closer still, to the side of the
slender woman whose arm was within his.  In Priscilla's manner there
was a protective and watchful quality, as if she felt herself the
guardian of her companion; but, likewise, a deep, submissive,
unquestioning reverence, and also a veiled happiness in her fair and
quiet countenance.

Drawing nearer, Priscilla recognized me, and gave me a kind and
friendly smile, but with a slight gesture, which I could not help
interpreting as an entreaty not to make myself known to Hollingsworth.
Nevertheless, an impulse took possession of me, and compelled me to
address him.

"I have come, Hollingsworth," said I, "to view your grand edifice for
the reformation of criminals.  Is it finished yet?"

"No, nor begun," answered he, without raising his eyes.  "A very small
one answers all my purposes."

Priscilla threw me an upbraiding glance.  But I spoke again, with a
bitter and revengeful emotion, as if flinging a poisoned arrow at
Hollingsworth's heart.

"Up to this moment," I inquired, "how many criminals have you reformed?"

"Not one," said Hollingsworth, with his eyes still fixed on the ground.
"Ever since we parted, I have been busy with a single murderer."

Then the tears gushed into my eyes, and I forgave him; for I remembered
the wild energy, the passionate shriek, with which Zenobia had spoken
those words, "Tell him he has murdered me!  Tell him that I'll haunt
him!"--and I knew what murderer he meant, and whose vindictive shadow
dogged the side where Priscilla was not.

The moral which presents itself to my reflections, as drawn from
Hollingsworth's character and errors, is simply this, that, admitting
what is called philanthropy, when adopted as a profession, to be often
useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, it is perilous to
the individual whose ruling passion, in one exclusive channel, it thus
becomes.  It ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the heart, the rich
juices of which God never meant should be pressed violently out and
distilled into alcoholic liquor by an unnatural process, but should
render life sweet, bland, and gently beneficent, and insensibly
influence other hearts and other lives to the same blessed end.  I see
in Hollingsworth an exemplification of the most awful truth in Bunyan's
book of such, from the very gate of heaven there is a by-way to the pit!

But, all this while, we have been standing by Zenobia's grave.  I have
never since beheld it, but make no question that the grass grew all the
better, on that little parallelogram of pasture land, for the decay of
the beautiful woman who slept beneath.  How Nature seems to love us!
And how readily, nevertheless, without a sigh or a complaint, she
converts us to a meaner purpose, when her highest one--that of a
conscious intellectual life and sensibility has been untimely balked!
While Zenobia lived, Nature was proud of her, and directed all eyes
upon that radiant presence, as her fairest handiwork.  Zenobia
perished.  Will not Nature shed a tear?  Ah, no!--she adopts the
calamity at once into her system, and is just as well pleased, for
aught we can see, with the tuft of ranker vegetation that grew out of
Zenobia's heart, as with all the beauty which has bequeathed us no
earthly representative except in this crop of weeds.  It is because the
spirit is inestimable that the lifeless body is so little valued.

While Coverdale wishes Zenobia would be laid at the foot of Eliot's pulpit, she is buried on the gently sloping hillside according to Hollingsworth's wishes. It is a simple ceremony. Moodie is there with Priscilla on his arm, Hollingsworth and Coverdale walking together. Coverdale talks to Westervelt, who also is in attendance. Westervelt is scornful of Zenobia's decision to kill herself, but Coverdale says that it seems as if Zenobia had reason to in her mind, as she had lost everything -prosperity and love. Westervelt disagrees, saying her mind was chive and she would have been a fine actress and had a fine life. He thinks it absurd that because love failed her life was over. Coverdale hates the man and tells him he saw him as Zenobia's evil fate, but secretly agreed with him that it is unfortunate Zenobia threw herself away for love. Looking at Priscilla, he sees that she is sad, but that her heart only has room for one predominating passion. Coverdale visits Hollingsworth and Priscilla some time later, and sees the man melancholy. He spitefully asks about his reform efforts, but Hollingsworth says he can only be concerned with his own fate as a murderer. Coverdale believes Philanthropy is a perilous thing for the individual, as it takes all his passion and focus


It remains only to say a few words about myself.  Not improbably, the
reader might be willing to spare me the trouble; for I have made but a
poor and dim figure in my own narrative, establishing no separate
interest, and suffering my colorless life to take its hue from other
lives.  But one still retains some little consideration for one's self;
so I keep these last two or three pages for my individual and sole
behoof.

But what, after all, have I to tell?  Nothing, nothing, nothing!  I
left Blithedale within the week after Zenobia's death, and went back
thither no more.  The whole soil of our farm, for a long time
afterwards, seemed but the sodded earth over her grave.  I could not
toil there, nor live upon its products.  Often, however, in these years
that are darkening around me, I remember our beautiful scheme of a
noble and unselfish life; and how fair, in that first summer, appeared
the prospect that it might endure for generations, and be perfected, as
the ages rolled away, into the system of a people and a world!  Were my
former associates now there,--were there only three or four of those
true-hearted men still laboring in the sun,--I sometimes fancy that I
should direct my world-weary footsteps thitherward, and entreat them to
receive me, for old friendship's sake.  More and more I feel that we
had struck upon what ought to be a truth.  Posterity may dig it up, and
profit by it.  The experiment, so far as its original projectors were
concerned, proved, long ago, a failure; first lapsing into Fourierism,
and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher
spirit.  Where once we toiled with our whole hopeful hearts, the town
paupers, aged, nerveless, and disconsolate, creep sluggishly afield.
Alas, what faith is requisite to bear up against such results of
generous effort!

My subsequent life has passed,--I was going to say happily, but, at all
events, tolerably enough.  I am now at middle age, well, well, a step
or two beyond the midmost point, and I care not a fig who knows it!--a
bachelor, with no very decided purpose of ever being otherwise. I have
been twice to Europe, and spent a year or two rather agreeably at each
visit.  Being well to do in the world, and having nobody but myself to
care for, I live very much at my ease, and fare sumptuously every day.
As for poetry, I have given it up, notwithstanding that Dr.
Griswold--as the reader, of course, knows--has placed me at a fair
elevation among our minor minstrelsy, on the strength of my pretty
little volume, published ten years ago. As regards human progress (in
spite of my irrepressible yearnings over the Blithedale reminiscences),
let them believe in it who can, and aid in it who choose.  If I could
earnestly do either, it might be all the better for my comfort.  As
Hollingsworth once told me, I lack a purpose.  How strange!  He was
ruined, morally, by an overplus of the very same ingredient, the want
of which, I occasionally suspect, has rendered my own life all an
emptiness.  I by no means wish to die.  Yet, were there any cause, in
this whole chaos of human struggle, worth a sane man's dying for, and
which my death would benefit, then--provided, however, the effort did
not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble--methinks I might be bold
to offer up my life.  If Kossuth, for example, would pitch the
battlefield of Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and
choose a mild, sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflict, Miles
Coverdale would gladly be his man, for one brave rush upon the levelled
bayonets.  Further than that, I should be loath to pledge myself.

I exaggerate my own defects.  The reader must not take my own word for
it, nor believe me altogether changed from the young man who once hoped
strenuously, and struggled not so much amiss.  Frostier heads than mine
have gained honor in the world; frostier hearts have imbibed new
warmth, and been newly happy.  Life, however, it must be owned, has
come to rather an idle pass with me.  Would my friends like to know
what brought it thither?  There is one secret,--I have concealed it all
along, and never meant to let the least whisper of it escape,--one
foolish little secret, which possibly may have had something to do with
these inactive years of meridian manhood, with my bachelorship, with
the unsatisfied retrospect that I fling back on life, and my listless
glance towards the future.  Shall I reveal it? It is an absurd thing
for a man in his afternoon,--a man of the world, moreover, with these
three white hairs in his brown mustache and that deepening track of a
crow's-foot on each temple,--an absurd thing ever to have happened, and
quite the absurdest for an old bachelor, like me, to talk about.  But
it rises to my throat; so let it come.

I perceive, moreover, that the confession, brief as it shall be, will
throw a gleam of light over my behavior throughout the foregoing
incidents, and is, indeed, essential to the full understanding of my
story.  The reader, therefore, since I have disclosed so much, is
entitled to this one word more.  As I write it, he will charitably
suppose me to blush, and turn away my face:

I--I myself--was in love--with--Priscilla!

Coverdale says he will say a few things about himself, though his narrative has mostly been focused on others. He never returned to Blithedale, and is now in middle age. He is a bachelor, and has a good amount of money. He is no longer a poet, but one of his little books made him financially secure. He muses that he has no purpose, according to Hollingsworth, but that man had an excess of it, which ruined him morally. Finally, Coverdale announces he has a secret: that he too was in love with Priscilla