The Blithedale Romance - Page 1/170

The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my

bachelor apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the

Veiled Lady, when an elderly man of rather shabby appearance met me in

an obscure part of the street.

"Mr. Coverdale," said he softly, "can I speak with you a moment?"

As I have casually alluded to the Veiled Lady, it may not be amiss to

mention, for the benefit of such of my readers as are unacquainted with

her now forgotten celebrity, that she was a phenomenon in the mesmeric

line; one of the earliest that had indicated the birth of a new

science, or the revival of an old humbug. Since those times her

sisterhood have grown too numerous to attract much individual notice;

nor, in fact, has any one of them come before the public under such

skilfully contrived circumstances of stage effect as those which at

once mystified and illuminated the remarkable performances of the lady

in question.

Nowadays, in the management of his "subject,"

"clairvoyant," or "medium," the exhibitor affects the simplicity and

openness of scientific experiment; and even if he profess to tread a

step or two across the boundaries of the spiritual world, yet carries

with him the laws of our actual life and extends them over his

preternatural conquests. Twelve or fifteen years ago, on the contrary,

all the arts of mysterious arrangement, of picturesque disposition, and

artistically contrasted light and shade, were made available, in order

to set the apparent miracle in the strongest attitude of opposition to

ordinary facts. In the case of the Veiled Lady, moreover, the interest

of the spectator was further wrought up by the enigma of her identity,

and an absurd rumor (probably set afloat by the exhibitor, and at one

time very prevalent) that a beautiful young lady, of family and

fortune, was enshrouded within the misty drapery of the veil.

It was white, with somewhat of a subdued silver sheen, like the sunny side of

a cloud; and, falling over the wearer from head to foot, was supposed

to insulate her from the material world, from time and space, and to

endow her with many of the privileges of a disembodied spirit.

Her pretensions, however, whether miraculous or otherwise, have little

to do with the present narrative--except, indeed, that I had

propounded, for the Veiled Lady's prophetic solution, a query as to the

success of our Blithedale enterprise. The response, by the bye, was of

the true Sibylline stamp,--nonsensical in its first aspect, yet on

closer study unfolding a variety of interpretations, one of which has

certainly accorded with the event. I was turning over this riddle in

my mind, and trying to catch its slippery purport by the tail, when the

old man above mentioned interrupted me.