The Blithedale Romance - Page 105/170

The next day, as soon as I thought of looking again towards the

opposite house, there sat the dove again, on the peak of the same

dormer window! It was by no means an early hour, for the preceding

evening I had ultimately mustered enterprise enough to visit the

theatre, had gone late to bed, and slept beyond all limit, in my

remoteness from Silas Foster's awakening horn. Dreams had tormented me

throughout the night. The train of thoughts which, for months past,

had worn a track through my mind, and to escape which was one of my

chief objects in leaving Blithedale, kept treading remorselessly to and

fro in their old footsteps, while slumber left me impotent to regulate

them.

It was not till I had quitted my three friends that they first

began to encroach upon my dreams. In those of the last night,

Hollingsworth and Zenobia, standing on either side of my bed, had bent

across it to exchange a kiss of passion. Priscilla, beholding

this,--for she seemed to be peeping in at the chamber window,--had

melted gradually away, and left only the sadness of her expression in

my heart. There it still lingered, after I awoke; one of those

unreasonable sadnesses that you know not how to deal with, because it

involves nothing for common-sense to clutch.

It was a gray and dripping forenoon; gloomy enough in town, and still

gloomier in the haunts to which my recollections persisted in

transporting me. For, in spite of my efforts to think of something

else, I thought how the gusty rain was drifting over the slopes and

valleys of our farm; how wet must be the foliage that overshadowed the

pulpit rock; how cheerless, in such a day, my hermitage--the

tree-solitude of my owl-like humors--in the vine-encircled heart of the

tall pine!

It was a phase of homesickness. I had wrenched myself too

suddenly out of an accustomed sphere. There was no choice, now, but to

bear the pang of whatever heartstrings were snapt asunder, and that

illusive torment (like the ache of a limb long ago cut off) by which a

past mode of life prolongs itself into the succeeding one. I was full

of idle and shapeless regrets. The thought impressed itself upon me

that I had left duties unperformed. With the power, perhaps, to act in

the place of destiny and avert misfortune from my friends, I had

resigned them to their fate. That cold tendency, between instinct and

intellect, which made me pry with a speculative interest into people's

passions and impulses, appeared to have gone far towards unhumanizing

my heart.