The Blithedale Romance - Page 107/170

I waited for her reappearance. It was one peculiarity, distinguishing

Zenobia from most of her sex, that she needed for her moral well-being,

and never would forego, a large amount of physical exercise. At

Blithedale, no inclemency of sky or muddiness of earth had ever impeded

her daily walks. Here in town, she probably preferred to tread the

extent of the two drawing-rooms, and measure out the miles by spaces of

forty feet, rather than bedraggle her skirts over the sloppy pavements.

Accordingly, in about the time requisite to pass through the arch of

the sliding-doors to the front window, and to return upon her steps,

there she stood again, between the festoons of the crimson curtains.

But another personage was now added to the scene. Behind Zenobia

appeared that face which I had first encountered in the wood-path; the

man who had passed, side by side with her, in such mysterious

familiarity and estrangement, beneath my vine curtained hermitage in

the tall pine-tree. It was Westervelt. And though he was looking

closely over her shoulder, it still seemed to me, as on the former

occasion, that Zenobia repelled him,--that, perchance, they mutually

repelled each other, by some incompatibility of their spheres.

This impression, however, might have been altogether the result of

fancy and prejudice in me. The distance was so great as to obliterate

any play of feature by which I might otherwise have been made a

partaker of their counsels.

There now needed only Hollingsworth and old Moodie to complete the knot

of characters, whom a real intricacy of events, greatly assisted by my

method of insulating them from other relations, had kept so long upon

my mental stage, as actors in a drama. In itself, perhaps, it was no

very remarkable event that they should thus come across me, at the

moment when I imagined myself free. Zenobia, as I well knew, had

retained an establishment in town, and had not unfrequently withdrawn

herself from Blithedale during brief intervals, on one of which

occasions she had taken Priscilla along with her.

Nevertheless, there

seemed something fatal in the coincidence that had borne me to this one

spot, of all others in a great city, and transfixed me there, and

compelled me again to waste my already wearied sympathies on affairs

which were none of mine, and persons who cared little for me. It

irritated my nerves; it affected me with a kind of heart-sickness.

After the effort which it cost me to fling them off,--after

consummating my escape, as I thought, from these goblins of flesh and

blood, and pausing to revive myself with a breath or two of an

atmosphere in which they should have no share,--it was a positive

despair to find the same figures arraying themselves before me, and

presenting their old problem in a shape that made it more insoluble

than ever.