The Blithedale Romance - Page 135/170

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.