The Blithedale Romance - Page 137/170

"I never saw the man before," he muttered, without turning his head.

But I had seen him three times already.

Once, on occasion of my first visit to the Veiled Lady; a second time,

in the wood-path at Blithedale; and lastly, in Zenobia's drawing-room.

It was Westervelt. A quick association of ideas made me shudder from

head to foot; and again, like an evil spirit, bringing up reminiscences

of a man's sins, I whispered a question in Hollingsworth's ear,--"What

have you done with Priscilla?"

He gave a convulsive start, as if I had thrust a knife into him,

writhed himself round on his seat, glared fiercely into my eyes, but

answered not a word.

The Professor began his discourse, explanatory of the psychological

phenomena, as he termed them, which it was his purpose to exhibit to

the spectators. There remains no very distinct impression of it on my

memory. It was eloquent, ingenious, plausible, with a delusive show of

spirituality, yet really imbued throughout with a cold and dead

materialism. I shivered, as at a current of chill air issuing out of a

sepulchral vault, and bringing the smell of corruption along with it.

He spoke of a new era that was dawning upon the world; an era that

would link soul to soul, and the present life to what we call futurity,

with a closeness that should finally convert both worlds into one

great, mutually conscious brotherhood. He described (in a strange,

philosophical guise, with terms of art, as if it were a matter of

chemical discovery) the agency by which this mighty result was to be

effected; nor would it have surprised me, had he pretended to hold up a

portion of his universally pervasive fluid, as he affirmed it to be, in

a glass phial.

At the close of his exordium, the Professor beckoned with his

hand,--once, twice, thrice,--and a figure came gliding upon the

platform, enveloped in a long veil of silvery whiteness. It fell about

her like the texture of a summer cloud, with a kind of vagueness, so

that the outline of the form beneath it could not be accurately

discerned. But the movement of the Veiled Lady was graceful, free, and

unembarrassed, like that of a person accustomed to be the spectacle of

thousands; or, possibly, a blindfold prisoner within the sphere with

which this dark earthly magician had surrounded her, she was wholly

unconscious of being the central object to all those straining eyes.

Pliant to his gesture (which had even an obsequious courtesy, but at

the same time a remarkable decisiveness), the figure placed itself in

the great chair. Sitting there, in such visible obscurity, it was,

perhaps, as much like the actual presence of a disembodied spirit as

anything that stage trickery could devise. The hushed breathing of the

spectators proved how high-wrought were their anticipations of the

wonders to be performed through the medium of this incomprehensible

creature. I, too, was in breathless suspense, but with a far different

presentiment of some strange event at hand.