The Blithedale Romance - Page 142/170

I felt an invincible reluctance, nevertheless, at the idea of

presenting myself before my old associates, without first ascertaining

the state in which they were. A nameless foreboding weighed upon me.

Perhaps, should I know all the circumstances that had occurred, I might

find it my wisest course to turn back, unrecognized, unseen, and never

look at Blithedale more. Had it been evening, I would have stolen

softly to some lighted window of the old farmhouse, and peeped darkling

in, to see all their well-known faces round the supper-board. Then,

were there a vacant seat, I might noiselessly unclose the door, glide

in, and take my place among them, without a word.

My entrance might be

so quiet, my aspect so familiar, that they would forget how long I had

been away, and suffer me to melt into the scene, as a wreath of vapor

melts into a larger cloud. I dreaded a boisterous greeting. Beholding

me at table, Zenobia, as a matter of course, would send me a cup of

tea, and Hollingsworth fill my plate from the great dish of pandowdy,

and Priscilla, in her quiet way, would hand the cream, and others help

me to the bread and butter. Being one of them again, the knowledge of

what had happened would come to me without a shock. For still, at

every turn of my shifting fantasies, the thought stared me in the face

that some evil thing had befallen us, or was ready to befall.

Yielding to this ominous impression, I now turned aside into the woods,

resolving to spy out the posture of the Community as craftily as the

wild Indian before he makes his onset. I would go wandering about the

outskirts of the farm, and, perhaps, catching sight of a solitary

acquaintance, would approach him amid the brown shadows of the trees (a

kind of medium fit for spirits departed and revisitant, like myself),

and entreat him to tell me how all things were.

The first living creature that I met was a partridge, which sprung up

beneath my feet, and whirred away; the next was a squirrel, who

chattered angrily at me from an overhanging bough. I trod along by the

dark, sluggish river, and remember pausing on the bank, above one of

its blackest and most placid pools (the very spot, with the barkless

stump of a tree aslantwise over the water, is depicting itself to my

fancy at this instant), and wondering how deep it was, and if any

overladen soul had ever flung its weight of mortality in thither, and

if it thus escaped the burden, or only made it heavier. And perhaps the

skeleton of the drowned wretch still lay beneath the inscrutable depth,

clinging to some sunken log at the bottom with the gripe of its old

despair.