The Blithedale Romance - Page 162/170

"Poor child!" said Foster,--and his dry old heart, I verily believe,

vouchsafed a tear, "I'm sorry for her!"

Were I to describe the perfect horror of the spectacle, the reader

might justly reckon it to me for a sin and shame. For more than twelve

long years I have borne it in my memory, and could now reproduce it as

freshly as if it were still before my eyes. Of all modes of death,

methinks it is the ugliest. Her wet garments swathed limbs of terrible

inflexibility. She was the marble image of a death-agony. Her arms

had grown rigid in the act of struggling, and were bent before her with

clenched hands; her knees, too, were bent, and--thank God for it!--in

the attitude of prayer. Ah, that rigidity! It is impossible to bear

the terror of it. It seemed,--I must needs impart so much of my own

miserable idea,--it seemed as if her body must keep the same position

in the coffin, and that her skeleton would keep it in the grave; and

that when Zenobia rose at the day of judgment, it would be in just the

same attitude as now!

One hope I had, and that too was mingled half with fear. She knelt as

if in prayer. With the last, choking consciousness, her soul, bubbling

out through her lips, it may be, had given itself up to the Father,

reconciled and penitent. But her arms! They were bent before her, as

if she struggled against Providence in never-ending hostility. Her

hands! They were clenched in immitigable defiance. Away with the

hideous thought. The flitting moment after Zenobia sank into the dark

pool--when her breath was gone, and her soul at her lips was as long,

in its capacity of God's infinite forgiveness, as the lifetime of the

world!

Foster bent over the body, and carefully examined it.

"You have wounded the poor thing's breast," said he to Hollingsworth,

"close by her heart, too!"

"Ha!" cried Hollingsworth with a start.

And so he had, indeed, both before and after death!

"See!" said Foster. "That's the place where the iron struck her. It

looks cruelly, but she never felt it!"

He endeavored to arrange the arms of the corpse decently by its side.

His utmost strength, however, scarcely sufficed to bring them down; and

rising again, the next instant, they bade him defiance, exactly as

before. He made another effort, with the same result.

"In God's name, Silas Foster," cried I with bitter indignation, "let

that dead woman alone!"

"Why, man, it's not decent!" answered he, staring at me in amazement.

"I can't bear to see her looking so! Well, well," added he, after a

third effort, "'tis of no use, sure enough; and we must leave the women

to do their best with her, after we get to the house. The sooner

that's done, the better."