The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated Edition). Nathaniel Hawthorne
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and slimy, a devilish-looking object, which the moon had not shone upon for half a hundred years, — then plunged again, and sullenly returned to its old resting-place, for the remnant of the century.
“That looked ugly!” quoth Silas. “I half thought it was the Evil One, on the same errand as ourselves, — searching for Zenobia.”
“He shall never get her,” said I, giving the boat a strong impulse.
“That’s not for you to say, my boy,” retorted the yeoman. “Pray God he never has, and never may. Slow work this, however! I should really be glad to find something! Pshaw! What a notion that is, when the only good luck would be to paddle, and drift, and poke, and grope, hereabouts, till morning, and have our labor for our pains! For my part, I shouldn’t wonder if the creature had only lost her shoe in the mud, and saved her soul alive, after all. My stars! how she will laugh at us, tomorrow morning!”
It is indescribable what an image of Zenobia — at the breakfast-table, full of warm and mirthful life — this surmise of Silas Foster’s brought before my mind. The terrible phantasm of her death was thrown by it into the remotest and dimmest background, where it seemed to grow as improbable as a myth.
“Yes, Silas, it may be as you say,” cried I. The drift of the stream had again borne us a little below the stump, when I felt — yes, felt, for it was as if the iron hook had smote my breast — felt Hollingsworth’s pole strike some object at the bottom of the river!
He started up, and almost overset the boat.
“Hold on!” cried Foster; “you have her!”
Putting a fury of strength into the effort, Hollingsworth heaved amain, and up came a white swash to the surface of the river. It was the flow of a woman’s garments. A little higher, and we saw her dark hair streaming down the current. Black River of Death, thou hadst yielded up thy victim! Zenobia was found!
Silas Foster laid hold of the body; Hollingsworth likewise grappled with it; and I steered towards the bank, gazing all the while at Zenobia, whose limbs were swaying in the current close at the boat’s side. Arriving near the shore, we all three stept into the water, bore her out, and laid her on the ground beneath a tree.
“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.”
We took two rails from a neighboring fence, and formed a bier by laying across some boards from the bottom of the boat. And thus we bore Zenobia homeward. Six hours before, how beautiful! At midnight, what a horror! A reflection occurs to me that will show ludicrously, I doubt not, on my page, but must come in for its sterling truth. Being the woman that she was, could Zenobia have foreseen all these ugly circumstances of death, — how ill it would become her, the altogether unseemly aspect which she must put on, and especially old Silas Foster’s efforts to improve the matter, — she would no more have committed the dreadful act than have exhibited herself to a public assembly in a badly fitting garment! Zenobia, I have often thought, was not quite simple in her death. She had seen pictures, I suppose, of drowned persons in lithe and graceful attitudes. And she deemed it well and decorous to die as so many village maidens have, wronged in their first love, and seeking peace in the bosom of the old familiar stream, — so familiar that they could not dread it, — where, in childhood, they used to bathe their little feet, wading mid-leg deep, unmindful of wet skirts. But in Zenobia’s case there was some tint of the Arcadian affectation that had been visible enough in all our lives for a few months past.
This, however, to my conception, takes nothing from the tragedy. For, has not the world come to an awfully sophisticated pass, when, after a certain degree of acquaintance with it, we cannot even put ourselves to death in whole-hearted simplicity? Slowly, slowly, with many a dreary pause, — resting the bier often on some rock or balancing it across a mossy log, to take fresh hold, — we bore our burden onward through the moonlight, and at last laid Zenobia on the floor of the old farmhouse. By and by came three or four withered women and stood whispering around the corpse, peering at it through their spectacles, holding up their skinny hands, shaking their night-capped heads, and taking counsel of one another’s experience what was to be done.
With those tire-women we left Zenobia.
XXVIII. BLITHEDALE PASTURE
Blithedale, thus far in its progress, had never found the necessity of a burial-ground. There was some consultation among us in what spot Zenobia might most fitly be laid. It was my own wish that she should sleep at the base of Eliot’s pulpit, and that on the rugged front of the rock the name by which we familiarly knew her, Zenobia, — and not another word, should be deeply cut, and left for the moss and lichens to fill up at their long leisure. But Hollingsworth (to whose ideas on this point great deference was due) made it his request that her grave might be dug on the gently sloping hillside, in the wide pasture, where, as we once supposed, Zenobia and he had planned to build their cottage. And thus it was done, accordingly.
She was buried very much as other people have been for hundreds of years gone by. In anticipation of a death, we Blithedale colonists had sometimes set our fancies at work to arrange a funereal ceremony, which should be the proper symbolic expression of our spiritual faith and eternal hopes; and this we meant to substitute for those customary rites which were moulded originally out of the Gothic gloom, and by long use, like an old velvet pall, have