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.