The Blithedale Romance
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Nathaniel Hawthorne >> The Blithedale Romance
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XXI. AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE
Thus excluded from everybody's confidence, and attaining no further, by
my most earnest study, than to an uncertain sense of something hidden
from me, it would appear reasonable that I should have flung off all
these alien perplexities. Obviously, my best course was to betake myself
to new scenes. Here I was only an intruder. Elsewhere there might be
circumstances in which I could establish a personal interest, and people
who would respond, with a portion of their sympathies, for so much as I
should bestow of mine.
Nevertheless, there occurred to me one other thing to be done.
Remembering old Moodie, and his relationship with Priscilla, I determined
to seek an interview, for the purpose of ascertaining whether the knot of
affairs was as inextricable on that side as I found it on all others.
Being tolerably well acquainted with the old man's haunts, I went, the
next day, to the saloon of a certain establishment about which he often
lurked. It was a reputable place enough, affording good entertainment in
the way of meat, drink, and fumigation; and there, in my young and idle
days and nights, when I was neither nice nor wise, I had often amused
myself with watching the staid humors and sober jollities of the thirsty
souls around me.
At my first entrance, old Moodie was not there. The more patiently to
await him, I lighted a cigar, and establishing myself in a corner, took a
quiet, and, by sympathy, a boozy kind of pleasure in the customary life
that was going forward. The saloon was fitted up with a good deal of
taste. There were pictures on the walls, and among them an oil-painting
of a beefsteak, with such an admirable show of juicy tenderness, that the
beholder sighed to think it merely visionary, and incapable of ever being
put upon a gridiron. Another work of high art was the lifelike
representation of a noble sirloin; another, the hindquarters of a deer,
retaining the hoofs and tawny fur; another, the head and shoulders of a
salmon; and, still more exquisitely finished, a brace of canvasback ducks,
in which the mottled feathers were depicted with the accuracy of a
daguerreotype. Some very hungry painter, I suppose, had wrought these
subjects of still-life, heightening his imagination with his appetite,
and earning, it is to be hoped, the privilege of a daily dinner off
whichever of his pictorial viands he themselves to plain brandy-and-water,
gin, or West India rum; and, oftentimes, they prefaced their dram with
some medicinal remark as to the wholesomeness and stomachic qualities of
that particular drink. Two or three appeared to have bottles of their
own behind the counter; and, winking one red eye to the bar-keeper, he
forthwith produced these choicest and peculiar cordials, which it was a
matter of great interest and favor, among their acquaintances, to obtain
a sip of.
Agreeably to the Yankee habit, under whatever circumstances, the
deportment of all these good fellows, old or young, was decorous and
thoroughly correct. They grew only the more sober in their cups; there
was no confused babble nor boisterous laughter. They sucked in the
joyous fire of the decanters and kept it smouldering in their inmost
recesses, with a bliss known only to the heart which it warmed and
comforted. Their eyes twinkled a little, to be sure; they hemmed
vigorously after each glass, and laid a hand upon the pit of the stomach,
as if the pleasant titillation there was what constituted the tangible
part of their enjoyment. In that spot, unquestionably, and not in the
brain, was the acme of the whole affair. But the true purpose of their
drinking--and one that will induce men to drink, or do something
equivalent, as long as this weary world shall endure--was the renewed
youth and vigor, the brisk, cheerful sense of things present and to come,
with which, for about a quarter of an hour, the dram permeated their
systems. And when such quarters of an hour can be obtained in some mode
less baneful to the great sum of a man's life,--but, nevertheless, with a
little spice of impropriety, to give it a wild flavor,--we temperance
people may ring out our bells for victory!
The prettiest object in the saloon was a tiny fountain, which threw up
its feathery jet through the counter, and sparkled down again into an
oval basin, or lakelet, containing several goldfishes. There was a bed
of bright sand at the bottom, strewn with coral and rock-work; and the
fishes went gleaming about, now turning up the sheen of a golden side,
and now vanishing into the shadows of the water, like the fanciful
thoughts that coquet with a poet in his dream. Never before, I imagine,
did a company of water-drinkers remain so entirely uncontaminated by the
bad example around them; nor could I help wondering that it had not
occurred to any freakish inebriate to empty a glass of liquor into their
lakelet. What a delightful idea! Who would not be a fish, if he could
inhale jollity with the essential element of his existence!
I had begun to despair of meeting old Moodie, when, all at once, I
recognized his hand and arm protruding from behind a screen that was set
up for the accommodation of bashful topers. As a matter of course, he
had one of Priscilla's little purses, and was quietly insinuating it
under the notice of a person who stood near. This was always old
Moodie's way. You hardly ever saw him advancing towards you, but became
aware of his proximity without being able to guess how he had come
thither. He glided about like a spirit, assuming visibility close to your
elbow, offering his petty trifles of merchandise, remaining long enough
for you to purchase, if so disposed, and then taking himself off, between
two breaths, while you happened to be thinking of something else.
By a sort of sympathetic impulse that often controlled me in those more
impressible days of my life, I was induced to approach this old man in a
mode as undemonstrative as his own. Thus, when, according to his custom,
he was probably just about to vanish, he found me at his elbow.
"Ah!" said he, with more emphasis than was usual with him. "It is Mr.
Coverdale!"
"Yes, Mr. Moodie, your old acquaintance," answered I. "It is some time
now since we ate luncheon together at Blithedale, and a good deal longer
since our little talk together at the street corner."
"That was a good while ago," said the old man.
And he seemed inclined to say not a word more. His existence looked so
colorless and torpid,--so very faintly shadowed on the canvas of reality,
--that I was half afraid lest he should altogether disappear, even while
my eyes were fixed full upon his figure. He was certainly the
wretchedest old ghost in the world, with his crazy hat, the dingy
handkerchief about his throat, his suit of threadbare gray, and
especially that patch over his right eye, behind which he always seemed
to be hiding himself. There was one method, however, of bringing him out
into somewhat stronger relief. A glass of brandy would effect it.
Perhaps the gentler influence of a bottle of claret might do the same.
Nor could I think it a matter for the recording angel to write down
against me, if--with my painful consciousness of the frost in this old
man's blood, and the positive ice that had congealed about his heart--I
should thaw him out, were it only for an hour, with the summer warmth of
a little wine. What else could possibly be done for him? How else could
he be imbued with energy enough to hope for a happier state hereafter?
How else be inspired to say his prayers? For there are states of our
spiritual system when the throb of the soul's life is too faint and weak
to render us capable of religious aspiration.
"Mr. Moodie," said I, "shall we lunch together? And would you like to
drink a glass of wine?"
His one eye gleamed. He bowed; and it impressed me that he grew to be
more of a man at once, either in anticipation of the wine, or as a
grateful response to my good fellowship in offering it.
"With pleasure," he replied.
The bar-keeper, at my request, showed us into a private room, and soon
afterwards set some fried oysters and a bottle of claret on the table;
and I saw the old man glance curiously at the label of the bottle, as if
to learn the brand.
"It should be good wine," I remarked, "if it have any right to its label."
"You cannot suppose, sir," said Moodie, with a sigh, "that a poor old
fellow like me knows any difference in wines."
And yet, in his way of handling the glass, in his preliminary snuff at
the aroma, in his first cautious sip of the wine, and the gustatory skill
with which he gave his palate the full advantage of it, it was impossible
not to recognize the connoisseur.
"I fancy, Mr. Moodie," said I, "you are a much better judge of wines than
I have yet learned to be. Tell me fairly,--did you never drink it where
the grape grows?"
"How should that have been, Mr. Coverdale?" answered old Moodie shyly;
but then he took courage, as it were, and uttered a feeble little laugh.
"The flavor of this wine," added he, "and its perfume still more than its
taste, makes me remember that I was once a young man."
"I wish, Mr. Moodie," suggested I,--not that I greatly cared about it,
however, but was only anxious to draw him into some talk about Priscilla
and Zenobia,--"I wish, while we sit over our wine, you would favor me
with a few of those youthful reminiscences."
"Ah," said he, shaking his head, "they might interest you more than you
suppose. But I had better be silent, Mr. Coverdale. If this good wine,
--though claret, I suppose, is not apt to play such a trick,--but if it
should make my tongue run too freely, I could never look you in the face
again."
"You never did look me in the face, Mr. Moodie," I replied, "until this
very moment."
"Ah!" sighed old Moodie.
It was wonderful, however, what an effect the mild grape-juice wrought
upon him. It was not in the wine, but in the associations which it
seemed to bring up. Instead of the mean, slouching, furtive, painfully
depressed air of an old city vagabond, more like a gray kennel-rat than
any other living thing, he began to take the aspect of a decayed
gentleman. Even his garments--especially after I had myself quaffed a
glass or two--looked less shabby than when we first sat down. There was,
by and by, a certain exuberance and elaborateness of gesture and manner,
oddly in contrast with all that I had hitherto seen of him. Anon, with
hardly any impulse from me, old Moodie began to talk. His communications
referred exclusively to a long-past and more fortunate period of his life,
with only a few unavoidable allusions to the circumstances that had
reduced him to his present state. But, having once got the clew, my
subsequent researches acquainted me with the main facts of the following
narrative; although, in writing it out, my pen has perhaps allowed itself
a trifle of romantic and legendary license, worthier of a small poet than
of a grave biographer.
XXII. FAUNTLEROY
Five-and-twenty years ago, at the epoch of this story, there dwelt in one
of the Middle States a man whom we shall call Fauntleroy; a man of wealth,
and magnificent tastes, and prodigal expenditure. His home might almost
be styled a palace; his habits, in the ordinary sense, princely. His
whole being seemed to have crystallized itself into an external splendor,
wherewith he glittered in the eyes of the world, and had no other life
than upon this gaudy surface. He had married a lovely woman, whose
nature was deeper than his own. But his affection for her, though it
showed largely, was superficial, like all his other manifestations and
developments; he did not so truly keep this noble creature in his heart,
as wear her beauty for the most brilliant ornament of his outward state.
And there was born to him a child, a beautiful daughter, whom he took
from the beneficent hand of God with no just sense of her immortal value,
but as a man already rich in gems would receive another jewel. If he
loved her, it was because she shone.
After Fauntleroy had thus spent a few empty years, coruscating
continually an unnatural light, the source of it--which was merely his
gold--began to grow more shallow, and finally became exhausted. He saw
himself in imminent peril of losing all that had heretofore distinguished
him; and, conscious of no innate worth to fall back upon, he recoiled
from this calamity with the instinct of a soul shrinking from
annihilation. To avoid it,--wretched man!--or rather to defer it, if but
for a month, a day, or only to procure himself the life of a few breaths
more amid the false glitter which was now less his own than ever,--he
made himself guilty of a crime. It was just the sort of crime, growing
out of its artificial state, which society (unless it should change its
entire constitution for this man's unworthy sake) neither could nor ought
to pardon. More safely might it pardon murder. Fauntleroy's guilt was
discovered. He fled; his wife perished, by the necessity of her innate
nobleness, in its alliance with a being so ignoble; and betwixt her
mother's death and her father's ignominy, his daughter was left worse
than orphaned.
There was no pursuit after Fauntleroy. His family connections, who had
great wealth, made such arrangements with those whom he had attempted to
wrong as secured him from the retribution that would have overtaken an
unfriended criminal. The wreck of his estate was divided among his
creditors: His name, in a very brief space, was forgotten by the
multitude who had passed it so diligently from mouth to mouth. Seldom,
indeed, was it recalled, even by his closest former intimates. Nor could
it have been otherwise. The man had laid no real touch on any mortal's
heart. Being a mere image, an optical delusion, created by the sunshine
of prosperity, it was his law to vanish into the shadow of the first
intervening cloud. He seemed to leave no vacancy; a phenomenon which,
like many others that attended his brief career, went far to prove the
illusiveness of his existence.
Not, however, that the physical substance of Fauntleroy had literally
melted into vapor. He had fled northward to the New England metropolis,
and had taken up his abode, under another name, in a squalid street or
court of the older portion of the city. There he dwelt among
poverty-stricken wretches, sinners, and forlorn good people, Irish, and
whomsoever else were neediest. Many families were clustered in each
house together, above stairs and below, in the little peaked garrets, and
even in the dusky cellars. The house where Fauntleroy paid weekly rent
for a chamber and a closet had been a stately habitation in its day. An
old colonial governor had built it, and lived there, long ago, and held
his levees in a great room where now slept twenty Irish bedfellows; and
died in Fauntleroy's chamber, which his embroidered and white-wigged
ghost still haunted. Tattered hangings, a marble hearth, traversed with
many cracks and fissures, a richly carved oaken mantelpiece, partly
hacked away for kindling-stuff, a stuccoed ceiling, defaced with great,
unsightly patches of the naked laths,--such was the chamber's aspect, as
if, with its splinters and rags of dirty splendor, it were a kind of
practical gibe at this poor, ruined man of show.
At first, and at irregular intervals, his relatives allowed Fauntleroy a
little pittance to sustain life; not from any love, perhaps, but lest
poverty should compel him, by new offences, to add more shame to that
with which he had already stained them. But he showed no tendency to
further guilt. His character appeared to have been radically changed (as,
indeed, from its shallowness, it well might) by his miserable fate; or,
it may be, the traits now seen in him were portions of the same character,
presenting itself in another phase. Instead of any longer seeking to
live in the sight of the world, his impulse was to shrink into the
nearest obscurity, and to be unseen of men, were it possible, even while
standing before their eyes. He had no pride; it was all trodden in the
dust. No ostentation; for how could it survive, when there was nothing
left of Fauntleroy, save penury and shame! His very gait demonstrated
that he would gladly have faded out of view, and have crept about
invisibly, for the sake of sheltering himself from the irksomeness of a
human glance. Hardly, it was averred, within the memory of those who
knew him now, had he the hardihood to show his full front to the world.
He skulked in corners, and crept about in a sort of noonday twilight,
making himself gray and misty, at all hours, with his morbid intolerance
of sunshine.
In his torpid despair, however, he had done an act which that condition
of the spirit seems to prompt almost as often as prosperity and hope.
Fauntleroy was again married. He had taken to wife a forlorn,
meek-spirited, feeble young woman, a seamstress, whom he found dwelling
with her mother in a contiguous chamber of the old gubernatorial
residence. This poor phantom--as the beautiful and noble companion of
his former life had done brought him a daughter. And sometimes, as from
one dream into another, Fauntleroy looked forth out of his present grimy
environment into that past magnificence, and wondered whether the grandee
of yesterday or the pauper of to-day were real. But, in my mind, the one
and the other were alike impalpable. In truth, it was Fauntleroy's
fatality to behold whatever he touched dissolve. After a few years, his
second wife (dim shadow that she had always been) faded finally out of
the world, and left Fauntleroy to deal as he might with their pale and
nervous child. And, by this time, among his distant relatives,--with
whom he had grown a weary thought, linked with contagious infamy, and
which they were only too willing to get rid of,--he was himself supposed
to be no more.
The younger child, like his elder one, might be considered as the true
offspring of both parents, and as the reflection of their state. She was
a tremulous little creature, shrinking involuntarily from all mankind,
but in timidity, and no sour repugnance. There was a lack of human
substance in her; it seemed as if, were she to stand up in a sunbeam, it
would pass right through her figure, and trace out the cracked and dusty
window-panes upon the naked floor. But, nevertheless, the poor child had
a heart; and from her mother's gentle character she had inherited a
profound and still capacity of affection. And so her life was one of
love. She bestowed it partly on her father, but in greater part on an
idea.
For Fauntleroy, as they sat by their cheerless fireside,--which was no
fireside, in truth, but only a rusty stove,--had often talked to the
little girl about his former wealth, the noble loveliness of his first
wife, and the beautiful child whom she had given him. Instead of the
fairy tales which other parents tell, he told Priscilla this. And, out
of the loneliness of her sad little existence, Priscilla's love grew, and
tended upward, and twined itself perseveringly around this unseen sister;
as a grapevine might strive to clamber out of a gloomy hollow among the
rocks, and embrace a young tree standing in the sunny warmth above. It
was almost like worship, both in its earnestness and its humility; nor
was it the less humble--though the more earnest--because Priscilla could
claim human kindred with the being whom she, so devoutly loved. As with
worship, too, it gave her soul the refreshment of a purer atmosphere.
Save for this singular, this melancholy, and yet beautiful affection, the
child could hardly have lived; or, had she lived, with a heart shrunken
for lack of any sentiment to fill it, she must have yielded to the barren
miseries of her position, and have grown to womanhood characterless and
worthless. But now, amid all the sombre coarseness of her father's
outward life, and of her own, Priscilla had a higher and imaginative life
within. Some faint gleam thereof was often visible upon her face. It
was as if, in her spiritual visits to her brilliant sister, a portion of
the latter's brightness had permeated our dim Priscilla, and still
lingered, shedding a faint illumination through the cheerless chamber,
after she came back.
As the child grew up, so pallid and so slender, and with much
unaccountable nervousness, and all the weaknesses of neglected infancy
still haunting her, the gross and simple neighbors whispered strange
things about Priscilla. The big, red, Irish matrons, whose innumerable
progeny swarmed out of the adjacent doors, used to mock at the pale
Western child. They fancied--or, at least, affirmed it, between jest and
earnest--that she was not so solid flesh and blood as other children, but
mixed largely with a thinner element. They called her ghost-child, and
said that she could indeed vanish when she pleased, but could never, in
her densest moments, make herself quite visible. The sun at midday would
shine through her; in the first gray of the twilight, she lost all the
distinctness of her outline; and, if you followed the dim thing into a
dark corner, behold! she was not there. And it was true that Priscilla
had strange ways; strange ways, and stranger words, when she uttered any
words at all. Never stirring out of the old governor's dusky house, she
sometimes talked of distant places and splendid rooms, as if she had just
left them. Hidden things were visible to her (at least so the people
inferred from obscure hints escaping unawares out of her mouth), and
silence was audible. And in all the world there was nothing so difficult
to be endured, by those who had any dark secret to conceal, as the glance
of Priscilla's timid and melancholy eyes.
Her peculiarities were the theme of continual gossip among the other
inhabitants of the gubernatorial mansion. The rumor spread thence into a
wider circle. Those who knew old Moodie, as he was now called, used
often to jeer him, at the very street-corners, about his daughter's gift
of second-sight and prophecy. It was a period when science (though mostly
through its empirical professors) was bringing forward, anew, a hoard of
facts and imperfect theories, that had partially won credence in elder
times, but which modern scepticism had swept away as rubbish. These
things were now tossed up again, out of the surging ocean of human
thought and experience. The story of Priscilla's preternatural
manifestations, therefore, attracted a kind of notice of which it would
have been deemed wholly unworthy a few years earlier. One day a
gentleman ascended the creaking staircase, and inquired which was old
Moodie's chamber door. And, several times, he came again. He was a
marvellously handsome man,--still youthful, too, and fashionably dressed.
Except that Priscilla, in those days, had no beauty, and, in the languor
of her existence, had not yet blossomed into womanhood, there would have
been rich food for scandal in these visits; for the girl was
unquestionably their sole object, although her father was supposed always
to be present. But, it must likewise be added, there was something about
Priscilla that calumny could not meddle with; and thus far was she
privileged, either by the preponderance of what was spiritual, or the
thin and watery blood that left her cheek so pallid.
Yet, if the busy tongues of the neighborhood spared Priscilla in one way,
they made themselves amends by renewed and wilder babble on another score.
They averred that the strange gentleman was a wizard, and that he had
taken advantage of Priscilla's lack of earthly substance to subject her
to himself, as his familiar spirit, through whose medium he gained
cognizance of whatever happened, in regions near or remote. The
boundaries of his power were defined by the verge of the pit of Tartarus
on the one hand, and the third sphere of the celestial world on the other.
Again, they declared their suspicion that the wizard, with all his show
of manly beauty, was really an aged and wizened figure, or else that his
semblance of a human body was only a necromantic, or perhaps a mechanical
contrivance, in which a demon walked about. In proof of it, however,
they could merely instance a gold band around his upper teeth, which had
once been visible to several old women, when he smiled at them from the
top of the governor's staircase. Of course this was all absurdity, or
mostly so. But, after every possible deduction, there remained certain
very mysterious points about the stranger's character, as well as the
connection that he established with Priscilla. Its nature at that period
was even less understood than now, when miracles of this kind have grown
so absolutely stale, that I would gladly, if the truth allowed, dismiss
the whole matter from my narrative.
We must now glance backward, in quest of the beautiful daughter of
Fauntleroy's prosperity. What had become of her? Fauntleroy's only
brother, a bachelor, and with no other relative so near, had adopted the
forsaken child. She grew up in affluence, with native graces clustering
luxuriantly about her. In her triumphant progress towards womanhood, she
was adorned with every variety of feminine accomplishment. But she
lacked a mother's care. With no adequate control, on any hand (for a man,
however stern, however wise, can never sway and guide a female child),
her character was left to shape itself. There was good in it, and evil.
Passionate, self-willed, and imperious, she had a warm and generous
nature; showing the richness of the soil, however, chiefly by the weeds
that flourished in it, and choked up the herbs of grace. In her girlhood
her uncle died. As Fauntleroy was supposed to be likewise dead, and no
other heir was known to exist, his wealth devolved on her, although,
dying suddenly, the uncle left no will. After his death there were
obscure passages in Zenobia's history. There were whispers of an
attachment, and even a secret marriage, with a fascinating and
accomplished but unprincipled young man. The incidents and appearances,
however, which led to this surmise soon passed away, and were forgotten.
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