The horn sounded at daybreak, as Silas Foster had forewarned us, harsh, uproarious, inexorably drawn out, and as sleep-dispelling as if this hard-hearted old yeoman had got hold of the trump of doom.
On all sides I could hear the creaking of the bedsteads, as the brethren of Blithedale started from slumber, and thrust themselves into their habiliments, all awry, no doubt, in their haste to begin the reformation of the world.Zenobia put her head into the entry, and besought Silas Foster to cease his clamor, and to be kind enough to leave an armful of firewood and a pail of water at her chamber door.Of the whole household, --unless, indeed, it were Priscilla, for whose habits, in this particular, I cannot vouch,--of all our apostolic society, whose mission was to bless mankind, Hollingsworth, I apprehend, was the only one who began the enterprise with prayer.My sleeping-room being but thinly partitioned from his, the solemn murmur of his voice made its way to my ears, compelling me to be an auditor of his awful privacy with the Creator.It affected me with a deep reverence for Hollingsworth, which no familiarity then existing, or that afterwards grew more intimate between us,--no, nor my subsequent perception of his own great errors,--ever quite effaced.
It is so rare, in these times, to meet with a man of prayerful habits (except, of course, in the pulpit), that such an one is decidedly marked out by the light of transfiguration, shed upon him in the divine interview from which he passes into his daily life.
As for me, I lay abed; and if I said my prayers, it was backward, cursing my day as bitterly as patient Job himself.The truth was, the hot-house warmth of a town residence, and the luxurious life in which I indulged myself, had taken much of the pith out of my physical system; and the wintry blast of the preceding day, together with the general chill of our airy old farmhouse, had got fairly into my heart and the marrow of my bones.In this predicament, I seriously wished--selfish as it may appear--that the reformation of society had been postponed about half a century, or, at all events, to such a date as should have put my intermeddling with it entirely out of the question.
What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough.My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the bedchamber adjoining; my centre-table, strewn with books and periodicals;my writing-desk with a half-finished poem, in a stanza of my own contrivance; my morning lounge at the reading-room or picture gallery; my noontide walk along the cheery pavement, with the suggestive succession of human faces, and the brisk throb of human life in which I shared; my dinner at the Albion, where I had a hundred dishes at command, and could banquet as delicately as the wizard Michael Scott when the Devil fed him from the king of France's kitchen; my evening at the billiard club, the concert, the theatre, or at somebody's party, if I pleased,--what could be better than all this? Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose vocation I had thrust myself? Above all, was it better to have a fever and die blaspheming, as I was like to do?
In this wretched plight, with a furnace in my heart and another in my head, by the heat of which I was kept constantly at the boiling point, yet shivering at the bare idea of extruding so much as a finger into the icy atmosphere of the room, I kept my bed until breakfast-time, when Hollingsworth knocked at the door, and entered.
"Well, Coverdale," cried he, "you bid fair to make an admirable farmer!
Don't you mean to get up to-day?"
"Neither to-day nor to-morrow," said I hopelessly."I doubt if I ever rise again!""What is the matter now?" he asked.
I told him my piteous case, and besought him to send me back to town in a close carriage.
"No, no!" said Hollingsworth with kindly seriousness."If you are really sick, we must take care of you."Accordingly he built a fire in my chamber, and, having little else to do while the snow lay on the ground, established himself as my nurse.Adoctor was sent for, who, being homaeopathic, gave me as much medicine, in the course of a fortnight's attendance, as would have laid on the point of a needle.They fed me on water-gruel, and I speedily became a skeleton above ground.But, after all, I have many precious recollections connected with that fit of sickness.
Hollingsworth's more than brotherly attendance gave me inexpressible comfort.Most men--and certainly I could not always claim to be one of the exceptions--have a natural indifference, if not an absolutely hostile feeling, towards those whom disease, or weakness, or calamity of any kind causes to falter and faint amid the rude jostle of our selfish existence.
