Discerning that Clifford was not gladdened by her efforts,Hepzibah searched about the house for the means of more exhilarating pastime. At one time,her eyes chanced to rest on Alice Pyncheon’s harpsichord. It was a moment of great peril; for,—despite the traditionary awe that had gathered over this instrument of music,and the dirges which spiritual fingers were said to play on it,—the devoted sister had solemn thoughts of thrumming on its chords for Clifford’s benefit,and accompanying the performance with her voice. Poor Clifford!Poor Hepzibah!Poor harpsichord!All three would have been miserable together. By some good agency,—possibly,by the unrecognized interposition of the long-buried Alice herself, —the threatening calamity was averted.
But the worst of all—the hardest stroke of fate for Hepzibah to endure, and perhaps for Clifford,too was his invincible distaste for her appearance. Her features, never the most agreeable,and now harsh with age and grief, and resentment against the world for his sake; her dress,and especially her turban; the queer and quaint manners,which had unconsciously grown upon her in solitude,—such being the poor gentlewoman’s outward characteristics, it is no great marvel,although the mournfullest of pities, that the instinctive lover of the Beautiful was fain to turn away his eyes.There was no help for it. It would be the latest impulse to die within him. In his last extremity,the expiring breath stealing faintly through Clifford’s lips,he would doubtless press Hepzibah’s hand, in fervent recognition of all her lavished love,and close his eyes,—but not so much to die, as to be constrained to look no longer on her face!Poor Hepzibah!She took counsel with herself what might be done, and thought of putting ribbons on her turban; but,by the instant rush of several guardian angels,was withheld from an experiment that could hardly have proved less than fatal to the beloved object of her anxiety.
To be brief, besides Hepzibah’s disadvantages of person,there was an uncouthness pervading all her deeds; a clumsy something,that could but ill adapt itself for use, and not at all for ornament. She was a grief to Clifford,and she knew it. In this extremity, the antiquated virgin turned to Phœbe.No grovelling jealousy was in her heart.Had it pleased Heaven to crown the heroic fidelity of her life by making her personally the medium of Clifford’s happiness,it would have rewarded her for all the past, by a joy with no bright tints, indeed,but deep and true, and worth a thousand gayer ecstasies. This could not be.She therefore turned to Phœbe, and resigned the task into the young girl’s hands.The latter took it up cheerfully, as she did everything, but with no sense of a mission to perform,and succeeding all the better for that same simplicity.
By the involuntary effect of a genial temperament,Phœbe soon grew to be absolutely essential to the daily comfort, if not the daily life,of her two forlorn companions. The grime and sordidness of the House of the Seven Gables seemed to have vanished since her appearance there;the gnawing tooth of the dry-rot was stayed among the old timbers of its skeleton frame;the dust had ceased to settle down so densely, from the antique ceilings,upon the floors and furniture of the rooms below,—or, at any rate, there was a little housewife,as light-footed as the breeze that sweeps a garden walk,gliding hither and thither to brush it all away.The shadows of gloomy events that haunted the else lonely and desolate apartments; the heavy,breathless scent which death had left in more than one of the bedchambers,ever since his visits of long ago,—these were less powerful than the purifying influence scattered throughout the atmosphere of the household by the presence of one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly wholesome heart. There was no morbidness in Phœbe; if there had been, the old Pyncheon House was the very locality to ripen it into incurable disease. But now her spirit resembled, in its potency, a minute quantity of ottar of rose in one of Hepzibah’s huge, iron-bound trunks, diffusing its fragrance through the various articles of linen and wrought-lace, kerchiefs, caps, stockings, folded dresses, gloves, and whatever else was treasured there. As every article in the great trunk was the sweeter for the rose-scent, so did all the thoughts and emotions of Hepzibah and Clifford, sombre as they might seem, acquire a subtle attribute of happiness from Phœbe’s intermixture with them. Her activity of body, intellect, and heart impelled her continually to perform the ordinary little toils that offered themselves around her, and to think the thought proper for the moment, and to sympathize,—now with the twittering gayety of the robins in the pear-tree, and now to such a depth as she could with Hepzibah’s dark anxiety, or the vague moan of her brother. This facile adaptation was at once the symptom of perfect health and its best preservative.
A nature like Phœbe’s has invariably its due influence, but is seldom regarded with due honor.Its spiritual force, however, may be partially estimated by the fact of her having found a place for herself,amid circumstances so stern as those which surrounded the mistress of the house;and also by the effect which she produced on a character of so much more mass than her own.For the gaunt, bony frame and limbs of Hepzibah,as compared with the tiny lightsomeness of Phœbe’s figure,were perhaps in some fit proportion with the moral weight and substance, respectively, of the woman and the girl.
To the guest,—to Hepzibah’s brother,—or Cousin Clifford, as Phœbe now began to call him,—she was especially necessary. Not that he could ever be said to converse with her,or often manifest, in any other very definite mode, his sense of a charm in her society.But if she were a long while absent he became pettish and nervously restless,pacing the room to and fro with the uncertainty that characterized all his movements;or else would sit broodingly in his great chair, resting his head on his hands,and evincing life only by an electric sparkle of ill-humor,whenever Hepzibah endeavored to arouse him. Phœbe’s presence,and the contiguity of her fresh life to his blighted one, was usually all that he required. Indeed,such was the native gush and play of her spirit,that she was seldom perfectly quiet and undemonstrative,any more than a fountain ever ceases to dimple and warble with its flow.She possessed the gift of song, and that, too, so naturally,that you would as little think of inquiring whence she had caught it,or what master had taught her, as of asking the same questions about a bird,in whose small strain of music we recognize the voice of the Creator as distinctly as in the loudest accents of his thunder.So long as Phœbe sang, she might stray at her own will about the house. Clifford was content,whether the sweet, airy homeliness of her tones came down from the upper chambers,or along the passageway from the shop, or was sprinkled through the foliage of the pear-tree,inward from the garden, with the twinkling sunbeams. He would sit quietly,with a gentle pleasure gleaming over his face, brighter now, and now a little dimmer,as the song happened to float near him, or was more remotely heard. It pleased him best, however,when she sat on a low footstool at his knee.
It is perhaps remarkable, considering her temperament,that Phœbe oftener chose a strain of pathos than of gayety.But the young and happy are not ill pleased to temper their life with a transparent shadow.The deepest pathos of Phœbe’s voice and song, moreover,came sifted through the golden texture of a cheery spirit,and was somehow so interfused with the quality thence acquired,that one’s heart felt all the lighter for having wept at it. Broad mirth,in the sacred presence of dark misfortune,would have jarred harshly and irreverently with the solemn symphony that rolled its undertone through Hepzibah’s and her brother’s life.Therefore, it was well that Phœbe so often chose sad themes,and not amiss that they ceased to be so sad while she was singing them.
Becoming habituated to her companionship,Clifford readily showed how capable of imbibing pleasant tints and gleams of cheerful light from all quarters his nature must originally have been.He grew youthful while she sat by him. A beauty,—not precisely real,even in its utmost manifestation, and which a painter would have watched long to seize and fix upon his canvas,and, after all, in vain,—beauty, nevertheless, that was not a mere dream,would sometimes play upon and illuminate his face. It did more than to illuminate;it transfigured him with an expression that could only be interpreted as the glow of an exquisite and happy spirit.That gray hair, and those furrows,—with their record of infinite sorrow so deeply written across his brow,and so compressed, as with a futile effort to crowd in all the tale,that the whole inscription was made illegible,—these, for the moment, vanished.An eye at once tender and acute might have beheld in the man some shadow of what he was meant to be.Anon, as age came stealing, like a sad twilight, back over his figure,you would have felt tempted to hold an argument with Destiny, and affirm,that either this being should not have been made mortal,or mortal existence should have been tempered to his qualities.There seemed no necessity for his having drawn breath at all; the world never wanted him; but,as he had breathed, it ought always to have been the balmiest of summer air.The same perplexity will invariably haunt us with regard to natures that tend to feed exclusively upon the Beautiful,let their earthly fate be as lenient as it may.
Phœbe, it is probable, had but a very imperfect comprehension of the character over which she had thrown so beneficent a spell.Nor was it necessary. The fire upon the hearth can gladden a whole semicircle of faces round about it,but need not know the individuality of one among them all. Indeed,there was something too fine and delicate in Clifford’s traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose sphere lay so much in the Actual as Phœbe’s did.For Clifford, however, the reality, and simplicity,and thorough homeliness of the girl’s nature were as powerful a charm as any that she possessed.Beauty, it is true, and beauty almost perfect in its own style, was indispensable.Had Phœbe been coarse in feature, shaped clumsily, of a harsh voice, and uncouthly mannered,she might have been rich with all good gifts, beneath this unfortunate exterior, and still,so long as she wore the guise of woman, she would have shocked Clifford,and depressed him by her lack of beauty. But nothing more beautiful—nothing prettier,at least—was ever made than Phœbe. And, therefore, to this man,—whose whole poor and impalpable enjoyment of existence heretofore,and until both his heart and fancy died within him, had been a dream,—whose images of women had more and more lost their warmth and substance, and been frozen,like the pictures of secluded artists, into the chillest ideality,—to him,this little figure of the cheeriest household life was just what he required to bring him back into the breathing world.Persons who have wandered, or been expelled, out of the common track of things,even were it for a better system, desire nothing so much as to be led back.They shiver in their loneliness, be it on a mountain-top or in a dungeon. Now,Phœbe’s presence made a home about her,—that very sphere which the outcast, the prisoner,the potentate,—the wretch beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above it, —instinctively pines after,—a home!She was real!Holding her hand, you felt something; a tender something; a substance, and a warm one:and so long as you should feel its grasp, soft as it was,you might be certain that your place was good in the whole sympathetic chain of human nature. The world was no longer a delusion.
By looking a little further in this direction,we might suggest an explanation of an often-suggested mystery.Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment,but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit?Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse;but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.
There was something very beautiful in the relation that grew up between this pair,so closely and constantly linked together,yet with such a waste of gloomy and mysterious years from his birthday to hers.On Clifford’s part it was the feeling of a man naturally endowed with the liveliest sensibility to feminine influence,but who had never quaffed the cup of passionate love, and knew that it was now too late.He knew it, with the instinctive delicacy that had survived his intellectual decay. Thus,his sentiment for Phœbe, without being paternal,was not less chaste than if she had been his daughter. He was a man, it is true,and recognized her as a woman. She was his only representative of womankind.He took unfailing note of every charm that appertained to her sex,and saw the ripeness of her lips, and the virginal development of her bosom.All her little womanly ways, budding out of her like blossoms on a young fruit-tree,had their effect on him, and sometimes caused his very heart to tingle with the keenest thrills of pleasure.At such moments,—for the effect was seldom more than momentary,—the half-torpid man would be full of harmonious life, just as a long-silent harp is full of sound,when the musician’s fingers sweep across it. But, after all, it seemed rather a perception,or a sympathy, than a sentiment belonging to himself as an individual.He read Phœbe as he would a sweet and simple story;he listened to her as if she were a verse of household poetry, which God,in requital of his bleak and dismal lot, had permitted some angel, that most pitied him,to warble through the house. She was not an actual fact for him,but the interpretation of all that he lacked on earth brought warmly home to his conception;so that this mere symbol, or life-like picture, had almost the comfort of reality.
But we strive in vain to put the idea into words.No adequate expression of the beauty and profound pathos with which it impresses us is attainable.This being, made only for happiness, and heretofore so miserably failing to be happy,—his tendencies so hideously thwarted, that, some unknown time ago,the delicate springs of his character, never morally or intellectually strong, had given way,and he was now imbecile,—this poor, forlorn voyager from the Islands of the Blest, in a frail bark,on a tempestuous sea, had been flung, by the last mountain-wave of his shipwreck,into a quiet harbor. There, as he lay more than half lifeless on the strand,the fragrance of an earthly rose-bud had come to his nostrils, and, as odors will,had summoned up reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid which he should have had his home.With his native susceptibility of happy influences, he inhales the slight,ethereal rapture into his soul, and expires!
And how did Phœbe regard Clifford?The girl’s was not one of those natures which are most attracted by what is strange and exceptional in human character.The path which would best have suited her was the well-worn track of ordinary life;the companions in whom she would most have delighted were such as one encounters at every turn.The mystery which enveloped Clifford, so far as it affected her at all, was an annoyance,rather than the piquant charm which many women might have found in it. Still,her native kindliness was brought strongly into play,not by what was darkly picturesque in his situation, nor so much, even,by the finer graces of his character, as by the simple appeal of a heart so forlorn as his to one so full of genuine sympathy as hers.She gave him an affectionate regard, because he needed so much love,and seemed to have received so little. With a ready tact,the result of ever-active and wholesome sensibility, she discerned what was good for him,and did it. Whatever was morbid in his mind and experience she ignored;and thereby kept their intercourse healthy, by the incautious, but, as it were,heaven-directed freedom of her whole conduct. The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body,are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease,mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them;they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in infinite repetition.But Phœbe afforded her poor patient a supply of purer air. She impregnated it, too,not with a wild-flower scent,—for wildness was no trait of hers,—but with the perfume of garden-roses, pinks, and other blossoms of much sweetness,which nature and man have consented together in making grow from summer to summer,and from century to century. Such a flower was Phœbe in her relation with Clifford,and such the delight that he inhaled from her.
Yet, it must be said, her petals sometimes drooped a little,in consequence of the heavy atmosphere about her. She grew more thoughtful than heretofore.Looking aside at Clifford’s face, and seeing the dim,unsatisfactory elegance and the intellect almost quenched,she would try to inquire what had been his life. Was he always thus?Had this veil been over him from his birth?—this veil, under which far more of his spirit was hidden than revealed,and through which he so imperfectly discerned the actual world,—or was its gray texture woven of some dark calamity?Phœbe loved no riddles, and would have been glad to escape the perplexity of this one. Nevertheless,there was so far a good result of her meditations on Clifford’s character, that,when her involuntary conjectures, together with the tendency of every strange circumstance to tell its own story,had gradually taught her the fact, it had no terrible effect upon her.Let the world have done him what vast wrong it might,she knew Cousin Clifford too well—or fancied so—ever to shudder at the touch of his thin, delicate fingers.
Within a few days after the appearance of this remarkable inmate,the routine of life had established itself with a good deal of uniformity in the old house of our narrative.In the morning, very shortly after breakfast, it was Clifford’s custom to fall asleep in his chair;nor, unless accidentally disturbed, would he emerge from a dense cloud of slumber or the thinner mists that flitted to and fro,until well towards noonday. These hours of drowsihead were the season of the old gentlewoman’s attendance on her brother,while Phœbe took charge of the shop; an arrangement which the public speedily understood,and evinced their decided preference of the younger shopwoman by the multiplicity of their calls during her administration of affairs.Dinner over, Hepzibah took her knitting-work,—a long stocking of gray yarn,for her brother’s winter wear,—and with a sigh, and a scowl of affectionate farewell to Clifford,and a gesture enjoining watchfulness on Phœbe, went to take her seat behind the counter.It was now the young girl’s turn to be the nurse,—the guardian, the playmate,—or whatever is the fitter phrase,—of the gray-haired man.
X. The Pyncheon Garden
Clifford, except for Phœbe’s more active instigation,would ordinarily have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of being,and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair till eventide.But the girl seldom failed to propose a removal to the garden,where Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist had made such repairs on the roof of the ruinous arbor,or summer-house, that it was now a sufficient shelter from sunshine and casual showers.The hop-vine, too, had begun to grow luxuriantly over the sides of the little edifice,and made an interior of verdant seclusion,with innumerable peeps and glimpses into the wider solitude of the garden.
Here, sometimes, in this green play-place of flickering light, Phœbe read to Clifford.Her acquaintance, the artist, who appeared to have a literary turn,had supplied her with works of fiction, in pamphlet form,—and a few volumes of poetry,in altogether a different style and taste from those which Hepzibah selected for his amusement.Small thanks were due to the books, however,if the girl’s readings were in any degree more successful than her elderly cousin’s.Phœbe’s voice had always a pretty music in it,and could either enliven Clifford by its sparkle and gayety of tone,or soothe him by a continued flow of pebbly and brook-like cadences.But the fictions—in which the country-girl, unused to works of that nature,often became deeply absorbed—interested her strange auditor very little, or not at all.Pictures of life, scenes of passion or sentiment, wit, humor, and pathos, were all thrown away,or worse than thrown away, on Clifford;either because he lacked an experience by which to test their truth,or because his own griefs were a touch-stone of reality that few feigned emotions could withstand.When Phœbe broke into a peal of merry laughter at what she read,he would now and then laugh for sympathy, but oftener respond with a troubled, questioning look.If a tear—a maiden’s sunshiny tear over imaginary woe—dropped upon some melancholy page,Clifford either took it as a token of actual calamity, or else grew peevish,and angrily motioned her to close the volume. And wisely too!Is not the world sad enough, in genuine earnest, without making a pastime of mock sorrows?
With poetry it was rather better. He delighted in the swell and subsidence of the rhythm,and the happily recurring rhyme. Nor was Clifford incapable of feeling the sentiment of poetry,—not, perhaps, where it was highest or deepest, but where it was most flitting and ethereal.It was impossible to foretell in what exquisite verse the awakening spell might lurk; but,on raising her eyes from the page to Clifford’s face, Phœbe would be made aware,by the light breaking through it, that a more delicate intelligence than her own had caught a lambent flame from what she read.One glow of this kind, however, was often the precursor of gloom for many hours afterward; because,when the glow left him, he seemed conscious of a missing sense and power,and groped about for them, as if a blind man should go seeking his lost eyesight.
It pleased him more, and was better for his inward welfare, that Phœbe should talk,and make passing occurrences vivid to his mind by her accompanying description and remarks.The life of the garden offered topics enough for such discourse as suited Clifford best.He never failed to inquire what flowers had bloomed since yesterday.His feeling for flowers was very exquisite, and seemed not so much a taste as an emotion;he was fond of sitting with one in his hand, intently observing it,and looking from its petals into Phœbe’s face,as if the garden flower were the sister of the household maiden.Not merely was there a delight in the flower’s perfume, or pleasure in its beautiful form,and the delicacy or brightness of its hue;but Clifford’s enjoyment was accompanied with a perception of life, character, and individuality,that made him love these blossoms of the garden,as if they were endowed with sentiment and intelligence.This affection and sympathy for flowers is almost exclusively a woman’s trait. Men,if endowed with it by nature, soon lose, forget, and learn to despise it,in their contact with coarser things than flowers. Clifford, too, had long forgotten it;but found it again now, as he slowly revived from the chill torpor of his life.
It is wonderful how many pleasant incidents continually came to pass in that secluded garden-spot when once Phœbe had set herself to look for them.She had seen or heard a bee there, on the first day of her acquaintance with the place. And often,—almost continually, indeed,—since then, the bees kept coming thither, Heaven knows why,or by what pertinacious desire, for far-fetched sweets, when, no doubt,there were broad clover-fields, and all kinds of garden growth, much nearer home than this.Thither the bees came, however, and plunged into the squash-blossoms,as if there were no other squash-vines within a long day’s flight,or as if the soil of Hepzibah’s garden gave its productions just the very quality which these laborious little wizards wanted,in order to impart the Hymettus odor to their whole hive of New England honey.When Clifford heard their sunny, buzzing murmur, in the heart of the great yellow blossoms,he looked about him with a joyful sense of warmth, and blue sky, and green grass,and of God’s free air in the whole height from earth to heaven. After all,there need be no question why the bees came to that one green nook in the dusty town.God sent them thither to gladden our poor Clifford. They brought the rich summer with them, in requital of a little honey.
When the bean-vines began to flower on the poles,there was one particular variety which bore a vivid scarlet blossom.The daguerreotypist had found these beans in a garret, over one of the seven gables,treasured up in an old chest of drawers by some horticultural Pyncheon of days gone by,who doubtless meant to sow them the next summer,but was himself first sown in Death’s garden-ground.By way of testing whether there were still a living germ in such ancient seeds,Holgrave had planted some of them; and the result of his experiment was a splendid row of bean-vines,clambering, early, to the full height of the poles, and arraying them, from top to bottom,in a spiral profusion of red blossoms. And, ever since the unfolding of the first bud,a multitude of humming-birds had been attracted thither. At times,it seemed as if for every one of the hundred blossoms there was one of these tiniest fowls of the air,—a thumb’s bigness of burnished plumage, hovering and vibrating about the bean-poles.It was with indescribable interest, and even more than childish delight,that Clifford watched the humming-birds.He used to thrust his head softly out of the arbor to see them the better; all the while, too,motioning Phœbe to be quiet, and snatching glimpses of the smile upon her face,so as to heap his enjoyment up the higher with her sympathy. He had not merely grown young; —he was a child again.
Hepzibah, whenever she happened to witness one of these fits of miniature enthusiasm,would shake her head, with a strange mingling of the mother and sister,and of pleasure and sadness, in her aspect.She said that it had always been thus with Clifford when the humming-birds came,—always,from his babyhood,—and that his delight in them had been one of the earliest tokens by which he showed his love for beautiful things.And it was a wonderful coincidence, the good lady thought,that the artist should have planted these scarlet-flowering beans—which the humming-birds sought far and wide,and which had not grown in the Pyncheon garden before for forty years—on the very summer of Clifford’s return.
Then would the tears stand in poor Hepzibah’s eyes, or overflow them with a too abundant gush,so that she was fain to betake herself into some corner, lest Clifford should espy her agitation.Indeed, all the enjoyments of this period were provocative of tears. Coming so late as it did,it was a kind of Indian summer, with a mist in its balmiest sunshine,and decay and death in its gaudiest delight.The more Clifford seemed to taste the happiness of a child,the sadder was the difference to be recognized. With a mysterious and terrible Past,which had annihilated his memory, and a blank Future before him,he had only this visionary and impalpable Now, which, if you once look closely at it, is nothing.He himself, as was perceptible by many symptoms, lay darkly behind his pleasure,and knew it to be a baby-play, which he was to toy and trifle with,instead of thoroughly believing. Clifford saw, it may be,in the mirror of his deeper consciousness,that he was an example and representative of that great class of people whom an inexplicable Providence is continually putting at cross-purposes with the world: breaking what seems its own promise in their nature; withholding their proper food, and setting poison before them for a banquet; and thus—when it might so easily, as one would think, have been adjusted otherwise—making their existence a strangeness, a solitude, and torment. All his life long, he had been learning how to be wretched, as one learns a foreign tongue; and now, with the lesson thoroughly by heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little airy happiness. Frequently there was a dim shadow of doubt in his eyes. “Take my hand, Phœbe,” he would say, “and pinch it hard with your little fingers!Give me a rose, that I may press its thorns, and prove myself awake by the sharp touch of pain!” Evidently, he desired this prick of a trifling anguish, in order to assure himself,by that quality which he best knew to be real, that the garden,and the seven weather-beaten gables, and Hepzibah’s scowl, and Phœbe’s smile, were real likewise.Without this signet in his flesh, he could have attributed no more substance to them than to the empty confusion of imaginary scenes with which he had fed his spirit, until even that poor sustenance was exhausted.
The author needs great faith in his reader’s sympathy;else he must hesitate to give details so minute, and incidents apparently so trifling,as are essential to make up the idea of this garden-life.It was the Eden of a thunder-smitten Adam,who had fled for refuge thither out of the same dreary and perilous wilderness into which the original Adam was expelled.