The Judge, beyond all question, was a man of eminent respectability. The church acknowledged it;the state acknowledged it. It was denied by nobody.In all the very extensive sphere of those who knew him,whether in his public or private capacities, there was not an individual—except Hepzibah,and some lawless mystic, like the daguerreotypist, and, possibly,a few political opponents—who would have dreamed of seriously disputing his claim to a high and honorable place in the world’s regard.Nor (we must do him the further justice to say) did Judge Pyncheon himself, probably,entertain many or very frequent doubts, that his enviable reputation accorded with his deserts.His conscience, therefore, usually considered the surest witness to a man’s integrity,—his conscience, unless it might be for the little space of five minutes in the twenty-four hours,or, now and then, some black day in the whole year’s circle,—his conscience bore an accordant testimony with the world’s laudatory voice. And yet,strong as this evidence may seem to be,we should hesitate to peril our own conscience on the assertion,that the Judge and the consenting world were right,and that poor Hepzibah with her solitary prejudice was wrong. Hidden from mankind,—forgotten by himself, or buried so deeply under a sculptured and ornamented pile of ostentatious deeds that his daily life could take no note of it,—there may have lurked some evil and unsightly thing. Nay, we could almost venture to say, further,that a daily guilt might have been acted by him, continually renewed, and reddening forth afresh,like the miraculous blood-stain of a murder,without his necessarily and at every moment being aware of it.
Men of strong minds, great force of character, and a hard texture of the sensibilities,are very capable of falling into mistakes of this kind.They are ordinarily men to whom forms are of paramount importance.Their field of action lies among the external phenomena of life.They possess vast ability in grasping, and arranging, and appropriating to themselves, the big,heavy, solid unrealities, such as gold, landed estate, offices of trust and emolument,and public honors. With these materials, and with deeds of goodly aspect, done in the public eye,an individual of this class builds up, as it were, a tall and stately edifice, which,in the view of other people, and ultimately in his own view, is no other than the man’s character,or the man himself. Behold, therefore, a palace!Its splendid halls and suites of spacious apartments are floored with a mosaic-work of costly marbles;its windows, the whole height of each room,admit the sunshine through the most transparent of plate-glass; its high cornices are gilded,and its ceilings gorgeously painted; and a lofty dome—through which, from the central pavement,you may gaze up to the sky, as with no obstructing medium between—surmounts the whole.With what fairer and nobler emblem could any man desire to shadow forth his character?Ah!but in some low and obscure nook,—some narrow closet on the ground-floor, shut, locked and bolted,and the key flung away,—or beneath the marble pavement, in a stagnant water-puddle,with the richest pattern of mosaic-work above,—may lie a corpse, half decayed, and still decaying,and diffusing its death-scent all through the palace!The inhabitant will not be conscious of it, for it has long been his daily breath!Neither will the visitors, for they smell only the rich odors which the master sedulously scatters through the palace,and the incense which they bring, and delight to burn before him!Now and then, perchance, comes in a seer,before whose sadly gifted eye the whole structure melts into thin air,leaving only the hidden nook, the bolted closet,with the cobwebs festooned over its forgotten door, or the deadly hole under the pavement,and the decaying corpse within. Here, then, we are to seek the true emblem of the man’s character,and of the deed that gives whatever reality it possesses to his life. And,beneath the show of a marble palace, that pool of stagnant water, foul with many impurities, and,perhaps, tinged with blood,—that secret abomination, above which, possibly, he may say his prayers,without remembering it,—is this man’s miserable soul!
To apply this train of remark somewhat more closely to Judge Pyncheon.We might say (without in the least imputing crime to a personage of his eminent respectability) that there was enough of splendid rubbish in his life to cover up and paralyze a more active and subtile conscience than the Judge was ever troubled with. The purity of his judicial character, while on the bench; the faithfulness of his public service in subsequent capacities; his devotedness to his party, and the rigid consistency with which he had adhered to its principles, or, at all events, kept pace with its organized movements; his remarkable zeal as president of a Bible society; his unimpeachable integrity as treasurer of a widow’s and orphan’s fund; his benefits to horticulture, by producing two much esteemed varieties of the pear and to agriculture, through the agency of the famous Pyncheon bull; the cleanliness of his moral deportment, for a great many years past; the severity with which he had frowned upon, and finally cast off, an expensive and dissipated son, delaying forgiveness until within the final quarter of an hour of the young man’s life; his prayers at morning and eventide, and graces at meal-time; his efforts in furtherance of the temperance cause; his confining himself, since the last attack of the gout, to five diurnal glasses of old sherry wine; the snowy whiteness of his linen, the polish of his boots, the handsomeness of his gold-headed cane, the square and roomy fashion of his coat, and the fineness of its material, and, in general, the studied propriety of his dress and equipment; the scrupulousness with which he paid public notice, in the street, by a bow, a lifting of the hat, a nod, or a motion of the hand, to all and sundry of his acquaintances, rich or poor; the smile of broad benevolence wherewith he made it a point to gladden the whole world,—what room could possibly be found for darker traits in a portrait made up of lineaments like these?This proper face was what he beheld in the looking-glass.This admirably arranged life was what he was conscious of in the progress of every day.Then might not he claim to be its result and sum, and say to himself and the community, “Behold Judge Pyncheon there”?
And allowing that, many, many years ago, in his early and reckless youth,he had committed some one wrong act,—or that, even now,the inevitable force of circumstances should occasionally make him do one questionable deed among a thousand praiseworthy,or, at least, blameless ones,—would you characterize the Judge by that one necessary deed,and that half-forgotten act, and let it overshadow the fair aspect of a lifetime?What is there so ponderous in evil, that a thumb’s bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil which were heaped into the other scale!This scale and balance system is a favorite one with people of Judge Pyncheon’s brotherhood. A hard,cold man, thus unfortunately situated, seldom or never looking inward,and resolutely taking his idea of himself from what purports to be his image as reflected in the mirror of public opinion,can scarcely arrive at true self-knowledge, except through loss of property and reputation.Sickness will not always help him do it; not always the death-hour!
But our affair now is with Judge Pyncheon as he stood confronting the fierce outbreak of Hepzibah’s wrath.Without premeditation, to her own surprise, and indeed terror, she had given vent, for once,to the inveteracy of her resentment, cherished against this kinsman for thirty years.
Thus far the Judge’s countenance had expressed mild forbearance,—grave and almost gentle deprecation of his cousin’s unbecoming violence,—free and Christian-like forgiveness of the wrong inflicted by her words.But when those words were irrevocably spoken, his look assumed sternness, the sense of power,and immitigable resolve; and this with so natural and imperceptible a change,that it seemed as if the iron man had stood there from the first, and the meek man not at all.The effect was as when the light, vapory clouds, with their soft coloring,suddenly vanish from the stony brow of a precipitous mountain,and leave there the frown which you at once feel to be eternal.Hepzibah almost adopted the insane belief that it was her old Puritan ancestor,and not the modern Judge, on whom she had just been wreaking the bitterness of her heart.Never did a man show stronger proof of the lineage attributed to him than Judge Pyncheon,at this crisis, by his unmistakable resemblance to the picture in the inner room.
“Cousin Hepzibah,” said he very calmly, “it is time to have done with this.”
“With all my heart!” answered she. “Then, why do you persecute us any longer?Leave poor Clifford and me in peace. Neither of us desires anything better!”
“It is my purpose to see Clifford before I leave this house,” continued the Judge. “Do not act like a madwoman, Hepzibah!I am his only friend, and an all-powerful one. Has it never occurred to you,—are you so blind as not to have seen,—that, without not merely my consent, but my efforts,my representations, the exertion of my whole influence, political, official, personal,Clifford would never have been what you call free?Did you think his release a triumph over me?Not so, my good cousin; not so, by any means!The furthest possible from that!No; but it was the accomplishment of a purpose long entertained on my part. I set him free!”
“You!” answered Hepzibah. “I never will believe it!He owed his dungeon to you; his freedom to God’s providence!”
“I set him free!” reaffirmed Judge Pyncheon, with the calmest composure.“And I came hither now to decide whether he shall retain his freedom. It will depend upon himself. For this purpose, I must see him.”
“Never!—it would drive him mad!” exclaimed Hepzibah, but with an irresoluteness sufficiently perceptible to the keen eye of the Judge;for, without the slightest faith in his good intentions,she knew not whether there was most to dread in yielding or resistance.“And why should you wish to see this wretched, broken man,who retains hardly a fraction of his intellect,and will hide even that from an eye which has no love in it?”
“He shall see love enough in mine, if that be all!” said the Judge, with well-grounded confidence in the benignity of his aspect. “But,Cousin Hepzibah, you confess a great deal, and very much to the purpose. Now, listen,and I will frankly explain my reasons for insisting on this interview. At the death,thirty years since, of our uncle Jaffrey, it was found,—I know not whether the circumstance ever attracted much of your attention,among the sadder interests that clustered round that event,—but it was found that his visible estate, of every kind,fell far short of any estimate ever made of it. He was supposed to be immensely rich.Nobody doubted that he stood among the weightiest men of his day. It was one of his eccentricities,however,—and not altogether a folly, neither,—to conceal the amount of his property by making distant and foreign investments,perhaps under other names than his own, and by various means, familiar enough to capitalists,but unnecessary here to be specified. By Uncle Jaffrey’s last will and testament, as you are aware,his entire property was bequeathed to me,with the single exception of a life interest to yourself in this old family mansion,and the strip of patrimonial estate remaining attached to it.”
“And do you seek to deprive us of that?” asked Hepzibah, unable to restrain her bitter contempt.“Is this your price for ceasing to persecute poor Clifford?”
“Certainly not, my dear cousin!” answered the Judge, smiling benevolently. “On the contrary, as you must do me the justice to own,I have constantly expressed my readiness to double or treble your resources,whenever you should make up your mind to accept any kindness of that nature at the hands of your kinsman. No, no!But here lies the gist of the matter. Of my uncle’s unquestionably great estate, as I have said,not the half—no, not one third, as I am fully convinced—was apparent after his death. Now,I have the best possible reasons for believing that your brother Clifford can give me a clew to the recovery of the remainder. ”
“Clifford!—Clifford know of any hidden wealth?Clifford have it in his power to make you rich?” cried the old gentlewoman, affected with a sense of something like ridicule at the idea. “Impossible!You deceive yourself!It is really a thing to laugh at!”
“It is as certain as that I stand here!” said Judge Pyncheon, striking his gold-headed cane on the floor,and at the same time stamping his foot,as if to express his conviction the more forcibly by the whole emphasis of his substantial person. “Clifford told me so himself!”
“No, no!” exclaimed Hepzibah incredulously. “You are dreaming, Cousin Jaffrey.”
“I do not belong to the dreaming class of men,” said the Judge quietly.“Some months before my uncle’s death, Clifford boasted to me of the possession of the secret of incalculable wealth.His purpose was to taunt me, and excite my curiosity. I know it well. But,from a pretty distinct recollection of the particulars of our conversation,I am thoroughly convinced that there was truth in what he said. Clifford, at this moment, if he chooses,—and choose he must!—can inform me where to find the schedule, the documents, the evidences,in whatever shape they exist, of the vast amount of Uncle Jaffrey’s missing property.He has the secret. His boast was no idle word. It had a directness, an emphasis, a particularity,that showed a backbone of solid meaning within the mystery of his expression.”
“But what could have been Clifford’s object,” asked Hepzibah, “in concealing it so long?”
“It was one of the bad impulses of our fallen nature,” replied the Judge, turning up his eyes.“He looked upon me as his enemy. He considered me as the cause of his overwhelming disgrace,his imminent peril of death, his irretrievable ruin. There was no great probability, therefore,of his volunteering information, out of his dungeon,that should elevate me still higher on the ladder of prosperity.But the moment has now come when he must give up his secret.”
“And what if he should refuse?” inquired Hepzibah. “Or,—as I steadfastly believe,—what if he has no knowledge of this wealth?”
“My dear cousin,” said Judge Pyncheon, with a quietude which he had the power of making more formidable than any violence,“since your brother’s return, I have taken the precaution (a highly proper one in the near kinsman and natural guardian of an individual so situated) to have his deportment and habits constantly and carefully overlooked. Your neighbors have been eye-witnesses to whatever has passed in the garden. The butcher, the baker, the fish-monger, some of the customers of your shop, and many a prying old woman, have told me several of the secrets of your interior. A still larger circle—I myself, among the rest—can testify to his extravagances at the arched window. Thousands beheld him, a week or two ago, on the point of flinging himself thence into the street. From all this testimony, I am led to apprehend—reluctantly, and with deep grief—that Clifford’s misfortunes have so affected his intellect, never very strong, that he cannot safely remain at large. The alternative, you must be aware,—and its adoption will depend entirely on the decision which I am now about to make,—the alternative is his confinement, probably for the remainder of his life, in a public asylum for persons in his unfortunate state of mind.”
“You cannot mean it!” shrieked Hepzibah.
“Should my cousin Clifford,” continued Judge Pyncheon, wholly undisturbed, “from mere malice,and hatred of one whose interests ought naturally to be dear to him,—a mode of passion that,as often as any other, indicates mental disease,—should he refuse me the information so important to myself, and which he assuredly possesses,I shall consider it the one needed jot of evidence to satisfy my mind of his insanity. And,once sure of the course pointed out by conscience, you know me too well, Cousin Hepzibah,to entertain a doubt that I shall pursue it.”
“O Jaffrey,—Cousin Jaffrey,” cried Hepzibah mournfully, not passionately,“it is you that are diseased in mind, not Clifford!You have forgotten that a woman was your mother!—that you have had sisters, brothers, children of your own!—or that there ever was affection between man and man, or pity from one man to another, in this miserable world!Else, how could you have dreamed of this?You are not young, Cousin Jaffrey!—no, nor middle-aged,—but already an old man!The hair is white upon your head!How many years have you to live?Are you not rich enough for that little time?Shall you be hungry,—shall you lack clothes, or a roof to shelter you, —between this point and the grave?No!but, with the half of what you now possess, you could revel in costly food and wines,and build a house twice as splendid as you now inhabit, and make a far greater show to the world,—and yet leave riches to your only son, to make him bless the hour of your death!Then, why should you do this cruel, cruel thing?—so mad a thing, that I know not whether to call it wicked!Alas, Cousin Jaffrey, this hard and grasping spirit has run in our blood these two hundred years.You are but doing over again, in another shape, what your ancestor before you did,and sending down to your posterity the curse inherited from him!”
“Talk sense, Hepzibah, for Heaven’s sake!” exclaimed the Judge, with the impatience natural to a reasonable man,on hearing anything so utterly absurd as the above, in a discussion about matters of business.“I have told you my determination. I am not apt to change. Clifford must give up his secret,or take the consequences. And let him decide quickly;for I have several affairs to attend to this morning,and an important dinner engagement with some political friends.”
“Clifford has no secret!” answered Hepzibah. “And God will not let you do the thing you meditate!”
“We shall see,” said the unmoved Judge. “Meanwhile, choose whether you will summon Clifford,and allow this business to be amicably settled by an interview between two kinsmen,or drive me to harsher measures, which I should be most happy to feel myself justified in avoiding.The responsibility is altogether on your part.”
“You are stronger than I,” said Hepzibah, after a brief consideration; “and you have no pity in your strength!Clifford is not now insane; but the interview which you insist upon may go far to make him so.Nevertheless, knowing you as I do, I believe it to be my best course to allow you to judge for yourself as to the improbability of his possessing any valuable secret. I will call Clifford. Be merciful in your dealings with him!—be far more merciful than your heart bids you be!—for God is looking at you, Jaffrey Pyncheon!”
The Judge followed his cousin from the shop, where the foregoing conversation had passed,into the parlor, and flung himself heavily into the great ancestral chair.Many a former Pyncheon had found repose in its capacious arms: rosy children, after their sports;young men, dreamy with love; grown men, weary with cares; old men, burdened with winters,—they had mused, and slumbered, and departed to a yet profounder sleep.It had been a long tradition, though a doubtful one, that this was the very chair,seated in which the earliest of the Judge’s New England forefathers—he whose picture still hung upon the wall—had given a dead man’s silent and stern reception to the throng of distinguished guests. From that hour of evil omen until the present, it may be,—though we know not the secret of his heart,—but it may be that no wearier and sadder man had ever sunk into the chair than this same Judge Pyncheon, whom we have just beheld so immitigably hard and resolute. Surely, it must have been at no slight cost that he had thus fortified his soul with iron. Such calmness is a mightier effort than the violence of weaker men. And there was yet a heavy task for him to do. Was it a little matter—a trifle to be prepared for in a single moment, and to be rested from in another moment,—that he must now, after thirty years, encounter a kinsman risen from a living tomb, and wrench a secret from him, or else consign him to a living tomb again?
“Did you speak?” asked Hepzibah, looking in from the threshold of the parlor;for she imagined that the Judge had uttered some sound which she was anxious to interpret as a relenting impulse. “I thought you called me back.”
“No, no” gruffly answered Judge Pyncheon with a harsh frown,while his brow grew almost a black purple, in the shadow of the room. “Why should I call you back?Time flies!Bid Clifford come to me!”
The Judge had taken his watch from his vest pocket and now held it in his hand,measuring the interval which was to ensue before the appearance of Clifford.
XVI. Clifford’s Chamber
Never had the old house appeared so dismal to poor Hepzibah as when she departed on that wretched errand.There was a strange aspect in it. As she trode along the foot-worn passages,and opened one crazy door after another, and ascended the creaking staircase,she gazed wistfully and fearfully around. It would have been no marvel, to her excited mind, if,behind or beside her, there had been the rustle of dead people’s garments,or pale visages awaiting her on the landing-place above.Her nerves were set all ajar by the scene of passion and terror through which she had just struggled.Her colloquy with Judge Pyncheon, who so perfectly represented the person and attributes of the founder of the family,had called back the dreary past. It weighed upon her heart. Whatever she had heard,from legendary aunts and grandmothers, concerning the good or evil fortunes of the Pyncheons,—stories which had heretofore been kept warm in her remembrance by the chimney-corner glow that was associated with them,—now recurred to her, sombre, ghastly, cold, like most passages of family history,when brooded over in melancholy mood. The whole seemed little else but a series of calamity,reproducing itself in successive generations, with one general hue, and varying in little,save the outline. But Hepzibah now felt as if the Judge, and Clifford, and herself,—they three together,—were on the point of adding another incident to the annals of the house,with a bolder relief of wrong and sorrow, which would cause it to stand out from all the rest.Thus it is that the grief of the passing moment takes upon itself an individuality,and a character of climax, which it is destined to lose after a while,and to fade into the dark gray tissue common to the grave or glad events of many years ago.It is but for a moment, comparatively, that anything looks strange or startling,—a truth that has the bitter and the sweet in it.
But Hepzibah could not rid herself of the sense of something unprecedented at that instant passing and soon to be accomplished.Her nerves were in a shake. Instinctively she paused before the arched window,and looked out upon the street, in order to seize its permanent objects with her mental grasp,and thus to steady herself from the reel and vibration which affected her more immediate sphere.It brought her up, as we may say, with a kind of shock,when she beheld everything under the same appearance as the day before,and numberless preceding days, except for the difference between sunshine and sullen storm.Her eyes travelled along the street, from doorstep to doorstep, noting the wet sidewalks,with here and there a puddle in hollows that had been imperceptible until filled with water.She screwed her dim optics to their acutest point, in the hope of making out,with greater distinctness, a certain window, where she half saw, half guessed,that a tailor’s seamstress was sitting at her work.Hepzibah flung herself upon that unknown woman’s companionship, even thus far off.Then she was attracted by a chaise rapidly passing, and watched its moist and glistening top,and its splashing wheels, until it had turned the corner,and refused to carry any further her idly trifling, because appalled and overburdened, mind.When the vehicle had disappeared, she allowed herself still another loitering moment;for the patched figure of good Uncle Venner was now visible,coming slowly from the head of the street downward, with a rheumatic limp,because the east wind had got into his joints. Hepzibah wished that he would pass yet more slowly,and befriend her shivering solitude a little longer.Anything that would take her out of the grievous present,and interpose human beings betwixt herself and what was nearest to her,—whatever would defer for an instant the inevitable errand on which she was bound,—all such impediments were welcome. Next to the lightest heart, the heaviest is apt to be most playful.
Hepzibah had little hardihood for her own proper pain,and far less for what she must inflict on Clifford. Of so slight a nature,and so shattered by his previous calamities,it could not well be short of utter ruin to bring him face to face with the hard,relentless man who had been his evil destiny through life.Even had there been no bitter recollections, nor any hostile interest now at stake between them,the mere natural repugnance of the more sensitive system to the massive, weighty,and unimpressible one, must, in itself, have been disastrous to the former.It would be like flinging a porcelain vase, with already a crack in it, against a granite column.Never before had Hepzibah so adequately estimated the powerful character of her cousin Jaffrey,—powerful by intellect, energy of will, the long habit of acting among men, and, as she believed,by his unscrupulous pursuit of selfish ends through evil means.It did but increase the difficulty that Judge Pyncheon was under a delusion as to the secret which he supposed Clifford to possess.Men of his strength of purpose and customary sagacity,if they chance to adopt a mistaken opinion in practical matters,so wedge it and fasten it among things known to be true,that to wrench it out of their minds is hardly less difficult than pulling up an oak. Thus,as the Judge required an impossibility of Clifford, the latter, as he could not perform it,must needs perish. For what, in the grasp of a man like this,was to become of Clifford’s soft poetic nature,that never should have had a task more stubborn than to set a life of beautiful enjoyment to the flow and rhythm of musical cadences!Indeed, what had become of it already?Broken!Blighted!All but annihilated!Soon to be wholly so!
For a moment, the thought crossed Hepzibah’s mind,whether Clifford might not really have such knowledge of their deceased uncle’s vanished estate as the Judge imputed to him.She remembered some vague intimations, on her brother’s part,which—if the supposition were not essentially preposterous—might have been so interpreted.There had been schemes of travel and residence abroad, day-dreams of brilliant life at home,and splendid castles in the air, which it would have required boundless wealth to build and realize.Had this wealth been in her power, how gladly would Hepzibah have bestowed it all upon her iron-hearted kinsman,to buy for Clifford the freedom and seclusion of the desolate old house!But she believed that her brother’s schemes were as destitute of actual substance and purpose as a child’s pictures of its future life,while sitting in a little chair by its mother’s knee.Clifford had none but shadowy gold at his command;and it was not the stuff to satisfy Judge Pyncheon!
Was there no help in their extremity?It seemed strange that there should be none, with a city round about her.It would be so easy to throw up the window, and send forth a shriek,at the strange agony of which everybody would come hastening to the rescue,well understanding it to be the cry of a human soul, at some dreadful crisis!But how wild, how almost laughable, the fatality,—and yet how continually it comes to pass,thought Hepzibah, in this dull delirium of a world,—that whosoever,and with however kindly a purpose, should come to help,they would be sure to help the strongest side!Might and wrong combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible attraction.There would be Judge Pyncheon,—a person eminent in the public view,of high station and great wealth, a philanthropist, a member of Congress and of the church,and intimately associated with whatever else bestows good name,—so imposing,in these advantageous lights, that Hepzibah herself could hardly help shrinking from her own conclusions as to his hollow integrity. The Judge, on one side!And who, on the other?The guilty Clifford!Once a byword!Now, an indistinctly remembered ignominy!