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.