Chapter 9
Clifford and Phobe
TRULY WAS
there
something high, generous, and noble in the native
composition of our poor old Hepzibah! Or else,--and it was
quite as probably the case,--she had been enriched by poverty,
developed by sorrow, elevated by the strong and solitary
affection of her life, and thus endowed with heroism which never
could have characterized her in what are called happier
circumstances. Through dreary years, Hepzibah had looked
forward--for the most part despairingly, never with any confidence of
hope, but always with the feeling that it was her brightest
possibility--to the very position in which she now found
herself. In her own behalf, she had asked nothing of Providence,
but the opportunity of devoting herself to this brother, whom she
had so loved,--so admired for what he was, or might have
been,--and to whom she had kept her faith, alone of all the world,
wholly, unfalteringly, at every instant, and throughout life.
And here, in his late decline, the lost one had come back out of
his long and strange misfortune, and was thrown on her sympathy,
as it seemed, not merely for the bread of his physical existence,
but for everything that should keep him morally alive. She had
responded to the call. She had come forward,--our poor, gaunt
Hepzibah, in her rusty silks,
with her rigid joints, and the sad perversity of her
scowl,--ready to do her utmost; and with affection enough, if that were
all, to do a hundred times as much! There could be few more
tearful sights,--and Heaven forgive us if a smile insist on
mingling with our conception of it,--few sights with truer
pathos in them, than Hepzibah presented, on that first afternoon.
How patiently did she endeavor to wrap Clifford up in her
great, warm love, and make it all the world to him, so that he
should retain no torturing sense of the coldness and dreariness
without! Her little efforts to amuse him! How pitiful, yet
magnanimous, they were!
Remembering his early love of
poetry and fiction, she unlocked a bookcase, and took down
several books that had been excellent reading in their day.
There was a volume of Pope, with the Rape of the Lock in it, and
another of the Tatler, and an odd one of Dryden's Miscellanies,
all with tarnished gilding on their covers, and thoughts of
tarnished brilliancy inside. They had no success with Clifford.
These, and all such writers of society, whose new works glow like
the rich texture of a just-woven carpet, must be content to
relinquish their charm, for every reader, after an age or two,
and could hardly be supposed to retain any portion of it for a
mind that had utterly lost its estimate of modes and manners.
Hepzibah then took up Rasselas, and began to read of the Happy
Valley, with a vague idea that some secret of a contented life
had there been elaborated, which might at least serve Clifford
and herself for this one day. But the Happy Valley had a cloud
over it. Hepzibah troubled her auditor, moreover, by innumerable
sins of emphasis, which he seemed to detect, without any
reference to the meaning; nor, in fact, did he appear to take
much note of the sense of what she read, but evidently felt the
tedium of the lecture, without harvesting its profit. His
sister's voice, too, naturally harsh, had, in the course of her
sorrowful lifetime, contracted a kind of croak, which, when it
once gets into the human throat, is as ineradicable as sin. In
both sexes, occasionally, this lifelong croak, accompanying each
word of joy or sorrow, is one of the symptoms of a settled
melancholy; and whenever it occurs, the whole history of
misfortune is conveyed in its slightest accent. The effect is as
if the voice had been dyed black; or,--if we must use a more
moderate simile,--this miserable croak, running through all the
variations of the voice, is like a black silken thread, on which
the crystal beads of speech are strung, and whence they take
their hue. Such voices have put on mourning
for dead hopes; and they ought to die and be
buried along with them!
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 Phoebe. 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 Phoebe, 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, Phoebe 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 bed-chambers, 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 Phoebe; 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 Phoebe'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 Phoebe'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 Phoebe'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 Phoebe 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. Phoebe'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 Phoebe 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 passage-way 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 Phoebe
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 Phoebe'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 Phoebe 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.
Phoebe, 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 semi-circle 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 Phoebe'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 Phoebe 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 Phoebe.
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, Phoebe'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 Phoebe, 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 Phoebe,
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 had 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 rosebud 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 Phoebe 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 grace 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
Phoebe 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
Phoebe, 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? Phoebe 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 drowsy head were the season of the old gentlewoman's
attendance on her brother, while Phoebe took charge of the shop;
an arrangement which the public speedily understood, and evinced
their decided preference of the younger shop-woman 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 Phoebe, went to take her seat behind
the counter. It was now the young girl's turn to be the
nurse,--the guardian, the play-mate, or whatever is the fitter
phrase,--of the gray-haired man.