“You do me great wrong, dear Cousin Hepzibah!” said he, first kindly

offering her his hand, and then drawing on his glove preparatory to

departure. “Very great wrong! But I forgive it, and will study to make

you think better of me. Of course, our poor Clifford being in so

unhappy a state of mind, I cannot think of urging an interview at

present. But I shall watch over his welfare as if he were my own

beloved brother; nor do I at all despair, my dear cousin, of

constraining both him and you to acknowledge your injustice. When that

shall happen, I desire no other revenge than your acceptance of the

best offices in my power to do you.”

With a bow to Hepzibah, and a degree of paternal benevolence in his

parting nod to Phœbe, the Judge left the shop, and went smiling along

the street. As is customary with the rich, when they aim at the honors

of a republic, he apologized, as it were, to the people, for his

wealth, prosperity, and elevated station, by a free and hearty manner

towards those who knew him; putting off the more of his dignity in due

proportion with the humbleness of the man whom he saluted, and thereby

proving a haughty consciousness of his advantages as irrefragably as if

he had marched forth preceded by a troop of lackeys to clear the way.

On this particular forenoon, so excessive was the warmth of Judge

Pyncheon’s kindly aspect, that (such, at least, was the rumor about

town) an extra passage of the water-carts was found essential, in order

to lay the dust occasioned by so much extra sunshine!

No sooner had he disappeared than Hepzibah grew deadly white, and,

staggering towards Phœbe, let her head fall on the young girl’s

shoulder.

“O Phœbe!” murmured she, “that man has been the horror of my life!

Shall I never, never have the courage,—will my voice never cease from

trembling long enough to let me tell him what he is?”

“Is he so very wicked?” asked Phœbe. “Yet his offers were surely kind!”

“Do not speak of them,—he has a heart of iron!” rejoined Hepzibah. “Go,

now, and talk to Clifford! Amuse and keep him quiet! It would disturb

him wretchedly to see me so agitated as I am. There, go, dear child,

and I will try to look after the shop.”

Phœbe went accordingly, but perplexed herself, meanwhile, with queries

as to the purport of the scene which she had just witnessed, and also

whether judges, clergymen, and other characters of that eminent stamp

and respectability, could really, in any single instance, be otherwise

than just and upright men. A doubt of this nature has a most disturbing

influence, and, if shown to be a fact, comes with fearful and startling

effect on minds of the trim, orderly, and limit-loving class, in which

we find our little country-girl. Dispositions more boldly speculative

may derive a stern enjoyment from the discovery, since there must be

evil in the world, that a high man is as likely to grasp his share of

it as a low one. A wider scope of view, and a deeper insight, may see

rank, dignity, and station, all proved illusory, so far as regards

their claim to human reverence, and yet not feel as if the universe

were thereby tumbled headlong into chaos. But Phœbe, in order to keep

the universe in its old place, was fain to smother, in some degree, her

own intuitions as to Judge Pyncheon’s character. And as for her

cousin’s testimony in disparagement of it, she concluded that

Hepzibah’s judgment was embittered by one of those family feuds which

render hatred the more deadly by the dead and corrupted love that they

intermingle with its native poison.

IX.

Clifford and Phœbe

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 wherever 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 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.

One of the available means of amusement, of which Phœbe made the most

in Clifford’s behalf, was that feathered society, the hens, a breed of

whom, as we have already said, was an immemorial heirloom in the

Pyncheon family. In compliance with a whim of Clifford, as it troubled

him to see them in confinement, they had been set at liberty, and now

roamed at will about the garden; doing some little mischief, but

hindered from escape by buildings on three sides, and the difficult

peaks of a wooden fence on the other. They spent much of their abundant

leisure on the margin of Maule’s well, which was haunted by a kind of

snail, evidently a titbit to their palates; and the brackish water

itself, however nauseous to the rest of the world, was so greatly

esteemed by these fowls, that they might be seen tasting, turning up

their heads, and smacking their bills, with precisely the air of

wine-bibbers round a probationary cask. Their generally quiet, yet

often brisk, and constantly diversified talk, one to another, or

sometimes in soliloquy,—as they scratched worms out of the rich, black

soil, or pecked at such plants as suited their taste,—had such a

domestic tone, that it was almost a wonder why you could not establish

a regular interchange of ideas about household matters, human and

gallinaceous. All hens are well worth studying for the piquancy and

rich variety of their manners; but by no possibility can there have

been other fowls of such odd appearance and deportment as these

ancestral ones. They probably embodied the traditionary peculiarities

of their whole line of progenitors, derived through an unbroken

succession of eggs; or else this individual Chanticleer and his two

wives had grown to be humorists, and a little crack-brained withal, on

account of their solitary way of life, and out of sympathy for

Hepzibah, their lady-patroness.

Queer, indeed, they looked! Chanticleer himself, though stalking on two

stilt-like legs, with the dignity of interminable descent in all his

gestures, was hardly bigger than an ordinary partridge; his two wives

were about the size of quails; and as for the one chicken, it looked

small enough to be still in the egg, and, at the same time,

sufficiently old, withered, wizened, and experienced, to have been

founder of the antiquated race. Instead of being the youngest of the

family, it rather seemed to have aggregated into itself the ages, not

only of these living specimens of the breed, but of all its forefathers

and foremothers, whose united excellences and oddities were squeezed

into its little body. Its mother evidently regarded it as the one

chicken of the world, and as necessary, in fact, to the world’s

continuance, or, at any rate, to the equilibrium of the present system

of affairs, whether in church or state. No lesser sense of the infant

fowl’s importance could have justified, even in a mother’s eyes, the

perseverance with which she watched over its safety, ruffling her small

person to twice its proper size, and flying in everybody’s face that so

much as looked towards her hopeful progeny. No lower estimate could

have vindicated the indefatigable zeal with which she scratched, and

her unscrupulousness in digging up the choicest flower or vegetable,

for the sake of the fat earthworm at its root. Her nervous cluck, when

the chicken happened to be hidden in the long grass or under the

squash-leaves; her gentle croak of satisfaction, while sure of it

beneath her wing; her note of ill-concealed fear and obstreperous

defiance, when she saw her arch-enemy, a neighbor’s cat, on the top of

the high fence,—one or other of these sounds was to be heard at almost

every moment of the day. By degrees, the observer came to feel nearly

as much interest in this chicken of illustrious race as the mother-hen

did.

Phœbe, after getting well acquainted with the old hen, was sometimes

permitted to take the chicken in her hand, which was quite capable of

grasping its cubic inch or two of body. While she curiously examined

its hereditary marks,—the peculiar speckle of its plumage, the funny

tuft on its head, and a knob on each of its legs,—the little biped, as

she insisted, kept giving her a sagacious wink. The daguerreotypist

once whispered her that these marks betokened the oddities of the

Pyncheon family, and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life

of the old house, embodying its interpretation, likewise, although an

unintelligible one, as such clews generally are. It was a feathered

riddle; a mystery hatched out of an egg, and just as mysterious as if

the egg had been addle!

The second of Chanticleer’s two wives, ever since Phœbe’s arrival, had

been in a state of heavy despondency, caused, as it afterwards

appeared, by her inability to lay an egg. One day, however, by her

self-important gait, the sideways turn of her head, and the cock of her

eye, as she pried into one and another nook of the garden,—croaking to

herself, all the while, with inexpressible complacency,—it was made

evident that this identical hen, much as mankind undervalued her,

carried something about her person the worth of which was not to be

estimated either in gold or precious stones. Shortly after, there was a

prodigious cackling and gratulation of Chanticleer and all his family,

including the wizened chicken, who appeared to understand the matter

quite as well as did his sire, his mother, or his aunt. That afternoon

Phœbe found a diminutive egg,—not in the regular nest, it was far too

precious to be trusted there,—but cunningly hidden under the

currant-bushes, on some dry stalks of last year’s grass. Hepzibah, on

learning the fact, took possession of the egg and appropriated it to

Clifford’s breakfast, on account of a certain delicacy of flavor, for

which, as she affirmed, these eggs had always been famous. Thus

unscrupulously did the old gentlewoman sacrifice the continuance,

perhaps, of an ancient feathered race, with no better end than to

supply her brother with a dainty that hardly filled the bowl of a

tea-spoon! It must have been in reference to this outrage that

Chanticleer, the next day, accompanied by the bereaved mother of the

egg, took his post in front of Phœbe and Clifford, and delivered

himself of a harangue that might have proved as long as his own

pedigree, but for a fit of merriment on Phœbe’s part. Hereupon, the

offended fowl stalked away on his long stilts, and utterly withdrew his

notice from Phœbe and the rest of human nature, until she made her

peace with an offering of spice-cake, which, next to snails, was the

delicacy most in favor with his aristocratic taste.

We linger too long, no doubt, beside this paltry rivulet of life that

flowed through the garden of the Pyncheon House. But we deem it

pardonable to record these mean incidents and poor delights, because

they proved so greatly to Clifford’s benefit. They had the earth-smell

in them, and contributed to give him health and substance. Some of his

occupations wrought less desirably upon him. He had a singular

propensity, for example, to hang over Maule’s well, and look at the

constantly shifting phantasmagoria of figures produced by the agitation

of the water over the mosaic-work of colored pebbles at the bottom. He

said that faces looked upward to him there,—beautiful faces, arrayed in

bewitching smiles,—each momentary face so fair and rosy, and every

smile so sunny, that he felt wronged at its departure, until the same

flitting witchcraft made a new one. But sometimes he would suddenly cry

out, “The dark face gazes at me!” and be miserable the whole day

afterwards. Phœbe, when she hung over the fountain by Clifford’s side,

could see nothing of all this,—neither the beauty nor the ugliness,—but

only the colored pebbles, looking as if the gush of the waters shook

and disarranged them. And the dark face, that so troubled Clifford, was

no more than the shadow thrown from a branch of one of the

damson-trees, and breaking the inner light of Maule’s well. The truth

was, however, that his fancy—reviving faster than his will and

judgment, and always stronger than they—created shapes of loveliness

that were symbolic of his native character, and now and then a stern

and dreadful shape that typified his fate.

On Sundays, after Phœbe had been at church,—for the girl had a

church-going conscience, and would hardly have been at ease had she

missed either prayer, singing, sermon, or benediction,—after

church-time, therefore, there was, ordinarily, a sober little festival

in the garden. In addition to Clifford, Hepzibah, and Phœbe, two guests

made up the company. One was the artist Holgrave, who, in spite of his

consociation with reformers, and his other queer and questionable

traits, continued to hold an elevated place in Hepzibah’s regard. The

other, we are almost ashamed to say, was the venerable Uncle Venner, in

a clean shirt, and a broadcloth coat, more respectable than his

ordinary wear, inasmuch as it was neatly patched on each elbow, and

might be called an entire garment, except for a slight inequality in

the length of its skirts. Clifford, on several occasions, had seemed to

enjoy the old man’s intercourse, for the sake of his mellow, cheerful

vein, which was like the sweet flavor of a frost-bitten apple, such as

one picks up under the tree in December. A man at the very lowest point

of the social scale was easier and more agreeable for the fallen

gentleman to encounter than a person at any of the intermediate

degrees; and, moreover, as Clifford’s young manhood had been lost, he

was fond of feeling himself comparatively youthful, now, in apposition

with the patriarchal age of Uncle Venner. In fact, it was sometimes

observable that Clifford half wilfully hid from himself the

consciousness of being stricken in years, and cherished visions of an

earthly future still before him; visions, however, too indistinctly

drawn to be followed by disappointment—though, doubtless, by

depression—when any casual incident or recollection made him sensible

of the withered leaf.

So this oddly composed little social party used to assemble under the

ruinous arbor. Hepzibah—stately as ever at heart, and yielding not an

inch of her old gentility, but resting upon it so much the more, as

justifying a princess-like condescension—exhibited a not ungraceful

hospitality. She talked kindly to the vagrant artist, and took sage

counsel—lady as she was—with the wood-sawyer, the messenger of

everybody’s petty errands, the patched philosopher. And Uncle Venner,

who had studied the world at street-corners, and other posts equally

well adapted for just observation, was as ready to give out his wisdom

as a town-pump to give water.

“Miss Hepzibah, ma’am,” said he once, after they had all been cheerful

together, “I really enjoy these quiet little meetings of a Sabbath

afternoon. They are very much like what I expect to have after I retire

to my farm!”

“Uncle Venner” observed Clifford in a drowsy, inward tone, “is always

talking about his farm. But I have a better scheme for him, by and by.

We shall see!”

“Ah, Mr. Clifford Pyncheon!” said the man of patches, “you may scheme

for me as much as you please; but I’m not going to give up this one

scheme of my own, even if I never bring it really to pass. It does seem

to me that men make a wonderful mistake in trying to heap up property

upon property. If I had done so, I should feel as if Providence was not

bound to take care of me; and, at all events, the city wouldn’t be! I’m

one of those people who think that infinity is big enough for us

all—and eternity long enough.”

“Why, so they are, Uncle Venner,” remarked Phœbe after a pause; for she

had been trying to fathom the profundity and appositeness of this

concluding apothegm. “But for this short life of ours, one would like a

house and a moderate garden-spot of one’s own.”

“It appears to me,” said the daguerreotypist, smiling, “that Uncle

Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom; only

they have not quite so much distinctness in his mind as in that of the

systematizing Frenchman.”

“Come, Phœbe,” said Hepzibah, “it is time to bring the currants.”

And then, while the yellow richness of the declining sunshine still

fell into the open space of the garden, Phœbe brought out a loaf of

bread and a china bowl of currants, freshly gathered from the bushes,

and crushed with sugar. These, with water,—but not from the fountain of

ill omen, close at hand,—constituted all the entertainment. Meanwhile,

Holgrave took some pains to establish an intercourse with Clifford,

actuated, it might seem, entirely by an impulse of kindliness, in order

that the present hour might be cheerfuller than most which the poor

recluse had spent, or was destined yet to spend. Nevertheless, in the

artist’s deep, thoughtful, all-observant eyes, there was, now and then,

an expression, not sinister, but questionable; as if he had some other

interest in the scene than a stranger, a youthful and unconnected

adventurer, might be supposed to have. With great mobility of outward

mood, however, he applied himself to the task of enlivening the party;

and with so much success, that even dark-hued Hepzibah threw off one

tint of melancholy, and made what shift she could with the remaining

portion. Phœbe said to herself,—“How pleasant he can be!” As for Uncle

Venner, as a mark of friendship and approbation, he readily consented

to afford the young man his countenance in the way of his

profession,—not metaphorically, be it understood, but literally, by

allowing a daguerreotype of his face, so familiar to the town, to be

exhibited at the entrance of Holgrave’s studio.

Clifford, as the company partook of their little banquet, grew to be

the gayest of them all. Either it was one of those up-quivering flashes

of the spirit, to which minds in an abnormal state are liable, or else

the artist had subtly touched some chord that made musical vibration.

Indeed, what with the pleasant summer evening, and the sympathy of this

little circle of not unkindly souls, it was perhaps natural that a

character so susceptible as Clifford’s should become animated, and show

itself readily responsive to what was said around him. But he gave out

his own thoughts, likewise, with an airy and fanciful glow; so that

they glistened, as it were, through the arbor, and made their escape

among the interstices of the foliage. He had been as cheerful, no

doubt, while alone with Phœbe, but never with such tokens of acute,

although partial intelligence.

But, as the sunlight left the peaks of the Seven Gables, so did the

excitement fade out of Clifford’s eyes. He gazed vaguely and mournfully

about him, as if he missed something precious, and missed it the more

drearily for not knowing precisely what it was.

“I want my happiness!” at last he murmured hoarsely and indistinctly,

hardly shaping out the words. “Many, many years have I waited for it!

It is late! It is late! I want my happiness!”

Alas, poor Clifford! You are old, and worn with troubles that ought

never to have befallen you. You are partly crazy and partly imbecile; a

ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is,—though some in less degree, or

less perceptibly, than their fellows. Fate has no happiness in store

for you; unless your quiet home in the old family residence with the

faithful Hepzibah, and your long summer afternoons with Phœbe, and

these Sabbath festivals with Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist,

deserve to be called happiness! Why not? If not the thing itself, it is

marvellously like it, and the more so for that ethereal and intangible

quality which causes it all to vanish at too close an introspection.

Take it, therefore, while you may. Murmur not,—question not,—but make

the most of it!

XI.

The Arched Window

From the inertness, or what we may term the vegetative character, of

his ordinary mood, Clifford would perhaps have been content to spend

one day after another, interminably,—or, at least, throughout the

summer-time,—in just the kind of life described in the preceding pages.

Fancying, however, that it might be for his benefit occasionally to

diversify the scene, Phœbe sometimes suggested that he should look out

upon the life of the street. For this purpose, they used to mount the

staircase together, to the second story of the house, where, at the

termination of a wide entry, there was an arched window, of uncommonly

large dimensions, shaded by a pair of curtains. It opened above the

porch, where there had formerly been a balcony, the balustrade of which

had long since gone to decay, and been removed. At this arched window,

throwing it open, but keeping himself in comparative obscurity by means

of the curtain, Clifford had an opportunity of witnessing such a

portion of the great world’s movement as might be supposed to roll

through one of the retired streets of a not very populous city. But he

and Phœbe made a sight as well worth seeing as any that the city could

exhibit. The pale, gray, childish, aged, melancholy, yet often simply

cheerful, and sometimes delicately intelligent aspect of Clifford,

peering from behind the faded crimson of the curtain,—watching the

monotony of every-day occurrences with a kind of inconsequential

interest and earnestness, and, at every petty throb of his sensibility,

turning for sympathy to the eyes of the bright young girl!

If once he were fairly seated at the window, even Pyncheon Street would

hardly be so dull and lonely but that, somewhere or other along its

extent, Clifford might discover matter to occupy his eye, and

titillate, if not engross, his observation. Things familiar to the

youngest child that had begun its outlook at existence seemed strange

to him. A cab; an omnibus, with its populous interior, dropping here

and there a passenger, and picking up another, and thus typifying that

vast rolling vehicle, the world, the end of whose journey is everywhere

and nowhere; these objects he followed eagerly with his eyes, but

forgot them before the dust raised by the horses and wheels had settled

along their track. As regarded novelties (among which cabs and

omnibuses were to be reckoned), his mind appeared to have lost its

proper gripe and retentiveness. Twice or thrice, for example, during

the sunny hours of the day, a water-cart went along by the Pyncheon

House, leaving a broad wake of moistened earth, instead of the white

dust that had risen at a lady’s lightest footfall; it was like a summer

shower, which the city authorities had caught and tamed, and compelled

it into the commonest routine of their convenience. With the water-cart

Clifford could never grow familiar; it always affected him with just

the same surprise as at first. His mind took an apparently sharp

impression from it, but lost the recollection of this perambulatory

shower, before its next reappearance, as completely as did the street

itself, along which the heat so quickly strewed white dust again. It

was the same with the railroad. Clifford could hear the obstreperous

howl of the steam-devil, and, by leaning a little way from the arched

window, could catch a glimpse of the trains of cars, flashing a brief

transit across the extremity of the street. The idea of terrible energy

thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence, and seemed to affect

him as disagreeably, and with almost as much surprise, the hundredth

time as the first.

Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of

the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the

swiftness of the passing moment. It can merely be a suspended

animation; for, were the power actually to perish, there would be

little use of immortality. We are less than ghosts, for the time being,

whenever this calamity befalls us.

Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives. All the

antique fashions of the street were dear to him; even such as were

characterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed his

fastidious senses. He loved the old rumbling and jolting carts, the

former track of which he still found in his long-buried remembrance, as

the observer of to-day finds the wheel-tracks of ancient vehicles in

Herculaneum. The butcher’s cart, with its snowy canopy, was an

acceptable object; so was the fish-cart, heralded by its horn; so,

likewise, was the countryman’s cart of vegetables, plodding from door

to door, with long pauses of the patient horse, while his owner drove a

trade in turnips, carrots, summer-squashes, string-beans, green peas,

and new potatoes, with half the housewives of the neighborhood. The

baker’s cart, with the harsh music of its bells, had a pleasant effect

on Clifford, because, as few things else did, it jingled the very

dissonance of yore. One afternoon a scissor-grinder chanced to set his

wheel a-going under the Pyncheon Elm, and just in front of the arched

window. Children came running with their mothers’ scissors, or the

carving-knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an

edge (except, indeed, poor Clifford’s wits), that the grinder might

apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new.

Round went the busily revolving machinery, kept in motion by the

scissor-grinder’s foot, and wore away the hard steel against the hard

stone, whence issued an intense and spiteful prolongation of a hiss as

fierce as those emitted by Satan and his compeers in Pandemonium,

though squeezed into smaller compass. It was an ugly, little, venomous

serpent of a noise, as ever did petty violence to human ears. But

Clifford listened with rapturous delight. The sound, however

disagreeable, had very brisk life in it, and, together with the circle

of curious children watching the revolutions of the wheel, appeared to

give him a more vivid sense of active, bustling, and sunshiny existence

than he had attained in almost any other way. Nevertheless, its charm

lay chiefly in the past; for the scissor-grinder’s wheel had hissed in

his childish ears.

He sometimes made doleful complaint that there were no stage-coaches

nowadays. And he asked in an injured tone what had become of all those

old square-topped chaises, with wings sticking out on either side, that

used to be drawn by a plough-horse, and driven by a farmer’s wife and

daughter, peddling whortle-berries and blackberries about the town.

Their disappearance made him doubt, he said, whether the berries had

not left off growing in the broad pastures and along the shady country

lanes.

But anything that appealed to the sense of beauty, in however humble a

way, did not require to be recommended by these old associations. This

was observable when one of those Italian boys (who are rather a modern

feature of our streets) came along with his barrel-organ, and stopped

under the wide and cool shadows of the elm. With his quick professional

eye he took note of the two faces watching him from the arched window,

and, opening his instrument, began to scatter its melodies abroad. He

had a monkey on his shoulder, dressed in a Highland plaid; and, to

complete the sum of splendid attractions wherewith he presented himself

to the public, there was a company of little figures, whose sphere and

habitation was in the mahogany case of his organ, and whose principle

of life was the music which the Italian made it his business to grind

out. In all their variety of occupation,—the cobbler, the blacksmith,

the soldier, the lady with her fan, the toper with his bottle, the

milk-maid sitting by her cow—this fortunate little society might truly

be said to enjoy a harmonious existence, and to make life literally a

dance. The Italian turned a crank; and, behold! every one of these

small individuals started into the most curious vivacity. The cobbler

wrought upon a shoe; the blacksmith hammered his iron, the soldier

waved his glittering blade; the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan;

the jolly toper swigged lustily at his bottle; a scholar opened his

book with eager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to and fro

along the page; the milkmaid energetically drained her cow; and a miser

counted gold into his strong-box,—all at the same turning of a crank.

Yes; and, moved by the self-same impulse, a lover saluted his mistress

on her lips! Possibly some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired

to signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our

business or amusement,—however serious, however trifling,—all dance to

one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring

nothing finally to pass. For the most remarkable aspect of the affair

was, that, at the cessation of the music, everybody was petrified at

once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor. Neither was

the cobbler’s shoe finished, nor the blacksmith’s iron shaped out; nor

was there a drop less of brandy in the toper’s bottle, nor a drop more

of milk in the milkmaid’s pail, nor one additional coin in the miser’s

strong-box, nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book. All were

precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so

ridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to

become wise. Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier

for the maiden’s granted kiss! But, rather than swallow this last too

acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show.

The monkey, meanwhile, with a thick tail curling out into preposterous

prolixity from beneath his tartans, took his station at the Italian’s

feet. He turned a wrinkled and abominable little visage to every

passer-by, and to the circle of children that soon gathered round, and

to Hepzibah’s shop-door, and upward to the arched window, whence Phœbe

and Clifford were looking down. Every moment, also, he took off his

Highland bonnet, and performed a bow and scrape. Sometimes, moreover,

he made personal application to individuals, holding out his small

black palm, and otherwise plainly signifying his excessive desire for

whatever filthy lucre might happen to be in anybody’s pocket. The mean

and low, yet strangely man-like expression of his wilted countenance;

the prying and crafty glance, that showed him ready to gripe at every

miserable advantage; his enormous tail (too enormous to be decently

concealed under his gabardine), and the deviltry of nature which it

betokened,—take this monkey just as he was, in short, and you could

desire no better image of the Mammon of copper coin, symbolizing the

grossest form of the love of money. Neither was there any possibility

of satisfying the covetous little devil. Phœbe threw down a whole

handful of cents, which he picked up with joyless eagerness, handed

them over to the Italian for safekeeping, and immediately recommenced a

series of pantomimic petitions for more.

Doubtless, more than one New-Englander—or, let him be of what country

he might, it is as likely to be the case—passed by, and threw a look at

the monkey, and went on, without imagining how nearly his own moral

condition was here exemplified. Clifford, however, was a being of

another order. He had taken childish delight in the music, and smiled,

too, at the figures which it set in motion. But, after looking awhile

at the long-tailed imp, he was so shocked by his horrible ugliness,

spiritual as well as physical, that he actually began to shed tears; a

weakness which men of merely delicate endowments, and destitute of the

fiercer, deeper, and more tragic power of laughter, can hardly avoid,

when the worst and meanest aspect of life happens to be presented to

them.

Pyncheon Street was sometimes enlivened by spectacles of more imposing

pretensions than the above, and which brought the multitude along with

them. With a shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact with

the world, a powerful impulse still seized on Clifford, whenever the

rush and roar of the human tide grew strongly audible to him. This was

made evident, one day, when a political procession, with hundreds of

flaunting banners, and drums, fifes, clarions, and cymbals,

reverberating between the rows of buildings, marched all through town,

and trailed its length of trampling footsteps, and most infrequent

uproar, past the ordinarily quiet House of the Seven Gables. As a mere

object of sight, nothing is more deficient in picturesque features than

a procession seen in its passage through narrow streets. The spectator

feels it to be fool’s play, when he can distinguish the tedious

commonplace of each man’s visage, with the perspiration and weary

self-importance on it, and the very cut of his pantaloons, and the

stiffness or laxity of his shirt-collar, and the dust on the back of

his black coat. In order to become majestic, it should be viewed from

some vantage point, as it rolls its slow and long array through the

centre of a wide plain, or the stateliest public square of a city; for

then, by its remoteness, it melts all the petty personalities, of which

it is made up, into one broad mass of existence,—one great life,—one

collected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animating

it. But, on the other hand, if an impressible person, standing alone

over the brink of one of these processions, should behold it, not in

its atoms, but in its aggregate,—as a mighty river of life, massive in

its tide, and black with mystery, and, out of its depths, calling to

the kindred depth within him,—then the contiguity would add to the

effect. It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained

from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies.

So it proved with Clifford. He shuddered; he grew pale; he threw an

appealing look at Hepzibah and Phœbe, who were with him at the window.

They comprehended nothing of his emotions, and supposed him merely

disturbed by the unaccustomed tumult. At last, with tremulous limbs, he

started up, set his foot on the window-sill, and in an instant more

would have been in the unguarded balcony. As it was, the whole

procession might have seen him, a wild, haggard figure, his gray locks

floating in the wind that waved their banners; a lonely being,

estranged from his race, but now feeling himself man again, by virtue

of the irrepressible instinct that possessed him. Had Clifford attained

the balcony, he would probably have leaped into the street; but whether

impelled by the species of terror that sometimes urges its victim over

the very precipice which he shrinks from, or by a natural magnetism,

tending towards the great centre of humanity, it were not easy to

decide. Both impulses might have wrought on him at once.

But his companions, affrighted by his gesture,—which was that of a man

hurried away in spite of himself,—seized Clifford’s garment and held

him back. Hepzibah shrieked. Phœbe, to whom all extravagance was a

horror, burst into sobs and tears.

“Clifford, Clifford! are you crazy?” cried his sister.

“I hardly know, Hepzibah,” said Clifford, drawing a long breath. “Fear

nothing,—it is over now,—but had I taken that plunge, and survived it,

methinks it would have made me another man!”

Possibly, in some sense, Clifford may have been right. He needed a

shock; or perhaps he required to take a deep, deep plunge into the

ocean of human life, and to sink down and be covered by its

profoundness, and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to the

world and to himself. Perhaps again, he required nothing less than the

great final remedy—death!

A similar yearning to renew the broken links of brotherhood with his

kind sometimes showed itself in a milder form; and once it was made

beautiful by the religion that lay even deeper than itself. In the

incident now to be sketched, there was a touching recognition, on

Clifford’s part, of God’s care and love towards him,—towards this poor,

forsaken man, who, if any mortal could, might have been pardoned for

regarding himself as thrown aside, forgotten, and left to be the sport

of some fiend, whose playfulness was an ecstasy of mischief.

It was the Sabbath morning; one of those bright, calm Sabbaths, with

its own hallowed atmosphere, when Heaven seems to diffuse itself over

the earth’s face in a solemn smile, no less sweet than solemn. On such

a Sabbath morn, were we pure enough to be its medium, we should be

conscious of the earth’s natural worship ascending through our frames,

on whatever spot of ground we stood. The church-bells, with various

tones, but all in harmony, were calling out and responding to one

another,—“It is the Sabbath!—The Sabbath!—Yea; the Sabbath!”—and over

the whole city the bells scattered the blessed sounds, now slowly, now

with livelier joy, now one bell alone, now all the bells together,

crying earnestly,—“It is the Sabbath!”—and flinging their accents afar

off, to melt into the air and pervade it with the holy word. The air

with God’s sweetest and tenderest sunshine in it, was meet for mankind

to breathe into their hearts, and send it forth again as the utterance

of prayer.

Clifford sat at the window with Hepzibah, watching the neighbors as

they stepped into the street. All of them, however unspiritual on other

days, were transfigured by the Sabbath influence; so that their very

garments—whether it were an old man’s decent coat well brushed for the

thousandth time, or a little boy’s first sack and trousers finished

yesterday by his mother’s needle—had somewhat of the quality of

ascension-robes. Forth, likewise, from the portal of the old house

stepped Phœbe, putting up her small green sunshade, and throwing upward

a glance and smile of parting kindness to the faces at the arched

window. In her aspect there was a familiar gladness, and a holiness

that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as ever. She was

like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of one’s

mother-tongue. Fresh was Phœbe, moreover, and airy and sweet in her

apparel; as if nothing that she wore—neither her gown, nor her small

straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowy

stockings—had ever been put on before; or, if worn, were all the

fresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the

rosebuds.

The girl waved her hand to Hepzibah and Clifford, and went up the

street; a religion in herself, warm, simple, true, with a substance

that could walk on earth, and a spirit that was capable of heaven.

“Hepzibah,” asked Clifford, after watching Phœbe to the corner, “do you

never go to church?”

“No, Clifford!” she replied,—“not these many, many years!”

“Were I to be there,” he rejoined, “it seems to me that I could pray

once more, when so many human souls were praying all around me!”

She looked into Clifford’s face, and beheld there a soft natural

effusion; for his heart gushed out, as it were, and ran over at his

eyes, in delightful reverence for God, and kindly affection for his

human brethren. The emotion communicated itself to Hepzibah. She

yearned to take him by the hand, and go and kneel down, they two

together,—both so long separate from the world, and, as she now

recognized, scarcely friends with Him above,—to kneel down among the

people, and be reconciled to God and man at once.

“Dear brother,” said she earnestly, “let us go! We belong nowhere. We

have not a foot of space in any church to kneel upon; but let us go to

some place of worship, even if we stand in the broad aisle. Poor and

forsaken as we are, some pew-door will be opened to us!”

So Hepzibah and her brother made themselves, ready—as ready as they

could in the best of their old-fashioned garments, which had hung on

pegs, or been laid away in trunks, so long that the dampness and mouldy

smell of the past was on them,—made themselves ready, in their faded

bettermost, to go to church. They descended the staircase

together,—gaunt, sallow Hepzibah, and pale, emaciated, age-stricken

Clifford! They pulled open the front door, and stepped across the

threshold, and felt, both of them, as if they were standing in the

presence of the whole world, and with mankind’s great and terrible eye

on them alone. The eye of their Father seemed to be withdrawn, and gave

them no encouragement. The warm sunny air of the street made them

shiver. Their hearts quaked within them at the idea of taking one step

farther.

“It cannot be, Hepzibah!—it is too late,” said Clifford with deep

sadness. “We are ghosts! We have no right among human beings,—no right

anywhere but in this old house, which has a curse on it, and which,

therefore, we are doomed to haunt! And, besides,” he continued, with a

fastidious sensibility, inalienably characteristic of the man, “it

would not be fit nor beautiful to go! It is an ugly thought that I

should be frightful to my fellow-beings, and that children would cling

to their mothers’ gowns at sight of me!”

They shrank back into the dusky passage-way, and closed the door. But,

going up the staircase again, they found the whole interior of the

house tenfold more dismal, and the air closer and heavier, for the

glimpse and breath of freedom which they had just snatched. They could

not flee; their jailer had but left the door ajar in mockery, and stood

behind it to watch them stealing out. At the threshold, they felt his

pitiless gripe upon them. For, what other dungeon is so dark as one’s

own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!

But it would be no fair picture of Clifford’s state of mind were we to

represent him as continually or prevailingly wretched. On the contrary,

there was no other man in the city, we are bold to affirm, of so much

as half his years, who enjoyed so many lightsome and griefless moments

as himself. He had no burden of care upon him; there were none of those

questions and contingencies with the future to be settled which wear

away all other lives, and render them not worth having by the very

process of providing for their support. In this respect he was a

child,—a child for the whole term of his existence, be it long or

short. Indeed, his life seemed to be standing still at a period little

in advance of childhood, and to cluster all his reminiscences about

that epoch; just as, after the torpor of a heavy blow, the sufferer’s

reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerably behind the

accident that stupefied him. He sometimes told Phœbe and Hepzibah his

dreams, in which he invariably played the part of a child, or a very

young man. So vivid were they, in his relation of them, that he once

held a dispute with his sister as to the particular figure or print of

a chintz morning-dress which he had seen their mother wear, in the

dream of the preceding night. Hepzibah, piquing herself on a woman’s

accuracy in such matters, held it to be slightly different from what

Clifford described; but, producing the very gown from an old trunk, it

proved to be identical with his remembrance of it. Had Clifford, every

time that he emerged out of dreams so lifelike, undergone the torture

of transformation from a boy into an old and broken man, the daily

recurrence of the shock would have been too much to bear. It would have

caused an acute agony to thrill from the morning twilight, all the day

through, until bedtime; and even then would have mingled a dull,

inscrutable pain and pallid hue of misfortune with the visionary bloom

and adolescence of his slumber. But the nightly moonshine interwove

itself with the morning mist, and enveloped him as in a robe, which he

hugged about his person, and seldom let realities pierce through; he

was not often quite awake, but slept open-eyed, and perhaps fancied

himself most dreaming then.

Thus, lingering always so near his childhood, he had sympathies with

children, and kept his heart the fresher thereby, like a reservoir into

which rivulets were pouring not far from the fountain-head. Though

prevented, by a subtile sense of propriety, from desiring to associate

with them, he loved few things better than to look out of the arched

window and see a little girl driving her hoop along the sidewalk, or

schoolboys at a game of ball. Their voices, also, were very pleasant to

him, heard at a distance, all swarming and intermingling together as

flies do in a sunny room.

Clifford would, doubtless, have been glad to share their sports. One

afternoon he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow

soap-bubbles; an amusement, as Hepzibah told Phœbe apart, that had been

a favorite one with her brother when they were both children. Behold

him, therefore, at the arched window, with an earthen pipe in his

mouth! Behold him, with his gray hair, and a wan, unreal smile over his

countenance, where still hovered a beautiful grace, which his worst

enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal, since it had

survived so long! Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad from the

window into the street! Little impalpable worlds were those

soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as

imagination, on the nothing of their surface. It was curious to see how

the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they came

floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them.

Some stopped to gaze, and perhaps, carried a pleasant recollection of

the bubbles onward as far as the street-corner; some looked angrily

upward, as if poor Clifford wronged them by setting an image of beauty

afloat so near their dusty pathway. A great many put out their fingers

or their walking-sticks to touch, withal; and were perversely

gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth and

sky scene, vanished as if it had never been.

At length, just as an elderly gentleman of very dignified presence

happened to be passing, a large bubble sailed majestically down, and

burst right against his nose! He looked up,—at first with a stern, keen

glance, which penetrated at once into the obscurity behind the arched

window,—then with a smile which might be conceived as diffusing a

dog-day sultriness for the space of several yards about him.

“Aha, Cousin Clifford!” cried Judge Pyncheon. “What! Still blowing

soap-bubbles!”

The tone seemed as if meant to be kind and soothing, but yet had a

bitterness of sarcasm in it. As for Clifford, an absolute palsy of fear

came over him. Apart from any definite cause of dread which his past

experience might have given him, he felt that native and original

horror of the excellent Judge which is proper to a weak, delicate, and

apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength. Strength is

incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible. There

is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle of

his own connections.

XII.

The Daguerreotypist

It must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so

active as Phœbe could be wholly confined within the precincts of the

old Pyncheon House. Clifford’s demands upon her time were usually

satisfied, in those long days, considerably earlier than sunset. Quiet

as his daily existence seemed, it nevertheless drained all the

resources by which he lived. It was not physical exercise that

overwearied him,—for except that he sometimes wrought a little with a

hoe, or paced the garden-walk, or, in rainy weather, traversed a large

unoccupied room,—it was his tendency to remain only too quiescent, as

regarded any toil of the limbs and muscles. But, either there was a

smouldering fire within him that consumed his vital energy, or the

monotony that would have dragged itself with benumbing effect over a

mind differently situated was no monotony to Clifford. Possibly, he was

in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly

assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights,

sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more

practised with the world. As all is activity and vicissitude to the new

mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had undergone

a kind of new creation, after its long-suspended life.

Be the cause what it might, Clifford commonly retired to rest,

thoroughly exhausted, while the sunbeams were still melting through his

window-curtains, or were thrown with late lustre on the chamber wall.

And while he thus slept early, as other children do, and dreamed of

childhood, Phœbe was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder of

the day and evening.

This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so

little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phœbe. The old

house, as we have already said, had both the dry-rot and the damp-rot

in its walls; it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere than that.

Hepzibah, though she had her valuable and redeeming traits, had grown

to be a kind of lunatic by imprisoning herself so long in one place,

with no other company than a single series of ideas, and but one

affection, and one bitter sense of wrong. Clifford, the reader may

perhaps imagine, was too inert to operate morally on his

fellow-creatures, however intimate and exclusive their relations with

him. But the sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtile

and universal than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes

of organized life, and vibrates from one to another. A flower, for

instance, as Phœbe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in

Clifford’s hand, or Hepzibah’s, than in her own; and by the same law,

converting her whole daily life into a flower fragrance for these two

sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much

sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast. Unless she had now

and then indulged her brisk impulses, and breathed rural air in a

suburban walk, or ocean breezes along the shore,—had occasionally

obeyed the impulse of Nature, in New England girls, by attending a

metaphysical or philosophical lecture, or viewing a seven-mile

panorama, or listening to a concert,—had gone shopping about the city,

ransacking entire depots of splendid merchandise, and bringing home a

ribbon,—had employed, likewise, a little time to read the Bible in her

chamber, and had stolen a little more to think of her mother and her

native place—unless for such moral medicines as the above, we should

soon have beheld our poor Phœbe grow thin and put on a bleached,

unwholesome aspect, and assume strange, shy ways, prophetic of

old-maidenhood and a cheerless future.

Even as it was, a change grew visible; a change partly to be regretted,

although whatever charm it infringed upon was repaired by another,

perhaps more precious. She was not so constantly gay, but had her moods

of thought, which Clifford, on the whole, liked better than her former

phase of unmingled cheerfulness; because now she understood him better

and more delicately, and sometimes even interpreted him to himself. Her

eyes looked larger, and darker, and deeper; so deep, at some silent

moments, that they seemed like Artesian wells, down, down, into the

infinite. She was less girlish than when we first beheld her alighting

from the omnibus; less girlish, but more a woman.

The only youthful mind with which Phœbe had an opportunity of frequent

intercourse was that of the daguerreotypist. Inevitably, by the

pressure of the seclusion about them, they had been brought into habits

of some familiarity. Had they met under different circumstances,

neither of these young persons would have been likely to bestow much

thought upon the other, unless, indeed, their extreme dissimilarity

should have proved a principle of mutual attraction. Both, it is true,

were characters proper to New England life, and possessing a common

ground, therefore, in their more external developments; but as unlike,

in their respective interiors, as if their native climes had been at

world-wide distance. During the early part of their acquaintance, Phœbe

had held back rather more than was customary with her frank and simple

manners from Holgrave’s not very marked advances. Nor was she yet

satisfied that she knew him well, although they almost daily met and

talked together, in a kind, friendly, and what seemed to be a familiar

way.

The artist, in a desultory manner, had imparted to Phœbe something of

his history. Young as he was, and had his career terminated at the

point already attained, there had been enough of incident to fill, very

creditably, an autobiographic volume. A romance on the plan of Gil

Blas, adapted to American society and manners, would cease to be a

romance. The experience of many individuals among us, who think it

hardly worth the telling, would equal the vicissitudes of the

Spaniard’s earlier life; while their ultimate success, or the point

whither they tend, may be incomparably higher than any that a novelist

would imagine for his hero. Holgrave, as he told Phœbe somewhat

proudly, could not boast of his origin, unless as being exceedingly

humble, nor of his education, except that it had been the scantiest

possible, and obtained by a few winter-months’ attendance at a district

school. Left early to his own guidance, he had begun to be

self-dependent while yet a boy; and it was a condition aptly suited to

his natural force of will. Though now but twenty-two years old (lacking

some months, which are years in such a life), he had already been,

first, a country schoolmaster; next, a salesman in a country store;

and, either at the same time or afterwards, the political editor of a

country newspaper. He had subsequently travelled New England and the

Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut

manufactory of cologne-water and other essences. In an episodical way

he had studied and practised dentistry, and with very flattering

success, especially in many of the factory-towns along our inland

streams. As a supernumerary official, of some kind or other, aboard a

packet-ship, he had visited Europe, and found means, before his return,

to see Italy, and part of France and Germany. At a later period he had

spent some months in a community of Fourierists. Still more recently he

had been a public lecturer on Mesmerism, for which science (as he

assured Phœbe, and, indeed, satisfactorily proved, by putting

Chanticleer, who happened to be scratching near by, to sleep) he had

very remarkable endowments.

His present phase, as a daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in

his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the

preceding ones. It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an

adventurer, who had his bread to earn. It would be thrown aside as

carelessly, whenever he should choose to earn his bread by some other

equally digressive means. But what was most remarkable, and, perhaps,

showed a more than common poise in the young man, was the fact that,

amid all these personal vicissitudes, he had never lost his identity.

Homeless as he had been,—continually changing his whereabout, and,

therefore, responsible neither to public opinion nor to

individuals,—putting off one exterior, and snatching up another, to be

soon shifted for a third,—he had never violated the innermost man, but

had carried his conscience along with him. It was impossible to know

Holgrave without recognizing this to be the fact. Hepzibah had seen it.

Phœbe soon saw it likewise, and gave him the sort of confidence which

such a certainty inspires. She was startled, however, and sometimes

repelled,—not by any doubt of his integrity to whatever law he

acknowledged, but by a sense that his law differed from her own. He

made her uneasy, and seemed to unsettle everything around her, by his

lack of reverence for what was fixed, unless, at a moment’s warning, it

could establish its right to hold its ground.

Then, moreover, she scarcely thought him affectionate in his nature. He

was too calm and cool an observer. Phœbe felt his eye, often; his

heart, seldom or never. He took a certain kind of interest in Hepzibah

and her brother, and Phœbe herself. He studied them attentively, and

allowed no slightest circumstance of their individualities to escape

him. He was ready to do them whatever good he might; but, after all, he

never exactly made common cause with them, nor gave any reliable

evidence that he loved them better in proportion as he knew them more.

In his relations with them, he seemed to be in quest of mental food,

not heart-sustenance. Phœbe could not conceive what interested him so

much in her friends and herself, intellectually, since he cared nothing

for them, or, comparatively, so little, as objects of human affection.

Always, in his interviews with Phœbe, the artist made especial inquiry

as to the welfare of Clifford, whom, except at the Sunday festival, he

seldom saw.

“Does he still seem happy?” he asked one day.

“As happy as a child,” answered Phœbe; “but—like a child, too—very

easily disturbed.”

“How disturbed?” inquired Holgrave. “By things without, or by thoughts

within?”

“I cannot see his thoughts! How should I?” replied Phœbe with simple

piquancy. “Very often his humor changes without any reason that can be

guessed at, just as a cloud comes over the sun. Latterly, since I have

begun to know him better, I feel it to be not quite right to look

closely into his moods. He has had such a great sorrow, that his heart

is made all solemn and sacred by it. When he is cheerful,—when the sun

shines into his mind,—then I venture to peep in, just as far as the

light reaches, but no further. It is holy ground where the shadow

falls!”

“How prettily you express this sentiment!” said the artist. “I can

understand the feeling, without possessing it. Had I your

opportunities, no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to

the full depth of my plummet-line!”

“How strange that you should wish it!” remarked Phœbe involuntarily.

“What is Cousin Clifford to you?”

“Oh, nothing,—of course, nothing!” answered Holgrave with a smile.

“Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible world! The more I look

at it, the more it puzzles me, and I begin to suspect that a man’s

bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom. Men and women, and children,

too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be certain that he

really knows them; nor ever guess what they have been from what he sees

them to be now. Judge Pyncheon! Clifford! What a complex riddle—a

complexity of complexities—do they present! It requires intuitive

sympathy, like a young girl’s, to solve it. A mere observer, like

myself (who never have any intuitions, and am, at best, only subtile

and acute), is pretty certain to go astray.”

The artist now turned the conversation to themes less dark than that

which they had touched upon. Phœbe and he were young together; nor had

Holgrave, in his premature experience of life, wasted entirely that

beautiful spirit of youth, which, gushing forth from one small heart

and fancy, may diffuse itself over the universe, making it all as

bright as on the first day of creation. Man’s own youth is the world’s

youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth’s

granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould

into whatever shape he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk

sagely about the world’s old age, but never actually believed what he

said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the

world—that gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without

being venerable—as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into

all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest

promise of becoming. He had that sense, or inward prophecy,—which a

young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a

mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,—that we

are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this

very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be

accomplished in his own lifetime. It seemed to Holgrave,—as doubtless

it has seemed to the hopeful of every century since the epoch of Adam’s

grandchildren,—that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown

and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be

thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to

begin anew.

As to the main point,—may we never live to doubt it!—as to the better

centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right. His error lay

in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is

destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new

suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in

applying his own little life-span as the measure of an interminable

achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything

to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or

against it. Yet it was well for him to think so. This enthusiasm,

infusing itself through the calmness of his character, and thus taking

an aspect of settled thought and wisdom, would serve to keep his youth

pure, and make his aspirations high. And when, with the years settling

down more weightily upon him, his early faith should be modified by

inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution

of his sentiments. He would still have faith in man’s brightening

destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he should recognize

his helplessness in his own behalf; and the haughty faith, with which

he began life, would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its

close, in discerning that man’s best directed effort accomplishes a

kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities.

Holgrave had read very little, and that little in passing through the

thoroughfare of life, where the mystic language of his books was

necessarily mixed up with the babble of the multitude, so that both one

and the other were apt to lose any sense that might have been properly

their own. He considered himself a thinker, and was certainly of a

thoughtful turn, but, with his own path to discover, had perhaps hardly

yet reached the point where an educated man begins to think. The true

value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward

strength, which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely like a

change of garments; in that enthusiasm, so quiet that he scarcely knew

of its existence, but which gave a warmth to everything that he laid

his hand on; in that personal ambition, hidden—from his own as well as

other eyes—among his more generous impulses, but in which lurked a

certain efficacy, that might solidify him from a theorist into the

champion of some practicable cause. Altogether in his culture and want

of culture,—in his crude, wild, and misty philosophy, and the practical

experience that counteracted some of its tendencies; in his magnanimous

zeal for man’s welfare, and his recklessness of whatever the ages had

established in man’s behalf; in his faith, and in his infidelity; in

what he had, and in what he lacked,—the artist might fitly enough stand

forth as the representative of many compeers in his native land.

His career it would be difficult to prefigure. There appeared to be

qualities in Holgrave, such as, in a country where everything is free

to the hand that can grasp it, could hardly fail to put some of the

world’s prizes within his reach. But these matters are delightfully

uncertain. At almost every step in life, we meet with young men of just

about Holgrave’s age, for whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of

whom, even after much and careful inquiry, we never happen to hear

another word. The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh

gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false

brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves and other people. Like

certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely in their

first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very

sober aspect after washing-day.

But our business is with Holgrave as we find him on this particular

afternoon, and in the arbor of the Pyncheon garden. In that point of

view, it was a pleasant sight to behold this young man, with so much

faith in himself, and so fair an appearance of admirable powers,—so

little harmed, too, by the many tests that had tried his metal,—it was

pleasant to see him in his kindly intercourse with Phœbe. Her thought

had scarcely done him justice when it pronounced him cold; or, if so,

he had grown warmer now. Without such purpose on her part, and

unconsciously on his, she made the House of the Seven Gables like a

home to him, and the garden a familiar precinct. With the insight on

which he prided himself, he fancied that he could look through Phœbe,

and all around her, and could read her off like a page of a child’s

story-book. But these transparent natures are often deceptive in their

depth; those pebbles at the bottom of the fountain are farther from us

than we think. Thus the artist, whatever he might judge of Phœbe’s

capacity, was beguiled, by some silent charm of hers, to talk freely of

what he dreamed of doing in the world. He poured himself out as to

another self. Very possibly, he forgot Phœbe while he talked to her,

and was moved only by the inevitable tendency of thought, when rendered

sympathetic by enthusiasm and emotion, to flow into the first safe

reservoir which it finds. But, had you peeped at them through the

chinks of the garden-fence, the young man’s earnestness and heightened

color might have led you to suppose that he was making love to the

young girl!

At length, something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for

Phœbe to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin

Hepzibah, and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old Pyncheon

House. Without directly answering her, he turned from the Future, which

had heretofore been the theme of his discourse, and began to speak of

the influences of the Past. One subject, indeed, is but the

reverberation of the other.

“Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?” cried he, keeping up the

earnest tone of his preceding conversation. “It lies upon the Present

like a giant’s dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant

were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse

of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only

needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle

you to see what slaves we are to bygone times,—to Death, if we give the

matter the right word!”

“But I do not see it,” observed Phœbe.

“For example, then,” continued Holgrave: “a dead man, if he happens to

have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die

intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much

longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and

living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in

dead men’s books! We laugh at dead men’s jokes, and cry at dead men’s

pathos! We are sick of dead men’s diseases, physical and moral, and die

of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We

worship the living Deity according to dead men’s forms and creeds.

Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man’s icy hand

obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man’s white,

immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we

must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence

on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world

of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to

interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men’s

houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!”

“And why not,” said Phœbe, “so long as we can be comfortable in them?”

“But we shall live to see the day, I trust,” went on the artist, “when

no man shall build his house for posterity. Why should he? He might

just as reasonably order a durable suit of clothes,—leather, or

guttapercha, or whatever else lasts longest,—so that his

great-grandchildren should have the benefit of them, and cut precisely

the same figure in the world that he himself does. If each generation

were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change,

comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform

which society is now suffering for. I doubt whether even our public

edifices—our capitols, state-houses, court-houses, city-hall, and

churches,—ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or

brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty

years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and

reform the institutions which they symbolize.”

“How you hate everything old!” said Phœbe in dismay. “It makes me dizzy

to think of such a shifting world!”

“I certainly love nothing mouldy,” answered Holgrave. “Now, this old

Pyncheon House! Is it a wholesome place to live in, with its black

shingles, and the green moss that shows how damp they are?—its dark,

low-studded rooms—its grime and sordidness, which are the

crystallization on its walls of the human breath, that has been drawn

and exhaled here in discontent and anguish? The house ought to be

purified with fire,—purified till only its ashes remain!”

“Then why do you live in it?” asked Phœbe, a little piqued.

“Oh, I am pursuing my studies here; not in books, however,” replied

Holgrave. “The house, in my view, is expressive of that odious and

abominable Past, with all its bad influences, against which I have just

been declaiming. I dwell in it for a while, that I may know the better

how to hate it. By the bye, did you ever hear the story of Maule, the

wizard, and what happened between him and your immeasurably

great-grandfather?”

“Yes, indeed!” said Phœbe; “I heard it long ago, from my father, and

two or three times from my cousin Hepzibah, in the month that I have

been here. She seems to think that all the calamities of the Pyncheons

began from that quarrel with the wizard, as you call him. And you, Mr.

Holgrave look as if you thought so too! How singular that you should

believe what is so very absurd, when you reject many things that are a

great deal worthier of credit!”

“I do believe it,” said the artist seriously; “not as a superstition,

however, but as proved by unquestionable facts, and as exemplifying a

theory. Now, see: under those seven gables, at which we now look

up,—and which old Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the house of his

descendants, in prosperity and happiness, down to an epoch far beyond

the present,—under that roof, through a portion of three centuries,

there has been perpetual remorse of conscience, a constantly defeated

hope, strife amongst kindred, various misery, a strange form of death,

dark suspicion, unspeakable disgrace,—all, or most of which calamity I

have the means of tracing to the old Puritan’s inordinate desire to

plant and endow a family. To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom

of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that,

once in every half-century, at longest, a family should be merged into

the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its

ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in

hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean

pipes. In the family existence of these Pyncheons, for

instance,—forgive me, Phœbe, but I cannot think of you as one of

them,—in their brief New England pedigree, there has been time enough

to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another.”

“You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred,” said Phœbe, debating

with herself whether she ought to take offence.

“I speak true thoughts to a true mind!” answered Holgrave, with a

vehemence which Phœbe had not before witnessed in him. “The truth is as

I say! Furthermore, the original perpetrator and father of this

mischief appears to have perpetuated himself, and still walks the

street,—at least, his very image, in mind and body,—with the fairest

prospect of transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched an

inheritance as he has received! Do you remember the daguerreotype, and

its resemblance to the old portrait?”

“How strangely in earnest you are!” exclaimed Phœbe, looking at him

with surprise and perplexity; half alarmed and partly inclined to

laugh. “You talk of the lunacy of the Pyncheons; is it contagious?”

“I understand you!” said the artist, coloring and laughing. “I believe

I am a little mad. This subject has taken hold of my mind with the

strangest tenacity of clutch since I have lodged in yonder old gable.

As one method of throwing it off, I have put an incident of the

Pyncheon family history, with which I happen to be acquainted, into the

form of a legend, and mean to publish it in a magazine.”

“Do you write for the magazines?” inquired Phœbe.

“Is it possible you did not know it?” cried Holgrave. “Well, such is

literary fame! Yes. Miss Phœbe Pyncheon, among the multitude of my

marvellous gifts I have that of writing stories; and my name has

figured, I can assure you, on the covers of Graham and Godey, making as

respectable an appearance, for aught I could see, as any of the

canonized bead-roll with which it was associated. In the humorous line,

I am thought to have a very pretty way with me; and as for pathos, I am

as provocative of tears as an onion. But shall I read you my story?”

“Yes, if it is not very long,” said Phœbe,—and added laughingly,—“nor

very dull.”

As this latter point was one which the daguerreotypist could not decide

for himself, he forthwith produced his roll of manuscript, and, while

the late sunbeams gilded the seven gables, began to read.

XIII.

Alice Pyncheon

There was a message brought, one day, from the worshipful Gervayse

Pyncheon to young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, desiring his immediate

presence at the House of the Seven Gables.

“And what does your master want with me?” said the carpenter to Mr.

Pyncheon’s black servant. “Does the house need any repair? Well it may,

by this time; and no blame to my father who built it, neither! I was

reading the old Colonel’s tombstone, no longer ago than last Sabbath;

and, reckoning from that date, the house has stood seven-and-thirty

years. No wonder if there should be a job to do on the roof.”

“Don’t know what massa wants,” answered Scipio. “The house is a berry

good house, and old Colonel Pyncheon think so too, I reckon;—else why

the old man haunt it so, and frighten a poor nigga, as he does?”

“Well, well, friend Scipio; let your master know that I’m coming,” said

the carpenter with a laugh. “For a fair, workmanlike job, he’ll find me

his man. And so the house is haunted, is it? It will take a tighter

workman than I am to keep the spirits out of the Seven Gables. Even if

the Colonel would be quiet,” he added, muttering to himself, “my old

grandfather, the wizard, will be pretty sure to stick to the Pyncheons

as long as their walls hold together.”

“What’s that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule?” asked Scipio. “And

what for do you look so black at me?”

“No matter, darky,” said the carpenter. “Do you think nobody is to look

black but yourself? Go tell your master I’m coming; and if you happen

to see Mistress Alice, his daughter, give Matthew Maule’s humble

respects to her. She has brought a fair face from Italy,—fair, and

gentle, and proud,—has that same Alice Pyncheon!”

“He talk of Mistress Alice!” cried Scipio, as he returned from his

errand. “The low carpenter-man! He no business so much as to look at

her a great way off!”

This young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, it must be observed, was a

person little understood, and not very generally liked, in the town

where he resided; not that anything could be alleged against his

integrity, or his skill and diligence in the handicraft which he

exercised. The aversion (as it might justly be called) with which many

persons regarded him was partly the result of his own character and

deportment, and partly an inheritance.

He was the grandson of a former Matthew Maule, one of the early

settlers of the town, and who had been a famous and terrible wizard in

his day. This old reprobate was one of the sufferers when Cotton

Mather, and his brother ministers, and the learned judges, and other

wise men, and Sir William Phipps, the sagacious governor, made such

laudable efforts to weaken the great enemy of souls, by sending a

multitude of his adherents up the rocky pathway of Gallows Hill. Since

those days, no doubt, it had grown to be suspected that, in consequence

of an unfortunate overdoing of a work praiseworthy in itself, the

proceedings against the witches had proved far less acceptable to the

Beneficent Father than to that very Arch Enemy whom they were intended

to distress and utterly overwhelm. It is not the less certain, however,

that awe and terror brooded over the memories of those who died for

this horrible crime of witchcraft. Their graves, in the crevices of the

rocks, were supposed to be incapable of retaining the occupants who had

been so hastily thrust into them. Old Matthew Maule, especially, was

known to have as little hesitation or difficulty in rising out of his

grave as an ordinary man in getting out of bed, and was as often seen

at midnight as living people at noonday. This pestilent wizard (in whom

his just punishment seemed to have wrought no manner of amendment) had

an inveterate habit of haunting a certain mansion, styled the House of

the Seven Gables, against the owner of which he pretended to hold an

unsettled claim for ground-rent. The ghost, it appears,—with the

pertinacity which was one of his distinguishing characteristics while

alive,—insisted that he was the rightful proprietor of the site upon

which the house stood. His terms were, that either the aforesaid

ground-rent, from the day when the cellar began to be dug, should be

paid down, or the mansion itself given up; else he, the ghostly

creditor, would have his finger in all the affairs of the Pyncheons,

and make everything go wrong with them, though it should be a thousand

years after his death. It was a wild story, perhaps, but seemed not

altogether so incredible to those who could remember what an inflexibly

obstinate old fellow this wizard Maule had been.

Now, the wizard’s grandson, the young Matthew Maule of our story, was

popularly supposed to have inherited some of his ancestor’s

questionable traits. It is wonderful how many absurdities were

promulgated in reference to the young man. He was fabled, for example,

to have a strange power of getting into people’s dreams, and regulating

matters there according to his own fancy, pretty much like the

stage-manager of a theatre. There was a great deal of talk among the

neighbors, particularly the petticoated ones, about what they called

the witchcraft of Maule’s eye. Some said that he could look into

people’s minds; others, that, by the marvellous power of this eye, he

could draw people into his own mind, or send them, if he pleased, to do

errands to his grandfather, in the spiritual world; others, again, that

it was what is termed an Evil Eye, and possessed the valuable faculty

of blighting corn, and drying children into mummies with the heartburn.

But, after all, what worked most to the young carpenter’s disadvantage

was, first, the reserve and sternness of his natural disposition, and

next, the fact of his not being a church-communicant, and the suspicion

of his holding heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity.

After receiving Mr. Pyncheon’s message, the carpenter merely tarried to

finish a small job, which he happened to have in hand, and then took

his way towards the House of the Seven Gables. This noted edifice,

though its style might be getting a little out of fashion, was still as

respectable a family residence as that of any gentleman in town. The

present owner, Gervayse Pyncheon, was said to have contracted a dislike

to the house, in consequence of a shock to his sensibility, in early

childhood, from the sudden death of his grandfather. In the very act of

running to climb Colonel Pyncheon’s knee, the boy had discovered the

old Puritan to be a corpse. On arriving at manhood, Mr. Pyncheon had

visited England, where he married a lady of fortune, and had

subsequently spent many years, partly in the mother country, and partly

in various cities on the continent of Europe. During this period, the

family mansion had been consigned to the charge of a kinsman, who was

allowed to make it his home for the time being, in consideration of

keeping the premises in thorough repair. So faithfully had this

contract been fulfilled, that now, as the carpenter approached the

house, his practised eye could detect nothing to criticise in its

condition. The peaks of the seven gables rose up sharply; the shingled

roof looked thoroughly water-tight; and the glittering plaster-work

entirely covered the exterior walls, and sparkled in the October sun,

as if it had been new only a week ago.

The house had that pleasant aspect of life which is like the cheery

expression of comfortable activity in the human countenance. You could

see, at once, that there was the stir of a large family within it. A

huge load of oak-wood was passing through the gateway, towards the

outbuildings in the rear; the fat cook—or probably it might be the

housekeeper—stood at the side door, bargaining for some turkeys and

poultry which a countryman had brought for sale. Now and then a

maid-servant, neatly dressed, and now the shining sable face of a

slave, might be seen bustling across the windows, in the lower part of

the house. At an open window of a room in the second story, hanging

over some pots of beautiful and delicate flowers,—exotics, but which

had never known a more genial sunshine than that of the New England

autumn,—was the figure of a young lady, an exotic, like the flowers,

and beautiful and delicate as they. Her presence imparted an

indescribable grace and faint witchery to the whole edifice. In other

respects, it was a substantial, jolly-looking mansion, and seemed fit

to be the residence of a patriarch, who might establish his own

headquarters in the front gable and assign one of the remainder to each

of his six children, while the great chimney in the centre should

symbolize the old fellow’s hospitable heart, which kept them all warm,

and made a great whole of the seven smaller ones.

There was a vertical sundial on the front gable; and as the carpenter

passed beneath it, he looked up and noted the hour.

“Three o’clock!” said he to himself. “My father told me that dial was

put up only an hour before the old Colonel’s death. How truly it has

kept time these seven-and-thirty years past! The shadow creeps and

creeps, and is always looking over the shoulder of the sunshine!”

It might have befitted a craftsman, like Matthew Maule, on being sent

for to a gentleman’s house, to go to the back door, where servants and

work-people were usually admitted; or at least to the side entrance,

where the better class of tradesmen made application. But the carpenter

had a great deal of pride and stiffness in his nature; and, at this

moment, moreover, his heart was bitter with the sense of hereditary

wrong, because he considered the great Pyncheon House to be standing on

soil which should have been his own. On this very site, beside a spring

of delicious water, his grandfather had felled the pine-trees and built

a cottage, in which children had been born to him; and it was only from

a dead man’s stiffened fingers that Colonel Pyncheon had wrested away

the title-deeds. So young Maule went straight to the principal

entrance, beneath a portal of carved oak, and gave such a peal of the

iron knocker that you would have imagined the stern old wizard himself

to be standing at the threshold.

Black Scipio answered the summons in a prodigious hurry; but showed the

whites of his eyes, in amazement on beholding only the carpenter.

“Lord-a-mercy, what a great man he be, this carpenter fellow!” mumbled

Scipio, down in his throat. “Anybody think he beat on the door with his

biggest hammer!”

“Here I am!” said Maule sternly. “Show me the way to your master’s

parlor.”

As he stept into the house, a note of sweet and melancholy music

thrilled and vibrated along the passage-way, proceeding from one of the

rooms above stairs. It was the harpsichord which Alice Pyncheon had

brought with her from beyond the sea. The fair Alice bestowed most of

her maiden leisure between flowers and music, although the former were

apt to droop, and the melodies were often sad. She was of foreign

education, and could not take kindly to the New England modes of life,

in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed.

As Mr. Pyncheon had been impatiently awaiting Maule’s arrival, black

Scipio, of course, lost no time in ushering the carpenter into his

master’s presence. The room in which this gentleman sat was a parlor of

moderate size, looking out upon the garden of the house, and having its

windows partly shadowed by the foliage of fruit-trees. It was Mr.

Pyncheon’s peculiar apartment, and was provided with furniture, in an

elegant and costly style, principally from Paris; the floor (which was

unusual at that day) being covered with a carpet, so skilfully and

richly wrought that it seemed to glow as with living flowers. In one

corner stood a marble woman, to whom her own beauty was the sole and

sufficient garment. Some pictures—that looked old, and had a mellow

tinge diffused through all their artful splendor—hung on the walls.

Near the fireplace was a large and very beautiful cabinet of ebony,

inlaid with ivory; a piece of antique furniture, which Mr. Pyncheon had

bought in Venice, and which he used as the treasure-place for medals,

ancient coins, and whatever small and valuable curiosities he had

picked up on his travels. Through all this variety of decoration,

however, the room showed its original characteristics; its low stud,

its cross-beam, its chimney-piece, with the old-fashioned Dutch tiles;

so that it was the emblem of a mind industriously stored with foreign

ideas, and elaborated into artificial refinement, but neither larger,

nor, in its proper self, more elegant than before.

There were two objects that appeared rather out of place in this very

handsomely furnished room. One was a large map, or surveyor’s plan, of

a tract of land, which looked as if it had been drawn a good many years

ago, and was now dingy with smoke, and soiled, here and there, with the

touch of fingers. The other was a portrait of a stern old man, in a

Puritan garb, painted roughly, but with a bold effect, and a remarkably

strong expression of character.

At a small table, before a fire of English sea-coal, sat Mr. Pyncheon,

sipping coffee, which had grown to be a very favorite beverage with him

in France. He was a middle-aged and really handsome man, with a wig

flowing down upon his shoulders; his coat was of blue velvet, with lace

on the borders and at the button-holes; and the firelight glistened on

the spacious breadth of his waistcoat, which was flowered all over with

gold. On the entrance of Scipio, ushering in the carpenter, Mr.

Pyncheon turned partly round, but resumed his former position, and

proceeded deliberately to finish his cup of coffee, without immediate

notice of the guest whom he had summoned to his presence. It was not

that he intended any rudeness or improper neglect,—which, indeed, he

would have blushed to be guilty of,—but it never occurred to him that a

person in Maule’s station had a claim on his courtesy, or would trouble

himself about it one way or the other.

The carpenter, however, stepped at once to the hearth, and turned

himself about, so as to look Mr. Pyncheon in the face.

“You sent for me,” said he. “Be pleased to explain your business, that

I may go back to my own affairs.”

“Ah! excuse me,” said Mr. Pyncheon quietly. “I did not mean to tax your

time without a recompense. Your name, I think, is Maule,—Thomas or

Matthew Maule,—a son or grandson of the builder of this house?”

“Matthew Maule,” replied the carpenter,—“son of him who built the

house,—grandson of the rightful proprietor of the soil.”

“I know the dispute to which you allude,” observed Mr. Pyncheon with

undisturbed equanimity. “I am well aware that my grandfather was

compelled to resort to a suit at law, in order to establish his claim

to the foundation-site of this edifice. We will not, if you please,

renew the discussion. The matter was settled at the time, and by the

competent authorities,—equitably, it is to be presumed,—and, at all

events, irrevocably. Yet, singularly enough, there is an incidental

reference to this very subject in what I am now about to say to you.

And this same inveterate grudge,—excuse me, I mean no offence,—this

irritability, which you have just shown, is not entirely aside from the

matter.”

“If you can find anything for your purpose, Mr. Pyncheon,” said the

carpenter, “in a man’s natural resentment for the wrongs done to his

blood, you are welcome to it.”