The House of the Seven Gables
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