The House of the Seven Gables
up, and at what still more intolerable pitch of dizzy trouble her
spirit would struggle out of the maze, and make her conscious that
nothing of all this had actually happened. Of course it was not real;
no such black, easterly day as this had yet begun to be; Judge Pyncheon
had not talked with, her. Clifford had not laughed, pointed, beckoned
her away with him; but she had merely been afflicted—as lonely sleepers
often are—with a great deal of unreasonable misery, in a morning dream!
“Now—now—I shall certainly awake!” thought Hepzibah, as she went to and
fro, making her little preparations. “I can bear it no longer! I must
wake up now!”
But it came not, that awakening moment! It came not, even when, just
before they left the house, Clifford stole to the parlor-door, and made
a parting obeisance to the sole occupant of the room.
“What an absurd figure the old fellow cuts now!” whispered he to
Hepzibah. “Just when he fancied he had me completely under his thumb!
Come, come; make haste! or he will start up, like Giant Despair in
pursuit of Christian and Hopeful, and catch us yet!”
As they passed into the street, Clifford directed Hepzibah’s attention
to something on one of the posts of the front door. It was merely the
initials of his own name, which, with somewhat of his characteristic
grace about the forms of the letters, he had cut there when a boy. The
brother and sister departed, and left Judge Pyncheon sitting in the old
home of his forefathers, all by himself; so heavy and lumpish that we
can liken him to nothing better than a defunct nightmare, which had
perished in the midst of its wickedness, and left its flabby corpse on
the breast of the tormented one, to be gotten rid of as it might!
XVII.
The Flight of Two Owls
Summer as it was, the east wind set poor Hepzibah’s few remaining teeth
chattering in her head, as she and Clifford faced it, on their way up
Pyncheon Street, and towards the centre of the town. Not merely was it
the shiver which this pitiless blast brought to her frame (although her
feet and hands, especially, had never seemed so death-a-cold as now),
but there was a moral sensation, mingling itself with the physical
chill, and causing her to shake more in spirit than in body. The
world’s broad, bleak atmosphere was all so comfortless! Such, indeed,
is the impression which it makes on every new adventurer, even if he
plunge into it while the warmest tide of life is bubbling through his
veins. What, then, must it have been to Hepzibah and Clifford,—so
time-stricken as they were, yet so like children in their
inexperience,—as they left the doorstep, and passed from beneath the
wide shelter of the Pyncheon Elm! They were wandering all abroad, on
precisely such a pilgrimage as a child often meditates, to the world’s
end, with perhaps a sixpence and a biscuit in his pocket. In Hepzibah’s
mind, there was the wretched consciousness of being adrift. She had
lost the faculty of self-guidance; but, in view of the difficulties
around her, felt it hardly worth an effort to regain it, and was,
moreover, incapable of making one.
As they proceeded on their strange expedition, she now and then cast a
look sidelong at Clifford, and could not but observe that he was
possessed and swayed by a powerful excitement. It was this, indeed,
that gave him the control which he had at once, and so irresistibly,
established over his movements. It not a little resembled the
exhilaration of wine. Or, it might more fancifully be compared to a
joyous piece of music, played with wild vivacity, but upon a disordered
instrument. As the cracked jarring note might always be heard, and as
it jarred loudest amidst the loftiest exultation of the melody, so was
there a continual quake through Clifford, causing him most to quiver
while he wore a triumphant smile, and seemed almost under a necessity
to skip in his gait.
They met few people abroad, even on passing from the retired
neighborhood of the House of the Seven Gables into what was ordinarily
the more thronged and busier portion of the town. Glistening sidewalks,
with little pools of rain, here and there, along their unequal surface;
umbrellas displayed ostentatiously in the shop-windows, as if the life
of trade had concentrated itself in that one article; wet leaves of the
horse-chestnut or elm-trees, torn off untimely by the blast and
scattered along the public way; an unsightly accumulation of mud in the
middle of the street, which perversely grew the more unclean for its
long and laborious washing,—these were the more definable points of a
very sombre picture. In the way of movement and human life, there was
the hasty rattle of a cab or coach, its driver protected by a
waterproof cap over his head and shoulders; the forlorn figure of an
old man, who seemed to have crept out of some subterranean sewer, and
was stooping along the kennel, and poking the wet rubbish with a stick,
in quest of rusty nails; a merchant or two, at the door of the
post-office, together with an editor and a miscellaneous politician,
awaiting a dilatory mail; a few visages of retired sea-captains at the
window of an insurance office, looking out vacantly at the vacant
street, blaspheming at the weather, and fretting at the dearth as well
of public news as local gossip. What a treasure-trove to these
venerable quidnuncs, could they have guessed the secret which Hepzibah
and Clifford were carrying along with them! But their two figures
attracted hardly so much notice as that of a young girl, who passed at
the same instant, and happened to raise her skirt a trifle too high
above her ankles. Had it been a sunny and cheerful day, they could
hardly have gone through the streets without making themselves
obnoxious to remark. Now, probably, they were felt to be in keeping
with the dismal and bitter weather, and therefore did not stand out in
strong relief, as if the sun were shining on them, but melted into the
gray gloom and were forgotten as soon as gone.
Poor Hepzibah! Could she have understood this fact, it would have
brought her some little comfort; for, to all her other
troubles,—strange to say!—there was added the womanish and
old-maiden-like misery arising from a sense of unseemliness in her
attire. Thus, she was fain to shrink deeper into herself, as it were,
as if in the hope of making people suppose that here was only a cloak
and hood, threadbare and woefully faded, taking an airing in the midst
of the storm, without any wearer!
As they went on, the feeling of indistinctness and unreality kept dimly
hovering round about her, and so diffusing itself into her system that
one of her hands was hardly palpable to the touch of the other. Any
certainty would have been preferable to this. She whispered to herself,
again and again, “Am I awake?—Am I awake?” and sometimes exposed her
face to the chill spatter of the wind, for the sake of its rude
assurance that she was. Whether it was Clifford’s purpose, or only
chance, had led them thither, they now found themselves passing beneath
the arched entrance of a large structure of gray stone. Within, there
was a spacious breadth, and an airy height from floor to roof, now
partially filled with smoke and steam, which eddied voluminously upward
and formed a mimic cloud-region over their heads. A train of cars was
just ready for a start; the locomotive was fretting and fuming, like a
steed impatient for a headlong rush; and the bell rang out its hasty
peal, so well expressing the brief summons which life vouchsafes to us
in its hurried career. Without question or delay,—with the irresistible
decision, if not rather to be called recklessness, which had so
strangely taken possession of him, and through him of
Hepzibah,—Clifford impelled her towards the cars, and assisted her to
enter. The signal was given; the engine puffed forth its short, quick
breaths; the train began its movement; and, along with a hundred other
passengers, these two unwonted travellers sped onward like the wind.
At last, therefore, and after so long estrangement from everything that
the world acted or enjoyed, they had been drawn into the great current
of human life, and were swept away with it, as by the suction of fate
itself.
Still haunted with the idea that not one of the past incidents,
inclusive of Judge Pyncheon’s visit, could be real, the recluse of the
Seven Gables murmured in her brother’s ear,—
“Clifford! Clifford! Is not this a dream?”
“A dream, Hepzibah!” repeated he, almost laughing in her face. “On the
contrary, I have never been awake before!”
Meanwhile, looking from the window, they could see the world racing
past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the
next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it
had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of
meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the
broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its age-long
rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to their
own.
Within the car there was the usual interior life of the railroad,
offering little to the observation of other passengers, but full of
novelty for this pair of strangely enfranchised prisoners. It was
novelty enough, indeed, that there were fifty human beings in close
relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by
the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its
grasp. It seemed marvellous how all these people could remain so
quietly in their seats, while so much noisy strength was at work in
their behalf. Some, with tickets in their hats (long travellers these,
before whom lay a hundred miles of railroad), had plunged into the
English scenery and adventures of pamphlet novels, and were keeping
company with dukes and earls. Others, whose briefer span forbade their
devoting themselves to studies so abstruse, beguiled the little tedium
of the way with penny-papers. A party of girls, and one young man, on
opposite sides of the car, found huge amusement in a game of ball. They
tossed it to and fro, with peals of laughter that might be measured by
mile-lengths; for, faster than the nimble ball could fly, the merry
players fled unconsciously along, leaving the trail of their mirth afar
behind, and ending their game under another sky than had witnessed its
commencement. Boys, with apples, cakes, candy, and rolls of variously
tinctured lozenges,—merchandise that reminded Hepzibah of her deserted
shop,—appeared at each momentary stopping-place, doing up their
business in a hurry, or breaking it short off, lest the market should
ravish them away with it. New people continually entered. Old
acquaintances—for such they soon grew to be, in this rapid current of
affairs—continually departed. Here and there, amid the rumble and the
tumult, sat one asleep. Sleep; sport; business; graver or lighter
study; and the common and inevitable movement onward! It was life
itself!
Clifford’s naturally poignant sympathies were all aroused. He caught
the color of what was passing about him, and threw it back more vividly
than he received it, but mixed, nevertheless, with a lurid and
portentous hue. Hepzibah, on the other hand, felt herself more apart
from human kind than even in the seclusion which she had just quitted.
“You are not happy, Hepzibah!” said Clifford, apart, in a tone of
reproach. “You are thinking of that dismal old house, and of Cousin
Jaffrey”—here came the quake through him,—“and of Cousin Jaffrey
sitting there, all by himself! Take my advice,—follow my example,—and
let such things slip aside. Here we are, in the world, Hepzibah!—in the
midst of life!—in the throng of our fellow beings! Let you and I be
happy! As happy as that youth and those pretty girls, at their game of
ball!”