University of Virginia Library

9. 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
bed-chambers, ever since his visits of long ago; — these
were less powerful than the purifying influence scattered
throughout the atmosphere of the household by the presence
of one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly wholesome
heart. There was no morbidness in 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 passage-way from
the shop, or was sprinkled through the foliage of the pear-tree,
inward from the garden, with the twinkling sunbeams.
He would sit quietly, with a gentle pleasure gleaming over

his face, brighter now, and now a little dimmer, as the song
happened to float near him, or was more remotely heard.
It pleased him best, however, when she sat on a low footstool
at his knee.

It is perhaps remarkable, considering her temperament,
that 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 semi-circle of faces round
about it, but need not know the individuality of one among
them all. Indeed, there was something too fine and delicate
in Clifford's traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose
sphere lay so much in the Actual as 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 mountaintop
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 birth-day 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 woman kind. 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 had lacked on earth, brought warmly home to his conception;
so that this more symbol, or lifelike 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 grace of his character, as by the simple
appeal of a heart so forlorn as his to one so full of genuine
sympathy as hers. She gave him an affectionate regard,
because he needed so much love, and seemed to have
received so little. With a ready tact, the result of ever-active
and wholesome sensibility, she discerned what was
good for him, and did it. Whatever was morbid in his
mind and experience, she ignored; and thereby kept their
intercourse healthy, by the incautious, but, as it were,
heaven-directed freedom of her whole conduct. The sick
in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more darkly
and hopelessly so, by the manifold reflection of their disease,
mirrored back from all quarters, in the deportment of
those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poison
of their own breath, in infinite repetition. But 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
noon-day. These hours of drowsy head 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.