University of Virginia Library

10. 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 even-tide. 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 was 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 beanvmes,
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 at 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.

Queerly, 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 the 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 earth-worm 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 clues 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 side-way
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 water 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
degree; 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 woodsawyer, the
messenger of everybody's petty errands, the patched philosopher.
And Uncle Venner, who had studied the world at
street-corners, and at 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 would n'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!