University of Virginia Library

11. 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
reäppearance, 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, now-a-days. And he asked, in an injured tone,
what had become of all those old square-top 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,
pedling whortleberries 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 milk-maid 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 safe-keeping, 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 a while 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 common-place 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 rose-buds.

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 further.

“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 ten-fold 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 burthen 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
subtle 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, or 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.