University of Virginia Library

17. 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 door-step, 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 amid 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 concentred 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 water-proof 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 postoffice,
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 wofully 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!”

“Happy!” thought Hepzibah, bitterly conscious, at the
word, of her dull and heavy heart, with the frozen pain in
it. “Happy! He is mad already; and, if I could once
feel myself broad awake, I should go mad too!”

If a fixed idea be madness, she was perhaps not remote
from it. Fast and far as they had rattled and clattered
along the iron track, they might just as well, as regarded
Hepzibah's mental images, have been passing up and down
Pyncheon-street. With miles and miles of varied scenery
between, there was no scene for her, save the seven old
gable-peaks, with their moss, and the tuft of weeds in one
of the angles, and the shop-window, and a customer shaking

the door, and compelling the little bell to jingle fiercely,
but without disturbing Judge Pyncheon! This one old
house was everywhere! It transported its great, lumbering
bulk, with more than railroad speed, and set itself phlegmatically
down on whatever spot she glanced at. The quality
of Hepzibah's mind was too unmalleable to take new impressions
so readily as Clifford's. He had a winged nature;
she was rather of the vegetable kind, and could hardly be
kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots. Thus it happened
that the relation heretofore existing between her
brother and herself was changed. At home, she was his
guardian; here, Clifford had become hers, and seemed to
comprehend whatever belonged to their new position with
a singular rapidity of intelligence. He had been startled
into manhood and intellectual vigor; or, at least, into a condition
that resembled them, though it might be both diseased
and transitory.

The conductor now applied for their tickets; and Clifford,
who had made himself the purse-bearer, put a bank-note
into his hand, as he had observed others do.

“For the lady and yourself?” asked the conductor. “And
how far?”

“As far as that will carry us,” said Clifford. “It is no
great matter. We are riding for pleasure, merely!”

“You choose a strange day for it, sir!” remarked a gimlet-eyed
old gentleman, on the other side of the car, looking
at Clifford and his companion, as if curious to make them
out. “The best chance of pleasure, in an easterly rain, I
take it, is in a man's own house, with a nice little fire in the
chimney.”

“I cannot precisely agree with you,” said Clifford, courteously
bowing to the old gentleman, and at once taking up
the clue of conversation which the latter had proffered. “It

had just occurred to me, on the contrary, that this admirable
invention of the railroad — with the vast and inevitable
improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and convenience
— is destined to do away with those stale ideas of
home and fireside, and substitute something better.”

“In the name of common sense,” asked the old gentleman,
rather testily, “what can be better for a man than his
own parlor and chimney-corner?”

“These things have not the merit which many good
people attribute to them,” replied Clifford. “They may be
said, in few and pithy words, to have ill-served a poor purpose.
My impression is, that our wonderfully increased
and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to
bring us round again to the nomadic state. You are aware,
my dear sir, — you must have observed it, in your own
experience, — that all human progress is in a circle; or, to
use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending
spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going straight forward,
and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position
of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago
tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized,
refined, and perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse
and sensual prophecy of the present and the future. To
apply this truth to the topic now under discussion. — In the
early epochs of our race, men dwelt in temporary huts, or
bowers of branches, as easily constructed as a bird's nest,
and which they built, — if it should be called building,
when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew
than were made with hands, — which Nature, we will say,
assisted them to rear, where fruit abounded, where fish and
game were plentiful, or, most especially, where the sense of
beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier shade than elsewhere,
and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood,

and hill. This life possessed a charm, which, ever since
man quitted it, has vanished from existence. And it
typified something better than itself. It had its drawbacks;
such as hunger and thirst, inclement weather, hot sunshine,
and weary and foot-blistering marches over barren and ugly
tracts, that lay between the sites desirable for their fertility
and beauty. But, in our ascending spiral, we escape all
this. These railroads — could but the whistle be made
musical, and the rumble and the jar got rid of — are positively
the greatest blessing that the ages have wrought out
for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the toil and
dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition
being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry
in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous
habitation than can readily be carried off with him?
Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick,
and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as
easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere, — in a better sense,
wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?”

Clifford's countenance glowed, as he divulged this theory;
a youthful character shone out from within, converting the
wrinkles and pallid duskiness of age into an almost transparent
mask. The merry girls let their ball drop upon the
floor, and gazed at him. They said to themselves, perhaps,
that, before his hair was gray and the crow's feet tracked
his temples, this now decaying man must have stamped the
impress of his features on many a woman's heart. But,
alas! no woman's eye had seen his face while it was
beautiful!

“I should scarcely call it an improved state of things,”
observed Clifford's new acquaintance, “to live everywhere
and nowhere!”

“Would you not?” exclaimed Clifford, with singular

energy. “It is as clear to me as sunshine, — were there
any in the sky, — that the greatest possible stumbling-blocks
in the path of human happiness and improvement are these
heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with mortar, or hewn
timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men painfully
contrive for their own torment, and call them house
and home! The soul needs air; a wide sweep and
frequent change of it. Morbid influences, in a thousandfold
variety, gather about hearths, and pollute the life of
households. There is no such unwholesome atmosphere
as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one's defunct
forefathers and relatives. I speak of what I know. There
is a certain house within my familiar recollection, — one
of those peaked-gable (there are seven of them) projecting-storied
edifices, such as you occasionally see, in our elder
towns, — a rusty, crazy, creaky, dry-rotted, damp-rotted,
dingy, dark, and miserable old dungeon, with an arched
window over the porch, and a little shop-door on one side,
and a great, melancholy elm before it! Now, sir, whenever
my thoughts recur to this seven-gabled mansion — (the
fact is so very curious that I must needs mention it) — immediately
I have a vision or image of an elderly man, of
remarkably stern countenance, sitting in an oaken elbow-chair,
dead, stone-dead, with an ugly flow of blood upon
his shirt-bosom! Dead, but with open eyes! He taints the
whole house, as I remember it. I could never flourish
there, nor be happy, nor do nor enjoy what God meant me
to do and enjoy!”

His face darkened, and seemed to contract, and shrivel
itself up, and wither into age.

“Never, sir!” he repeated. “I could never draw cheerful
breath there!”

“I should think not,” said the old gentleman, eying

Clifford earnestly, and rather apprehensively. “I should
conceive not, sir, with that notion in your head!”

“Surely not,” continued Clifford; “and it were a relief
to me if that house could be torn down, or burnt up, and
so the earth be rid of it, and grass be sown abundantly over
its foundation. Not that I should ever visit its site again!
for, sir, the further I get away from it, the more does the
joy, the lightsome freshness, the heart-leap, the intellectual
dance, the youth, in short, — yes, my youth, my youth! —
the more does it come back to me. No longer ago than
this morning, I was old. I remember looking in the glass,
and wondering at my own gray hair, and the wrinkles,
many and deep, right across my brow, and the furrows
down my cheeks, and the prodigious trampling of crow's
feet about my temples! It was too soon! I could not bear
it! Age had no right to come! I had not lived! But
now do I look old? If so, my aspect belies me strangely;
for — a great weight being off my mind — I feel in the
very hey-day of my youth, with the world and my best days
before me!”

“I trust you may find it so,” said the old gentleman, who
seemed rather embarrassed, and desirous of avoiding the
observation which Clifford's wild talk drew on them both.
“You have my best wishes for it.”

“For Heaven's sake, dear Clifford, be quiet!” whispered
his sister. “They think you mad.”

“Be quiet yourself, Hepzibah!” returned her brother.
“No matter what they think! I am not mad. For the
first time in thirty years, my thoughts gush up and find
words ready for them. I must talk, and I will!”

He turned again towards the old gentleman, and renewed
the conversation.

“Yes, my dear sir,” said he, “it is my firm belief and

hope, that these terms of roof and hearth-stone, which have
so long been held to embody something sacred, are soon to
pass out of men's daily use, and be forgotten. Just imagine,
for a moment, how much of human evil will crumble away,
with this one change! What we call real estate — the
solid ground to build a house on — is the braod foundation
on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests. A man
will commit almost any wrong, — he will heap up an
immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and which
will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages, — only
to build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself
to die in, and for his posterity to be miserable in. He
lays his own dead corpse beneath the underpinning, as one
may say, and hangs his frowning picture on the wall, and,
after thus converting himself into an evil destiny, expects
his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there! I do
not speak wildly. I have just such a house in my mind's
eye!”

“Then, sir,” said the old gentleman, getting anxious to
drop the subject, “you are not to blame for leaving it.”

“Within the lifetime of the child already born,” Clifford
went on, “all this will be done away. The world is growing
too ethereal and spiritual to bear these enormities a
great while longer. To me, — though, for a considerable
period of time, I have lived chiefly in retirement, and know
less of such things than most men, — even to me, the harbingers
of a better era are unmistakable. Mesmerism, now!
Will that effect nothing, think you, towards purging away
the grossness out of human life?”

“All a humbug!” growled the old gentleman.

“These rapping spirits, that little Phœbe told us of, the
other day,” said Clifford, — “what are these but the messengers

of the spiritual world, knocking at the door of substance?
And it shall be flung wide open!”

“A humbug, again!” cried the old gentleman, growing
more and more testy, at these glimpses of Clifford's metaphysics.
“I should like to rap with a good stick on the
empty pates of the dolts who circulate such nonsense!”

“Then there is electricity; — the demon, the angel, the
mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence!”
exclaimed Clifford. “Is that a humbug, too? Is it a fact
— or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the
world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands
of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the
round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!
Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but
thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!”

“If you mean the telegraph,” said the old gentleman,
glancing his eye toward its wire, alongside the rail-track,
“it is an excellent thing; — that is, of course, if the speculators
in cotton and politics don't get possession of it. A
great thing, indeed, sir; particularly as regards the detection
of bank-robbers and murderers.”

“I don't quite like it, in that point of view,” replied Clifford.
“A bank-robber, and what you call a murderer, likewise,
has his rights, which men of enlightened humanity
and conscience should regard in so much the more liberal
spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to controvert
their existence. An almost spiritual medium, like the
electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep,
joyful, and holy missions. Lovers, day by day, — hour by
hour, if so often moved to do it, — might send their heartthrobs
from Maine to Florida, with some such words as
these, — `I love you forever!' — `My heart runs over
with love!' — `I love you more than I can!' — and,

again, at the next message, — `I have lived an hour longer,
and love you twice as much!' Or, when a good man has
departed, his distant friend should be conscious of an
electric thrill, as from the world of happy spirits, telling
him, — `Your dear friend is in bliss!' Or, to an absent
husband, should come tidings thus, — `An immortal being,
of whom you are the father, has this moment come from
God!' — and immediately its little voice would seem to
have reached so far, and to be echoing in his heart. But
for these poor rogues, the bank-robbers, — who, after all,
are about as honest as nine people in ten, except that they
disregard certain formalities, and prefer to transact business
at midnight, rather than 'Change-hours, — and for these
murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the
motives of their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public
benefactors, if we consider only its result, — for unfortunate
individuals like these, I really cannot applaud the
enlistment of an immaterial and miraculous power in the
universal world-hunt at their heels!”

“You can't, hey?” cried the old gentleman, with a hard
look.

“Positively, no!” answered Clifford. “It puts them too
miserably at disadvantage. For example, sir, in a dark,
low, cross-beamed, panelled room of an old house, let us
suppose a dead man, sitting in an arm-chair, with a blood-stain
on his shirt-bosom, — and let us add to our hypothesis
another man, issuing from the house, which he feels to be
over-filled with the dead man's presence, — and let us lastly
imagine him fleeing, Heaven knows whither, at the speed
of a hurricane, by railroad! Now, sir, if the fugitive
alight in some distant town, and find all the people babbling
about that self-same dead man, whom he has fled so far to
avoid the sight and thought of, will you not allow that

his natural rights have been infringed? He has been
deprived of his city of refuge, and, in my humble opinion,
has suffered infinite wrong!”

“You are a strange man, sir!” said the old gentleman,
bringing his gimlet-eye to a point on Clifford, as if determined
to bore right into him. “I can't see through you!”

“No, I 'll be bound you can't!” cried Clifford, laughing.
“And yet, my dear sir, I am as transparent as the water of
Maule's well! But come, Hepzibah! We have flown far
enough for once. Let us alight, as the birds do, and perch
ourselves on the nearest twig, and consult whither we shall
fly next!”

Just then, as it happened, the train reached a solitary
way-station. Taking advantage of the brief pause, Clifford
left the car, and drew Hepzibah along with him. A
moment afterwards, the train — with all the life of its
interior, amid which Clifford had made himself so conspicuous
an object — was gliding away in the distance, and
rapidly lessening to a point, which, in another moment,
vanished. The world had fled away from these two wanderers.
They gazed drearily about them. At a little distance
stood a wooden church, black with age, and in a
dismal state of ruin and decay, with broken windows, a
great rift through the main body of the edifice, and a rafter
dangling from the top of the square tower. Further off
was a farm-house, in the old style, as venerably black as
the church, with a roof sloping downward from the three-story
peak, to within a man's height of the ground. It
seemed uninhabited. There were the relics of a wood-pile,
indeed, near the door, but with grass sprouting up among
the chips and scattered logs. The small rain-drops came
down aslant; the wind was not turbulent, but sullen, and
full of chilly moisture.

Clifford shivered from head to foot. The wild effervescence
of his mood — which had so readily supplied thoughts,
fantasies, and a strange aptitude of words, and impelled him
to talk from the mere necessity of giving vent to this bubbling-up
gush of ideas — had entirely subsided. A powerful
excitement had given him energy and vivacity. Its
operation over, he forthwith began to sink.

“You must take the lead now, Hepzibah!” murmured he,
with a torpid and reluctant utterance. “Do with me as
you will!”

She knelt down upon the platform where they were
standing, and lifted her clasped hands to the sky. The
dull, gray weight of clouds made it invisible; but it was no
hour for disbelief; — no juncture this, to question that there
was a sky above, and an Almighty Father looking down
from it!

“O, God!” — ejaculated poor, gaunt Hepzibah, — then
paused a moment, to consider what her prayer should be, —
“O, God, — our Father, — are we not thy children? Have
mercy on us!”