Chapter: 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 Phoebe.  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 Phoebe, 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, Phoebe 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 bedchambers, 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 Phoebe; 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 Phoebe'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 Phoebe'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
    Phoebe'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 Phoebe
    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.  Phoebe'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 Phoebe 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 passageway 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 Phoebe
    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 Phoebe'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 Phoebe 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.

    Phoebe, 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 semicircle 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 Phoebe'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 Phoebe 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 Phoebe.  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 mountain-top
    or in a dungeon.  Now, Phoebe'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 birthday 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 Phoebe, 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 womankind.  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 Phoebe 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 lacked on earth brought warmly home
    to his conception; so that this mere symbol, or life-like 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 Phoebe 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 graces 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 Phoebe 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 Phoebe 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?  Phoebe 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 noonday.  These hours of drowsihead were the season of the old
         gentlewoman's attendance on her brother, while Phoebe 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 Phoebe, 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.

 Clifford and Phoebe: For years Hepzibah had looked forward to the point at which she now found herself. She had asked for nothing but the opportunity to devote herself to the brother she so loved. She adored giving attention to Clifford, but she also troubled Clifford through innumerable sins of emphasis. The worst burden that she faced from Clifford was his distaste for her appearance. She was a grief to Clifford and she knew it. Phoebe did not quite know the effect that she had on Clifford. For Clifford, Phoebe was the only representative of womankind, yet this sentiment was chaste. He read Phoebe as he would a simple story; she was not an actual fact for him, but the interpretation of all that he had lacked. Phoebe gave him an affectionate regard because he needed so much love and seemed to have received so little.

