Chapter: HOLGRAVE, plunging into his tale with the energy and absorption natural
to a young author, had given a good deal of action to the parts capable
of being developed and exemplified in that manner.  He now observed
that a certain remarkable drowsiness (wholly unlike that with which the
        reader possibly feels himself affected) had been flung over the senses
of his auditress.  It was the effect, unquestionably, of the mystic
gesticulations by which he had sought to bring bodily before Phoebe's
perception the figure of the mesmerizing carpenter.  With the lids
drooping over her eyes,--now lifted for an instant, and drawn down
again as with leaden weights,--she leaned slightly towards him, and
seemed almost to regulate her breath by his.  Holgrave gazed at her, as
he rolled up his manuscript, and recognized an incipient stage of that
curious psychological condition which, as he had himself told Phoebe,
        he possessed more than an ordinary faculty of producing.  A veil was
        beginning to be muffled about her, in which she could behold only him,
        and live only in his thoughts and emotions.  His glance, as he fastened
        it on the young girl, grew involuntarily more concentrated; in his
        attitude there was the consciousness of power, investing his hardly
        mature figure with a dignity that did not belong to its physical
        manifestation.  It was evident, that, with but one wave of his hand and
        a corresponding effort of his will, he could complete his mastery over
        Phoebe's yet free and virgin spirit:  he could establish an influence
        over this good, pure, and simple child, as dangerous, and perhaps as
        disastrous, as that which the carpenter of his legend had acquired and
        exercised over the ill-fated Alice.

        To a disposition like Holgrave's, at once speculative and active, there
        is no temptation so great as the opportunity of acquiring empire over
        the human spirit; nor any idea more seductive to a young man than to
        become the arbiter of a young girl's destiny.  Let us,
        therefore,--whatever his defects of nature and education, and in spite
        of his scorn for creeds and institutions,--concede to the
        daguerreotypist the rare and high quality of reverence for another's
        individuality.  Let us allow him integrity, also, forever after to be
        confided in; since he forbade himself to twine that one link more which
        might have rendered his spell over Phoebe indissoluble.

        He made a slight gesture upward with his hand.

        "You really mortify me, my dear Miss Phoebe!" he exclaimed, smiling
        half-sarcastically at her.  "My poor story, it is but too evident, will
        never do for Godey or Graham! Only think of your falling asleep at what
        I hoped the newspaper critics would pronounce a most brilliant,
        powerful, imaginative, pathetic, and original winding up! Well, the
        manuscript must serve to light lamps with;--if, indeed, being so imbued
        with my gentle dulness, it is any longer capable of flame!"

        "Me asleep! How can you say so?" answered Phoebe, as unconscious of the
        crisis through which she had passed as an infant of the precipice to
        the verge of which it has rolled.  "No, no! I consider myself as having
        been very attentive; and, though I don't remember the incidents quite
        distinctly, yet I have an impression of a vast deal of trouble and
        calamity,--so, no doubt, the story will prove exceedingly attractive."

        By this time the sun had gone down, and was tinting the clouds towards
        the zenith with those bright hues which are not seen there until some
        time after sunset, and when the horizon has quite lost its richer
        brilliancy.  The moon, too, which had long been climbing overhead, and
        unobtrusively melting its disk into the azure,--like an ambitious
        demagogue, who hides his aspiring purpose by assuming the prevalent hue
        of popular sentiment,--now began to shine out, broad and oval, in its
        middle pathway.  These silvery beams were already powerful enough to
        change the character of the lingering daylight.  They softened and
        embellished the aspect of the old house; although the shadows fell
        deeper into the angles of its many gables, and lay brooding under the
        projecting story, and within the half-open door.  With the lapse of
        every moment, the garden grew more picturesque; the fruit-trees,
        shrubbery, and flower-bushes had a dark obscurity among them.  The
        commonplace characteristics--which, at noontide, it seemed to have
        taken a century of sordid life to accumulate--were now transfigured by
        a charm of romance.  A hundred mysterious years were whispering among
        the leaves, whenever the slight sea-breeze found its way thither and
        stirred them.  Through the foliage that roofed the little summer-house
        the moonlight flickered to and fro, and fell silvery white on the dark
        floor, the table, and the circular bench, with a continual shift and
        play, according as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs
        admitted or shut out the glimmer.

        So sweetly cool was the atmosphere, after all the feverish day, that
        the summer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid
        moonlight, with a dash of icy temper in them, out of a silver vase.
        Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human
        heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of
        nature.  The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence
        fell.  It made him feel--what he sometimes almost forgot, thrust so
        early as he had been into the rude struggle of man with man--how
        youthful he still was.

        "It seems to me," he observed, "that I never watched the coming of so
        beautiful an eve, and never felt anything so very much like happiness
        as at this moment.  After all, what a good world we live in! How good,
        and beautiful! How young it is, too, with nothing really rotten or
        age-worn in it! This old house, for example, which sometimes has
        positively oppressed my breath with its smell of decaying timber! And
        this garden, where the black mould always clings to my spade, as if I
        were a sexton delving in a graveyard! Could I keep the feeling that now
        possesses me, the garden would every day be virgin soil, with the
        earth's first freshness in the flavor of its beans and squashes; and
        the house!--it would be like a bower in Eden, blossoming with the
        earliest roses that God ever made.  Moonlight, and the sentiment in
        man's heart responsive to it, are the greatest of renovators and
        reformers.  And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove
        to be no better than moonshine!"

        "I have been happier than I am now; at least, much gayer," said Phoebe
        thoughtfully.  "Yet I am sensible of a great charm in this brightening
        moonlight; and I love to watch how the day, tired as it is, lags away
        reluctantly, and hates to be called yesterday so soon.  I never cared
        much about moonlight before.  What is there, I wonder, so beautiful in
        it, to-night?"

        "And you have never felt it before?" inquired the artist, looking
        earnestly at the girl through the twilight.

        "Never," answered Phoebe; "and life does not look the same, now that I
        have felt it so.  It seems as if I had looked at everything, hitherto,
        in broad daylight, or else in the ruddy light of a cheerful fire,
        glimmering and dancing through a room.  Ah, poor me!" she added, with a
        half-melancholy laugh.  "I shall never be so merry as before I knew
        Cousin Hepzibah and poor Cousin Clifford.  I have grown a great deal
        older, in this little time.  Older, and, I hope, wiser, and,--not
        exactly sadder,--but, certainly, with not half so much lightness in my
        spirits! I have given them my sunshine, and have been glad to give it;
        but, of course, I cannot both give and keep it.  They are welcome,
        notwithstanding!"

        "You have lost nothing, Phoebe, worth keeping, nor which it was
        possible to keep," said Holgrave after a pause.  "Our first youth is of
        no value; for we are never conscious of it until after it is gone.  But
        sometimes--always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly
        unfortunate--there comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the
        heart's joy at being in love; or, possibly, it may come to crown some
        other grand festival in life, if any other such there be.  This
        bemoaning of one's self (as you do now) over the first, careless,
        shallow gayety of youth departed, and this profound happiness at youth
        regained,--so much deeper and richer than that we lost,--are essential
        to the soul's development.  In some cases, the two states come almost
        simultaneously, and mingle the sadness and the rapture in one
        mysterious emotion."

        "I hardly think I understand you," said Phoebe.

        "No wonder," replied Holgrave, smiling; "for I have told you a secret
        which I hardly began to know before I found myself giving it utterance.
        Remember it, however; and when the truth becomes clear to you, then
        think of this moonlight scene!"

        "It is entirely moonlight now, except only a little flush of faint
        crimson, upward from the west, between those buildings," remarked
        Phoebe.  "I must go in.  Cousin Hepzibah is not quick at figures, and
        will give herself a headache over the day's accounts, unless I help
        her."

        But Holgrave detained her a little longer.

        "Miss Hepzibah tells me," observed he, "that you return to the country
        in a few days."

        "Yes, but only for a little while," answered Phoebe; "for I look upon
        this as my present home.  I go to make a few arrangements, and to take
        a more deliberate leave of my mother and friends.  It is pleasant to
        live where one is much desired and very useful; and I think I may have
        the satisfaction of feeling myself so here."

        "You surely may, and more than you imagine," said the artist.
        "Whatever health, comfort, and natural life exists in the house is
        embodied in your person.  These blessings came along with you, and will
        vanish when you leave the threshold.  Miss Hepzibah, by secluding
        herself from society, has lost all true relation with it, and is, in
        fact, dead; although she galvanizes herself into a semblance of life,
        and stands behind her counter, afflicting the world with a
        greatly-to-be-deprecated scowl.  Your poor cousin Clifford is another
        dead and long-buried person, on whom the governor and council have
        wrought a necromantic miracle.  I should not wonder if he were to
        crumble away, some morning, after you are gone, and nothing be seen of
        him more, except a heap of dust.  Miss Hepzibah, at any rate, will lose
        what little flexibility she has.  They both exist by you."

        "I should be very sorry to think so," answered Phoebe gravely.  "But it
        is true that my small abilities were precisely what they needed; and I
        have a real interest in their welfare,--an odd kind of motherly
        sentiment,--which I wish you would not laugh at!  And let me tell you
        frankly, Mr. Holgrave, I am sometimes puzzled to know whether you wish
        them well or ill."

        "Undoubtedly," said the daguerreotypist, "I do feel an interest in this
        antiquated, poverty-stricken old maiden lady, and this degraded and
        shattered gentleman,--this abortive lover of the beautiful.  A kindly
        interest, too, helpless old children that they are! But you have no
        conception what a different kind of heart mine is from your own.  It is
        not my impulse, as regards these two individuals, either to help or
        hinder; but to look on, to analyze, to explain matters to myself, and
        to comprehend the drama which, for almost two hundred years, has been
        dragging its slow length over the ground where you and I now tread.  If
        permitted to witness the close, I doubt not to derive a moral
        satisfaction from it, go matters how they may.  There is a conviction
        within me that the end draws nigh.  But, though Providence sent you
        hither to help, and sends me only as a privileged and meet spectator, I
        pledge myself to lend these unfortunate beings whatever aid I can!"

        "I wish you would speak more plainly," cried Phoebe, perplexed and
        displeased; "and, above all, that you would feel more like a Christian
        and a human being! How is it possible to see people in distress without
        desiring, more than anything else, to help and comfort them? You talk
        as if this old house were a theatre; and you seem to look at Hepzibah's
        and Clifford's misfortunes, and those of generations before them, as a
        tragedy, such as I have seen acted in the hall of a country hotel, only
        the present one appears to be played exclusively for your amusement.  I
        do not like this.  The play costs the performers too much, and the
        audience is too cold-hearted."

        "You are severe," said Holgrave, compelled to recognize a degree of
        truth in the piquant sketch of his own mood.

        "And then," continued Phoebe, "what can you mean by your conviction,
        which you tell me of, that the end is drawing near? Do you know of any
        new trouble hanging over my poor relatives? If so, tell me at once, and
        I will not leave them!"

        "Forgive me, Phoebe!" said the daguerreotypist, holding out his hand,
        to which the girl was constrained to yield her own.  "I am somewhat of
        a mystic, it must be confessed.  The tendency is in my blood, together
        with the faculty of mesmerism, which might have brought me to Gallows
        Hill, in the good old times of witchcraft.  Believe me, if I were
        really aware of any secret, the disclosure of which would benefit your
        friends,--who are my own friends, likewise,--you should learn it before
        we part.  But I have no such knowledge."

        "You hold something back!" said Phoebe.

        "Nothing,--no secrets but my own," answered Holgrave.  "I can perceive,
        indeed, that Judge Pyncheon still keeps his eye on Clifford, in whose
        ruin he had so large a share.  His motives and intentions, however are
        a mystery to me.  He is a determined and relentless man, with the
        genuine character of an inquisitor; and had he any object to gain by
        putting Clifford to the rack, I verily believe that he would wrench his
        joints from their sockets, in order to accomplish it.  But, so wealthy
        and eminent as he is,--so powerful in his own strength, and in the
        support of society on all sides,--what can Judge Pyncheon have to hope
        or fear from the imbecile, branded, half-torpid Clifford?"

        "Yet," urged Phoebe, "you did speak as if misfortune were impending!"

        "Oh, that was because I am morbid!" replied the artist.  "My mind has a
        twist aside, like almost everybody's mind, except your own.  Moreover,
        it is so strange to find myself an inmate of this old Pyncheon House,
        and sitting in this old garden--(hark, how Maule's well is
                murmuring!)--that, were it only for this one circumstance, I cannot
        help fancying that Destiny is arranging its fifth act for a
        catastrophe."

        "There!"  cried Phoebe with renewed vexation; for she was by nature as
        hostile to mystery as the sunshine to a dark corner.  "You puzzle me
        more than ever!"

        "Then let us part friends!" said Holgrave, pressing her hand.  "Or, if
        not friends, let us part before you entirely hate me.  You, who love
        everybody else in the world!"

        "Good-by, then," said Phoebe frankly.  "I do not mean to be angry a
        great while, and should be sorry to have you think so.   There has
        Cousin Hepzibah been standing in the shadow of the doorway, this
        quarter of an hour past! She thinks I stay too long in the damp garden.
        So, good-night, and good-by."

        On the second morning thereafter, Phoebe might have been seen, in her
        straw bonnet, with a shawl on one arm and a little carpet-bag on the
        other, bidding adieu to Hepzibah and Cousin Clifford.  She was to take
        a seat in the next train of cars, which would transport her to within
        half a dozen miles of her country village.

        The tears were in Phoebe's eyes; a smile, dewy with affectionate
        regret, was glimmering around her pleasant mouth.  She wondered how it
        came to pass, that her life of a few weeks, here in this heavy-hearted
        old mansion, had taken such hold of her, and so melted into her
        associations, as now to seem a more important centre-point of
        remembrance than all which had gone before.  How had Hepzibah--grim,
        silent, and irresponsive to her overflow of cordial sentiment--contrived
        to win so much love? And Clifford,--in his abortive decay, with the
        mystery of fearful crime upon him, and the close prison-atmosphere yet
        lurking in his breath,--how had he transformed himself into the simplest
        child, whom Phoebe felt bound to watch over, and be, as it were, the
        providence of his unconsidered hours! Everything, at that instant of
        farewell, stood out prominently to her view.  Look where she would, lay
        her hand on what she might, the object responded to her consciousness,
        as if a moist human heart were in it.

        She peeped from the window into the garden, and felt herself more
        regretful at leaving this spot of black earth, vitiated with such an
        age-long growth of weeds, than joyful at the idea of again scenting her
        pine forests and fresh clover-fields.  She called Chanticleer, his two
        wives, and the venerable chicken, and threw them some crumbs of bread
        from the breakfast-table.  These being hastily gobbled up, the chicken
        spread its wings, and alighted close by Phoebe on the window-sill,
        where it looked gravely into her face and vented its emotions in a
        croak.  Phoebe bade it be a good old chicken during her absence, and
        promised to bring it a little bag of buckwheat.

        "Ah, Phoebe!" remarked Hepzibah, "you do not smile so naturally as when
        you came to us! Then, the smile chose to shine out; now, you choose it
        should.  It is well that you are going back, for a little while, into
        your native air.  There has been too much weight on your spirits.  The
        house is too gloomy and lonesome; the shop is full of vexations; and as
        for me, I have no faculty of making things look brighter than they are.
        Dear Clifford has been your only comfort!"

        "Come hither, Phoebe," suddenly cried her cousin Clifford, who had said
        very little all the morning.  "Close!--closer!--and look me in the
        face!"

        Phoebe put one of her small hands on each elbow of his chair, and
        leaned her face towards him, so that he might peruse it as carefully as
        he would.  It is probable that the latent emotions of this parting hour
        had revived, in some degree, his bedimmed and enfeebled faculties.  At
        any rate, Phoebe soon felt that, if not the profound insight of a seer,
        yet a more than feminine delicacy of appreciation, was making her heart
        the subject of its regard.  A moment before, she had known nothing
        which she would have sought to hide.  Now, as if some secret were
        hinted to her own consciousness through the medium of another's
        perception, she was fain to let her eyelids droop beneath Clifford's
        gaze.  A blush, too,--the redder, because she strove hard to keep it
        down,--ascended bigger and higher, in a tide of fitful progress, until
        even her brow was all suffused with it.

        "It is enough, Phoebe," said Clifford, with a melancholy smile.  "When
        I first saw you, you were the prettiest little maiden in the world; and
        now you have deepened into beauty.  Girlhood has passed into womanhood;
        the bud is a bloom! Go, now--I feel lonelier than I did."

        Phoebe took leave of the desolate couple, and passed through the shop,
        twinkling her eyelids to shake off a dew-drop; for--considering how
        brief her absence was to be, and therefore the folly of being cast down
        about it--she would not so far acknowledge her tears as to dry them
        with her handkerchief.  On the doorstep, she met the little urchin
        whose marvellous feats of gastronomy have been recorded in the earlier
        pages of our narrative.  She took from the window some specimen or
        other of natural history,--her eyes being too dim with moisture to
        inform her accurately whether it was a rabbit or a hippopotamus,--put
        it into the child's hand as a parting gift, and went her way.  Old
        Uncle Venner was just coming out of his door, with a wood-horse and saw
        on his shoulder; and, trudging along the street, he scrupled not to
        keep company with Phoebe, so far as their paths lay together; nor, in
        spite of his patched coat and rusty beaver, and the curious fashion of
        his tow-cloth trousers, could she find it in her heart to outwalk him.

        "We shall miss you, next Sabbath afternoon," observed the street
        philosopher.  "It is unaccountable how little while it takes some folks
        to grow just as natural to a man as his own breath; and, begging your
        pardon, Miss Phoebe (though there can be no offence in an old man's
                saying it), that's just what you've grown to me!  My years have been a
        great many, and your life is but just beginning; and yet, you are
        somehow as familiar to me as if I had found you at my mother's door,
        and you had blossomed, like a running vine, all along my pathway since.
        Come back soon, or I shall be gone to my farm; for I begin to find
        these wood-sawing jobs a little too tough for my back-ache."

        "Very soon, Uncle Venner," replied Phoebe.

        "And let it be all the sooner, Phoebe, for the sake of those poor souls
        yonder," continued her companion.  "They can never do without you,
        now,--never, Phoebe; never--no more than if one of God's angels had
        been living with them, and making their dismal house pleasant and
        comfortable! Don't it seem to you they'd be in a sad case, if, some
        pleasant summer morning like this, the angel should spread his wings,
        and fly to the place he came from? Well, just so they feel, now that
        you're going home by the railroad!  They can't bear it, Miss Phoebe; so
        be sure to come back!"

        "I am no angel, Uncle Venner," said Phoebe, smiling, as she offered him
        her hand at the street-corner.  "But, I suppose, people never feel so
        much like angels as when they are doing what little good they may.  So
        I shall certainly come back!"

        Thus parted the old man and the rosy girl; and Phoebe took the wings of
        the morning, and was soon flitting almost as rapidly away as if endowed
        with the aerial locomotion of the angels to whom Uncle Venner had so
        graciously compared her.

 Phoebe's Goodbye: Holgrave finishes his story and finds Phoebe to appear as if she were in a trance. To a person like Holgrave, there is no temptation greater than the opportunity to acquire empire over the human spirit, but he also possesses a high quality of reverence for another's individuality. He makes a gesture with his hand and Phoebe becomes alert. That night is a beautiful one, with a cool atmosphere after a feverish day. Holgrave believes that he has never seen a more beautiful eve, while Phoebe senses a great charm in the moonlight. Phoebe claims that she will never be as merry as before she knew Hepzibah and Clifford. Holgrave tells her that she has lost nothing, for one's first youth is of little value. The departure of shallow gaiety is essential to the soul's development, he says. Phoebe plans to return to the country in a few days. Holgrave tells Phoebe that Hepzibah and Clifford both exist by Phoebe, who tells Holgrave that he talks as if the old house were a theater. Holgrave says that Judge Pyncheon still keeps his eye on Clifford, but his motives remain a mystery. He wonders what Jaffrey has to fear from Clifford. Phoebe wonders how it came to pass that the old mansion had taken such hold of her in so few weeks and how grim Hepzibah contrived to win so much love. Clifford later remarks to Phoebe how she has deepened into beauty. Phoebe departed, bidding farewell to everyone, including Uncle Venner, who compares her to an angel.

