Chapter: NEVER had the old house appeared so dismal to poor Hepzibah as when she
departed on that wretched errand.  There was a strange aspect in it.
As she trode along the foot-worn passages, and opened one crazy door
after another, and ascended the creaking staircase, she gazed wistfully
and fearfully around.  It would have been no marvel, to her excited
mind, if, behind or beside her, there had been the rustle of dead
people's garments, or pale visages awaiting her on the landing-place
above.  Her nerves were set all ajar by the scene of passion and terror
through which she had just struggled.  Her colloquy with Judge
Pyncheon, who so perfectly represented the person and attributes of the
founder of the family, had called back the dreary past.  It weighed
upon her heart.  Whatever she had heard, from legendary aunts and
grandmothers, concerning the good or evil fortunes of the
Pyncheons,--stories which had heretofore been kept warm in her
remembrance by the chimney-corner glow that was associated with
them,--now recurred to her, sombre, ghastly, cold, like most passages
of family history, when brooded over in melancholy mood.  The whole
seemed little else but a series of calamity, reproducing itself in
successive generations, with one general hue, and varying in little,
           save the outline.  But Hepzibah now felt as if the Judge, and Clifford,
           and herself,--they three together,--were on the point of adding another
           incident to the annals of the house, with a bolder relief of wrong and
           sorrow, which would cause it to stand out from all the rest.  Thus it
           is that the grief of the passing moment takes upon itself an
           individuality, and a character of climax, which it is destined to lose
           after a while, and to fade into the dark gray tissue common to the
           grave or glad events of many years ago.  It is but for a moment,
           comparatively, that anything looks strange or startling,--a truth that
           has the bitter and the sweet in it.

           But Hepzibah could not rid herself of the sense of something
           unprecedented at that instant passing and soon to be accomplished.  Her
           nerves were in a shake.  Instinctively she paused before the arched
           window, and looked out upon the street, in order to seize its permanent
           objects with her mental grasp, and thus to steady herself from the reel
           and vibration which affected her more immediate sphere.  It brought her
           up, as we may say, with a kind of shock, when she beheld everything
           under the same appearance as the day before, and numberless preceding
           days, except for the difference between sunshine and sullen storm.  Her
           eyes travelled along the street, from doorstep to doorstep, noting the
           wet sidewalks, with here and there a puddle in hollows that had been
           imperceptible until filled with water.  She screwed her dim optics to
           their acutest point, in the hope of making out, with greater
           distinctness, a certain window, where she half saw, half guessed, that
           a tailor's seamstress was sitting at her work.   Hepzibah flung herself
           upon that unknown woman's companionship, even thus far off.  Then she
           was attracted by a chaise rapidly passing, and watched its moist and
           glistening top, and its splashing wheels, until it had turned the
           corner, and refused to carry any further her idly trifling, because
           appalled and overburdened, mind.  When the vehicle had disappeared, she
           allowed herself still another loitering moment; for the patched figure
           of good Uncle Venner was now visible, coming slowly from the head of
           the street downward, with a rheumatic limp, because the east wind had
           got into his joints.  Hepzibah wished that he would pass yet more
           slowly, and befriend her shivering solitude a little longer.  Anything
           that would take her out of the grievous present, and interpose human
           beings betwixt herself and what was nearest to her,--whatever would
           defer for an instant the inevitable errand on which she was bound,--all
           such impediments were welcome.  Next to the lightest heart, the
           heaviest is apt to be most playful.

           Hepzibah had little hardihood for her own proper pain, and far less for
           what she must inflict on Clifford.  Of so slight a nature, and so
           shattered by his previous calamities, it could not well be short of
           utter ruin to bring him face to face with the hard, relentless man who
           had been his evil destiny through life.  Even had there been no bitter
           recollections, nor any hostile interest now at stake between them, the
           mere natural repugnance of the more sensitive system to the massive,
           weighty, and unimpressible one, must, in itself, have been disastrous
           to the former.  It would be like flinging a porcelain vase, with
           already a crack in it, against a granite column.  Never before had
           Hepzibah so adequately estimated the powerful character of her cousin
           Jaffrey,--powerful by intellect, energy of will, the long habit of
           acting among men, and, as she believed, by his unscrupulous pursuit of
           selfish ends through evil means.  It did but increase the difficulty
           that Judge Pyncheon was under a delusion as to the secret which he
           supposed Clifford to possess.  Men of his strength of purpose and
           customary sagacity, if they chance to adopt a mistaken opinion in
           practical matters, so wedge it and fasten it among things known to be
           true, that to wrench it out of their minds is hardly less difficult
           than pulling up an oak.  Thus, as the Judge required an impossibility
           of Clifford, the latter, as he could not perform it, must needs perish.
           For what, in the grasp of a man like this, was to become of Clifford's
           soft poetic nature, that never should have had a task more stubborn
           than to set a life of beautiful enjoyment to the flow and rhythm of
           musical cadences! Indeed, what had become of it already? Broken!
           Blighted! All but annihilated! Soon to be wholly so!

           For a moment, the thought crossed Hepzibah's mind, whether Clifford
           might not really have such knowledge of their deceased uncle's vanished
           estate as the Judge imputed to him.  She remembered some vague
           intimations, on her brother's part, which--if the supposition were not
           essentially preposterous--might have been so interpreted.  There had
           been schemes of travel and residence abroad, day-dreams of brilliant
           life at home, and splendid castles in the air, which it would have
           required boundless wealth to build and realize.  Had this wealth been
           in her power, how gladly would Hepzibah have bestowed it all upon her
           iron-hearted kinsman, to buy for Clifford the freedom and seclusion of
           the desolate old house!  But she believed that her brother's schemes
           were as destitute of actual substance and purpose as a child's pictures
           of its future life, while sitting in a little chair by its mother's
           knee.  Clifford had none but shadowy gold at his command; and it was
           not the stuff to satisfy Judge Pyncheon!

           Was there no help in their extremity? It seemed strange that there
           should be none, with a city round about her.  It would be so easy to
           throw up the window, and send forth a shriek, at the strange agony of
           which everybody would come hastening to the rescue, well understanding
           it to be the cry of a human soul, at some dreadful crisis! But how
           wild, how almost laughable, the fatality,--and yet how continually it
           comes to pass, thought Hepzibah, in this dull delirium of a
           world,--that whosoever, and with however kindly a purpose, should come
           to help, they would be sure to help the strongest side! Might and wrong
           combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible
           attraction.  There would be Judge Pyncheon,--a person eminent in the
           public view, of high station and great wealth, a philanthropist, a
           member of Congress and of the church, and intimately associated with
           whatever else bestows good name,--so imposing, in these advantageous
           lights, that Hepzibah herself could hardly help shrinking from her own
           conclusions as to his hollow integrity.  The Judge, on one side! And
           who, on the other? The guilty Clifford! Once a byword! Now, an
           indistinctly remembered ignominy!

           Nevertheless, in spite of this perception that the Judge would draw all
           human aid to his own behalf, Hepzibah was so unaccustomed to act for
           herself, that the least word of counsel would have swayed her to any
           mode of action. Little Phoebe Pyncheon would at once have lighted up
           the whole scene, if not by any available suggestion, yet simply by the
           warm vivacity of her character. The idea of the artist occurred to
           Hepzibah. Young and unknown, mere vagrant adventurer as he was, she had
           been conscious of a force in Holgrave which might well adapt him to be
           the champion of a crisis. With this thought in her mind, she unbolted a
           door, cobwebbed and long disused, but which had served as a former
           medium of communication between her own part of the house and the gable
           where the wandering daguerreotypist had now established his temporary
           home. He was not there. A book, face downward, on the table, a roll of
           manuscript, a half-written sheet, a newspaper, some tools of his
           present occupation, and several rejected daguerreotypes, conveyed an
           impression as if he were close at hand. But, at this period of the day,
           as Hepzibah might have anticipated, the artist was at his public rooms.
           With an impulse of idle curiosity, that flickered among her heavy
           thoughts, she looked at one of the daguerreotypes, and beheld Judge
           Pyncheon frowning at her. Fate stared her in the face. She turned back
           from her fruitless quest, with a heartsinking sense of disappointment.
           In all her years of seclusion, she had never felt, as now, what it was
           to be alone. It seemed as if the house stood in a desert, or, by some
           spell, was made invisible to those who dwelt around, or passed beside
           it; so that any mode of misfortune, miserable accident, or crime might
           happen in it without the possibility of aid.  In her grief and wounded
           pride, Hepzibah had spent her life in divesting herself of friends; she
           had wilfully cast off the support which God has ordained his creatures
           to need from one another; and it was now her punishment, that Clifford
           and herself would fall the easier victims to their kindred enemy.

           Returning to the arched window, she lifted her eyes,--scowling, poor,
           dim-sighted Hepzibah, in the face of Heaven!--and strove hard to send
           up a prayer through the dense gray pavement of clouds.  Those mists had
           gathered, as if to symbolize a great, brooding mass of human trouble,
           doubt, confusion, and chill indifference, between earth and the better
           regions.  Her faith was too weak; the prayer too heavy to be thus
           uplifted.  It fell back, a lump of lead, upon her heart.  It smote her
           with the wretched conviction that Providence intermeddled not in these
           petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor had any balm for
           these little agonies of a solitary soul; but shed its justice, and its
           mercy, in a broad, sunlike sweep, over half the universe at once.  Its
           vastness made it nothing.  But Hepzibah did not see that, just as there
           comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of
           God's care and pity for every separate need.

           At last, finding no other pretext for deferring the torture that she
           was to inflict on Clifford,--her reluctance to which was the true cause
           of her loitering at the window, her search for the artist, and even her
           abortive prayer,--dreading, also, to hear the stern voice of Judge
           Pyncheon from below stairs, chiding her delay,--she crept slowly, a
           pale, grief-stricken figure, a dismal shape of woman, with almost
           torpid limbs, slowly to her brother's door, and knocked!

           There was no reply.

           And how should there have been? Her hand, tremulous with the shrinking
           purpose which directed it, had smitten so feebly against the door that
           the sound could hardly have gone inward.  She knocked again.  Still no
           response! Nor was it to be wondered at.  She had struck with the entire
           force of her heart's vibration, communicating, by some subtile
           magnetism, her own terror to the summons.  Clifford would turn his face
           to the pillow, and cover his head beneath the bedclothes, like a
           startled child at midnight.  She knocked a third time, three regular
           strokes, gentle, but perfectly distinct, and with meaning in them; for,
           modulate it with what cautious art we will, the hand cannot help
           playing some tune of what we feel upon the senseless wood.

           Clifford returned no answer.

           "Clifford! Dear brother!"  said Hepzibah.  "Shall I come in?"

           A silence.

           Two or three times, and more, Hepzibah repeated his name, without
           result; till, thinking her brother's sleep unwontedly profound, she
           undid the door, and entering, found the chamber vacant.  How could he
           have come forth, and when, without her knowledge?  Was it possible
           that, in spite of the stormy day, and worn out with the irksomeness
           within doors he had betaken himself to his customary haunt in the
           garden, and was now shivering under the cheerless shelter of the
           summer-house? She hastily threw up a window, thrust forth her turbaned
           head and the half of her gaunt figure, and searched the whole garden
           through, as completely as her dim vision would allow.  She could see
           the interior of the summer-house, and its circular seat, kept moist by
           the droppings of the roof.  It had no occupant.  Clifford was not
           thereabouts; unless, indeed, he had crept for concealment (as, for a
                   moment, Hepzibah fancied might be the case) into a great, wet mass of
           tangled and broad-leaved shadow, where the squash-vines were clambering
           tumultuously upon an old wooden framework, set casually aslant against
           the fence.  This could not be, however; he was not there; for, while
           Hepzibah was looking, a strange grimalkin stole forth from the very
           spot, and picked his way across the garden.  Twice he paused to snuff
           the air, and then anew directed his course towards the parlor window.
           Whether it was only on account of the stealthy, prying manner common to
           the race, or that this cat seemed to have more than ordinary mischief
           in his thoughts, the old gentlewoman, in spite of her much perplexity,
           felt an impulse to drive the animal away, and accordingly flung down a
           window stick.  The cat stared up at her, like a detected thief or
           murderer, and, the next instant, took to flight.  No other living
           creature was visible in the garden.  Chanticleer and his family had
           either not left their roost, disheartened by the interminable rain, or
           had done the next wisest thing, by seasonably returning to it.
           Hepzibah closed the window.

           But where was Clifford? Could it be that, aware of the presence of his
           Evil Destiny, he had crept silently down the staircase, while the Judge
           and Hepzibah stood talking in the shop, and had softly undone the
           fastenings of the outer door, and made his escape into the street?
           With that thought, she seemed to behold his gray, wrinkled, yet
           childlike aspect, in the old-fashioned garments which he wore about the
           house; a figure such as one sometimes imagines himself to be, with the
           world's eye upon him, in a troubled dream.  This figure of her wretched
           brother would go wandering through the city, attracting all eyes, and
           everybody's wonder and repugnance, like a ghost, the more to be
           shuddered at because visible at noontide.  To incur the ridicule of the
           younger crowd, that knew him not,--the harsher scorn and indignation of
           a few old men, who might recall his once familiar features! To be the
           sport of boys, who, when old enough to run about the streets, have no
           more reverence for what is beautiful and holy, nor pity for what is
           sad,--no more sense of sacred misery, sanctifying the human shape in
           which it embodies itself,--than if Satan were the father of them all!
           Goaded by their taunts, their loud, shrill cries, and cruel
           laughter,--insulted by the filth of the public ways, which they would
           fling upon him,--or, as it might well be, distracted by the mere
           strangeness of his situation, though nobody should afflict him with so
           much as a thoughtless word,--what wonder if Clifford were to break into
           some wild extravagance which was certain to be interpreted as lunacy?
           Thus Judge Pyncheon's fiendish scheme would be ready accomplished to
           his hands!

           Then Hepzibah reflected that the town was almost completely
           water-girdled.  The wharves stretched out towards the centre of the
           harbor, and, in this inclement weather, were deserted by the ordinary
           throng of merchants, laborers, and sea-faring men; each wharf a
           solitude, with the vessels moored stem and stern, along its misty
           length.  Should her brother's aimless footsteps stray thitherward, and
           he but bend, one moment, over the deep, black tide, would he not
           bethink himself that here was the sure refuge within his reach, and
           that, with a single step, or the slightest overbalance of his body, he
           might be forever beyond his kinsman's gripe? Oh, the temptation! To
           make of his ponderous sorrow a security! To sink, with its leaden
           weight upon him, and never rise again!

           The horror of this last conception was too much for Hepzibah.  Even
           Jaffrey Pyncheon must help her now She hastened down the staircase,
           shrieking as she went.

           "Clifford is gone!" she cried.  "I cannot find my brother.  Help,
           Jaffrey Pyncheon! Some harm will happen to him!"

           She threw open the parlor-door.  But, what with the shade of branches
           across the windows, and the smoke-blackened ceiling, and the dark
           oak-panelling of the walls, there was hardly so much daylight in the
           room that Hepzibah's imperfect sight could accurately distinguish the
           Judge's figure.  She was certain, however, that she saw him sitting in
           the ancestral arm-chair, near the centre of the floor, with his face
           somewhat averted, and looking towards a window.  So firm and quiet is
           the nervous system of such men as Judge Pyncheon, that he had perhaps
           stirred not more than once since her departure, but, in the hard
           composure of his temperament, retained the position into which accident
           had thrown him.

           "I tell you, Jaffrey," cried Hepzibah impatiently, as she turned from
           the parlor-door to search other rooms, "my brother is not in his
           chamber! You must help me seek him!"

           But Judge Pyncheon was not the man to let himself be startled from an
           easy-chair with haste ill-befitting either the dignity of his character
           or his broad personal basis, by the alarm of an hysteric woman.  Yet,
           considering his own interest in the matter, he might have bestirred
           himself with a little more alacrity.

           "Do you hear me, Jaffrey Pyncheon?" screamed Hepzibah, as she again
           approached the parlor-door, after an ineffectual search elsewhere.
           "Clifford is gone."

           At this instant, on the threshold of the parlor, emerging from within,
           appeared Clifford himself! His face was preternaturally pale; so deadly
           white, indeed, that, through all the glimmering indistinctness of the
           passageway, Hepzibah could discern his features, as if a light fell on
           them alone.  Their vivid and wild expression seemed likewise sufficient
           to illuminate them; it was an expression of scorn and mockery,
           coinciding with the emotions indicated by his gesture.   As Clifford
           stood on the threshold, partly turning back, he pointed his finger
           within the parlor, and shook it slowly as though he would have
           summoned, not Hepzibah alone, but the whole world, to gaze at some
           object inconceivably ridiculous.   This action, so ill-timed and
           extravagant,--accompanied, too, with a look that showed more like joy
           than any other kind of excitement,--compelled Hepzibah to dread that
           her stern kinsman's ominous visit had driven her poor brother to
           absolute insanity.  Nor could she otherwise account for the Judge's
           quiescent mood than by supposing him craftily on the watch, while
           Clifford developed these symptoms of a distracted mind.

           "Be quiet, Clifford!" whispered his sister, raising her hand to impress
           caution.  "Oh, for Heaven's sake, be quiet!"

           "Let him be quiet! What can he do better?" answered Clifford, with a
           still wilder gesture, pointing into the room which he had just quitted.
           "As for us, Hepzibah, we can dance now!--we can sing, laugh, play, do
           what we will! The weight is gone, Hepzibah!  It is gone off this weary
           old world, and we may be as light-hearted as little Phoebe herself."

           And, in accordance with his words, he began to laugh, still pointing
           his finger at the object, invisible to Hepzibah, within the parlor.
           She was seized with a sudden intuition of some horrible thing.  She
           thrust herself past Clifford, and disappeared into the room; but almost
           immediately returned, with a cry choking in her throat.  Gazing at her
           brother with an affrighted glance of inquiry, she beheld him all in a
           tremor and a quake, from head to foot, while, amid these commoted
           elements of passion or alarm, still flickered his gusty mirth.

           "My God! what is to become of us?" gasped Hepzibah.

           "Come!" said Clifford in a tone of brief decision, most unlike what was
           usual with him.  "We stay here too long! Let us leave the old house to
           our cousin Jaffrey! He will take good care of it!"

           Hepzibah now noticed that Clifford had on a cloak,--a garment of long
           ago,--in which he had constantly muffled himself during these days of
           easterly storm.  He beckoned with his hand, and intimated, so far as
           she could comprehend him, his purpose that they should go together from
           the house.  There are chaotic, blind, or drunken moments, in the lives
           of persons who lack real force of character,--moments of test, in which
           courage would most assert itself,--but where these individuals, if left
           to themselves, stagger aimlessly along, or follow implicitly whatever
           guidance may befall them, even if it be a child's.  No matter how
           preposterous or insane, a purpose is a Godsend to them.   Hepzibah had
           reached this point.  Unaccustomed to action or responsibility,--full of
           horror at what she had seen, and afraid to inquire, or almost to
           imagine, how it had come to pass,--affrighted at the fatality which
           seemed to pursue her brother,--stupefied by the dim, thick, stifling
           atmosphere of dread which filled the house as with a death-smell, and
           obliterated all definiteness of thought,--she yielded without a
           question, and on the instant, to the will which Clifford expressed.
           For herself, she was like a person in a dream, when the will always
           sleeps.  Clifford, ordinarily so destitute of this faculty, had found
           it in the tension of the crisis.

           "Why do you delay so?" cried he sharply.  "Put on your cloak and hood,
           or whatever it pleases you to wear! No matter what; you cannot look
           beautiful nor brilliant, my poor Hepzibah! Take your purse, with money
           in it, and come along!"

           Hepzibah obeyed these instructions, as if nothing else were to be done
           or thought of.  She began to wonder, it is true, why she did not wake
           up, and at what still more intolerable pitch of dizzy trouble her
           spirit would struggle out of the maze, and make her conscious that
           nothing of all this had actually happened.  Of course it was not real;
           no such black, easterly day as this had yet begun to be; Judge Pyncheon
           had not talked with, her.  Clifford had not laughed, pointed, beckoned
           her away with him; but she had merely been afflicted--as lonely
           sleepers often are--with a great deal of unreasonable misery, in a
           morning dream!

           "Now--now--I shall certainly awake!" thought Hepzibah, as she went to
           and fro, making her little preparations.  "I can bear it no longer I
           must wake up now!"

           But it came not, that awakening moment! It came not, even when, just
           before they left the house, Clifford stole to the parlor-door, and made
           a parting obeisance to the sole occupant of the room.

           "What an absurd figure the old fellow cuts now!" whispered he to
           Hepzibah.  "Just when he fancied he had me completely under his thumb!
           Come, come; make haste! or he will start up, like Giant Despair in
           pursuit of Christian and Hopeful, and catch us yet!"

           As they passed into the street, Clifford directed Hepzibah's attention
           to something on one of the posts of the front door.  It was merely the
           initials of his own name, which, with somewhat of his characteristic
           grace about the forms of the letters, he had cut there when a boy.  The
           brother and sister departed, and left Judge Pyncheon sitting in the old
           home of his forefathers, all by himself; so heavy and lumpish that we
           can liken him to nothing better than a defunct nightmare, which had
           perished in the midst of its wickedness, and left its flabby corpse on
           the breast of the tormented one, to be gotten rid of as it might!

 Clifford's Chamber: Hepzibah felt that she, Clifford and Judge Pyncheon were on the brink of adding another disturbing incident to the house. She cannot rid herself of the sense of something unprecedented occurring. She had never adequately estimated how powerful Jaffrey was in intellect and energy of will and had never felt as alone. She goes to Clifford's room, but does not find him there. She calls for help from Jaffrey, telling him that Clifford is not in his room, but then Clifford appears from the parlor. Judge Pyncheon still remains there, slumped over and unresponsive. Clifford points to the dead Judge and says that they can live without such weight anymore, but they must escape the house.

