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_ 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 armchair,
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! _
Read next: CHAPTER XVII - THE FLIGHT OF TWO OWLS
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