 Chapter 15 of The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne Chapter 15 The Scowl and Smile Several days passed over the Seven Gables heavily and drearily enough, in fact, not to attribute the whole gloom of sky and earth to the one inauspicious circumstance of Phoebe's departure. An easterly storm had set in, and, indefaticably, apply itself to the task of making the black roof and walls of the old house look more cheerless than ever before. Yet was the outside not half so cheerless as the interior? Poor Clifford was cut off at once from all his scanty resources of enjoyment. Phoebe was not there, nor did the sunshine fall upon the floor. The garden with its muddy walks, and the chill, dripping foliage of its summer house, was an image to be shuttered at. Nothing flourished in the cold, moist, pitiless atmosphere, drifting with the brackish scud of sea breezes, except the moss along the joints of the shingle roof, and the great bunch of weeds that had lately been suffering from drought in the angle between the two front gables. As for Hepsiba, she seemed not merely possessed with the east wind, but to be, in her very person, only another phase of this gray and sullen spell of weather, the east wind itself, grim and disconsolate, in a rusty black silked gown, and with a turban of cloud wreaths on its head. The custom of the shop fell off, because a story got abroad that she soured her small beer and other damageable commodities, by scowling on them. It is perhaps true that the public had something reasonably to complain of in her deportment, but towards Clifford she was neither ill-tempered nor unkind, nor felt less warmth of heart than always, had it been possible to make it reach him. The in-utility of her best efforts, however, palsied the poor old gentlewoman. She could do little else than sit silently in a corner of the room, when the wet pear-tree branches, sweeping across the small windows, created a noonday dusk, which Hepsiba unconsciously darkened with her woe-begone aspect. It was no fault of Hepsiba's. Everything, even the old chairs and tables, that had known what weather was for three or four such lifetimes as her own, looked as damp and chill as if the present were their worst experience. The picture of the Puritan Colonel shivered on the wall. The house itself shivered, from every attic of its seven gables down to the great kitchen fireplace, which served all the better as an emblem of the mansion's heart, because, though built for warmth, it was now so comfortless and empty. Hepsiba attempted to enliven matters by a fire in the parlor, but the storm-demon kept watch above, and whenever a flame was kindled drove the smoke back again, choking the chimney's sooty throat with its own breath. Nevertheless, during four days of this miserable storm Clifford wrapped himself in an old cloak and occupied his customary chair. On the morning of the fifth, when summoned to breakfast, he responded only by a broken-hearted murmur, expressive of a determination not to leave his bed. His sister made no attempt to change his purpose. In fact, entirely as she loved him, Hepsiba could hardly have borne any longer the wretched duty, so impracticable by her few and rigid faculties, of seeking pastime for a still sensitive, but ruined mind, critical and fastidious, without force or volition. It was at least something short of positive despair, that to-day she might sit shivering alone and not suffer continually a new grief, and unreasonable pang of remorse at every fitful sigh of her fellow sufferer. But Clifford, it seemed, though he did not make his appearance below stairs, had, after all, besturred himself in quest of amusement. In the course of the forenoon, Hepsiba heard a note of music, which, there being no other tuneful contrivance in the house of the Seven Gables, she knew must proceed from Alice Pinchon's harpsichord. She was aware that Clifford and his youth had possessed a cultivated taste for music, and a considerable degree of skill in its practice. It was difficult, however, to conceive of his retaining an accomplishment to which daily exercise is so essential, in the measure indicated by the sweet, airy and delicate, the most melancholy strain that now stole upon her ear. Nor was it less marvellous that the long, silent instrument should be capable of so much melody. Hepsiba involuntarily thought of the ghostly harmonies, prelusive of death in the family which were attributed to the legendary Alice. But it was, perhaps, proof of the agency of other than spiritual fingers, that, after a few touches, the chords seemed to snap asunder with their own vibrations, and the music ceased. But a harsher sound succeeded to the mysterious notes, nor was the easterly day faded to pass without an event sufficient in itself to poison, for Hepsiba and Clifford, the balmiest air that ever brought the hummingbirds along with it. The final echoes of Alice Pinchon's performance, or Clifford's, if his we must consider it, were driven away by no less vulgar addisonance than the ringing of the shop-bell. A foot was heard scraping itself on the threshold, and thence somewhat ponderously stepping on the floor. Hepsiba delayed a moment, while muffling herself in a faded shawl, which had been her defensive armour in a forty years' warfare against the east wind. A characteristic sound, however, neither a cough nor a hymn, but a kind of rumbling and reverberating spasm in somebody's capacious depth of chest, impelled her to hurry forward with that aspect of fierce faint-heartedness so common to women in cases of perilous emergency. Few of her sex, on such occasions, have ever looked so terrible as our poor scowling Hepsiba, but the visitor quietly closed the shop-door behind him, stood up his umbrella against the counter, and turned a visage of composed indignity to meet the alarm and anger which his appearance had excited. Hepsiba's presentiment had not deceived her. It was no other than Judge Pinshawn, who, after in vain trying the front-door, had now affected his entrance into the shop. How do you do, Cousin Hepsiba, and how does this most inclement weather affect our poor Clifford? Began the Judge, and wonderful it seemed, indeed, that the easterly storm was not put to shame, or at any rate a little modified by the genial benevolence of his smile. I could not rest without calling to ask once more whether I can in any manner provoke his comfort or your own. You can do nothing," said Hepsiba, controlling her agitation as well as she could. I devote myself to Clifford. He has every comfort which his situation admits of. But allow me to suggest, dear cousin, rejoin the Judge. You err, in all affection and kindness no doubt, and with the very best intentions, but you do err, nevertheless, in keeping your brother so secluded. Why insulate him thus from all sympathy and kindness? Clifford, alas, has had too much of solitude. Now let him try society, the society that is to say of kindred and old friends. Let me, for instance, but see Clifford, and I will answer for the good effect of the interview. You cannot see him," answered Hepsiba. Clifford has kept his bed since yesterday. What? How? Is he ill? exclaimed Judge Pinshan, starting with what seemed to be angry alarm, for the very frown of the old Puritan darkened through the room as he spoke. Nay, then, I must and will see him. What if he should die? He is no danger of death," said Hepsiba, and added, with bitterness that she could repress no longer. None, unless he shall be persecuted to death, now by the same man who long ago attempted it. Cousin Hepsiba said the Judge with an impressive earnestness of manner which grew even to tearful pathos as he proceeded. Is it possible that you do not perceive how unjust, how unkind, how un-Christian is this constant, this long-continued bitterness against me, for a part which I was constrained by duty and conscience, by the force of law, and at my own peril to act? What did I do, in detriment to Clifford, which it was possible to leave undone? How could you, his sister, if for your never-ending sorrow, as it has been for mine, you had known what I did, have shown greater tenderness, and do you think, cousin, that it has cost me no pang, that it has left no anguish in my bosom from that day to this, amidst all the prosperity with which heaven is blessed me? Or that I do not now rejoice when it is deemed consistent with the dues of public justice and the welfare of society that this dear kinsman, this early friend, this nature so delicately and beautifully constituted, so unfortunate, let us pronounce him, and forbear to say, so guilty, that our own Clifford, in fine, should be given back to life and its possibilities of enjoyment. Ah! you little know me, cousin Hepsiba, you little know this heart. It now throbs at the thought of meeting him. There lives not the human being, except yourself, and you not more than I. Who has shed so many tears for Clifford's calamity? You behold some of them now. There is none who would so delight to promote his happiness. Try me, Hepsiba. Try me, cousin. Try the man whom you have treated as your enemy and Clifford's. Try Jaffrey Pinshawn, and you shall find him true to the heart's core. In the name of heaven! cried Hepsiba, provoked only to intenser indignation by this outgush of the inestimable tenderness of a stern nature. In God's name, whom you insult, and whose power I could almost question, since he hears you utter so many false words without pausing your tongue, give over, I beseech you, this loathsome pretensive affection for your victim. You hate him! Say so like a man. You cherish at this moment some black purpose against him in your heart. Speak it out at once, or if you hope so to promote it better, hide it till you can triumph in its success. But never speak again of your love for my poor brother. I cannot bear it. It will drive me beyond a woman's decency. It will drive me mad. Forbear! Not another word! It will make me spurn you! For once Hepsiba's wrath had given her courage. She had spoken. But, after all, was this unconquerable distrust of Judge Pinshawn's integrity and this utter denial, apparently, of his claim to stand in the ring of human sympathies? Were they founded in any just perception of his character, or merely the offspring of a woman's unreasonable prejudice, deduced from nothing? The Judge, beyond all question, was a man of eminent respectability. The church acknowledged it, the state acknowledged it. It was denied by nobody. In all the very extensive sphere of those who knew him, whether in his public or private capacities, there was not an individual, except Hepsiba, and some lawless mystic like the daguerreotypist, and possibly a few political opponents who would have dreamed of seriously disputing his claim to a high and honorable place in the world's regard. Nor, we must do him the further justice to say, did Judge Pinshawn himself probably entertain many or very frequent doubts that his enviable reputation accorded with his desserts. His conscience, therefore, usually considered the surest witness to a man's integrity, his conscience, unless it might be for the little space of five minutes in the twenty-four hours, or, now and then, some black day in the whole year's cycle, his conscience bore an accordant testimony with the world's laudatory voice. And yet, strong as this evidence may seem to be, we should hesitate to peril our own conscience on the assertion that the judge and the consenting world were right, and that poor Hepsiba, with her solitary prejudice, was wrong. Hidden from mankind, forgotten by himself, or buried so deeply under a sculptured and ornamented pile of ostentatious deeds that his daily life could take no note of it, there may have lurked some evil and unsightly thing. Nay, we could almost venture to say, further, that a daily guilt might have been acted by him, continually renewed, and reddening forth afresh, like the miraculous bloodstain of a murder, without his necessarily and at every moment being aware of it. Men of strong minds, great force of character, and a hard texture of the sensibilities are very capable of falling into mistakes of this kind. They are ordinary men to whom forms are of paramount importance. Their field of action lies among the external phenomena of life. They possess vast ability in grasping and arranging and appropriating to themselves the big, heavy, solid unrealities, such as gold, landed estate, offices of trust in emolument, and public honors. With these materials, and with deeds of goodly aspect, done in the public eye, an individual of this class builds up, as it were, a tall and stately edifice, which, in the view of other people, and ultimately in his own view, is no other than the man's character or the man himself. Behold, therefore, a palace, its splendid halls and suites of spacious apartments, are floored with the mosaic work of costly marbles. Its windows, the whole height of each room, admit the sunshine through the most transparent of plate glass. Its high cornices are gilded, and its ceilings gorgeously painted, and a lofty dome, through which, from the central pavement, you may gaze up to the sky, as with no obstructing medium between, surmounts the whole. With what ferrer and nobler emblem could any man desire to shadow forth his character? Ah! But in some low and obscure nook, some narrow closet on the ground floor, shut, locked, and bolted, and the key flung away, or beneath the marble pavement, in a stagnant water puddle, with the richest pattern of mosaic work above, may lie a corpse, half decayed and still decaying, and diffusing its death-scent all through the palace. The inhabitant will not be conscious of it, for it has long been his daily breath. Neither will the visitors, for they smell only the rich odors which the master sedulously scatters through the palace, and the incense which they bring, delight to burn before him. Now and then, perchance comes in a seer, before whose sadly gifted eye the whole structure melts into thin air, leaving only the hidden nook, the bolted closet, with the cobwebs festooned over its forgotten door, or the deadly hole under the pavement, and the decaying corpse within. Here, then, we are to seek the true emblem of man's character, and of the deed that gives whatever reality it possesses to his life. And, beneath the show of a marble palace, that pool of stagnant water fowl with many impurities, and perhaps tinged with blood, that secret abomination above which possibly he may say his prayers without remembering it, is this man's miserable soul. To apply this train of remark somewhat more closely to Judge Pinchon. We might say, without in the least imputing crime to a personage of his eminent respectability, that there was enough of splendid rubbish in his life to cover up and paralyze a more active and subtle conscience than the judge was ever troubled with. The purity of his judicial character, while on the bench, the faithfulness of his public service in subsequent capacities, his devotedness to his party and the rigid consistency with which he had adhered to its principles, or, at all events, kept pace with its organized movements, his remarkable zeal as president of a Bible society, his unimpeachable integrity as treasurer of a widow's and orphan's fund, his benefits to horticulture by producing too much esteemed varieties of the pair, and to agriculture through the agency of the famous Pinchon Bull, the cleanliness of his moral deportment, for a great many years past the severity with which he had frowned upon, and finally cast off, an expensive and dissipated son, delaying forgiveness until within the final quarter of an hour of the young man's life, his prayers at morning and even tide, and graces at mealtime, his efforts in furtherance of the temperance cause, his confining himself since the last attack of the gout, to five diurnal glasses of old cherry wine, the snowy whiteness of his linen, the polish of his boots, the handsomeness of his gold-headed cane, the square and roomy fashion of his coat, and the fineness of its material, and, in general, the studied propriety of his dress and equipment, the scrupulousness with which he paid public notice in the street by a bow, a lifting of the hat, a nod, or a motion of the hand, to all and sundry of his acquaintances, rich or poor, the smile of broad benevolence, wherewith he made it a point to gladden the whole world, what room could possibly be found for darker traits in a portrait made up of liniments like these? This proper face was what he beheld in the looking-glass. This admirably arranged life was what he was conscious of in the progress of every day. Then might not he claim to be its result and some, and say to himself and the community, Behold, Judge Pinchon there? And allowing that, many, many years ago, in his early and reckless youth he had committed some one wrong act, or that even now the inevitable force of circumstances should occasionally make him do one questionable deed among a thousand praiseworthy, or at least blameless ones, would you characterize the Judge by that one necessary deed and that half-forgotten act, and let it overshadow the fair aspect of a lifetime? What is there so ponderous and evil that a thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil which were heaped into the other scale? The scale and balance system is a favorite one with people of Judge Pinchon's brotherhood. A hard, cold man, thus unfortunately situated, seldom or never looking inward, and resolutely taking his idea of himself from what he purports to be his image as reflected in the mirror of public opinion, can scarcely arrive at true self-knowledge, except through loss of property and reputation. Sickness will not always help him do it, not always the death hour. But our affair now is with Judge Pinchon as he stood confronting the fierce outbreak of Hepsiba's wrath. Without premeditation, to her own surprise, and indeed terror, she had given vent for once to the inveteracy of her resentment cherished against this kinsman for thirty years. Thus far the Judge's countenance had expressed mild forbearance, grave and almost gentle deprecation of his cousin's unbecoming violence, free and Christian-like forgiveness of the wrong inflicted by her words. But when those words were irrevocably spoken, his look assumed sterness, the sense of power, an immitable resolve, and this was so natural and imperceptible a change, that it seemed as if the Iron Man had stood there from the first, and the meek man, not at all. The effect was as when the light-vapory clouds, with their soft coloring, suddenly vanish from the stony brow of a precipitous mountain, and leave there the frown which you at once feel to be eternal. Hepsiba almost adopted the insane belief that it was her old Puritan ancestor, and not the modern judge, on whom she had just been wreaking the bitterness of her heart. Never did a man show stronger proof of the lineage attributed to him than Judge Pinchon at this crisis by his unmistakable resemblance to the picture in the inner room. "'Cousin Hepsiba,' said he, very calmly, "'it is time to have done with this.'" "'With all my heart,' answered she, "'then why do you persecute us any longer? Leave poor Clifford and me in peace. Neither of us desires anything better.' "'It is my purpose to see Clifford before I leave this house,' continued the judge. "'Do not act like a madwoman, Hepsiba. I am his only friend, and an all-powerful one. Has it never occurred to you, are you so blind as not to have seen, that without not merely my consent, but my efforts, my representations, the exertion of my whole influence, political, official, personal, Clifford would never have been what you call free? Did you think his release a triumph over me? Not so, my good cousin, not so by any means. The furthest possible from that. No, it was the accomplishment of a purpose long entertained on my part. I set him free.'" "'You,' answered Hepsiba, "'I never will believe it. He owed his dungeon to you, his freedom to God's providence!' "'I set him free,' reaffirmed Judge Pinchon, with a calmest composure. And I came hither now to decide whether he shall retain his freedom. It will depend upon himself. For this purpose I must see him.'" "'Never! It would drive him mad,' exclaimed Hepsiba, but with an irresolute-ness sufficiently perceptible to the keen eye of the Judge. For without the slightest faith in his good intentions, she knew not whether there was most to dread in yielding or resistance. "'And why should you wish to see this wretched broken man, who retains hardly a fraction of his intellect, and will hide even that from an eye which has no love in it?' "'He shall see love enough in mine, if that be all,' said the Judge, with well-grounded confidence in the benignity of his aspect. But, Cousin Hepsiba, you confess a great deal, and very much to the purpose. Now listen, and I will frankly explain my reasons for insisting on this interview. At the death, thirty years since, of our Uncle Jeffrey, it was found, I know not whether the circumstance ever attracted much of your attention among the sadder interest that clustered round that event. But it was found that his visible estate of every kind fell far short of any estimate ever made of it. He was supposed to be immensely rich. Nobody doubted that he stood among the weightiest men of his day. It was one of his eccentricities, however, and not altogether a folly, neither, to conceal the amount of his property by making distant and foreign investments. Perhaps under other names than his own, and by various means familiar enough to capitalists, but unnecessary here to be specified. By Uncle Jeffrey's last will and testament, as you are aware, his entire property was bequeathed to me, with a single exception of a life interest to yourself in this old family mansion, and the strip of patrimonial estate remaining attached to it. And do you seek to deprive us of that? As Hepsiba, unable to restrain her bitter contempt, is this your price for ceasing to persecute poor Clifford? Certainly not, my dear cousin," answered the judge, smiling benevolently. On the contrary, as you must do me the justice to own, I have constantly expressed my readiness to double or treble your resources, whenever you should make up your mind to accept any kindness of that nature at the hands of your kinsmen. No, no, but here lies the gist of the manner. Of my uncle's unquestionably great estate, as I have said, not the half, no, not one-third, as I am fully convinced, was apparent after his death. Now I have the best possible reasons for believing that your brother Clifford can give me a clue to the recovery of the remainder. Clifford! Clifford know of any hidden wealth? Clifford have it in his power to make you rich!" cried the old gentlewoman, affected with a sense of something like ridicule at the idea. Impossible! You deceive yourself! It is really a thing to laugh at! It is as certain as that I stand here! said Judge Pinchon, striking his gold-headed cane on the floor, and at the same time stamping his foot, as if to express his conviction the more forcibly by the whole emphasis of his substantial person. Clifford told me so himself. No, no! exclaimed Hepsiba incredulously. You are dreaming, cousin Jeffery! I do not belong to the dreaming class of men! said the Judge quietly. Some months before my uncle's death Clifford boasted to me of the possession of the secret of incalculable wealth. His purpose was to taunt me and excite my curiosity. I know it well. But from a pretty distinct recollection of the particulars of our conversation I am thoroughly convinced that there was truth in what he said. Clifford at this moment, if he chooses, and choose he must, can inform me where to find the schedule, the documents, the evidences in whatever shape they exist of the vast amount of Uncle Jeffery's missing property. He has the secret. His boast was no idle word. It had a directness, an emphasis, a particularity that showed a backbone of solid meaning within the mystery of his expression. But what could have been Clifford's object? asked Hepsiba, In concealing it so long. It was one of the bad impulses of our fallen nature. Replied the Judge, turning up his eyes. He looked upon me as his enemy. He considered me as the cause of his overwhelming disgrace, his imminent peril of death, his irretrievable ruin. There was no great probability, therefore, of his volunteering information, out of his dungeon, that should elevate me still higher on the ladder of prosperity. But the moment has now come when he must give up his secret. And what if he should refuse? inquired Hepsiba. Or as I steadfastly believe, what if he has no knowledge of this wealth? My dear cousin, said Judge Pinchon, with a quietude which he had the power of making more formidable than any violence. Since your brother's return I have taken the precaution, a highly proper one in the near kinsman and natural guardian of an individual so situated, to have his deportment and habits constantly and carefully overlooked. Your neighbors have been eye-witnesses to whatever has passed in the garden. The butcher, the baker, the fishmonger, some of the customers of your shop, and many a prying old woman, have told me several of the secrets of your interior. A still larger circle, I myself, among the rest, can testify to his extravagances at the arched window. Thousands beheld him a week or two ago on the point of flinging himself thence into the street. From all this testimony I am led to apprehend, reluctantly and with deep grief, that Clifford's misfortunes have so affected his intellect never very strong, that he cannot safely remain at large. The alternative, you must be aware, and its adoption will depend entirely on the decision which I am now about to make. The alternative is his confinement, probably for the remainder of his life, in a public asylum for persons in his unfortunate state of mind. You cannot mean it! shrieked Hepsiba. Should my cousin Clifford, continued Judge Pinshawn, wholly undisturbed, from mere malice and hatred of one whose interests ought naturally to be dear to him, a mode of passion that, as often as any other, indicates mental disease, should he refuse me the information so important to myself, and which he assuredly possesses, I shall consider it the one needed jot of evidence to satisfy my mind of his insanity. And once sure of the course pointed out by conscience, you know me too well, cousin Hepsiba, to entertain a doubt that I shall pursue it. Oh, Jeffrey! cousin Jeffrey! cried Hepsiba mournfully, not passionately. It is you that are diseased in mind, not Clifford. You have forgotten that a woman was your mother, that you have had sisters, brothers, children of your own, or that there ever was affection between man and man, or pity from one man to another in this miserable world. Else how could you have dreamed of this? You are not young, cousin Jeffrey. No, nor middle-aged, but already an old man. The hair is white upon your head. How many years have you to live? Are you not rich enough for that little time? Shall you be hungry? Shall you lack clothes or a roof to shelter you between this point and the grave? No. But with the half of what you now possess, you could revel in costly food and wines, and build a house twice as splendid as you now inhabit, and make a far greater show to the world, and yet leave riches to your only son to make him bless the hour of your death. Then why should you do this cruel, cruel thing, so mad a thing that I know not whether to call it wicked? Alas, cousin Jeffrey, this hard and grasping spirit has run in our blood these two hundred years. You are but doing over again, in another shape, what your ancestor before you did, and sending down to your posterity the curse inherited from him. Talk sense, Hepsiba, for a heaven's sake! exclaim the judge with the impatience natural to a reasonable man on hearing anything so utterly absurd as the above in a discussion about matters of business. I have told you my determination. I am not apt to change. Clifford must give up his secret or take the consequences, and let him decide quickly, for I have several affairs to attend to this morning, and an important dinner engagement with some political friends. Clifford has no secret, answered Hepsiba, and God will not let you do the thing you meditate. We shall see, said the unmoved judge. Meanwhile choose whether you will summon Clifford and allow this business to be amicably settled by an interview between two kinsmen, or drive me to harsher measures, which I should be most happy to feel myself justified in avoiding. The responsibility is altogether on your part. You are stronger than I, said Hepsiba, after a brief consideration. And you have no pity in your strength. Clifford is not now insane, but the interview which you insist upon may go far to making so. Nevertheless, knowing you as I do, I believe it to be my best course to allow you to judge for yourself as to the improbability of his possessing any valuable secret. I will call Clifford. Be merciful in your dealings with him. Be far more merciful than your heart beads you be. For God is looking at you, Jeffrey Pinchon! The judge followed his cousin from the shop, where the foregoing conversation had passed, into the parlor, and flung himself heavily into the great ancestral chair. Many a former Pinchon had found repose in its capaceous arms, rosy children after their sports, young men dreamy with love, grown men weary with cares, old men burdened with winters. They had mused and slumbered and departed to a yet profounder sleep. It had been a long tradition, though a doubtful one, that this was the very chair, seated in which the earliest of the judge's New England forefathers, he whose picture still hung upon the wall, had given a dead man's silent and stern reception to the throng of distinguished guests. From that hour of evil omen until the present it may be, though we know not the secret of his heart, but it may be that no wearier and sadder man had ever sunk into the chair than this same judge Pinchon, whom we have just beheld so immitably hard and resolute. Surely it must have been at no slight cost that he had thus fortified his soul with iron. Such calmness is a mightier effort than the violence of weaker men, and there was yet a heavy task for him to do. Was it a little matter, a trifle to be prepared for in a single moment, and to be rested from in another moment, that he must now, after thirty years, encounter a kinsman risen from a living tomb, and wrench a secret from him, or else consign him to a living tomb again? Did you speak? asked Hepsiba, looking in from the threshold of the parlor, for she imagined that the judge had uttered some sound which she was anxious to interpret as a relenting impulse. I thought you called me back. No, no. Gruffly answered Judge Pinchon with a harsh frown, while his brow grew almost a black purple in the shadow of the room. Why should I call you back? Time flies! Bid Clifford come to me. The judge had taken his watch from his vest pocket and now held it in his hand, measuring the interval which was to ensue before the appearance of Clifford. CHAPTER XVI never had the old house appeared so dismal to poor Hepsiba as when she departed on that wretched errand. There was a strange aspect in it. As she trod 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 Pinchon, 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 Pinchons, stories which had heretofore been kept warm in her remembrance by the chimney-corner glow that was associated with them, now recurred to her somber, 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 Hepsba 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 Hepsba 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 real 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 in numberless preceding days except for the difference between sunshine and cellar and storm. Her eyes traveled 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 acutus point in the hope of making out, with greater distinctness, a certain window where she half-saw, half-guest, that a tailor's seamstress was sitting at her work. Hepsba flung herself upon that unknown woman's companionship, even thus far off. Then she was attracted by a shez, 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 an 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 gotten to his joints. Hepsba wished that he would pass yet more slowly and befriend her shivering solitude a little longer. Something that would take her out of the grievous present and interposed 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. Hepsba had little hardy-hood 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 unimpressable 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 Hepsba 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 Pinchon was under a delusion as to the secret which he's 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 wedged and fascinated 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 and is 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 Hepsba'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 have been schemes of travel and residence abroad, daydreams of brilliant life and 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 Hepsba have bestowed it all upon her iron-harding kinsmen 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 his mother's knee. Clifford had none but shadowy gold at his command, and it was not the stuff to satisfy Judge Pinchon. Since 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 Hepsba, 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 Pinchon, 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 Hepsba 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, Hepsba was so unaccustomed to act for herself that the least word of counsel would have swayed her to any mode of action. Little Phoebe Pinchon 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 Hepsba, 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, which had served as a former medium of communication between her own part of the house and the gable where the wandering daguerreotypeist had now established his temporary home. He was not there. A book, faced 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 Hepsba 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 Pinchon frowning at her. Fates stared her in the face. She turned back from her fruitless quest with a heart-sinking 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 dwelled 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, Hepsba had spent her life in divesting herself of friends. She had willfully 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-sided Hepsba in the face of heaven, and strove hard to send up a prayer through the dense gray pavement of clouds. Those mist 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 and her meddled, 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, sun-like sweep over half the universe at once. Its vastness made it nothing. But Hepsba did not see that, just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a love-beam 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 Pinchon from below's 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 subtle magnetism her own terror to the summons. Clifford would turn his face to a pillow and cover his head beneath the bed-clothes like a startled child at midnight. She knocked a third time, three regular strokes, gentle but perfectly distinct and with meaning in them, four modulated 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 Hepsiba, shall I come in? A silence. Two or three times and more, Hepsiba repeated his name without result, till, thinking her brother's sleep unwantedly 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 be taken 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 Hepsiba 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 as slant against the fence. This could not be, however. He was not there, for while Hepsiba was looking, a strange grimalken 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 power window. Whether it was only on account of the stealthy, prying manner a 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. Shanticleer 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. Hepsiba 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 in Hepsiba 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 shuttered 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, distraught by the filth of the public ways which they would fling upon him, or as it might 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 Pinchon's fiendish scheme would be ready accomplished to his hands. Anne Hepseba reflected that the town was almost completely water-girdled. The wharves stretched out towards the centre of the harbour, and in this inclement weather, were deserted by the ordinary throng of merchants, labourers, and seafaring men. Each wharf a solitude, with a vessel's 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 be think himself that here was the sure refuge within his reach, and that were the single step, or the slightest overbalance of his body, he might be forever beyond his kinsman's grip. O, the temptation, to make of his ponderous sorrow a security, to sink with its lead and weight upon him, and never rise again! The horror of this last conception was too much for Hepseba. Even Jaffrey Pinchon 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 Pinchon! Some harm will happen to him! She threw open the parlor door. But what were the shade of branches across the windows, and the smoke blackened the ceiling, and the dark oak paneling of the walls? There was hardly so much daylight in the room that Hepseba'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 center 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 Pinchon, 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 Hepseba 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 Pinchon 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 Pinchon? screamed Hepseba, 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, Hepseba could discern his features as if a light fell on them alone. Their vivid and wild expressions 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 Hepseba alone, but the whole world, to gaze at some object inconceivably ridiculous. So ill-timed and extravagant, accompanied, too, with a look that showed more like joy than any other kind of excitement, compelled Hepseba 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. Let him 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, Hepseba, we can dance now. We can sing, laugh, play, do what we will. The wait is gone, Hepseba! 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 Hepseba, 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 Hepseba. 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. Hepseba now noticed the 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 were 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, Hepseba 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 slips. Clifford, ordinarily so destitute of this faculty, had founded in the tension of the crisis. Why do you delay so? cried he sharply. Put on your cloak and hood, or whatever he pleases you to wear. No matter what, you cannot look beautiful nor brilliant, my poor Hepseba. Take your purse, with money in it, and come along. Hepseba 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. Strange Pinchon 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. Ha! Now! Now! I shall certainly awake! thought Hepseba, 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 parling of basins to the sole occupant of the room. What an absurd figure the old fellow cuts now! whispered he to Hepseba. 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 Hepseba'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 Pinchon 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. CHAPTER XVII. The Flight of Two Owls. Summer as it was, the East wind set for Hepseba's few remaining teeth chattering in her head, as she and Clifford faced it on their way up to Pinchon Street and towards the center of the town. Not merely was it the shiver which this pitiless blast brought to her frame, although her feet and hands especially had never seemed so death a cold as now, but there was a moral sensation, mingling itself with the physical chill and causing her to shake more in spirit than in body. The world's broad, bleak atmosphere was all so comfortless. Such indeed is the impression which it makes on every new adventurer, even if he plunge into it while the warmest tide of life is bubbling through his veins. What then must it have been to Hepseba and Clifford? So time-stricken as they were, yet so like children in their inexperience, as they left the doorstep and passed from beneath the wide shelter of the Pinchon Elm. They were wandering all abroad, on precisely such a pilgrimage as a child often meditates, to the world's end, with perhaps a sixpence and a biscuit in his pocket. In Hepseba's mind there was the wretched consciousness of being adrift. She had lost the faculty of self-guidance, but in view of the difficulties around her felt it hardly worth an effort to regain it, and was moreover incapable of making one. As they proceeded on their strange expedition she now and then cast a look side-long at Clifford, and could not but observe that he was possessed and swayed by a powerful excitement. It was this indeed that gave him the control which he had at once, and so irresistibly established over his movements. It not a little resembled the exhilaration of wine, or it might more fancifully be compared to a joyous piece of music, played with wild vivacity, but upon a disordered instrument. As the cracked jarring note might always be heard, and as it jarred loudest amidst the loftiest exultation of the melody, so was there a continual quake through Clifford, causing him most to quiver when he wore a triumphant smile, and seemed almost under a necessity to skip in his gait. They met few people abroad, even on passing from the retired neighborhood of the House of the Seven Gables, into what was ordinarily the more thronged and busier portion of the town. Glistening sidewalks, with little pools of rain here and there along their unequal surface, umbrellas displayed ostentatiously in the shop windows, as if the life of trade had concentrated itself in that one article. Wet leaves of the horse-chestnut or elm-trees torn off untimely by the blast and scattered along the public way, an unsightly accumulation of mud in the middle of the street which perversely grew the more unclean for its long and laborious washing. These were the more definable points of a very somber picture. In the way of movement and human life there was the hasty rattle of a cab or coach, its driver protected by a waterproof cap over his head and shoulders. The falorn figure of an old man, who seemed to have crept out of some subterranean sewer, and was stooping along the kennel and poking the wet rubbish with a stick in quest of rusty nails. A merchant or two, at the door of the post office, together with an editor and a miscellaneous politician, awaiting a dilatory mail. A few visages of retired sea-captains at the window of an insurance office, looking out vacantly at the vacant street, blaspheming at the weather, and fretting at the dearth as well of public news as local gossip. What a treasure-trove to these venerable quid-nunks could they have guessed the secret which Hepsipa and Clifford were carrying along with them. But their two figures attracted hardly so much notice as that of a young girl, who passed at the same instant, and happened to raise her skirt a trifle too high above her ankles. Had it been a sunny and cheerful day, they could hardly have gone through the streets without making themselves obnoxious to remark. Now probably they were felt to be in keeping with the dismal and bitter weather, and therefore did not stand out in strong relief, as if the sun were shining on them, but melted into the grey gloom and were forgotten as soon as gone. Poor Hepsipa! Could she have understood this fact it would have brought her some little comfort, for to all her other troubles, strange to say, there was added the womanish and old maiden-like misery arising from a sense of unseemliness in her attire. Thus she was feigned to shrink deeper into herself as it were, as if in the hope of making people suppose that here was only a cloak and hood, threadbare and woefully faded, taking an airing in the midst of the storm without any wearer. As they went on, the feeling of indistinctness and unreality kept dimly hovering round about her, and so diffusing itself into her system that one of her hands was hardly palpable to the touch of the other. Any certainty would have been preferable to this. She whispered to herself again and again, Am I awake? Am I awake? and sometimes exposed her face to the chill spatter of the wind, for the sake of its rude assurance that she was. Whether it was Clifford's purpose, or only chance, had led them thither, they now found themselves passing beneath the arched entrance of a large structure of grainy stone. Within there was a spacious breadth, and an airy height from floor to roof, now partially filled with smoke and steam, which eddied voluminously upward and formed a mimic cloud region over their heads. A train of cars was just ready for a start. The locomotive was fretting and fuming like a steed impatient for a headlong rush, and the bell rang out its hasty peel, so well expressing the brief summons which life vouchsafes to us in its hurried career. Without question or delay, with the irresistible decision, if not rather to be called recklessness which had so strangely taken possession of him, and through him of Hepsiba, Clifford impelled her towards the cars, and assisted her to enter. The signal was given, the engine puffed forth at short quick breaths, the train began its movement, and, along with a hundred other passengers, these two unwanted travellers sped onward like the wind. At last, therefore, and after so long estrangement from everything that the world acted or enjoyed, they had been drawn into the great current of human life, and were swept away with it, as by the suction of fate itself. Still haunted with the idea that not one of the past incidents, inclusive of Judge Pinchon's visit, could be real, the recluse of the seven gables murmured in her brother's ear, Clifford, Clifford, is not this a dream? A dream, Hepsiba! repeated he, almost laughing in her face. From the contrary, I have never been awake before! Meanwhile, looking from the window, they could see the world racing past them. At one moment they were rattling through a solitude. The next, a village had grown up around them. A few breaths more and it had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations. The broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its age-long rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to their own. Within the car there was the usual interior life of the railroad, offering little to the observation of other passengers, but full of novelty for this pair of strangely enfranchised prisoners. It was novelty enough, indeed, that there were fifty human beings in close relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its grasp. It seemed marvellous how all these people could remain so quietly in their seats, while so much noisy strength was at work in their behalf. Some, with tickets in their hats, long travellers these, before whom lay a hundred miles of railroad, had plunged into the English scenery and adventures of pamphlet novels, and were keeping company with dukes and earls. Others, whose brieferspan forbade their devoting themselves to study so abstruse, beguiled the little tedium of the way with penny-papers. A party of girls, and one young man, on opposite sides of the car, found huge amusement in a game of ball. They tossed it to and fro, with peels of laughter that might be measured by mile lengths. More faster than the nimble ball could fly, the merry players fled unconsciously along, leaving the trail of their mirth a far behind, and ending their game under another sky than had witnessed its commencement. Boys, with apples, cakes, candy, and rolls of variously tinctured lozenges, merchandise that reminded Hepsiba of her deserted shop, appeared at each momentary stopping-place, doing up their business in a hurry, for breaking it short off, lest the market should ravish them away with it. New people continually entered. Old acquaintances, for such they soon grew to be in this rapid current of affairs, continually departed. Here and there, amid the rumble and the tumult, sat one asleep. Sleep, sport, business, graver or lighter study, and the common and inevitable movement onward. It was life itself. Clifford's naturally poignant sympathies were all aroused. He caught the color of what was passing about him, and threw it back more vividly than he received it, but mixed, nevertheless, with a lurid and portentous hue. Hepsiba, on the other hand, felt herself more apart from humankind than even in the seclusion which he had just quitted. You are not happy, Hepsiba, said Clifford, apart in a tone of approach. You are thinking of that dismal old house, and of cousin Jaffrey. Here came the quake through him, and of cousin Jaffrey sitting there all by himself. Take my advice, follow my example, and let such things slip aside. Here we are in the world, Hepsiba, in the midst of life, in the throng of her fellow-beings. Let you and I be happy, as happy as that youth and those pretty girls at their game of ball. Happy, thought Hepsiba, bitterly conscious at the word, of her dull and heavy heart, with the frozen pain in it. Happy! He is mad already, and if I could once feel myself broad awake, I should go mad, too. With a fixed idea, be madness, she was perhaps not remote from it. Fast and far as they had rattled and clattered along the iron track, the might just as well, as regarded Hepsiba's metal images, had been passing up and down Pinchon Street. With miles and miles of varied scenery between, there was no scene for her save the seven old gable-peaks, with their moss and the tuft of weeds in one of the angles, and the shop window, and a customer shaking the door, and compelling the little bell to jingle fiercely, but without disturbing Judge Pinchon. This one old house was everywhere. It transported its great lumbering bulk with more than railroad speed, and set itself flammatically down on whatever spot she glanced at. The quality of Hepsiba's mind was too unmeleable to take new impressions so readily as Clifford's. He had a winged nature. She was rather of the vegetable kind, and could hardly be kept long alive if drawn up by the roots. Thus it happened that the relation here to fore existing between her brother and herself was changed. At home she was his guardian. Here Clifford had become hers, and seemed to comprehend whatever belonged to their new position with a singular rapidity of intelligence. He had been startled into manhood and intellectual vigor, or at least into a condition that resembled them, though it might be both diseased and transitory. The conductor now applied for their tickets, and Clifford, who had made himself the purse-bearer, put a bank note into his hand as he had observed others do. For the lady and yourself, asked the conductor, and how far? As far as that will carry us, said Clifford, it is no great matter we are riding for pleasure merely. You choose a strange day for it, sir," remarked a gimlet-eyed old gentleman on the other side of the car, looking at Clifford and his companion as if curious to make them out. The best chance of pleasure in an easterly rain, I take it, is in a man's own house, with a nice little fire in the chimney. I cannot precisely agree with you," said Clifford, courteously bowing to the old gentleman, and at once taking up the clue of conversation which the latter had proffered. It had just occurred to me, on the contrary, that this admirable invention of the railroad, with the vast and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and convenience, is destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and fireside, and substitute something better. In the name of common sense, asked the old gentleman rather testily, what can be better for a man than his own parlor in chimney corner? These things have not the merit which many good people attribute to them, replied Clifford. They may be said, in few and pithy words, to have ill-served a poor purpose. My impression is, that our wonderfully increased and still-increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to bring us around again to the nomadic state. You are aware, my dear sir, you must have observed it in your own experience, that all human progress is in a circle. To use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve, while we fancy ourselves going straight forward and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal. The past is but a course in sensual prophecy of the present and the future. To apply this truth to the topic now under discussion. In the early epics of our race, men dwelt in temporary huts of powers of branches, as easily constructed as a bird's nest, and which they built, if it should be called building, when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made with hands. Such nature, we shall say, assisted them to rear where fruit abounded, where fishing game were plentiful, or most especially, where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier shade than elsewhere, and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood, and hill. This life possessed a charm which, ever since men quitted it, has vanished from existence, and it typified something better than itself. It had its drawbacks, such as hunger and thirst, inclement weather, hot sunshine, and weary and foot-blistering marches over barren and ugly tracks that lay between the sights desirable for their fertility and beauty. But in our ascending spiral we escape all this. These railroads, could but the whistle be made musical and the rumble and the jar got rid of, are positively the greatest blessing that the ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings. They annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage. They spiritualize travel. Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbersome habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick and stone and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell in one sense nowhere? In a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home. Clifford's countenance glowed as he divulged this theory, a youthful character shown out from within, converting the wrinkles and pallid duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask. The merry girls let their ball drop upon the floor and gazed at him. They said to themselves, perhaps, that before his hair was gray and the crow's feet tracked his temples, this now decaying man must have stamped the impress of his features on many a woman's heart. But alas, no woman's eye had seen his face while it was beautiful. I should scarcely call it an improved state of things," observed Clifford's new acquaintance, to live everywhere and nowhere. Would you not, exclaimed Clifford with singular energy, it is as clear to me as sunshine, worth their eddy in the sky, that the greatest possible stumbling blocks in the path of human happiness and improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones consolidated with mortar or hewn timber, fastened together with spiked nails, which men painfully contrived for their own torment, and call them house and home. The soul needs air, a wide sweep and frequent change of it. Morbid influences in a thousand fold variety gather about hearths and pollute the life of households. There is no such unwholesome atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one's defunct forefathers and relatives. I speak of what I know. There is a certain house within my familiar recollection. One of those peaked gable, there are seven of them, projecting storied edifices, such as you occasionally see in our older towns, a rusty, crazy, creaky, dry rotted, dingy, dark and miserable old dungeon with an arched window over the porch and a little shop door on one side and a great melancholy elm before it. Now, sir, whenever my thoughts recurred to this seven gabled mansion, the fact is so very curious that I must needs mention it. Immediately I have a vision or image of an elderly man of remarkably stern countenance, sitting in an oaken elbow chair, dead, stoned dead, with an ugly flow of blood upon his shirt bosom, dead but with open eyes. He taints the whole house as I remember it. I could never flourish there, nor be happy, nor do nor enjoy what God meant me to do and enjoy. His face darkened and seemed to contract and shrivel itself up and wither into age. Never, sir, he repeated, I could never draw up cheerful breath there. I should think not, said the old gentleman, eyeing Clifford earnestly and rather apprehensively. I should conceive not, sir, with that notion in your head. Surely not, continued Clifford, and it were a relief to me if that house could be torn down or burnt up, and so the earth be rid of it and grasped be sown abundantly over its foundation. Not that I should ever visit its site again. For, sir, the farther I get away from it, the more does the joy, the lightsome freshness, the heart leap, the intellectual dance, the youth in short. Yes, my youth, my youth, the more does it come back to me. No longer ago than this morning I was old. I remember looking in the glass and wandering at my own gray hair and the wrinkles many and deep right across my brow and the furrows down my cheeks and the prodigious trampling of crow's feet about my temples. It was too soon. I could not bear it. Age had no right to come. I had not lived. But now do I look old? If so, my aspect belies me strangely, for a great weight being off my mind, I feel in the very heyday of my youth, with the world and my best days before me. I trust you may find it so, said the old gentleman who seemed rather embarrassed and desirous of avoiding the observation which Clifford's wild talk drew on them both. You have my best wishes for it. For heaven's sake, dear Clifford, be quiet, whispered his sister. They think you mad. Be quiet yourself, happy tuba, returned her brother. No matter what they think, I am not mad. For the first time in 30 years my thoughts gush up and find words ready for them. I must talk, and I will. He turned again towards the old gentleman and renewed the conversation. Yes, my dear sir, said he. It is my firm belief and hope that these terms of roof and hearthstone, which have so long been held to embody something sacred, are soon to pass out of men's daily use and be forgotten. Just imagine for a moment how much of human evil will crumble away with this one change. What we call real estate, the solid ground to build a house on, is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit almost any wrong. He will heap up an immense pile of wickedness as hard as granite, and which will weigh as heavily upon his soul to eternal ages, only to build a great gloomy, dark chambered mansion for himself to die in, and for his posterity to be miserable in. He lays his own dead corpse beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning picture on the wall. And after thus converting himself into an evil destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there. I do not speak wildly. I have just such a house in my mind's eye. Then, sir, said the old gentleman, getting anxious to drop the subject, you are not to blame for leaving it. Within the lifetime of the child already born, Clifford went on, all this will be done away. The world is growing too ethereal and spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer. To me, though, for a considerable period of time, I have lived chiefly in retirement, and no less of such things than most men. Even to me the harbingers of a better era are unmistakable. Mesmerism now. Will that effect nothing, think you, towards purging away the grossness out of human life? All a humbug, growled the old gentleman. These wrapping spirits that little Phoebe told us of the other day, said Clifford, what are these but the messengers of the spiritual world knocking at the door of substance? And it shall be flung wide open. A humbug again, cried the old gentleman, growing more and more testy at these glimpses of Clifford's metaphysics. I should like to wrap with a good stick on the empty pates of the adults who circulate such nonsense. Then there is electricity, the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence, exclaimed Clifford. Is that a humbug too? Is it a fact, or have I dreamt it, that by means of electricity the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence. Or shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it? If you mean the telegraph, said the old gentleman, glancing his eye towards its wire alongside the rail track, it is an excellent thing. That is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics don't get possession of it. A great thing indeed, sir, particularly as regards the detection of bank robbers and murderers. I don't quite like it in that point of view, replied Clifford. A bank robber, and what you call a murderer, likewise has his rights, which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard in so much the more liberal spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to controvert their existence. An almost spiritual medium, like the electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and holy missions. Lovers, day by day, hour by hour, if so often moved to do it, might send their heart throbs from Maine to Florida, with some such words as these, I love you forever. My heart runs over with love. I love you more than I can. And again at the next message, I have lived an hour longer and love you twice as much. Or when a good man has departed, his distant friend should be conscious of an electric thrill, as from the world of happy spirits telling him, your dear friend is in bliss. Or to an absent husband should come tidings thus, an immortal being of whom you are the father has this moment come from God. And immediately its little voice would seem to have reached so far, and to be echoing in his heart. But for these poor rogues, the bank robbers, who after all are about as honest as nine people in ten, except that they disregard certain formalities, and prefer to transact business at midnight rather than change hours. And for these murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the motives of their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public benefactors, if we consider only its result. For unfortunate individuals like these, I really cannot applaud the enlistment of an immaterial and miraculous power in the universal world hunt at their heels. You can't, hey? cried the old gentleman with a hard look. Positively no, answered Clifford. It puts them too miserably at disadvantage. For example, sir, in a dark, low, crossbeamed, paneled room of an old house, let us suppose a dead man sitting in an armchair, with a blood stain on his shirt bosom, and let us add to our hypothesis another man, issuing from the house what he feels to be overfilled with the dead man's presence. And let us lastly imagine him fleeing, heaven knows wither, at the speed of a hurricane, by railroad. Now, sir, if the fugitive alight in some distant town, and find all the people babbling about that self-same dead man, whom he has fled so far to avoid the sight and thought of, will you not allow that his natural rights have been infringed? He has been deprived of his city of refuge, and, in my humble opinion, has suffered infinite wrong. You are a strange man, sir, said the old gentleman, bringing his gimlet-eye to a point on Clifford, as if determined to bore right into him. I can't see through you. No, I'll be bound you can't, cried Clifford, laughing. And yet, my dear sir, I am as transparent as the water of Maul's well. But come, Hepsiba, we have flown far enough for once. Let us alight, as the birds do, and perch ourselves on the nearest twig, and consult wither we shall fly next. Just then, as it happened, the train reached the solitary way station. Taking advantage of the brief pause, Clifford left the car, and drew Hepsiba along with him. A moment afterwards, the train, with all the life of its interior, amid which Clifford had made himself so conspicuous an object, was gliding away in the distance, and rapidly lessening to a point which, in another moment, vanished. The world had fled away from these two wanderers. They gazed drearily about them. At a little distance stood a wooden church, black with age, and in a dismal state of ruin and decay, with broken windows, a great rift through the main body of the edifice, and a rafter dangling from the top of the square tower. Farther off was a farmhouse in the old style, as venerably black as the church, with a roof sloping downward from the three-story peak to within a man's height of the ground. It seemed uninhabited. There were the relics of a woodpile, indeed, near the door, but with grass sprouting up among the chips and scattered logs. The small raindrops came down a slant. The wind was not turbulent, but sullen, and full of chilly moisture. Clifford shivered from head to foot. The wild effervescence of his mood, which had so readily supplied thoughts, fantasies, and a strange aptitude of words, and impelled him to talk from the mere necessity of giving vent to this bubbling-up gush of ideas, had entirely subsided. A powerful excitement had given him energy and vivacity. Its operation over, he forthwith began to sink. You must take the lead now, Hipsiba, murmured he with a torpid and reluctant utterance. Do with me as you will. She knelt down upon the platform where they were standing and lifted her claff's hands to the sky. The dull gray weight of clouds made it invisible, but it was no hour for disbelief, no juncture this to question that there was a sky above and an almighty father looking from it. Oh, God! ejaculated poor Gaunt Hipsiba, then paused a moment to consider what her prayer should be. Oh, God! Our Father, are we not thy children? Have mercy on us! End of chapter