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CHAPTER VII The Guest
WHEN Phoebe awoke,--which she did with the early twittering of the conjugal couple of
robins in the pear-tree,--she heard movements below stairs, and, hastening
down, found Hepzibah already in the kitchen.
She stood by a window, holding a book in close contiguity to her nose, as if with
the hope of gaining an olfactory acquaintance with its contents, since her
imperfect vision made it not very easy to read them.
If any volume could have manifested its essential wisdom in the mode suggested, it
would certainly have been the one now in Hepzibah's hand; and the kitchen, in such
an event, would forthwith have streamed
with the fragrance of venison, turkeys, capons, larded partridges, puddings, cakes,
and Christmas pies, in all manner of elaborate mixture and concoction.
It was a cookery book, full of innumerable old fashions of English dishes, and
illustrated with engravings, which represented the arrangements of the table
at such banquets as it might have befitted
a nobleman to give in the great hall of his castle.
And, amid these rich and potent devices of the culinary art (not one of which,
probably, had been tested, within the memory of any man's grandfather), poor
Hepzibah was seeking for some nimble little
titbit, which, with what skill she had, and such materials as were at hand, she might
toss up for breakfast.
Soon, with a deep sigh, she put aside the savory volume, and inquired of Phoebe
whether old Speckle, as she called one of the hens, had laid an egg the preceding
day.
Phoebe ran to see, but returned without the expected treasure in her hand.
At that instant, however, the blast of a fish-dealer's conch was heard, announcing
his approach along the street.
With energetic raps at the shop-window, Hepzibah summoned the man in, and made
purchase of what he warranted as the finest mackerel in his cart, and as fat a one as
ever he felt with his finger so early in the season.
Requesting Phoebe to roast some coffee,-- which she casually observed was the real
Mocha, and so long kept that each of the small berries ought to be worth its weight
in gold,--the maiden lady heaped fuel into
the vast receptacle of the ancient fireplace in such quantity as soon to drive
the lingering dusk out of the kitchen.
The country-girl, willing to give her utmost assistance, proposed to make an
Indian cake, after her mother's peculiar method, of easy manufacture, and which she
could vouch for as possessing a richness,
and, if rightly prepared, a delicacy, unequalled by any other mode of breakfast-
cake. Hepzibah gladly assenting, the kitchen was
soon the scene of savory preparation.
Perchance, amid their proper element of smoke, which eddied forth from the ill-
constructed chimney, the ghosts of departed cook-maids looked wonderingly on, or peeped
down the great breadth of the flue,
despising the simplicity of the projected meal, yet ineffectually pining to thrust
their shadowy hands into each inchoate dish.
The half-starved rats, at any rate, stole visibly out of their hiding-places, and sat
on their hind-legs, snuffing the fumy atmosphere, and wistfully awaiting an
opportunity to nibble.
Hepzibah had no natural turn for cookery, and, to say the truth, had fairly incurred
her present meagreness by often choosing to go without her dinner rather than be
attendant on the rotation of the spit, or ebullition of the pot.
Her zeal over the fire, therefore, was quite an heroic test of sentiment.
It was touching, and positively worthy of tears (if Phoebe, the only spectator,
except the rats and ghosts aforesaid, had not been better employed than in shedding
them), to see her rake out a bed of fresh
and glowing coals, and proceed to broil the mackerel.
Her usually pale cheeks were all ablaze with heat and hurry.
She watched the fish with as much tender care and minuteness of attention as if,--we
know not how to express it otherwise,--as if her own heart were on the gridiron, and
her immortal happiness were involved in its being done precisely to a turn!
Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged and well-
provisioned breakfast-table.
We come to it freshly, in the dewy youth of the day, and when our spiritual and sensual
elements are in better accord than at a later period; so that the material delights
of the morning meal are capable of being
fully enjoyed, without any very grievous reproaches, whether gastric or
conscientious, for yielding even a trifle overmuch to the animal department of our
nature.
The thoughts, too, that run around the ring of familiar guests have a piquancy and
mirthfulness, and oftentimes a vivid truth, which more rarely find their way into the
elaborate intercourse of dinner.
Hepzibah's small and ancient table, supported on its slender and graceful legs,
and covered with a cloth of the richest damask, looked worthy to be the scene and
centre of one of the cheerfullest of parties.
The vapor of the broiled fish arose like incense from the shrine of a barbarian
idol, while the fragrance of the Mocha might have gratified the nostrils of a
tutelary Lar, or whatever power has scope over a modern breakfast-table.
Phoebe's Indian cakes were the sweetest offering of all,--in their hue befitting
the rustic altars of the innocent and golden age,--or, so brightly yellow were
they, resembling some of the bread which
was changed to glistening gold when Midas tried to eat it.
The butter must not be forgotten,--butter which Phoebe herself had churned, in her
own rural home, and brought it to her cousin as a propitiatory gift,--smelling of
clover-blossoms, and diffusing the charm of
pastoral scenery through the dark-panelled parlor.
All this, with the quaint gorgeousness of the old china cups and saucers, and the
crested spoons, and a silver cream-jug (Hepzibah's only other article of plate,
and shaped like the rudest porringer), set
out a board at which the stateliest of old Colonel Pyncheon's guests need not have
scorned to take his place.
But the Puritan's face scowled down out of the picture, as if nothing on the table
pleased his appetite.
By way of contributing what grace she could, Phoebe gathered some roses and a few
other flowers, possessing either scent or beauty, and arranged them in a glass
pitcher, which, having long ago lost its
handle, was so much the fitter for a flower-vase.
The early sunshine--as fresh as that which peeped into Eve's bower while she and Adam
sat at breakfast there--came twinkling through the branches of the pear-tree, and
fell quite across the table.
All was now ready. There were chairs and plates for three.
A chair and plate for Hepzibah,--the same for Phoebe,--but what other guest did her
cousin look for?
Throughout this preparation there had been a constant tremor in Hepzibah's frame; an
agitation so powerful that Phoebe could see the quivering of her gaunt shadow, as
thrown by the firelight on the kitchen
wall, or by the sunshine on the parlor floor.
Its manifestations were so various, and agreed so little with one another, that the
girl knew not what to make of it.
Sometimes it seemed an ecstasy of delight and happiness.
At such moments, Hepzibah would fling out her arms, and infold Phoebe in them, and
kiss her cheek as tenderly as ever her mother had; she appeared to do so by an
inevitable impulse, and as if her ***
were oppressed with tenderness, of which she must needs pour out a little, in order
to gain breathing-room.
The next moment, without any visible cause for the change, her unwonted joy shrank
back, appalled, as it were, and clothed itself in mourning; or it ran and hid
itself, so to speak, in the dungeon of her
heart, where it had long lain chained, while a cold, spectral sorrow took the
place of the imprisoned joy, that was afraid to be enfranchised,--a sorrow as
black as that was bright.
She often broke into a little, nervous, hysteric laugh, more touching than any
tears could be; and forthwith, as if to try which was the most touching, a gush of
tears would follow; or perhaps the laughter
and tears came both at once, and surrounded our poor Hepzibah, in a moral sense, with a
kind of pale, dim rainbow.
Towards Phoebe, as we have said, she was affectionate,--far tenderer than ever
before, in their brief acquaintance, except for that one kiss on the preceding night,--
yet with a continually recurring pettishness and irritability.
She would speak sharply to her; then, throwing aside all the starched reserve of
her ordinary manner, ask pardon, and the next instant renew the just-forgiven
injury.
At last, when their mutual labor was all finished, she took Phoebe's hand in her own
trembling one. "Bear with me, my dear child," she cried;
"for truly my heart is full to the brim!
Bear with me; for I love you, Phoebe, though I speak so roughly.
Think nothing of it, dearest child! By and by, I shall be kind, and only kind!"
"My dearest cousin, cannot you tell me what has happened?" asked Phoebe, with a sunny
and tearful sympathy. "What is it that moves you so?"
"Hush! hush!
He is coming!" whispered Hepzibah, hastily wiping her eyes.
"Let him see you first, Phoebe; for you are young and rosy, and cannot help letting a
smile break out whether or no.
He always liked bright faces! And mine is old now, and the tears are
hardly dry on it. He never could abide tears.
There; draw the curtain a little, so that the shadow may fall across his side of the
table!
But let there be a good deal of sunshine, too; for he never was fond of gloom, as
some people are.
He has had but little sunshine in his life,--poor Clifford,--and, oh, what a
black shadow. Poor, poor Clifford!"
Thus murmuring in an undertone, as if speaking rather to her own heart than to
Phoebe, the old gentlewoman stepped on tiptoe about the room, making such
arrangements as suggested themselves at the crisis.
Meanwhile there was a step in the passage- way, above stairs.
Phoebe recognized it as the same which had passed upward, as through her dream, in the
night-time.
The approaching guest, whoever it might be, appeared to pause at the head of the
staircase; he paused twice or thrice in the descent; he paused again at the foot.
Each time, the delay seemed to be without purpose, but rather from a forgetfulness of
the purpose which had set him in motion, or as if the person's feet came involuntarily
to a stand-still because the motive-power was too feeble to sustain his progress.
Finally, he made a long pause at the threshold of the parlor.
He took hold of the *** of the door; then loosened his grasp without opening it.
Hepzibah, her hands convulsively clasped, stood gazing at the entrance.
"Dear Cousin Hepzibah, pray don't look so!" said Phoebe, trembling; for her cousin's
emotion, and this mysteriously reluctant step, made her feel as if a ghost were
coming into the room.
"You really frighten me! Is something awful going to happen?"
"Hush!" whispered Hepzibah. "Be cheerful! whatever may happen, be
nothing but cheerful!"
The final pause at the threshold proved so long, that Hepzibah, unable to endure the
suspense, rushed forward, threw open the door, and led in the stranger by the hand.
At the first glance, Phoebe saw an elderly personage, in an old-fashioned dressing-
gown of faded damask, and wearing his gray or almost white hair of an unusual length.
It quite overshadowed his forehead, except when he thrust it back, and stared vaguely
about the room.
After a very brief inspection of his face, it was easy to conceive that his footstep
must necessarily be such an one as that which, slowly and with as indefinite an aim
as a child's first journey across a floor, had just brought him hitherward.
Yet there were no tokens that his physical strength might not have sufficed for a free
and determined gait.
It was the spirit of the man that could not walk.
The expression of his countenance--while, notwithstanding it had the light of reason
in it--seemed to waver, and glimmer, and nearly to die away, and feebly to recover
itself again.
It was like a flame which we see twinkling among half-extinguished embers; we gaze at
it more intently than if it were a positive blaze, gushing vividly upward,--more
intently, but with a certain impatience, as
if it ought either to kindle itself into satisfactory splendor, or be at once
extinguished.
For an instant after entering the room, the guest stood still, retaining Hepzibah's
hand instinctively, as a child does that of the grown person who guides it.
He saw Phoebe, however, and caught an illumination from her youthful and pleasant
aspect, which, indeed, threw a cheerfulness about the parlor, like the circle of
reflected brilliancy around the glass vase
of flowers that was standing in the sunshine.
He made a salutation, or, to speak nearer the truth, an ill-defined, abortive attempt
at curtsy.
Imperfect as it was, however, it conveyed an idea, or, at least, gave a hint, of
indescribable grace, such as no practised art of external manners could have
attained.
It was too slight to seize upon at the instant; yet, as recollected afterwards,
seemed to transfigure the whole man.
"Dear Clifford," said Hepzibah, in the tone with which one soothes a wayward infant,
"this is our cousin Phoebe,--little Phoebe Pyncheon,--Arthur's only child, you know.
She has come from the country to stay with us awhile; for our old house has grown to
be very lonely now."
"Phoebe--Phoebe Pyncheon?--Phoebe?" repeated the guest, with a strange,
sluggish, ill-defined utterance. "Arthur's child!
Ah, I forget!
No matter. She is very welcome!"
"Come, dear Clifford, take this chair," said Hepzibah, leading him to his place.
"Pray, Phoebe, lower the curtain a very little more.
Now let us begin breakfast." The guest seated himself in the place
assigned him, and looked strangely around.
He was evidently trying to grapple with the present scene, and bring it home to his
mind with a more satisfactory distinctness.
He desired to be certain, at least, that he was here, in the low-studded, cross-beamed,
oaken-panelled parlor, and not in some other spot, which had stereotyped itself
into his senses.
But the effort was too great to be sustained with more than a fragmentary
success.
Continually, as we may express it, he faded away out of his place; or, in other words,
his mind and consciousness took their departure, leaving his wasted, gray, and
melancholy figure--a substantial emptiness,
a material ghost--to occupy his seat at table.
Again, after a blank moment, there would be a flickering taper-gleam in his eyeballs.
It betokened that his spiritual part had returned, and was doing its best to kindle
the heart's household fire, and light up intellectual lamps in the dark and ruinous
mansion, where it was doomed to be a forlorn inhabitant.
At one of these moments of less torpid, yet still imperfect animation, Phoebe became
convinced of what she had at first rejected as too extravagant and startling an idea.
She saw that the person before her must have been the original of the beautiful
miniature in her cousin Hepzibah's possession.
Indeed, with a feminine eye for costume, she had at once identified the damask
dressing-gown, which enveloped him, as the same in figure, material, and fashion, with
that so elaborately represented in the picture.
This old, faded garment, with all its pristine brilliancy extinct, seemed, in
some indescribable way, to translate the wearer's untold misfortune, and make it
perceptible to the beholder's eye.
It was the better to be discerned, by this exterior type, how worn and old were the
soul's more immediate garments; that form and countenance, the beauty and grace of
which had almost transcended the skill of the most exquisite of artists.
It could the more adequately be known that the soul of the man must have suffered some
miserable wrong, from its earthly experience.
There he seemed to sit, with a dim veil of decay and ruin betwixt him and the world,
but through which, at flitting intervals, might be caught the same expression, so
refined, so softly imaginative, which
Malbone--venturing a happy touch, with suspended breath--had imparted to the
miniature!
There had been something so innately characteristic in this look, that all the
dusky years, and the burden of unfit calamity which had fallen upon him, did not
suffice utterly to destroy it.
Hepzibah had now poured out a cup of deliciously fragrant coffee, and presented
it to her guest. As his eyes met hers, he seemed bewildered
and disquieted.
"Is this you, Hepzibah?" he murmured sadly; then, more apart, and perhaps unconscious
that he was overheard, "How changed! how changed!
And is she angry with me?
Why does she bend her brow so?" Poor Hepzibah!
It was that wretched scowl which time and her near-sightedness, and the fret of
inward discomfort, had rendered so habitual that any vehemence of mood invariably
evoked it.
But at the indistinct murmur of his words her whole face grew tender, and even
lovely, with sorrowful affection; the harshness of her features disappeared, as
it were, behind the warm and misty glow.
"Angry!" she repeated; "angry with you, Clifford!"
Her tone, as she uttered the exclamation, had a plaintive and really exquisite melody
thrilling through it, yet without subduing a certain something which an obtuse auditor
might still have mistaken for asperity.
It was as if some transcendent musician should draw a soul-thrilling sweetness out
of a cracked instrument, which makes its physical imperfection heard in the midst of
ethereal harmony,--so deep was the
sensibility that found an organ in Hepzibah's voice!
"There is nothing but love here, Clifford," she added,--"nothing but love!
You are at home!" The guest responded to her tone by a smile,
which did not half light up his face. Feeble as it was, however, and gone in a
moment, it had a charm of wonderful beauty.
It was followed by a coarser expression; or one that had the effect of coarseness on
the fine mould and outline of his countenance, because there was nothing
intellectual to temper it.
It was a look of appetite.
He ate food with what might almost be termed voracity; and seemed to forget
himself, Hepzibah, the young girl, and everything else around him, in the sensual
enjoyment which the bountifully spread table afforded.
In his natural system, though high-wrought and delicately refined, a sensibility to
the delights of the palate was probably inherent.
It would have been kept in check, however, and even converted into an accomplishment,
and one of the thousand modes of intellectual culture, had his more ethereal
characteristics retained their vigor.
But as it existed now, the effect was painful and made Phoebe droop her eyes.
In a little while the guest became sensible of the fragrance of the yet untasted
coffee.
He quaffed it eagerly.
The subtle essence acted on him like a charmed draught, and caused the opaque
substance of his animal being to grow transparent, or, at least, translucent; so
that a spiritual gleam was transmitted
through it, with a clearer lustre than hitherto.
"More, more!" he cried, with nervous haste in his utterance, as if anxious to retain
his grasp of what sought to escape him.
"This is what I need! Give me more!"
Under this delicate and powerful influence he sat more erect, and looked out from his
eyes with a glance that took note of what it rested on.
It was not so much that his expression grew more intellectual; this, though it had its
share, was not the most peculiar effect.
Neither was what we call the moral nature so forcibly awakened as to present itself
in remarkable prominence.
But a certain fine temper of being was now not brought out in full relief, but
changeably and imperfectly betrayed, of which it was the function to deal with all
beautiful and enjoyable things.
In a character where it should exist as the chief attribute, it would bestow on its
possessor an exquisite taste, and an enviable susceptibility of happiness.
Beauty would be his life; his aspirations would all tend toward it; and, allowing his
frame and physical organs to be in consonance, his own developments would
likewise be beautiful.
Such a man should have nothing to do with sorrow; nothing with strife; nothing with
the martyrdom which, in an infinite variety of shapes, awaits those who have the heart,
and will, and conscience, to fight a battle with the world.
To these heroic tempers, such martyrdom is the richest meed in the world's gift.
To the individual before us, it could only be a grief, intense in due proportion with
the severity of the infliction.
He had no right to be a martyr; and, beholding him so fit to be happy and so
feeble for all other purposes, a generous, strong, and noble spirit would, methinks,
have been ready to sacrifice what little
enjoyment it might have planned for itself,--it would have flung down the
hopes, so paltry in its regard,--if thereby the wintry blasts of our rude sphere might
come tempered to such a man.
Not to speak it harshly or scornfully, it seemed Clifford's nature to be a Sybarite.
It was perceptible, even there, in the dark old parlor, in the inevitable polarity with
which his eyes were attracted towards the quivering play of sunbeams through the
shadowy foliage.
It was seen in his appreciating notice of the vase of flowers, the scent of which he
inhaled with a zest almost peculiar to a physical organization so refined that
spiritual ingredients are moulded in with it.
It was betrayed in the unconscious smile with which he regarded Phoebe, whose fresh
and maidenly figure was both sunshine and flowers,--their essence, in a prettier and
more agreeable mode of manifestation.
Not less evident was this love and necessity for the Beautiful, in the
instinctive caution with which, even so soon, his eyes turned away from his
hostess, and wandered to any quarter rather than come back.
It was Hepzibah's misfortune,--not Clifford's fault.
How could he,--so yellow as she was, so wrinkled, so sad of mien, with that odd
uncouthness of a turban on her head, and that most perverse of scowls contorting her
brow,--how could he love to gaze at her?
But, did he owe her no affection for so much as she had silently given?
He owed her nothing. A nature like Clifford's can contract no
debts of that kind.
It is--we say it without censure, nor in diminution of the claim which it
indefeasibly possesses on beings of another mould--it is always selfish in its essence;
and we must give it leave to be so, and
heap up our heroic and disinterested love upon it so much the more, without a
recompense. Poor Hepzibah knew this truth, or, at
least, acted on the instinct of it.
So long estranged from what was lovely as Clifford had been, she rejoiced--rejoiced,
though with a present sigh, and a secret purpose to shed tears in her own chamber
that he had brighter objects now before his eyes than her aged and uncomely features.
They never possessed a charm; and if they had, the canker of her grief for him would
long since have destroyed it.
The guest leaned back in his chair. Mingled in his countenance with a dreamy
delight, there was a troubled look of effort and unrest.
He was seeking to make himself more fully sensible of the scene around him; or,
perhaps, dreading it to be a dream, or a play of imagination, was vexing the fair
moment with a struggle for some added brilliancy and more durable illusion.
"How pleasant!--How delightful!" he murmured, but not as if addressing any one.
"Will it last?
How balmy the atmosphere through that open window!
An open window! How beautiful that play of sunshine!
Those flowers, how very fragrant!
That young girl's face, how cheerful, how blooming!--a flower with the dew on it, and
sunbeams in the dew-drops! Ah! this must be all a dream!
A dream!
A dream! But it has quite hidden the four stone
walls!"
Then his face darkened, as if the shadow of a cavern or a dungeon had come over it;
there was no more light in its expression than might have come through the iron
grates of a prison-window--still lessening,
too, as if he were sinking farther into the depths.
Phoebe (being of that quickness and activity of temperament that she seldom
long refrained from taking a part, and generally a good one, in what was going
forward) now felt herself moved to address the stranger.
"Here is a new kind of rose, which I found this morning in the garden," said she,
choosing a small crimson one from among the flowers in the vase.
"There will be but five or six on the bush this season.
This is the most perfect of them all; not a speck of blight or mildew in it.
And how sweet it is!--sweet like no other rose!
One can never forget that scent!"
"Ah!--let me see!--let me hold it!" cried the guest, eagerly seizing the flower,
which, by the spell peculiar to remembered odors, brought innumerable associations
along with the fragrance that it exhaled.
"Thank you! This has done me good.
I remember how I used to prize this flower,--long ago, I suppose, very long
ago!--or was it only yesterday?
It makes me feel young again! Am I young?
Either this remembrance is singularly distinct, or this consciousness strangely
dim!
But how kind of the fair young girl! Thank you!
Thank you!"
The favorable excitement derived from this little crimson rose afforded Clifford the
brightest moment which he enjoyed at the breakfast-table.
It might have lasted longer, but that his eyes happened, soon afterwards, to rest on
the face of the old Puritan, who, out of his dingy frame and lustreless canvas, was
looking down on the scene like a ghost, and a most ill-tempered and ungenial one.
The guest made an impatient gesture of the hand, and addressed Hepzibah with what
might easily be recognized as the licensed irritability of a petted member of the
family.
"Hepzibah!--Hepzibah!" cried he with no little force and distinctness, "why do you
keep that odious picture on the wall? Yes, yes!--that is precisely your taste!
I have told you, a thousand times, that it was the evil genius of the house!--my evil
genius particularly! Take it down, at once!"
"Dear Clifford," said Hepzibah sadly, "you know it cannot be!"
"Then, at all events," continued he, still speaking with some energy, "pray cover it
with a crimson curtain, broad enough to hang in folds, and with a golden border and
tassels.
I cannot bear it! It must not stare me in the face!"
"Yes, dear Clifford, the picture shall be covered," said Hepzibah soothingly.
"There is a crimson curtain in a trunk above stairs,--a little faded and moth-
eaten, I'm afraid,--but Phoebe and I will do wonders with it."
"This very day, remember" said he; and then added, in a low, self-communing voice, "Why
should we live in this dismal house at all? Why not go to the South of France?--to
Italy?--Paris, Naples, Venice, Rome?
Hepzibah will say we have not the means. A droll idea that!"
He smiled to himself, and threw a glance of fine sarcastic meaning towards Hepzibah.
But the several moods of feeling, faintly as they were marked, through which he had
passed, occurring in so brief an interval of time, had evidently wearied the
stranger.
He was probably accustomed to a sad monotony of life, not so much flowing in a
stream, however sluggish, as stagnating in a pool around his feet.
A slumberous veil diffused itself over his countenance, and had an effect, morally
speaking, on its naturally delicate and elegant outline, like that which a brooding
mist, with no sunshine in it, throws over the features of a landscape.
He appeared to become grosser,--almost cloddish.
If aught of interest or beauty--even ruined beauty--had heretofore been visible in this
man, the beholder might now begin to doubt it, and to accuse his own imagination of
deluding him with whatever grace had
flickered over that visage, and whatever exquisite lustre had gleamed in those filmy
eyes.
Before he had quite sunken away, however, the sharp and peevish *** of the shop-
bell made itself audible.
Striking most disagreeably on Clifford's auditory organs and the characteristic
sensibility of his nerves, it caused him to start upright out of his chair.
"Good heavens, Hepzibah! what horrible disturbance have we now in the house?"
cried he, wreaking his resentful impatience--as a matter of course, and a
custom of old--on the one person in the world that loved him.
"I have never heard such a hateful clamor! Why do you permit it?
In the name of all dissonance, what can it be?"
It was very remarkable into what prominent relief--even as if a dim picture should
leap suddenly from its canvas--Clifford's character was thrown by this apparently
trifling annoyance.
The secret was, that an individual of his temper can always be pricked more acutely
through his sense of the beautiful and harmonious than through his heart.
It is even possible--for similar cases have often happened--that if Clifford, in his
foregoing life, had enjoyed the means of cultivating his taste to its utmost
perfectibility, that subtile attribute
might, before this period, have completely eaten out or filed away his affections.
Shall we venture to pronounce, therefore, that his long and black calamity may not
have had a redeeming drop of mercy at the bottom?
"Dear Clifford, I wish I could keep the sound from your ears," said Hepzibah,
patiently, but reddening with a painful suffusion of shame.
"It is very disagreeable even to me.
But, do you know, Clifford, I have something to tell you?
This ugly noise,--pray run, Phoebe, and see who is there!--this naughty little ***
is nothing but our shop-bell!"
"Shop-bell!" repeated Clifford, with a bewildered stare.
"Yes, our shop-bell," said Hepzibah, a certain natural dignity, mingled with deep
emotion, now asserting itself in her manner.
"For you must know, dearest Clifford, that we are very poor.
And there was no other resource, but either to accept assistance from a hand that I
would push aside (and so would you!) were it to offer bread when we were dying for
it,--no help, save from him, or else to earn our subsistence with my own hands!
Alone, I might have been content to starve. But you were to be given back to me!
Do you think, then, dear Clifford," added she, with a wretched smile, "that I have
brought an irretrievable disgrace on the old house, by opening a little shop in the
front gable?
Our great-great-grandfather did the same, when there was far less need!
Are you ashamed of me?" "Shame!
Disgrace!
Do you speak these words to me, Hepzibah?" said Clifford,--not angrily, however; for
when a man's spirit has been thoroughly crushed, he may be peevish at small
offences, but never resentful of great ones.
So he spoke with only a grieved emotion. "It was not kind to say so, Hepzibah!
What shame can befall me now?"
And then the unnerved man--he that had been born for enjoyment, but had met a doom so
very wretched--burst into a woman's passion of tears.
It was but of brief continuance, however; soon leaving him in a quiescent, and, to
judge by his countenance, not an uncomfortable state.
From this mood, too, he partially rallied for an instant, and looked at Hepzibah with
a smile, the keen, half-derisory purport of which was a puzzle to her.
"Are we so very poor, Hepzibah?" said he.
Finally, his chair being deep and softly cushioned, Clifford fell asleep.
Hearing the more regular rise and fall of his breath (which, however, even then,
instead of being strong and full, had a feeble kind of tremor, corresponding with
the lack of vigor in his character),--
hearing these tokens of settled slumber, Hepzibah seized the opportunity to peruse
his face more attentively than she had yet dared to do.
Her heart melted away in tears; her profoundest spirit sent forth a moaning
voice, low, gentle, but inexpressibly sad.
In this depth of grief and pity she felt that there was no irreverence in gazing at
his altered, aged, faded, ruined face.
But no sooner was she a little relieved than her conscience smote her for gazing
curiously at him, now that he was so changed; and, turning hastily away,
Hepzibah let down the curtain over the
sunny window, and left Clifford to slumber there.