Thus Jaffrey Pyncheon's inward criminality, as regarded Clifford, was,
indeed, black and damnable; while its mere outward show and positive
commission was the smallest that could possibly consist with so great a
sin. This is just the sort of guilt that a man of eminent
respectability finds it easiest to dispose of. It was suffered to fade
out of sight or be reckoned a venial matter, in the Honorable Judge
Pyncheon's long subsequent survey of his own life. He shuffled it
aside, among the forgotten and forgiven frailties of his youth, and
seldom thought of it again.
We leave the Judge to his repose. He could not be styled fortunate at
the hour of death. Unknowingly, he was a childless man, while striving
to add more wealth to his only child's inheritance. Hardly a week
after his decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of
the death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheon's son, just at the point of
embarkation for his native land. By this misfortune Clifford became
rich; so did Hepzibah; so did our little village maiden, and, through
her, that sworn foe of wealth and all manner of conservatism,--the wild
reformer,--Holgrave!
It was now far too late in Clifford's life for the good opinion of
society to be worth the trouble and anguish of a formal vindication.
What he needed was the love of a very few; not the admiration, or even
the respect, of the unknown many. The latter might probably have been
won for him, had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had
fallen deemed it advisable to expose Clifford to a miserable
resuscitation of past ideas, when the condition of whatever comfort he
might expect lay in the calm of forgetfulness. After such wrong as he
had suffered, there is no reparation. The pitiable mockery of it,
which the world might have been ready enough to offer, coming so long
after the agony had done its utmost work, would have been fit only to
provoke bitterer laughter than poor Clifford was ever capable of. It
is a truth (and it would be a very sad one but for the higher hopes
which it suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in
our mortal sphere, is ever really set right. Time, the continual
vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of
death, render it impossible. If, after long lapse of years, the right
seems to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in. The better
remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought
his irreparable ruin far behind him.
The shock of Judge Pyncheon's death had a permanently invigorating and
ultimately beneficial effect on Clifford. That strong and ponderous
man had been Clifford's nightmare. There was no free breath to be
drawn, within the sphere of so malevolent an influence. The first
effect of freedom, as we have witnessed in Clifford's aimless flight,
was a tremulous exhilaration. Subsiding from it, he did not sink into
his former intellectual apathy. He never, it is true, attained to
nearly the full measure of what might have been his faculties. But he
recovered enough of them partially to light up his character, to
display some outline of the marvellous grace that was abortive in it,
and to make him the object of no less deep, although less melancholy
interest than heretofore. He was evidently happy. Could we pause to
give another picture of his daily life, with all the appliances now at
command to gratify his instinct for the Beautiful, the garden scenes,
that seemed so sweet to him, would look mean and trivial in comparison.