To be brief, besides Hepzibah's disadvantages of person, there was an
uncouthness pervading all her deeds; a clumsy something, that could but
ill adapt itself for use, and not at all for ornament. She was a grief
to Clifford, and she knew it. In this extremity, the antiquated virgin
turned to Phoebe. No grovelling jealousy was in her heart. Had it
pleased Heaven to crown the heroic fidelity of her life by making her
personally the medium of Clifford's happiness, it would have rewarded
her for all the past, by a joy with no bright tints, indeed, but deep
and true, and worth a thousand gayer ecstasies. This could not be.
She therefore turned to Phoebe, and resigned the task into the young
girl's hands. The latter took it up cheerfully, as she did everything,
but with no sense of a mission to perform, and succeeding all the
better for that same simplicity.
By the involuntary effect of a genial temperament, Phoebe soon grew to
be absolutely essential to the daily comfort, if not the daily life, of
her two forlorn companions. The grime and sordidness of the House of
the Seven Gables seemed to have vanished since her appearance there;
the gnawing tooth of the dry-rot was stayed among the old timbers of
its skeleton frame; the dust had ceased to settle down so densely, from
the antique ceilings, upon the floors and furniture of the rooms
below,--or, at any rate, there was a little housewife, as light-footed
as the breeze that sweeps a garden walk, gliding hither and thither to
brush it all away. The shadows of gloomy events that haunted the else
lonely and desolate apartments; the heavy, breathless scent which death
had left in more than one of the bedchambers, ever since his visits of
long ago,--these were less powerful than the purifying influence
scattered throughout the atmosphere of the household by the presence of
one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly wholesome heart. There was no
morbidness in Phoebe; if there had been, the old Pyncheon House was the
very locality to ripen it into incurable disease. But now her spirit
resembled, in its potency, a minute quantity of ottar of rose in one of
Hepzibah's huge, iron-bound trunks, diffusing its fragrance through the
various articles of linen and wrought-lace, kerchiefs, caps, stockings,
folded dresses, gloves, and whatever else was treasured there. As
every article in the great trunk was the sweeter for the rose-scent, so
did all the thoughts and emotions of Hepzibah and Clifford, sombre as
they might seem, acquire a subtle attribute of happiness from Phoebe's
intermixture with them. Her activity of body, intellect, and heart
impelled her continually to perform the ordinary little toils that
offered themselves around her, and to think the thought proper for the
moment, and to sympathize,--now with the twittering gayety of the
robins in the pear-tree, and now to such a depth as she could with
Hepzibah's dark anxiety, or the vague moan of her brother. This facile
adaptation was at once the symptom of perfect health and its best
preservative.