Becoming habituated to her companionship, Clifford readily showed how
capable of imbibing pleasant tints and gleams of cheerful light from
all quarters his nature must originally have been. He grew youthful
while she sat by him. A beauty,--not precisely real, even in its
utmost manifestation, and which a painter would have watched long to
seize and fix upon his canvas, and, after all, in vain,--beauty,
nevertheless, that was not a mere dream, would sometimes play upon and
illuminate his face. It did more than to illuminate; it transfigured
him with an expression that could only be interpreted as the glow of an
exquisite and happy spirit. That gray hair, and those furrows,--with
their record of infinite sorrow so deeply written across his brow, and
so compressed, as with a futile effort to crowd in all the tale, that
the whole inscription was made illegible,--these, for the moment,
vanished. An eye at once tender and acute might have beheld in the man
some shadow of what he was meant to be. Anon, as age came stealing,
like a sad twilight, back over his figure, you would have felt tempted
to hold an argument with Destiny, and affirm, that either this being
should not have been made mortal, or mortal existence should have been
tempered to his qualities. There seemed no necessity for his having
drawn breath at all; the world never wanted him; but, as he had
breathed, it ought always to have been the balmiest of summer air. The
same perplexity will invariably haunt us with regard to natures that
tend to feed exclusively upon the Beautiful, let their earthly fate be
as lenient as it may.
Phoebe, it is probable, had but a very imperfect comprehension of the
character over which she had thrown so beneficent a spell. Nor was it
necessary. The fire upon the hearth can gladden a whole semicircle of
faces round about it, but need not know the individuality of one among
them all. Indeed, there was something too fine and delicate in
Clifford's traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose sphere lay
so much in the Actual as Phoebe's did. For Clifford, however, the
reality, and simplicity, and thorough homeliness of the girl's nature
were as powerful a charm as any that she possessed. Beauty, it is
true, and beauty almost perfect in its own style, was indispensable.
Had Phoebe been coarse in feature, shaped clumsily, of a harsh voice,
and uncouthly mannered, she might have been rich with all good gifts,
beneath this unfortunate exterior, and still, so long as she wore the
guise of woman, she would have shocked Clifford, and depressed him by
her lack of beauty. But nothing more beautiful--nothing prettier, at
least--was ever made than Phoebe. And, therefore, to this man,--whose
whole poor and impalpable enjoyment of existence heretofore, and until
both his heart and fancy died within him, had been a dream,--whose
images of women had more and more lost their warmth and substance, and
been frozen, like the pictures of secluded artists, into the chillest
ideality,--to him, this little figure of the cheeriest household life
was just what he required to bring him back into the breathing world.
Persons who have wandered, or been expelled, out of the common track of
things, even were it for a better system, desire nothing so much as to
be led back. They shiver in their loneliness, be it on a mountain-top
or in a dungeon. Now, Phoebe's presence made a home about her,--that
very sphere which the outcast, the prisoner, the potentate,--the wretch
beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above
it,--instinctively pines after,--a home! She was real! Holding her
hand, you felt something; a tender something; a substance, and a warm
one: and so long as you should feel its grasp, soft as it was, you
might be certain that your place was good in the whole sympathetic
chain of human nature. The world was no longer a delusion.