Clifford, except for Phoebe's More active instigation would ordinarily
have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of
being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair
till eventide. But the girl seldom failed to propose a removal to the
garden, where Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist had made such
repairs on the roof of the ruinous arbor, or summer-house, that it was
now a sufficient shelter from sunshine and casual showers. The
hop-vine, too, had begun to grow luxuriantly over the sides of the
little edifice, and made an interior of verdant seclusion, with
innumerable peeps and glimpses into the wider solitude of the garden.
Here, sometimes, in this green play-place of flickering light, Phoebe
read to Clifford. Her acquaintance, the artist, who appeared to have a
literary turn, had supplied her with works of fiction, in pamphlet
form,--and a few volumes of poetry, in altogether a different style and
taste from those which Hepzibah selected for his amusement. Small
thanks were due to the books, however, if the girl's readings were in
any degree more successful than her elderly cousin's. Phoebe's voice
had always a pretty music in it, and could either enliven Clifford by
its sparkle and gayety of tone, or soothe him by a continued flow of
pebbly and brook-like cadences. But the fictions--in which the
country-girl, unused to works of that nature, often became deeply
absorbed--interested her strange auditor very little, or not at all.
Pictures of life, scenes of passion or sentiment, wit, humor, and
pathos, were all thrown away, or worse than thrown away, on Clifford;
either because he lacked an experience by which to test their truth, or
because his own griefs were a touch-stone of reality that few feigned
emotions could withstand. When Phoebe broke into a peal of merry
laughter at what she read, he would now and then laugh for sympathy,
but oftener respond with a troubled, questioning look. If a tear--a
maiden's sunshiny tear over imaginary woe--dropped upon some melancholy
page, Clifford either took it as a token of actual calamity, or else
grew peevish, and angrily motioned her to close the volume. And wisely
too! Is not the world sad enough, in genuine earnest, without making a
pastime of mock sorrows?
With poetry it was rather better. He delighted in the swell and
subsidence of the rhythm, and the happily recurring rhyme. Nor was
Clifford incapable of feeling the sentiment of poetry,--not, perhaps,
where it was highest or deepest, but where it was most flitting and
ethereal. It was impossible to foretell in what exquisite verse the
awakening spell might lurk; but, on raising her eyes from the page to
Clifford's face, Phoebe would be made aware, by the light breaking
through it, that a more delicate intelligence than her own had caught a
lambent flame from what she read. One glow of this kind, however, was
often the precursor of gloom for many hours afterward; because, when
the glow left him, he seemed conscious of a missing sense and power,
and groped about for them, as if a blind man should go seeking his lost
eyesight.