Never had the old house appeared so dismal to poor Hepzibah as when she
departed on that wretched errand. There was a strange aspect in it.
As she trode along the foot-worn passages, and opened one crazy door
after another, and ascended the creaking staircase, she gazed wistfully
and fearfully around. It would have been no marvel, to her excited
mind, if, behind or beside her, there had been the rustle of dead
people's garments, or pale visages awaiting her on the landing-place
above. Her nerves were set all ajar by the scene of passion and terror
through which she had just struggled. Her colloquy with Judge
Pyncheon, who so perfectly represented the person and attributes of the
founder of the family, had called back the dreary past. It weighed
upon her heart. Whatever she had heard, from legendary aunts and
grandmothers, concerning the good or evil fortunes of the
Pyncheons,--stories which had heretofore been kept warm in her
remembrance by the chimney-corner glow that was associated with
them,--now recurred to her, sombre, ghastly, cold, like most passages
of family history, when brooded over in melancholy mood. The whole
seemed little else but a series of calamity, reproducing itself in
successive generations, with one general hue, and varying in little,
save the outline.
But Hepzibah now felt as if the Judge, and Clifford,
and herself,--they three together,--were on the point of adding another
incident to the annals of the house, with a bolder relief of wrong and
sorrow, which would cause it to stand out from all the rest. Thus it
is that the grief of the passing moment takes upon itself an
individuality, and a character of climax, which it is destined to lose
after a while, and to fade into the dark gray tissue common to the
grave or glad events of many years ago. It is but for a moment,
comparatively, that anything looks strange or startling,--a truth that
has the bitter and the sweet in it.
But Hepzibah could not rid herself of the sense of something
unprecedented at that instant passing and soon to be accomplished. Her
nerves were in a shake. Instinctively she paused before the arched
window, and looked out upon the street, in order to seize its permanent
objects with her mental grasp, and thus to steady herself from the reel
and vibration which affected her more immediate sphere. It brought her
up, as we may say, with a kind of shock, when she beheld everything
under the same appearance as the day before, and numberless preceding
days, except for the difference between sunshine and sullen storm.
Her eyes travelled along the street, from doorstep to doorstep, noting the
wet sidewalks, with here and there a puddle in hollows that had been
imperceptible until filled with water. She screwed her dim optics to
their acutest point, in the hope of making out, with greater
distinctness, a certain window, where she half saw, half guessed, that
a tailor's seamstress was sitting at her work. Hepzibah flung herself
upon that unknown woman's companionship, even thus far off. Then she
was attracted by a chaise rapidly passing, and watched its moist and
glistening top, and its splashing wheels, until it had turned the
corner, and refused to carry any further her idly trifling, because
appalled and overburdened, mind. When the vehicle had disappeared, she
allowed herself still another loitering moment; for the patched figure
of good Uncle Venner was now visible, coming slowly from the head of
the street downward, with a rheumatic limp, because the east wind had
got into his joints. Hepzibah wished that he would pass yet more
slowly, and befriend her shivering solitude a little longer. Anything
that would take her out of the grievous present, and interpose human
beings betwixt herself and what was nearest to her,--whatever would
defer for an instant the inevitable errand on which she was bound,--all
such impediments were welcome. Next to the lightest heart, the
heaviest is apt to be most playful.