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 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 a 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, 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. By looking a little further in this direction, we might suggest an explanation of an often-suggested mystery. Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsmen as well as that of the ideal craftsmen of the spirit?
Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.
There was something very beautiful in the relation that grew up between this pair, so closely and constantly linked together, yet with such a waste of gloomy and mysterious years from his birthday to hers.
On Clifford's part, it was the feeling of a man naturally endowed with the liveliest sensibility to feminine influence, but who had never quaffed the cup of passionate love, and knew that it was now too late.
He knew the instinctive delicacy that had survived his intellectual decay.
Thus, his sentiment for Phoebe, without being paternal, was not less chaste than if she had been his daughter.
He was a man, it is true, and recognized her as a woman.
She was his only representative of womankind.
He took unfailing note of every charm that appertained to her sex, and saw the ripeness of her lips, and the virginal development of her bosom.
All her little womanly ways, budding out of her, like blossoms on a young fruit tree, had their effect on him, and sometimes caused his very heart to tingle with the keenest thrills of pleasure.
At such moments—for the effect was seldom more than momentary—the half-torpid man would be full of harmonious life, just as a long-silent harp is full of sound when the musician's fingers sweep across it. But, after all, it seemed rather a perception, or a sympathy, than a sentiment belonging to himself as an individual.
He read Phoebe, as he would a sweet and simple story; he listened to her, as if she were a verse of household poetry, which God, in requital of his bleak and dismal lot, had permitted some angel, that most pitied him, to warble through the house.
She was not an actual fact for him, but the interpretation of all that he had lacked on earth, brought warmly home to his conception; so that this mere symbol, or lifelike picture, had almost the comfort of reality.
But we strive in vain to put the idea into words.
No adequate expression of the beauty and profound pathos with which it impresses us is unattainable.
This being, made only for happiness, and heretofore so miserably failing to be happy—his tendencies so hideously thwarted, that, some unknown time ago, the delicate springs of his character, never morally or intellectually strong, had given way, and he was now imbecile—this poor, forlorn voyager from the Islands of the Blest, in a frail bark, on a tempestuous sea, had been flung, by the last mountain-wave of his shipwreck, into a quiet harbor.
There, as he lay more than half lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly rosebud had come to his nostrils, and, as odours will, had summoned up reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid which he should have had his home.
With his native susceptibility of happy influences, he inhales the slight, ethereal rapture into his soul, and expires!
And how did Phoebe regard Clifford?
The girl's was not one of those natures which are most attracted by what is strange and exceptional in human character. The path which would best have suited her was the well-worn track of ordinary life; the companions in whom she would most have delighted were such as one encounters at every turn.
The mystery which enveloped Clifford, so far as it affected her at all, was an annoyance, rather than the piquant charm which many women might have found in it.
Still her native kindliness was brought strongly into play, not by what was darkly picturesque in his situation, nor so much even, by the finer grace of his character, as by the simple appeal of a heart so forlorn as his to one so full of genuine sympathy as hers.
She gave him an affectionate regard, because he needed so much love, and seemed to have received so little.
With a ready tact, the result of ever-active and wholesome sensibility, she discerned what was good for him and did it.
Whatever was morbid in his mind and experience she ignored; and thereby kept their intercourse healthy, by the incautious, but, as it were, heaven-directed freedom of her whole conduct.
The sick in mind and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so, by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters, in the deportment of those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in infinite repetition. But Phoebe afforded her poor patient a supply of purer air. She impregnated it, too, not with a wild-flower scent—for wildness was no trait of hers—but with the perfume of garden roses, pinks, and other blossoms of much sweetness, which nature and man have consented together in making grow, from summer to summer, and from century to century.
Such a flower was Phoebe, in her relation with Clifford, and such the delight that he inhaled from her.
Yet, it must be said, her petals sometimes drooped a little, in consequence of the heavy atmosphere about her.
She grew more thoughtful than heretofore.
Looking aside at Clifford's face, and seeing the dim, unsatisfactory elegance and the intellect almost quenched, she would try to inquire what had been his life.
Was he always thus? Had this veil been over him from his birth?—this veil, under which far more of his spirit was hidden than revealed, and through which he so imperfectly discerned the actual world—or was its gray texture woven of some dark calamity?
Phoebe loved no riddles, and would have been glad to escape the perplexity of this one.
Nevertheless, there was so far a good result of her meditations on Clifford's character, that, when her involuntary conjectures together with the tendency of every strange circumstances to tell its own story, had gradually taught her the fact, it had no terrible effect upon her.
Let the world have done him what vast wrong it might, she knew cousin Clifford too well—or fancied so—ever to shudder at the touch of his thin delicate fingers.
Within a few days after the appearance of this remarkable inmate, the routine of life had established itself with a good deal of uniformity in the old house of our narrative.