THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES
by
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES
by
Nathaniel Hawthorne
I The Old Pyncheon Family
HALFWAY down a bystreet of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house with seven acutely peaked gables facing towards various points of the compass and a huge clustered chimney in the midst The street is Pyncheon Street the house is the old Pyncheon House and an elmtree of wide circumference rooted before the door is familiar to every townborn child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm On my occasional visits to the town aforesaid I seldom failed to turn down Pyncheon Street for the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquities—the great elmtree and the weatherbeaten edifice
The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine but expressive also of the long lapse of mortal life and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within Were these to be worthily recounted they would form a narrative of no small interest and instruction and possessing moreover a certain remarkable unity which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement But the story would include a chain of events extending over the better part of two centuries and written out with reasonable amplitude would fill a bigger folio volume or a longer series of duodecimos than could prudently be appropriated to the annals of all New England during a similar period It consequently becomes imperative to make short work with most of the traditionary lore of which the old Pyncheon House otherwise known as the House of the Seven Gables has been the theme With a brief sketch therefore of the circumstances amid which the foundation of the house was laid and a rapid glimpse at its quaint exterior as it grew black in the prevalent east wind—pointing too here and there at some spot of more verdant mossiness on its roof and walls—we shall commence the real action of our tale at an epoch not very remote from the present day Still there will be a connection with the long past—a reference to forgotten events and personages and to manners feelings and opinions almost or wholly obsolete—which if adequately translated to the reader would serve to illustrate how much of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human life Hence too might be drawn a weighty lesson from the littleregarded truth that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a fardistant time that together with the seed of the merely temporary crop which mortals term expediency they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth which may darkly overshadow their posterity
The House of the Seven Gables antique as it now looks was not the first habitation erected by civilized man on precisely the same spot of ground Pyncheon Street formerly bore the humbler appellation of Maules Lane from the name of the original occupant of the soil before whose cottagedoor it was a cowpath A natural spring of soft and pleasant water—a rare treasure on the seagirt peninsula where the Puritan settlement was made—had early induced Matthew Maule to build a hut shaggy with thatch at this point although somewhat too remote from what was then the centre of the village In the growth of the town however after some thirty or forty years the site covered by this rude hovel had become exceedingly desirable in the eyes of a prominent and powerful personage who asserted plausible claims to the proprietorship of this and a large adjacent tract of land on the strength of a grant from the legislature Colonel Pyncheon the claimant as we gather from whatever traits of him are preserved was characterized by an iron energy of purpose Matthew Maule on the other hand though an obscure man was stubborn in the defence of what he considered his right and for several years he succeeded in protecting the acre or two of earth which with his own toil he had hewn out of the primeval forest to be his garden ground and homestead No written record of this dispute is known to be in existence Our acquaintance with the whole subject is derived chiefly from tradition It would be bold therefore and possibly unjust to venture a decisive opinion as to its merits although it appears to have been at least a matter of doubt whether Colonel Pyncheons claim were not unduly stretched in order to make it cover the small metes and bounds of Matthew Maule What greatly strengthens such a suspicion is the fact that this controversy between two illmatched antagonists—at a period moreover laud it as we may when personal influence had far more weight than now—remained for years undecided and came to a close only with the death of the party occupying the disputed soil The mode of his death too affects the mind differently in our day from what it did a century and a half ago It was a death that blasted with strange horror the humble name of the dweller in the cottage and made it seem almost a religious act to drive the plough over the little area of his habitation and obliterate his place and memory from among men
Old Matthew Maule in a word was executed for the crime of witchcraft He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion which should teach us among its other morals that the influential classes and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob Clergymen judges statesmen—the wisest calmest holiest persons of their day stood in the inner circle round about the gallows loudest to applaud the work of blood latest to confess themselves miserably deceived If any one part of their proceedings can be said to deserve less blame than another it was the singular indiscrimination with which they persecuted not merely the poor and aged as in former judicial massacres but people of all ranks their own equals brethren and wives Amid the disorder of such various ruin it is not strange that a man of inconsiderable note like Maule should have trodden the martyrs path to the hill of execution almost unremarked in the throng of his fellow sufferers But in after days when the frenzy of that hideous epoch had subsided it was remembered how loudly Colonel Pyncheon had joined in the general cry to purge the land from witchcraft nor did it fail to be whispered that there was an invidious acrimony in the zeal with which he had sought the condemnation of Matthew Maule It was well known that the victim had recognized the bitterness of personal enmity in his persecutors conduct towards him and that he declared himself hunted to death for his spoil At the moment of execution—with the halter about his neck and while Colonel Pyncheon sat on horseback grimly gazing at the scene Maule had addressed him from the scaffold and uttered a prophecy of which history as well as fireside tradition has preserved the very words God said the dying man pointing his finger with a ghastly look at the undismayed countenance of his enemy—God will give him blood to drink After the reputed wizards death his humble homestead had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel Pyncheons grasp When it was understood however that the Colonel intended to erect a family mansionspacious ponderously framed of oaken timber and calculated to endure for many generations of his posterity over the spot first covered by the logbuilt hut of Matthew Maule there was much shaking of the head among the village gossips Without absolutely expressing a doubt whether the stalwart Puritan had acted as a man of conscience and integrity throughout the proceedings which have been sketched they nevertheless hinted that he was about to build his house over an unquiet grave His home would include the home of the dead and buried wizard and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind of privilege to haunt its new apartments and the chambers into which future bridegrooms were to lead their brides and where children of the Pyncheon blood were to be born The terror and ugliness of Maules crime and the wretchedness of his punishment would darken the freshly plastered walls and infect them early with the scent of an old and melancholy house Why then—while so much of the soil around him was bestrewn with the virgin forest leaves—why should Colonel Pyncheon prefer a site that had already been accurst
But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned aside from his wellconsidered scheme either by dread of the wizards ghost or by flimsy sentimentalities of any kind however specious Had he been told of a bad air it might have moved him somewhat but he was ready to encounter an evil spirit on his own ground Endowed with commonsense as massive and hard as blocks of granite fastened together by stern rigidity of purpose as with iron clamps he followed out his original design probably without so much as imagining an objection to it On the score of delicacy or any scrupulousness which a finer sensibility might have taught him the Colonel like most of his breed and generation was impenetrable He therefore dug his cellar and laid the deep foundations of his mansion on the square of earth whence Matthew Maule forty years before had first swept away the fallen leaves It was a curious and as some people thought an ominous fact that very soon after the workmen began their operations the spring of water above mentioned entirely lost the deliciousness of its pristine quality Whether its sources were disturbed by the depth of the new cellar or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the bottom it is certain that the water of Maules Well as it continued to be called grew hard and brackish Even such we find it now and any old woman of the neighborhood will certify that it is productive of intestinal mischief to those who quench their thirst there
The reader may deem it singular that the head carpenter of the new edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead gripe the property of the soil had been wrested Not improbably he was the best workman of his time or perhaps the Colonel thought it expedient or was impelled by some better feeling thus openly to cast aside all animosity against the race of his fallen antagonist Nor was it out of keeping with the general coarseness and matteroffact character of the age that the son should be willing to earn an honest penny or rather a weighty amount of sterling pounds from the purse of his fathers deadly enemy At all events Thomas Maule became the architect of the House of the Seven Gables and performed his duty so faithfully that the timber framework fastened by his hands still holds together
Thus the great house was built Familiar as it stands in the writers recollection—for it has been an object of curiosity with him from boyhood both as a specimen of the best and stateliest architecture of a longpast epoch and as the scene of events more full of human interest perhaps than those of a gray feudal castle—familiar as it stands in its rusty old age it is therefore only the more difficult to imagine the bright novelty with which it first caught the sunshine The impression of its actual state at this distance of a hundred and sixty years darkens inevitably through the picture which we would fain give of its appearance on the morning when the Puritan magnate bade all the town to be his guests A ceremony of consecration festive as well as religious was now to be performed A prayer and discourse from the Rev Mr Higginson and the outpouring of a psalm from the general throat of the community was to be made acceptable to the grosser sense by ale cider wine and brandy in copious effusion and as some authorities aver by an ox roasted whole or at least by the weight and substance of an ox in more manageable joints and sirloins The carcass of a deer shot within twenty miles had supplied material for the vast circumference of a pasty A codfish of sixty pounds caught in the bay had been dissolved into the rich liquid of a chowder The chimney of the new house in short belching forth its kitchen smoke impregnated the whole air with the scent of meats fowls and fishes spicily concocted with odoriferous herbs and onions in abundance The mere smell of such festivity making its way to everybodys nostrils was at once an invitation and an appetite
Maules Lane or Pyncheon Street as it were now more decorous to call it was thronged at the appointed hour as with a congregation on its way to church All as they approached looked upward at the imposing edifice which was henceforth to assume its rank among the habitations of mankind There it rose a little withdrawn from the line of the street but in pride not modesty Its whole visible exterior was ornamented with quaint figures conceived in the grotesqueness of a Gothic fancy and drawn or stamped in the glittering plaster composed of lime pebbles and bits of glass with which the woodwork of the walls was overspread On every side the seven gables pointed sharply towards the sky and presented the aspect of a whole sisterhood of edifices breathing through the spiracles of one great chimney The many lattices with their small diamondshaped panes admitted the sunlight into hall and chamber while nevertheless the second story projecting far over the base and itself retiring beneath the third threw a shadowy and thoughtful gloom into the lower rooms Carved globes of wood were affixed under the jutting stories Little spiral rods of iron beautified each of the seven peaks On the triangular portion of the gable that fronted next the street was a dial put up that very morning and on which the sun was still marking the passage of the first bright hour in a history that was not destined to be all so bright All around were scattered shavings chips shingles and broken halves of bricks these together with the lately turned earth on which the grass had not begun to grow contributed to the impression of strangeness and novelty proper to a house that had yet its place to make among mens daily interests
The principal entrance which had almost the breadth of a churchdoor was in the angle between the two front gables and was covered by an open porch with benches beneath its shelter Under this arched doorway scraping their feet on the unworn threshold now trod the clergymen the elders the magistrates the deacons and whatever of aristocracy there was in town or county Thither too thronged the plebeian classes as freely as their betters and in larger number Just within the entrance however stood two servingmen pointing some of the guests to the neighborhood of the kitchen and ushering others into the statelier rooms—hospitable alike to all but still with a scrutinizing regard to the high or low degree of each Velvet garments sombre but rich stiffly plaited ruffs and bands embroidered gloves venerable beards the mien and countenance of authority made it easy to distinguish the gentleman of worship at that period from the tradesman with his plodding air or the laborer in his leathern jerkin stealing awestricken into the house which he had perhaps helped to build
One inauspicious circumstance there was which awakened a hardly concealed displeasure in the breasts of a few of the more punctilious visitors The founder of this stately mansion—a gentleman noted for the square and ponderous courtesy of his demeanor ought surely to have stood in his own hall and to have offered the first welcome to so many eminent personages as here presented themselves in honor of his solemn festival He was as yet invisible the most favored of the guests had not beheld him This sluggishness on Colonel Pyncheons part became still more unaccountable when the second dignitary of the province made his appearance and found no more ceremonious a reception The lieutenantgovernor although his visit was one of the anticipated glories of the day had alighted from his horse and assisted his lady from her sidesaddle and crossed the Colonels threshold without other greeting than that of the principal domestic
This person—a grayheaded man of quiet and most respectful deportment—found it necessary to explain that his master still remained in his study or private apartment on entering which an hour before he had expressed a wish on no account to be disturbed
Do not you see fellow said the highsheriff of the county taking the servant aside that this is no less a man than the lieutenantgovernor Summon Colonel Pyncheon at once I know that he received letters from England this morning and in the perusal and consideration of them an hour may have passed away without his noticing it But he will be illpleased I judge if you suffer him to neglect the courtesy due to one of our chief rulers and who may be said to represent King William in the absence of the governor himself Call your master instantly
Nay please your worship answered the man in much perplexity but with a backwardness that strikingly indicated the hard and severe character of Colonel Pyncheons domestic rule my masters orders were exceeding strict and as your worship knows he permits of no discretion in the obedience of those who owe him service Let who list open yonder door I dare not though the governors own voice should bid me do it
Pooh pooh master high sheriff cried the lieutenantgovernor who had overheard the foregoing discussion and felt himself high enough in station to play a little with his dignity I will take the matter into my own hands It is time that the good Colonel came forth to greet his friends else we shall be apt to suspect that he has taken a sip too much of his Canary wine in his extreme deliberation which cask it were best to broach in honor of the day But since he is so much behindhand I will give him a remembrancer myself
Accordingly with such a tramp of his ponderous ridingboots as might of itself have been audible in the remotest of the seven gables he advanced to the door which the servant pointed out and made its new panels reecho with a loud free knock Then looking round with a smile to the spectators he awaited a response As none came however he knocked again but with the same unsatisfactory result as at first And now being a trifle choleric in his temperament the lieutenantgovernor uplifted the heavy hilt of his sword wherewith he so beat and banged upon the door that as some of the bystanders whispered the racket might have disturbed the dead Be that as it might it seemed to produce no awakening effect on Colonel Pyncheon When the sound subsided the silence through the house was deep dreary and oppressive notwithstanding that the tongues of many of the guests had already been loosened by a surreptitious cup or two of wine or spirits
Strange forsooth—very strange cried the lieutenantgovernor whose smile was changed to a frown But seeing that our host sets us the good example of forgetting ceremony I shall likewise throw it aside and make free to intrude on his privacy
He tried the door which yielded to his hand and was flung wide open by a sudden gust of wind that passed as with a loud sigh from the outermost portal through all the passages and apartments of the new house It rustled the silken garments of the ladies and waved the long curls of the gentlemens wigs and shook the windowhangings and the curtains of the bedchambers causing everywhere a singular stir which yet was more like a hush A shadow of awe and halffearful anticipation—nobody knew wherefore nor of what—had all at once fallen over the company
They thronged however to the now open door pressing the lieutenantgovernor in the eagerness of their curiosity into the room in advance of them At the first glimpse they beheld nothing extraordinary a handsomely furnished room of moderate size somewhat darkened by curtains books arranged on shelves a large map on the wall and likewise a portrait of Colonel Pyncheon beneath which sat the original Colonel himself in an oaken elbowchair with a pen in his hand Letters parchments and blank sheets of paper were on the table before him He appeared to gaze at the curious crowd in front of which stood the lieutenantgovernor and there was a frown on his dark and massive countenance as if sternly resentful of the boldness that had impelled them into his private retirement
A little boy—the Colonels grandchild and the only human being that ever dared to be familiar with him—now made his way among the guests and ran towards the seated figure then pausing halfway he began to shriek with terror The company tremulous as the leaves of a tree when all are shaking together drew nearer and perceived that there was an unnatural distortion in the fixedness of Colonel Pyncheons stare that there was blood on his ruff and that his hoary beard was saturated with it It was too late to give assistance The ironhearted Puritan the relentless persecutor the grasping and strongwilled man was dead Dead in his new house There is a tradition only worth alluding to as lending a tinge of superstitious awe to a scene perhaps gloomy enough without it that a voice spoke loudly among the guests the tones of which were like those of old Matthew Maule the executed wizard—God hath given him blood to drink
Thus early had that one guest—the only guest who is certain at one time or another to find his way into every human dwelling—thus early had Death stepped across the threshold of the House of the Seven Gables
Colonel Pyncheons sudden and mysterious end made a vast deal of noise in its day There were many rumors some of which have vaguely drifted down to the present time how that appearances indicated violence that there were the marks of fingers on his throat and the print of a bloody hand on his plaited ruff and that his peaked beard was dishevelled as if it had been fiercely clutched and pulled It was averred likewise that the lattice window near the Colonels chair was open and that only a few minutes before the fatal occurrence the figure of a man had been seen clambering over the garden fence in the rear of the house But it were folly to lay any stress on stories of this kind which are sure to spring up around such an event as that now related and which as in the present case sometimes prolong themselves for ages afterwards like the toadstools that indicate where the fallen and buried trunk of a tree has long since mouldered into the earth For our own part we allow them just as little credence as to that other fable of the skeleton hand which the lieutenantgovernor was said to have seen at the Colonels throat but which vanished away as he advanced farther into the room Certain it is however that there was a great consultation and dispute of doctors over the dead body One—John Swinnerton by name—who appears to have been a man of eminence upheld it if we have rightly understood his terms of art to be a case of apoplexy His professional brethren each for himself adopted various hypotheses more or less plausible but all dressed out in a perplexing mystery of phrase which if it do not show a bewilderment of mind in these erudite physicians certainly causes it in the unlearned peruser of their opinions The coroners jury sat upon the corpse and like sensible men returned an unassailable verdict of Sudden Death
It is indeed difficult to imagine that there could have been a serious suspicion of murder or the slightest grounds for implicating any particular individual as the perpetrator The rank wealth and eminent character of the deceased must have insured the strictest scrutiny into every ambiguous circumstance As none such is on record it is safe to assume that none existed Tradition—which sometimes brings down truth that history has let slip but is oftener the wild babble of the time such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now congeals in newspapers—tradition is responsible for all contrary averments In Colonel Pyncheons funeral sermon which was printed and is still extant the Rev Mr Higginson enumerates among the many felicities of his distinguished parishioners earthly career the happy seasonableness of his death His duties all performed—the highest prosperity attained—his race and future generations fixed on a stable basis and with a stately roof to shelter them for centuries to come—what other upward step remained for this good man to take save the final step from earth to the golden gate of heaven The pious clergyman surely would not have uttered words like these had he in the least suspected that the Colonel had been thrust into the other world with the clutch of violence upon his throat
The family of Colonel Pyncheon at the epoch of his death seemed destined to as fortunate a permanence as can anywise consist with the inherent instability of human affairs It might fairly be anticipated that the progress of time would rather increase and ripen their prosperity than wear away and destroy it For not only had his son and heir come into immediate enjoyment of a rich estate but there was a claim through an Indian deed confirmed by a subsequent grant of the General Court to a vast and as yet unexplored and unmeasured tract of Eastern lands These possessions—for as such they might almost certainly be reckoned—comprised the greater part of what is now known as Waldo County in the state of Maine and were more extensive than many a dukedom or even a reigning princes territory on European soil When the pathless forest that still covered this wild principality should give place—as it inevitably must though perhaps not till ages hence—to the golden fertility of human culture it would be the source of incalculable wealth to the Pyncheon blood Had the Colonel survived only a few weeks longer it is probable that his great political influence and powerful connections at home and abroad would have consummated all that was necessary to render the claim available But in spite of good Mr Higginsons congratulatory eloquence this appeared to be the one thing which Colonel Pyncheon provident and sagacious as he was had allowed to go at loose ends So far as the prospective territory was concerned he unquestionably died too soon His son lacked not merely the fathers eminent position but the talent and force of character to achieve it he could therefore effect nothing by dint of political interest and the bare justice or legality of the claim was not so apparent after the Colonels decease as it had been pronounced in his lifetime Some connecting link had slipped out of the evidence and could not anywhere be found
Efforts it is true were made by the Pyncheons not only then but at various periods for nearly a hundred years afterwards to obtain what they stubbornly persisted in deeming their right But in course of time the territory was partly regranted to more favored individuals and partly cleared and occupied by actual settlers These last if they ever heard of the Pyncheon title would have laughed at the idea of any mans asserting a right—on the strength of mouldy parchments signed with the faded autographs of governors and legislators long dead and forgotten—to the lands which they or their fathers had wrested from the wild hand of nature by their own sturdy toil This impalpable claim therefore resulted in nothing more solid than to cherish from generation to generation an absurd delusion of family importance which all along characterized the Pyncheons It caused the poorest member of the race to feel as if he inherited a kind of nobility and might yet come into the possession of princely wealth to support it In the better specimens of the breed this peculiarity threw an ideal grace over the hard material of human life without stealing away any truly valuable quality In the baser sort its effect was to increase the liability to sluggishness and dependence and induce the victim of a shadowy hope to remit all selfeffort while awaiting the realization of his dreams Years and years after their claim had passed out of the public memory the Pyncheons were accustomed to consult the Colonels ancient map which had been projected while Waldo County was still an unbroken wilderness Where the old land surveyor had put down woods lakes and rivers they marked out the cleared spaces and dotted the villages and towns and calculated the progressively increasing value of the territory as if there were yet a prospect of its ultimately forming a princedom for themselves
In almost every generation nevertheless there happened to be some one descendant of the family gifted with a portion of the hard keen sense and practical energy that had so remarkably distinguished the original founder His character indeed might be traced all the way down as distinctly as if the Colonel himself a little diluted had been gifted with a sort of intermittent immortality on earth At two or three epochs when the fortunes of the family were low this representative of hereditary qualities had made his appearance and caused the traditionary gossips of the town to whisper among themselves Here is the old Pyncheon come again Now the Seven Gables will be newshingled From father to son they clung to the ancestral house with singular tenacity of home attachment For various reasons however and from impressions often too vaguely founded to be put on paper the writer cherishes the belief that many if not most of the successive proprietors of this estate were troubled with doubts as to their moral right to hold it Of their legal tenure there could be no question but old Matthew Maule it is to be feared trode downward from his own age to a far later one planting a heavy footstep all the way on the conscience of a Pyncheon If so we are left to dispose of the awful query whether each inheritor of the property—conscious of wrong and failing to rectify it—did not commit anew the great guilt of his ancestor and incur all its original responsibilities And supposing such to be the case would it not be a far truer mode of expression to say of the Pyncheon family that they inherited a great misfortune than the reverse
We have already hinted that it is not our purpose to trace down the history of the Pyncheon family in its unbroken connection with the House of the Seven Gables nor to show as in a magic picture how the rustiness and infirmity of age gathered over the venerable house itself As regards its interior life a large dim lookingglass used to hang in one of the rooms and was fabled to contain within its depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected there—the old Colonel himself and his many descendants some in the garb of antique babyhood and others in the bloom of feminine beauty or manly prime or saddened with the wrinkles of frosty age Had we the secret of that mirror we would gladly sit down before it and transfer its revelations to our page But there was a story for which it is difficult to conceive any foundation that the posterity of Matthew Maule had some connection with the mystery of the lookingglass and that by what appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process they could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons not as they had shown themselves to the world nor in their better and happier hours but as doing over again some deed of sin or in the crisis of lifes bitterest sorrow The popular imagination indeed long kept itself busy with the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon and the wizard Maule the curse which the latter flung from his scaffold was remembered with the very important addition that it had become a part of the Pyncheon inheritance If one of the family did but gurgle in his throat a bystander would be likely enough to whisper between jest and earnest He has Maules blood to drink The sudden death of a Pyncheon about a hundred years ago with circumstances very similar to what have been related of the Colonels exit was held as giving additional probability to the received opinion on this topic It was considered moreover an ugly and ominous circumstance that Colonel Pyncheons picture—in obedience it was said to a provision of his will—remained affixed to the wall of the room in which he died Those stern immitigable features seemed to symbolize an evil influence and so darkly to mingle the shadow of their presence with the sunshine of the passing hour that no good thoughts or purposes could ever spring up and blossom there To the thoughtful mind there will be no tinge of superstition in what we figuratively express by affirming that the ghost of a dead progenitor—perhaps as a portion of his own punishment—is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family
The Pyncheons in brief lived along for the better part of two centuries with perhaps less of outward vicissitude than has attended most other New England families during the same period of time Possessing very distinctive traits of their own they nevertheless took the general characteristics of the little community in which they dwelt a town noted for its frugal discreet wellordered and homeloving inhabitants as well as for the somewhat confined scope of its sympathies but in which be it said there are odder individuals and now and then stranger occurrences than one meets with almost anywhere else During the Revolution the Pyncheon of that epoch adopting the royal side became a refugee but repented and made his reappearance just at the point of time to preserve the House of the Seven Gables from confiscation For the last seventy years the most noted event in the Pyncheon annals had been likewise the heaviest calamity that ever befell the race no less than the violent death—for so it was adjudged—of one member of the family by the criminal act of another Certain circumstances attending this fatal occurrence had brought the deed irresistibly home to a nephew of the deceased Pyncheon The young man was tried and convicted of the crime but either the circumstantial nature of the evidence and possibly some lurking doubts in the breast of the executive or lastly—an argument of greater weight in a republic than it could have been under a monarchy—the high respectability and political influence of the criminals connections had availed to mitigate his doom from death to perpetual imprisonment This sad affair had chanced about thirty years before the action of our story commences Latterly there were rumors which few believed and only one or two felt greatly interested in that this longburied man was likely for some reason or other to be summoned forth from his living tomb
It is essential to say a few words respecting the victim of this now almost forgotten murder He was an old bachelor and possessed of great wealth in addition to the house and real estate which constituted what remained of the ancient Pyncheon property Being of an eccentric and melancholy turn of mind and greatly given to rummaging old records and hearkening to old traditions he had brought himself it is averred to the conclusion that Matthew Maule the wizard had been foully wronged out of his homestead if not out of his life Such being the case and he the old bachelor in possession of the illgotten spoil—with the black stain of blood sunken deep into it and still to be scented by conscientious nostrils—the question occurred whether it were not imperative upon him even at this late hour to make restitution to Maules posterity To a man living so much in the past and so little in the present as the secluded and antiquarian old bachelor a century and a half seemed not so vast a period as to obviate the propriety of substituting right for wrong It was the belief of those who knew him best that he would positively have taken the very singular step of giving up the House of the Seven Gables to the representative of Matthew Maule but for the unspeakable tumult which a suspicion of the old gentlemans project awakened among his Pyncheon relatives Their exertions had the effect of suspending his purpose but it was feared that he would perform after death by the operation of his last will what he had so hardly been prevented from doing in his proper lifetime But there is no one thing which men so rarely do whatever the provocation or inducement as to bequeath patrimonial property away from their own blood They may love other individuals far better than their relatives—they may even cherish dislike or positive hatred to the latter but yet in view of death the strong prejudice of propinquity revives and impels the testator to send down his estate in the line marked out by custom so immemorial that it looks like nature In all the Pyncheons this feeling had the energy of disease It was too powerful for the conscientious scruples of the old bachelor at whose death accordingly the mansionhouse together with most of his other riches passed into the possession of his next legal representative
This was a nephew the cousin of the miserable young man who had been convicted of the uncles murder The new heir up to the period of his accession was reckoned rather a dissipated youth but had at once reformed and made himself an exceedingly respectable member of society In fact he showed more of the Pyncheon quality and had won higher eminence in the world than any of his race since the time of the original Puritan Applying himself in earlier manhood to the study of the law and having a natural tendency towards office he had attained many years ago to a judicial situation in some inferior court which gave him for life the very desirable and imposing title of judge Later he had engaged in politics and served a part of two terms in Congress besides making a considerable figure in both branches of the State legislature Judge Pyncheon was unquestionably an honor to his race He had built himself a countryseat within a few miles of his native town and there spent such portions of his time as could be spared from public service in the display of every grace and virtue—as a newspaper phrased it on the eve of an election—befitting the Christian the good citizen the horticulturist and the gentleman
There were few of the Pyncheons left to sun themselves in the glow of the Judges prosperity In respect to natural increase the breed had not thriven it appeared rather to be dying out The only members of the family known to be extant were first the Judge himself and a single surviving son who was now travelling in Europe next the thirty years prisoner already alluded to and a sister of the latter who occupied in an extremely retired manner the House of the Seven Gables in which she had a lifeestate by the will of the old bachelor She was understood to be wretchedly poor and seemed to make it her choice to remain so inasmuch as her affluent cousin the Judge had repeatedly offered her all the comforts of life either in the old mansion or his own modern residence The last and youngest Pyncheon was a little countrygirl of seventeen the daughter of another of the Judges cousins who had married a young woman of no family or property and died early and in poor circumstances His widow had recently taken another husband
As for Matthew Maules posterity it was supposed now to be extinct For a very long period after the witchcraft delusion however the Maules had continued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had suffered so unjust a death To all appearance they were a quiet honest wellmeaning race of people cherishing no malice against individuals or the public for the wrong which had been done them or if at their own fireside they transmitted from father to child any hostile recollection of the wizards fate and their lost patrimony it was never acted upon nor openly expressed Nor would it have been singular had they ceased to remember that the House of the Seven Gables was resting its heavy framework on a foundation that was rightfully their own There is something so massive stable and almost irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank and great possessions that their very existence seems to give them a right to exist at least so excellent a counterfeit of right that few poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it even in their secret minds Such is the case now after so many ancient prejudices have been overthrown and it was far more so in anteRevolutionary days when the aristocracy could venture to be proud and the low were content to be abased Thus the Maules at all events kept their resentments within their own breasts They were generally povertystricken always plebeian and obscure working with unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts laboring on the wharves or following the sea as sailors before the mast living here and there about the town in hired tenements and coming finally to the almshouse as the natural home of their old age At last after creeping as it were for such a length of time along the utmost verge of the opaque puddle of obscurity they had taken that downright plunge which sooner or later is the destiny of all families whether princely or plebeian For thirty years past neither townrecord nor gravestone nor the directory nor the knowledge or memory of man bore any trace of Matthew Maules descendants His blood might possibly exist elsewhere here where its lowly current could be traced so far back it had ceased to keep an onward course
So long as any of the race were to be found they had been marked out from other men—not strikingly nor as with a sharp line but with an effect that was felt rather than spoken of—by an hereditary character of reserve Their companions or those who endeavored to become such grew conscious of a circle round about the Maules within the sanctity or the spell of which in spite of an exterior of sufficient frankness and goodfellowship it was impossible for any man to step It was this indefinable peculiarity perhaps that by insulating them from human aid kept them always so unfortunate in life It certainly operated to prolong in their case and to confirm to them as their only inheritance those feelings of repugnance and superstitious terror with which the people of the town even after awakening from their frenzy continued to regard the memory of the reputed witches The mantle or rather the ragged cloak of old Matthew Maule had fallen upon his children They were half believed to inherit mysterious attributes the family eye was said to possess strange power Among other goodfornothing properties and privileges one was especially assigned them—that of exercising an influence over peoples dreams The Pyncheons if all stories were true haughtily as they bore themselves in the noonday streets of their native town were no better than bondservants to these plebeian Maules on entering the topsyturvy commonwealth of sleep Modern psychology it may be will endeavor to reduce these alleged necromancies within a system instead of rejecting them as altogether fabulous
A descriptive paragraph or two treating of the sevengabled mansion in its more recent aspect will bring this preliminary chapter to a close The street in which it upreared its venerable peaks has long ceased to be a fashionable quarter of the town so that though the old edifice was surrounded by habitations of modern date they were mostly small built entirely of wood and typical of the most plodding uniformity of common life Doubtless however the whole story of human existence may be latent in each of them but with no picturesqueness externally that can attract the imagination or sympathy to seek it there But as for the old structure of our story its whiteoak frame and its boards shingles and crumbling plaster and even the huge clustered chimney in the midst seemed to constitute only the least and meanest part of its reality So much of mankinds varied experience had passed there—so much had been suffered and something too enjoyed—that the very timbers were oozy as with the moisture of a heart It was itself like a great human heart with a life of its own, and full of rich and sombre reminiscences
The deep projection of the second story gave the house such a meditative look that you could not pass it without the idea that it had secrets to keep and an eventful history to moralize upon In front just on the edge of the unpaved sidewalk grew the Pyncheon Elm which in reference to such trees as one usually meets with might well be termed gigantic It had been planted by a greatgrandson of the first Pyncheon and though now fourscore years of age or perhaps nearer a hundred was still in its strong and broad maturity throwing its shadow from side to side of the street overtopping the seven gables and sweeping the whole black roof with its pendant foliage It gave beauty to the old edifice and seemed to make it a part of nature The street having been widened about forty years ago the front gable was now precisely on a line with it On either side extended a ruinous wooden fence of open latticework through which could be seen a grassy yard and especially in the angles of the building an enormous fertility of burdocks with leaves it is hardly an exaggeration to say two or three feet long Behind the house there appeared to be a garden which undoubtedly had once been extensive but was now infringed upon by other enclosures or shut in by habitations and outbuildings that stood on another street It would be an omission trifling indeed but unpardonable were we to forget the green moss that had long since gathered over the projections of the windows and on the slopes of the roof nor must we fail to direct the readers eye to a crop not of weeds but flowershrubs which were growing aloft in the air not a great way from the chimney in the nook between two of the gables They were called Alices Posies The tradition was that a certain Alice Pyncheon had flung up the seeds in sport and that the dust of the street and the decay of the roof gradually formed a kind of soil for them out of which they grew when Alice had long been in her grave However the flowers might have come there it was both sad and sweet to observe how Nature adopted to herself this desolate decaying gusty rusty old house of the Pyncheon family and how the everreturning Summer did her best to gladden it with tender beauty and grew melancholy in the effort
There is one other feature very essential to be noticed but which we greatly fear may damage any picturesque and romantic impression which we have been willing to throw over our sketch of this respectable edifice In the front gable under the impending brow of the second story and contiguous to the street was a shopdoor divided horizontally in the midst and with a window for its upper segment such as is often seen in dwellings of a somewhat ancient date This same shopdoor had been a subject of no slight mortification to the present occupant of the august Pyncheon House as well as to some of her predecessors The matter is disagreeably delicate to handle but since the reader must needs be let into the secret he will please to understand that about a century ago the head of the Pyncheons found himself involved in serious financial difficulties The fellow gentleman as he styled himself can hardly have been other than a spurious interloper for instead of seeking office from the king or the royal governor or urging his hereditary claim to Eastern lands he bethought himself of no better avenue to wealth than by cutting a shopdoor through the side of his ancestral residence It was the custom of the time indeed for merchants to store their goods and transact business in their own dwellings But there was something pitifully small in this old Pyncheons mode of setting about his commercial operations it was whispered that with his own hands all beruffled as they were he used to give change for a shilling and would turn a halfpenny twice over to make sure that it was a good one Beyond all question he had the blood of a petty huckster in his veins through whatever channel it may have found its way there
Immediately on his death the shopdoor had been locked bolted and barred and down to the period of our story had probably never once been opened The old counter shelves and other fixtures of the little shop remained just as he had left them It used to be affirmed that the dead shopkeeper in a white wig a faded velvet coat an apron at his waist and his ruffles carefully turned back from his wrists might be seen through the chinks of the shutters any night of the year ransacking his till or poring over the dingy pages of his daybook From the look of unutterable woe upon his face it appeared to be his doom to spend eternity in a vain effort to make his accounts balance
And now—in a very humble way as will be seen—we proceed to open our narrative
II The Little ShopWindow
IT still lacked half an hour of sunrise when Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon—we will not say awoke it being doubtful whether the poor lady had so much as closed her eyes during the brief night of midsummer—but at all events arose from her solitary pillow and began what it would be mockery to term the adornment of her person Far from us be the indecorum of assisting even in imagination at a maiden ladys toilet Our story must therefore await Miss Hepzibah at the threshold of her chamber only presuming meanwhile to note some of the heavy sighs that labored from her bosom with little restraint as to their lugubrious depth and volume of sound inasmuch as they could be audible to nobody save a disembodied listener like ourself The Old Maid was alone in the old house Alone except for a certain respectable and orderly young man an artist in the daguerreotype line who for about three months back had been a lodger in a remote gable—quite a house by itself indeed—with locks bolts and oaken bars on all the intervening doors Inaudible consequently were poor Miss Hepzibahs gusty sighs Inaudible the creaking joints of her stiffened knees as she knelt down by the bedside And inaudible too by mortal ear but heard with allcomprehending love and pity in the farthest heaven that almost agony of prayer—now whispered now a groan now a struggling silence—wherewith she besought the Divine assistance through the day Evidently this is to be a day of more than ordinary trial to Miss Hepzibah who for above a quarter of a century gone by has dwelt in strict seclusion taking no part in the business of life and just as little in its intercourse and pleasures Not with such fervor prays the torpid recluse looking forward to the cold sunless stagnant calm of a day that is to be like innumerable yesterdays
The maiden ladys devotions are concluded Will she now issue forth over the threshold of our story Not yet by many moments First every drawer in the tall oldfashioned bureau is to be opened with difficulty and with a succession of spasmodic jerks then all must close again with the same fidgety reluctance There is a rustling of stiff silks a tread of backward and forward footsteps to and fro across the chamber We suspect Miss Hepzibah moreover of taking a step upward into a chair in order to give heedful regard to her appearance on all sides and at full length in the oval dingyframed toiletglass that hangs above her table Truly well indeed who would have thought it Is all this precious time to be lavished on the matutinal repair and beautifying of an elderly person who never goes abroad whom nobody ever visits and from whom when she shall have done her utmost it were the best charity to turn ones eyes another way
Now she is almost ready Let us pardon her one other pause for it is given to the sole sentiment or we might better say—heightened and rendered intense as it has been by sorrow and seclusion—to the strong passion of her life We heard the turning of a key in a small lock she has opened a secret drawer of an escritoire and is probably looking at a certain miniature done in Malbones most perfect style and representing a face worthy of no less delicate a pencil It was once our good fortune to see this picture It is a likeness of a young man in a silken dressinggown of an old fashion the soft richness of which is well adapted to the countenance of reverie with its full tender lips and beautiful eyes that seem to indicate not so much capacity of thought as gentle and voluptuous emotion Of the possessor of such features we shall have a right to ask nothing except that he would take the rude world easily and make himself happy in it Can it have been an early lover of Miss Hepzibah No she never had a lover—poor thing how could she—nor ever knew by her own experience what love technically means And yet her undying faith and trust her fresh remembrance and continual devotedness towards the original of that miniature have been the only substance for her heart to feed upon
She seems to have put aside the miniature and is standing again before the toiletglass There are tears to be wiped off A few more footsteps to and fro and here at last—with another pitiful sigh like a gust of chill damp wind out of a longclosed vault the door of which has accidentally been set ajar—here comes Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon Forth she steps into the dusky timedarkened passage a tall figure clad in black silk with a long and shrunken waist feeling her way towards the stairs like a nearsighted person as in truth she is
The sun meanwhile if not already above the horizon was ascending nearer and nearer to its verge A few clouds floating high upward caught some of the earliest light and threw down its golden gleam on the windows of all the houses in the street not forgetting the House of the Seven Gables which—many such sunrises as it had witnessed—looked cheerfully at the present one The reflected radiance served to show pretty distinctly the aspect and arrangement of the room which Hepzibah entered after descending the stairs It was a lowstudded room with a beam across the ceiling panelled with dark wood and having a large chimneypiece set round with pictured tiles but now closed by an iron fireboard through which ran the funnel of a modern stove There was a carpet on the floor originally of rich texture but so worn and faded in these latter years that its once brilliant figure had quite vanished into one indistinguishable hue In the way of furniture there were two tables one constructed with perplexing intricacy and exhibiting as many feet as a centipede the other most delicately wrought with four long and slender legs so apparently frail that it was almost incredible what a length of time the ancient teatable had stood upon them Half a dozen chairs stood about the room straight and stiff and so ingeniously contrived for the discomfort of the human person that they were irksome even to sight and conveyed the ugliest possible idea of the state of society to which they could have been adapted One exception there was however in a very antique elbowchair with a high back carved elaborately in oak and a roomy depth within its arms that made up by its spacious comprehensiveness for the lack of any of those artistic curves which abound in a modern chair
As for ornamental articles of furniture we recollect but two if such they may be called One was a map of the Pyncheon territory at the eastward not engraved but the handiwork of some skilful old draughtsman and grotesquely illuminated with pictures of Indians and wild beasts among which was seen a lion the natural history of the region being as little known as its geography which was put down most fantastically awry The other adornment was the portrait of old Colonel Pyncheon at two thirds length representing the stern features of a Puritaniclooking personage in a skullcap with a laced band and a grizzly beard holding a Bible with one hand and in the other uplifting an iron swordhilt The latter object being more successfully depicted by the artist stood out in far greater prominence than the sacred volume Face to face with this picture on entering the apartment Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon came to a pause regarding it with a singular scowl a strange contortion of the brow which by people who did not know her would probably have been interpreted as an expression of bitter anger and illwill But it was no such thing She in fact felt a reverence for the pictured visage of which only a fardescended and timestricken virgin could be susceptible and this forbidding scowl was the innocent result of her nearsightedness and an effort so to concentrate her powers of vision as to substitute a firm outline of the object instead of a vague one
We must linger a moment on this unfortunate expression of poor Hepzibahs brow Her scowl—as the world or such part of it as sometimes caught a transitory glimpse of her at the window wickedly persisted in calling it—her scowl had done Miss Hepzibah a very ill office in establishing her character as an illtempered old maid nor does it appear improbable that by often gazing at herself in a dim lookingglass and perpetually encountering her own frown with its ghostly sphere she had been led to interpret the expression almost as unjustly as the world did How miserably cross I look she must often have whispered to herself and ultimately have fancied herself so by a sense of inevitable doom But her heart never frowned It was naturally tender sensitive and full of little tremors and palpitations all of which weaknesses it retained while her visage was growing so perversely stern and even fierce Nor had Hepzibah ever any hardihood except what came from the very warmest nook in her affections
All this time however we are loitering faintheartedly on the threshold of our story In very truth we have an invincible reluctance to disclose what Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon was about to do
It has already been observed that in the basement story of the gable fronting on the street an unworthy ancestor nearly a century ago had fitted up a shop Ever since the old gentleman retired from trade and fell asleep under his coffinlid not only the shopdoor but the inner arrangements had been suffered to remain unchanged while the dust of ages gathered inchdeep over the shelves and counter and partly filled an old pair of scales as if it were of value enough to be weighed It treasured itself up too in the halfopen till where there still lingered a base sixpence worth neither more nor less than the hereditary pride which had here been put to shame Such had been the state and condition of the little shop in old Hepzibahs childhood when she and her brother used to play at hideandseek in its forsaken precincts So it had remained until within a few days past
But now though the shopwindow was still closely curtained from the public gaze a remarkable change had taken place in its interior The rich and heavy festoons of cobweb which it had cost a long ancestral succession of spiders their lifes labor to spin and weave had been carefully brushed away from the ceiling The counter shelves and floor had all been scoured and the latter was overstrewn with fresh blue sand The brown scales too had evidently undergone rigid discipline in an unavailing effort to rub off the rust which alas had eaten through and through their substance Neither was the little old shop any longer empty of merchantable goods A curious eye privileged to take an account of stock and investigate behind the counter would have discovered a barrel yea two or three barrels and half ditto—one containing flour another apples and a third perhaps Indian meal There was likewise a square box of pinewood full of soap in bars also another of the same size in which were tallow candles ten to the pound A small stock of brown sugar some white beans and split peas and a few other commodities of low price and such as are constantly in demand made up the bulkier portion of the merchandise It might have been taken for a ghostly or phantasmagoric reflection of the old shopkeeper Pyncheons shabbily provided shelves save that some of the articles were of a description and outward form which could hardly have been known in his day For instance there was a glass picklejar filled with fragments of Gibraltar rock not indeed splinters of the veritable stone foundation of the famous fortress but bits of delectable candy neatly done up in white paper Jim Crow moreover was seen executing his worldrenowned dance in gingerbread A party of leaden dragoons were galloping along one of the shelves in equipments and uniform of modern cut and there were some sugar figures with no strong resemblance to the humanity of any epoch but less unsatisfactorily representing our own fashions than those of a hundred years ago Another phenomenon still more strikingly modern was a package of lucifer matches which in old times would have been thought actually to borrow their instantaneous flame from the nether fires of Tophet
In short to bring the matter at once to a point it was incontrovertibly evident that somebody had taken the shop and fixtures of the longretired and forgotten Mr Pyncheon and was about to renew the enterprise of that departed worthy with a different set of customers Who could this bold adventurer be And of all places in the world why had he chosen the House of the Seven Gables as the scene of his commercial speculations
We return to the elderly maiden She at length withdrew her eyes from the dark countenance of the Colonels portrait heaved a sigh—indeed her breast was a very cave of Aolus that morning—and stept across the room on tiptoe as is the customary gait of elderly women Passing through an intervening passage she opened a door that communicated with the shop just now so elaborately described Owing to the projection of the upper story—and still more to the thick shadow of the Pyncheon Elm which stood almost directly in front of the gable—the twilight here was still as much akin to night as morning Another heavy sigh from Miss Hepzibah After a moments pause on the threshold peering towards the window with her nearsighted scowl as if frowning down some bitter enemy she suddenly projected herself into the shop The haste and as it were the galvanic impulse of the movement were really quite startling
Nervously—in a sort of frenzy we might almost say—she began to busy herself in arranging some childrens playthings and other little wares on the shelves and at the shopwindow In the aspect of this darkarrayed palefaced ladylike old figure there was a deeply tragic character that contrasted irreconcilably with the ludicrous pettiness of her employment It seemed a queer anomaly that so gaunt and dismal a personage should take a toy in hand a miracle that the toy did not vanish in her grasp a miserably absurd idea that she should go on perplexing her stiff and sombre intellect with the question how to tempt little boys into her premises Yet such is undoubtedly her object Now she places a gingerbread elephant against the window but with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor with the dismemberment of three legs and its trunk it has ceased to be an elephant and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread There again she has upset a tumbler of marbles all of which roll different ways and each individual marble devildirected into the most difficult obscurity that it can find Heaven help our poor old Hepzibah and forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of her position As her rigid and rusty frame goes down upon its hands and knees in quest of the absconding marbles we positively feel so much the more inclined to shed tears of sympathy from the very fact that we must needs turn aside and laugh at her For here—and if we fail to impress it suitably upon the reader it is our own fault not that of the theme here is one of the truest points of melancholy interest that occur in ordinary life It was the final throe of what called itself old gentility A lady—who had fed herself from childhood with the shadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences and whose religion it was that a ladys hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for bread—this born lady after sixty years of narrowing means is fain to step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank Poverty treading closely at her heels for a lifetime has come up with her at last She must earn her own food or starve And we have stolen upon Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon too irreverently at the instant of time when the patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman
In this republican country amid the fluctuating waves of our social life somebody is always at the drowningpoint The tragedy is enacted with as continual a repetition as that of a popular drama on a holiday and nevertheless is felt as deeply perhaps as when an hereditary noble sinks below his order More deeply since with us rank is the grosser substance of wealth and a splendid establishment and has no spiritual existence after the death of these but dies hopelessly along with them And therefore since we have been unfortunate enough to introduce our heroine at so inauspicious a juncture we would entreat for a mood of due solemnity in the spectators of her fate Let us behold in poor Hepzibah the immemorial lady—two hundred years old on this side of the water and thrice as many on the other—with her antique portraits pedigrees coats of arms records and traditions and her claim as joint heiress to that princely territory at the eastward no longer a wilderness but a populous fertility—born too in Pyncheon Street under the Pyncheon Elm and in the Pyncheon House where she has spent all her days—reduced Now in that very house to be the hucksteress of a centshop
This business of setting up a petty shop is almost the only resource of women in circumstances at all similar to those of our unfortunate recluse With her nearsightedness and those tremulous fingers of hers at once inflexible and delicate she could not be a seamstress although her sampler of fifty years gone by exhibited some of the most recondite specimens of ornamental needlework A school for little children had been often in her thoughts and at one time she had begun a review of her early studies in the New England Primer with a view to prepare herself for the office of instructress But the love of children had never been quickened in Hepzibahs heart and was now torpid if not extinct she watched the little people of the neighborhood from her chamberwindow and doubted whether she could tolerate a more intimate acquaintance with them Besides in our day the very ABC has become a science greatly too abstruse to be any longer taught by pointing a pin from letter to letter A modern child could teach old Hepzibah more than old Hepzibah could teach the child So—with many a cold deep heartquake at the idea of at last coming into sordid contact with the world from which she had so long kept aloof while every added day of seclusion had rolled another stone against the cavern door of her hermitage—the poor thing bethought herself of the ancient shopwindow the rusty scales and dusty till She might have held back a little longer but another circumstance not yet hinted at had somewhat hastened her decision Her humble preparations therefore were duly made and the enterprise was now to be commenced Nor was she entitled to complain of any remarkable singularity in her fate for in the town of her nativity we might point to several little shops of a similar description some of them in houses as ancient as that of the Seven Gables and one or two it may be where a decayed gentlewoman stands behind the counter as grim an image of family pride as Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon herself
It was overpoweringly ridiculous—we must honestly confess it—the deportment of the maiden lady while setting her shop in order for the public eye She stole on tiptoe to the window as cautiously as if she conceived some bloodyminded villain to be watching behind the elmtree with intent to take her life Stretching out her long lank arm she put a paper of pearlbuttons a jewsharp or whatever the small article might be in its destined place and straightway vanished back into the dusk as if the world need never hope for another glimpse of her It might have been fancied indeed that she expected to minister to the wants of the community unseen like a disembodied divinity or enchantress holding forth her bargains to the reverential and awestricken purchaser in an invisible hand But Hepzibah had no such flattering dream She was well aware that she must ultimately come forward and stand revealed in her proper individuality but like other sensitive persons she could not bear to be observed in the gradual process and chose rather to flash forth on the worlds astonished gaze at once
The inevitable moment was not much longer to be delayed The sunshine might now be seen stealing down the front of the opposite house from the windows of which came a reflected gleam struggling through the boughs of the elmtree and enlightening the interior of the shop more distinctly than heretofore The town appeared to be waking up A bakers cart had already rattled through the street chasing away the latest vestige of nights sanctity with the jinglejangle of its dissonant bells A milkman was distributing the contents of his cans from door to door and the harsh peal of a fishermans conch shell was heard far off around the corner None of these tokens escaped Hepzibahs notice The moment had arrived To delay longer would be only to lengthen out her misery Nothing remained except to take down the bar from the shopdoor leaving the entrance free—more than free—welcome as if all were household friends—to every passerby whose eyes might be attracted by the commodities at the window This last act Hepzibah now performed letting the bar fall with what smote upon her excited nerves as a most astounding clatter Then—as if the only barrier betwixt herself and the world had been thrown down and a flood of evil consequences would come tumbling through the gap—she fled into the inner parlor threw herself into the ancestral elbowchair and wept
Our miserable old Hepzibah It is a heavy annoyance to a writer who endeavors to represent nature its various attitudes and circumstances in a reasonably correct outline and true coloring that so much of the mean and ludicrous should be hopelessly mixed up with the purest pathos which life anywhere supplies to him What tragic dignity for example can be wrought into a scene like this How can we elevate our history of retribution for the sin of long ago when as one of our most prominent figures we are compelled to introduce—not a young and lovely woman nor even the stately remains of beauty stormshattered by affliction—but a gaunt sallow rustyjointed maiden in a longwaisted silk gown and with the strange horror of a turban on her head Her visage is not even ugly It is redeemed from insignificance only by the contraction of her eyebrows into a nearsighted scowl And finally her great lifetrial seems to be that after sixty years of idleness she finds it convenient to earn comfortable bread by setting up a shop in a small way Nevertheless if we look through all the heroic fortunes of mankind we shall find this same entanglement of something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow Life is made up of marble and mud And without all the deeper trust in a comprehensive sympathy above us we might hence be led to suspect the insult of a sneer as well as an immitigable frown on the iron countenance of fate What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning in this sphere of strangely mingled elements the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid
III The First Customer
MISS HEPZIBAH PYNCHEON sat in the oaken elbowchair with her hands over her face giving way to that heavy downsinking of the heart which most persons have experienced when the image of hope itself seems ponderously moulded of lead on the eve of an enterprise at once doubtful and momentous She was suddenly startled by the tinkling alarum—high sharp and irregular—of a little bell The maiden lady arose upon her feet as pale as a ghost at cockcrow for she was an enslaved spirit and this the talisman to which she owed obedience This little bell—to speak in plainer terms—being fastened over the shopdoor was so contrived as to vibrate by means of a steel spring and thus convey notice to the inner regions of the house when any customer should cross the threshold Its ugly and spiteful little din heard now for the first time perhaps since Hepzibahs periwigged predecessor had retired from trade at once set every nerve of her body in responsive and tumultuous vibration The crisis was upon her Her first customer was at the door
Without giving herself time for a second thought she rushed into the shop pale wild desperate in gesture and expression scowling portentously and looking far better qualified to do fierce battle with a housebreaker than to stand smiling behind the counter bartering small wares for a copper recompense Any ordinary customer indeed would have turned his back and fled And yet there was nothing fierce in Hepzibahs poor old heart nor had she at the moment a single bitter thought against the world at large or one individual man or woman She wished them all well but wished too that she herself were done with them and in her quiet grave
The applicant by this time stood within the doorway Coming freshly as he did out of the morning light he appeared to have brought some of its cheery influences into the shop along with him It was a slender young man not more than one or two and twenty years old with rather a grave and thoughtful expression for his years but likewise a springy alacrity and vigor These qualities were not only perceptible physically in his make and motions but made themselves felt almost immediately in his character A brown beard not too silken in its texture fringed his chin but as yet without completely hiding it he wore a short mustache too and his dark highfeatured countenance looked all the better for these natural ornaments As for his dress it was of the simplest kind a summer sack of cheap and ordinary material thin checkered pantaloons and a straw hat by no means of the finest braid Oak Hall might have supplied his entire equipment He was chiefly marked as a gentleman—if such indeed he made any claim to be—by the rather remarkable whiteness and nicety of his clean linen
He met the scowl of old Hepzibah without apparent alarm as having heretofore encountered it and found it harmless
So my dear Miss Pyncheon said the daguerreotypist—for it was that sole other occupant of the sevengabled mansion—I am glad to see that you have not shrunk from your good purpose I merely look in to offer my best wishes and to ask if I can assist you any further in your preparations
People in difficulty and distress or in any manner at odds with the world can endure a vast amount of harsh treatment and perhaps be only the stronger for it whereas they give way at once before the simplest expression of what they perceive to be genuine sympathy So it proved with poor Hepzibah for when she saw the young mans smile—looking so much the brighter on a thoughtful face—and heard his kindly tone she broke first into a hysteric giggle and then began to sob
Ah Mr Holgrave cried she as soon as she could speak I never can go through with it Never never never I wish I were dead and in the old family tomb with all my forefathers With my father and my mother and my sister Yes and with my brother who had far better find me there than here The world is too chill and hard—and I am too old and too feeble and too hopeless
Oh believe me Miss Hepzibah said the young man quietly these feelings will not trouble you any longer after you are once fairly in the midst of your enterprise They are unavoidable at this moment standing as you do on the outer verge of your long seclusion and peopling the world with ugly shapes which you will soon find to be as unreal as the giants and ogres of a childs storybook I find nothing so singular in life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it So it will be with what you think so terrible
But I am a woman said Hepzibah piteously I was going to say a lady—but I consider that as past
Well no matter if it be past answered the artist a strange gleam of halfhidden sarcasm flashing through the kindliness of his manner Let it go You are the better without it I speak frankly my dear Miss Pyncheon—for are we not friends I look upon this as one of the fortunate days of your life It ends an epoch and begins one Hitherto the lifeblood has been gradually chilling in your veins as you sat aloof within your circle of gentility while the rest of the world was fighting out its battle with one kind of necessity or another Henceforth you will at least have the sense of healthy and natural effort for a purpose and of lending your strength be it great or small—to the united struggle of mankind This is success—all the success that anybody meets with
It is natural enough Mr Holgrave that you should have ideas like these rejoined Hepzibah drawing up her gaunt figure with slightly offended dignity You are a man a young man and brought up I suppose as almost everybody is nowadays with a view to seeking your fortune But I was born a lady and have always lived one no matter in what narrowness of means always a lady
But I was not born a gentleman neither have I lived like one said Holgrave slightly smiling so my dear madam you will hardly expect me to sympathize with sensibilities of this kind though unless I deceive myself I have some imperfect comprehension of them These names of gentleman and lady had a meaning in the past history of the world and conferred privileges desirable or otherwise on those entitled to bear them In the present—and still more in the future condition of societythey imply not privilege but restriction
These are new notions said the old gentlewoman shaking her head I shall never understand them neither do I wish it
We will cease to speak of them then replied the artist with a friendlier smile than his last one and I will leave you to feel whether it is not better to be a true woman than a lady Do you really think Miss Hepzibah that any lady of your family has ever done a more heroic thing since this house was built than you are performing in it today Never and if the Pyncheons had always acted so nobly I doubt whether an old wizard Maules anathema of which you told me once would have had much weight with Providence against them
Ah—no no said Hepzibah not displeased at this allusion to the sombre dignity of an inherited curse If old Maules ghost or a descendant of his could see me behind the counter today he would call it the fulfillment of his worst wishes But I thank you for your kindness Mr Holgrave and will do my utmost to be a good shopkeeper
Pray do said Holgrave and let me have the pleasure of being your first customer I am about taking a walk to the seashore before going to my rooms where I misuse Heavens blessed sunshine by tracing out human features through its agency A few of those biscuits dipt in seawater will be just what I need for breakfast What is the price of half a dozen
Let me be a lady a moment longer replied Hepzibah with a manner of antique stateliness to which a melancholy smile lent a kind of grace She put the biscuits into his hand but rejected the compensation A Pyncheon must not at all events under her forefathers roof receive money for a morsel of bread from her only friend
Holgrave took his departure leaving her for the moment with spirits not quite so much depressed Soon however they had subsided nearly to their former dead level With a beating heart she listened to the footsteps of early passengers which now began to be frequent along the street Once or twice they seemed to linger these strangers or neighbors as the case might be were looking at the display of toys and petty commodities in Hepzibahs shopwindow She was doubly tortured in part with a sense of overwhelming shame that strange and unloving eyes should have the privilege of gazing and partly because the idea occurred to her with ridiculous importunity that the window was not arranged so skilfully nor nearly to so much advantage as it might have been It seemed as if the whole fortune or failure of her shop might depend on the display of a different set of articles or substituting a fairer apple for one which appeared to be specked So she made the change and straightway fancied that everything was spoiled by it not recognizing that it was the nervousness of the juncture and her own native squeamishness as an old maid that wrought all the seeming mischief
Anon there was an encounter just at the doorstep betwixt two laboring men as their rough voices denoted them to be After some slight talk about their own affairs one of them chanced to notice the shopwindow and directed the others attention to it
See here cried he what do you think of this Trade seems to be looking up in Pyncheon Street
Well well this is a sight to be sure exclaimed the other In the old Pyncheon House and underneath the Pyncheon Elm Who would have thought it Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a centshop
Will she make it go think you Dixey said his friend I dont call it a very good stand Theres another shop just round the corner
Make it go cried Dixey with a most contemptuous expression as if the very idea were impossible to be conceived Not a bit of it Why her face—Ive seen it for I dug her garden for her one year—her face is enough to frighten the Old Nick himself if he had ever so great a mind to trade with her People cant stand it I tell you She scowls dreadfully reason or none out of pure ugliness of temper
Well thats not so much matter remarked the other man These sourtempered folks are mostly handy at business and know pretty well what they are about But as you say I dont think shell do much This business of keeping centshops is overdone like all other kinds of trade handicraft and bodily labor I know it to my cost My wife kept a centshop three months and lost five dollars on her outlay
Poor business responded Dixey in a tone as if he were shaking his head—poor business
For some reason or other not very easy to analyze there had hardly been so bitter a pang in all her previous misery about the matter as what thrilled Hepzibahs heart on overhearing the above conversation The testimony in regard to her scowl was frightfully important it seemed to hold up her image wholly relieved from the false light of her selfpartialities and so hideous that she dared not look at it She was absurdly hurt moreover by the slight and idle effect that her setting up shop—an event of such breathless interest to herself—appeared to have upon the public of which these two men were the nearest representatives A glance a passing word or two a coarse laugh and she was doubtless forgotten before they turned the corner They cared nothing for her dignity and just as little for her degradation Then also the augury of illsuccess uttered from the sure wisdom of experience fell upon her halfdead hope like a clod into a grave The mans wife had already tried the same experiment and failed How could the born lady—the recluse of half a lifetime utterly unpractised in the world at sixty years of age—how could she ever dream of succeeding when the hard vulgar keen busy hackneyed New England woman had lost five dollars on her little outlay Success presented itself as an impossibility and the hope of it as a wild hallucination
Some malevolent spirit doing his utmost to drive Hepzibah mad unrolled before her imagination a kind of panorama representing the great thoroughfare of a city all astir with customers So many and so magnificent shops as there were Groceries toyshops drygoods stores with their immense panes of plateglass their gorgeous fixtures their vast and complete assortments of merchandise in which fortunes had been invested and those noble mirrors at the farther end of each establishment doubling all this wealth by a brightly burnished vista of unrealities On one side of the street this splendid bazaar with a multitude of perfumed and glossy salesmen smirking smiling bowing and measuring out the goods On the other the dusky old House of the Seven Gables with the antiquated shopwindow under its projecting story and Hepzibah herself in a gown of rusty black silk behind the counter scowling at the world as it went by This mighty contrast thrust itself forward as a fair expression of the odds against which she was to begin her struggle for a subsistence Success Preposterous She would never think of it again The house might just as well be buried in an eternal fog while all other houses had the sunshine on them for not a foot would ever cross the threshold nor a hand so much as try the door
But at this instant the shopbell right over her head tinkled as if it were bewitched The old gentlewomans heart seemed to be attached to the same steel spring for it went through a series of sharp jerks in unison with the sound The door was thrust open although no human form was perceptible on the other side of the halfwindow Hepzibah nevertheless stood at a gaze with her hands clasped looking very much as if she had summoned up an evil spirit and were afraid yet resolved to hazard the encounter
Heaven help me she groaned mentally Now is my hour of need
The door which moved with difficulty on its creaking and rusty hinges being forced quite open a square and sturdy little urchin became apparent with cheeks as red as an apple He was clad rather shabbily but as it seemed more owing to his mothers carelessness than his fathers poverty in a blue apron very wide and short trousers shoes somewhat out at the toes and a chip hat with the frizzles of his curly hair sticking through its crevices A book and a small slate under his arm indicated that he was on his way to school He stared at Hepzibah a moment as an elder customer than himself would have been likely enough to do not knowing what to make of the tragic attitude and queer scowl wherewith she regarded him
Well child said she taking heart at sight of a personage so little formidable—well my child what did you wish for
That Jim Crow there in the window answered the urchin holding out a cent and pointing to the gingerbread figure that had attracted his notice as he loitered along to school the one that has not a broken foot
So Hepzibah put forth her lank arm and taking the effigy from the shopwindow delivered it to her first customer
No matter for the money said she giving him a little push towards the door for her old gentility was contumaciously squeamish at sight of the copper coin and besides it seemed such pitiful meanness to take the childs pocketmoney in exchange for a bit of stale gingerbread No matter for the cent You are welcome to Jim Crow
The child staring with round eyes at this instance of liberality wholly unprecedented in his large experience of centshops took the man of gingerbread and quitted the premises No sooner had he reached the sidewalk little cannibal that he was than Jim Crows head was in his mouth As he had not been careful to shut the door Hepzibah was at the pains of closing it after him with a pettish ejaculation or two about the troublesomeness of young people and particularly of small boys She had just placed another representative of the renowned Jim Crow at the window when again the shopbell tinkled clamorously and again the door being thrust open with its characteristic jerk and jar disclosed the same sturdy little urchin who precisely two minutes ago had made his exit The crumbs and discoloration of the cannibal feast as yet hardly consummated were exceedingly visible about his mouth
What is it now child asked the maiden lady rather impatiently did you come back to shut the door
No answered the urchin pointing to the figure that had just been put up I want that other Jim Crow
Well here it is for you said Hepzibah reaching it down but recognizing that this pertinacious customer would not quit her on any other terms so long as she had a gingerbread figure in her shop she partly drew back her extended hand Where is the cent
The little boy had the cent ready but like a trueborn Yankee would have preferred the better bargain to the worse Looking somewhat chagrined he put the coin into Hepzibahs hand and departed sending the second Jim Crow in quest of the former one The new shopkeeper dropped the first solid result of her commercial enterprise into the till It was done The sordid stain of that copper coin could never be washed away from her palm The little schoolboy aided by the impish figure of the negro dancer had wrought an irreparable ruin The structure of ancient aristocracy had been demolished by him even as if his childish gripe had torn down the sevengabled mansion Now let Hepzibah turn the old Pyncheon portraits with their faces to the wall and take the map of her Eastern territory to kindle the kitchen fire and blow up the flame with the empty breath of her ancestral traditions What had she to do with ancestry Nothing no more than with posterity No lady now but simply Hepzibah Pyncheon a forlorn old maid and keeper of a centshop
Nevertheless even while she paraded these ideas somewhat ostentatiously through her mind it is altogether surprising what a calmness had come over her The anxiety and misgivings which had tormented her whether asleep or in melancholy daydreams ever since her project began to take an aspect of solidity had now vanished quite away She felt the novelty of her position indeed but no longer with disturbance or affright Now and then there came a thrill of almost youthful enjoyment It was the invigorating breath of a fresh outward atmosphere after the long torpor and monotonous seclusion of her life So wholesome is effort So miraculous the strength that we do not know of The healthiest glow that Hepzibah had known for years had come now in the dreaded crisis when for the first time she had put forth her hand to help herself The little circlet of the schoolboys copper coin—dim and lustreless though it was with the small services which it had been doing here and there about the world—had proved a talisman fragrant with good and deserving to be set in gold and worn next her heart It was as potent and perhaps endowed with the same kind of efficacy as a galvanic ring Hepzibah at all events was indebted to its subtile operation both in body and spirit so much the more as it inspired her with energy to get some breakfast at which still the better to keep up her courage she allowed herself an extra spoonful in her infusion of black tea
Her introductory day of shopkeeping did not run on however without many and serious interruptions of this mood of cheerful vigor As a general rule Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers In the case of our old gentlewoman after the excitement of new effort had subsided the despondency of her whole life threatened ever and anon to return It was like the heavy mass of clouds which we may often see obscuring the sky and making a gray twilight everywhere until towards nightfall it yields temporarily to a glimpse of sunshine But always the envious cloud strives to gather again across the streak of celestial azure
Customers came in as the forenoon advanced but rather slowly in some cases too it must be owned with little satisfaction either to themselves or Miss Hepzibah nor on the whole with an aggregate of very rich emolument to the till A little girl sent by her mother to match a skein of cotton thread of a peculiar hue took one that the nearsighted old lady pronounced extremely like but soon came running back with a blunt and cross message that it would not do and besides was very rotten Then there was a pale carewrinkled woman not old but haggard and already with streaks of gray among her hair like silver ribbons one of those women naturally delicate whom you at once recognize as worn to death by a brute—probably a drunken brute—of a husband and at least nine children She wanted a few pounds of flour and offered the money which the decayed gentlewoman silently rejected and gave the poor soul better measure than if she had taken it Shortly afterwards a man in a blue cotton frock much soiled came in and bought a pipe filling the whole shop meanwhile with the hot odor of strong drink not only exhaled in the torrid atmosphere of his breath but oozing out of his entire system like an inflammable gas It was impressed on Hepzibahs mind that this was the husband of the carewrinkled woman He asked for a paper of tobacco and as she had neglected to provide herself with the article her brutal customer dashed down his newlybought pipe and left the shop muttering some unintelligible words which had the tone and bitterness of a curse Hereupon Hepzibah threw up her eyes unintentionally scowling in the face of Providence
No less than five persons during the forenoon inquired for gingerbeer or rootbeer or any drink of a similar brewage and obtaining nothing of the kind went off in an exceedingly bad humor Three of them left the door open and the other two pulled it so spitefully in going out that the little bell played the very deuce with Hepzibahs nerves A round bustling fireruddy housewife of the neighborhood burst breathless into the shop fiercely demanding yeast and when the poor gentlewoman with her cold shyness of manner gave her hot customer to understand that she did not keep the article this very capable housewife took upon herself to administer a regular rebuke
A centshop and no yeast quoth she That will never do Who ever heard of such a thing Your loaf will never rise no more than mine will today You had better shut up shop at once
Well said Hepzibah heaving a deep sigh perhaps I had
Several times moreover besides the above instance her ladylike sensibilities were seriously infringed upon by the familiar if not rude tone with which people addressed her They evidently considered themselves not merely her equals but her patrons and superiors Now Hepzibah had unconsciously flattered herself with the idea that there would be a gleam or halo of some kind or other about her person which would insure an obeisance to her sterling gentility or at least a tacit recognition of it On the other hand nothing tortured her more intolerably than when this recognition was too prominently expressed To one or two rather officious offers of sympathy her responses were little short of acrimonious and we regret to say Hepzibah was thrown into a positively unchristian state of mind by the suspicion that one of her customers was drawn to the shop not by any real need of the article which she pretended to seek but by a wicked wish to stare at her The vulgar creature was determined to see for herself what sort of a figure a mildewed piece of aristocracy after wasting all the bloom and much of the decline of her life apart from the world would cut behind a counter In this particular case however mechanical and innocuous it might be at other times Hepzibahs contortion of brow served her in good stead
I never was so frightened in my life said the curious customer in describing the incident to one of her acquaintances Shes a real old vixen take my word of it She says little to be sure but if you could only see the mischief in her eye
On the whole therefore her new experience led our decayed gentlewoman to very disagreeable conclusions as to the temper and manners of what she termed the lower classes whom heretofore she had looked down upon with a gentle and pitying complaisance as herself occupying a sphere of unquestionable superiority But unfortunately she had likewise to struggle against a bitter emotion of a directly opposite kind a sentiment of virulence we mean towards the idle aristocracy to which it had so recently been her pride to belong When a lady in a delicate and costly summer garb with a floating veil and gracefully swaying gown and altogether an ethereal lightness that made you look at her beautifully slippered feet to see whether she trod on the dust or floated in the air—when such a vision happened to pass through this retired street leaving it tenderly and delusively fragrant with her passage as if a bouquet of tearoses had been borne along—then again it is to be feared old Hepzibahs scowl could no longer vindicate itself entirely on the plea of nearsightedness
For what end thought she giving vent to that feeling of hostility which is the only real abasement of the poor in presence of the rich—for what good end in the wisdom of Providence does that woman live Must the whole world toil that the palms of her hands may be kept white and delicate
Then ashamed and penitent she hid her face
May God forgive me said she
Doubtless God did forgive her But taking the inward and outward history of the first halfday into consideration Hepzibah began to fear that the shop would prove her ruin in a moral and religious point of view without contributing very essentially towards even her temporal welfare
IV A Day Behind the Counter
TOWARDS noon Hepzibah saw an elderly gentleman large and portly and of remarkably dignified demeanor passing slowly along on the opposite side of the white and dusty street On coming within the shadow of the Pyncheon Elm he stopt and taking off his hat meanwhile to wipe the perspiration from his brow seemed to scrutinize with especial interest the dilapidated and rustyvisaged House of the Seven Gables He himself in a very different style was as well worth looking at as the house No better model need be sought nor could have been found of a very high order of respectability which by some indescribable magic not merely expressed itself in his looks and gestures but even governed the fashion of his garments and rendered them all proper and essential to the man Without appearing to differ in any tangible way from other peoples clothes there was yet a wide and rich gravity about them that must have been a characteristic of the wearer since it could not be defined as pertaining either to the cut or material His goldheaded cane too—a serviceable staff of dark polished wood—had similar traits and had it chosen to take a walk by itself would have been recognized anywhere as a tolerably adequate representative of its master This character—which showed itself so strikingly in everything about him and the effect of which we seek to convey to the reader—went no deeper than his station habits of life and external circumstances One perceived him to be a personage of marked influence and authority and especially you could feel just as certain that he was opulent as if he had exhibited his bank account or as if you had seen him touching the twigs of the Pyncheon Elm and Midaslike transmuting them to gold
In his youth he had probably been considered a handsome man at his present age his brow was too heavy his temples too bare his remaining hair too gray his eye too cold his lips too closely compressed to bear any relation to mere personal beauty He would have made a good and massive portrait better now perhaps than at any previous period of his life although his look might grow positively harsh in the process of being fixed upon the canvas The artist would have found it desirable to study his face and prove its capacity for varied expression to darken it with a frown—to kindle it up with a smile
While the elderly gentleman stood looking at the Pyncheon House both the frown and the smile passed successively over his countenance His eye rested on the shopwindow and putting up a pair of goldbowed spectacles which he held in his hand he minutely surveyed Hepzibahs little arrangement of toys and commodities At first it seemed not to please him—nay to cause him exceeding displeasure—and yet the very next moment he smiled While the latter expression was yet on his lips he caught a glimpse of Hepzibah who had involuntarily bent forward to the window and then the smile changed from acrid and disagreeable to the sunniest complacency and benevolence He bowed with a happy mixture of dignity and courteous kindliness and pursued his way
There he is said Hepzibah to herself gulping down a very bitter emotion and since she could not rid herself of it trying to drive it back into her heart What does he think of it I wonder Does it please him Ah he is looking back
The gentleman had paused in the street and turned himself half about still with his eyes fixed on the shopwindow In fact he wheeled wholly round and commenced a step or two as if designing to enter the shop but as it chanced his purpose was anticipated by Hepzibahs first customer the little cannibal of Jim Crow who staring up at the window was irresistibly attracted by an elephant of gingerbread What a grand appetite had this small urchin—Two Jim Crows immediately after breakfast—and now an elephant as a preliminary whet before dinner By the time this latter purchase was completed the elderly gentleman had resumed his way and turned the street corner
Take it as you like Cousin Jaffrey muttered the maiden lady as she drew back after cautiously thrusting out her head and looking up and down the street—Take it as you like You have seen my little shopwindow Well—what have you to say—is not the Pyncheon House my own while Im alive
After this incident Hepzibah retreated to the back parlor where she at first caught up a halffinished stocking and began knitting at it with nervous and irregular jerks but quickly finding herself at odds with the stitches she threw it aside and walked hurriedly about the room At length she paused before the portrait of the stern old Puritan her ancestor and the founder of the house In one sense this picture had almost faded into the canvas and hidden itself behind the duskiness of age in another she could not but fancy that it had been growing more prominent and strikingly expressive ever since her earliest familiarity with it as a child For while the physical outline and substance were darkening away from the beholders eye the bold hard and at the same time indirect character of the man seemed to be brought out in a kind of spiritual relief Such an effect may occasionally be observed in pictures of antique date They acquire a look which an artist if he have anything like the complacency of artists nowadays would never dream of presenting to a patron as his own characteristic expression but which nevertheless we at once recognize as reflecting the unlovely truth of a human soul In such cases the painters deep conception of his subjects inward traits has wrought itself into the essence of the picture and is seen after the superficial coloring has been rubbed off by time
While gazing at the portrait Hepzibah trembled under its eye Her hereditary reverence made her afraid to judge the character of the original so harshly as a perception of the truth compelled her to do But still she gazed because the face of the picture enabled her—at least she fancied so—to read more accurately and to a greater depth the face which she had just seen in the street
This is the very man murmured she to herself Let Jaffrey Pyncheon smile as he will there is that look beneath Put on him a skullcap and a band and a black cloak and a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other—then let Jaffrey smile as he might—nobody would doubt that it was the old Pyncheon come again He has proved himself the very man to build up a new house Perhaps too to draw down a new curse
Thus did Hepzibah bewilder herself with these fantasies of the old time She had dwelt too much alone—too long in the Pyncheon House—until her very brain was impregnated with the dryrot of its timbers She needed a walk along the noonday street to keep her sane
By the spell of contrast another portrait rose up before her painted with more daring flattery than any artist would have ventured upon but yet so delicately touched that the likeness remained perfect Malbones miniature though from the same original was far inferior to Hepzibahs airdrawn picture at which affection and sorrowful remembrance wrought together Soft mildly and cheerfully contemplative with full red lips just on the verge of a smile which the eyes seemed to herald by a gentle kindlingup of their orbs Feminine traits moulded inseparably with those of the other sex The miniature likewise had this last peculiarity so that you inevitably thought of the original as resembling his mother and she a lovely and lovable woman with perhaps some beautiful infirmity of character that made it all the pleasanter to know and easier to love her
Yes thought Hepzibah with grief of which it was only the more tolerable portion that welled up from her heart to her eyelids they persecuted his mother in him He never was a Pyncheon
But here the shopbell rang it was like a sound from a remote distance—so far had Hepzibah descended into the sepulchral depths of her reminiscences On entering the shop she found an old man there a humble resident of Pyncheon Street and whom for a great many years past she had suffered to be a kind of familiar of the house He was an immemorial personage who seemed always to have had a white head and wrinkles and never to have possessed but a single tooth and that a halfdecayed one in the front of the upper jaw Well advanced as Hepzibah was she could not remember when Uncle Venner as the neighborhood called him had not gone up and down the street stooping a little and drawing his feet heavily over the gravel or pavement But still there was something tough and vigorous about him that not only kept him in daily breath but enabled him to fill a place which would else have been vacant in the apparently crowded world To go of errands with his slow and shuffling gait which made you doubt how he ever was to arrive anywhere to saw a small households foot or two of firewood or knock to pieces an old barrel or split up a pine board for kindlingstuff in summer to dig the few yards of garden ground appertaining to a lowrented tenement and share the produce of his labor at the halves in winter to shovel away the snow from the sidewalk or open paths to the woodshed or along the clothesline such were some of the essential offices which Uncle Venner performed among at least a score of families Within that circle he claimed the same sort of privilege and probably felt as much warmth of interest as a clergyman does in the range of his parishioners Not that he laid claim to the tithe pig but as an analogous mode of reverence he went his rounds every morning to gather up the crumbs of the table and overflowings of the dinnerpot as food for a pig of his own
In his younger days—for after all there was a dim tradition that he had been not young but younger—Uncle Venner was commonly regarded as rather deficient than otherwise in his wits In truth he had virtually pleaded guilty to the charge by scarcely aiming at such success as other men seek and by taking only that humble and modest part in the intercourse of life which belongs to the alleged deficiency But now in his extreme old age—whether it were that his long and hard experience had actually brightened him or that his decaying judgment rendered him less capable of fairly measuring himself—the venerable man made pretensions to no little wisdom and really enjoyed the credit of it There was likewise at times a vein of something like poetry in him it was the moss or wallflower of his mind in its small dilapidation and gave a charm to what might have been vulgar and commonplace in his earlier and middle life Hepzibah had a regard for him because his name was ancient in the town and had formerly been respectable It was a still better reason for awarding him a species of familiar reverence that Uncle Venner was himself the most ancient existence whether of man or thing in Pyncheon Street except the House of the Seven Gables and perhaps the elm that overshadowed it
This patriarch now presented himself before Hepzibah clad in an old blue coat which had a fashionable air and must have accrued to him from the castoff wardrobe of some dashing clerk As for his trousers they were of towcloth very short in the legs and bagging down strangely in the rear but yet having a suitableness to his figure which his other garment entirely lacked His hat had relation to no other part of his dress and but very little to the head that wore it Thus Uncle Venner was a miscellaneous old gentleman partly himself but in good measure somebody else patched together too of different epochs an epitome of times and fashions
So you have really begun trade said he—really begun trade Well Im glad to see it Young people should never live idle in the world nor old ones neither unless when the rheumatize gets hold of them It has given me warning already and in two or three years longer I shall think of putting aside business and retiring to my farm Thats yonder—the great brick house you know—the workhouse most folks call it but I mean to do my work first and go there to be idle and enjoy myself And Im glad to see you beginning to do your work Miss Hepzibah
Thank you Uncle Venner said Hepzibah smiling for she always felt kindly towards the simple and talkative old man Had he been an old woman she might probably have repelled the freedom which she now took in good part It is time for me to begin work indeed Or to speak the truth I have just begun when I ought to be giving it up
Oh never say that Miss Hepzibah answered the old man You are a young woman yet Why I hardly thought myself younger than I am now it seems so little while ago since I used to see you playing about the door of the old house quite a small child Oftener though you used to be sitting at the threshold and looking gravely into the street for you had always a grave kind of way with you—a grownup air when you were only the height of my knee It seems as if I saw you now and your grandfather with his red cloak and his white wig and his cocked hat and his cane coming out of the house and stepping so grandly up the street Those old gentlemen that grew up before the Revolution used to put on grand airs In my young days the great man of the town was commonly called King and his wife not Queen to be sure but Lady Nowadays a man would not dare to be called King and if he feels himself a little above common folks he only stoops so much the lower to them I met your cousin the Judge ten minutes ago and in my old towcloth trousers as you see the Judge raised his hat to me I do believe At any rate the Judge bowed and smiled
Yes said Hepzibah with something bitter stealing unawares into her tone my cousin Jaffrey is thought to have a very pleasant smile
And so he has replied Uncle Venner And thats rather remarkable in a Pyncheon for begging your pardon Miss Hepzibah they never had the name of being an easy and agreeable set of folks There was no getting close to them But Now Miss Hepzibah if an old man may be bold to ask why dont Judge Pyncheon with his great means step forward and tell his cousin to shut up her little shop at once Its for your credit to be doing something but its not for the Judges credit to let you
We wont talk of this if you please Uncle Venner said Hepzibah coldly I ought to say however that if I choose to earn bread for myself it is not Judge Pyncheons fault Neither will he deserve the blame added she more kindly remembering Uncle Venners privileges of age and humble familiarity if I should by and by find it convenient to retire with you to your farm
And its no bad place either that farm of mine cried the old man cheerily as if there were something positively delightful in the prospect No bad place is the great brick farmhouse especially for them that will find a good many old cronies there as will be my case I quite long to be among them sometimes of the winter evenings for it is but dull business for a lonesome elderly man like me to be nodding by the hour together with no company but his airtight stove Summer or winter theres a great deal to be said in favor of my farm And take it in the autumn what can be pleasanter than to spend a whole day on the sunny side of a barn or a woodpile chatting with somebody as old as ones self or perhaps idling away the time with a naturalborn simpleton who knows how to be idle because even our busy Yankees never have found out how to put him to any use Upon my word Miss Hepzibah I doubt whether Ive ever been so comfortable as I mean to be at my farm which most folks call the workhouse But you—youre a young woman yet—you never need go there Something still better will turn up for you Im sure of it
Hepzibah fancied that there was something peculiar in her venerable friends look and tone insomuch that she gazed into his face with considerable earnestness endeavoring to discover what secret meaning if any might be lurking there Individuals whose affairs have reached an utterly desperate crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive with hopes so much the more airily magnificent as they have the less of solid matter within their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and moderate expectation of good Thus all the while Hepzibah was perfecting the scheme of her little shop she had cherished an unacknowledged idea that some harlequin trick of fortune would intervene in her favor For example an uncle—who had sailed for India fifty years before and never been heard of since—might yet return and adopt her to be the comfort of his very extreme and decrepit age and adorn her with pearls diamonds and Oriental shawls and turbans and make her the ultimate heiress of his unreckonable riches Or the member of Parliament now at the head of the English branch of the family—with which the elder stock on this side of the Atlantic had held little or no intercourse for the last two centuries—this eminent gentleman might invite Hepzibah to quit the ruinous House of the Seven Gables and come over to dwell with her kindred at Pyncheon Hall But for reasons the most imperative she could not yield to his request It was more probable therefore that the descendants of a Pyncheon who had emigrated to Virginia in some past generation and became a great planter there—hearing of Hepzibahs destitution and impelled by the splendid generosity of character with which their Virginian mixture must have enriched the New England blood—would send her a remittance of a thousand dollars with a hint of repeating the favor annually Or—and surely anything so undeniably just could not be beyond the limits of reasonable anticipation—the great claim to the heritage of Waldo County might finally be decided in favor of the Pyncheons so that instead of keeping a centshop Hepzibah would build a palace and look down from its highest tower on hill dale forest field and town as her own share of the ancestral territory
These were some of the fantasies which she had long dreamed about and aided by these Uncle Venners casual attempt at encouragement kindled a strange festal glory in the poor bare melancholy chambers of her brain as if that inner world were suddenly lighted up with gas But either he knew nothing of her castles in the air—as how should he—or else her earnest scowl disturbed his recollection as it might a more courageous mans Instead of pursuing any weightier topic Uncle Venner was pleased to favor Hepzibah with some sage counsel in her shopkeeping capacity
Give no credit—these were some of his golden maxims—Never take papermoney Look well to your change Ring the silver on the fourpound weight Shove back all English halfpence and base copper tokens such as are very plenty about town At your leisure hours knit childrens woollen socks and mittens Brew your own yeast and make your own gingerbeer
And while Hepzibah was doing her utmost to digest the hard little pellets of his already uttered wisdom he gave vent to his final and what he declared to be his allimportant advice as follows—
Put on a bright face for your customers and smile pleasantly as you hand them what they ask for A stale article if you dip it in a good warm sunny smile will go off better than a fresh one that youve scowled upon
To this last apothegm poor Hepzibah responded with a sigh so deep and heavy that it almost rustled Uncle Venner quite away like a withered leaf—as he was—before an autumnal gale Recovering himself however he bent forward and with a good deal of feeling in his ancient visage beckoned her nearer to him
When do you expect him home whispered he
Whom do you mean asked Hepzibah turning pale
Ah—You dont love to talk about it said Uncle Venner Well well well say no more though theres word of it all over town I remember him Miss Hepzibah before he could run alone
During the remainder of the day poor Hepzibah acquitted herself even less creditably as a shopkeeper than in her earlier efforts She appeared to be walking in a dream or more truly the vivid life and reality assumed by her emotions made all outward occurrences unsubstantial like the teasing phantasms of a halfconscious slumber She still responded mechanically to the frequent summons of the shopbell and at the demand of her customers went prying with vague eyes about the shop proffering them one article after another and thrusting aside—perversely as most of them supposed—the identical thing they asked for There is sad confusion indeed when the spirit thus flits away into the past or into the more awful future or in any manner steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its own region and the actual world where the body remains to guide itself as best it may with little more than the mechanism of animal life It is like death without deaths quiet privilege—its freedom from mortal care Worst of all when the actual duties are comprised in such petty details as now vexed the brooding soul of the old gentlewoman As the animosity of fate would have it there was a great influx of custom in the course of the afternoon Hepzibah blundered to and fro about her small place of business committing the most unheardof errors now stringing up twelve and now seven tallowcandles instead of ten to the pound selling ginger for Scotch snuff pins for needles and needles for pins misreckoning her change sometimes to the public detriment and much oftener to her own and thus she went on doing her utmost to bring chaos back again until at the close of the days labor to her inexplicable astonishment she found the moneydrawer almost destitute of coin After all her painful traffic the whole proceeds were perhaps half a dozen coppers and a questionable ninepence which ultimately proved to be copper likewise
At this price or at whatever price she rejoiced that the day had reached its end Never before had she had such a sense of the intolerable length of time that creeps between dawn and sunset and of the miserable irksomeness of having aught to do and of the better wisdom that it would be to lie down at once in sullen resignation and let life and its toils and vexations trample over ones prostrate body as they may Hepzibahs final operation was with the little devourer of Jim Crow and the elephant who now proposed to eat a camel In her bewilderment she offered him first a wooden dragoon and next a handful of marbles neither of which being adapted to his else omnivorous appetite she hastily held out her whole remaining stock of natural history in gingerbread and huddled the small customer out of the shop She then muffled the bell in an unfinished stocking and put up the oaken bar across the door
During the latter process an omnibus came to a standstill under the branches of the elmtree Hepzibahs heart was in her mouth Remote and dusky and with no sunshine on all the intervening space was that region of the Past whence her only guest might be expected to arrive Was she to meet him now
Somebody at all events was passing from the farthest interior of the omnibus towards its entrance A gentleman alighted but it was only to offer his hand to a young girl whose slender figure nowise needing such assistance now lightly descended the steps and made an airy little jump from the final one to the sidewalk She rewarded her cavalier with a smile the cheery glow of which was seen reflected on his own face as he reentered the vehicle The girl then turned towards the House of the Seven Gables to the door of which meanwhile—not the shopdoor but the antique portal—the omnibusman had carried a light trunk and a bandbox First giving a sharp rap of the old iron knocker he left his passenger and her luggage at the doorstep and departed
Who can it be thought Hepzibah who had been screwing her visual organs into the acutest focus of which they were capable The girl must have mistaken the house She stole softly into the hall and herself invisible gazed through the dusty sidelights of the portal at the young blooming and very cheerful face which presented itself for admittance into the gloomy old mansion It was a face to which almost any door would have opened of its own accord
The young girl so fresh so unconventional and yet so orderly and obedient to common rules as you at once recognized her to be was widely in contrast at that moment with everything about her The sordid and ugly luxuriance of gigantic weeds that grew in the angle of the house and the heavy projection that overshadowed her and the timeworn framework of the door—none of these things belonged to her sphere But even as a ray of sunshine fall into what dismal place it may instantaneously creates for itself a propriety in being there so did it seem altogether fit that the girl should be standing at the threshold It was no less evidently proper that the door should swing open to admit her The maiden lady herself sternly inhospitable in her first purposes soon began to feel that the door ought to be shoved back and the rusty key be turned in the reluctant lock
Can it be Phoebe questioned she within herself It must be little Phoebe for it can be nobody else—and there is a look of her father about her too But what does she want here And how like a country cousin to come down upon a poor body in this way without so much as a days notice or asking whether she would be welcome Well she must have a nights lodging I suppose and tomorrow the child shall go back to her mother
Phoebe it must be understood was that one little offshoot of the Pyncheon race to whom we have already referred as a native of a rural part of New England where the old fashions and feelings of relationship are still partially kept up In her own circle it was regarded as by no means improper for kinsfolk to visit one another without invitation or preliminary and ceremonious warning Yet in consideration of Miss Hepzibahs recluse way of life a letter had actually been written and despatched conveying information of Phoebes projected visit This epistle for three or four days past had been in the pocket of the pennypostman who happening to have no other business in Pyncheon Street had not yet made it convenient to call at the House of the Seven Gables
No—she can stay only one night said Hepzibah unbolting the door If Clifford were to find her here it might disturb him
V May and November
PHOEBE PYNCHEON slept on the night of her arrival in a chamber that looked down on the garden of the old house It fronted towards the east so that at a very seasonable hour a glow of crimson light came flooding through the window and bathed the dingy ceiling and paperhangings in its own hue There were curtains to Phoebes bed a dark antique canopy and ponderous festoons of a stuff which had been rich and even magnificent in its time but which now brooded over the girl like a cloud making a night in that one corner while elsewhere it was beginning to be day The morning light however soon stole into the aperture at the foot of the bed betwixt those faded curtains Finding the new guest there—with a bloom on her cheeks like the mornings own and a gentle stir of departing slumber in her limbs as when an early breeze moves the foliage—the dawn kissed her brow It was the caress which a dewy maiden—such as the Dawn is immortally—gives to her sleeping sister partly from the impulse of irresistible fondness and partly as a pretty hint that it is time now to unclose her eyes
At the touch of those lips of light Phoebe quietly awoke and for a moment did not recognize where she was nor how those heavy curtains chanced to be festooned around her Nothing indeed was absolutely plain to her except that it was now early morning and that whatever might happen next it was proper first of all to get up and say her prayers She was the more inclined to devotion from the grim aspect of the chamber and its furniture especially the tall stiff chairs one of which stood close by her bedside and looked as if some oldfashioned personage had been sitting there all night and had vanished only just in season to escape discovery
When Phoebe was quite dressed she peeped out of the window and saw a rosebush in the garden Being a very tall one and of luxuriant growth it had been propped up against the side of the house and was literally covered with a rare and very beautiful species of white rose A large portion of them as the girl afterwards discovered had blight or mildew at their hearts but viewed at a fair distance the whole rosebush looked as if it had been brought from Eden that very summer together with the mould in which it grew The truth was nevertheless that it had been planted by Alice Pyncheon—she was Phoebes greatgreatgrandaunt—in soil which reckoning only its cultivation as a gardenplat was now unctuous with nearly two hundred years of vegetable decay Growing as they did however out of the old earth the flowers still sent a fresh and sweet incense up to their Creator nor could it have been the less pure and acceptable because Phoebes young breath mingled with it as the fragrance floated past the window Hastening down the creaking and carpetless staircase she found her way into the garden gathered some of the most perfect of the roses and brought them to her chamber
Little Phoebe was one of those persons who possess as their exclusive patrimony the gift of practical arrangement It is a kind of natural magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them and particularly to give a look of comfort and habitableness to any place which for however brief a period may happen to be their home A wild hut of underbrush tossed together by wayfarers through the primitive forest would acquire the home aspect by one nights lodging of such a woman and would retain it long after her quiet figure had disappeared into the surrounding shade No less a portion of such homely witchcraft was requisite to reclaim as it were Phoebes waste cheerless and dusky chamber which had been untenanted so long—except by spiders and mice and rats and ghosts—that it was all overgrown with the desolation which watches to obliterate every trace of mans happier hours What was precisely Phoebes process we find it impossible to say She appeared to have no preliminary design but gave a touch here and another there brought some articles of furniture to light and dragged others into the shadow looped up or let down a windowcurtain and in the course of half an hour had fully succeeded in throwing a kindly and hospitable smile over the apartment No longer ago than the night before it had resembled nothing so much as the old maids heart for there was neither sunshine nor household fire in one nor the other and save for ghosts and ghostly reminiscences not a guest for many years gone by had entered the heart or the chamber
There was still another peculiarity of this inscrutable charm The bedchamber no doubt was a chamber of very great and varied experience as a scene of human life the joy of bridal nights had throbbed itself away here new immortals had first drawn earthly breath here and here old people had died But—whether it were the white roses or whatever the subtile influence might be—a person of delicate instinct would have known at once that it was now a maidens bedchamber and had been purified of all former evil and sorrow by her sweet breath and happy thoughts Her dreams of the past night being such cheerful ones had exorcised the gloom and now haunted the chamber in its stead
After arranging matters to her satisfaction Phoebe emerged from her chamber with a purpose to descend again into the garden Besides the rosebush she had observed several other species of flowers growing there in a wilderness of neglect and obstructing one anothers development as is often the parallel case in human society by their uneducated entanglement and confusion At the head of the stairs however she met Hepzibah who it being still early invited her into a room which she would probably have called her boudoir had her education embraced any such French phrase It was strewn about with a few old books and a workbasket and a dusty writingdesk and had on one side a large black article of furniture of very strange appearance which the old gentlewoman told Phoebe was a harpsichord It looked more like a coffin than anything else and indeed—not having been played upon or opened for years—there must have been a vast deal of dead music in it stifled for want of air Human finger was hardly known to have touched its chords since the days of Alice Pyncheon who had learned the sweet accomplishment of melody in Europe
Hepzibah bade her young guest sit down and herself taking a chair near by looked as earnestly at Phoebes trim little figure as if she expected to see right into its springs and motive secrets
Cousin Phoebe said she at last I really cant see my way clear to keep you with me
These words however had not the inhospitable bluntness with which they may strike the reader for the two relatives in a talk before bedtime had arrived at a certain degree of mutual understanding Hepzibah knew enough to enable her to appreciate the circumstances resulting from the second marriage of the girls mother which made it desirable for Phoebe to establish herself in another home Nor did she misinterpret Phoebes character and the genial activity pervading it—one of the most valuable traits of the true New England woman—which had impelled her forth as might be said to seek her fortune but with a selfrespecting purpose to confer as much benefit as she could anywise receive As one of her nearest kindred she had naturally betaken herself to Hepzibah with no idea of forcing herself on her cousins protection but only for a visit of a week or two which might be indefinitely extended should it prove for the happiness of both
To Hepzibahs blunt observation therefore Phoebe replied as frankly and more cheerfully
Dear cousin I cannot tell how it will be said she But I really think we may suit one another much better than you suppose
You are a nice girl—I see it plainly continued Hepzibah and it is not any question as to that point which makes me hesitate But Phoebe this house of mine is but a melancholy place for a young person to be in It lets in the wind and rain and the snow too in the garret and upper chambers in wintertime but it never lets in the sunshine And as for myself you see what I am—a dismal and lonesome old woman for I begin to call myself old Phoebe whose temper I am afraid is none of the best and whose spirits are as bad as can be I cannot make your life pleasant Cousin Phoebe neither can I so much as give you bread to eat
You will find me a cheerful little body answered Phoebe smiling and yet with a kind of gentle dignity and I mean to earn my bread You know I have not been brought up a Pyncheon A girl learns many things in a New England village
Ah Phoebe said Hepzibah sighing your knowledge would do but little for you here And then it is a wretched thought that you should fling away your young days in a place like this Those cheeks would not be so rosy after a month or two Look at my face and indeed the contrast was very striking—you see how pale I am It is my idea that the dust and continual decay of these old houses are unwholesome for the lungs
There is the garden—the flowers to be taken care of observed Phoebe I should keep myself healthy with exercise in the open air
And after all child exclaimed Hepzibah suddenly rising as if to dismiss the subject it is not for me to say who shall be a guest or inhabitant of the old Pyncheon House Its master is coming
Do you mean Judge Pyncheon asked Phoebe in surprise
Judge Pyncheon answered her cousin angrily He will hardly cross the threshold while I live No no But Phoebe you shall see the face of him I speak of
She went in quest of the miniature already described and returned with it in her hand Giving it to Phoebe she watched her features narrowly and with a certain jealousy as to the mode in which the girl would show herself affected by the picture
How do you like the face asked Hepzibah
It is handsome—it is very beautiful said Phoebe admiringly It is as sweet a face as a mans can be or ought to be It has something of a childs expression—and yet not childish—only one feels so very kindly towards him He ought never to suffer anything One would bear much for the sake of sparing him toil or sorrow Who is it Cousin Hepzibah
Did you never hear whispered her cousin bending towards her of Clifford Pyncheon
Never I thought there were no Pyncheons left except yourself and our cousin Jaffrey answered Phoebe And yet I seem to have heard the name of Clifford Pyncheon Yes—from my father or my mother but has he not been a long while dead
Well well child perhaps he has said Hepzibah with a sad hollow laugh but in old houses like this you know dead people are very apt to come back again We shall see And Cousin Phoebe since after all that I have said your courage does not fail you we will not part so soon You are welcome my child for the present to such a home as your kinswoman can offer you
With this measured but not exactly cold assurance of a hospitable purpose Hepzibah kissed her cheek
They now went below stairs where Phoebe—not so much assuming the office as attracting it to herself by the magnetism of innate fitness—took the most active part in preparing breakfast The mistress of the house meanwhile as is usual with persons of her stiff and unmalleable cast stood mostly aside willing to lend her aid yet conscious that her natural inaptitude would be likely to impede the business in hand Phoebe and the fire that boiled the teakettle were equally bright cheerful and efficient in their respective offices Hepzibah gazed forth from her habitual sluggishness the necessary result of long solitude as from another sphere She could not help being interested however and even amused at the readiness with which her new inmate adapted herself to the circumstances and brought the house moreover and all its rusty old appliances into a suitableness for her purposes Whatever she did too was done without conscious effort and with frequent outbreaks of song which were exceedingly pleasant to the ear This natural tunefulness made Phoebe seem like a bird in a shadowy tree or conveyed the idea that the stream of life warbled through her heart as a brook sometimes warbles through a pleasant little dell It betokened the cheeriness of an active temperament finding joy in its activity and therefore rendering it beautiful it was a New England trait—the stern old stuff of Puritanism with a gold thread in the web
Hepzibah brought out some old silver spoons with the family crest upon them and a china teaset painted over with grotesque figures of man bird and beast in as grotesque a landscape These pictured people were odd humorists in a world of their own—a world of vivid brilliancy so far as color went and still unfaded although the teapot and small cups were as ancient as the custom itself of teadrinking
Your greatgreatgreatgreatgrandmother had these cups when she was married said Hepzibah to Phoebe She was a Davenport of a good family They were almost the first teacups ever seen in the colony and if one of them were to be broken my heart would break with it But it is nonsense to speak so about a brittle teacup when I remember what my heart has gone through without breaking
The cups—not having been used perhaps since Hepzibahs youth—had contracted no small burden of dust which Phoebe washed away with so much care and delicacy as to satisfy even the proprietor of this invaluable china
What a nice little housewife you are exclaimed the latter smiling and at the same time frowning so prodigiously that the smile was sunshine under a thundercloud Do you do other things as well Are you as good at your book as you are at washing teacups
Not quite I am afraid said Phoebe laughing at the form of Hepzibahs question But I was schoolmistress for the little children in our district last summer and might have been so still
Ah tis all very well observed the maiden lady drawing herself up But these things must have come to you with your mothers blood I never knew a Pyncheon that had any turn for them
It is very queer but not the less true that people are generally quite as vain or even more so of their deficiencies than of their available gifts as was Hepzibah of this native inapplicability so to speak of the Pyncheons to any useful purpose She regarded it as an hereditary trait and so perhaps it was but unfortunately a morbid one such as is often generated in families that remain long above the surface of society
Before they left the breakfasttable the shopbell rang sharply and Hepzibah set down the remnant of her final cup of tea with a look of sallow despair that was truly piteous to behold In cases of distasteful occupation the second day is generally worse than the first We return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding torture in our limbs At all events Hepzibah had fully satisfied herself of the impossibility of ever becoming wonted to this peevishly obstreperous little bell Ring as often as it might the sound always smote upon her nervous system rudely and suddenly And especially now while with her crested teaspoons and antique china she was flattering herself with ideas of gentility she felt an unspeakable disinclination to confront a customer
Do not trouble yourself dear cousin cried Phoebe starting lightly up I am shopkeeper today
You child exclaimed Hepzibah What can a little country girl know of such matters
Oh I have done all the shopping for the family at our village store said Phoebe And I have had a table at a fancy fair and made better sales than anybody These things are not to be learnt they depend upon a knack that comes I suppose added she smiling with ones mothers blood You shall see that I am as nice a little saleswoman as I am a housewife
The old gentlewoman stole behind Phoebe and peeped from the passageway into the shop to note how she would manage her undertaking It was a case of some intricacy A very ancient woman in a white short gown and a green petticoat with a string of gold beads about her neck and what looked like a nightcap on her head had brought a quantity of yarn to barter for the commodities of the shop She was probably the very last person in town who still kept the timehonored spinningwheel in constant revolution It was worth while to hear the croaking and hollow tones of the old lady and the pleasant voice of Phoebe mingling in one twisted thread of talk and still better to contrast their figures—so light and bloomy—so decrepit and dusky—with only the counter betwixt them in one sense but more than threescore years in another As for the bargain it was wrinkled slyness and craft pitted against native truth and sagacity
Was not that well done asked Phoebe laughing when the customer was gone
Nicely done indeed child answered Hepzibah I could not have gone through with it nearly so well As you say it must be a knack that belongs to you on the mothers side
It is a very genuine admiration that with which persons too shy or too awkward to take a due part in the bustling world regard the real actors in lifes stirring scenes so genuine in fact that the former are usually fain to make it palatable to their selflove by assuming that these active and forcible qualities are incompatible with others which they choose to deem higher and more important Thus Hepzibah was well content to acknowledge Phoebes vastly superior gifts as a shopkeeper—she listened with compliant ear to her suggestion of various methods whereby the influx of trade might be increased and rendered profitable without a hazardous outlay of capital She consented that the village maiden should manufacture yeast both liquid and in cakes and should brew a certain kind of beer nectareous to the palate and of rare stomachic virtues and moreover should bake and exhibit for sale some little spicecakes which whosoever tasted would longingly desire to taste again All such proofs of a ready mind and skilful handiwork were highly acceptable to the aristocratic hucksteress so long as she could murmur to herself with a grim smile and a halfnatural sigh and a sentiment of mixed wonder pity and growing affection—
What a nice little body she is If she only could be a lady too—but thats impossible Phoebe is no Pyncheon She takes everything from her mother
As to Phoebes not being a lady or whether she were a lady or no it was a point perhaps difficult to decide but which could hardly have come up for judgment at all in any fair and healthy mind Out of New England it would be impossible to meet with a person combining so many ladylike attributes with so many others that form no necessary if compatible part of the character She shocked no canon of taste she was admirably in keeping with herself and never jarred against surrounding circumstances Her figure to be sure—so small as to be almost childlike and so elastic that motion seemed as easy or easier to it than rest would hardly have suited ones idea of a countess Neither did her face—with the brown ringlets on either side and the slightly piquant nose and the wholesome bloom and the clear shade of tan and the half dozen freckles friendly remembrances of the April sun and breeze—precisely give us a right to call her beautiful But there was both lustre and depth in her eyes She was very pretty as graceful as a bird and graceful much in the same way as pleasant about the house as a gleam of sunshine falling on the floor through a shadow of twinkling leaves or as a ray of firelight that dances on the wall while evening is drawing nigh Instead of discussing her claim to rank among ladies it would be preferable to regard Phoebe as the example of feminine grace and availability combined in a state of society if there were any such where ladies did not exist There it should be womans office to move in the midst of practical affairs and to gild them all the very homeliest—were it even the scouring of pots and kettles—with an atmosphere of loveliness and joy
Such was the sphere of Phoebe To find the born and educated lady on the other hand we need look no farther than Hepzibah our forlorn old maid in her rustling and rusty silks with her deeply cherished and ridiculous consciousness of long descent her shadowy claims to princely territory and in the way of accomplishment her recollections it may be of having formerly thrummed on a harpsichord and walked a minuet and worked an antique tapestrystitch on her sampler It was a fair parallel between new Plebeianism and old Gentility
It really seemed as if the battered visage of the House of the Seven Gables black and heavybrowed as it still certainly looked must have shown a kind of cheerfulness glimmering through its dusky windows as Phoebe passed to and fro in the interior Otherwise it is impossible to explain how the people of the neighborhood so soon became aware of the girls presence There was a great run of custom setting steadily in from about ten o clock until towards noon—relaxing somewhat at dinnertime but recommencing in the afternoon and finally dying away a half an hour or so before the long days sunset One of the stanchest patrons was little Ned Higgins the devourer of Jim Crow and the elephant who today signalized his omnivorous prowess by swallowing two dromedaries and a locomotive Phoebe laughed as she summed up her aggregate of sales upon the slate while Hepzibah first drawing on a pair of silk gloves reckoned over the sordid accumulation of copper coin not without silver intermixed that had jingled into the till
We must renew our stock Cousin Hepzibah cried the little saleswoman The gingerbread figures are all gone and so are those Dutch wooden milkmaids and most of our other playthings There has been constant inquiry for cheap raisins and a great cry for whistles and trumpets and jewsharps and at least a dozen little boys have asked for molassescandy And we must contrive to get a peck of russet apples late in the season as it is But dear cousin what an enormous heap of copper Positively a copper mountain
Well done well done well done quoth Uncle Venner who had taken occasion to shuffle in and out of the shop several times in the course of the day Heres a girl that will never end her days at my farm Bless my eyes what a brisk little soul
Yes Phoebe is a nice girl said Hepzibah with a scowl of austere approbation But Uncle Venner you have known the family a great many years Can you tell me whether there ever was a Pyncheon whom she takes after
I dont believe there ever was answered the venerable man At any rate it never was my luck to see her like among them nor for that matter anywhere else Ive seen a great deal of the world not only in peoples kitchens and backyards but at the streetcorners and on the wharves and in other places where my business calls me and Im free to say Miss Hepzibah that I never knew a human creature do her work so much like one of Gods angels as this child Phoebe does
Uncle Venners eulogium if it appear rather too highstrained for the person and occasion had nevertheless a sense in which it was both subtile and true There was a spiritual quality in Phoebes activity The life of the long and busy day—spent in occupations that might so easily have taken a squalid and ugly aspect—had been made pleasant and even lovely by the spontaneous grace with which these homely duties seemed to bloom out of her character so that labor while she dealt with it had the easy and flexible charm of play Angels do not toil but let their good works grow out of them and so did Phoebe
The two relatives—the young maid and the old one—found time before nightfall in the intervals of trade to make rapid advances towards affection and confidence A recluse like Hepzibah usually displays remarkable frankness and at least temporary affability on being absolutely cornered and brought to the point of personal intercourse like the angel whom Jacob wrestled with she is ready to bless you when once overcome
The old gentlewoman took a dreary and proud satisfaction in leading Phoebe from room to room of the house and recounting the traditions with which as we may say the walls were lugubriously frescoed She showed the indentations made by the lieutenantgovernors swordhilt in the doorpanels of the apartment where old Colonel Pyncheon a dead host had received his affrighted visitors with an awful frown The dusky terror of that frown Hepzibah observed was thought to be lingering ever since in the passageway She bade Phoebe step into one of the tall chairs and inspect the ancient map of the Pyncheon territory at the eastward In a tract of land on which she laid her finger there existed a silver mine the locality of which was precisely pointed out in some memoranda of Colonel Pyncheon himself but only to be made known when the family claim should be recognized by government Thus it was for the interest of all New England that the Pyncheons should have justice done them She told too how that there was undoubtedly an immense treasure of English guineas hidden somewhere about the house or in the cellar or possibly in the garden
If you should happen to find it Phoebe said Hepzibah glancing aside at her with a grim yet kindly smile we will tie up the shopbell for good and all
Yes dear cousin answered Phoebe but in the mean time I hear somebody ringing it
When the customer was gone Hepzibah talked rather vaguely and at great length about a certain Alice Pyncheon who had been exceedingly beautiful and accomplished in her lifetime a hundred years ago The fragrance of her rich and delightful character still lingered about the place where she had lived as a dried rosebud scents the drawer where it has withered and perished This lovely Alice had met with some great and mysterious calamity and had grown thin and white and gradually faded out of the world But even now she was supposed to haunt the House of the Seven Gables and a great many times—especially when one of the Pyncheons was to die—she had been heard playing sadly and beautifully on the harpsichord One of these tunes just as it had sounded from her spiritual touch had been written down by an amateur of music it was so exquisitely mournful that nobody to this day could bear to hear it played unless when a great sorrow had made them know the still profounder sweetness of it
Was it the same harpsichord that you showed me inquired Phoebe
The very same said Hepzibah It was Alice Pyncheons harpsichord When I was learning music my father would never let me open it So as I could only play on my teachers instrument I have forgotten all my music long ago
Leaving these antique themes the old lady began to talk about the daguerreotypist whom as he seemed to be a wellmeaning and orderly young man and in narrow circumstances she had permitted to take up his residence in one of the seven gables But on seeing more of Mr Holgrave she hardly knew what to make of him He had the strangest companions imaginable men with long beards and dressed in linen blouses and other such newfangled and illfitting garments reformers temperance lecturers and all manner of crosslooking philanthropists communitymen and comeouters as Hepzibah believed who acknowledged no law and ate no solid food but lived on the scent of other peoples cookery and turned up their noses at the fare As for the daguerreotypist she had read a paragraph in a penny paper the other day accusing him of making a speech full of wild and disorganizing matter at a meeting of his bandittilike associates For her own part she had reason to believe that he practised animal magnetism and if such things were in fashion nowadays should be apt to suspect him of studying the Black Art up there in his lonesome chamber
But dear cousin said Phoebe if the young man is so dangerous why do you let him stay If he does nothing worse he may set the house on fire
Why sometimes answered Hepzibah I have seriously made it a question whether I ought not to send him away But with all his oddities he is a quiet kind of a person and has such a way of taking hold of ones mind that without exactly liking him for I dont know enough of the young man I should be sorry to lose sight of him entirely A woman clings to slight acquaintances when she lives so much alone as I do
But if Mr Holgrave is a lawless person remonstrated Phoebe a part of whose essence it was to keep within the limits of law
Oh said Hepzibah carelessly—for formal as she was still in her lifes experience she had gnashed her teeth against human law—I suppose he has a law of his own
VI Maules Well
AFTER an early tea the little countrygirl strayed into the garden The enclosure had formerly been very extensive but was now contracted within small compass and hemmed about partly by high wooden fences and partly by the outbuildings of houses that stood on another street In its centre was a grassplat surrounding a ruinous little structure which showed just enough of its original design to indicate that it had once been a summerhouse A hopvine springing from last years root was beginning to clamber over it but would be long in covering the roof with its green mantle Three of the seven gables either fronted or looked sideways with a dark solemnity of aspect down into the garden
The black rich soil had fed itself with the decay of a long period of time such as fallen leaves the petals of flowers and the stalks and seed—vessels of vagrant and lawless plants more useful after their death than ever while flaunting in the sun The evil of these departed years would naturally have sprung up again in such rank weeds symbolic of the transmitted vices of society as are always prone to root themselves about human dwellings Phoebe saw however that their growth must have been checked by a degree of careful labor bestowed daily and systematically on the garden The white double rosebush had evidently been propped up anew against the house since the commencement of the season and a peartree and three damsontrees which except a row of currantbushes constituted the only varieties of fruit bore marks of the recent amputation of several superfluous or defective limbs There were also a few species of antique and hereditary flowers in no very flourishing condition but scrupulously weeded as if some person either out of love or curiosity had been anxious to bring them to such perfection as they were capable of attaining The remainder of the garden presented a wellselected assortment of esculent vegetables in a praiseworthy state of advancement Summer squashes almost in their golden blossom cucumbers now evincing a tendency to spread away from the main stock and ramble far and wide two or three rows of stringbeans and as many more that were about to festoon themselves on poles tomatoes occupying a site so sheltered and sunny that the plants were already gigantic and promised an early and abundant harvest
Phoebe wondered whose care and toil it could have been that had planted these vegetables and kept the soil so clean and orderly Not surely her cousin Hepzibahs who had no taste nor spirits for the ladylike employment of cultivating flowers and—with her recluse habits and tendency to shelter herself within the dismal shadow of the house—would hardly have come forth under the speck of open sky to weed and hoe among the fraternity of beans and squashes
It being her first day of complete estrangement from rural objects Phoebe found an unexpected charm in this little nook of grass and foliage and aristocratic flowers and plebeian vegetables The eye of Heaven seemed to look down into it pleasantly and with a peculiar smile as if glad to perceive that nature elsewhere overwhelmed and driven out of the dusty town had here been able to retain a breathingplace The spot acquired a somewhat wilder grace and yet a very gentle one from the fact that a pair of robins had built their nest in the peartree and were making themselves exceedingly busy and happy in the dark intricacy of its boughs Bees too—strange to say—had thought it worth their while to come hither possibly from the range of hives beside some farmhouse miles away How many aerial voyages might they have made in quest of honey or honeyladen betwixt dawn and sunset Yet late as it now was there still arose a pleasant hum out of one or two of the squashblossoms in the depths of which these bees were plying their golden labor There was one other object in the garden which Nature might fairly claim as her inalienable property in spite of whatever man could do to render it his own This was a fountain set round with a rim of old mossy stones and paved in its bed with what appeared to be a sort of mosaicwork of variously colored pebbles The play and slight agitation of the water in its upward gush wrought magically with these variegated pebbles and made a continually shifting apparition of quaint figures vanishing too suddenly to be definable Thence swelling over the rim of mossgrown stones the water stole away under the fence through what we regret to call a gutter rather than a channel Nor must we forget to mention a hencoop of very reverend antiquity that stood in the farther corner of the garden not a great way from the fountain It now contained only Chanticleer his two wives and a solitary chicken All of them were pure specimens of a breed which had been transmitted down as an heirloom in the Pyncheon family and were said while in their prime to have attained almost the size of turkeys and on the score of delicate flesh to be fit for a princes table In proof of the authenticity of this legendary renown Hepzibah could have exhibited the shell of a great egg which an ostrich need hardly have been ashamed of Be that as it might the hens were now scarcely larger than pigeons and had a queer rusty withered aspect and a gouty kind of movement and a sleepy and melancholy tone throughout all the variations of their clucking and cackling It was evident that the race had degenerated like many a noble race besides in consequence of too strict a watchfulness to keep it pure These feathered people had existed too long in their distinct variety a fact of which the present representatives judging by their lugubrious deportment seemed to be aware They kept themselves alive unquestionably and laid now and then an egg and hatched a chicken not for any pleasure of their own but that the world might not absolutely lose what had once been so admirable a breed of fowls The distinguishing mark of the hens was a crest of lamentably scanty growth in these latter days but so oddly and wickedly analogous to Hepzibahs turban that Phoebe—to the poignant distress of her conscience but inevitably—was led to fancy a general resemblance betwixt these forlorn bipeds and her respectable relative
The girl ran into the house to get some crumbs of bread cold potatoes and other such scraps as were suitable to the accommodating appetite of fowls Returning she gave a peculiar call which they seemed to recognize The chicken crept through the pales of the coop and ran with some show of liveliness to her feet while Chanticleer and the ladies of his household regarded her with queer sidelong glances and then croaked one to another as if communicating their sage opinions of her character So wise as well as antique was their aspect as to give color to the idea not merely that they were the descendants of a timehonored race but that they had existed in their individual capacity ever since the House of the Seven Gables was founded and were somehow mixed up with its destiny They were a species of tutelary sprite or Banshee although winged and feathered differently from most other guardian angels
Here you odd little chicken said Phoebe here are some nice crumbs for you
The chicken hereupon though almost as venerable in appearance as its mother—possessing indeed the whole antiquity of its progenitors in miniature—mustered vivacity enough to flutter upward and alight on Phoebes shoulder
That little fowl pays you a high compliment said a voice behind Phoebe
Turning quickly she was surprised at sight of a young man who had found access into the garden by a door opening out of another gable than that whence she had emerged He held a hoe in his hand and while Phoebe was gone in quest of the crumbs had begun to busy himself with drawing up fresh earth about the roots of the tomatoes
The chicken really treats you like an old acquaintance continued he in a quiet way while a smile made his face pleasanter than Phoebe at first fancied it Those venerable personages in the coop too seem very affably disposed You are lucky to be in their good graces so soon They have known me much longer but never honor me with any familiarity though hardly a day passes without my bringing them food Miss Hepzibah I suppose will interweave the fact with her other traditions and set it down that the fowls know you to be a Pyncheon
The secret is said Phoebe smiling that I have learned how to talk with hens and chickens
Ah but these hens answered the young man—these hens of aristocratic lineage would scorn to understand the vulgar language of a barnyard fowl I prefer to think—and so would Miss Hepzibah—that they recognize the family tone For you are a Pyncheon
My name is Phoebe Pyncheon said the girl with a manner of some reserve for she was aware that her new acquaintance could be no other than the daguerreotypist of whose lawless propensities the old maid had given her a disagreeable idea I did not know that my cousin Hepzibahs garden was under another persons care
Yes said Holgrave I dig and hoe and weed in this black old earth for the sake of refreshing myself with what little nature and simplicity may be left in it after men have so long sown and reaped here I turn up the earth by way of pastime My sober occupation so far as I have any is with a lighter material In short I make pictures out of sunshine and not to be too much dazzled with my own trade I have prevailed with Miss Hepzibah to let me lodge in one of these dusky gables It is like a bandage over ones eyes to come into it But would you like to see a specimen of my productions
A daguerreotype likeness do you mean asked Phoebe with less reserve for in spite of prejudice her own youthfulness sprang forward to meet his I dont much like pictures of that sort—they are so hard and stern besides dodging away from the eye and trying to escape altogether They are conscious of looking very unamiable I suppose and therefore hate to be seen
If you would permit me said the artist looking at Phoebe I should like to try whether the daguerreotype can bring out disagreeable traits on a perfectly amiable face But there certainly is truth in what you have said Most of my likenesses do look unamiable but the very sufficient reason I fancy is because the originals are so There is a wonderful insight in Heavens broad and simple sunshine While we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon even could he detect it There is at least no flattery in my humble line of art Now here is a likeness which I have taken over and over again and still with no better result Yet the original wears to common eyes a very different expression It would gratify me to have your judgment on this character
He exhibited a daguerreotype miniature in a morocco case Phoebe merely glanced at it and gave it back
I know the face she replied for its stern eye has been following me about all day It is my Puritan ancestor who hangs yonder in the parlor To be sure you have found some way of copying the portrait without its black velvet cap and gray beard and have given him a modern coat and satin cravat instead of his cloak and band I dont think him improved by your alterations
You would have seen other differences had you looked a little longer said Holgrave laughing yet apparently much struck I can assure you that this is a modern face and one which you will very probably meet Now the remarkable point is that the original wears to the worlds eye—and for aught I know to his most intimate friends—an exceedingly pleasant countenance indicative of benevolence openness of heart sunny goodhumor and other praiseworthy qualities of that cast The sun as you see tells quite another story and will not be coaxed out of it after half a dozen patient attempts on my part Here we have the man sly subtle hard imperious and withal cold as ice Look at that eye Would you like to be at its mercy At that mouth Could it ever smile And yet if you could only see the benign smile of the original It is so much the more unfortunate as he is a public character of some eminence and the likeness was intended to be engraved
Well I dont wish to see it any more observed Phoebe turning away her eyes It is certainly very like the old portrait But my cousin Hepzibah has another picture—a miniature If the original is still in the world I think he might defy the sun to make him look stern and hard
You have seen that picture then exclaimed the artist with an expression of much interest I never did but have a great curiosity to do so And you judge favorably of the face
There never was a sweeter one said Phoebe It is almost too soft and gentle for a mans
Is there nothing wild in the eye continued Holgrave so earnestly that it embarrassed Phoebe as did also the quiet freedom with which he presumed on their so recent acquaintance Is there nothing dark or sinister anywhere Could you not conceive the original to have been guilty of a great crime
It is nonsense said Phoebe a little impatiently for us to talk about a picture which you have never seen You mistake it for some other A crime indeed Since you are a friend of my cousin Hepzibahs you should ask her to show you the picture
It will suit my purpose still better to see the original replied the daguerreotypist coolly As to his character we need not discuss its points they have already been settled by a competent tribunal or one which called itself competent But stay Do not go yet if you please I have a proposition to make you
Phoebe was on the point of retreating but turned back with some hesitation for she did not exactly comprehend his manner although on better observation its feature seemed rather to be lack of ceremony than any approach to offensive rudeness There was an odd kind of authority too in what he now proceeded to say rather as if the garden were his own than a place to which he was admitted merely by Hepzibahs courtesy
If agreeable to you he observed it would give me pleasure to turn over these flowers and those ancient and respectable fowls to your care Coming fresh from country air and occupations you will soon feel the need of some such outofdoor employment My own sphere does not so much lie among flowers You can trim and tend them therefore as you please and I will ask only the least trifle of a blossom now and then in exchange for all the good honest kitchen vegetables with which I propose to enrich Miss Hepzibahs table So we will be fellowlaborers somewhat on the community system
Silently and rather surprised at her own compliance Phoebe accordingly betook herself to weeding a flowerbed but busied herself still more with cogitations respecting this young man with whom she so unexpectedly found herself on terms approaching to familiarity She did not altogether like him His character perplexed the little countrygirl as it might a more practised observer for while the tone of his conversation had generally been playful the impression left on her mind was that of gravity and except as his youth modified it almost sternness She rebelled as it were against a certain magnetic element in the artists nature which he exercised towards her possibly without being conscious of it
After a little while the twilight deepened by the shadows of the fruittrees and the surrounding buildings threw an obscurity over the garden
There said Holgrave it is time to give over work That last stroke of the hoe has cut off a beanstalk Goodnight Miss Phoebe Pyncheon Any bright day if you will put one of those rosebuds in your hair and come to my rooms in Central Street I will seize the purest ray of sunshine and make a picture of the flower and its wearer He retired towards his own solitary gable but turned his head on reaching the door and called to Phoebe with a tone which certainly had laughter in it yet which seemed to be more than half in earnest
Be careful not to drink at Maules well said he Neither drink nor bathe your face in it
Maules well answered Phoebe Is that it with the rim of mossy stones I have no thought of drinking there—but why not
Oh rejoined the daguerreotypist because like an old ladys cup of tea it is water bewitched
He vanished and Phoebe lingering a moment saw a glimmering light and then the steady beam of a lamp in a chamber of the gable On returning into Hepzibahs apartment of the house she found the lowstudded parlor so dim and dusky that her eyes could not penetrate the interior She was indistinctly aware however that the gaunt figure of the old gentlewoman was sitting in one of the straightbacked chairs a little withdrawn from the window the faint gleam of which showed the blanched paleness of her cheek turned sideways towards a corner
Shall I light a lamp Cousin Hepzibah she asked
Do if you please my dear child answered Hepzibah But put it on the table in the corner of the passage My eyes are weak and I can seldom bear the lamplight on them
What an instrument is the human voice How wonderfully responsive to every emotion of the human soul In Hepzibahs tone at that moment there was a certain rich depth and moisture as if the words commonplace as they were had been steeped in the warmth of her heart Again while lighting the lamp in the kitchen Phoebe fancied that her cousin spoke to her
In a moment cousin answered the girl These matches just glimmer and go out
But instead of a response from Hepzibah she seemed to hear the murmur of an unknown voice It was strangely indistinct however and less like articulate words than an unshaped sound such as would be the utterance of feeling and sympathy rather than of the intellect So vague was it that its impression or echo in Phoebes mind was that of unreality She concluded that she must have mistaken some other sound for that of the human voice or else that it was altogether in her fancy
She set the lighted lamp in the passage and again entered the parlor Hepzibahs form though its sable outline mingled with the dusk was now less imperfectly visible In the remoter parts of the room however its walls being so ill adapted to reflect light there was nearly the same obscurity as before
Cousin said Phoebe did you speak to me just now
No child replied Hepzibah
Fewer words than before but with the same mysterious music in them Mellow melancholy yet not mournful the tone seemed to gush up out of the deep well of Hepzibahs heart all steeped in its profoundest emotion There was a tremor in it too that—as all strong feeling is electric—partly communicated itself to Phoebe The girl sat silently for a moment But soon her senses being very acute she became conscious of an irregular respiration in an obscure corner of the room Her physical organization moreover being at once delicate and healthy gave her a perception operating with almost the effect of a spiritual medium that somebody was near at hand
My dear cousin asked she overcoming an indefinable reluctance is there not some one in the room with us
Phoebe my dear little girl said Hepzibah after a moments pause you were up betimes and have been busy all day Pray go to bed for I am sure you must need rest I will sit in the parlor awhile and collect my thoughts It has been my custom for more years child than you have lived While thus dismissing her the maiden lady stept forward kissed Phoebe and pressed her to her heart which beat against the girls bosom with a strong high and tumultuous swell How came there to be so much love in this desolate old heart that it could afford to well over thus abundantly
Goodnight cousin said Phoebe strangely affected by Hepzibahs manner If you begin to love me I am glad
She retired to her chamber but did not soon fall asleep nor then very profoundly At some uncertain period in the depths of night and as it were through the thin veil of a dream she was conscious of a footstep mounting the stairs heavily but not with force and decision The voice of Hepzibah with a hush through it was going up along with the footsteps and again responsive to her cousins voice Phoebe heard that strange vague murmur which might be likened to an indistinct shadow of human utterance
VII The Guest
WHEN Phoebe awoke—which she did with the early twittering of the conjugal couple of robins in the peartree—she heard movements below stairs and hastening down found Hepzibah already in the kitchen She stood by a window holding a book in close contiguity to her nose as if with the hope of gaining an olfactory acquaintance with its contents since her imperfect vision made it not very easy to read them If any volume could have manifested its essential wisdom in the mode suggested it would certainly have been the one now in Hepzibahs hand and the kitchen in such an event would forthwith have streamed with the fragrance of venison turkeys capons larded partridges puddings cakes and Christmas pies in all manner of elaborate mixture and concoction It was a cookery book full of innumerable old fashions of English dishes and illustrated with engravings which represented the arrangements of the table at such banquets as it might have befitted a nobleman to give in the great hall of his castle And amid these rich and potent devices of the culinary art not one of which probably had been tested within the memory of any mans grandfather poor Hepzibah was seeking for some nimble little titbit which with what skill she had and such materials as were at hand she might toss up for breakfast
Soon with a deep sigh she put aside the savory volume and inquired of Phoebe whether old Speckle as she called one of the hens had laid an egg the preceding day Phoebe ran to see but returned without the expected treasure in her hand At that instant however the blast of a fishdealers conch was heard announcing his approach along the street With energetic raps at the shopwindow Hepzibah summoned the man in and made purchase of what he warranted as the finest mackerel in his cart and as fat a one as ever he felt with his finger so early in the season Requesting Phoebe to roast some coffee—which she casually observed was the real Mocha and so long kept that each of the small berries ought to be worth its weight in gold—the maiden lady heaped fuel into the vast receptacle of the ancient fireplace in such quantity as soon to drive the lingering dusk out of the kitchen The countrygirl willing to give her utmost assistance proposed to make an Indian cake after her mothers peculiar method of easy manufacture and which she could vouch for as possessing a richness and if rightly prepared a delicacy unequalled by any other mode of breakfastcake Hepzibah gladly assenting the kitchen was soon the scene of savory preparation Perchance amid their proper element of smoke which eddied forth from the illconstructed chimney the ghosts of departed cookmaids looked wonderingly on or peeped down the great breadth of the flue despising the simplicity of the projected meal yet ineffectually pining to thrust their shadowy hands into each inchoate dish The halfstarved rats at any rate stole visibly out of their hidingplaces and sat on their hindlegs snuffing the fumy atmosphere and wistfully awaiting an opportunity to nibble
Hepzibah had no natural turn for cookery and to say the truth had fairly incurred her present meagreness by often choosing to go without her dinner rather than be attendant on the rotation of the spit or ebullition of the pot Her zeal over the fire therefore was quite an heroic test of sentiment It was touching and positively worthy of tears if Phoebe the only spectator except the rats and ghosts aforesaid had not been better employed than in shedding them to see her rake out a bed of fresh and glowing coals and proceed to broil the mackerel Her usually pale cheeks were all ablaze with heat and hurry She watched the fish with as much tender care and minuteness of attention as if—we know not how to express it otherwise—as if her own heart were on the gridiron and her immortal happiness were involved in its being done precisely to a turn
Life within doors has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged and wellprovisioned breakfasttable We come to it freshly in the dewy youth of the day and when our spiritual and sensual elements are in better accord than at a later period so that the material delights of the morning meal are capable of being fully enjoyed without any very grievous reproaches whether gastric or conscientious for yielding even a trifle overmuch to the animal department of our nature The thoughts too that run around the ring of familiar guests have a piquancy and mirthfulness and oftentimes a vivid truth which more rarely find their way into the elaborate intercourse of dinner Hepzibahs small and ancient table supported on its slender and graceful legs and covered with a cloth of the richest damask looked worthy to be the scene and centre of one of the cheerfullest of parties The vapor of the broiled fish arose like incense from the shrine of a barbarian idol while the fragrance of the Mocha might have gratified the nostrils of a tutelary Lar or whatever power has scope over a modern breakfasttable Phoebes Indian cakes were the sweetest offering of all—in their hue befitting the rustic altars of the innocent and golden age—or so brightly yellow were they resembling some of the bread which was changed to glistening gold when Midas tried to eat it The butter must not be forgotten—butter which Phoebe herself had churned in her own rural home and brought it to her cousin as a propitiatory gift—smelling of cloverblossoms and diffusing the charm of pastoral scenery through the darkpanelled parlor All this with the quaint gorgeousness of the old china cups and saucers and the crested spoons and a silver creamjug Hepzibahs only other article of plate and shaped like the rudest porringer set out a board at which the stateliest of old Colonel Pyncheons guests need not have scorned to take his place But the Puritans face scowled down out of the picture as if nothing on the table pleased his appetite
By way of contributing what grace she could Phoebe gathered some roses and a few other flowers possessing either scent or beauty and arranged them in a glass pitcher which having long ago lost its handle was so much the fitter for a flowervase The early sunshine—as fresh as that which peeped into Eves bower while she and Adam sat at breakfast there—came twinkling through the branches of the peartree and fell quite across the table All was now ready There were chairs and plates for three A chair and plate for Hepzibah—the same for Phoebe—but what other guest did her cousin look for
Throughout this preparation there had been a constant tremor in Hepzibahs frame an agitation so powerful that Phoebe could see the quivering of her gaunt shadow as thrown by the firelight on the kitchen wall or by the sunshine on the parlor floor Its manifestations were so various and agreed so little with one another that the girl knew not what to make of it Sometimes it seemed an ecstasy of delight and happiness At such moments Hepzibah would fling out her arms and infold Phoebe in them and kiss her cheek as tenderly as ever her mother had she appeared to do so by an inevitable impulse and as if her bosom were oppressed with tenderness of which she must needs pour out a little in order to gain breathingroom The next moment without any visible cause for the change her unwonted joy shrank back appalled as it were and clothed itself in mourning or it ran and hid itself so to speak in the dungeon of her heart where it had long lain chained while a cold spectral sorrow took the place of the imprisoned joy that was afraid to be enfranchised—a sorrow as black as that was bright She often broke into a little nervous hysteric laugh more touching than any tears could be and forthwith as if to try which was the most touching a gush of tears would follow or perhaps the laughter and tears came both at once and surrounded our poor Hepzibah in a moral sense with a kind of pale dim rainbow Towards Phoebe as we have said she was affectionate—far tenderer than ever before in their brief acquaintance except for that one kiss on the preceding night—yet with a continually recurring pettishness and irritability She would speak sharply to her then throwing aside all the starched reserve of her ordinary manner ask pardon and the next instant renew the justforgiven injury
At last when their mutual labor was all finished she took Phoebes hand in her own trembling one
Bear with me my dear child she cried for truly my heart is full to the brim Bear with me for I love you Phoebe though I speak so roughly Think nothing of it dearest child By and by I shall be kind and only kind
My dearest cousin cannot you tell me what has happened asked Phoebe with a sunny and tearful sympathy What is it that moves you so
Hush hush He is coming whispered Hepzibah hastily wiping her eyes Let him see you first Phoebe for you are young and rosy and cannot help letting a smile break out whether or no He always liked bright faces And mine is old now and the tears are hardly dry on it He never could abide tears There draw the curtain a little so that the shadow may fall across his side of the table But let there be a good deal of sunshine too for he never was fond of gloom as some people are He has had but little sunshine in his life—poor Clifford—and oh what a black shadow Poor poor Clifford
Thus murmuring in an undertone as if speaking rather to her own heart than to Phoebe the old gentlewoman stepped on tiptoe about the room making such arrangements as suggested themselves at the crisis
Meanwhile there was a step in the passageway above stairs Phoebe recognized it as the same which had passed upward as through her dream in the nighttime The approaching guest whoever it might be appeared to pause at the head of the staircase he paused twice or thrice in the descent he paused again at the foot Each time the delay seemed to be without purpose but rather from a forgetfulness of the purpose which had set him in motion or as if the persons feet came involuntarily to a standstill because the motivepower was too feeble to sustain his progress Finally he made a long pause at the threshold of the parlor He took hold of the knob of the door then loosened his grasp without opening it Hepzibah her hands convulsively clasped stood gazing at the entrance
Dear Cousin Hepzibah pray dont look so said Phoebe trembling for her cousins emotion and this mysteriously reluctant step made her feel as if a ghost were coming into the room You really frighten me Is something awful going to happen
Hush whispered Hepzibah Be cheerful whatever may happen be nothing but cheerful
The final pause at the threshold proved so long that Hepzibah unable to endure the suspense rushed forward threw open the door and led in the stranger by the hand At the first glance Phoebe saw an elderly personage in an oldfashioned dressinggown of faded damask and wearing his gray or almost white hair of an unusual length It quite overshadowed his forehead except when he thrust it back and stared vaguely about the room After a very brief inspection of his face it was easy to conceive that his footstep must necessarily be such an one as that which slowly and with as indefinite an aim as a childs first journey across a floor had just brought him hitherward Yet there were no tokens that his physical strength might not have sufficed for a free and determined gait It was the spirit of the man that could not walk The expression of his countenance—while notwithstanding it had the light of reason in it—seemed to waver and glimmer and nearly to die away and feebly to recover itself again It was like a flame which we see twinkling among halfextinguished embers we gaze at it more intently than if it were a positive blaze gushing vividly upward—more intently but with a certain impatience as if it ought either to kindle itself into satisfactory splendor or be at once extinguished
For an instant after entering the room the guest stood still retaining Hepzibahs hand instinctively as a child does that of the grown person who guides it He saw Phoebe however and caught an illumination from her youthful and pleasant aspect which indeed threw a cheerfulness about the parlor like the circle of reflected brilliancy around the glass vase of flowers that was standing in the sunshine He made a salutation or to speak nearer the truth an illdefined abortive attempt at curtsy Imperfect as it was however it conveyed an idea or at least gave a hint of indescribable grace such as no practised art of external manners could have attained It was too slight to seize upon at the instant yet as recollected afterwards seemed to transfigure the whole man
Dear Clifford said Hepzibah in the tone with which one soothes a wayward infant this is our cousin Phoebe—little Phoebe Pyncheon—Arthurs only child you know She has come from the country to stay with us awhile for our old house has grown to be very lonely now
Phoebe—Phoebe Pyncheon—Phoebe repeated the guest with a strange sluggish illdefined utterance Arthurs child Ah I forget No matter She is very welcome
Come dear Clifford take this chair said Hepzibah leading him to his place Pray Phoebe lower the curtain a very little more Now let us begin breakfast
The guest seated himself in the place assigned him and looked strangely around He was evidently trying to grapple with the present scene and bring it home to his mind with a more satisfactory distinctness He desired to be certain at least that he was here in the lowstudded crossbeamed oakenpanelled parlor and not in some other spot which had stereotyped itself into his senses But the effort was too great to be sustained with more than a fragmentary success Continually as we may express it he faded away out of his place or, in other words, his mind and consciousness took their departure leaving his wasted gray and melancholy figure—a substantial emptiness a material ghost—to occupy his seat at table Again after a blank moment there would be a flickering tapergleam in his eyeballs It betokened that his spiritual part had returned and was doing its best to kindle the hearts household fire and light up intellectual lamps in the dark and ruinous mansion where it was doomed to be a forlorn inhabitant
At one of these moments of less torpid yet still imperfect animation Phoebe became convinced of what she had at first rejected as too extravagant and startling an idea She saw that the person before her must have been the original of the beautiful miniature in her cousin Hepzibahs possession Indeed with a feminine eye for costume she had at once identified the damask dressinggown which enveloped him as the same in figure material and fashion with that so elaborately represented in the picture This old faded garment with all its pristine brilliancy extinct seemed in some indescribable way to translate the wearers untold misfortune and make it perceptible to the beholders eye It was the better to be discerned by this exterior type how worn and old were the souls more immediate garments that form and countenance the beauty and grace of which had almost transcended the skill of the most exquisite of artists It could the more adequately be known that the soul of the man must have suffered some miserable wrong from its earthly experience There he seemed to sit with a dim veil of decay and ruin betwixt him and the world but through which at flitting intervals might be caught the same expression so refined so softly imaginative which Malbone—venturing a happy touch with suspended breath—had imparted to the miniature There had been something so innately characteristic in this look that all the dusky years and the burden of unfit calamity which had fallen upon him did not suffice utterly to destroy it
Hepzibah had now poured out a cup of deliciously fragrant coffee and presented it to her guest As his eyes met hers he seemed bewildered and disquieted
Is this you Hepzibah he murmured sadly then more apart and perhaps unconscious that he was overheard How changed how changed And is she angry with me Why does she bend her brow so
Poor Hepzibah It was that wretched scowl which time and her nearsightedness and the fret of inward discomfort had rendered so habitual that any vehemence of mood invariably evoked it But at the indistinct murmur of his words her whole face grew tender and even lovely with sorrowful affection the harshness of her features disappeared as it were behind the warm and misty glow
Angry she repeated angry with you Clifford
Her tone as she uttered the exclamation had a plaintive and really exquisite melody thrilling through it yet without subduing a certain something which an obtuse auditor might still have mistaken for asperity It was as if some transcendent musician should draw a soulthrilling sweetness out of a cracked instrument which makes its physical imperfection heard in the midst of ethereal harmony—so deep was the sensibility that found an organ in Hepzibahs voice
There is nothing but love here Clifford she added—nothing but love You are at home
The guest responded to her tone by a smile which did not half light up his face Feeble as it was however and gone in a moment it had a charm of wonderful beauty It was followed by a coarser expression or one that had the effect of coarseness on the fine mould and outline of his countenance because there was nothing intellectual to temper it It was a look of appetite He ate food with what might almost be termed voracity and seemed to forget himself Hepzibah the young girl and everything else around him in the sensual enjoyment which the bountifully spread table afforded In his natural system though highwrought and delicately refined a sensibility to the delights of the palate was probably inherent It would have been kept in check however and even converted into an accomplishment and one of the thousand modes of intellectual culture had his more ethereal characteristics retained their vigor But as it existed now the effect was painful and made Phoebe droop her eyes
In a little while the guest became sensible of the fragrance of the yet untasted coffee He quaffed it eagerly The subtle essence acted on him like a charmed draught and caused the opaque substance of his animal being to grow transparent or at least translucent so that a spiritual gleam was transmitted through it with a clearer lustre than hitherto
More more he cried with nervous haste in his utterance as if anxious to retain his grasp of what sought to escape him This is what I need Give me more
Under this delicate and powerful influence he sat more erect and looked out from his eyes with a glance that took note of what it rested on It was not so much that his expression grew more intellectual this though it had its share was not the most peculiar effect Neither was what we call the moral nature so forcibly awakened as to present itself in remarkable prominence But a certain fine temper of being was now not brought out in full relief but changeably and imperfectly betrayed of which it was the function to deal with all beautiful and enjoyable things In a character where it should exist as the chief attribute it would bestow on its possessor an exquisite taste and an enviable susceptibility of happiness Beauty would be his life his aspirations would all tend toward it and allowing his frame and physical organs to be in consonance his own developments would likewise be beautiful Such a man should have nothing to do with sorrow nothing with strife nothing with the martyrdom which in an infinite variety of shapes awaits those who have the heart and will and conscience to fight a battle with the world To these heroic tempers such martyrdom is the richest meed in the worlds gift To the individual before us it could only be a grief intense in due proportion with the severity of the infliction He had no right to be a martyr and beholding him so fit to be happy and so feeble for all other purposes a generous strong and noble spirit would methinks have been ready to sacrifice what little enjoyment it might have planned for itself—it would have flung down the hopes so paltry in its regard—if thereby the wintry blasts of our rude sphere might come tempered to such a man
Not to speak it harshly or scornfully it seemed Cliffords nature to be a Sybarite It was perceptible even there in the dark old parlor in the inevitable polarity with which his eyes were attracted towards the quivering play of sunbeams through the shadowy foliage It was seen in his appreciating notice of the vase of flowers the scent of which he inhaled with a zest almost peculiar to a physical organization so refined that spiritual ingredients are moulded in with it It was betrayed in the unconscious smile with which he regarded Phoebe whose fresh and maidenly figure was both sunshine and flowers—their essence in a prettier and more agreeable mode of manifestation Not less evident was this love and necessity for the Beautiful in the instinctive caution with which even so soon his eyes turned away from his hostess and wandered to any quarter rather than come back It was Hepzibahs misfortune—not Cliffords fault How could he—so yellow as she was so wrinkled so sad of mien with that odd uncouthness of a turban on her head and that most perverse of scowls contorting her brow—how could he love to gaze at her But did he owe her no affection for so much as she had silently given He owed her nothing A nature like Cliffords can contract no debts of that kind It is—we say it without censure nor in diminution of the claim which it indefeasibly possesses on beings of another mould—it is always selfish in its essence and we must give it leave to be so and heap up our heroic and disinterested love upon it so much the more without a recompense Poor Hepzibah knew this truth or at least acted on the instinct of it So long estranged from what was lovely as Clifford had been she rejoiced—rejoiced though with a present sigh and a secret purpose to shed tears in her own chamber that he had brighter objects now before his eyes than her aged and uncomely features They never possessed a charm and if they had the canker of her grief for him would long since have destroyed it
The guest leaned back in his chair Mingled in his countenance with a dreamy delight there was a troubled look of effort and unrest He was seeking to make himself more fully sensible of the scene around him or perhaps dreading it to be a dream or a play of imagination was vexing the fair moment with a struggle for some added brilliancy and more durable illusion
How pleasant—How delightful he murmured but not as if addressing any one Will it last How balmy the atmosphere through that open window An open window How beautiful that play of sunshine Those flowers how very fragrant That young girls face how cheerful how blooming—a flower with the dew on it and sunbeams in the dewdrops Ah this must be all a dream A dream A dream But it has quite hidden the four stone walls
Then his face darkened as if the shadow of a cavern or a dungeon had come over it there was no more light in its expression than might have come through the iron grates of a prisonwindow—still lessening too as if he were sinking farther into the depths Phoebe being of that quickness and activity of temperament that she seldom long refrained from taking a part and generally a good one in what was going forward now felt herself moved to address the stranger
Here is a new kind of rose which I found this morning in the garden said she choosing a small crimson one from among the flowers in the vase There will be but five or six on the bush this season This is the most perfect of them all not a speck of blight or mildew in it And how sweet it is—sweet like no other rose One can never forget that scent
Ah—let me see—let me hold it cried the guest eagerly seizing the flower which by the spell peculiar to remembered odors brought innumerable associations along with the fragrance that it exhaled Thank you This has done me good I remember how I used to prize this flower—long ago I suppose very long ago—or was it only yesterday It makes me feel young again Am I young Either this remembrance is singularly distinct or this consciousness strangely dim But how kind of the fair young girl Thank you Thank you
The favorable excitement derived from this little crimson rose afforded Clifford the brightest moment which he enjoyed at the breakfasttable It might have lasted longer but that his eyes happened soon afterwards to rest on the face of the old Puritan who out of his dingy frame and lustreless canvas was looking down on the scene like a ghost and a most illtempered and ungenial one The guest made an impatient gesture of the hand and addressed Hepzibah with what might easily be recognized as the licensed irritability of a petted member of the family
Hepzibah—Hepzibah cried he with no little force and distinctness why do you keep that odious picture on the wall Yes yes—that is precisely your taste I have told you a thousand times that it was the evil genius of the house—my evil genius particularly Take it down at once
Dear Clifford said Hepzibah sadly you know it cannot be
Then at all events continued he still speaking with some energy pray cover it with a crimson curtain broad enough to hang in folds and with a golden border and tassels I cannot bear it It must not stare me in the face
Yes dear Clifford the picture shall be covered said Hepzibah soothingly There is a crimson curtain in a trunk above stairs—a little faded and motheaten Im afraid—but Phoebe and I will do wonders with it
This very day remember said he and then added in a low selfcommuning voice Why should we live in this dismal house at all Why not go to the South of France—to Italy—Paris Naples Venice Rome Hepzibah will say we have not the means A droll idea that
He smiled to himself and threw a glance of fine sarcastic meaning towards Hepzibah
But the several moods of feeling faintly as they were marked through which he had passed occurring in so brief an interval of time had evidently wearied the stranger He was probably accustomed to a sad monotony of life not so much flowing in a stream however sluggish as stagnating in a pool around his feet A slumberous veil diffused itself over his countenance and had an effect morally speaking on its naturally delicate and elegant outline like that which a brooding mist with no sunshine in it throws over the features of a landscape He appeared to become grosser—almost cloddish If aught of interest or beauty—even ruined beauty—had heretofore been visible in this man the beholder might now begin to doubt it and to accuse his own imagination of deluding him with whatever grace had flickered over that visage and whatever exquisite lustre had gleamed in those filmy eyes
Before he had quite sunken away however the sharp and peevish tinkle of the shopbell made itself audible Striking most disagreeably on Cliffords auditory organs and the characteristic sensibility of his nerves it caused him to start upright out of his chair
Good heavens Hepzibah what horrible disturbance have we now in the house cried he wreaking his resentful impatience—as a matter of course and a custom of old—on the one person in the world that loved him I have never heard such a hateful clamor Why do you permit it In the name of all dissonance what can it be
It was very remarkable into what prominent relief—even as if a dim picture should leap suddenly from its canvas—Cliffords character was thrown by this apparently trifling annoyance The secret was that an individual of his temper can always be pricked more acutely through his sense of the beautiful and harmonious than through his heart It is even possible—for similar cases have often happened—that if Clifford in his foregoing life had enjoyed the means of cultivating his taste to its utmost perfectibility that subtile attribute might before this period have completely eaten out or filed away his affections Shall we venture to pronounce therefore that his long and black calamity may not have had a redeeming drop of mercy at the bottom
Dear Clifford I wish I could keep the sound from your ears said Hepzibah patiently but reddening with a painful suffusion of shame It is very disagreeable even to me But do you know Clifford I have something to tell you This ugly noise—pray run Phoebe and see who is there—this naughty little tinkle is nothing but our shopbell
Shopbell repeated Clifford with a bewildered stare
Yes our shopbell said Hepzibah a certain natural dignity mingled with deep emotion now asserting itself in her manner For you must know dearest Clifford that we are very poor And there was no other resource but either to accept assistance from a hand that I would push aside and so would you were it to offer bread when we were dying for it—no help save from him or else to earn our subsistence with my own hands Alone I might have been content to starve But you were to be given back to me Do you think then dear Clifford added she with a wretched smile that I have brought an irretrievable disgrace on the old house by opening a little shop in the front gable Our greatgreatgrandfather did the same when there was far less need Are you ashamed of me
Shame Disgrace Do you speak these words to me Hepzibah said Clifford—not angrily however for when a mans spirit has been thoroughly crushed he may be peevish at small offences but never resentful of great ones So he spoke with only a grieved emotion It was not kind to say so Hepzibah What shame can befall me now
And then the unnerved man—he that had been born for enjoyment but had met a doom so very wretched—burst into a womans passion of tears It was but of brief continuance however soon leaving him in a quiescent and to judge by his countenance not an uncomfortable state From this mood too he partially rallied for an instant and looked at Hepzibah with a smile the keen halfderisory purport of which was a puzzle to her
Are we so very poor Hepzibah said he
Finally his chair being deep and softly cushioned Clifford fell asleep Hearing the more regular rise and fall of his breath which however even then instead of being strong and full had a feeble kind of tremor corresponding with the lack of vigor in his character—hearing these tokens of settled slumber Hepzibah seized the opportunity to peruse his face more attentively than she had yet dared to do Her heart melted away in tears her profoundest spirit sent forth a moaning voice low gentle but inexpressibly sad In this depth of grief and pity she felt that there was no irreverence in gazing at his altered aged faded ruined face But no sooner was she a little relieved than her conscience smote her for gazing curiously at him now that he was so changed and turning hastily away Hepzibah let down the curtain over the sunny window and left Clifford to slumber there
VIII The Pyncheon of Today
PHOEBE on entering the shop beheld there the already familiar face of the little devourer—if we can reckon his mighty deeds aright—of Jim Crow the elephant the camel the dromedaries and the locomotive Having expended his private fortune on the two preceding days in the purchase of the above unheardof luxuries the young gentlemans present errand was on the part of his mother in quest of three eggs and half a pound of raisins These articles Phoebe accordingly supplied and as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage and a slight superadded morsel after breakfast put likewise into his hand a whale The great fish reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him This remarkable urchin in truth was the very emblem of old Father Time both in respect of his alldevouring appetite for men and things and because he as well as Time after ingulfing thus much of creation looked almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made
After partly closing the door the child turned back and mumbled something to Phoebe which as the whale was but half disposed of she could not perfectly understand
What did you say my little fellow asked she
Mother wants to know repeated Ned Higgins more distinctly how Old Maid Pyncheons brother does Folks say he has got home
My cousin Hepzibahs brother exclaimed Phoebe surprised at this sudden explanation of the relationship between Hepzibah and her guest Her brother And where can he have been
The little boy only put his thumb to his broad snubnose with that look of shrewdness which a child spending much of his time in the street so soon learns to throw over his features however unintelligent in themselves Then as Phoebe continued to gaze at him without answering his mothers message he took his departure
As the child went down the steps a gentleman ascended them and made his entrance into the shop It was the portly and had it possessed the advantage of a little more height would have been the stately figure of a man considerably in the decline of life dressed in a black suit of some thin stuff resembling broadcloth as closely as possible A goldheaded cane of rare Oriental wood added materially to the high respectability of his aspect as did also a neckcloth of the utmost snowy purity and the conscientious polish of his boots His dark square countenance with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows was naturally impressive and would perhaps have been rather stern had not the gentleman considerately taken upon himself to mitigate the harsh effect by a look of exceeding goodhumor and benevolence Owing however to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about the lower region of his face the look was perhaps unctuous rather than spiritual and had so to speak a kind of fleshly effulgence not altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be A susceptible observer at any rate might have regarded it as affording very little evidence of the general benignity of soul whereof it purported to be the outward reflection And if the observer chanced to be illnatured as well as acute and susceptible he would probably suspect that the smile on the gentlemans face was a good deal akin to the shine on his boots and that each must have cost him and his bootblack respectively a good deal of hard labor to bring out and preserve them
As the stranger entered the little shop where the projection of the second story and the thick foliage of the elmtree as well as the commodities at the window created a sort of gray medium his smile grew as intense as if he had set his heart on counteracting the whole gloom of the atmosphere besides any moral gloom pertaining to Hepzibah and her inmates by the unassisted light of his countenance On perceiving a young rosebud of a girl instead of the gaunt presence of the old maid a look of surprise was manifest He at first knit his brows then smiled with more unctuous benignity than ever
Ah I see how it is said he in a deep voice—a voice which had it come from the throat of an uncultivated man would have been gruff but by dint of careful training was now sufficiently agreeable—I was not aware that Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon had commenced business under such favorable auspices You are her assistant I suppose
I certainly am answered Phoebe and added with a little air of ladylike assumption for civil as the gentleman was he evidently took her to be a young person serving for wages I am a cousin of Miss Hepzibah on a visit to her
Her cousin—and from the country Pray pardon me then said the gentleman bowing and smiling as Phoebe never had been bowed to nor smiled on before in that case we must be better acquainted for unless I am sadly mistaken you are my own little kinswoman likewise Let me see—Mary—Dolly—Phoebe—yes Phoebe is the name Is it possible that you are Phoebe Pyncheon only child of my dear cousin and classmate Arthur Ah I see your father now about your mouth Yes yes we must be better acquainted I am your kinsman my dear Surely you must have heard of Judge Pyncheon
As Phoebe curtsied in reply the Judge bent forward with the pardonable and even praiseworthy purpose—considering the nearness of blood and the difference of age—of bestowing on his young relative a kiss of acknowledged kindred and natural affection Unfortunately without design or only with such instinctive design as gives no account of itself to the intellect Phoebe just at the critical moment drew back so that her highly respectable kinsman with his body bent over the counter and his lips protruded was betrayed into the rather absurd predicament of kissing the empty air It was a modern parallel to the case of Ixion embracing a cloud and was so much the more ridiculous as the Judge prided himself on eschewing all airy matter and never mistaking a shadow for a substance The truth was—and it is Phoebes only excuse—that although Judge Pyncheons glowing benignity might not be absolutely unpleasant to the feminine beholder with the width of a street or even an ordinarysized room interposed between yet it became quite too intense when this dark fullfed physiognomy so roughly bearded too that no razor could ever make it smooth sought to bring itself into actual contact with the object of its regards The man the sex somehow or other was entirely too prominent in the Judges demonstrations of that sort Phoebes eyes sank and without knowing why she felt herself blushing deeply under his look Yet she had been kissed before and without any particular squeamishness by perhaps half a dozen different cousins younger as well as older than this darkbrowned grislybearded whiteneckclothed and unctuouslybenevolent Judge Then why not by him
On raising her eyes Phoebe was startled by the change in Judge Pyncheons face It was quite as striking allowing for the difference of scale as that betwixt a landscape under a broad sunshine and just before a thunderstorm not that it had the passionate intensity of the latter aspect but was cold hard immitigable like a daylong brooding cloud
Dear me what is to be done now thought the countrygirl to herself He looks as if there were nothing softer in him than a rock nor milder than the east wind I meant no harm Since he is really my cousin I would have let him kiss me if I could
Then all at once it struck Phoebe that this very Judge Pyncheon was the original of the miniature which the daguerreotypist had shown her in the garden and that the hard stern relentless look now on his face was the same that the sun had so inflexibly persisted in bringing out Was it therefore no momentary mood but however skilfully concealed the settled temper of his life And not merely so but was it hereditary in him and transmitted down as a precious heirloom from that bearded ancestor in whose picture both the expression and to a singular degree the features of the modern Judge were shown as by a kind of prophecy A deeper philosopher than Phoebe might have found something very terrible in this idea It implied that the weaknesses and defects the bad passions the mean tendencies and the moral diseases which lead to crime are handed down from one generation to another by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been able to establish in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to entail upon posterity
But as it happened scarcely had Phoebes eyes rested again on the Judges countenance than all its ugly sternness vanished and she found herself quite overpowered by the sultry dogday heat as it were of benevolence which this excellent man diffused out of his great heart into the surrounding atmosphere—very much like a serpent which as a preliminary to fascination is said to fill the air with his peculiar odor
I like that Cousin Phoebe cried he with an emphatic nod of approbation I like it much my little cousin You are a good child and know how to take care of yourself A young girl—especially if she be a very pretty one—can never be too chary of her lips
Indeed sir said Phoebe trying to laugh the matter off I did not mean to be unkind
Nevertheless whether or no it were entirely owing to the inauspicious commencement of their acquaintance she still acted under a certain reserve which was by no means customary to her frank and genial nature The fantasy would not quit her that the original Puritan of whom she had heard so many sombre traditions—the progenitor of the whole race of New England Pyncheons the founder of the House of the Seven Gables and who had died so strangely in it—had now stept into the shop In these days of offhand equipment the matter was easily enough arranged On his arrival from the other world he had merely found it necessary to spend a quarter of an hour at a barbers who had trimmed down the Puritans full beard into a pair of grizzled whiskers then patronizing a readymade clothing establishment he had exchanged his velvet doublet and sable cloak with the richly worked band under his chin for a white collar and cravat coat vest and pantaloons and lastly putting aside his steelhilted broadsword to take up a goldheaded cane the Colonel Pyncheon of two centuries ago steps forward as the Judge of the passing moment
Of course Phoebe was far too sensible a girl to entertain this idea in any other way than as matter for a smile Possibly also could the two personages have stood together before her eye many points of difference would have been perceptible and perhaps only a general resemblance The long lapse of intervening years in a climate so unlike that which had fostered the ancestral Englishman must inevitably have wrought important changes in the physical system of his descendant The Judges volume of muscle could hardly be the same as the Colonels there was undoubtedly less beef in him Though looked upon as a weighty man among his contemporaries in respect of animal substance and as favored with a remarkable degree of fundamental development well adapting him for the judicial bench we conceive that the modern Judge Pyncheon if weighed in the same balance with his ancestor would have required at least an oldfashioned fiftysix to keep the scale in equilibrio Then the Judges face had lost the ruddy English hue that showed its warmth through all the duskiness of the Colonels weatherbeaten cheek and had taken a sallow shade the established complexion of his countrymen If we mistake not moreover a certain quality of nervousness had become more or less manifest even in so solid a specimen of Puritan descent as the gentleman now under discussion As one of its effects it bestowed on his countenance a quicker mobility than the old Englishmans had possessed and keener vivacity but at the expense of a sturdier something on which these acute endowments seemed to act like dissolving acids This process for aught we know may belong to the great system of human progress which with every ascending footstep as it diminishes the necessity for animal force may be destined gradually to spiritualize us by refining away our grosser attributes of body If so Judge Pyncheon could endure a century or two more of such refinement as well as most other men
The similarity intellectual and moral between the Judge and his ancestor appears to have been at least as strong as the resemblance of mien and feature would afford reason to anticipate In old Colonel Pyncheons funeral discourse the clergyman absolutely canonized his deceased parishioner and opening as it were a vista through the roof of the church and thence through the firmament above showed him seated harp in hand among the crowned choristers of the spiritual world On his tombstone too the record is highly eulogistic nor does history so far as he holds a place upon its page assail the consistency and uprightness of his character So also as regards the Judge Pyncheon of today neither clergyman nor legal critic nor inscriber of tombstones nor historian of general or local politics would venture a word against this eminent persons sincerity as a Christian or respectability as a man or integrity as a judge or courage and faithfulness as the oftentried representative of his political party But besides these cold formal and empty words of the chisel that inscribes the voice that speaks and the pen that writes for the public eye and for distant time—and which inevitably lose much of their truth and freedom by the fatal consciousness of so doing—there were traditions about the ancestor and private diurnal gossip about the Judge remarkably accordant in their testimony It is often instructive to take the womans the private and domestic view of a public man nor can anything be more curious than the vast discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving and the pencilsketches that pass from hand to hand behind the originals back
For example tradition affirmed that the Puritan had been greedy of wealth the Judge too with all the show of liberal expenditure was said to be as closefisted as if his gripe were of iron The ancestor had clothed himself in a grim assumption of kindliness a rough heartiness of word and manner which most people took to be the genuine warmth of nature making its way through the thick and inflexible hide of a manly character His descendant in compliance with the requirements of a nicer age had etherealized this rude benevolence into that broad benignity of smile wherewith he shone like a noonday sun along the streets or glowed like a household fire in the drawingrooms of his private acquaintance The Puritan—if not belied by some singular stories murmured even at this day under the narrators breath—had fallen into certain transgressions to which men of his great animal development whatever their faith or principles must continue liable until they put off impurity along with the gross earthly substance that involves it We must not stain our page with any contemporary scandal to a similar purport that may have been whispered against the Judge The Puritan again an autocrat in his own household had worn out three wives and merely by the remorseless weight and hardness of his character in the conjugal relation had sent them one after another brokenhearted to their graves Here the parallel in some sort fails The Judge had wedded but a single wife and lost her in the third or fourth year of their marriage There was a fable however—for such we choose to consider it though not impossibly typical of Judge Pyncheons marital deportment—that the lady got her deathblow in the honeymoon and never smiled again because her husband compelled her to serve him with coffee every morning at his bedside in token of fealty to her liegelord and master
But it is too fruitful a subject this of hereditary resemblances—the frequent recurrence of which in a direct line is truly unaccountable when we consider how large an accumulation of ancestry lies behind every man at the distance of one or two centuries We shall only add therefore that the Puritan—so at least says chimneycorner tradition which often preserves traits of character with marvellous fidelity—was bold imperious relentless crafty laying his purposes deep and following them out with an inveteracy of pursuit that knew neither rest nor conscience trampling on the weak and when essential to his ends doing his utmost to beat down the strong Whether the Judge in any degree resembled him the further progress of our narrative may show
Scarcely any of the items in the abovedrawn parallel occurred to Phoebe whose country birth and residence in truth had left her pitifully ignorant of most of the family traditions which lingered like cobwebs and incrustations of smoke about the rooms and chimneycorners of the House of the Seven Gables Yet there was a circumstance very trifling in itself which impressed her with an odd degree of horror She had heard of the anathema flung by Maule the executed wizard against Colonel Pyncheon and his posterity—that God would give them blood to drink—and likewise of the popular notion that this miraculous blood might now and then be heard gurgling in their throats The latter scandal—as became a person of sense and more especially a member of the Pyncheon family—Phoebe had set down for the absurdity which it unquestionably was But ancient superstitions after being steeped in human hearts and embodied in human breath and passing from lip to ear in manifold repetition through a series of generations become imbued with an effect of homely truth The smoke of the domestic hearth has scented them through and through By long transmission among household facts they grow to look like them and have such a familiar way of making themselves at home that their influence is usually greater than we suspect Thus it happened that when Phoebe heard a certain noise in Judge Pyncheons throat—rather habitual with him not altogether voluntary yet indicative of nothing unless it were a slight bronchial complaint or as some people hinted an apoplectic symptom—when the girl heard this queer and awkward ingurgitation which the writer never did hear and therefore cannot describe she very foolishly started and clasped her hands
Of course it was exceedingly ridiculous in Phoebe to be discomposed by such a trifle and still more unpardonable to show her discomposure to the individual most concerned in it But the incident chimed in so oddly with her previous fancies about the Colonel and the Judge that for the moment it seemed quite to mingle their identity
What is the matter with you young woman said Judge Pyncheon giving her one of his harsh looks Are you afraid of anything
Oh nothing sir—nothing in the world answered Phoebe with a little laugh of vexation at herself But perhaps you wish to speak with my cousin Hepzibah Shall I call her
Stay a moment if you please said the Judge again beaming sunshine out of his face You seem to be a little nervous this morning The town air Cousin Phoebe does not agree with your good wholesome country habits Or has anything happened to disturb you—anything remarkable in Cousin Hepzibahs family— An arrival eh I thought so No wonder you are out of sorts my little cousin To be an inmate with such a guest may well startle an innocent young girl
You quite puzzle me sir replied Phoebe gazing inquiringly at the Judge There is no frightful guest in the house but only a poor gentle childlike man whom I believe to be Cousin Hepzibahs brother I am afraid but you sir will know better than I that he is not quite in his sound senses but so mild and quiet he seems to be that a mother might trust her baby with him and I think he would play with the baby as if he were only a few years older than itself He startle me—Oh no indeed
I rejoice to hear so favorable and so ingenuous an account of my cousin Clifford said the benevolent Judge Many years ago when we were boys and young men together I had a great affection for him and still feel a tender interest in all his concerns You say Cousin Phoebe he appears to be weak minded Heaven grant him at least enough of intellect to repent of his past sins
Nobody I fancy observed Phoebe can have fewer to repent of
And is it possible my dear rejoined the Judge with a commiserating look that you have never heard of Clifford Pyncheon—that you know nothing of his history Well it is all right and your mother has shown a very proper regard for the good name of the family with which she connected herself Believe the best you can of this unfortunate person and hope the best It is a rule which Christians should always follow in their judgments of one another and especially is it right and wise among near relatives whose characters have necessarily a degree of mutual dependence But is Clifford in the parlor I will just step in and see
Perhaps sir I had better call my cousin Hepzibah said Phoebe hardly knowing however whether she ought to obstruct the entrance of so affectionate a kinsman into the private regions of the house Her brother seemed to be just falling asleep after breakfast and I am sure she would not like him to be disturbed Pray sir let me give her notice
But the Judge showed a singular determination to enter unannounced and as Phoebe with the vivacity of a person whose movements unconsciously answer to her thoughts had stepped towards the door he used little or no ceremony in putting her aside
No no Miss Phoebe said Judge Pyncheon in a voice as deep as a thundergrowl and with a frown as black as the cloud whence it issues Stay you here I know the house and know my cousin Hepzibah and know her brother Clifford likewise—nor need my little country cousin put herself to the trouble of announcing me—in these latter words by the bye there were symptoms of a change from his sudden harshness into his previous benignity of manner I am at home here Phoebe you must recollect and you are the stranger I will just step in therefore and see for myself how Clifford is and assure him and Hepzibah of my kindly feelings and best wishes It is right at this juncture that they should both hear from my own lips how much I desire to serve them Ha here is Hepzibah herself
Such was the case The vibrations of the Judges voice had reached the old gentlewoman in the parlor where she sat with face averted waiting on her brothers slumber She now issued forth as would appear to defend the entrance looking we must needs say amazingly like the dragon which in fairy tales is wont to be the guardian over an enchanted beauty The habitual scowl of her brow was undeniably too fierce at this moment to pass itself off on the innocent score of nearsightedness and it was bent on Judge Pyncheon in a way that seemed to confound if not alarm him so inadequately had he estimated the moral force of a deeply grounded antipathy She made a repelling gesture with her hand and stood a perfect picture of prohibition at full length in the dark frame of the doorway But we must betray Hepzibahs secret and confess that the native timorousness of her character even now developed itself in a quick tremor which to her own perception set each of her joints at variance with its fellows
Possibly the Judge was aware how little true hardihood lay behind Hepzibahs formidable front At any rate being a gentleman of steady nerves he soon recovered himself and failed not to approach his cousin with outstretched hand adopting the sensible precaution however to cover his advance with a smile so broad and sultry that had it been only half as warm as it looked a trellis of grapes might at once have turned purple under its summerlike exposure It may have been his purpose indeed to melt poor Hepzibah on the spot as if she were a figure of yellow wax
Hepzibah my beloved cousin I am rejoiced exclaimed the Judge most emphatically Now at length you have something to live for Yes and all of us let me say your friends and kindred have more to live for than we had yesterday I have lost no time in hastening to offer any assistance in my power towards making Clifford comfortable He belongs to us all I know how much he requires—how much he used to require—with his delicate taste and his love of the beautiful Anything in my house—pictures books wine luxuries of the table—he may command them all It would afford me most heartfelt gratification to see him Shall I step in this moment
No replied Hepzibah her voice quivering too painfully to allow of many words He cannot see visitors
A visitor my dear cousin—do you call me so cried the Judge whose sensibility it seems was hurt by the coldness of the phrase Nay then let me be Cliffords host and your own likewise Come at once to my house The country air and all the conveniences—I may say luxuries—that I have gathered about me will do wonders for him And you and I dear Hepzibah will consult together and watch together and labor together to make our dear Clifford happy Come why should we make more words about what is both a duty and a pleasure on my part Come to me at once
On hearing these so hospitable offers and such generous recognition of the claims of kindred Phoebe felt very much in the mood of running up to Judge Pyncheon and giving him of her own accord the kiss from which she had so recently shrunk away It was quite otherwise with Hepzibah the Judges smile seemed to operate on her acerbity of heart like sunshine upon vinegar making it ten times sourer than ever
Clifford said she—still too agitated to utter more than an abrupt sentence—Clifford has a home here
May Heaven forgive you Hepzibah said Judge Pyncheon—reverently lifting his eyes towards that high court of equity to which he appealed—if you suffer any ancient prejudice or animosity to weigh with you in this matter I stand here with an open heart willing and anxious to receive yourself and Clifford into it Do not refuse my good offices—my earnest propositions for your welfare They are such in all respects as it behooves your nearest kinsman to make It will be a heavy responsibility cousin if you confine your brother to this dismal house and stifled air when the delightful freedom of my countryseat is at his command
It would never suit Clifford said Hepzibah as briefly as before
Woman broke forth the Judge giving way to his resentment what is the meaning of all this Have you other resources Nay I suspected as much Take care Hepzibah take care Clifford is on the brink of as black a ruin as ever befell him yet But why do I talk with you woman as you are Make way—I must see Clifford
Hepzibah spread out her gaunt figure across the door and seemed really to increase in bulk looking the more terrible also because there was so much terror and agitation in her heart But Judge Pyncheons evident purpose of forcing a passage was interrupted by a voice from the inner room a weak tremulous wailing voice indicating helpless alarm with no more energy for selfdefence than belongs to a frightened infant
Hepzibah Hepzibah cried the voice go down on your knees to him Kiss his feet Entreat him not to come in Oh let him have mercy on me Mercy mercy
For the instant it appeared doubtful whether it were not the Judges resolute purpose to set Hepzibah aside and step across the threshold into the parlor whence issued that broken and miserable murmur of entreaty It was not pity that restrained him for at the first sound of the enfeebled voice a red fire kindled in his eyes and he made a quick pace forward with something inexpressibly fierce and grim darkening forth as it were out of the whole man To know Judge Pyncheon was to see him at that moment After such a revelation let him smile with what sultriness he would he could much sooner turn grapes purple or pumpkins yellow than melt the ironbranded impression out of the beholders memory And it rendered his aspect not the less but more frightful that it seemed not to express wrath or hatred but a certain hot fellness of purpose which annihilated everything but itself
Yet after all are we not slandering an excellent and amiable man Look at the Judge now He is apparently conscious of having erred in too energetically pressing his deeds of lovingkindness on persons unable to appreciate them He will await their better mood and hold himself as ready to assist them then as at this moment As he draws back from the door an allcomprehensive benignity blazes from his visage indicating that he gathers Hepzibah little Phoebe and the invisible Clifford all three together with the whole world besides into his immense heart and gives them a warm bath in its flood of affection
You do me great wrong dear Cousin Hepzibah said he first kindly offering her his hand and then drawing on his glove preparatory to departure Very great wrong But I forgive it and will study to make you think better of me Of course our poor Clifford being in so unhappy a state of mind I cannot think of urging an interview at present But I shall watch over his welfare as if he were my own beloved brother nor do I at all despair my dear cousin of constraining both him and you to acknowledge your injustice When that shall happen I desire no other revenge than your acceptance of the best offices in my power to do you
With a bow to Hepzibah and a degree of paternal benevolence in his parting nod to Phoebe the Judge left the shop and went smiling along the street As is customary with the rich when they aim at the honors of a republic he apologized as it were to the people for his wealth prosperity and elevated station by a free and hearty manner towards those who knew him putting off the more of his dignity in due proportion with the humbleness of the man whom he saluted and thereby proving a haughty consciousness of his advantages as irrefragably as if he had marched forth preceded by a troop of lackeys to clear the way On this particular forenoon so excessive was the warmth of Judge Pyncheons kindly aspect that such at least was the rumor about town an extra passage of the watercarts was found essential in order to lay the dust occasioned by so much extra sunshine
No sooner had he disappeared than Hepzibah grew deadly white and staggering towards Phoebe let her head fall on the young girls shoulder
O Phoebe murmured she that man has been the horror of my life Shall I never never have the courage—will my voice never cease from trembling long enough to let me tell him what he is
Is he so very wicked asked Phoebe Yet his offers were surely kind
Do not speak of them—he has a heart of iron rejoined Hepzibah Go now and talk to Clifford Amuse and keep him quiet It would disturb him wretchedly to see me so agitated as I am There go dear child and I will try to look after the shop
Phoebe went accordingly but perplexed herself meanwhile with queries as to the purport of the scene which she had just witnessed and also whether judges clergymen and other characters of that eminent stamp and respectability could really in any single instance be otherwise than just and upright men A doubt of this nature has a most disturbing influence and if shown to be a fact comes with fearful and startling effect on minds of the trim orderly and limitloving class in which we find our little countrygirl Dispositions more boldly speculative may derive a stern enjoyment from the discovery since there must be evil in the world that a high man is as likely to grasp his share of it as a low one A wider scope of view and a deeper insight may see rank dignity and station all proved illusory so far as regards their claim to human reverence and yet not feel as if the universe were thereby tumbled headlong into chaos But Phoebe in order to keep the universe in its old place was fain to smother in some degree her own intuitions as to Judge Pyncheons character And as for her cousins testimony in disparagement of it she concluded that Hepzibahs judgment was embittered by one of those family feuds which render hatred the more deadly by the dead and corrupted love that they intermingle with its native poison
IX Clifford and Phoebe
TRULY was there something high generous and noble in the native composition of our poor old Hepzibah Or else—and it was quite as probably the case—she had been enriched by poverty developed by sorrow elevated by the strong and solitary affection of her life and thus endowed with heroism which never could have characterized her in what are called happier circumstances Through dreary years Hepzibah had looked forward—for the most part despairingly never with any confidence of hope but always with the feeling that it was her brightest possibility—to the very position in which she now found herself In her own behalf she had asked nothing of Providence but the opportunity of devoting herself to this brother whom she had so loved—so admired for what he was or might have been—and to whom she had kept her faith alone of all the world wholly unfalteringly at every instant and throughout life And here in his late decline the lost one had come back out of his long and strange misfortune and was thrown on her sympathy as it seemed not merely for the bread of his physical existence but for everything that should keep him morally alive She had responded to the call She had come forward—our poor gaunt Hepzibah in her rusty silks with her rigid joints and the sad perversity of her scowl—ready to do her utmost and with affection enough if that were all to do a hundred times as much There could be few more tearful sights—and Heaven forgive us if a smile insist on mingling with our conception of it—few sights with truer pathos in them than Hepzibah presented on that first afternoon
How patiently did she endeavor to wrap Clifford up in her great warm love and make it all the world to him so that he should retain no torturing sense of the coldness and dreariness without Her little efforts to amuse him How pitiful yet magnanimous they were
Remembering his early love of poetry and fiction she unlocked a bookcase and took down several books that had been excellent reading in their day There was a volume of Pope with the Rape of the Lock in it and another of the Tatler and an odd one of Drydens Miscellanies all with tarnished gilding on their covers and thoughts of tarnished brilliancy inside They had no success with Clifford These and all such writers of society whose new works glow like the rich texture of a justwoven carpet must be content to relinquish their charm for every reader after an age or two and could hardly be supposed to retain any portion of it for a mind that had utterly lost its estimate of modes and manners Hepzibah then took up Rasselas and began to read of the Happy Valley with a vague idea that some secret of a contented life had there been elaborated which might at least serve Clifford and herself for this one day But the Happy Valley had a cloud over it Hepzibah troubled her auditor moreover by innumerable sins of emphasis which he seemed to detect without any reference to the meaning nor in fact did he appear to take much note of the sense of what she read but evidently felt the tedium of the lecture without harvesting its profit His sisters voice too naturally harsh had in the course of her sorrowful lifetime contracted a kind of croak which when it once gets into the human throat is as ineradicable as sin In both sexes occasionally this lifelong croak accompanying each word of joy or sorrow is one of the symptoms of a settled melancholy and wherever it occurs the whole history of misfortune is conveyed in its slightest accent The effect is as if the voice had been dyed black or—if we must use a more moderate simile—this miserable croak running through all the variations of the voice is like a black silken thread on which the crystal beads of speech are strung and whence they take their hue Such voices have put on mourning for dead hopes and they ought to die and be buried along with them
Discerning that Clifford was not gladdened by her efforts Hepzibah searched about the house for the means of more exhilarating pastime At one time her eyes chanced to rest on Alice Pyncheons harpsichord It was a moment of great peril for—despite the traditionary awe that had gathered over this instrument of music and the dirges which spiritual fingers were said to play on it—the devoted sister had solemn thoughts of thrumming on its chords for Cliffords benefit and accompanying the performance with her voice Poor Clifford Poor Hepzibah Poor harpsichord All three would have been miserable together By some good agency—possibly by the unrecognized interposition of the longburied Alice herself—the threatening calamity was averted
But the worst of all—the hardest stroke of fate for Hepzibah to endure and perhaps for Clifford too was his invincible distaste for her appearance Her features never the most agreeable and now harsh with age and grief and resentment against the world for his sake her dress and especially her turban the queer and quaint manners which had unconsciously grown upon her in solitude—such being the poor gentlewomans outward characteristics it is no great marvel although the mournfullest of pities that the instinctive lover of the Beautiful was fain to turn away his eyes There was no help for it It would be the latest impulse to die within him In his last extremity the expiring breath stealing faintly through Cliffords lips he would doubtless press Hepzibahs hand in fervent recognition of all her lavished love and close his eyes—but not so much to die as to be constrained to look no longer on her face Poor Hepzibah She took counsel with herself what might be done and thought of putting ribbons on her turban but by the instant rush of several guardian angels was withheld from an experiment that could hardly have proved less than fatal to the beloved object of her anxiety
To be brief besides Hepzibahs 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 Cliffords 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 girls 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 dryrot 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 lightfooted 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 Hepzibahs huge ironbound trunks diffusing its fragrance through the various articles of linen and wroughtlace kerchiefs caps stockings folded dresses gloves and whatever else was treasured there As every article in the great trunk was the sweeter for the rosescent so did all the thoughts and emotions of Hepzibah and Clifford sombre as they might seem acquire a subtle attribute of happiness from Phoebes 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 peartree and now to such a depth as she could with Hepzibahs dark anxiety or the vague moan of her brother This facile adaptation was at once the symptom of perfect health and its best preservative
A nature like Phoebes has invariably its due influence but is seldom regarded with due honor Its spiritual force however may be partially estimated by the fact of her having found a place for herself amid circumstances so stern as those which surrounded the mistress of the house and also by the effect which she produced on a character of so much more mass than her own For the gaunt bony frame and limbs of Hepzibah as compared with the tiny lightsomeness of Phoebes figure were perhaps in some fit proportion with the moral weight and substance respectively of the woman and the girl
To the guest—to Hepzibahs brother—or Cousin Clifford as Phoebe now began to call him—she was especially necessary Not that he could ever be said to converse with her or often manifest in any other very definite mode his sense of a charm in her society But if she were a long while absent he became pettish and nervously restless pacing the room to and fro with the uncertainty that characterized all his movements or else would sit broodingly in his great chair resting his head on his hands and evincing life only by an electric sparkle of illhumor whenever Hepzibah endeavored to arouse him Phoebes presence and the contiguity of her fresh life to his blighted one was usually all that he required Indeed such was the native gush and play of her spirit that she was seldom perfectly quiet and undemonstrative any more than a fountain ever ceases to dimple and warble with its flow She possessed the gift of song and that too so naturally that you would as little think of inquiring whence she had caught it or what master had taught her as of asking the same questions about a bird in whose small strain of music we recognize the voice of the Creator as distinctly as in the loudest accents of his thunder So long as Phoebe sang she might stray at her own will about the house Clifford was content whether the sweet airy homeliness of her tones came down from the upper chambers or along the passageway from the shop or was sprinkled through the foliage of the peartree inward from the garden with the twinkling sunbeams He would sit quietly with a gentle pleasure gleaming over his face brighter now and now a little dimmer as the song happened to float near him or was more remotely heard It pleased him best however when she sat on a low footstool at his knee
It is perhaps remarkable considering her temperament that Phoebe oftener chose a strain of pathos than of gayety But the young and happy are not ill pleased to temper their life with a transparent shadow The deepest pathos of Phoebes voice and song moreover came sifted through the golden texture of a cheery spirit and was somehow so interfused with the quality thence acquired that ones heart felt all the lighter for having wept at it Broad mirth in the sacred presence of dark misfortune would have jarred harshly and irreverently with the solemn symphony that rolled its undertone through Hepzibahs and her brothers life Therefore it was well that Phoebe so often chose sad themes and not amiss that they ceased to be so sad while she was singing them
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 Cliffords traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose sphere lay so much in the Actual as Phoebes did For Clifford however the reality and simplicity and thorough homeliness of the girls 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 mountaintop or in a dungeon Now Phoebes 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 oftensuggested 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 handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman 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 Cliffords 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 it with 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 fruittree 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 halftorpid man would be full of harmonious life just as a longsilent harp is full of sound when the musicians 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 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 attainable 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 mountainwave 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 odors 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 girls 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 wellworn 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 graces 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 everactive 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 heavendirected 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 wildflower scent—for wildness was no trait of hers—but with the perfume of gardenroses 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 Cliffords 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 Cliffords character that when her involuntary conjectures together with the tendency of every strange circumstance 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 In the morning very shortly after breakfast it was Cliffords custom to fall asleep in his chair nor unless accidentally disturbed would he emerge from a dense cloud of slumber or the thinner mists that flitted to and fro until well towards noonday These hours of drowsihead were the season of the old gentlewomans attendance on her brother while Phoebe took charge of the shop an arrangement which the public speedily understood and evinced their decided preference of the younger shopwoman by the multiplicity of their calls during her administration of affairs Dinner over Hepzibah took her knittingwork—a long stocking of gray yarn for her brothers winter wear—and with a sigh and a scowl of affectionate farewell to Clifford and a gesture enjoining watchfulness on Phoebe went to take her seat behind the counter It was now the young girls turn to be the nurse—the guardian the playmate—or whatever is the fitter phrase—of the grayhaired man
X The Pyncheon Garden
CLIFFORD except for Phoebes 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 summerhouse that it was now a sufficient shelter from sunshine and casual showers The hopvine 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 playplace 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 girls readings were in any degree more successful than her elderly cousins Phoebes 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 brooklike cadences But the fictions—in which the countrygirl 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 touchstone 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 maidens 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 Cliffords 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
It pleased him more and was better for his inward welfare that Phoebe should talk and make passing occurrences vivid to his mind by her accompanying description and remarks The life of the garden offered topics enough for such discourse as suited Clifford best He never failed to inquire what flowers had bloomed since yesterday His feeling for flowers was very exquisite and seemed not so much a taste as an emotion he was fond of sitting with one in his hand intently observing it and looking from its petals into Phoebes face as if the garden flower were the sister of the household maiden Not merely was there a delight in the flowers perfume or pleasure in its beautiful form and the delicacy or brightness of its hue but Cliffords enjoyment was accompanied with a perception of life character and individuality that made him love these blossoms of the garden as if they were endowed with sentiment and intelligence This affection and sympathy for flowers is almost exclusively a womans trait Men if endowed with it by nature soon lose forget and learn to despise it in their contact with coarser things than flowers Clifford too had long forgotten it but found it again now as he slowly revived from the chill torpor of his life
It is wonderful how many pleasant incidents continually came to pass in that secluded gardenspot when once Phoebe had set herself to look for them She had seen or heard a bee there on the first day of her acquaintance with the place And often—almost continually indeed—since then the bees kept coming thither Heaven knows why or by what pertinacious desire for farfetched sweets when no doubt there were broad cloverfields and all kinds of garden growth much nearer home than this Thither the bees came however and plunged into the squashblossoms as if there were no other squashvines within a long days flight or as if the soil of Hepzibahs garden gave its productions just the very quality which these laborious little wizards wanted in order to impart the Hymettus odor to their whole hive of New England honey When Clifford heard their sunny buzzing murmur in the heart of the great yellow blossoms he looked about him with a joyful sense of warmth and blue sky and green grass and of Gods free air in the whole height from earth to heaven After all there need be no question why the bees came to that one green nook in the dusty town God sent them thither to gladden our poor Clifford They brought the rich summer with them in requital of a little honey
When the beanvines began to flower on the poles there was one particular variety which bore a vivid scarlet blossom The daguerreotypist had found these beans in a garret over one of the seven gables treasured up in an old chest of drawers by some horticultural Pyncheon of days gone by who doubtless meant to sow them the next summer but was himself first sown in Deaths gardenground By way of testing whether there were still a living germ in such ancient seeds Holgrave had planted some of them and the result of his experiment was a splendid row of beanvines clambering early to the full height of the poles and arraying them from top to bottom in a spiral profusion of red blossoms And ever since the unfolding of the first bud a multitude of hummingbirds had been attracted thither At times it seemed as if for every one of the hundred blossoms there was one of these tiniest fowls of the air—a thumbs bigness of burnished plumage hovering and vibrating about the beanpoles It was with indescribable interest and even more than childish delight that Clifford watched the hummingbirds He used to thrust his head softly out of the arbor to see them the better all the while too motioning Phoebe to be quiet and snatching glimpses of the smile upon her face so as to heap his enjoyment up the higher with her sympathy He had not merely grown young—he was a child again
Hepzibah whenever she happened to witness one of these fits of miniature enthusiasm would shake her head with a strange mingling of the mother and sister and of pleasure and sadness in her aspect She said that it had always been thus with Clifford when the hummingbirds came—always from his babyhood—and that his delight in them had been one of the earliest tokens by which he showed his love for beautiful things And it was a wonderful coincidence the good lady thought that the artist should have planted these scarletflowering beans—which the hummingbirds sought far and wide and which had not grown in the Pyncheon garden before for forty years—on the very summer of Cliffords return
Then would the tears stand in poor Hepzibahs eyes or overflow them with a too abundant gush so that she was fain to betake herself into some corner lest Clifford should espy her agitation Indeed all the enjoyments of this period were provocative of tears Coming so late as it did it was a kind of Indian summer with a mist in its balmiest sunshine and decay and death in its gaudiest delight The more Clifford seemed to taste the happiness of a child the sadder was the difference to be recognized With a mysterious and terrible Past which had annihilated his memory and a blank Future before him he had only this visionary and impalpable Now which if you once look closely at it is nothing He himself as was perceptible by many symptoms lay darkly behind his pleasure and knew it to be a babyplay which he was to toy and trifle with instead of thoroughly believing Clifford saw it may be in the mirror of his deeper consciousness that he was an example and representative of that great class of people whom an inexplicable Providence is continually putting at crosspurposes with the world breaking what seems its own promise in their nature withholding their proper food and setting poison before them for a banquet and thus—when it might so easily as one would think have been adjusted otherwise—making their existence a strangeness a solitude and torment All his life long he had been learning how to be wretched as one learns a foreign tongue and now with the lesson thoroughly by heart he could with difficulty comprehend his little airy happiness Frequently there was a dim shadow of doubt in his eyes Take my hand Phoebe he would say and pinch it hard with your little fingers Give me a rose that I may press its thorns and prove myself awake by the sharp touch of pain Evidently he desired this prick of a trifling anguish in order to assure himself by that quality which he best knew to be real that the garden and the seven weatherbeaten gables and Hepzibahs scowl and Phoebes smile were real likewise Without this signet in his flesh he could have attributed no more substance to them than to the empty confusion of imaginary scenes with which he had fed his spirit until even that poor sustenance was exhausted
The author needs great faith in his readers sympathy else he must hesitate to give details so minute and incidents apparently so trifling as are essential to make up the idea of this gardenlife It was the Eden of a thundersmitten Adam who had fled for refuge thither out of the same dreary and perilous wilderness into which the original Adam was expelled
One of the available means of amusement of which Phoebe made the most in Cliffords behalf was that feathered society the hens a breed of whom as we have already said was an immemorial heirloom in the Pyncheon family In compliance with a whim of Clifford as it troubled him to see them in confinement they had been set at liberty and now roamed at will about the garden doing some little mischief but hindered from escape by buildings on three sides and the difficult peaks of a wooden fence on the other They spent much of their abundant leisure on the margin of Maules well which was haunted by a kind of snail evidently a titbit to their palates and the brackish water itself however nauseous to the rest of the world was so greatly esteemed by these fowls that they might be seen tasting turning up their heads and smacking their bills with precisely the air of winebibbers round a probationary cask Their generally quiet yet often brisk and constantly diversified talk one to another or sometimes in soliloquy—as they scratched worms out of the rich black soil or pecked at such plants as suited their taste—had such a domestic tone that it was almost a wonder why you could not establish a regular interchange of ideas about household matters human and gallinaceous All hens are well worth studying for the piquancy and rich variety of their manners but by no possibility can there have been other fowls of such odd appearance and deportment as these ancestral ones They probably embodied the traditionary peculiarities of their whole line of progenitors derived through an unbroken succession of eggs or else this individual Chanticleer and his two wives had grown to be humorists and a little crackbrained withal on account of their solitary way of life and out of sympathy for Hepzibah their ladypatroness
Queer indeed they looked Chanticleer himself though stalking on two stiltlike legs with the dignity of interminable descent in all his gestures was hardly bigger than an ordinary partridge his two wives were about the size of quails and as for the one chicken it looked small enough to be still in the egg and at the same time sufficiently old withered wizened and experienced to have been founder of the antiquated race Instead of being the youngest of the family it rather seemed to have aggregated into itself the ages not only of these living specimens of the breed but of all its forefathers and foremothers whose united excellences and oddities were squeezed into its little body Its mother evidently regarded it as the one chicken of the world and as necessary in fact to the worlds continuance or at any rate to the equilibrium of the present system of affairs whether in church or state No lesser sense of the infant fowls importance could have justified even in a mothers eyes the perseverance with which she watched over its safety ruffling her small person to twice its proper size and flying in everybodys face that so much as looked towards her hopeful progeny No lower estimate could have vindicated the indefatigable zeal with which she scratched and her unscrupulousness in digging up the choicest flower or vegetable for the sake of the fat earthworm at its root Her nervous cluck when the chicken happened to be hidden in the long grass or under the squashleaves her gentle croak of satisfaction while sure of it beneath her wing her note of illconcealed fear and obstreperous defiance when she saw her archenemy a neighbors cat on the top of the high fence—one or other of these sounds was to be heard at almost every moment of the day By degrees the observer came to feel nearly as much interest in this chicken of illustrious race as the motherhen did
Phoebe after getting well acquainted with the old hen was sometimes permitted to take the chicken in her hand which was quite capable of grasping its cubic inch or two of body While she curiously examined its hereditary marks—the peculiar speckle of its plumage the funny tuft on its head and a knob on each of its legs—the little biped as she insisted kept giving her a sagacious wink The daguerreotypist once whispered her that these marks betokened the oddities of the Pyncheon family and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life of the old house embodying its interpretation likewise although an unintelligible one as such clews generally are It was a feathered riddle a mystery hatched out of an egg and just as mysterious as if the egg had been addle
The second of Chanticleers two wives ever since Phoebes arrival had been in a state of heavy despondency caused as it afterwards appeared by her inability to lay an egg One day however by her selfimportant gait the sideways turn of her head and the cock of her eye as she pried into one and another nook of the garden—croaking to herself all the while with inexpressible complacency—it was made evident that this identical hen much as mankind undervalued her carried something about her person the worth of which was not to be estimated either in gold or precious stones Shortly after there was a prodigious cackling and gratulation of Chanticleer and all his family including the wizened chicken who appeared to understand the matter quite as well as did his sire his mother or his aunt That afternoon Phoebe found a diminutive egg—not in the regular nest it was far too precious to be trusted there—but cunningly hidden under the currantbushes on some dry stalks of last years grass Hepzibah on learning the fact took possession of the egg and appropriated it to Cliffords breakfast on account of a certain delicacy of flavor for which as she affirmed these eggs had always been famous Thus unscrupulously did the old gentlewoman sacrifice the continuance perhaps of an ancient feathered race with no better end than to supply her brother with a dainty that hardly filled the bowl of a teaspoon It must have been in reference to this outrage that Chanticleer the next day accompanied by the bereaved mother of the egg took his post in front of Phoebe and Clifford and delivered himself of a harangue that might have proved as long as his own pedigree but for a fit of merriment on Phoebes part Hereupon the offended fowl stalked away on his long stilts and utterly withdrew his notice from Phoebe and the rest of human nature until she made her peace with an offering of spicecake which next to snails was the delicacy most in favor with his aristocratic taste
We linger too long no doubt beside this paltry rivulet of life that flowed through the garden of the Pyncheon House But we deem it pardonable to record these mean incidents and poor delights because they proved so greatly to Cliffords benefit They had the earthsmell in them and contributed to give him health and substance Some of his occupations wrought less desirably upon him He had a singular propensity for example to hang over Maules well and look at the constantly shifting phantasmagoria of figures produced by the agitation of the water over the mosaicwork of colored pebbles at the bottom He said that faces looked upward to him there—beautiful faces arrayed in bewitching smiles—each momentary face so fair and rosy and every smile so sunny that he felt wronged at its departure until the same flitting witchcraft made a new one But sometimes he would suddenly cry out The dark face gazes at me and be miserable the whole day afterwards Phoebe when she hung over the fountain by Cliffords side could see nothing of all this—neither the beauty nor the ugliness—but only the colored pebbles looking as if the gush of the waters shook and disarranged them And the dark face that so troubled Clifford was no more than the shadow thrown from a branch of one of the damsontrees and breaking the inner light of Maules well The truth was however that his fancy—reviving faster than his will and judgment and always stronger than they—created shapes of loveliness that were symbolic of his native character and now and then a stern and dreadful shape that typified his fate
On Sundays after Phoebe had been at church—for the girl had a churchgoing conscience and would hardly have been at ease had she missed either prayer singing sermon or benediction—after churchtime therefore there was ordinarily a sober little festival in the garden In addition to Clifford Hepzibah and Phoebe two guests made up the company One was the artist Holgrave who in spite of his consociation with reformers and his other queer and questionable traits continued to hold an elevated place in Hepzibahs regard The other we are almost ashamed to say was the venerable Uncle Venner in a clean shirt and a broadcloth coat more respectable than his ordinary wear inasmuch as it was neatly patched on each elbow and might be called an entire garment except for a slight inequality in the length of its skirts Clifford on several occasions had seemed to enjoy the old mans intercourse for the sake of his mellow cheerful vein which was like the sweet flavor of a frostbitten apple such as one picks up under the tree in December A man at the very lowest point of the social scale was easier and more agreeable for the fallen gentleman to encounter than a person at any of the intermediate degrees and moreover as Cliffords young manhood had been lost he was fond of feeling himself comparatively youthful now in apposition with the patriarchal age of Uncle Venner In fact it was sometimes observable that Clifford half wilfully hid from himself the consciousness of being stricken in years and cherished visions of an earthly future still before him visions however too indistinctly drawn to be followed by disappointment—though doubtless by depression—when any casual incident or recollection made him sensible of the withered leaf
So this oddly composed little social party used to assemble under the ruinous arbor Hepzibah—stately as ever at heart and yielding not an inch of her old gentility but resting upon it so much the more as justifying a princesslike condescension—exhibited a not ungraceful hospitality She talked kindly to the vagrant artist and took sage counsel—lady as she was—with the woodsawyer the messenger of everybodys petty errands the patched philosopher And Uncle Venner who had studied the world at streetcorners and other posts equally well adapted for just observation was as ready to give out his wisdom as a townpump to give water
Miss Hepzibah maam said he once after they had all been cheerful together I really enjoy these quiet little meetings of a Sabbath afternoon They are very much like what I expect to have after I retire to my farm
Uncle Venner observed Clifford in a drowsy inward tone is always talking about his farm But I have a better scheme for him by and by We shall see
Ah Mr Clifford Pyncheon said the man of patches you may scheme for me as much as you please but Im not going to give up this one scheme of my own even if I never bring it really to pass It does seem to me that men make a wonderful mistake in trying to heap up property upon property If I had done so I should feel as if Providence was not bound to take care of me and at all events the city wouldnt be Im one of those people who think that infinity is big enough for us all—and eternity long enough
Why so they are Uncle Venner remarked Phoebe after a pause for she had been trying to fathom the profundity and appositeness of this concluding apothegm But for this short life of ours one would like a house and a moderate gardenspot of ones own
It appears to me said the daguerreotypist smiling that Uncle Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom only they have not quite so much distinctness in his mind as in that of the systematizing Frenchman
Come Phoebe said Hepzibah it is time to bring the currants
And then while the yellow richness of the declining sunshine still fell into the open space of the garden Phoebe brought out a loaf of bread and a china bowl of currants freshly gathered from the bushes and crushed with sugar These with water—but not from the fountain of ill omen close at hand—constituted all the entertainment Meanwhile Holgrave took some pains to establish an intercourse with Clifford actuated it might seem entirely by an impulse of kindliness in order that the present hour might be cheerfuller than most which the poor recluse had spent or was destined yet to spend Nevertheless in the artists deep thoughtful allobservant eyes there was now and then an expression not sinister but questionable as if he had some other interest in the scene than a stranger a youthful and unconnected adventurer might be supposed to have With great mobility of outward mood however he applied himself to the task of enlivening the party and with so much success that even darkhued Hepzibah threw off one tint of melancholy and made what shift she could with the remaining portion Phoebe said to herself—How pleasant he can be As for Uncle Venner as a mark of friendship and approbation he readily consented to afford the young man his countenance in the way of his profession—not metaphorically be it understood but literally by allowing a daguerreotype of his face so familiar to the town to be exhibited at the entrance of Holgraves studio
Clifford as the company partook of their little banquet grew to be the gayest of them all Either it was one of those upquivering flashes of the spirit to which minds in an abnormal state are liable or else the artist had subtly touched some chord that made musical vibration Indeed what with the pleasant summer evening and the sympathy of this little circle of not unkindly souls it was perhaps natural that a character so susceptible as Cliffords should become animated and show itself readily responsive to what was said around him But he gave out his own thoughts likewise with an airy and fanciful glow so that they glistened as it were through the arbor and made their escape among the interstices of the foliage He had been as cheerful no doubt while alone with Phoebe but never with such tokens of acute although partial intelligence
But as the sunlight left the peaks of the Seven Gables so did the excitement fade out of Cliffords eyes He gazed vaguely and mournfully about him as if he missed something precious and missed it the more drearily for not knowing precisely what it was
I want my happiness at last he murmured hoarsely and indistinctly hardly shaping out the words Many many years have I waited for it It is late It is late I want my happiness
Alas poor Clifford You are old and worn with troubles that ought never to have befallen you You are partly crazy and partly imbecile a ruin a failure as almost everybody is—though some in less degree or less perceptibly than their fellows Fate has no happiness in store for you unless your quiet home in the old family residence with the faithful Hepzibah and your long summer afternoons with Phoebe and these Sabbath festivals with Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist deserve to be called happiness Why not If not the thing itself, it is marvellously like it and the more so for that ethereal and intangible quality which causes it all to vanish at too close an introspection Take it therefore while you may Murmur not—question not—but make the most of it
XI The Arched Window
FROM the inertness or what we may term the vegetative character of his ordinary mood Clifford would perhaps have been content to spend one day after another interminably—or at least throughout the summertime—in just the kind of life described in the preceding pages Fancying however that it might be for his benefit occasionally to diversify the scene Phoebe sometimes suggested that he should look out upon the life of the street For this purpose they used to mount the staircase together to the second story of the house where at the termination of a wide entry there was an arched window of uncommonly large dimensions shaded by a pair of curtains It opened above the porch where there had formerly been a balcony the balustrade of which had long since gone to decay and been removed At this arched window throwing it open but keeping himself in comparative obscurity by means of the curtain Clifford had an opportunity of witnessing such a portion of the great worlds movement as might be supposed to roll through one of the retired streets of a not very populous city But he and Phoebe made a sight as well worth seeing as any that the city could exhibit The pale gray childish aged melancholy yet often simply cheerful and sometimes delicately intelligent aspect of Clifford peering from behind the faded crimson of the curtain—watching the monotony of everyday occurrences with a kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness and at every petty throb of his sensibility turning for sympathy to the eyes of the bright young girl
If once he were fairly seated at the window even Pyncheon Street would hardly be so dull and lonely but that somewhere or other along its extent Clifford might discover matter to occupy his eye and titillate if not engross his observation Things familiar to the youngest child that had begun its outlook at existence seemed strange to him A cab an omnibus with its populous interior dropping here and there a passenger and picking up another and thus typifying that vast rolling vehicle the world the end of whose journey is everywhere and nowhere these objects he followed eagerly with his eyes but forgot them before the dust raised by the horses and wheels had settled along their track As regarded novelties among which cabs and omnibuses were to be reckoned his mind appeared to have lost its proper gripe and retentiveness Twice or thrice for example during the sunny hours of the day a watercart went along by the Pyncheon House leaving a broad wake of moistened earth instead of the white dust that had risen at a ladys lightest footfall it was like a summer shower which the city authorities had caught and tamed and compelled it into the commonest routine of their convenience With the watercart Clifford could never grow familiar it always affected him with just the same surprise as at first His mind took an apparently sharp impression from it but lost the recollection of this perambulatory shower before its next reappearance as completely as did the street itself along which the heat so quickly strewed white dust again It was the same with the railroad Clifford could hear the obstreperous howl of the steamdevil and by leaning a little way from the arched window could catch a glimpse of the trains of cars flashing a brief transit across the extremity of the street The idea of terrible energy thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence and seemed to affect him as disagreeably and with almost as much surprise the hundredth time as the first
Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment It can merely be a suspended animation for were the power actually to perish there would be little use of immortality We are less than ghosts for the time being whenever this calamity befalls us
Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives All the antique fashions of the street were dear to him even such as were characterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed his fastidious senses He loved the old rumbling and jolting carts the former track of which he still found in his longburied remembrance as the observer of today finds the wheeltracks of ancient vehicles in Herculaneum The butchers cart with its snowy canopy was an acceptable object so was the fishcart heralded by its horn so likewise was the countrymans cart of vegetables plodding from door to door with long pauses of the patient horse while his owner drove a trade in turnips carrots summersquashes stringbeans green peas and new potatoes with half the housewives of the neighborhood The bakers cart with the harsh music of its bells had a pleasant effect on Clifford because as few things else did it jingled the very dissonance of yore One afternoon a scissorgrinder chanced to set his wheel agoing under the Pyncheon Elm and just in front of the arched window Children came running with their mothers scissors or the carvingknife or the paternal razor or anything else that lacked an edge except indeed poor Cliffords wits that the grinder might apply the article to his magic wheel and give it back as good as new Round went the busily revolving machinery kept in motion by the scissorgrinders foot and wore away the hard steel against the hard stone whence issued an intense and spiteful prolongation of a hiss as fierce as those emitted by Satan and his compeers in Pandemonium though squeezed into smaller compass It was an ugly little venomous serpent of a noise as ever did petty violence to human ears But Clifford listened with rapturous delight The sound however disagreeable had very brisk life in it and together with the circle of curious children watching the revolutions of the wheel appeared to give him a more vivid sense of active bustling and sunshiny existence than he had attained in almost any other way Nevertheless its charm lay chiefly in the past for the scissorgrinders wheel had hissed in his childish ears
He sometimes made doleful complaint that there were no stagecoaches nowadays And he asked in an injured tone what had become of all those old squaretopped chaises with wings sticking out on either side that used to be drawn by a ploughhorse and driven by a farmers wife and daughter peddling whortleberries and blackberries about the town Their disappearance made him doubt he said whether the berries had not left off growing in the broad pastures and along the shady country lanes
But anything that appealed to the sense of beauty in however humble a way did not require to be recommended by these old associations This was observable when one of those Italian boys who are rather a modern feature of our streets came along with his barrelorgan and stopped under the wide and cool shadows of the elm With his quick professional eye he took note of the two faces watching him from the arched window and opening his instrument began to scatter its melodies abroad He had a monkey on his shoulder dressed in a Highland plaid and to complete the sum of splendid attractions wherewith he presented himself to the public there was a company of little figures whose sphere and habitation was in the mahogany case of his organ and whose principle of life was the music which the Italian made it his business to grind out In all their variety of occupation—the cobbler the blacksmith the soldier the lady with her fan the toper with his bottle the milkmaid sitting by her cow—this fortunate little society might truly be said to enjoy a harmonious existence and to make life literally a dance The Italian turned a crank and behold every one of these small individuals started into the most curious vivacity The cobbler wrought upon a shoe the blacksmith hammered his iron the soldier waved his glittering blade the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan the jolly toper swigged lustily at his bottle a scholar opened his book with eager thirst for knowledge and turned his head to and fro along the page the milkmaid energetically drained her cow and a miser counted gold into his strongbox—all at the same turning of a crank Yes and moved by the selfsame impulse a lover saluted his mistress on her lips Possibly some cynic at once merry and bitter had desired to signify in this pantomimic scene that we mortals whatever our business or amusement—however serious however trifling—all dance to one identical tune and in spite of our ridiculous activity bring nothing finally to pass For the most remarkable aspect of the affair was that at the cessation of the music everybody was petrified at once from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor Neither was the cobblers shoe finished nor the blacksmiths iron shaped out nor was there a drop less of brandy in the topers bottle nor a drop more of milk in the milkmaids pail nor one additional coin in the misers strongbox nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book All were precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so ridiculous by their haste to toil to enjoy to accumulate gold and to become wise Saddest of all moreover the lover was none the happier for the maidens granted kiss But rather than swallow this last too acrid ingredient we reject the whole moral of the show
The monkey meanwhile with a thick tail curling out into preposterous prolixity from beneath his tartans took his station at the Italians feet He turned a wrinkled and abominable little visage to every passerby and to the circle of children that soon gathered round and to Hepzibahs shopdoor and upward to the arched window whence Phoebe and Clifford were looking down Every moment also he took off his Highland bonnet and performed a bow and scrape Sometimes moreover he made personal application to individuals holding out his small black palm and otherwise plainly signifying his excessive desire for whatever filthy lucre might happen to be in anybodys pocket The mean and low yet strangely manlike expression of his wilted countenance the prying and crafty glance that showed him ready to gripe at every miserable advantage his enormous tail too enormous to be decently concealed under his gabardine and the deviltry of nature which it betokened—take this monkey just as he was in short and you could desire no better image of the Mammon of copper coin symbolizing the grossest form of the love of money Neither was there any possibility of satisfying the covetous little devil Phoebe threw down a whole handful of cents which he picked up with joyless eagerness handed them over to the Italian for safekeeping and immediately recommenced a series of pantomimic petitions for more
Doubtless more than one NewEnglander—or let him be of what country he might it is as likely to be the case—passed by and threw a look at the monkey and went on without imagining how nearly his own moral condition was here exemplified Clifford however was a being of another order He had taken childish delight in the music and smiled too at the figures which it set in motion But after looking awhile at the longtailed imp he was so shocked by his horrible ugliness spiritual as well as physical that he actually began to shed tears a weakness which men of merely delicate endowments and destitute of the fiercer deeper and more tragic power of laughter can hardly avoid when the worst and meanest aspect of life happens to be presented to them
Pyncheon Street was sometimes enlivened by spectacles of more imposing pretensions than the above and which brought the multitude along with them With a shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact with the world a powerful impulse still seized on Clifford whenever the rush and roar of the human tide grew strongly audible to him This was made evident one day when a political procession with hundreds of flaunting banners and drums fifes clarions and cymbals reverberating between the rows of buildings marched all through town and trailed its length of trampling footsteps and most infrequent uproar past the ordinarily quiet House of the Seven Gables As a mere object of sight nothing is more deficient in picturesque features than a procession seen in its passage through narrow streets The spectator feels it to be fools play when he can distinguish the tedious commonplace of each mans visage with the perspiration and weary selfimportance on it and the very cut of his pantaloons and the stiffness or laxity of his shirtcollar and the dust on the back of his black coat In order to become majestic it should be viewed from some vantage point as it rolls its slow and long array through the centre of a wide plain or the stateliest public square of a city for then by its remoteness it melts all the petty personalities of which it is made up into one broad mass of existence—one great life—one collected body of mankind with a vast homogeneous spirit animating it But on the other hand if an impressible person standing alone over the brink of one of these processions should behold it not in its atoms but in its aggregate—as a mighty river of life massive in its tide and black with mystery and out of its depths calling to the kindred depth within him—then the contiguity would add to the effect It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies
So it proved with Clifford He shuddered he grew pale he threw an appealing look at Hepzibah and Phoebe who were with him at the window They comprehended nothing of his emotions and supposed him merely disturbed by the unaccustomed tumult At last with tremulous limbs he started up set his foot on the windowsill and in an instant more would have been in the unguarded balcony As it was the whole procession might have seen him a wild haggard figure his gray locks floating in the wind that waved their banners a lonely being estranged from his race but now feeling himself man again by virtue of the irrepressible instinct that possessed him Had Clifford attained the balcony he would probably have leaped into the street but whether impelled by the species of terror that sometimes urges its victim over the very precipice which he shrinks from or by a natural magnetism tending towards the great centre of humanity it were not easy to decide Both impulses might have wrought on him at once
But his companions affrighted by his gesture—which was that of a man hurried away in spite of himself—seized Cliffords garment and held him back Hepzibah shrieked Phoebe to whom all extravagance was a horror burst into sobs and tears
Clifford Clifford are you crazy cried his sister
I hardly know Hepzibah said Clifford drawing a long breath Fear nothing—it is over now—but had I taken that plunge and survived it methinks it would have made me another man
Possibly in some sense Clifford may have been right He needed a shock or perhaps he required to take a deep deep plunge into the ocean of human life and to sink down and be covered by its profoundness and then to emerge sobered invigorated restored to the world and to himself Perhaps again he required nothing less than the great final remedy—death
A similar yearning to renew the broken links of brotherhood with his kind sometimes showed itself in a milder form and once it was made beautiful by the religion that lay even deeper than itself In the incident now to be sketched there was a touching recognition on Cliffords part of Gods care and love towards him—towards this poor forsaken man who if any mortal could might have been pardoned for regarding himself as thrown aside forgotten and left to be the sport of some fiend whose playfulness was an ecstasy of mischief
It was the Sabbath morning one of those bright calm Sabbaths with its own hallowed atmosphere when Heaven seems to diffuse itself over the earths face in a solemn smile no less sweet than solemn On such a Sabbath morn were we pure enough to be its medium we should be conscious of the earths natural worship ascending through our frames on whatever spot of ground we stood The churchbells with various tones but all in harmony were calling out and responding to one another—It is the Sabbath—The Sabbath—Yea the Sabbath—and over the whole city the bells scattered the blessed sounds now slowly now with livelier joy now one bell alone now all the bells together crying earnestly—It is the Sabbath—and flinging their accents afar off to melt into the air and pervade it with the holy word The air with Gods sweetest and tenderest sunshine in it was meet for mankind to breathe into their hearts and send it forth again as the utterance of prayer
Clifford sat at the window with Hepzibah watching the neighbors as they stepped into the street All of them however unspiritual on other days were transfigured by the Sabbath influence so that their very garments—whether it were an old mans decent coat well brushed for the thousandth time or a little boys first sack and trousers finished yesterday by his mothers needle—had somewhat of the quality of ascensionrobes Forth likewise from the portal of the old house stepped Phoebe putting up her small green sunshade and throwing upward a glance and smile of parting kindness to the faces at the arched window In her aspect there was a familiar gladness and a holiness that you could play with and yet reverence it as much as ever She was like a prayer offered up in the homeliest beauty of ones mothertongue Fresh was Phoebe moreover and airy and sweet in her apparel as if nothing that she wore—neither her gown nor her small straw bonnet nor her little kerchief any more than her snowy stockings—had ever been put on before or if worn were all the fresher for it and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the rosebuds
The girl waved her hand to Hepzibah and Clifford and went up the street a religion in herself warm simple true with a substance that could walk on earth and a spirit that was capable of heaven
Hepzibah asked Clifford after watching Phoebe to the corner do you never go to church
No Clifford she replied—not these many many years
Were I to be there he rejoined it seems to me that I could pray once more when so many human souls were praying all around me
She looked into Cliffords face and beheld there a soft natural effusion for his heart gushed out as it were and ran over at his eyes in delightful reverence for God and kindly affection for his human brethren The emotion communicated itself to Hepzibah She yearned to take him by the hand and go and kneel down they two together—both so long separate from the world and as she now recognized scarcely friends with Him above—to kneel down among the people and be reconciled to God and man at once
Dear brother said she earnestly let us go We belong nowhere We have not a foot of space in any church to kneel upon but let us go to some place of worship even if we stand in the broad aisle Poor and forsaken as we are some pewdoor will be opened to us
So Hepzibah and her brother made themselves ready—as ready as they could in the best of their oldfashioned garments which had hung on pegs or been laid away in trunks so long that the dampness and mouldy smell of the past was on them—made themselves ready in their faded bettermost to go to church They descended the staircase together—gaunt sallow Hepzibah and pale emaciated agestricken Clifford They pulled open the front door and stepped across the threshold and felt both of them as if they were standing in the presence of the whole world and with mankinds great and terrible eye on them alone The eye of their Father seemed to be withdrawn and gave them no encouragement The warm sunny air of the street made them shiver Their hearts quaked within them at the idea of taking one step farther
It cannot be Hepzibah—it is too late said Clifford with deep sadness We are ghosts We have no right among human beings—no right anywhere but in this old house which has a curse on it and which therefore we are doomed to haunt And besides he continued with a fastidious sensibility inalienably characteristic of the man it would not be fit nor beautiful to go It is an ugly thought that I should be frightful to my fellowbeings and that children would cling to their mothers gowns at sight of me
They shrank back into the dusky passageway and closed the door But going up the staircase again they found the whole interior of the house tenfold more dismal and the air closer and heavier for the glimpse and breath of freedom which they had just snatched They could not flee their jailer had but left the door ajar in mockery and stood behind it to watch them stealing out At the threshold they felt his pitiless gripe upon them For what other dungeon is so dark as ones own heart What jailer so inexorable as ones self
But it would be no fair picture of Cliffords state of mind were we to represent him as continually or prevailingly wretched On the contrary there was no other man in the city we are bold to affirm of so much as half his years who enjoyed so many lightsome and griefless moments as himself He had no burden of care upon him there were none of those questions and contingencies with the future to be settled which wear away all other lives and render them not worth having by the very process of providing for their support In this respect he was a child—a child for the whole term of his existence be it long or short Indeed his life seemed to be standing still at a period little in advance of childhood and to cluster all his reminiscences about that epoch just as after the torpor of a heavy blow the sufferers reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerably behind the accident that stupefied him He sometimes told Phoebe and Hepzibah his dreams in which he invariably played the part of a child or a very young man So vivid were they in his relation of them that he once held a dispute with his sister as to the particular figure or print of a chintz morningdress which he had seen their mother wear in the dream of the preceding night Hepzibah piquing herself on a womans accuracy in such matters held it to be slightly different from what Clifford described but producing the very gown from an old trunk it proved to be identical with his remembrance of it Had Clifford every time that he emerged out of dreams so lifelike undergone the torture of transformation from a boy into an old and broken man the daily recurrence of the shock would have been too much to bear It would have caused an acute agony to thrill from the morning twilight all the day through until bedtime and even then would have mingled a dull inscrutable pain and pallid hue of misfortune with the visionary bloom and adolescence of his slumber But the nightly moonshine interwove itself with the morning mist and enveloped him as in a robe which he hugged about his person and seldom let realities pierce through he was not often quite awake but slept openeyed and perhaps fancied himself most dreaming then
Thus lingering always so near his childhood he had sympathies with children and kept his heart the fresher thereby like a reservoir into which rivulets were pouring not far from the fountainhead Though prevented by a subtile sense of propriety from desiring to associate with them he loved few things better than to look out of the arched window and see a little girl driving her hoop along the sidewalk or schoolboys at a game of ball Their voices also were very pleasant to him heard at a distance all swarming and intermingling together as flies do in a sunny room
Clifford would doubtless have been glad to share their sports One afternoon he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow soapbubbles an amusement as Hepzibah told Phoebe apart that had been a favorite one with her brother when they were both children Behold him therefore at the arched window with an earthen pipe in his mouth Behold him with his gray hair and a wan unreal smile over his countenance where still hovered a beautiful grace which his worst enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal since it had survived so long Behold him scattering airy spheres abroad from the window into the street Little impalpable worlds were those soapbubbles with the big world depicted in hues bright as imagination on the nothing of their surface It was curious to see how the passersby regarded these brilliant fantasies as they came floating down and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them Some stopped to gaze and perhaps carried a pleasant recollection of the bubbles onward as far as the streetcorner some looked angrily upward as if poor Clifford wronged them by setting an image of beauty afloat so near their dusty pathway A great many put out their fingers or their walkingsticks to touch withal and were perversely gratified no doubt when the bubble with all its pictured earth and sky scene vanished as if it had never been
At length just as an elderly gentleman of very dignified presence happened to be passing a large bubble sailed majestically down and burst right against his nose He looked up—at first with a stern keen glance which penetrated at once into the obscurity behind the arched window—then with a smile which might be conceived as diffusing a dogday sultriness for the space of several yards about him
Aha Cousin Clifford cried Judge Pyncheon What Still blowing soapbubbles
The tone seemed as if meant to be kind and soothing but yet had a bitterness of sarcasm in it As for Clifford an absolute palsy of fear came over him Apart from any definite cause of dread which his past experience might have given him he felt that native and original horror of the excellent Judge which is proper to a weak delicate and apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength Strength is incomprehensible by weakness and therefore the more terrible There is no greater bugbear than a strongwilled relative in the circle of his own connections
XII The Daguerreotypist
IT must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so active as Phoebe could be wholly confined within the precincts of the old Pyncheon House Cliffords demands upon her time were usually satisfied in those long days considerably earlier than sunset Quiet as his daily existence seemed it nevertheless drained all the resources by which he lived It was not physical exercise that overwearied him—for except that he sometimes wrought a little with a hoe or paced the gardenwalk or in rainy weather traversed a large unoccupied room—it was his tendency to remain only too quiescent as regarded any toil of the limbs and muscles But either there was a smouldering fire within him that consumed his vital energy or the monotony that would have dragged itself with benumbing effect over a mind differently situated was no monotony to Clifford Possibly he was in a state of second growth and recovery and was constantly assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights sounds and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more practised with the world As all is activity and vicissitude to the new mind of a child so might it be likewise to a mind that had undergone a kind of new creation after its longsuspended life
Be the cause what it might Clifford commonly retired to rest thoroughly exhausted while the sunbeams were still melting through his windowcurtains or were thrown with late lustre on the chamber wall And while he thus slept early as other children do and dreamed of childhood Phoebe was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder of the day and evening
This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe The old house as we have already said had both the dryrot and the damprot in its walls it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere than that Hepzibah though she had her valuable and redeeming traits had grown to be a kind of lunatic by imprisoning herself so long in one place with no other company than a single series of ideas and but one affection and one bitter sense of wrong Clifford the reader may perhaps imagine was too inert to operate morally on his fellowcreatures however intimate and exclusive their relations with him But the sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtile and universal than we think it exists indeed among different classes of organized life and vibrates from one to another A flower for instance as Phoebe herself observed always began to droop sooner in Cliffords hand or Hepzibahs than in her own and by the same law converting her whole daily life into a flower fragrance for these two sickly spirits the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast Unless she had now and then indulged her brisk impulses and breathed rural air in a suburban walk or ocean breezes along the shore—had occasionally obeyed the impulse of Nature in New England girls by attending a metaphysical or philosophical lecture or viewing a sevenmile panorama or listening to a concert—had gone shopping about the city ransacking entire depots of splendid merchandise and bringing home a ribbon—had employed likewise a little time to read the Bible in her chamber and had stolen a little more to think of her mother and her native place—unless for such moral medicines as the above we should soon have beheld our poor Phoebe grow thin and put on a bleached unwholesome aspect and assume strange shy ways prophetic of oldmaidenhood and a cheerless future
Even as it was a change grew visible a change partly to be regretted although whatever charm it infringed upon was repaired by another perhaps more precious She was not so constantly gay but had her moods of thought which Clifford on the whole liked better than her former phase of unmingled cheerfulness because now she understood him better and more delicately and sometimes even interpreted him to himself Her eyes looked larger and darker and deeper so deep at some silent moments that they seemed like Artesian wells down down into the infinite She was less girlish than when we first beheld her alighting from the omnibus less girlish but more a woman
The only youthful mind with which Phoebe had an opportunity of frequent intercourse was that of the daguerreotypist Inevitably by the pressure of the seclusion about them they had been brought into habits of some familiarity Had they met under different circumstances neither of these young persons would have been likely to bestow much thought upon the other unless indeed their extreme dissimilarity should have proved a principle of mutual attraction Both it is true were characters proper to New England life and possessing a common ground therefore in their more external developments but as unlike in their respective interiors as if their native climes had been at worldwide distance During the early part of their acquaintance Phoebe had held back rather more than was customary with her frank and simple manners from Holgraves not very marked advances Nor was she yet satisfied that she knew him well although they almost daily met and talked together in a kind friendly and what seemed to be a familiar way
The artist in a desultory manner had imparted to Phoebe something of his history Young as he was and had his career terminated at the point already attained there had been enough of incident to fill very creditably an autobiographic volume A romance on the plan of Gil Blas adapted to American society and manners would cease to be a romance The experience of many individuals among us who think it hardly worth the telling would equal the vicissitudes of the Spaniards earlier life while their ultimate success or the point whither they tend may be incomparably higher than any that a novelist would imagine for his hero Holgrave as he told Phoebe somewhat proudly could not boast of his origin unless as being exceedingly humble nor of his education except that it had been the scantiest possible and obtained by a few wintermonths attendance at a district school Left early to his own guidance he had begun to be selfdependent while yet a boy and it was a condition aptly suited to his natural force of will Though now but twentytwo years old lacking some months which are years in such a life he had already been first a country schoolmaster next a salesman in a country store and either at the same time or afterwards the political editor of a country newspaper He had subsequently travelled New England and the Middle States as a peddler in the employment of a Connecticut manufactory of colognewater and other essences In an episodical way he had studied and practised dentistry and with very flattering success especially in many of the factorytowns along our inland streams As a supernumerary official of some kind or other aboard a packetship he had visited Europe and found means before his return to see Italy and part of France and Germany At a later period he had spent some months in a community of Fourierists Still more recently he had been a public lecturer on Mesmerism for which science as he assured Phoebe and indeed satisfactorily proved by putting Chanticleer who happened to be scratching near by to sleep he had very remarkable endowments
His present phase as a daguerreotypist was of no more importance in his own view nor likely to be more permanent than any of the preceding ones It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an adventurer who had his bread to earn It would be thrown aside as carelessly whenever he should choose to earn his bread by some other equally digressive means But what was most remarkable and perhaps showed a more than common poise in the young man was the fact that, amid all these personal vicissitudes he had never lost his identity Homeless as he had been—continually changing his whereabout and therefore responsible neither to public opinion nor to individuals—putting off one exterior and snatching up another to be soon shifted for a third—he had never violated the innermost man but had carried his conscience along with him It was impossible to know Holgrave without recognizing this to be the fact Hepzibah had seen it Phoebe soon saw it likewise and gave him the sort of confidence which such a certainty inspires She was startled however and sometimes repelled—not by any doubt of his integrity to whatever law he acknowledged but by a sense that his law differed from her own He made her uneasy and seemed to unsettle everything around her by his lack of reverence for what was fixed unless at a moments warning it could establish its right to hold its ground
Then moreover she scarcely thought him affectionate in his nature He was too calm and cool an observer Phoebe felt his eye often his heart seldom or never He took a certain kind of interest in Hepzibah and her brother and Phoebe herself He studied them attentively and allowed no slightest circumstance of their individualities to escape him He was ready to do them whatever good he might but after all he never exactly made common cause with them nor gave any reliable evidence that he loved them better in proportion as he knew them more In his relations with them he seemed to be in quest of mental food not heartsustenance Phoebe could not conceive what interested him so much in her friends and herself intellectually since he cared nothing for them or comparatively so little as objects of human affection
Always in his interviews with Phoebe the artist made especial inquiry as to the welfare of Clifford whom except at the Sunday festival he seldom saw
Does he still seem happy he asked one day
As happy as a child answered Phoebe but—like a child too—very easily disturbed
How disturbed inquired Holgrave By things without or by thoughts within
I cannot see his thoughts How should I replied Phoebe with simple piquancy Very often his humor changes without any reason that can be guessed at just as a cloud comes over the sun Latterly since I have begun to know him better I feel it to be not quite right to look closely into his moods He has had such a great sorrow that his heart is made all solemn and sacred by it When he is cheerful—when the sun shines into his mind—then I venture to peep in just as far as the light reaches but no further It is holy ground where the shadow falls
How prettily you express this sentiment said the artist I can understand the feeling without possessing it Had I your opportunities no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to the full depth of my plummetline
How strange that you should wish it remarked Phoebe involuntarily What is Cousin Clifford to you
Oh nothing—of course nothing answered Holgrave with a smile Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible world The more I look at it the more it puzzles me and I begin to suspect that a mans bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom Men and women and children too are such strange creatures that one never can be certain that he really knows them nor ever guess what they have been from what he sees them to be now Judge Pyncheon Clifford What a complex riddle—a complexity of complexities—do they present It requires intuitive sympathy like a young girls to solve it A mere observer like myself who never have any intuitions and am at best only subtile and acute is pretty certain to go astray
The artist now turned the conversation to themes less dark than that which they had touched upon Phoebe and he were young together nor had Holgrave in his premature experience of life wasted entirely that beautiful spirit of youth which gushing forth from one small heart and fancy may diffuse itself over the universe making it all as bright as on the first day of creation Mans own youth is the worlds youth at least he feels as if it were and imagines that the earths granite substance is something not yet hardened and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes So it was with Holgrave He could talk sagely about the worlds old age but never actually believed what he said he was a young man still and therefore looked upon the world—that graybearded and wrinkled profligate decrepit without being venerable—as a tender stripling capable of being improved into all that it ought to be but scarcely yet had shown the remotest promise of becoming He had that sense or inward prophecy—which a young man had better never have been born than not to have and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish—that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way but that this very now there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era to be accomplished in his own lifetime It seemed to Holgrave—as doubtless it has seemed to the hopeful of every century since the epoch of Adams grandchildren—that in this age more than ever before the mossgrown and rotten Past is to be torn down and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way and their dead corpses buried and everything to begin anew
As to the main point—may we never live to doubt it—as to the better centuries that are coming the artist was surely right His error lay in supposing that this age more than any past or future one is destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork in applying his own little lifespan as the measure of an interminable achievement and more than all in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or against it Yet it was well for him to think so This enthusiasm infusing itself through the calmness of his character and thus taking an aspect of settled thought and wisdom would serve to keep his youth pure and make his aspirations high And when with the years settling down more weightily upon him his early faith should be modified by inevitable experience it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution of his sentiments He would still have faith in mans brightening destiny and perhaps love him all the better as he should recognize his helplessness in his own behalf and the haughty faith with which he began life would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its close in discerning that mans best directed effort accomplishes a kind of dream while God is the sole worker of realities
Holgrave had read very little and that little in passing through the thoroughfare of life where the mystic language of his books was necessarily mixed up with the babble of the multitude so that both one and the other were apt to lose any sense that might have been properly their own He considered himself a thinker and was certainly of a thoughtful turn but with his own path to discover had perhaps hardly yet reached the point where an educated man begins to think The true value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward strength which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely like a change of garments in that enthusiasm so quiet that he scarcely knew of its existence but which gave a warmth to everything that he laid his hand on in that personal ambition hidden—from his own as well as other eyes—among his more generous impulses but in which lurked a certain efficacy that might solidify him from a theorist into the champion of some practicable cause Altogether in his culture and want of culture—in his crude wild and misty philosophy and the practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies in his magnanimous zeal for mans welfare and his recklessness of whatever the ages had established in mans behalf in his faith and in his infidelity in what he had and in what he lacked—the artist might fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his native land
His career it would be difficult to prefigure There appeared to be qualities in Holgrave such as in a country where everything is free to the hand that can grasp it could hardly fail to put some of the worlds prizes within his reach But these matters are delightfully uncertain At almost every step in life we meet with young men of just about Holgraves age for whom we anticipate wonderful things but of whom even after much and careful inquiry we never happen to hear another word The effervescence of youth and passion and the fresh gloss of the intellect and imagination endow them with a false brilliancy which makes fools of themselves and other people Like certain chintzes calicoes and ginghams they show finely in their first newness but cannot stand the sun and rain and assume a very sober aspect after washingday
But our business is with Holgrave as we find him on this particular afternoon and in the arbor of the Pyncheon garden In that point of view it was a pleasant sight to behold this young man with so much faith in himself and so fair an appearance of admirable powers—so little harmed too by the many tests that had tried his metal—it was pleasant to see him in his kindly intercourse with Phoebe Her thought had scarcely done him justice when it pronounced him cold or if so he had grown warmer now Without such purpose on her part and unconsciously on his she made the House of the Seven Gables like a home to him and the garden a familiar precinct With the insight on which he prided himself he fancied that he could look through Phoebe and all around her and could read her off like a page of a childs storybook But these transparent natures are often deceptive in their depth those pebbles at the bottom of the fountain are farther from us than we think Thus the artist whatever he might judge of Phoebes capacity was beguiled by some silent charm of hers to talk freely of what he dreamed of doing in the world He poured himself out as to another self Very possibly he forgot Phoebe while he talked to her and was moved only by the inevitable tendency of thought when rendered sympathetic by enthusiasm and emotion to flow into the first safe reservoir which it finds But had you peeped at them through the chinks of the gardenfence the young mans earnestness and heightened color might have led you to suppose that he was making love to the young girl
At length something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for Phoebe to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin Hepzibah and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old Pyncheon House Without directly answering her he turned from the Future which had heretofore been the theme of his discourse and began to speak of the influences of the Past One subject indeed is but the reverberation of the other
Shall we never never get rid of this Past cried he keeping up the earnest tone of his preceding conversation It lies upon the Present like a giants dead body In fact the case is just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of the old giant his grandfather who died a long while ago and only needs to be decently buried Just think a moment and it will startle you to see what slaves we are to bygone times—to Death if we give the matter the right word
But I do not see it observed Phoebe
For example then continued Holgrave a dead man if he happens to have made a will disposes of wealth no longer his own or if he die intestate it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much longer dead than he A dead man sits on all our judgmentseats and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions We read in dead mens books We laugh at dead mens jokes and cry at dead mens pathos We are sick of dead mens diseases physical and moral and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients We worship the living Deity according to dead mens forms and creeds Whatever we seek to do of our own free motion a dead mans icy hand obstructs us Turn our eyes to what point we may a dead mans white immitigable face encounters them and freezes our very heart And we must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence on our own world which will then be no longer our world but the world of another generation with which we shall have no shadow of a right to interfere I ought to have said too that we live in dead mens houses as for instance in this of the Seven Gables
And why not said Phoebe so long as we can be comfortable in them
But we shall live to see the day I trust went on the artist when no man shall build his house for posterity Why should he He might just as reasonably order a durable suit of clothes—leather or guttapercha or whatever else lasts longest—so that his greatgrandchildren should have the benefit of them and cut precisely the same figure in the world that he himself does If each generation were allowed and expected to build its own houses that single change comparatively unimportant in itself would imply almost every reform which society is now suffering for I doubt whether even our public edifices—our capitols statehouses courthouses cityhall and churches—ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or brick It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty years or thereabouts as a hint to the people to examine into and reform the institutions which they symbolize
How you hate everything old said Phoebe in dismay It makes me dizzy to think of such a shifting world
I certainly love nothing mouldy answered Holgrave Now this old Pyncheon House Is it a wholesome place to live in with its black shingles and the green moss that shows how damp they are—its dark lowstudded rooms—its grime and sordidness which are the crystallization on its walls of the human breath that has been drawn and exhaled here in discontent and anguish The house ought to be purified with fire—purified till only its ashes remain
Then why do you live in it asked Phoebe a little piqued
Oh I am pursuing my studies here not in books however replied Holgrave The house in my view is expressive of that odious and abominable Past with all its bad influences against which I have just been declaiming I dwell in it for a while that I may know the better how to hate it By the bye did you ever hear the story of Maule the wizard and what happened between him and your immeasurably greatgrandfather
Yes indeed said Phoebe I heard it long ago from my father and two or three times from my cousin Hepzibah in the month that I have been here She seems to think that all the calamities of the Pyncheons began from that quarrel with the wizard as you call him And you Mr Holgrave look as if you thought so too How singular that you should believe what is so very absurd when you reject many things that are a great deal worthier of credit
I do believe it said the artist seriously not as a superstition however but as proved by unquestionable facts and as exemplifying a theory Now see under those seven gables at which we now look up—and which old Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the house of his descendants in prosperity and happiness down to an epoch far beyond the present—under that roof through a portion of three centuries there has been perpetual remorse of conscience a constantly defeated hope strife amongst kindred various misery a strange form of death dark suspicion unspeakable disgrace—all or most of which calamity I have the means of tracing to the old Puritans inordinate desire to plant and endow a family To plant a family This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do The truth is that once in every halfcentury at longest a family should be merged into the great obscure mass of humanity and forget all about its ancestors Human blood in order to keep its freshness should run in hidden streams as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean pipes In the family existence of these Pyncheons for instance—forgive me Phoebe but I cannot think of you as one of them—in their brief New England pedigree there has been time enough to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another
You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred said Phoebe debating with herself whether she ought to take offence
I speak true thoughts to a true mind answered Holgrave with a vehemence which Phoebe had not before witnessed in him The truth is as I say Furthermore the original perpetrator and father of this mischief appears to have perpetuated himself and still walks the street—at least his very image in mind and body—with the fairest prospect of transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched an inheritance as he has received Do you remember the daguerreotype and its resemblance to the old portrait
How strangely in earnest you are exclaimed Phoebe looking at him with surprise and perplexity half alarmed and partly inclined to laugh You talk of the lunacy of the Pyncheons is it contagious
I understand you said the artist coloring and laughing I believe I am a little mad This subject has taken hold of my mind with the strangest tenacity of clutch since I have lodged in yonder old gable As one method of throwing it off I have put an incident of the Pyncheon family history with which I happen to be acquainted into the form of a legend and mean to publish it in a magazine
Do you write for the magazines inquired Phoebe
Is it possible you did not know it cried Holgrave Well such is literary fame Yes Miss Phoebe Pyncheon among the multitude of my marvellous gifts I have that of writing stories and my name has figured I can assure you on the covers of Graham and Godey making as respectable an appearance for aught I could see as any of the canonized beadroll with which it was associated In the humorous line I am thought to have a very pretty way with me and as for pathos I am as provocative of tears as an onion But shall I read you my story
Yes if it is not very long said Phoebe—and added laughingly—nor very dull
As this latter point was one which the daguerreotypist could not decide for himself he forthwith produced his roll of manuscript and while the late sunbeams gilded the seven gables began to read
XIII Alice Pyncheon
THERE was a message brought one day from the worshipful Gervayse Pyncheon to young Matthew Maule the carpenter desiring his immediate presence at the House of the Seven Gables
And what does your master want with me said the carpenter to Mr Pyncheons black servant Does the house need any repair Well it may by this time and no blame to my father who built it neither I was reading the old Colonels tombstone no longer ago than last Sabbath and reckoning from that date the house has stood sevenandthirty years No wonder if there should be a job to do on the roof
Dont know what massa wants answered Scipio The house is a berry good house and old Colonel Pyncheon think so too I reckon—else why the old man haunt it so and frighten a poor nigga As he does
Well well friend Scipio let your master know that Im coming said the carpenter with a laugh For a fair workmanlike job hell find me his man And so the house is haunted is it It will take a tighter workman than I am to keep the spirits out of the Seven Gables Even if the Colonel would be quiet he added muttering to himself my old grandfather the wizard will be pretty sure to stick to the Pyncheons as long as their walls hold together
Whats that you mutter to yourself Matthew Maule asked Scipio And what for do you look so black at me
No matter darky said the carpenter Do you think nobody is to look black but yourself Go tell your master Im coming and if you happen to see Mistress Alice his daughter give Matthew Maules humble respects to her She has brought a fair face from Italy—fair and gentle and proud—has that same Alice Pyncheon
He talk of Mistress Alice cried Scipio as he returned from his errand The low carpenterman He no business so much as to look at her a great way off
This young Matthew Maule the carpenter it must be observed was a person little understood and not very generally liked in the town where he resided not that anything could be alleged against his integrity or his skill and diligence in the handicraft which he exercised The aversion as it might justly be called with which many persons regarded him was partly the result of his own character and deportment and partly an inheritance
He was the grandson of a former Matthew Maule one of the early settlers of the town and who had been a famous and terrible wizard in his day This old reprobate was one of the sufferers when Cotton Mather and his brother ministers and the learned judges and other wise men and Sir William Phipps the sagacious governor made such laudable efforts to weaken the great enemy of souls by sending a multitude of his adherents up the rocky pathway of Gallows Hill Since those days no doubt it had grown to be suspected that in consequence of an unfortunate overdoing of a work praiseworthy in itself the proceedings against the witches had proved far less acceptable to the Beneficent Father than to that very Arch Enemy whom they were intended to distress and utterly overwhelm It is not the less certain however that awe and terror brooded over the memories of those who died for this horrible crime of witchcraft Their graves in the crevices of the rocks were supposed to be incapable of retaining the occupants who had been so hastily thrust into them Old Matthew Maule especially was known to have as little hesitation or difficulty in rising out of his grave as an ordinary man in getting out of bed and was as often seen at midnight as living people at noonday This pestilent wizard in whom his just punishment seemed to have wrought no manner of amendment had an inveterate habit of haunting a certain mansion styled the House of the Seven Gables against the owner of which he pretended to hold an unsettled claim for groundrent The ghost it appears—with the pertinacity which was one of his distinguishing characteristics while alive—insisted that he was the rightful proprietor of the site upon which the house stood His terms were that either the aforesaid groundrent from the day when the cellar began to be dug should be paid down or the mansion itself given up else he the ghostly creditor would have his finger in all the affairs of the Pyncheons and make everything go wrong with them though it should be a thousand years after his death It was a wild story perhaps but seemed not altogether so incredible to those who could remember what an inflexibly obstinate old fellow this wizard Maule had been
Now the wizards grandson the young Matthew Maule of our story was popularly supposed to have inherited some of his ancestors questionable traits It is wonderful how many absurdities were promulgated in reference to the young man He was fabled for example to have a strange power of getting into peoples dreams and regulating matters there according to his own fancy pretty much like the stagemanager of a theatre There was a great deal of talk among the neighbors particularly the petticoated ones about what they called the witchcraft of Maules eye Some said that he could look into peoples minds others that by the marvellous power of this eye he could draw people into his own mind or send them if he pleased to do errands to his grandfather in the spiritual world others again that it was what is termed an Evil Eye and possessed the valuable faculty of blighting corn and drying children into mummies with the heartburn But after all what worked most to the young carpenters disadvantage was first the reserve and sternness of his natural disposition and next the fact of his not being a churchcommunicant and the suspicion of his holding heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity
After receiving Mr Pyncheons message the carpenter merely tarried to finish a small job which he happened to have in hand and then took his way towards the House of the Seven Gables This noted edifice though its style might be getting a little out of fashion was still as respectable a family residence as that of any gentleman in town The present owner Gervayse Pyncheon was said to have contracted a dislike to the house in consequence of a shock to his sensibility in early childhood from the sudden death of his grandfather In the very act of running to climb Colonel Pyncheons knee the boy had discovered the old Puritan to be a corpse On arriving at manhood Mr Pyncheon had visited England where he married a lady of fortune and had subsequently spent many years partly in the mother country and partly in various cities on the continent of Europe During this period the family mansion had been consigned to the charge of a kinsman who was allowed to make it his home for the time being in consideration of keeping the premises in thorough repair So faithfully had this contract been fulfilled that now as the carpenter approached the house his practised eye could detect nothing to criticise in its condition The peaks of the seven gables rose up sharply the shingled roof looked thoroughly watertight and the glittering plasterwork entirely covered the exterior walls and sparkled in the October sun as if it had been new only a week ago
The house had that pleasant aspect of life which is like the cheery expression of comfortable activity in the human countenance You could see at once that there was the stir of a large family within it A huge load of oakwood was passing through the gateway towards the outbuildings in the rear the fat cook—or probably it might be the housekeeper—stood at the side door bargaining for some turkeys and poultry which a countryman had brought for sale Now and then a maidservant neatly dressed and now the shining sable face of a slave might be seen bustling across the windows in the lower part of the house At an open window of a room in the second story hanging over some pots of beautiful and delicate flowers—exotics but which had never known a more genial sunshine than that of the New England autumn—was the figure of a young lady an exotic like the flowers and beautiful and delicate as they Her presence imparted an indescribable grace and faint witchery to the whole edifice In other respects it was a substantial jollylooking mansion and seemed fit to be the residence of a patriarch who might establish his own headquarters in the front gable and assign one of the remainder to each of his six children while the great chimney in the centre should symbolize the old fellows hospitable heart which kept them all warm and made a great whole of the seven smaller ones
There was a vertical sundial on the front gable and as the carpenter passed beneath it he looked up and noted the hour
Three oclock said he to himself My father told me that dial was put up only an hour before the old Colonels death How truly it has kept time these sevenandthirty years past The shadow creeps and creeps and is always looking over the shoulder of the sunshine
It might have befitted a craftsman like Matthew Maule on being sent for to a gentlemans house to go to the back door where servants and workpeople were usually admitted or at least to the side entrance where the better class of tradesmen made application But the carpenter had a great deal of pride and stiffness in his nature and at this moment moreover his heart was bitter with the sense of hereditary wrong because he considered the great Pyncheon House to be standing on soil which should have been his own On this very site beside a spring of delicious water his grandfather had felled the pinetrees and built a cottage in which children had been born to him and it was only from a dead mans stiffened fingers that Colonel Pyncheon had wrested away the titledeeds So young Maule went straight to the principal entrance beneath a portal of carved oak and gave such a peal of the iron knocker that you would have imagined the stern old wizard himself to be standing at the threshold
Black Scipio answered the summons in a prodigious hurry but showed the whites of his eyes in amazement on beholding only the carpenter
Lordamercy what a great man he be this carpenter fellow mumbled Scipio down in his throat Anybody think he beat on the door with his biggest hammer
Here I am said Maule sternly Show me the way to your masters parlor
As he stept into the house a note of sweet and melancholy music thrilled and vibrated along the passageway proceeding from one of the rooms above stairs It was the harpsichord which Alice Pyncheon had brought with her from beyond the sea The fair Alice bestowed most of her maiden leisure between flowers and music although the former were apt to droop and the melodies were often sad She was of foreign education and could not take kindly to the New England modes of life in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed
As Mr Pyncheon had been impatiently awaiting Maules arrival black Scipio of course lost no time in ushering the carpenter into his masters presence The room in which this gentleman sat was a parlor of moderate size looking out upon the garden of the house and having its windows partly shadowed by the foliage of fruittrees It was Mr Pyncheons peculiar apartment and was provided with furniture in an elegant and costly style principally from Paris the floor which was unusual at that day being covered with a carpet so skilfully and richly wrought that it seemed to glow as with living flowers In one corner stood a marble woman to whom her own beauty was the sole and sufficient garment Some pictures—that looked old and had a mellow tinge diffused through all their artful splendor—hung on the walls Near the fireplace was a large and very beautiful cabinet of ebony inlaid with ivory a piece of antique furniture which Mr Pyncheon had bought in Venice and which he used as the treasureplace for medals ancient coins and whatever small and valuable curiosities he had picked up on his travels Through all this variety of decoration however the room showed its original characteristics its low stud its crossbeam its chimneypiece with the oldfashioned Dutch tiles so that it was the emblem of a mind industriously stored with foreign ideas and elaborated into artificial refinement but neither larger nor in its proper self more elegant than before
There were two objects that appeared rather out of place in this very handsomely furnished room One was a large map or surveyors plan of a tract of land which looked as if it had been drawn a good many years ago and was now dingy with smoke and soiled here and there with the touch of fingers The other was a portrait of a stern old man in a Puritan garb painted roughly but with a bold effect and a remarkably strong expression of character
At a small table before a fire of English seacoal sat Mr Pyncheon sipping coffee which had grown to be a very favorite beverage with him in France He was a middleaged and really handsome man with a wig flowing down upon his shoulders his coat was of blue velvet with lace on the borders and at the buttonholes and the firelight glistened on the spacious breadth of his waistcoat which was flowered all over with gold On the entrance of Scipio ushering in the carpenter Mr Pyncheon turned partly round but resumed his former position and proceeded deliberately to finish his cup of coffee without immediate notice of the guest whom he had summoned to his presence It was not that he intended any rudeness or improper neglect—which indeed he would have blushed to be guilty of—but it never occurred to him that a person in Maules station had a claim on his courtesy or would trouble himself about it one way or the other
The carpenter however stepped at once to the hearth and turned himself about so as to look Mr Pyncheon in the face
You sent for me said he Be pleased to explain your business that I may go back to my own affairs
Ah excuse me said Mr Pyncheon quietly I did not mean to tax your time without a recompense Your name I think is Maule—Thomas or Matthew Maule—a son or grandson of the builder of this house
Matthew Maule replied the carpenter—son of him who built the house—grandson of the rightful proprietor of the soil
I know the dispute to which you allude observed Mr Pyncheon with undisturbed equanimity I am well aware that my grandfather was compelled to resort to a suit at law in order to establish his claim to the foundationsite of this edifice We will not if you please renew the discussion The matter was settled at the time and by the competent authorities—equitably it is to be presumed—and at all events irrevocably Yet singularly enough there is an incidental reference to this very subject in what I am now about to say to you And this same inveterate grudge—excuse me I mean no offence—this irritability which you have just shown is not entirely aside from the matter
If you can find anything for your purpose Mr Pyncheon said the carpenter in a mans natural resentment for the wrongs done to his blood you are welcome to it
I take you at your word Goodman Maule said the owner of the Seven Gables with a smile and will proceed to suggest a mode in which your hereditary resentments—justifiable or otherwise—may have had a bearing on my affairs You have heard I suppose that the Pyncheon family ever since my grandfathers days have been prosecuting a still unsettled claim to a very large extent of territory at the Eastward
Often replied Maule—and it is said that a smile came over his face—very often—from my father
This claim continued Mr Pyncheon after pausing a moment as if to consider what the carpenters smile might mean appeared to be on the very verge of a settlement and full allowance at the period of my grandfathers decease It was well known to those in his confidence that he anticipated neither difficulty nor delay Now Colonel Pyncheon I need hardly say was a practical man well acquainted with public and private business and not at all the person to cherish illfounded hopes or to attempt the following out of an impracticable scheme It is obvious to conclude therefore that he had grounds not apparent to his heirs for his confident anticipation of success in the matter of this Eastern claim In a word I believe—and my legal advisers coincide in the belief which moreover is authorized to a certain extent by the family traditions—that my grandfather was in possession of some deed or other document essential to this claim but which has since disappeared
Very likely said Matthew Maule—and again it is said there was a dark smile on his face—but what can a poor carpenter have to do with the grand affairs of the Pyncheon family
Perhaps nothing returned Mr Pyncheon possibly much
Here ensued a great many words between Matthew Maule and the proprietor of the Seven Gables on the subject which the latter had thus broached It seems although Mr Pyncheon had some hesitation in referring to stories so exceedingly absurd in their aspect that the popular belief pointed to some mysterious connection and dependence existing between the family of the Maules and these vast unrealized possessions of the Pyncheons It was an ordinary saying that the old wizard hanged though he was had obtained the best end of the bargain in his contest with Colonel Pyncheon inasmuch as he had got possession of the great Eastern claim in exchange for an acre or two of gardenground A very aged woman recently dead had often used the metaphorical expression in her fireside talk that miles and miles of the Pyncheon lands had been shovelled into Maules grave which by the bye was but a very shallow nook between two rocks near the summit of Gallows Hill Again when the lawyers were making inquiry for the missing document it was a byword that it would never be found unless in the wizards skeleton hand So much weight had the shrewd lawyers assigned to these fables that but Mr Pyncheon did not see fit to inform the carpenter of the fact they had secretly caused the wizards grave to be searched Nothing was discovered however except that unaccountably the right hand of the skeleton was gone
Now what was unquestionably important a portion of these popular rumors could be traced though rather doubtfully and indistinctly to chance words and obscure hints of the executed wizards son and the father of this present Matthew Maule And here Mr Pyncheon could bring an item of his own personal evidence into play Though but a child at the time he either remembered or fancied that Matthews father had had some job to perform on the day before or possibly the very morning of the Colonels decease in the private room where he and the carpenter were at this moment talking Certain papers belonging to Colonel Pyncheon as his grandson distinctly recollected had been spread out on the table
Matthew Maule understood the insinuated suspicion
My father he said—but still there was that dark smile making a riddle of his countenance—my father was an honester man than the bloody old Colonel Not to get his rights back again would he have carried off one of those papers
I shall not bandy words with you observed the foreignbred Mr Pyncheon with haughty composure Nor will it become me to resent any rudeness towards either my grandfather or myself A gentleman before seeking intercourse with a person of your station and habits will first consider whether the urgency of the end may compensate for the disagreeableness of the means It does so in the present instance
He then renewed the conversation and made great pecuniary offers to the carpenter in case the latter should give information leading to the discovery of the lost document and the consequent success of the Eastern claim For a long time Matthew Maule is said to have turned a cold ear to these propositions At last however with a strange kind of laugh he inquired whether Mr Pyncheon would make over to him the old wizards homesteadground together with the House of the Seven Gables now standing on it in requital of the documentary evidence so urgently required
The wild chimneycorner legend which without copying all its extravagances my narrative essentially follows here gives an account of some very strange behavior on the part of Colonel Pyncheons portrait This picture it must be understood was supposed to be so intimately connected with the fate of the house and so magically built into its walls that if once it should be removed that very instant the whole edifice would come thundering down in a heap of dusty ruin All through the foregoing conversation between Mr Pyncheon and the carpenter the portrait had been frowning clenching its fist and giving many such proofs of excessive discomposure but without attracting the notice of either of the two colloquists And finally at Matthew Maules audacious suggestion of a transfer of the sevengabled structure the ghostly portrait is averred to have lost all patience and to have shown itself on the point of descending bodily from its frame But such incredible incidents are merely to be mentioned aside
Give up this house exclaimed Mr Pyncheon in amazement at the proposal Were I to do so my grandfather would not rest quiet in his grave
He never has if all stories are true remarked the carpenter composedly But that matter concerns his grandson more than it does Matthew Maule I have no other terms to propose
Impossible as he at first thought it to comply with Maules conditions still on a second glance Mr Pyncheon was of opinion that they might at least be made matter of discussion He himself had no personal attachment for the house nor any pleasant associations connected with his childish residence in it On the contrary after sevenandthirty years the presence of his dead grandfather seemed still to pervade it as on that morning when the affrighted boy had beheld him with so ghastly an aspect stiffening in his chair His long abode in foreign parts moreover and familiarity with many of the castles and ancestral halls of England and the marble palaces of Italy had caused him to look contemptuously at the House of the Seven Gables whether in point of splendor or convenience It was a mansion exceedingly inadequate to the style of living which it would be incumbent on Mr Pyncheon to support after realizing his territorial rights His steward might deign to occupy it but never certainly the great landed proprietor himself In the event of success indeed it was his purpose to return to England nor to say the truth would he recently have quitted that more congenial home had not his own fortune as well as his deceased wifes begun to give symptoms of exhaustion The Eastern claim once fairly settled and put upon the firm basis of actual possession Mr Pyncheons property—to be measured by miles not acres—would be worth an earldom and would reasonably entitle him to solicit or enable him to purchase that elevated dignity from the British monarch Lord Pyncheon—or the Earl of Waldo—how could such a magnate be expected to contract his grandeur within the pitiful compass of seven shingled gables
In short on an enlarged view of the business the carpenters terms appeared so ridiculously easy that Mr Pyncheon could scarcely forbear laughing in his face He was quite ashamed after the foregoing reflections to propose any diminution of so moderate a recompense for the immense service to be rendered
I consent to your proposition Maule cried he Put me in possession of the document essential to establish my rights and the House of the Seven Gables is your own
According to some versions of the story a regular contract to the above effect was drawn up by a lawyer and signed and sealed in the presence of witnesses Others say that Matthew Maule was contented with a private written agreement in which Mr Pyncheon pledged his honor and integrity to the fulfillment of the terms concluded upon The gentleman then ordered wine which he and the carpenter drank together in confirmation of their bargain During the whole preceding discussion and subsequent formalities the old Puritans portrait seems to have persisted in its shadowy gestures of disapproval but without effect except that as Mr Pyncheon set down the emptied glass he thought he beheld his grandfather frown
This sherry is too potent a wine for me it has affected my brain already he observed after a somewhat startled look at the picture On returning to Europe I shall confine myself to the more delicate vintages of Italy and France the best of which will not bear transportation
My Lord Pyncheon may drink what wine he will and wherever he pleases replied the carpenter as if he had been privy to Mr Pyncheons ambitious projects But first sir if you desire tidings of this lost document I must crave the favor of a little talk with your fair daughter Alice
You are mad Maule exclaimed Mr Pyncheon haughtily and now at last there was anger mixed up with his pride What can my daughter have to do with a business like this
Indeed at this new demand on the carpenters part the proprietor of the Seven Gables was even more thunderstruck than at the cool proposition to surrender his house There was at least an assignable motive for the first stipulation there appeared to be none whatever for the last Nevertheless Matthew Maule sturdily insisted on the young lady being summoned and even gave her father to understand in a mysterious kind of explanation—which made the matter considerably darker than it looked before—that the only chance of acquiring the requisite knowledge was through the clear crystal medium of a pure and virgin intelligence like that of the fair Alice Not to encumber our story with Mr Pyncheons scruples whether of conscience pride or fatherly affection he at length ordered his daughter to be called He well knew that she was in her chamber and engaged in no occupation that could not readily be laid aside for as it happened ever since Alices name had been spoken both her father and the carpenter had heard the sad and sweet music of her harpsichord and the airier melancholy of her accompanying voice
So Alice Pyncheon was summoned and appeared A portrait of this young lady painted by a Venetian artist and left by her father in England is said to have fallen into the hands of the present Duke of Devonshire and to be now preserved at Chatsworth not on account of any associations with the original but for its value as a picture and the high character of beauty in the countenance If ever there was a lady born and set apart from the worlds vulgar mass by a certain gentle and cold stateliness it was this very Alice Pyncheon Yet there was the womanly mixture in her the tenderness or at least the tender capabilities For the sake of that redeeming quality a man of generous nature would have forgiven all her pride and have been content almost to lie down in her path and let Alice set her slender foot upon his heart All that he would have required was simply the acknowledgment that he was indeed a man and a fellowbeing moulded of the same elements as she
As Alice came into the room her eyes fell upon the carpenter who was standing near its centre clad in green woollen jacket a pair of loose breeches open at the knees and with a long pocket for his rule the end of which protruded it was as proper a mark of the artisans calling as Mr Pyncheons fulldress sword of that gentlemans aristocratic pretensions A glow of artistic approval brightened over Alice Pyncheons face she was struck with admiration—which she made no attempt to conceal—of the remarkable comeliness strength and energy of Maules figure But that admiring glance which most other men perhaps would have cherished as a sweet recollection all through life the carpenter never forgave It must have been the devil himself that made Maule so subtile in his preception
Does the girl look at me as if I were a brute beast thought he setting his teeth She shall know whether I have a human spirit and the worse for her if it prove stronger than her own
My father you sent for me said Alice in her sweet and harplike voice But if you have business with this young man pray let me go again You know I do not love this room in spite of that Claude with which you try to bring back sunny recollections
Stay a moment young lady if you please said Matthew Maule My business with your father is over With yourself it is now to begin
Alice looked towards her father in surprise and inquiry
Yes Alice said Mr Pyncheon with some disturbance and confusion This young man—his name is Matthew Maule—professes so far as I can understand him to be able to discover through your means a certain paper or parchment which was missing long before your birth The importance of the document in question renders it advisable to neglect no possible even if improbable method of regaining it You will therefore oblige me my dear Alice by answering this persons inquiries and complying with his lawful and reasonable requests so far as they may appear to have the aforesaid object in view As I shall remain in the room you need apprehend no rude nor unbecoming deportment on the young mans part and at your slightest wish of course the investigation or whatever we may call it shall immediately be broken off
Mistress Alice Pyncheon remarked Matthew Maule with the utmost deference but yet a halfhidden sarcasm in his look and tone will no doubt feel herself quite safe in her fathers presence and under his allsufficient protection
I certainly shall entertain no manner of apprehension with my father at hand said Alice with maidenly dignity Neither do I conceive that a lady while true to herself can have aught to fear from whomsoever or in any circumstances
Poor Alice By what unhappy impulse did she thus put herself at once on terms of defiance against a strength which she could not estimate
Then Mistress Alice said Matthew Maule handing a chair—gracefully enough for a craftsman will it please you only to sit down and do me the favor though altogether beyond a poor carpenters deserts to fix your eyes on mine
Alice complied She was very proud Setting aside all advantages of rank this fair girl deemed herself conscious of a power—combined of beauty high unsullied purity and the preservative force of womanhood—that could make her sphere impenetrable unless betrayed by treachery within She instinctively knew it may be that some sinister or evil potency was now striving to pass her barriers nor would she decline the contest So Alice put womans might against mans might a match not often equal on the part of woman
Her father meanwhile had turned away and seemed absorbed in the contemplation of a landscape by Claude where a shadowy and sunstreaked vista penetrated so remotely into an ancient wood that it would have been no wonder if his fancy had lost itself in the pictures bewildering depths But in truth the picture was no more to him at that moment than the blank wall against which it hung His mind was haunted with the many and strange tales which he had heard attributing mysterious if not supernatural endowments to these Maules as well the grandson here present as his two immediate ancestors Mr Pyncheons long residence abroad and intercourse with men of wit and fashion—courtiers worldings and freethinkers—had done much towards obliterating the grim Puritan superstitions which no man of New England birth at that early period could entirely escape But on the other hand had not a whole community believed Maules grandfather to be a wizard Had not the crime been proved Had not the wizard died for it Had he not bequeathed a legacy of hatred against the Pyncheons to this only grandson who as it appeared was now about to exercise a subtle influence over the daughter of his enemys house Might not this influence be the same that was called witchcraft
Turning half around he caught a glimpse of Maules figure in the lookingglass At some paces from Alice with his arms uplifted in the air the carpenter made a gesture as if directing downward a slow ponderous and invisible weight upon the maiden
Stay Maule exclaimed Mr Pyncheon stepping forward I forbid your proceeding further
Pray my dear father do not interrupt the young man said Alice without changing her position His efforts I assure you will prove very harmless
Again Mr Pyncheon turned his eyes towards the Claude It was then his daughters will in opposition to his own that the experiment should be fully tried Henceforth therefore he did but consent not urge it And was it not for her sake far more than for his own that he desired its success That lost parchment once restored the beautiful Alice Pyncheon with the rich dowry which he could then bestow might wed an English duke or a German reigningprince instead of some New England clergyman or lawyer At the thought the ambitious father almost consented in his heart that if the devils power were needed to the accomplishment of this great object Maule might evoke him Alices own purity would be her safeguard
With his mind full of imaginary magnificence Mr Pyncheon heard a halfuttered exclamation from his daughter It was very faint and low so indistinct that there seemed but half a will to shape out the words and too undefined a purport to be intelligible Yet it was a call for help—his conscience never doubted it—and little more than a whisper to his ear it was a dismal shriek and long reechoed so in the region round his heart But this time the father did not turn
After a further interval Maule spoke
Behold your daughter said he
Mr Pyncheon came hastily forward The carpenter was standing erect in front of Alices chair and pointing his finger towards the maiden with an expression of triumphant power the limits of which could not be defined as indeed its scope stretched vaguely towards the unseen and the infinite Alice sat in an attitude of profound repose with the long brown lashes drooping over her eyes
There she is said the carpenter Speak to her
Alice My daughter exclaimed Mr Pyncheon My own Alice
She did not stir
Louder said Maule smiling
Alice Awake cried her father It troubles me to see you thus Awake
He spoke loudly with terror in his voice and close to that delicate ear which had always been so sensitive to every discord But the sound evidently reached her not It is indescribable what a sense of remote dim unattainable distance betwixt himself and Alice was impressed on the father by this impossibility of reaching her with his voice
Best touch her said Matthew Maule Shake the girl and roughly too My hands are hardened with too much use of axe saw and plane—else I might help you
Mr Pyncheon took her hand and pressed it with the earnestness of startled emotion He kissed her with so great a heartthrob in the kiss that he thought she must needs feel it Then in a gust of anger at her insensibility he shook her maiden form with a violence which the next moment it affrighted him to remember He withdrew his encircling arms and Alice—whose figure though flexible had been wholly impassive—relapsed into the same attitude as before these attempts to arouse her Maule having shifted his position her face was turned towards him slightly but with what seemed to be a reference of her very slumber to his guidance
Then it was a strange sight to behold how the man of conventionalities shook the powder out of his periwig how the reserved and stately gentleman forgot his dignity how the goldembroidered waistcoat flickered and glistened in the firelight with the convulsion of rage terror and sorrow in the human heart that was beating under it
Villain cried Mr Pyncheon shaking his clenched fist at Maule You and the fiend together have robbed me of my daughter Give her back spawn of the old wizard or you shall climb Gallows Hill in your grandfathers footsteps
Softly Mr Pyncheon said the carpenter with scornful composure Softly an it please your worship else you will spoil those rich laceruffles at your wrists Is it my crime if you have sold your daughter for the mere hope of getting a sheet of yellow parchment into your clutch There sits Mistress Alice quietly asleep Now let Matthew Maule try whether she be as proud as the carpenter found her awhile since
He spoke and Alice responded with a soft subdued inward acquiescence and a bending of her form towards him like the flame of a torch when it indicates a gentle draught of air He beckoned with his hand and rising from her chair—blindly but undoubtingly as tending to her sure and inevitable centre—the proud Alice approached him He waved her back and retreating Alice sank again into her seat
She is mine said Matthew Maule Mine by the right of the strongest spirit
In the further progress of the legend there is a long grotesque and occasionally awestriking account of the carpenters incantations if so they are to be called with a view of discovering the lost document It appears to have been his object to convert the mind of Alice into a kind of telescopic medium through which Mr Pyncheon and himself might obtain a glimpse into the spiritual world He succeeded accordingly in holding an imperfect sort of intercourse at one remove with the departed personages in whose custody the so much valued secret had been carried beyond the precincts of earth During her trance Alice described three figures as being present to her spiritualized perception One was an aged dignified sternlooking gentleman clad as for a solemn festival in grave and costly attire but with a great bloodstain on his richly wrought band the second an aged man meanly dressed with a dark and malign countenance and a broken halter about his neck the third a person not so advanced in life as the former two but beyond the middle age wearing a coarse woollen tunic and leather breeches and with a carpenters rule sticking out of his side pocket These three visionary characters possessed a mutual knowledge of the missing document One of them in truth—it was he with the bloodstain on his band—seemed unless his gestures were misunderstood to hold the parchment in his immediate keeping but was prevented by his two partners in the mystery from disburdening himself of the trust Finally when he showed a purpose of shouting forth the secret loudly enough to be heard from his own sphere into that of mortals his companions struggled with him and pressed their hands over his mouth and forthwith—whether that he were choked by it or that the secret itself was of a crimson hue—there was a fresh flow of blood upon his band Upon this the two meanly dressed figures mocked and jeered at the muchabashed old dignitary and pointed their fingers at the stain
At this juncture Maule turned to Mr Pyncheon
It will never be allowed said he The custody of this secret that would so enrich his heirs makes part of your grandfathers retribution He must choke with it until it is no longer of any value And keep you the House of the Seven Gables It is too dear bought an inheritance and too heavy with the curse upon it to be shifted yet awhile from the Colonels posterity
Mr Pyncheon tried to speak but—what with fear and passion—could make only a gurgling murmur in his throat The carpenter smiled
Aha worshipful sir—so you have old Maules blood to drink said he jeeringly
Fiend in mans shape why dost thou keep dominion over my child cried Mr Pyncheon when his choked utterance could make way Give me back my daughter Then go thy ways and may we never meet again
Your daughter said Matthew Maule Why she is fairly mine Nevertheless not to be too hard with fair Mistress Alice I will leave her in your keeping but I do not warrant you that she shall never have occasion to remember Maule the carpenter
He waved his hands with an upward motion and after a few repetitions of similar gestures the beautiful Alice Pyncheon awoke from her strange trance She awoke without the slightest recollection of her visionary experience but as one losing herself in a momentary reverie and returning to the consciousness of actual life in almost as brief an interval as the downsinking flame of the hearth should quiver again up the chimney On recognizing Matthew Maule she assumed an air of somewhat cold but gentle dignity the rather as there was a certain peculiar smile on the carpenters visage that stirred the native pride of the fair Alice So ended for that time the quest for the lost titledeed of the Pyncheon territory at the Eastward nor though often subsequently renewed has it ever yet befallen a Pyncheon to set his eye upon that parchment
But alas for the beautiful the gentle yet too haughty Alice A power that she little dreamed of had laid its grasp upon her maiden soul A will most unlike her own constrained her to do its grotesque and fantastic bidding Her father as it proved had martyred his poor child to an inordinate desire for measuring his land by miles instead of acres And therefore while Alice Pyncheon lived she was Maules slave in a bondage more humiliating a thousandfold than that which binds its chain around the body Seated by his humble fireside Maule had but to wave his hand and wherever the proud lady chanced to be—whether in her chamber or entertaining her fathers stately guests or worshipping at church—whatever her place or occupation her spirit passed from beneath her own control and bowed itself to Maule Alice laugh—the carpenter beside his hearth would say or perhaps intensely will it without a spoken word And even were it prayertime or at a funeral Alice must break into wild laughter Alice be sad—and at the instant down would come her tears quenching all the mirth of those around her like sudden rain upon a bonfire Alice dance—and dance she would not in such courtlike measures as she had learned abroad but some highpaced jig or hopskip rigadoon befitting the brisk lasses at a rustic merrymaking It seemed to be Maules impulse not to ruin Alice nor to visit her with any black or gigantic mischief which would have crowned her sorrows with the grace of tragedy but to wreak a low ungenerous scorn upon her Thus all the dignity of life was lost She felt herself too much abased and longed to change natures with some worm
One evening at a bridal party but not her own for so lost from selfcontrol she would have deemed it sin to marry poor Alice was beckoned forth by her unseen despot and constrained in her gossamer white dress and satin slippers to hasten along the street to the mean dwelling of a laboringman There was laughter and good cheer within for Matthew Maule that night was to wed the laborers daughter and had summoned proud Alice Pyncheon to wait upon his bride And so she did and when the twain were one Alice awoke out of her enchanted sleep Yet no longer proud—humbly and with a smile all steeped in sadness—she kissed Maules wife and went her way It was an inclement night the southeast wind drove the mingled snow and rain into her thinly sheltered bosom her satin slippers were wet through and through as she trod the muddy sidewalks The next day a cold soon a settled cough anon a hectic cheek a wasted form that sat beside the harpsichord and filled the house with music Music in which a strain of the heavenly choristers was echoed Oh joy For Alice had borne her last humiliation Oh greater joy For Alice was penitent of her one earthly sin and proud no more
The Pyncheons made a great funeral for Alice The kith and kin were there and the whole respectability of the town besides But last in the procession came Matthew Maule gnashing his teeth as if he would have bitten his own heart in twain—the darkest and wofullest man that ever walked behind a corpse He meant to humble Alice not to kill her but he had taken a womans delicate soul into his rude gripe to play with—and she was dead
XIV Phoebes GoodBye
HOLGRAVE plunging into his tale with the energy and absorption natural to a young author had given a good deal of action to the parts capable of being developed and exemplified in that manner He now observed that a certain remarkable drowsiness wholly unlike that with which the reader possibly feels himself affected had been flung over the senses of his auditress It was the effect unquestionably of the mystic gesticulations by which he had sought to bring bodily before Phoebes perception the figure of the mesmerizing carpenter With the lids drooping over her eyes—now lifted for an instant and drawn down again as with leaden weights—she leaned slightly towards him and seemed almost to regulate her breath by his Holgrave gazed at her as he rolled up his manuscript and recognized an incipient stage of that curious psychological condition which as he had himself told Phoebe he possessed more than an ordinary faculty of producing A veil was beginning to be muffled about her in which she could behold only him and live only in his thoughts and emotions His glance as he fastened it on the young girl grew involuntarily more concentrated in his attitude there was the consciousness of power investing his hardly mature figure with a dignity that did not belong to its physical manifestation It was evident that with but one wave of his hand and a corresponding effort of his will he could complete his mastery over Phoebes yet free and virgin spirit he could establish an influence over this good pure and simple child as dangerous and perhaps as disastrous as that which the carpenter of his legend had acquired and exercised over the illfated Alice
To a disposition like Holgraves at once speculative and active there is no temptation so great as the opportunity of acquiring empire over the human spirit nor any idea more seductive to a young man than to become the arbiter of a young girls destiny Let us therefore—whatever his defects of nature and education and in spite of his scorn for creeds and institutions—concede to the daguerreotypist the rare and high quality of reverence for anothers individuality Let us allow him integrity also forever after to be confided in since he forbade himself to twine that one link more which might have rendered his spell over Phoebe indissoluble
He made a slight gesture upward with his hand
You really mortify me my dear Miss Phoebe he exclaimed smiling halfsarcastically at her My poor story it is but too evident will never do for Godey or Graham Only think of your falling asleep at what I hoped the newspaper critics would pronounce a most brilliant powerful imaginative pathetic and original winding up Well the manuscript must serve to light lamps with—if indeed being so imbued with my gentle dulness it is any longer capable of flame
Me asleep How can you say so answered Phoebe as unconscious of the crisis through which she had passed as an infant of the precipice to the verge of which it has rolled No no I consider myself as having been very attentive and though I dont remember the incidents quite distinctly yet I have an impression of a vast deal of trouble and calamity—so no doubt the story will prove exceedingly attractive
By this time the sun had gone down and was tinting the clouds towards the zenith with those bright hues which are not seen there until some time after sunset and when the horizon has quite lost its richer brilliancy The moon too which had long been climbing overhead and unobtrusively melting its disk into the azure—like an ambitious demagogue who hides his aspiring purpose by assuming the prevalent hue of popular sentiment—now began to shine out broad and oval in its middle pathway These silvery beams were already powerful enough to change the character of the lingering daylight They softened and embellished the aspect of the old house although the shadows fell deeper into the angles of its many gables and lay brooding under the projecting story and within the halfopen door With the lapse of every moment the garden grew more picturesque the fruittrees shrubbery and flowerbushes had a dark obscurity among them The commonplace characteristics—which at noontide it seemed to have taken a century of sordid life to accumulate—were now transfigured by a charm of romance A hundred mysterious years were whispering among the leaves whenever the slight seabreeze found its way thither and stirred them Through the foliage that roofed the little summerhouse the moonlight flickered to and fro and fell silvery white on the dark floor the table and the circular bench with a continual shift and play according as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs admitted or shut out the glimmer
So sweetly cool was the atmosphere after all the feverish day that the summer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid moonlight with a dash of icy temper in them out of a silver vase Here and there a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human heart and gave it youth again and sympathy with the eternal youth of nature The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence fell It made him feel—what he sometimes almost forgot thrust so early as he had been into the rude struggle of man with man—how youthful he still was
It seems to me he observed that I never watched the coming of so beautiful an eve and never felt anything so very much like happiness as at this moment After all what a good world we live in How good and beautiful How young it is too with nothing really rotten or ageworn in it This old house for example which sometimes has positively oppressed my breath with its smell of decaying timber And this garden where the black mould always clings to my spade as if I were a sexton delving in a graveyard Could I keep the feeling that now possesses me the garden would every day be virgin soil with the earths first freshness in the flavor of its beans and squashes and the house—it would be like a bower in Eden blossoming with the earliest roses that God ever made Moonlight and the sentiment in mans heart responsive to it are the greatest of renovators and reformers And all other reform and renovation I suppose will prove to be no better than moonshine
I have been happier than I am now at least much gayer said Phoebe thoughtfully Yet I am sensible of a great charm in this brightening moonlight and I love to watch how the day tired as it is lags away reluctantly and hates to be called yesterday so soon I never cared much about moonlight before What is there I wonder so beautiful in it tonight
And you have never felt it before inquired the artist looking earnestly at the girl through the twilight
Never answered Phoebe and life does not look the same now that I have felt it so It seems as if I had looked at everything hitherto in broad daylight or else in the ruddy light of a cheerful fire glimmering and dancing through a room Ah poor me she added with a halfmelancholy laugh I shall never be so merry as before I knew Cousin Hepzibah and poor Cousin Clifford I have grown a great deal older in this little time Older and I hope wiser and—not exactly sadder—but certainly with not half so much lightness in my spirits I have given them my sunshine and have been glad to give it but of course I cannot both give and keep it They are welcome notwithstanding
You have lost nothing Phoebe worth keeping nor which it was possible to keep said Holgrave after a pause Our first youth is of no value for we are never conscious of it until after it is gone But sometimes—always I suspect unless one is exceedingly unfortunate—there comes a sense of second youth gushing out of the hearts joy at being in love or possibly it may come to crown some other grand festival in life if any other such there be This bemoaning of ones self as you do now over the first careless shallow gayety of youth departed and this profound happiness at youth regained—so much deeper and richer than that we lost—are essential to the souls development In some cases the two states come almost simultaneously and mingle the sadness and the rapture in one mysterious emotion
I hardly think I understand you said Phoebe
No wonder replied Holgrave smiling for I have told you a secret which I hardly began to know before I found myself giving it utterance Remember it however and when the truth becomes clear to you then think of this moonlight scene
It is entirely moonlight now except only a little flush of faint crimson upward from the west between those buildings remarked Phoebe I must go in Cousin Hepzibah is not quick at figures and will give herself a headache over the days accounts unless I help her
But Holgrave detained her a little longer
Miss Hepzibah tells me observed he that you return to the country in a few days
Yes but only for a little while answered Phoebe for I look upon this as my present home I go to make a few arrangements and to take a more deliberate leave of my mother and friends It is pleasant to live where one is much desired and very useful and I think I may have the satisfaction of feeling myself so here
You surely may and more than you imagine said the artist Whatever health comfort and natural life exists in the house is embodied in your person These blessings came along with you and will vanish when you leave the threshold Miss Hepzibah by secluding herself from society has lost all true relation with it and is in fact dead although she galvanizes herself into a semblance of life and stands behind her counter afflicting the world with a greatlytobedeprecated scowl Your poor cousin Clifford is another dead and longburied person on whom the governor and council have wrought a necromantic miracle I should not wonder if he were to crumble away some morning after you are gone and nothing be seen of him more except a heap of dust Miss Hepzibah at any rate will lose what little flexibility she has They both exist by you
I should be very sorry to think so answered Phoebe gravely But it is true that my small abilities were precisely what they needed and I have a real interest in their welfare—an odd kind of motherly sentiment—which I wish you would not laugh at And let me tell you frankly Mr Holgrave I am sometimes puzzled to know whether you wish them well or ill
Undoubtedly said the daguerreotypist I do feel an interest in this antiquated povertystricken old maiden lady and this degraded and shattered gentleman—this abortive lover of the beautiful A kindly interest too helpless old children that they are But you have no conception what a different kind of heart mine is from your own It is not my impulse as regards these two individuals either to help or hinder but to look on to analyze to explain matters to myself and to comprehend the drama which for almost two hundred years has been dragging its slow length over the ground where you and I now tread If permitted to witness the close I doubt not to derive a moral satisfaction from it go matters how they may There is a conviction within me that the end draws nigh But though Providence sent you hither to help and sends me only as a privileged and meet spectator I pledge myself to lend these unfortunate beings whatever aid I can
I wish you would speak more plainly cried Phoebe perplexed and displeased and above all that you would feel more like a Christian and a human being How is it possible to see people in distress without desiring more than anything else to help and comfort them You talk as if this old house were a theatre and you seem to look at Hepzibahs and Cliffords misfortunes and those of generations before them as a tragedy such as I have seen acted in the hall of a country hotel only the present one appears to be played exclusively for your amusement I do not like this The play costs the performers too much and the audience is too coldhearted
You are severe said Holgrave compelled to recognize a degree of truth in the piquant sketch of his own mood
And then continued Phoebe what can you mean by your conviction which you tell me of that the end is drawing near Do you know of any new trouble hanging over my poor relatives If so tell me at once and I will not leave them
Forgive me Phoebe said the daguerreotypist holding out his hand to which the girl was constrained to yield her own I am somewhat of a mystic it must be confessed The tendency is in my blood together with the faculty of mesmerism which might have brought me to Gallows Hill in the good old times of witchcraft Believe me if I were really aware of any secret the disclosure of which would benefit your friends—who are my own friends likewise—you should learn it before we part But I have no such knowledge
You hold something back said Phoebe
Nothing—no secrets but my own answered Holgrave I can perceive indeed that Judge Pyncheon still keeps his eye on Clifford in whose ruin he had so large a share His motives and intentions however are a mystery to me He is a determined and relentless man with the genuine character of an inquisitor and had he any object to gain by putting Clifford to the rack I verily believe that he would wrench his joints from their sockets in order to accomplish it But so wealthy and eminent as he is—so powerful in his own strength and in the support of society on all sides—what can Judge Pyncheon have to hope or fear from the imbecile branded halftorpid Clifford
Yet urged Phoebe you did speak as if misfortune were impending
Oh that was because I am morbid replied the artist My mind has a twist aside like almost everybodys mind except your own Moreover it is so strange to find myself an inmate of this old Pyncheon House and sitting in this old garden—hark how Maules well is murmuring—that were it only for this one circumstance I cannot help fancying that Destiny is arranging its fifth act for a catastrophe
There cried Phoebe with renewed vexation for she was by nature as hostile to mystery as the sunshine to a dark corner You puzzle me more than ever
Then let us part friends said Holgrave pressing her hand Or if not friends let us part before you entirely hate me You who love everybody else in the world
Goodby then said Phoebe frankly I do not mean to be angry a great while and should be sorry to have you think so There has Cousin Hepzibah been standing in the shadow of the doorway this quarter of an hour past She thinks I stay too long in the damp garden So goodnight and goodby
On the second morning thereafter Phoebe might have been seen in her straw bonnet with a shawl on one arm and a little carpetbag on the other bidding adieu to Hepzibah and Cousin Clifford She was to take a seat in the next train of cars which would transport her to within half a dozen miles of her country village
The tears were in Phoebes eyes a smile dewy with affectionate regret was glimmering around her pleasant mouth She wondered how it came to pass that her life of a few weeks here in this heavyhearted old mansion had taken such hold of her and so melted into her associations as now to seem a more important centrepoint of remembrance than all which had gone before How had Hepzibah—grim silent and irresponsive to her overflow of cordial sentiment—contrived to win so much love And Clifford—in his abortive decay with the mystery of fearful crime upon him and the close prisonatmosphere yet lurking in his breath—how had he transformed himself into the simplest child whom Phoebe felt bound to watch over and be as it were the providence of his unconsidered hours Everything at that instant of farewell stood out prominently to her view Look where she would lay her hand on what she might the object responded to her consciousness as if a moist human heart were in it
She peeped from the window into the garden and felt herself more regretful at leaving this spot of black earth vitiated with such an agelong growth of weeds than joyful at the idea of again scenting her pine forests and fresh cloverfields She called Chanticleer his two wives and the venerable chicken and threw them some crumbs of bread from the breakfasttable These being hastily gobbled up the chicken spread its wings and alighted close by Phoebe on the windowsill where it looked gravely into her face and vented its emotions in a croak Phoebe bade it be a good old chicken during her absence and promised to bring it a little bag of buckwheat
Ah Phoebe remarked Hepzibah you do not smile so naturally as when you came to us Then the smile chose to shine out now you choose it should It is well that you are going back for a little while into your native air There has been too much weight on your spirits The house is too gloomy and lonesome the shop is full of vexations and as for me I have no faculty of making things look brighter than they are Dear Clifford has been your only comfort
Come hither Phoebe suddenly cried her cousin Clifford who had said very little all the morning Close—closer—and look me in the face
Phoebe put one of her small hands on each elbow of his chair and leaned her face towards him so that he might peruse it as carefully as he would It is probable that the latent emotions of this parting hour had revived in some degree his bedimmed and enfeebled faculties At any rate Phoebe soon felt that if not the profound insight of a seer yet a more than feminine delicacy of appreciation was making her heart the subject of its regard A moment before she had known nothing which she would have sought to hide Now as if some secret were hinted to her own consciousness through the medium of anothers perception she was fain to let her eyelids droop beneath Cliffords gaze A blush too—the redder because she strove hard to keep it down—ascended bigger and higher in a tide of fitful progress until even her brow was all suffused with it
It is enough Phoebe said Clifford with a melancholy smile When I first saw you you were the prettiest little maiden in the world and now you have deepened into beauty Girlhood has passed into womanhood the bud is a bloom Go now—I feel lonelier than I did
Phoebe took leave of the desolate couple and passed through the shop twinkling her eyelids to shake off a dewdrop for—considering how brief her absence was to be and therefore the folly of being cast down about it—she would not so far acknowledge her tears as to dry them with her handkerchief On the doorstep she met the little urchin whose marvellous feats of gastronomy have been recorded in the earlier pages of our narrative She took from the window some specimen or other of natural history—her eyes being too dim with moisture to inform her accurately whether it was a rabbit or a hippopotamus—put it into the childs hand as a parting gift and went her way Old Uncle Venner was just coming out of his door with a woodhorse and saw on his shoulder and trudging along the street he scrupled not to keep company with Phoebe so far as their paths lay together nor in spite of his patched coat and rusty beaver and the curious fashion of his towcloth trousers could she find it in her heart to outwalk him
We shall miss you next Sabbath afternoon observed the street philosopher It is unaccountable how little while it takes some folks to grow just as natural to a man as his own breath and begging your pardon Miss Phoebe though there can be no offence in an old mans saying it thats just what youve grown to me My years have been a great many and your life is but just beginning and yet you are somehow as familiar to me as if I had found you at my mothers door and you had blossomed like a running vine all along my pathway since Come back soon or I shall be gone to my farm for I begin to find these woodsawing jobs a little too tough for my backache
Very soon Uncle Venner replied Phoebe
And let it be all the sooner Phoebe for the sake of those poor souls yonder continued her companion They can never do without you now—never Phoebe never—no more than if one of Gods angels had been living with them and making their dismal house pleasant and comfortable Dont it seem to you theyd be in a sad case if some pleasant summer morning like this the angel should spread his wings and fly to the place he came from Well just so they feel now that youre going home by the railroad They cant bear it Miss Phoebe so be sure to come back
I am no angel Uncle Venner said Phoebe smiling as she offered him her hand at the streetcorner But I suppose people never feel so much like angels as when they are doing what little good they may So I shall certainly come back
Thus parted the old man and the rosy girl and Phoebe took the wings of the morning and was soon flitting almost as rapidly away as if endowed with the aerial locomotion of the angels to whom Uncle Venner had so graciously compared her
XV The Scowl and Smile
SEVERAL days passed over the Seven Gables heavily and drearily enough In fact not to attribute the whole gloom of sky and earth to the one inauspicious circumstance of Phoebes departure an easterly storm had set in and indefatigably apply itself to the task of making the black roof and walls of the old house look more cheerless than ever before Yet was the outside not half so cheerless as the interior Poor Clifford was cut off at once from all his scanty resources of enjoyment Phoebe was not there nor did the sunshine fall upon the floor The garden with its muddy walks and the chill dripping foliage of its summerhouse was an image to be shuddered at Nothing flourished in the cold moist pitiless atmosphere drifting with the brackish scud of seabreezes except the moss along the joints of the shingleroof and the great bunch of weeds that had lately been suffering from drought in the angle between the two front gables
As for Hepzibah she seemed not merely possessed with the east wind but to be in her very person only another phase of this gray and sullen spell of weather the EastWind itself grim and disconsolate in a rusty black silk gown and with a turban of cloudwreaths on its head The custom of the shop fell off because a story got abroad that she soured her small beer and other damageable commodities by scowling on them It is perhaps true that the public had something reasonably to complain of in her deportment but towards Clifford she was neither illtempered nor unkind nor felt less warmth of heart than always had it been possible to make it reach him The inutility of her best efforts however palsied the poor old gentlewoman She could do little else than sit silently in a corner of the room when the wet peartree branches sweeping across the small windows created a noonday dusk which Hepzibah unconsciously darkened with her woebegone aspect It was no fault of Hepzibahs Everything—even the old chairs and tables that had known what weather was for three or four such lifetimes as her own—looked as damp and chill as if the present were their worst experience The picture of the Puritan Colonel shivered on the wall The house itself shivered from every attic of its seven gables down to the great kitchen fireplace which served all the better as an emblem of the mansions heart because though built for warmth it was now so comfortless and empty
Hepzibah attempted to enliven matters by a fire in the parlor But the storm demon kept watch above and whenever a flame was kindled drove the smoke back again choking the chimneys sooty throat with its own breath Nevertheless during four days of this miserable storm Clifford wrapt himself in an old cloak and occupied his customary chair On the morning of the fifth when summoned to breakfast he responded only by a brokenhearted murmur expressive of a determination not to leave his bed His sister made no attempt to change his purpose In fact entirely as she loved him Hepzibah could hardly have borne any longer the wretched duty—so impracticable by her few and rigid faculties—of seeking pastime for a still sensitive but ruined mind critical and fastidious without force or volition It was at least something short of positive despair that today she might sit shivering alone and not suffer continually a new grief and unreasonable pang of remorse at every fitful sigh of her fellow sufferer
But Clifford it seemed though he did not make his appearance below stairs had after all bestirred himself in quest of amusement In the course of the forenoon Hepzibah heard a note of music which there being no other tuneful contrivance in the House of the Seven Gables she knew must proceed from Alice Pyncheons harpsichord She was aware that Clifford in his youth had possessed a cultivated taste for music and a considerable degree of skill in its practice It was difficult however to conceive of his retaining an accomplishment to which daily exercise is so essential in the measure indicated by the sweet airy and delicate though most melancholy strain that now stole upon her ear Nor was it less marvellous that the longsilent instrument should be capable of so much melody Hepzibah involuntarily thought of the ghostly harmonies prelusive of death in the family which were attributed to the legendary Alice But it was perhaps proof of the agency of other than spiritual fingers that after a few touches the chords seemed to snap asunder with their own vibrations and the music ceased
But a harsher sound succeeded to the mysterious notes nor was the easterly day fated to pass without an event sufficient in itself to poison for Hepzibah and Clifford the balmiest air that ever brought the hummingbirds along with it The final echoes of Alice Pyncheons performance or Cliffords if his we must consider it were driven away by no less vulgar a dissonance than the ringing of the shopbell A foot was heard scraping itself on the threshold and thence somewhat ponderously stepping on the floor Hepzibah delayed a moment while muffling herself in a faded shawl which had been her defensive armor in a forty years warfare against the east wind A characteristic sound however—neither a cough nor a hem but a kind of rumbling and reverberating spasm in somebodys capacious depth of chest—impelled her to hurry forward with that aspect of fierce faintheartedness so common to women in cases of perilous emergency Few of her sex on such occasions have ever looked so terrible as our poor scowling Hepzibah But the visitor quietly closed the shopdoor behind him stood up his umbrella against the counter and turned a visage of composed benignity to meet the alarm and anger which his appearance had excited
Hepzibahs presentiment had not deceived her It was no other than Judge Pyncheon who after in vain trying the front door had now effected his entrance into the shop
How do you do Cousin Hepzibah—and how does this most inclement weather affect our poor Clifford began the Judge and wonderful it seemed indeed that the easterly storm was not put to shame or at any rate a little mollified by the genial benevolence of his smile I could not rest without calling to ask once more whether I can in any manner promote his comfort or your own
You can do nothing said Hepzibah controlling her agitation as well as she could I devote myself to Clifford He has every comfort which his situation admits of
But allow me to suggest dear cousin rejoined the Judge you err—in all affection and kindness no doubt and with the very best intentions—but you do err nevertheless in keeping your brother so secluded Why insulate him thus from all sympathy and kindness Clifford alas has had too much of solitude Now let him try society—the society that is to say of kindred and old friends Let me for instance but see Clifford and I will answer for the good effect of the interview
You cannot see him answered Hepzibah Clifford has kept his bed since yesterday
What How Is he ill exclaimed Judge Pyncheon starting with what seemed to be angry alarm for the very frown of the old Puritan darkened through the room as he spoke Nay then I must and will see him What if he should die
He is in no danger of death said Hepzibah—and added with bitterness that she could repress no longer none unless he shall be persecuted to death now by the same man who long ago attempted it
Cousin Hepzibah said the Judge with an impressive earnestness of manner which grew even to tearful pathos as he proceeded is it possible that you do not perceive how unjust how unkind how unchristian is this constant this longcontinued bitterness against me for a part which I was constrained by duty and conscience by the force of law and at my own peril to act What did I do in detriment to Clifford which it was possible to leave undone How could you his sister—if for your neverending sorrow as it has been for mine you had known what I did—have shown greater tenderness And do you think cousin that it has cost me no pang—that it has left no anguish in my bosom from that day to this amidst all the prosperity with which Heaven has blessed me—or that I do not now rejoice when it is deemed consistent with the dues of public justice and the welfare of society that this dear kinsman this early friend this nature so delicately and beautifully constituted—so unfortunate let us pronounce him and forbear to say so guilty—that our own Clifford in fine should be given back to life and its possibilities of enjoyment Ah you little know me Cousin Hepzibah You little know this heart It now throbs at the thought of meeting him There lives not the human being except yourself—and you not more than I who has shed so many tears for Cliffords calamity You behold some of them now There is none who would so delight to promote his happiness Try me Hepzibah—try me Cousin—try the man whom you have treated as your enemy and Cliffords—try Jaffrey Pyncheon and you shall find him true to the hearts core
In the name of Heaven cried Hepzibah provoked only to intenser indignation by this outgush of the inestimable tenderness of a stern nature—in Gods name whom you insult and whose power I could almost question since he hears you utter so many false words without palsying your tongue—give over I beseech you this loathsome pretence of affection for your victim You hate him Say so like a man You cherish at this moment some black purpose against him in your heart Speak it out at once—or if you hope so to promote it better hide it till you can triumph in its success But never speak again of your love for my poor brother I cannot bear it It will drive me beyond a womans decency It will drive me mad Forbear Not another word It will make me spurn you
For once Hepzibahs wrath had given her courage She had spoken But after all was this unconquerable distrust of Judge Pyncheons integrity and this utter denial apparently of his claim to stand in the ring of human sympathies—were they founded in any just perception of his character or merely the offspring of a womans unreasonable prejudice deduced from nothing
The Judge beyond all question was a man of eminent respectability The church acknowledged it the state acknowledged it It was denied by nobody In all the very extensive sphere of those who knew him whether in his public or private capacities there was not an individual—except Hepzibah and some lawless mystic like the daguerreotypist and possibly a few political opponents—who would have dreamed of seriously disputing his claim to a high and honorable place in the worlds regard Nor we must do him the further justice to say did Judge Pyncheon himself probably entertain many or very frequent doubts that his enviable reputation accorded with his deserts His conscience therefore usually considered the surest witness to a mans integrity—his conscience unless it might be for the little space of five minutes in the twentyfour hours or now and then some black day in the whole years circle—his conscience bore an accordant testimony with the worlds laudatory voice And yet strong as this evidence may seem to be we should hesitate to peril our own conscience on the assertion that the Judge and the consenting world were right and that poor Hepzibah with her solitary prejudice was wrong Hidden from mankind—forgotten by himself or buried so deeply under a sculptured and ornamented pile of ostentatious deeds that his daily life could take no note of it—there may have lurked some evil and unsightly thing Nay we could almost venture to say further that a daily guilt might have been acted by him continually renewed and reddening forth afresh like the miraculous bloodstain of a murder without his necessarily and at every moment being aware of it
Men of strong minds great force of character and a hard texture of the sensibilities are very capable of falling into mistakes of this kind They are ordinarily men to whom forms are of paramount importance Their field of action lies among the external phenomena of life They possess vast ability in grasping and arranging and appropriating to themselves the big heavy solid unrealities such as gold landed estate offices of trust and emolument and public honors With these materials and with deeds of goodly aspect done in the public eye an individual of this class builds up as it were a tall and stately edifice which in the view of other people and ultimately in his own view is no other than the mans character or the man himself Behold therefore a palace Its splendid halls and suites of spacious apartments are floored with a mosaicwork of costly marbles its windows the whole height of each room admit the sunshine through the most transparent of plateglass its high cornices are gilded and its ceilings gorgeously painted and a lofty dome—through which from the central pavement you may gaze up to the sky as with no obstructing medium between—surmounts the whole With what fairer and nobler emblem could any man desire to shadow forth his character Ah but in some low and obscure nook—some narrow closet on the groundfloor shut locked and bolted and the key flung away—or beneath the marble pavement in a stagnant waterpuddle with the richest pattern of mosaicwork above—may lie a corpse half decayed and still decaying and diffusing its deathscent all through the palace The inhabitant will not be conscious of it for it has long been his daily breath Neither will the visitors for they smell only the rich odors which the master sedulously scatters through the palace and the incense which they bring and delight to burn before him Now and then perchance comes in a seer before whose sadly gifted eye the whole structure melts into thin air leaving only the hidden nook the bolted closet with the cobwebs festooned over its forgotten door or the deadly hole under the pavement and the decaying corpse within Here then we are to seek the true emblem of the mans character and of the deed that gives whatever reality it possesses to his life And beneath the show of a marble palace that pool of stagnant water foul with many impurities and perhaps tinged with blood—that secret abomination above which possibly he may say his prayers without remembering it—is this mans miserable soul
To apply this train of remark somewhat more closely to Judge Pyncheon We might say without in the least imputing crime to a personage of his eminent respectability that there was enough of splendid rubbish in his life to cover up and paralyze a more active and subtile conscience than the Judge was ever troubled with The purity of his judicial character while on the bench the faithfulness of his public service in subsequent capacities his devotedness to his party and the rigid consistency with which he had adhered to its principles or at all events kept pace with its organized movements his remarkable zeal as president of a Bible society his unimpeachable integrity as treasurer of a widows and orphans fund his benefits to horticulture by producing two much esteemed varieties of the pear and to agriculture through the agency of the famous Pyncheon bull the cleanliness of his moral deportment for a great many years past the severity with which he had frowned upon and finally cast off an expensive and dissipated son delaying forgiveness until within the final quarter of an hour of the young mans life his prayers at morning and eventide and graces at mealtime his efforts in furtherance of the temperance cause his confining himself since the last attack of the gout to five diurnal glasses of old sherry wine the snowy whiteness of his linen the polish of his boots the handsomeness of his goldheaded cane the square and roomy fashion of his coat and the fineness of its material and in general the studied propriety of his dress and equipment the scrupulousness with which he paid public notice in the street by a bow a lifting of the hat a nod or a motion of the hand to all and sundry of his acquaintances rich or poor the smile of broad benevolence wherewith he made it a point to gladden the whole world—what room could possibly be found for darker traits in a portrait made up of lineaments like these This proper face was what he beheld in the lookingglass This admirably arranged life was what he was conscious of in the progress of every day Then might not he claim to be its result and sum and say to himself and the community Behold Judge Pyncheon there
And allowing that many many years ago in his early and reckless youth he had committed some one wrong act—or that even now the inevitable force of circumstances should occasionally make him do one questionable deed among a thousand praiseworthy or at least blameless ones—would you characterize the Judge by that one necessary deed and that halfforgotten act and let it overshadow the fair aspect of a lifetime What is there so ponderous in evil that a thumbs bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil which were heaped into the other scale This scale and balance system is a favorite one with people of Judge Pyncheons brotherhood A hard cold man thus unfortunately situated seldom or never looking inward and resolutely taking his idea of himself from what purports to be his image as reflected in the mirror of public opinion can scarcely arrive at true selfknowledge except through loss of property and reputation Sickness will not always help him do it not always the deathhour
But our affair now is with Judge Pyncheon as he stood confronting the fierce outbreak of Hepzibahs wrath Without premeditation to her own surprise and indeed terror she had given vent for once to the inveteracy of her resentment cherished against this kinsman for thirty years
Thus far the Judges countenance had expressed mild forbearance—grave and almost gentle deprecation of his cousins unbecoming violence—free and Christianlike forgiveness of the wrong inflicted by her words But when those words were irrevocably spoken his look assumed sternness the sense of power and immitigable resolve and this with so natural and imperceptible a change that it seemed as if the iron man had stood there from the first and the meek man not at all The effect was as when the light vapory clouds with their soft coloring suddenly vanish from the stony brow of a precipitous mountain and leave there the frown which you at once feel to be eternal Hepzibah almost adopted the insane belief that it was her old Puritan ancestor and not the modern Judge on whom she had just been wreaking the bitterness of her heart Never did a man show stronger proof of the lineage attributed to him than Judge Pyncheon at this crisis by his unmistakable resemblance to the picture in the inner room
Cousin Hepzibah said he very calmly it is time to have done with this
With all my heart answered she Then why do you persecute us any longer Leave poor Clifford and me in peace Neither of us desires anything better
It is my purpose to see Clifford before I leave this house continued the Judge Do not act like a madwoman Hepzibah I am his only friend and an allpowerful one Has it never occurred to you—are you so blind as not to have seen—that without not merely my consent but my efforts my representations the exertion of my whole influence political official personal Clifford would never have been what you call free Did you think his release a triumph over me Not so my good cousin not so by any means The furthest possible from that No but it was the accomplishment of a purpose long entertained on my part I set him free
You answered Hepzibah I never will believe it He owed his dungeon to you his freedom to Gods providence
I set him free reaffirmed Judge Pyncheon with the calmest composure And I came hither now to decide whether he shall retain his freedom It will depend upon himself For this purpose I must see him
Never—it would drive him mad exclaimed Hepzibah but with an irresoluteness sufficiently perceptible to the keen eye of the Judge for without the slightest faith in his good intentions she knew not whether there was most to dread in yielding or resistance And why should you wish to see this wretched broken man who retains hardly a fraction of his intellect and will hide even that from an eye which has no love in it
He shall see love enough in mine if that be all said the Judge with wellgrounded confidence in the benignity of his aspect But Cousin Hepzibah you confess a great deal and very much to the purpose Now listen and I will frankly explain my reasons for insisting on this interview At the death thirty years since of our uncle Jaffrey it was found—I know not whether the circumstance ever attracted much of your attention among the sadder interests that clustered round that event—but it was found that his visible estate of every kind fell far short of any estimate ever made of it He was supposed to be immensely rich Nobody doubted that he stood among the weightiest men of his day It was one of his eccentricities however—and not altogether a folly neither—to conceal the amount of his property by making distant and foreign investments perhaps under other names than his own and by various means familiar enough to capitalists but unnecessary here to be specified By Uncle Jaffreys last will and testament as you are aware his entire property was bequeathed to me with the single exception of a life interest to yourself in this old family mansion and the strip of patrimonial estate remaining attached to it
And do you seek to deprive us of that asked Hepzibah unable to restrain her bitter contempt Is this your price for ceasing to persecute poor Clifford
Certainly not my dear cousin answered the Judge smiling benevolently On the contrary as you must do me the justice to own I have constantly expressed my readiness to double or treble your resources whenever you should make up your mind to accept any kindness of that nature at the hands of your kinsman No no But here lies the gist of the matter Of my uncles unquestionably great estate as I have said not the half—no not one third as I am fully convinced—was apparent after his death Now I have the best possible reasons for believing that your brother Clifford can give me a clew to the recovery of the remainder
Clifford—Clifford know of any hidden wealth Clifford have it in his power to make you rich cried the old gentlewoman affected with a sense of something like ridicule at the idea Impossible You deceive yourself It is really a thing to laugh at
It is as certain as that I stand here said Judge Pyncheon striking his goldheaded cane on the floor and at the same time stamping his foot as if to express his conviction the more forcibly by the whole emphasis of his substantial person Clifford told me so himself
No no exclaimed Hepzibah incredulously You are dreaming Cousin Jaffrey
I do not belong to the dreaming class of men said the Judge quietly Some months before my uncles death Clifford boasted to me of the possession of the secret of incalculable wealth His purpose was to taunt me and excite my curiosity I know it well But from a pretty distinct recollection of the particulars of our conversation I am thoroughly convinced that there was truth in what he said Clifford at this moment if he chooses—and choose he must—can inform me where to find the schedule the documents the evidences in whatever shape they exist of the vast amount of Uncle Jaffreys missing property He has the secret His boast was no idle word It had a directness an emphasis a particularity that showed a backbone of solid meaning within the mystery of his expression
But what could have been Cliffords object asked Hepzibah in concealing it so long
It was one of the bad impulses of our fallen nature replied the Judge turning up his eyes He looked upon me as his enemy He considered me as the cause of his overwhelming disgrace his imminent peril of death his irretrievable ruin There was no great probability therefore of his volunteering information out of his dungeon that should elevate me still higher on the ladder of prosperity But the moment has now come when he must give up his secret
And what if he should refuse inquired Hepzibah Or—as I steadfastly believe—what if he has no knowledge of this wealth
My dear cousin said Judge Pyncheon with a quietude which he had the power of making more formidable than any violence since your brothers return I have taken the precaution a highly proper one in the near kinsman and natural guardian of an individual so situated to have his deportment and habits constantly and carefully overlooked Your neighbors have been eyewitnesses to whatever has passed in the garden The butcher the baker the fishmonger some of the customers of your shop and many a prying old woman have told me several of the secrets of your interior A still larger circle—I myself among the rest—can testify to his extravagances at the arched window Thousands beheld him a week or two ago on the point of flinging himself thence into the street From all this testimony I am led to apprehend—reluctantly and with deep grief—that Cliffords misfortunes have so affected his intellect never very strong that he cannot safely remain at large The alternative you must be aware—and its adoption will depend entirely on the decision which I am now about to make—the alternative is his confinement probably for the remainder of his life in a public asylum for persons in his unfortunate state of mind
You cannot mean it shrieked Hepzibah
Should my cousin Clifford continued Judge Pyncheon wholly undisturbed from mere malice and hatred of one whose interests ought naturally to be dear to him—a mode of passion that as often as any other indicates mental disease—should he refuse me the information so important to myself and which he assuredly possesses I shall consider it the one needed jot of evidence to satisfy my mind of his insanity And once sure of the course pointed out by conscience you know me too well Cousin Hepzibah to entertain a doubt that I shall pursue it
O Jaffrey—Cousin Jaffrey cried Hepzibah mournfully not passionately it is you that are diseased in mind not Clifford You have forgotten that a woman was your mother—that you have had sisters brothers children of your own—or that there ever was affection between man and man or pity from one man to another in this miserable world Else how could you have dreamed of this You are not young Cousin Jaffrey—no nor middleaged—but already an old man The hair is white upon your head How many years have you to live Are you not rich enough for that little time Shall you be hungry—shall you lack clothes or a roof to shelter you—between this point and the grave No but with the half of what you now possess you could revel in costly food and wines and build a house twice as splendid as you now inhabit and make a far greater show to the world—and yet leave riches to your only son to make him bless the hour of your death Then why should you do this cruel cruel thing—so mad a thing that I know not whether to call it wicked Alas Cousin Jaffrey this hard and grasping spirit has run in our blood these two hundred years You are but doing over again in another shape what your ancestor before you did and sending down to your posterity the curse inherited from him
Talk sense Hepzibah for Heavens sake exclaimed the Judge with the impatience natural to a reasonable man on hearing anything so utterly absurd as the above in a discussion about matters of business I have told you my determination I am not apt to change Clifford must give up his secret or take the consequences And let him decide quickly for I have several affairs to attend to this morning and an important dinner engagement with some political friends
Clifford has no secret answered Hepzibah And God will not let you do the thing you meditate
We shall see said the unmoved Judge Meanwhile choose whether you will summon Clifford and allow this business to be amicably settled by an interview between two kinsmen or drive me to harsher measures which I should be most happy to feel myself justified in avoiding The responsibility is altogether on your part
You are stronger than I said Hepzibah after a brief consideration and you have no pity in your strength Clifford is not now insane but the interview which you insist upon may go far to make him so Nevertheless knowing you as I do I believe it to be my best course to allow you to judge for yourself as to the improbability of his possessing any valuable secret I will call Clifford Be merciful in your dealings with him—be far more merciful than your heart bids you be—for God is looking at you Jaffrey Pyncheon
The Judge followed his cousin from the shop where the foregoing conversation had passed into the parlor and flung himself heavily into the great ancestral chair Many a former Pyncheon had found repose in its capacious arms rosy children after their sports young men dreamy with love grown men weary with cares old men burdened with winters—they had mused and slumbered and departed to a yet profounder sleep It had been a long tradition though a doubtful one that this was the very chair seated in which the earliest of the Judges New England forefathers—he whose picture still hung upon the wall—had given a dead mans silent and stern reception to the throng of distinguished guests From that hour of evil omen until the present it may be—though we know not the secret of his heart—but it may be that no wearier and sadder man had ever sunk into the chair than this same Judge Pyncheon whom we have just beheld so immitigably hard and resolute Surely it must have been at no slight cost that he had thus fortified his soul with iron Such calmness is a mightier effort than the violence of weaker men And there was yet a heavy task for him to do Was it a little matter—a trifle to be prepared for in a single moment and to be rested from in another moment—that he must now after thirty years encounter a kinsman risen from a living tomb and wrench a secret from him or else consign him to a living tomb again
Did you speak asked Hepzibah looking in from the threshold of the parlor for she imagined that the Judge had uttered some sound which she was anxious to interpret as a relenting impulse I thought you called me back
No no gruffly answered Judge Pyncheon with a harsh frown while his brow grew almost a black purple in the shadow of the room Why should I call you back Time flies Bid Clifford come to me
The Judge had taken his watch from his vest pocket and now held it in his hand measuring the interval which was to ensue before the appearance of Clifford
XVI Cliffords Chamber
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 footworn 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 peoples garments or pale visages awaiting her on the landingplace 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 chimneycorner 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 tailors seamstress was sitting at her work Hepzibah flung herself upon that unknown womans 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
Hepzibah had little hardihood for her own proper pain and far less for what she must inflict on Clifford Of so slight a nature and so shattered by his previous calamities it could not well be short of utter ruin to bring him face to face with the hard relentless man who had been his evil destiny through life Even had there been no bitter recollections nor any hostile interest now at stake between them the mere natural repugnance of the more sensitive system to the massive weighty and unimpressible one must in itself have been disastrous to the former It would be like flinging a porcelain vase with already a crack in it against a granite column Never before had Hepzibah so adequately estimated the powerful character of her cousin Jaffrey—powerful by intellect energy of will the long habit of acting among men and as she believed by his unscrupulous pursuit of selfish ends through evil means It did but increase the difficulty that Judge Pyncheon was under a delusion as to the secret which he supposed Clifford to possess Men of his strength of purpose and customary sagacity if they chance to adopt a mistaken opinion in practical matters so wedge it and fasten it among things known to be true that to wrench it out of their minds is hardly less difficult than pulling up an oak Thus as the Judge required an impossibility of Clifford the latter as he could not perform it must needs perish For what in the grasp of a man like this was to become of Cliffords soft poetic nature that never should have had a task more stubborn than to set a life of beautiful enjoyment to the flow and rhythm of musical cadences Indeed what had become of it already Broken Blighted All but annihilated Soon to be wholly so
For a moment the thought crossed Hepzibahs mind whether Clifford might not really have such knowledge of their deceased uncles vanished estate as the Judge imputed to him She remembered some vague intimations on her brothers part which—if the supposition were not essentially preposterous—might have been so interpreted There had been schemes of travel and residence abroad daydreams of brilliant life at home and splendid castles in the air which it would have required boundless wealth to build and realize Had this wealth been in her power how gladly would Hepzibah have bestowed it all upon her ironhearted kinsman to buy for Clifford the freedom and seclusion of the desolate old house But she believed that her brothers schemes were as destitute of actual substance and purpose as a childs pictures of its future life while sitting in a little chair by its mothers knee Clifford had none but shadowy gold at his command and it was not the stuff to satisfy Judge Pyncheon
Was there no help in their extremity It seemed strange that there should be none with a city round about her It would be so easy to throw up the window and send forth a shriek at the strange agony of which everybody would come hastening to the rescue well understanding it to be the cry of a human soul at some dreadful crisis But how wild how almost laughable the fatality—and yet how continually it comes to pass thought Hepzibah in this dull delirium of a world—that whosoever and with however kindly a purpose should come to help they would be sure to help the strongest side Might and wrong combined like iron magnetized are endowed with irresistible attraction There would be Judge Pyncheon—a person eminent in the public view of high station and great wealth a philanthropist a member of Congress and of the church and intimately associated with whatever else bestows good name—so imposing in these advantageous lights that Hepzibah herself could hardly help shrinking from her own conclusions as to his hollow integrity The Judge on one side And who on the other The guilty Clifford Once a byword Now an indistinctly remembered ignominy
Nevertheless in spite of this perception that the Judge would draw all human aid to his own behalf Hepzibah was so unaccustomed to act for herself that the least word of counsel would have swayed her to any mode of action Little Phoebe Pyncheon would at once have lighted up the whole scene if not by any available suggestion yet simply by the warm vivacity of her character The idea of the artist occurred to Hepzibah Young and unknown mere vagrant adventurer as he was she had been conscious of a force in Holgrave which might well adapt him to be the champion of a crisis With this thought in her mind she unbolted a door cobwebbed and long disused but which had served as a former medium of communication between her own part of the house and the gable where the wandering daguerreotypist had now established his temporary home He was not there A book face downward on the table a roll of manuscript a halfwritten sheet a newspaper some tools of his present occupation and several rejected daguerreotypes conveyed an impression as if he were close at hand But at this period of the day as Hepzibah might have anticipated the artist was at his public rooms With an impulse of idle curiosity that flickered among her heavy thoughts she looked at one of the daguerreotypes and beheld Judge Pyncheon frowning at her Fate stared her in the face She turned back from her fruitless quest with a heartsinking sense of disappointment In all her years of seclusion she had never felt as now what it was to be alone It seemed as if the house stood in a desert or by some spell was made invisible to those who dwelt around or passed beside it so that any mode of misfortune miserable accident or crime might happen in it without the possibility of aid In her grief and wounded pride Hepzibah had spent her life in divesting herself of friends she had wilfully cast off the support which God has ordained his creatures to need from one another; and it was now her punishment that Clifford and herself would fall the easier victims to their kindred enemy
Returning to the arched window she lifted her eyes—scowling poor dimsighted Hepzibah in the face of Heaven—and strove hard to send up a prayer through the dense gray pavement of clouds Those mists had gathered as if to symbolize a great brooding mass of human trouble doubt confusion and chill indifference between earth and the better regions Her faith was too weak the prayer too heavy to be thus uplifted It fell back a lump of lead upon her heart It smote her with the wretched conviction that Providence intermeddled not in these petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow nor had any balm for these little agonies of a solitary soul but shed its justice and its mercy in a broad sunlike sweep over half the universe at once Its vastness made it nothing But Hepzibah did not see that just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window so comes a lovebeam of Gods care and pity for every separate need
At last finding no other pretext for deferring the torture that she was to inflict on Clifford—her reluctance to which was the true cause of her loitering at the window her search for the artist and even her abortive prayer—dreading also to hear the stern voice of Judge Pyncheon from below stairs chiding her delay—she crept slowly a pale griefstricken figure a dismal shape of woman with almost torpid limbs slowly to her brothers door and knocked
There was no reply
And how should there have been Her hand tremulous with the shrinking purpose which directed it had smitten so feebly against the door that the sound could hardly have gone inward She knocked again Still no response Nor was it to be wondered at She had struck with the entire force of her hearts vibration communicating by some subtile magnetism her own terror to the summons Clifford would turn his face to the pillow and cover his head beneath the bedclothes like a startled child at midnight She knocked a third time three regular strokes gentle but perfectly distinct and with meaning in them for modulate it with what cautious art we will the hand cannot help playing some tune of what we feel upon the senseless wood
Clifford returned no answer
Clifford Dear brother said Hepzibah Shall I come in
A silence
Two or three times and more Hepzibah repeated his name without result till thinking her brothers sleep unwontedly profound she undid the door and entering found the chamber vacant How could he have come forth and when without her knowledge Was it possible that in spite of the stormy day and worn out with the irksomeness within doors he had betaken himself to his customary haunt in the garden and was now shivering under the cheerless shelter of the summerhouse She hastily threw up a window thrust forth her turbaned head and the half of her gaunt figure and searched the whole garden through as completely as her dim vision would allow She could see the interior of the summerhouse and its circular seat kept moist by the droppings of the roof It had no occupant Clifford was not thereabouts unless indeed he had crept for concealment as for a moment Hepzibah fancied might be the case into a great wet mass of tangled and broadleaved shadow where the squashvines were clambering tumultuously upon an old wooden framework set casually aslant against the fence This could not be however he was not there for while Hepzibah was looking a strange grimalkin stole forth from the very spot and picked his way across the garden Twice he paused to snuff the air and then anew directed his course towards the parlor window Whether it was only on account of the stealthy prying manner common to the race or that this cat seemed to have more than ordinary mischief in his thoughts the old gentlewoman in spite of her much perplexity felt an impulse to drive the animal away and accordingly flung down a window stick The cat stared up at her like a detected thief or murderer and the next instant took to flight No other living creature was visible in the garden Chanticleer and his family had either not left their roost disheartened by the interminable rain or had done the next wisest thing by seasonably returning to it Hepzibah closed the window
But where was Clifford Could it be that aware of the presence of his Evil Destiny he had crept silently down the staircase while the Judge and Hepzibah stood talking in the shop and had softly undone the fastenings of the outer door and made his escape into the street With that thought she seemed to behold his gray wrinkled yet childlike aspect in the oldfashioned garments which he wore about the house a figure such as one sometimes imagines himself to be with the worlds eye upon him in a troubled dream This figure of her wretched brother would go wandering through the city attracting all eyes and everybodys wonder and repugnance like a ghost the more to be shuddered at because visible at noontide To incur the ridicule of the younger crowd that knew him not—the harsher scorn and indignation of a few old men who might recall his once familiar features To be the sport of boys who when old enough to run about the streets have no more reverence for what is beautiful and holy nor pity for what is sad—no more sense of sacred misery sanctifying the human shape in which it embodies itself—than if Satan were the father of them all Goaded by their taunts their loud shrill cries and cruel laughter—insulted by the filth of the public ways which they would fling upon him—or as it might well be distracted by the mere strangeness of his situation though nobody should afflict him with so much as a thoughtless word—what wonder if Clifford were to break into some wild extravagance which was certain to be interpreted as lunacy Thus Judge Pyncheons fiendish scheme would be ready accomplished to his hands
Then Hepzibah reflected that the town was almost completely watergirdled The wharves stretched out towards the centre of the harbor and in this inclement weather were deserted by the ordinary throng of merchants laborers and seafaring men each wharf a solitude with the vessels moored stem and stern along its misty length Should her brothers aimless footsteps stray thitherward and he but bend one moment over the deep black tide would he not bethink himself that here was the sure refuge within his reach and that with a single step or the slightest overbalance of his body he might be forever beyond his kinsmans gripe Oh the temptation To make of his ponderous sorrow a security To sink with its leaden weight upon him and never rise again
The horror of this last conception was too much for Hepzibah Even Jaffrey Pyncheon must help her now She hastened down the staircase shrieking as she went
Clifford is gone she cried I cannot find my brother Help Jaffrey Pyncheon Some harm will happen to him
She threw open the parlordoor But what with the shade of branches across the windows and the smokeblackened ceiling and the dark oakpanelling of the walls there was hardly so much daylight in the room that Hepzibahs imperfect sight could accurately distinguish the Judges figure She was certain however that she saw him sitting in the ancestral armchair near the centre of the floor with his face somewhat averted and looking towards a window So firm and quiet is the nervous system of such men as Judge Pyncheon that he had perhaps stirred not more than once since her departure but in the hard composure of his temperament retained the position into which accident had thrown him
I tell you Jaffrey cried Hepzibah impatiently as she turned from the parlordoor to search other rooms my brother is not in his chamber You must help me seek him
But Judge Pyncheon was not the man to let himself be startled from an easychair with haste illbefitting either the dignity of his character or his broad personal basis by the alarm of an hysteric woman Yet considering his own interest in the matter he might have bestirred himself with a little more alacrity
Do you hear me Jaffrey Pyncheon screamed Hepzibah as she again approached the parlordoor after an ineffectual search elsewhere Clifford is gone
At this instant on the threshold of the parlor emerging from within appeared Clifford himself His face was preternaturally pale so deadly white indeed that through all the glimmering indistinctness of the passageway Hepzibah could discern his features as if a light fell on them alone Their vivid and wild expression seemed likewise sufficient to illuminate them it was an expression of scorn and mockery coinciding with the emotions indicated by his gesture As Clifford stood on the threshold partly turning back he pointed his finger within the parlor and shook it slowly as though he would have summoned not Hepzibah alone but the whole world to gaze at some object inconceivably ridiculous This action so illtimed and extravagant—accompanied too with a look that showed more like joy than any other kind of excitement—compelled Hepzibah to dread that her stern kinsmans ominous visit had driven her poor brother to absolute insanity Nor could she otherwise account for the Judges quiescent mood than by supposing him craftily on the watch while Clifford developed these symptoms of a distracted mind
Be quiet Clifford whispered his sister raising her hand to impress caution Oh for Heavens sake be quiet
Let him be quiet What can he do better answered Clifford with a still wilder gesture pointing into the room which he had just quitted As for us Hepzibah we can dance now—we can sing laugh play do what we will The weight is gone Hepzibah It is gone off this weary old world and we may be as lighthearted as little Phoebe herself
And in accordance with his words he began to laugh still pointing his finger at the object invisible to Hepzibah within the parlor She was seized with a sudden intuition of some horrible thing She thrust herself past Clifford and disappeared into the room but almost immediately returned with a cry choking in her throat Gazing at her brother with an affrighted glance of inquiry she beheld him all in a tremor and a quake from head to foot while amid these commoted elements of passion or alarm still flickered his gusty mirth
My God what is to become of us gasped Hepzibah
Come said Clifford in a tone of brief decision most unlike what was usual with him We stay here too long Let us leave the old house to our cousin Jaffrey He will take good care of it
Hepzibah now noticed that Clifford had on a cloak—a garment of long ago—in which he had constantly muffled himself during these days of easterly storm He beckoned with his hand and intimated so far as she could comprehend him his purpose that they should go together from the house There are chaotic blind or drunken moments in the lives of persons who lack real force of character—moments of test in which courage would most assert itself—but where these individuals if left to themselves stagger aimlessly along or follow implicitly whatever guidance may befall them even if it be a childs No matter how preposterous or insane a purpose is a Godsend to them Hepzibah had reached this point Unaccustomed to action or responsibility—full of horror at what she had seen and afraid to inquire or almost to imagine how it had come to pass—affrighted at the fatality which seemed to pursue her brother—stupefied by the dim thick stifling atmosphere of dread which filled the house as with a deathsmell and obliterated all definiteness of thought—she yielded without a question and on the instant to the will which Clifford expressed For herself she was like a person in a dream when the will always sleeps Clifford ordinarily so destitute of this faculty had found it in the tension of the crisis
Why do you delay so cried he sharply Put on your cloak and hood or whatever it pleases you to wear No matter what you cannot look beautiful nor brilliant my poor Hepzibah Take your purse with money in it and come along
Hepzibah obeyed these instructions as if nothing else were to be done or thought of She began to wonder it is true why she did not wake up and at what still more intolerable pitch of dizzy trouble her spirit would struggle out of the maze and make her conscious that nothing of all this had actually happened Of course it was not real no such black easterly day as this had yet begun to be Judge Pyncheon had not talked with her Clifford had not laughed pointed beckoned her away with him but she had merely been afflicted—as lonely sleepers often are—with a great deal of unreasonable misery in a morning dream
Now—now—I shall certainly awake thought Hepzibah as she went to and fro making her little preparations I can bear it no longer I must wake up now
But it came not that awakening moment It came not even when just before they left the house Clifford stole to the parlordoor and made a parting obeisance to the sole occupant of the room
What an absurd figure the old fellow cuts now whispered he to Hepzibah Just when he fancied he had me completely under his thumb Come come make haste or he will start up like Giant Despair in pursuit of Christian and Hopeful and catch us yet
As they passed into the street Clifford directed Hepzibahs attention to something on one of the posts of the front door It was merely the initials of his own name which with somewhat of his characteristic grace about the forms of the letters he had cut there when a boy The brother and sister departed and left Judge Pyncheon sitting in the old home of his forefathers all by himself so heavy and lumpish that we can liken him to nothing better than a defunct nightmare which had perished in the midst of its wickedness and left its flabby corpse on the breast of the tormented one to be gotten rid of as it might
XVII The Flight of Two Owls
SUMMER as it was the east wind set poor Hepzibahs few remaining teeth chattering in her head as she and Clifford faced it on their way up Pyncheon Street and towards the centre of the town Not merely was it the shiver which this pitiless blast brought to her frame although her feet and hands especially had never seemed so deathacold as now but there was a moral sensation mingling itself with the physical chill and causing her to shake more in spirit than in body The worlds broad bleak atmosphere was all so comfortless Such indeed is the impression which it makes on every new adventurer even if he plunge into it while the warmest tide of life is bubbling through his veins What then must it have been to Hepzibah and Clifford—so timestricken as they were yet so like children in their inexperience—as they left the doorstep and passed from beneath the wide shelter of the Pyncheon Elm They were wandering all abroad on precisely such a pilgrimage as a child often meditates to the worlds end with perhaps a sixpence and a biscuit in his pocket In Hepzibahs mind there was the wretched consciousness of being adrift She had lost the faculty of selfguidance but in view of the difficulties around her felt it hardly worth an effort to regain it and was moreover incapable of making one
As they proceeded on their strange expedition she now and then cast a look sidelong at Clifford and could not but observe that he was possessed and swayed by a powerful excitement It was this indeed that gave him the control which he had at once and so irresistibly established over his movements It not a little resembled the exhilaration of wine Or it might more fancifully be compared to a joyous piece of music played with wild vivacity but upon a disordered instrument As the cracked jarring note might always be heard and as it jarred loudest amidst the loftiest exultation of the melody so was there a continual quake through Clifford causing him most to quiver while he wore a triumphant smile and seemed almost under a necessity to skip in his gait
They met few people abroad even on passing from the retired neighborhood of the House of the Seven Gables into what was ordinarily the more thronged and busier portion of the town Glistening sidewalks with little pools of rain here and there along their unequal surface umbrellas displayed ostentatiously in the shopwindows as if the life of trade had concentrated itself in that one article wet leaves of the horsechestnut or elmtrees torn off untimely by the blast and scattered along the public way an unsightly accumulation of mud in the middle of the street which perversely grew the more unclean for its long and laborious washing—these were the more definable points of a very sombre picture In the way of movement and human life there was the hasty rattle of a cab or coach its driver protected by a waterproof cap over his head and shoulders the forlorn figure of an old man who seemed to have crept out of some subterranean sewer and was stooping along the kennel and poking the wet rubbish with a stick in quest of rusty nails a merchant or two at the door of the postoffice together with an editor and a miscellaneous politician awaiting a dilatory mail a few visages of retired seacaptains at the window of an insurance office looking out vacantly at the vacant street blaspheming at the weather and fretting at the dearth as well of public news as local gossip What a treasuretrove to these venerable quidnuncs could they have guessed the secret which Hepzibah and Clifford were carrying along with them But their two figures attracted hardly so much notice as that of a young girl who passed at the same instant and happened to raise her skirt a trifle too high above her ankles Had it been a sunny and cheerful day they could hardly have gone through the streets without making themselves obnoxious to remark Now probably they were felt to be in keeping with the dismal and bitter weather and therefore did not stand out in strong relief as if the sun were shining on them but melted into the gray gloom and were forgotten as soon as gone
Poor Hepzibah Could she have understood this fact it would have brought her some little comfort for to all her other troubles—strange to say—there was added the womanish and oldmaidenlike misery arising from a sense of unseemliness in her attire Thus she was fain to shrink deeper into herself as it were as if in the hope of making people suppose that here was only a cloak and hood threadbare and woefully faded taking an airing in the midst of the storm without any wearer
As they went on the feeling of indistinctness and unreality kept dimly hovering round about her and so diffusing itself into her system that one of her hands was hardly palpable to the touch of the other Any certainty would have been preferable to this She whispered to herself again and again Am I awake—Am I awake and sometimes exposed her face to the chill spatter of the wind for the sake of its rude assurance that she was Whether it was Cliffords purpose or only chance had led them thither they now found themselves passing beneath the arched entrance of a large structure of gray stone Within there was a spacious breadth and an airy height from floor to roof now partially filled with smoke and steam which eddied voluminously upward and formed a mimic cloudregion over their heads A train of cars was just ready for a start the locomotive was fretting and fuming like a steed impatient for a headlong rush and the bell rang out its hasty peal so well expressing the brief summons which life vouchsafes to us in its hurried career Without question or delay—with the irresistible decision if not rather to be called recklessness which had so strangely taken possession of him and through him of Hepzibah—Clifford impelled her towards the cars and assisted her to enter The signal was given the engine puffed forth its short quick breaths the train began its movement and along with a hundred other passengers these two unwonted travellers sped onward like the wind
At last therefore and after so long estrangement from everything that the world acted or enjoyed they had been drawn into the great current of human life and were swept away with it as by the suction of fate itself
Still haunted with the idea that not one of the past incidents inclusive of Judge Pyncheons visit could be real the recluse of the Seven Gables murmured in her brothers ear—
Clifford Clifford Is not this a dream
A dream Hepzibah repeated he almost laughing in her face On the contrary I have never been awake before
Meanwhile looking from the window they could see the world racing past them At one moment they were rattling through a solitude the next a village had grown up around them a few breaths more and it had vanished as if swallowed by an earthquake The spires of meetinghouses seemed set adrift from their foundations the broadbased hills glided away Everything was unfixed from its agelong rest and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to their own
Within the car there was the usual interior life of the railroad offering little to the observation of other passengers but full of novelty for this pair of strangely enfranchised prisoners It was novelty enough indeed that there were fifty human beings in close relation with them under one long and narrow roof and drawn onward by the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its grasp It seemed marvellous how all these people could remain so quietly in their seats while so much noisy strength was at work in their behalf Some with tickets in their hats long travellers these before whom lay a hundred miles of railroad had plunged into the English scenery and adventures of pamphlet novels and were keeping company with dukes and earls Others whose briefer span forbade their devoting themselves to studies so abstruse beguiled the little tedium of the way with pennypapers A party of girls and one young man on opposite sides of the car found huge amusement in a game of ball They tossed it to and fro with peals of laughter that might be measured by milelengths for faster than the nimble ball could fly the merry players fled unconsciously along leaving the trail of their mirth afar behind and ending their game under another sky than had witnessed its commencement Boys with apples cakes candy and rolls of variously tinctured lozenges—merchandise that reminded Hepzibah of her deserted shop—appeared at each momentary stoppingplace doing up their business in a hurry or breaking it short off lest the market should ravish them away with it New people continually entered Old acquaintances—for such they soon grew to be in this rapid current of affairs—continually departed Here and there amid the rumble and the tumult sat one asleep Sleep sport business graver or lighter study and the common and inevitable movement onward It was life itself
Cliffords naturally poignant sympathies were all aroused He caught the color of what was passing about him and threw it back more vividly than he received it but mixed nevertheless with a lurid and portentous hue Hepzibah on the other hand felt herself more apart from human kind than even in the seclusion which she had just quitted
You are not happy Hepzibah said Clifford apart in a tone of approach You are thinking of that dismal old house and of Cousin Jaffrey—here came the quake through him—and of Cousin Jaffrey sitting there all by himself Take my advice—follow my example—and let such things slip aside Here we are in the world Hepzibah—in the midst of life—in the throng of our fellow beings Let you and I be happy As happy as that youth and those pretty girls at their game of ball
Happy— thought Hepzibah bitterly conscious at the word of her dull and heavy heart with the frozen pain in it—happy He is mad already and if I could once feel myself broad awake I should go mad too
If a fixed idea be madness she was perhaps not remote from it Fast and far as they had rattled and clattered along the iron track they might just as well as regarded Hepzibahs mental images have been passing up and down Pyncheon Street With miles and miles of varied scenery between there was no scene for her save the seven old gablepeaks with their moss and the tuft of weeds in one of the angles and the shopwindow and a customer shaking the door and compelling the little bell to jingle fiercely but without disturbing Judge Pyncheon This one old house was everywhere It transported its great lumbering bulk with more than railroad speed and set itself phlegmatically down on whatever spot she glanced at The quality of Hepzibahs mind was too unmalleable to take new impressions so readily as Cliffords He had a winged nature she was rather of the vegetable kind and could hardly be kept long alive if drawn up by the roots Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her brother and herself was changed At home she was his guardian here Clifford had become hers and seemed to comprehend whatever belonged to their new position with a singular rapidity of intelligence He had been startled into manhood and intellectual vigor or at least into a condition that resembled them though it might be both diseased and transitory
The conductor now applied for their tickets and Clifford who had made himself the pursebearer put a banknote into his hand as he had observed others do
For the lady and yourself asked the conductor And how far
As far as that will carry us said Clifford It is no great matter We are riding for pleasure merely
You choose a strange day for it sir remarked a gimleteyed old gentleman on the other side of the car looking at Clifford and his companion as if curious to make them out The best chance of pleasure in an easterly rain I take it is in a mans own house with a nice little fire in the chimney
I cannot precisely agree with you said Clifford courteously bowing to the old gentleman and at once taking up the clew of conversation which the latter had proffered It had just occurred to me on the contrary that this admirable invention of the railroad—with the vast and inevitable improvements to be looked for both as to speed and convenience—is destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and fireside and substitute something better
In the name of commonsense asked the old gentleman rather testily what can be better for a man than his own parlor and chimneycorner
These things have not the merit which many good people attribute to them replied Clifford They may be said in few and pithy words to have ill served a poor purpose My impression is that our wonderfully increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to bring us around again to the nomadic state You are aware my dear sir—you must have observed it in your own experience—that all human progress is in a circle or to use a more accurate and beautiful figure in an ascending spiral curve While we fancy ourselves going straight forward and attaining at every step an entirely new position of affairs we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned but which we now find etherealized refined and perfected to its ideal The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future To apply this truth to the topic now under discussion In the early epochs of our race men dwelt in temporary huts of bowers of branches as easily constructed as a birdsnest and which they built—if it should be called building when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made with hands—which Nature we will say assisted them to rear where fruit abounded where fish and game were plentiful or most especially where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier shade than elsewhere and a more exquisite arrangement of lake wood and hill This life possessed a charm which ever since man quitted it has vanished from existence And it typified something better than itself It had its drawbacks such as hunger and thirst inclement weather hot sunshine and weary and footblistering marches over barren and ugly tracts that lay between the sites desirable for their fertility and beauty But in our ascending spiral we escape all this These railroads—could but the whistle be made musical and the rumble and the jar got rid of—are positively the greatest blessing that the ages have wrought out for us They give us wings they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage they spiritualize travel Transition being so facile what can be any mans inducement to tarry in one spot Why therefore should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick and stone and old wormeaten timber when he may just as easily dwell in one sense nowhere—in a better sense wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home
Cliffords countenance glowed as he divulged this theory a youthful character shone out from within converting the wrinkles and pallid duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask The merry girls let their ball drop upon the floor and gazed at him They said to themselves perhaps that before his hair was gray and the crowsfeet tracked his temples this now decaying man must have stamped the impress of his features on many a womans heart But alas no womans eye had seen his face while it was beautiful
I should scarcely call it an improved state of things observed Cliffords new acquaintance to live everywhere and nowhere
Would you not exclaimed Clifford with singular energy It is as clear to me as sunshine—were there any in the sky—that the greatest possible stumblingblocks in the path of human happiness and improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones consolidated with mortar or hewn timber fastened together with spikenails which men painfully contrive for their own torment and call them house and home The soul needs air a wide sweep and frequent change of it Morbid influences in a thousandfold variety gather about hearths and pollute the life of households There is no such unwholesome atmosphere as that of an old home rendered poisonous by ones defunct forefathers and relatives I speak of what I know There is a certain house within my familiar recollection—one of those peakedgable there are seven of them projectingstoried edifices such as you occasionally see in our older towns—a rusty crazy creaky dryrotted dingy dark and miserable old dungeon with an arched window over the porch and a little shopdoor on one side and a great melancholy elm before it Now sir whenever my thoughts recur to this sevengabled mansion the fact is so very curious that I must needs mention it immediately I have a vision or image of an elderly man of remarkably stern countenance sitting in an oaken elbowchair dead stonedead with an ugly flow of blood upon his shirtbosom Dead but with open eyes He taints the whole house as I remember it I could never flourish there nor be happy nor do nor enjoy what God meant me to do and enjoy
His face darkened and seemed to contract and shrivel itself up and wither into age
Never sir he repeated I could never draw cheerful breath there
I should think not said the old gentleman eyeing Clifford earnestly and rather apprehensively I should conceive not sir with that notion in your head
Surely not continued Clifford and it were a relief to me if that house could be torn down or burnt up and so the earth be rid of it and grass be sown abundantly over its foundation Not that I should ever visit its site again for sir the farther I get away from it the more does the joy the lightsome freshness the heartleap the intellectual dance the youth in short—yes my youth my youth—the more does it come back to me No longer ago than this morning I was old I remember looking in the glass and wondering at my own gray hair and the wrinkles many and deep right across my brow and the furrows down my cheeks and the prodigious trampling of crowsfeet about my temples It was too soon I could not bear it Age had no right to come I had not lived But now do I look old If so my aspect belies me strangely for—a great weight being off my mind—I feel in the very heyday of my youth with the world and my best days before me
I trust you may find it so said the old gentleman who seemed rather embarrassed and desirous of avoiding the observation which Cliffords wild talk drew on them both You have my best wishes for it
For Heavens sake dear Clifford be quiet whispered his sister They think you mad
Be quiet yourself Hepzibah returned her brother No matter what they think I am not mad For the first time in thirty years my thoughts gush up and find words ready for them I must talk and I will
He turned again towards the old gentleman and renewed the conversation
Yes my dear sir said he it is my firm belief and hope that these terms of roof and hearthstone which have so long been held to embody something sacred are soon to pass out of mens daily use and be forgotten Just imagine for a moment how much of human evil will crumble away with this one change What we call real estate—the solid ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests A man will commit almost any wrong—he will heap up an immense pile of wickedness as hard as granite and which will weigh as heavily upon his soul to eternal ages—only to build a great gloomy darkchambered mansion for himself to die in and for his posterity to be miserable in He lays his own dead corpse beneath the underpinning as one may say and hangs his frowning picture on the wall and after thus converting himself into an evil destiny expects his remotest greatgrandchildren to be happy there I do not speak wildly I have just such a house in my minds eye
Then sir said the old gentleman getting anxious to drop the subject you are not to blame for leaving it
Within the lifetime of the child already born Clifford went on all this will be done away The world is growing too ethereal and spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer To me though for a considerable period of time I have lived chiefly in retirement and know less of such things than most men—even to me the harbingers of a better era are unmistakable Mesmerism now Will that effect nothing think you towards purging away the grossness out of human life
All a humbug growled the old gentleman
These rapping spirits that little Phoebe told us of the other day said Clifford—what are these but the messengers of the spiritual world knocking at the door of substance And it shall be flung wide open
A humbug again cried the old gentleman growing more and more testy at these glimpses of Cliffords metaphysics I should like to rap with a good stick on the empty pates of the dolts who circulate such nonsense
Then there is electricity—the demon the angel the mighty physical power the allpervading intelligence exclaimed Clifford Is that a humbug too Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that by means of electricity the world of matter has become a great nerve vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time Rather the round globe is a vast head a brain instinct with intelligence Or shall we say it is itself a thought nothing but thought and no longer the substance which we deemed it
If you mean the telegraph said the old gentleman glancing his eye toward its wire alongside the railtrack it is an excellent thing—that is of course if the speculators in cotton and politics dont get possession of it A great thing indeed sir particularly as regards the detection of bankrobbers and murderers
I dont quite like it in that point of view replied Clifford A bankrobber and what you call a murderer likewise has his rights which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard in so much the more liberal spirit because the bulk of society is prone to controvert their existence An almost spiritual medium like the electric telegraph should be consecrated to high deep joyful and holy missions Lovers day by day—hour by hour if so often moved to do it—might send their heartthrobs from Maine to Florida with some such words as these I love you forever—My heart runs over with love—I love you more than I can and again at the next message I have lived an hour longer and love you twice as much Or when a good man has departed his distant friend should be conscious of an electric thrill as from the world of happy spirits telling him Your dear friend is in bliss Or to an absent husband should come tidings thus An immortal being of whom you are the father has this moment come from God and immediately its little voice would seem to have reached so far and to be echoing in his heart But for these poor rogues the bankrobbers—who after all are about as honest as nine people in ten except that they disregard certain formalities and prefer to transact business at midnight rather than Changehours—and for these murderers as you phrase it who are often excusable in the motives of their deed and deserve to be ranked among public benefactors if we consider only its result—for unfortunate individuals like these I really cannot applaud the enlistment of an immaterial and miraculous power in the universal worldhunt at their heels
You cant hey cried the old gentleman with a hard look
Positively no answered Clifford It puts them too miserably at disadvantage For example sir in a dark low crossbeamed panelled room of an old house let us suppose a dead man sitting in an armchair with a bloodstain on his shirtbosom—and let us add to our hypothesis another man issuing from the house which he feels to be overfilled with the dead mans presence—and let us lastly imagine him fleeing Heaven knows whither at the speed of a hurricane by railroad Now sir if the fugitive alight in some distant town and find all the people babbling about that selfsame dead man whom he has fled so far to avoid the sight and thought of will you not allow that his natural rights have been infringed He has been deprived of his city of refuge and in my humble opinion has suffered infinite wrong
You are a strange man Sir said the old gentleman bringing his gimleteye to a point on Clifford as if determined to bore right into him I cant see through you
No Ill be bound you cant cried Clifford laughing And yet my dear sir I am as transparent as the water of Maules well But come Hepzibah We have flown far enough for once Let us alight as the birds do and perch ourselves on the nearest twig and consult wither we shall fly next
Just then as it happened the train reached a solitary waystation Taking advantage of the brief pause Clifford left the car and drew Hepzibah along with him A moment afterwards the train—with all the life of its interior amid which Clifford had made himself so conspicuous an object—was gliding away in the distance and rapidly lessening to a point which in another moment vanished The world had fled away from these two wanderers They gazed drearily about them At a little distance stood a wooden church black with age and in a dismal state of ruin and decay with broken windows a great rift through the main body of the edifice and a rafter dangling from the top of the square tower Farther off was a farmhouse in the old style as venerably black as the church with a roof sloping downward from the threestory peak to within a mans height of the ground It seemed uninhabited There were the relics of a woodpile indeed near the door but with grass sprouting up among the chips and scattered logs The small raindrops came down aslant the wind was not turbulent but sullen and full of chilly moisture
Clifford shivered from head to foot The wild effervescence of his mood—which had so readily supplied thoughts fantasies and a strange aptitude of words and impelled him to talk from the mere necessity of giving vent to this bubblingup gush of ideas had entirely subsided A powerful excitement had given him energy and vivacity Its operation over he forthwith began to sink
You must take the lead now Hepzibah murmured he with a torpid and reluctant utterance Do with me as you will She knelt down upon the platform where they were standing and lifted her clasped hands to the sky The dull gray weight of clouds made it invisible but it was no hour for disbelief—no juncture this to question that there was a sky above and an Almighty Father looking from it
O God—ejaculated poor gaunt Hepzibah—then paused a moment to consider what her prayer should be—O God—our Father—are we not thy children Have mercy on us
XVIII Governor Pyncheon
JUDGE PYNCHEON while his two relatives have fled away with such illconsidered haste still sits in the old parlor keeping house as the familiar phrase is in the absence of its ordinary occupants To him and to the venerable House of the Seven Gables does our story now betake itself like an owl bewildered in the daylight and hastening back to his hollow tree
The Judge has not shifted his position for a long while now He has not stirred hand or foot nor withdrawn his eyes so much as a hairsbreadth from their fixed gaze towards the corner of the room since the footsteps of Hepzibah and Clifford creaked along the passage and the outer door was closed cautiously behind their exit He holds his watch in his left hand but clutched in such a manner that you cannot see the dialplate How profound a fit of meditation Or supposing him asleep how infantile a quietude of conscience and what wholesome order in the gastric region are betokened by slumber so entirely undisturbed with starts cramp twitches muttered dreamtalk trumpetblasts through the nasal organ or any slightest irregularity of breath You must hold your own breath to satisfy yourself whether he breathes at all It is quite inaudible You hear the ticking of his watch his breath you do not hear A most refreshing slumber doubtless And yet the Judge cannot be asleep His eyes are open A veteran politician such as he would never fall asleep with wideopen eyes lest some enemy or mischiefmaker taking him thus at unawares should peep through these windows into his consciousness and make strange discoveries among the reminiscences projects hopes apprehensions weaknesses and strong points which he has heretofore shared with nobody A cautious man is proverbially said to sleep with one eye open That may be wisdom But not with both for this were heedlessness No no Judge Pyncheon cannot be asleep
It is odd however that a gentleman so burdened with engagements—and noted too for punctuality—should linger thus in an old lonely mansion which he has never seemed very fond of visiting The oaken chair to be sure may tempt him with its roominess It is indeed a spacious and allowing for the rude age that fashioned it a moderately easy seat with capacity enough at all events and offering no restraint to the Judges breadth of beam A bigger man might find ample accommodation in it His ancestor now pictured upon the wall with all his English beef about him used hardly to present a front extending from elbow to elbow of this chair or a base that would cover its whole cushion But there are better chairs than this—mahogany black walnut rosewood springseated and damaskcushioned with varied slopes and innumerable artifices to make them easy and obviate the irksomeness of too tame an ease—a score of such might be at Judge Pyncheons service Yes in a score of drawingrooms he would be more than welcome Mamma would advance to meet him with outstretched hand the virgin daughter elderly as he has now got to be—an old widower as he smilingly describes himself—would shake up the cushion for the Judge and do her pretty utmost to make him comfortable For the Judge is a prosperous man He cherishes his schemes moreover like other people and reasonably brighter than most others or did so at least as he lay abed this morning in an agreeable halfdrowse planning the business of the day and speculating on the probabilities of the next fifteen years With his firm health and the little inroad that age has made upon him fifteen years or twenty—yes or perhaps fiveandtwenty—are no more than he may fairly call his own Fiveandtwenty years for the enjoyment of his real estate in town and country his railroad bank and insurance shares his United States stock—his wealth in short however invested now in possession or soon to be acquired together with the public honors that have fallen upon him and the weightier ones that are yet to fall It is good It is excellent It is enough
Still lingering in the old chair If the Judge has a little time to throw away why does not he visit the insurance office as is his frequent custom and sit awhile in one of their leatherncushioned armchairs listening to the gossip of the day and dropping some deeply designed chanceword which will be certain to become the gossip of tomorrow And have not the bank directors a meeting at which it was the Judges purpose to be present and his office to preside Indeed they have and the hour is noted on a card which is or ought to be in Judge Pyncheons right vestpocket Let him go thither and loll at ease upon his moneybags He has lounged long enough in the old chair
This was to have been such a busy day In the first place the interview with Clifford Half an hour by the Judges reckoning was to suffice for that it would probably be less but—taking into consideration that Hepzibah was first to be dealt with and that these women are apt to make many words where a few would do much better—it might be safest to allow half an hour Half an hour Why Judge it is already two hours by your own undeviatingly accurate chronometer Glance your eye down at it and see Ah he will not give himself the trouble either to bend his head or elevate his hand so as to bring the faithful timekeeper within his range of vision Time all at once appears to have become a matter of no moment with the Judge
And has he forgotten all the other items of his memoranda Cliffords affair arranged he was to meet a State Street broker who has undertaken to procure a heavy percentage and the best of paper for a few loose thousands which the Judge happens to have by him uninvested The wrinkled noteshaver will have taken his railroad trip in vain Half an hour later in the street next to this there was to be an auction of real estate including a portion of the old Pyncheon property originally belonging to Maules garden ground It has been alienated from the Pyncheons these fourscore years but the Judge had kept it in his eye and had set his heart on reannexing it to the small demesne still left around the Seven Gables and now during this odd fit of oblivion the fatal hammer must have fallen and transferred our ancient patrimony to some alien possessor Possibly indeed the sale may have been postponed till fairer weather If so will the Judge make it convenient to be present and favor the auctioneer with his bid On the proximate occasion
The next affair was to buy a horse for his own driving The one heretofore his favorite stumbled this very morning on the road to town and must be at once discarded Judge Pyncheons neck is too precious to be risked on such a contingency as a stumbling steed Should all the above business be seasonably got through with he might attend the meeting of a charitable society the very name of which however in the multiplicity of his benevolence is quite forgotten so that this engagement may pass unfulfilled and no great harm done And if he have time amid the press of more urgent matters he must take measures for the renewal of Mrs Pyncheons tombstone which the sexton tells him has fallen on its marble face and is cracked quite in twain She was a praiseworthy woman enough thinks the Judge in spite of her nervousness and the tears that she was so oozy with and her foolish behavior about the coffee and as she took her departure so seasonably he will not grudge the second tombstone It is better at least than if she had never needed any The next item on his list was to give orders for some fruittrees of a rare variety to be deliverable at his countryseat in the ensuing autumn Yes buy them by all means and may the peaches be luscious in your mouth Judge Pyncheon After this comes something more important A committee of his political party has besought him for a hundred or two of dollars in addition to his previous disbursements towards carrying on the fall campaign The Judge is a patriot the fate of the country is staked on the November election and besides as will be shadowed forth in another paragraph he has no trifling stake of his own in the same great game He will do what the committee asks nay he will be liberal beyond their expectations they shall have a check for five hundred dollars and more anon if it be needed What next A decayed widow whose husband was Judge Pyncheons early friend has laid her case of destitution before him in a very moving letter She and her fair daughter have scarcely bread to eat He partly intends to call on her today—perhaps so—perhaps not—accordingly as he may happen to have leisure and a small banknote
Another business which however he puts no great weight on it is well you know to be heedful but not overanxious as respects ones personal health—another business then was to consult his family physician About what for Heavens sake Why it is rather difficult to describe the symptoms A mere dimness of sight and dizziness of brain was it—or disagreeable choking or stifling or gurgling or bubbling in the region of the thorax as the anatomists say—or was it a pretty severe throbbing and kicking of the heart rather creditable to him than otherwise as showing that the organ had not been left out of the Judges physical contrivance No matter what it was The doctor probably would smile at the statement of such trifles to his professional ear the Judge would smile in his turn and meeting one anothers eyes they would enjoy a hearty laugh together But a fig for medical advice The Judge will never need it
Pray pray Judge Pyncheon look at your watch Now What—not a glance It is within ten minutes of the dinner hour It surely cannot have slipped your memory that the dinner of today is to be the most important in its consequences of all the dinners you ever ate Yes precisely the most important although in the course of your somewhat eminent career you have been placed high towards the head of the table at splendid banquets and have poured out your festive eloquence to ears yet echoing with Websters mighty organtones No public dinner this however It is merely a gathering of some dozen or so of friends from several districts of the State men of distinguished character and influence assembling almost casually at the house of a common friend likewise distinguished who will make them welcome to a little better than his ordinary fare Nothing in the way of French cookery but an excellent dinner nevertheless Real turtle we understand and salmon tautog canvasbacks pig English mutton good roast beef or dainties of that serious kind fit for substantial country gentlemen as these honorable persons mostly are The delicacies of the season in short and flavored by a brand of old Madeira which has been the pride of many seasons It is the Juno brand a glorious wine fragrant and full of gentle might a bottledup happiness put by for use a golden liquid worth more than liquid gold so rare and admirable that veteran winebibbers count it among their epochs to have tasted it It drives away the heartache and substitutes no headache Could the Judge but quaff a glass it might enable him to shake off the unaccountable lethargy which for the ten intervening minutes and five to boot are already past has made him such a laggard at this momentous dinner It would all but revive a dead man Would you like to sip it now Judge Pyncheon
Alas this dinner Have you really forgotten its true object Then let us whisper it that you may start at once out of the oaken chair which really seems to be enchanted like the one in Comus or that in which Moll Pitcher imprisoned your own grandfather But ambition is a talisman more powerful than witchcraft Start up then and hurrying through the streets burst in upon the company that they may begin before the fish is spoiled They wait for you and it is little for your interest that they should wait These gentlemen—need you be told it—have assembled not without purpose from every quarter of the State They are practised politicians every man of them and skilled to adjust those preliminary measures which steal from the people without its knowledge the power of choosing its own rulers The popular voice at the next gubernatorial election though loud as thunder will be really but an echo of what these gentlemen shall speak under their breath at your friends festive board They meet to decide upon their candidate This little knot of subtle schemers will control the convention and through it dictate to the party And what worthier candidate—more wise and learned more noted for philanthropic liberality truer to safe principles tried oftener by public trusts more spotless in private character with a larger stake in the common welfare and deeper grounded by hereditary descent in the faith and practice of the Puritans—what man can be presented for the suffrage of the people so eminently combining all these claims to the chiefrulership as Judge Pyncheon here before us
Make haste then Do your part The meed for which you have toiled and fought and climbed and crept is ready for your grasp Be present at this dinner—drink a glass or two of that noble wine—make your pledges in as low a whisper as you will—and you rise up from table virtually governor of the glorious old State Governor Pyncheon of Massachusetts
And is there no potent and exhilarating cordial in a certainty like this It has been the grand purpose of half your lifetime to obtain it Now when there needs little more than to signify your acceptance why do you sit so lumpishly in your greatgreatgrandfathers oaken chair as if preferring it to the gubernatorial one We have all heard of King Log but in these jostling times one of that royal kindred will hardly win the race for an elective chiefmagistracy
Well it is absolutely too late for dinner Turtle salmon tautog woodcock boiled turkey SouthDown mutton pig roastbeef have vanished or exist only in fragments with lukewarm potatoes and gravies crusted over with cold fat The Judge had he done nothing else would have achieved wonders with his knife and fork It was he you know of whom it used to be said in reference to his ogrelike appetite that his Creator made him a great animal but that the dinnerhour made him a great beast Persons of his large sensual endowments must claim indulgence at their feedingtime But for once the Judge is entirely too late for dinner Too late we fear even to join the party at their wine The guests are warm and merry they have given up the Judge and concluding that the FreeSoilers have him they will fix upon another candidate Were our friend now to stalk in among them with that wideopen stare at once wild and stolid his ungenial presence would be apt to change their cheer Neither would it be seemly in Judge Pyncheon generally so scrupulous in his attire to show himself at a dinnertable with that crimson stain upon his shirtbosom By the bye how came it there It is an ugly sight at any rate and the wisest way for the Judge is to button his coat closely over his breast and taking his horse and chaise from the livery stable to make all speed to his own house There after a glass of brandy and water and a muttonchop a beefsteak a broiled fowl or some such hasty little dinner and supper all in one he had better spend the evening by the fireside He must toast his slippers a long while in order to get rid of the chilliness which the air of this vile old house has sent curdling through his veins
Up therefore Judge Pyncheon up You have lost a day But tomorrow will be here anon Will you rise betimes and make the most of it Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow We that are alive may rise betimes tomorrow As for him that has died today his morrow will be the resurrection morn
Meanwhile the twilight is glooming upward out of the corners of the room The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper and at first become more definite then spreading wider they lose their distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion as it were that creeps slowly over the various objects and the one human figure sitting in the midst of them The gloom has not entered from without it has brooded here all day and now taking its own inevitable time will possess itself of everything The Judges face indeed rigid and singularly white refuses to melt into this universal solvent Fainter and fainter grows the light It is as if another doublehandful of darkness had been scattered through the air Now it is no longer gray but sable There is still a faint appearance at the window neither a glow nor a gleam nor a glimmer—any phrase of light would express something far brighter than this doubtful perception or sense rather that there is a window there Has it yet vanished No—yes—not quite And there is still the swarthy whiteness—we shall venture to marry these illagreeing words—the swarthy whiteness of Judge Pyncheons face The features are all gone there is only the paleness of them left And how looks it now There is no window There is no face An infinite inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight Where is our universe All crumbled away from us and we adrift in chaos may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind that go sighing and murmuring about in quest of what was once a world
Is there no other sound One other and a fearful one It is the ticking of the Judges watch which ever since Hepzibah left the room in search of Clifford he has been holding in his hand Be the cause what it may this little quiet neverceasing throb of Times pulse repeating its small strokes with such busy regularity in Judge Pyncheons motionless hand has an effect of terror which we do not find in any other accompaniment of the scene
But listen That puff of the breeze was louder It had a tone unlike the dreary and sullen one which has bemoaned itself and afflicted all mankind with miserable sympathy for five days past The wind has veered about It now comes boisterously from the northwest and taking hold of the aged framework of the Seven Gables gives it a shake like a wrestler that would try strength with his antagonist Another and another sturdy tussle with the blast The old house creaks again and makes a vociferous but somewhat unintelligible bellowing in its sooty throat the big flue we mean of its wide chimney partly in complaint at the rude wind but rather as befits their century and a half of hostile intimacy in tough defiance A rumbling kind of a bluster roars behind the fireboard A door has slammed above stairs A window perhaps has been left open or else is driven in by an unruly gust It is not to be conceived beforehand what wonderful windinstruments are these old timber mansions and how haunted with the strangest noises which immediately begin to sing and sigh and sob and shriek—and to smite with sledgehammers airy but ponderous in some distant chamber—and to tread along the entries as with stately footsteps and rustle up and down the staircase as with silks miraculously stiff—whenever the gale catches the house with a window open and gets fairly into it Would that we were not an attendant spirit here It is too awful This clamor of the wind through the lonely house the Judges quietude as he sits invisible and that pertinacious ticking of his watch
As regards Judge Pyncheons invisibility however that matter will soon be remedied The northwest wind has swept the sky clear The window is distinctly seen Through its panes moreover we dimly catch the sweep of the dark clustering foliage outside fluttering with a constant irregularity of movement and letting in a peep of starlight now here now there Oftener than any other object these glimpses illuminate the Judges face But here comes more effectual light Observe that silvery dance upon the upper branches of the peartree and now a little lower and now on the whole mass of boughs while through their shifting intricacies the moonbeams fall aslant into the room They play over the Judges figure and show that he has not stirred throughout the hours of darkness They follow the shadows in changeful sport across his unchanging features They gleam upon his watch His grasp conceals the dialplate—but we know that the faithful hands have met for one of the city clocks tells midnight
A man of sturdy understanding like Judge Pyncheon cares no more for twelve oclock at night than for the corresponding hour of noon However just the parallel drawn in some of the preceding pages between his Puritan ancestor and himself it fails in this point The Pyncheon of two centuries ago in common with most of his contemporaries professed his full belief in spiritual ministrations although reckoning them chiefly of a malignant character The Pyncheon of tonight who sits in yonder armchair believes in no such nonsense Such at least was his creed some few hours since His hair will not bristle therefore at the stories which—in times when chimneycorners had benches in them where old people sat poking into the ashes of the past and raking out traditions like live coals—used to be told about this very room of his ancestral house In fact these tales are too absurd to bristle even childhoods hair What sense meaning or moral for example such as even ghoststories should be susceptible of can be traced in the ridiculous legend that at midnight all the dead Pyncheons are bound to assemble in this parlor And pray for what Why to see whether the portrait of their ancestor still keeps its place upon the wall in compliance with his testamentary directions Is it worth while to come out of their graves for that
We are tempted to make a little sport with the idea Ghoststories are hardly to be treated seriously any longer The familyparty of the defunct Pyncheons we presume goes off in this wise
First comes the ancestor himself in his black cloak steeplehat and trunkbreeches girt about the waist with a leathern belt in which hangs his steelhilted sword he has a long staff in his hand such as gentlemen in advanced life used to carry as much for the dignity of the thing as for the support to be derived from it He looks up at the portrait a thing of no substance gazing at its own painted image All is safe The picture is still there The purpose of his brain has been kept sacred thus long after the man himself has sprouted up in graveyard grass See he lifts his ineffectual hand and tries the frame All safe But is that a smile—is it not rather a frown of deadly import that darkens over the shadow of his features The stout Colonel is dissatisfied So decided is his look of discontent as to impart additional distinctness to his features through which nevertheless the moonlight passes and flickers on the wall beyond Something has strangely vexed the ancestor With a grim shake of the head he turns away Here come other Pyncheons the whole tribe in their half a dozen generations jostling and elbowing one another to reach the picture We behold aged men and grandames a clergyman with the Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien and a redcoated officer of the old French war and there comes the shopkeeping Pyncheon of a century ago with the ruffles turned back from his wrists and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artists legend with the beautiful and pensive Alice who brings no pride out of her virgin grave All try the pictureframe What do these ghostly people seek A mother lifts her child that his little hands may touch it There is evidently a mystery about the picture that perplexes these poor Pyncheons when they ought to be at rest In a corner meanwhile stands the figure of an elderly man in a leathern jerkin and breeches with a carpenters rule sticking out of his side pocket he points his finger at the bearded Colonel and his descendants nodding jeering mocking and finally bursting into obstreperous though inaudible laughter
Indulging our fancy in this freak we have partly lost the power of restraint and guidance We distinguish an unlookedfor figure in our visionary scene Among those ancestral people there is a young man dressed in the very fashion of today he wears a dark frockcoat almost destitute of skirts gray pantaloons gaiter boots of patent leather and has a finely wrought gold chain across his breast and a little silverheaded whalebone stick in his hand Were we to meet this figure at noonday we should greet him as young Jaffrey Pyncheon the Judges only surviving child who has been spending the last two years in foreign travel If still in life how comes his shadow hither If dead what a misfortune The old Pyncheon property together with the great estate acquired by the young mans father would devolve on whom On poor foolish Clifford gaunt Hepzibah and rustic little Phoebe But another and a greater marvel greets us Can we believe our eyes A stout elderly gentleman has made his appearance he has an aspect of eminent respectability wears a black coat and pantaloons of roomy width and might be pronounced scrupulously neat in his attire but for a broad crimson stain across his snowy neckcloth and down his shirtbosom Is it the Judge or no How can it be Judge Pyncheon We discern his figure as plainly as the flickering moonbeams can show us anything still seated in the oaken chair Be the apparition whose it may it advances to the picture seems to seize the frame tries to peep behind it and turns away with a frown as black as the ancestral one
The fantastic scene just hinted at must by no means be considered as forming an actual portion of our story We were betrayed into this brief extravagance by the quiver of the moonbeams they dance handinhand with shadows and are reflected in the lookingglass which you are aware is always a kind of window or doorway into the spiritual world We needed relief moreover from our too long and exclusive contemplation of that figure in the chair This wild wind too has tossed our thoughts into strange confusion but without tearing them away from their one determined centre Yonder leaden Judge sits immovably upon our soul Will he never stir again We shall go mad unless he stirs You may the better estimate his quietude by the fearlessness of a little mouse which sits on its hind legs in a streak of moonlight close by Judge Pyncheons foot and seems to meditate a journey of exploration over this great black bulk Ha what has startled the nimble little mouse It is the visage of grimalkin outside of the window where he appears to have posted himself for a deliberate watch This grimalkin has a very ugly look Is it a cat watching for a mouse or the devil for a human soul Would we could scare him from the window
Thank Heaven the night is wellnigh past The moonbeams have no longer so silvery a gleam nor contrast so strongly with the blackness of the shadows among which they fall They are paler now the shadows look gray not black The boisterous wind is hushed What is the hour Ah the watch has at last ceased to tick for the Judges forgetful fingers neglected to wind it up as usual at ten oclock being half an hour or so before his ordinary bedtime—and it has run down for the first time in five years But the great worldclock of Time still keeps its beat The dreary night—for oh how dreary seems its haunted waste behind us—gives place to a fresh transparent cloudless morn Blessed blessed radiance The daybeam—even what little of it finds its way into this always dusky parlor—seems part of the universal benediction annulling evil and rendering all goodness possible and happiness attainable Will Judge Pyncheon now rise up from his chair Will he go forth and receive the early sunbeams on his brow Will he begin this new day—which God has smiled upon and blessed and given to mankind—will he begin it with better purposes than the many that have been spent amiss Or are all the deeplaid schemes of yesterday as stubborn in his heart and as busy in his brain as ever
In this latter case there is much to do Will the Judge still insist with Hepzibah on the interview with Clifford Will he buy a safe elderly gentlemans horse Will he persuade the purchaser of the old Pyncheon property to relinquish the bargain in his favor Will he see his family physician and obtain a medicine that shall preserve him to be an honor and blessing to his race until the utmost term of patriarchal longevity Will Judge Pyncheon above all make due apologies to that company of honorable friends and satisfy them that his absence from the festive board was unavoidable and so fully retrieve himself in their good opinion that he shall yet be Governor of Massachusetts And all these great purposes accomplished will he walk the streets again with that dogday smile of elaborate benevolence sultry enough to tempt flies to come and buzz in it Or will he after the tomblike seclusion of the past day and night go forth a humbled and repentant man sorrowful gentle seeking no profit shrinking from worldly honor hardly daring to love God but bold to love his fellow man and to do him what good he may Will he bear about with him—no odious grin of feigned benignity insolent in its pretence and loathsome in its falsehood—but the tender sadness of a contrite heart broken at last beneath its own weight of sin For it is our belief whatever show of honor he may have piled upon it that there was heavy sin at the base of this mans being
Rise up Judge Pyncheon The morning sunshine glimmers through the foliage and beautiful and holy as it is shuns not to kindle up your face Rise up thou subtle worldly selfish ironhearted hypocrite and make thy choice whether still to be subtle worldly selfish ironhearted and hypocritical or to tear these sins out of thy nature though they bring the lifeblood with them The Avenger is upon thee Rise up before it be too late
What Thou art not stirred by this last appeal No not a jot And there we see a fly—one of your common houseflies such as are always buzzing on the windowpane—which has smelt out Governor Pyncheon and alights now on his forehead now on his chin and now Heaven help us is creeping over the bridge of his nose towards the wouldbe chiefmagistrates wideopen eyes Canst thou not brush the fly away Art thou too sluggish Thou man that hadst so many busy projects yesterday Art thou too weak that wast so powerful Not brush away a fly Nay then we give thee up
And hark the shopbell rings After hours like these latter ones through which we have borne our heavy tale it is good to be made sensible that there is a living world and that even this old lonely mansion retains some manner of connection with it We breathe more freely emerging from Judge Pyncheons presence into the street before the Seven Gables
XIX Alices Posies
UNCLE VENNER trundling a wheelbarrow was the earliest person stirring in the neighborhood the day after the storm
Pyncheon Street in front of the House of the Seven Gables was a far pleasanter scene than a bylane confined by shabby fences and bordered with wooden dwellings of the meaner class could reasonably be expected to present Nature made sweet amends that morning for the five unkindly days which had preceded it It would have been enough to live for merely to look up at the wide benediction of the sky or as much of it as was visible between the houses genial once more with sunshine Every object was agreeable whether to be gazed at in the breadth or examined more minutely Such for example were the wellwashed pebbles and gravel of the sidewalk even the skyreflecting pools in the centre of the street and the grass now freshly verdant that crept along the base of the fences on the other side of which if one peeped over was seen the multifarious growth of gardens Vegetable productions of whatever kind seemed more than negatively happy in the juicy warmth and abundance of their life The Pyncheon Elm throughout its great circumference was all alive and full of the morning sun and a sweettempered little breeze which lingered within this verdant sphere and set a thousand leafy tongues awhispering all at once This aged tree appeared to have suffered nothing from the gale It had kept its boughs unshattered and its full complement of leaves and the whole in perfect verdure except a single branch that by the earlier change with which the elmtree sometimes prophesies the autumn had been transmuted to bright gold It was like the golden branch that gained Aeneas and the Sibyl admittance into Hades
This one mystic branch hung down before the main entrance of the Seven Gables so nigh the ground that any passerby might have stood on tiptoe and plucked it off Presented at the door it would have been a symbol of his right to enter and be made acquainted with all the secrets of the house So little faith is due to external appearance that there was really an inviting aspect over the venerable edifice conveying an idea that its history must be a decorous and happy one and such as would be delightful for a fireside tale Its windows gleamed cheerfully in the slanting sunlight The lines and tufts of green moss here and there seemed pledges of familiarity and sisterhood with Nature as if this human dwellingplace being of such old date had established its prescriptive title among primeval oaks and whatever other objects by virtue of their long continuance have acquired a gracious right to be A person of imaginative temperament while passing by the house would turn once and again and peruse it well its many peaks consenting together in the clustered chimney the deep projection over its basementstory the arched window imparting a look if not of grandeur yet of antique gentility to the broken portal over which it opened the luxuriance of gigantic burdocks near the threshold he would note all these characteristics and be conscious of something deeper than he saw He would conceive the mansion to have been the residence of the stubborn old Puritan Integrity who dying in some forgotten generation had left a blessing in all its rooms and chambers the efficacy of which was to be seen in the religion honesty moderate competence or upright poverty and solid happiness of his descendants to this day
One object above all others would take root in the imaginative observers memory It was the great tuft of flowers—weeds you would have called them only a week ago—the tuft of crimsonspotted flowers in the angle between the two front gables The old people used to give them the name of Alices Posies in remembrance of fair Alice Pyncheon who was believed to have brought their seeds from Italy They were flaunting in rich beauty and full bloom today and seemed as it were a mystic expression that something within the house was consummated
It was but little after sunrise when Uncle Venner made his appearance as aforesaid impelling a wheelbarrow along the street He was going his matutinal rounds to collect cabbageleaves turniptops potatoskins and the miscellaneous refuse of the dinnerpot which the thrifty housewives of the neighborhood were accustomed to put aside as fit only to feed a pig Uncle Venners pig was fed entirely and kept in prime order on these eleemosynary contributions insomuch that the patched philosopher used to promise that before retiring to his farm he would make a feast of the portly grunter and invite all his neighbors to partake of the joints and spareribs which they had helped to fatten Miss Hepzibah Pyncheons housekeeping had so greatly improved since Clifford became a member of the family that her share of the banquet would have been no lean one and Uncle Venner accordingly was a good deal disappointed not to find the large earthen pan full of fragmentary eatables that ordinarily awaited his coming at the back doorstep of the Seven Gables
I never knew Miss Hepzibah so forgetful before said the patriarch to himself She must have had a dinner yesterday—no question of that She always has one nowadays So wheres the potliquor and potatoskins I ask Shall I knock and see if shes stirring yet No no—t wont do If little Phoebe was about the house I should not mind knocking but Miss Hepzibah likely as not would scowl down at me out of the window and look cross even if she felt pleasantly So Ill come back at noon
With these reflections the old man was shutting the gate of the little backyard Creaking on its hinges however like every other gate and door about the premises the sound reached the ears of the occupant of the northern gable one of the windows of which had a sideview towards the gate
Goodmorning Uncle Venner said the daguerreotypist leaning out of the window Do you hear nobody stirring
Not a soul said the man of patches But thats no wonder Tis barely half an hour past sunrise yet But Im really glad to see you Mr Holgrave Theres a strange lonesome look about this side of the house so that my heart misgave me somehow or other and I felt as if there was nobody alive in it The front of the house looks a good deal cheerier and Alices Posies are blooming there beautifully and if I were a young man Mr Holgrave my sweetheart should have one of those flowers in her bosom though I risked my neck climbing for it Well and did the wind keep you awake last night
It did indeed answered the artist smiling If I were a believer in ghosts—and I dont quite know whether I am or not—I should have concluded that all the old Pyncheons were running riot in the lower rooms especially in Miss Hepzibahs part of the house But it is very quiet now
Yes Miss Hepzibah will be apt to oversleep herself after being disturbed all night with the racket said Uncle Venner But it would be odd now wouldnt it if the Judge had taken both his cousins into the country along with him I saw him go into the shop yesterday
At what hour inquired Holgrave
Oh along in the forenoon said the old man Well well I must go my rounds and so must my wheelbarrow But Ill be back here at dinnertime for my pig likes a dinner as well as a breakfast No mealtime and no sort of victuals ever seems to come amiss to my pig Good morning to you And Mr Holgrave if I were a young man like you Id get one of Alices Posies and keep it in water till Phoebe comes back
I have heard said the daguerreotypist as he drew in his head that the water of Maules well suits those flowers best
Here the conversation ceased and Uncle Venner went on his way For half an hour longer nothing disturbed the repose of the Seven Gables nor was there any visitor except a carrierboy who as he passed the front doorstep threw down one of his newspapers for Hepzibah of late had regularly taken it in After a while there came a fat woman making prodigious speed and stumbling as she ran up the steps of the shopdoor Her face glowed with fireheat and it being a pretty warm morning she bubbled and hissed as it were as if all afry with chimneywarmth and summerwarmth and the warmth of her own corpulent velocity She tried the shopdoor it was fast She tried it again with so angry a jar that the bell tinkled angrily back at her
The deuce take Old Maid Pyncheon muttered the irascible housewife Think of her pretending to set up a centshop and then lying abed till noon These are what she calls gentlefolks airs I suppose But Ill either start her ladyship or break the door down
She shook it accordingly and the bell having a spiteful little temper of its own, rang obstreperously making its remonstrances heard—not indeed by the ears for which they were intended—but by a good lady on the opposite side of the street She opened the window and addressed the impatient applicant
Youll find nobody there Mrs Gubbins
But I must and will find somebody here cried Mrs Gubbins inflicting another outrage on the bell I want a halfpound of pork to fry some firstrate flounders for Mr Gubbinss breakfast and lady or not Old Maid Pyncheon shall get up and serve me with it
But do hear reason Mrs Gubbins responded the lady opposite She and her brother too have both gone to their cousins Judge Pyncheons at his countryseat Theres not a soul in the house but that young daguerreotypeman that sleeps in the north gable I saw old Hepzibah and Clifford go away yesterday and a queer couple of ducks they were paddling through the mudpuddles Theyre gone Ill assure you
And how do you know theyre gone to the Judges asked Mrs Gubbins Hes a rich man and theres been a quarrel between him and Hepzibah this many a day because he wont give her a living Thats the main reason of her setting up a centshop
I know that well enough said the neighbor But theyre gone—thats one thing certain And who but a blood relation that couldnt help himself I ask you would take in that awfultempered old maid and that dreadful Clifford Thats it you may be sure
Mrs Gubbins took her departure still brimming over with hot wrath against the absent Hepzibah For another halfhour or perhaps considerably more there was almost as much quiet on the outside of the house as within The elm however made a pleasant cheerful sunny sigh responsive to the breeze that was elsewhere imperceptible a swarm of insects buzzed merrily under its drooping shadow and became specks of light whenever they darted into the sunshine a locust sang once or twice in some inscrutable seclusion of the tree and a solitary little bird with plumage of pale gold came and hovered about Alices Posies
At last our small acquaintance Ned Higgins trudged up the street on his way to school and happening for the first time in a fortnight to be the possessor of a cent he could by no means get past the shopdoor of the Seven Gables But it would not open Again and again however and half a dozen other agains with the inexorable pertinacity of a child intent upon some object important to itself did he renew his efforts for admittance He had doubtless set his heart upon an elephant or possibly with Hamlet he meant to eat a crocodile In response to his more violent attacks the bell gave now and then a moderate tinkle but could not be stirred into clamor by any exertion of the little fellows childish and tiptoe strength Holding by the doorhandle he peeped through a crevice of the curtain and saw that the inner door communicating with the passage towards the parlor was closed
Miss Pyncheon screamed the child rapping on the windowpane I want an elephant
There being no answer to several repetitions of the summons Ned began to grow impatient and his little pot of passion quickly boiling over he picked up a stone with a naughty purpose to fling it through the window at the same time blubbering and sputtering with wrath A man—one of two who happened to be passing by—caught the urchins arm
Whats the trouble old gentleman he asked
I want old Hepzibah or Phoebe or any of them answered Ned sobbing They wont open the door and I cant get my elephant
Go to school you little scamp said the man Theres another centshop round the corner T is very strange Dixey added he to his companion whats become of all these Pyncheons Smith the liverystable keeper tells me Judge Pyncheon put his horse up yesterday to stand till after dinner and has not taken him away yet And one of the Judges hired men has been in this morning to make inquiry about him Hes a kind of person they say that seldom breaks his habits or stays out o nights
Oh hell turn up safe enough said Dixey And as for Old Maid Pyncheon take my word for it she has run in debt and gone off from her creditors I foretold you remember the first morning she set up shop that her devilish scowl would frighten away customers They couldnt stand it
I never thought shed make it go remarked his friend This business of centshops is overdone among the womenfolks My wife tried it and lost five dollars on her outlay
Poor business said Dixey shaking his head Poor business
In the course of the morning there were various other attempts to open a communication with the supposed inhabitants of this silent and impenetrable mansion The man of rootbeer came in his neatly painted wagon with a couple of dozen full bottles to be exchanged for empty ones the baker with a lot of crackers which Hepzibah had ordered for her retail custom the butcher with a nice titbit which he fancied she would be eager to secure for Clifford Had any observer of these proceedings been aware of the fearful secret hidden within the house it would have affected him with a singular shape and modification of horror to see the current of human life making this small eddy hereabouts—whirling sticks straws and all such trifles round and round right over the black depth where a dead corpse lay unseen
The butcher was so much in earnest with his sweetbread of lamb or whatever the dainty might be that he tried every accessible door of the Seven Gables and at length came round again to the shop where he ordinarily found admittance
Its a nice article and I know the old lady would jump at it said he to himself She cant be gone away In fifteen years that I have driven my cart through Pyncheon Street Ive never known her to be away from home though often enough to be sure a man might knock all day without bringing her to the door But that was when shed only herself to provide for
Peeping through the same crevice of the curtain where only a little while before the urchin of elephantine appetite had peeped the butcher beheld the inner door not closed as the child had seen it but ajar and almost wide open However it might have happened it was the fact Through the passageway there was a dark vista into the lighter but still obscure interior of the parlor It appeared to the butcher that he could pretty clearly discern what seemed to be the stalwart legs clad in black pantaloons of a man sitting in a large oaken chair the back of which concealed all the remainder of his figure This contemptuous tranquillity on the part of an occupant of the house in response to the butchers indefatigable efforts to attract notice so piqued the man of flesh that he determined to withdraw
So thought he there sits Old Maid Pyncheons bloody brother while Ive been giving myself all this trouble Why if a hog hadnt more manners Id stick him I call it demeaning a mans business to trade with such people and from this time forth if they want a sausage or an ounce of liver they shall run after the cart for it
He tossed the titbit angrily into his cart and drove off in a pet
Not a great while afterwards there was a sound of music turning the corner and approaching down the street with several intervals of silence and then a renewed and nearer outbreak of brisk melody A mob of children was seen moving onward or stopping in unison with the sound which appeared to proceed from the centre of the throng so that they were loosely bound together by slender strains of harmony and drawn along captive with ever and anon an accession of some little fellow in an apron and strawhat capering forth from door or gateway Arriving under the shadow of the Pyncheon Elm it proved to be the Italian boy who with his monkey and show of puppets had once before played his hurdygurdy beneath the arched window The pleasant face of Phoebe—and doubtless too the liberal recompense which she had flung him—still dwelt in his remembrance His expressive features kindled up as he recognized the spot where this trifling incident of his erratic life had chanced He entered the neglected yard now wilder than ever with its growth of hogweed and burdock stationed himself on the doorstep of the main entrance and opening his showbox began to play Each individual of the automatic community forthwith set to work according to his or her proper vocation the monkey taking off his Highland bonnet bowed and scraped to the bystanders most obsequiously with ever an observant eye to pick up a stray cent and the young foreigner himself as he turned the crank of his machine glanced upward to the arched window expectant of a presence that would make his music the livelier and sweeter The throng of children stood near some on the sidewalk some within the yard two or three establishing themselves on the very doorstep and one squatting on the threshold Meanwhile the locust kept singing in the great old Pyncheon Elm
I dont hear anybody in the house said one of the children to another The monkey wont pick up anything here
There is somebody at home affirmed the urchin on the threshold I heard a step
Still the young Italians eye turned sidelong upward and it really seemed as if the touch of genuine though slight and almost playful emotion communicated a juicier sweetness to the dry mechanical process of his minstrelsy These wanderers are readily responsive to any natural kindness—be it no more than a smile or a word itself not understood but only a warmth in it—which befalls them on the roadside of life They remember these things because they are the little enchantments which for the instant—for the space that reflects a landscape in a soapbubble—build up a home about them Therefore the Italian boy would not be discouraged by the heavy silence with which the old house seemed resolute to clog the vivacity of his instrument He persisted in his melodious appeals he still looked upward trusting that his dark alien countenance would soon be brightened by Phoebes sunny aspect Neither could he be willing to depart without again beholding Clifford whose sensibility like Phoebes smile had talked a kind of hearts language to the foreigner He repeated all his music over and over again until his auditors were getting weary So were the little wooden people in his showbox and the monkey most of all There was no response save the singing of the locust
No children live in this house said a schoolboy at last Nobody lives here but an old maid and an old man Youll get nothing here Why dont you go along
You fool you why do you tell him whispered a shrewd little Yankee caring nothing for the music but a good deal for the cheap rate at which it was had Let him play as he likes If theres nobody to pay him thats his own lookout
Once more however the Italian ran over his round of melodies To the common observer—who could understand nothing of the case except the music and the sunshine on the hither side of the door—it might have been amusing to watch the pertinacity of the streetperformer Will he succeed at last Will that stubborn door be suddenly flung open Will a group of joyous children the young ones of the house come dancing shouting laughing into the open air and cluster round the showbox looking with eager merriment at the puppets and tossing each a copper for longtailed Mammon the monkey to pick up
But to us who know the inner heart of the Seven Gables as well as its exterior face there is a ghastly effect in this repetition of light popular tunes at its doorstep It would be an ugly business indeed if Judge Pyncheon who would not have cared a fig for Paganinis fiddle in his most harmonious mood should make his appearance at the door with a bloody shirtbosom and a grim frown on his swarthily white visage and motion the foreign vagabond away Was ever before such a grinding out of jigs and waltzes where nobody was in the cue to dance Yes very often This contrast or intermingling of tragedy with mirth happens daily hourly momently The gloomy and desolate old house deserted of life and with awful Death sitting sternly in its solitude was the emblem of many a human heart which nevertheless is compelled to hear the thrill and echo of the worlds gayety around it
Before the conclusion of the Italians performance a couple of men happened to be passing On their way to dinner I say you young French fellow called out one of them—come away from that doorstep and go somewhere else with your nonsense The Pyncheon family live there and they are in great trouble just about this time They dont feel musical today It is reported all over town that Judge Pyncheon who owns the house has been murdered and the city marshal is going to look into the matter So be off with you at once
As the Italian shouldered his hurdygurdy he saw on the doorstep a card which had been covered all the morning by the newspaper that the carrier had flung upon it but was now shuffled into sight He picked it up and perceiving something written in pencil gave it to the man to read In fact it was an engraved card of Judge Pyncheons with certain pencilled memoranda on the back referring to various businesses which it had been his purpose to transact during the preceding day It formed a prospective epitome of the days history only that affairs had not turned out altogether in accordance with the programme The card must have been lost from the Judges vestpocket in his preliminary attempt to gain access by the main entrance of the house Though well soaked with rain it was still partially legible
Look here Dixey cried the man This has something to do with Judge Pyncheon See—heres his name printed on it and here I suppose is some of his handwriting
Lets go to the city marshal with it said Dixey It may give him just the clew he wants After all whispered he in his companions ear it would be no wonder if the Judge has gone into that door and never come out again A certain cousin of his may have been at his old tricks And Old Maid Pyncheon having got herself in debt by the centshop—and the Judges pocketbook being well filled—and bad blood amongst them already Put all these things together and see what they make
Hush hush whispered the other It seems like a sin to be the first to speak of such a thing But I think with you that we had better go to the city marshal
Yes yes said Dixey Well—I always said there was something devilish in that womans scowl
The men wheeled about accordingly and retraced their steps up the street The Italian also made the best of his way off with a parting glance up at the arched window As for the children they took to their heels with one accord and scampered as if some giant or ogre were in pursuit until at a good distance from the house they stopped as suddenly and simultaneously as they had set out Their susceptible nerves took an indefinite alarm from what they had overheard Looking back at the grotesque peaks and shadowy angles of the old mansion they fancied a gloom diffused about it which no brightness of the sunshine could dispel An imaginary Hepzibah scowled and shook her finger at them from several windows at the same moment An imaginary Clifford—for and it would have deeply wounded him to know it he had always been a horror to these small people—stood behind the unreal Hepzibah making awful gestures in a faded dressinggown Children are even more apt if possible than grown people to catch the contagion of a panic terror For the rest of the day the more timid went whole streets about for the sake of avoiding the Seven Gables while the bolder signalized their hardihood by challenging their comrades to race past the mansion at full speed
It could not have been more than half an hour after the disappearance of the Italian boy with his unseasonable melodies when a cab drove down the street It stopped beneath the Pyncheon Elm the cabman took a trunk a canvas bag and a bandbox from the top of his vehicle and deposited them on the doorstep of the old house a straw bonnet and then the pretty figure of a young girl came into view from the interior of the cab It was Phoebe Though not altogether so blooming as when she first tripped into our story—for in the few intervening weeks her experiences had made her graver more womanly and deepereyed in token of a heart that had begun to suspect its depths—still there was the quiet glow of natural sunshine over her Neither had she forfeited her proper gift of making things look real rather than fantastic within her sphere Yet we feel it to be a questionable venture even for Phoebe at this juncture to cross the threshold of the Seven Gables Is her healthful presence potent enough to chase away the crowd of pale hideous and sinful phantoms that have gained admittance there since her departure Or will she likewise fade sicken sadden and grow into deformity and be only another pallid phantom to glide noiselessly up and down the stairs and affright children as she pauses at the window
At least we would gladly forewarn the unsuspecting girl that there is nothing in human shape or substance to receive her unless it be the figure of Judge Pyncheon who—wretched spectacle that he is and frightful in our remembrance since our nightlong vigil with him—still keeps his place in the oaken chair
Phoebe first tried the shopdoor It did not yield to her hand and the white curtain drawn across the window which formed the upper section of the door struck her quick perceptive faculty as something unusual Without making another effort to enter here she betook herself to the great portal under the arched window Finding it fastened she knocked A reverberation came from the emptiness within She knocked again and a third time and listening intently fancied that the floor creaked as if Hepzibah were coming with her ordinary tiptoe movement to admit her But so dead a silence ensued upon this imaginary sound that she began to question whether she might not have mistaken the house familiar as she thought herself with its exterior
Her notice was now attracted by a childs voice at some distance It appeared to call her name Looking in the direction whence it proceeded Phoebe saw little Ned Higgins a good way down the street stamping shaking his head violently making deprecatory gestures with both hands and shouting to her at mouthwide screech
No no Phoebe he screamed Dont you go in Theres something wicked there Dont—dont—dont go in
But as the little personage could not be induced to approach near enough to explain himself Phoebe concluded that he had been frightened on some of his visits to the shop by her cousin Hepzibah for the good ladys manifestations in truth ran about an equal chance of scaring children out of their wits or compelling them to unseemly laughter Still she felt the more for this incident how unaccountably silent and impenetrable the house had become As her next resort Phoebe made her way into the garden where on so warm and bright a day as the present she had little doubt of finding Clifford and perhaps Hepzibah also idling away the noontide in the shadow of the arbor Immediately on her entering the garden gate the family of hens half ran half flew to meet her while a strange grimalkin which was prowling under the parlor window took to his heels clambered hastily over the fence and vanished The arbor was vacant and its floor table and circular bench were still damp and bestrewn with twigs and the disarray of the past storm The growth of the garden seemed to have got quite out of bounds the weeds had taken advantage of Phoebes absence and the longcontinued rain to run rampant over the flowers and kitchenvegetables Maules well had overflowed its stone border and made a pool of formidable breadth in that corner of the garden
The impression of the whole scene was that of a spot where no human foot had left its print for many preceding days—probably not since Phoebes departure—for she saw a sidecomb of her own under the table of the arbor where it must have fallen on the last afternoon when she and Clifford sat there
The girl knew that her two relatives were capable of far greater oddities than that of shutting themselves up in their old house as they appeared now to have done Nevertheless with indistinct misgivings of something amiss and apprehensions to which she could not give shape she approached the door that formed the customary communication between the house and garden It was secured within like the two which she had already tried She knocked however and immediately as if the application had been expected the door was drawn open by a considerable exertion of some unseen persons strength not wide but far enough to afford her a sidelong entrance As Hepzibah in order not to expose herself to inspection from without invariably opened a door in this manner Phoebe necessarily concluded that it was her cousin who now admitted her
Without hesitation therefore she stepped across the threshold and had no sooner entered than the door closed behind her
XX The Flower of Eden
PHOEBE coming so suddenly from the sunny daylight was altogether bedimmed in such density of shadow as lurked in most of the passages of the old house She was not at first aware by whom she had been admitted Before her eyes had adapted themselves to the obscurity a hand grasped her own with a firm but gentle and warm pressure thus imparting a welcome which caused her heart to leap and thrill with an indefinable shiver of enjoyment She felt herself drawn along not towards the parlor but into a large and unoccupied apartment which had formerly been the grand receptionroom of the Seven Gables The sunshine came freely into all the uncurtained windows of this room and fell upon the dusty floor so that Phoebe now clearly saw—what indeed had been no secret after the encounter of a warm hand with hers—that it was not Hepzibah nor Clifford but Holgrave to whom she owed her reception The subtile intuitive communication or rather the vague and formless impression of something to be told had made her yield unresistingly to his impulse Without taking away her hand she looked eagerly in his face not quick to forebode evil but unavoidably conscious that the state of the family had changed since her departure and therefore anxious for an explanation
The artist looked paler than ordinary there was a thoughtful and severe contraction of his forehead tracing a deep vertical line between the eyebrows His smile however was full of genuine warmth and had in it a joy by far the most vivid expression that Phoebe had ever witnessed shining out of the New England reserve with which Holgrave habitually masked whatever lay near his heart It was the look wherewith a man brooding alone over some fearful object in a dreary forest or illimitable desert would recognize the familiar aspect of his dearest friend bringing up all the peaceful ideas that belong to home and the gentle current of everyday affairs And yet as he felt the necessity of responding to her look of inquiry the smile disappeared
I ought not to rejoice that you have come Phoebe said he We meet at a strange moment
What has happened she exclaimed Why is the house so deserted Where are Hepzibah and Clifford
Gone I cannot imagine where they are answered Holgrave We are alone in the house
Hepzibah and Clifford gone cried Phoebe It is not possible And why have you brought me into this room instead of the parlor Ah something terrible has happened I must run and see
No no Phoebe said Holgrave holding her back It is as I have told you They are gone and I know not whither A terrible event has indeed happened but not to them nor as I undoubtingly believe through any agency of theirs If I read your character rightly Phoebe he continued fixing his eyes on hers with stern anxiety intermixed with tenderness gentle as you are and seeming to have your sphere among common things you yet possess remarkable strength You have wonderful poise and a faculty which when tested will prove itself capable of dealing with matters that fall far out of the ordinary rule
Oh no I am very weak replied Phoebe trembling But tell me what has happened
You are strong persisted Holgrave You must be both strong and wise for I am all astray and need your counsel It may be you can suggest the one right thing to do
Tell me—tell me said Phoebe all in a tremble It oppresses—it terrifies me—this mystery Anything else I can bear
The artist hesitated Notwithstanding what he had just said and most sincerely in regard to the selfbalancing power with which Phoebe impressed him it still seemed almost wicked to bring the awful secret of yesterday to her knowledge It was like dragging a hideous shape of death into the cleanly and cheerful space before a household fire where it would present all the uglier aspect amid the decorousness of everything about it Yet it could not be concealed from her she must needs know it
Phoebe said he do you remember this He put into her hand a daguerreotype the same that he had shown her at their first interview in the garden and which so strikingly brought out the hard and relentless traits of the original
What has this to do with Hepzibah and Clifford asked Phoebe with impatient surprise that Holgrave should so trifle with her at such a moment It is Judge Pyncheon You have shown it to me before
But here is the same face taken within this halfhour said the artist presenting her with another miniature I had just finished it when I heard you at the door
This is death shuddered Phoebe turning very pale Judge Pyncheon dead
Such as there represented said Holgrave he sits in the next room The Judge is dead and Clifford and Hepzibah have vanished I know no more All beyond is conjecture On returning to my solitary chamber last evening I noticed no light either in the parlor or Hepzibahs room or Cliffords no stir nor footstep about the house This morning there was the same deathlike quiet From my window I overheard the testimony of a neighbor that your relatives were seen leaving the house in the midst of yesterdays storm A rumor reached me too of Judge Pyncheon being missed A feeling which I cannot describe—an indefinite sense of some catastrophe or consummation—impelled me to make my way into this part of the house where I discovered what you see As a point of evidence that may be useful to Clifford and also as a memorial valuable to myself—for Phoebe there are hereditary reasons that connect me strangely with that mans fate—I used the means at my disposal to preserve this pictorial record of Judge Pyncheons death
Even in her agitation Phoebe could not help remarking the calmness of Holgraves demeanor He appeared it is true to feel the whole awfulness of the Judges death yet had received the fact into his mind without any mixture of surprise but as an event preordained happening inevitably and so fitting itself into past occurrences that it could almost have been prophesied
Why have you not thrown open the doors and called in witnesses inquired she with a painful shudder It is terrible to be here alone
But Clifford suggested the artist Clifford and Hepzibah We must consider what is best to be done in their behalf It is a wretched fatality that they should have disappeared Their flight will throw the worst coloring over this event of which it is susceptible Yet how easy is the explanation to those who know them Bewildered and terrorstricken by the similarity of this death to a former one which was attended with such disastrous consequences to Clifford they have had no idea but of removing themselves from the scene How miserably unfortunate Had Hepzibah but shrieked aloud—had Clifford flung wide the door and proclaimed Judge Pyncheons death—it would have been however awful in itself an event fruitful of good consequences to them As I view it it would have gone far towards obliterating the black stain on Cliffords character
And how asked Phoebe could any good come from what is so very dreadful
Because said the artist if the matter can be fairly considered and candidly interpreted it must be evident that Judge Pyncheon could not have come unfairly to his end This mode of death had been an idiosyncrasy with his family for generations past not often occurring indeed but when it does occur usually attacking individuals about the Judges time of life and generally in the tension of some mental crisis or perhaps in an access of wrath Old Maules prophecy was probably founded on a knowledge of this physical predisposition in the Pyncheon race Now there is a minute and almost exact similarity in the appearances connected with the death that occurred yesterday and those recorded of the death of Cliffords uncle thirty years ago It is true there was a certain arrangement of circumstances unnecessary to be recounted which made it possible nay as men look at these things probable or even certain—that old Jaffrey Pyncheon came to a violent death and by Cliffords hands
Whence came those circumstances exclaimed Phoebe He being innocent as we know him to be
They were arranged said Holgrave—at least such has long been my conviction—they were arranged after the uncles death and before it was made public by the man who sits in yonder parlor His own death so like that former one yet attended by none of those suspicious circumstances seems the stroke of God upon him at once a punishment for his wickedness and making plain the innocence of Clifford But this flight—it distorts everything He may be in concealment near at hand Could we but bring him back before the discovery of the Judges death the evil might be rectified
We must not hide this thing a moment longer said Phoebe It is dreadful to keep it so closely in our hearts Clifford is innocent God will make it manifest Let us throw open the doors and call all the neighborhood to see the truth
You are right Phoebe rejoined Holgrave Doubtless you are right
Yet the artist did not feel the horror which was proper to Phoebes sweet and orderloving character at thus finding herself at issue with society and brought in contact with an event that transcended ordinary rules Neither was he in haste like her to betake himself within the precincts of common life On the contrary he gathered a wild enjoyment—as it were a flower of strange beauty growing in a desolate spot and blossoming in the wind—such a flower of momentary happiness he gathered from his present position It separated Phoebe and himself from the world and bound them to each other by their exclusive knowledge of Judge Pyncheons mysterious death and the counsel which they were forced to hold respecting it The secret so long as it should continue such kept them within the circle of a spell a solitude in the midst of men a remoteness as entire as that of an island in midocean once divulged the ocean would flow betwixt them standing on its widely sundered shores Meanwhile all the circumstances of their situation seemed to draw them together they were like two children who go hand in hand pressing closely to one anothers side through a shadowhaunted passage The image of awful Death which filled the house held them united by his stiffened grasp
These influences hastened the development of emotions that might not otherwise have flowered so Possibly indeed it had been Holgraves purpose to let them die in their undeveloped germs Why do we delay so asked Phoebe This secret takes away my breath Let us throw open the doors
In all our lives there can never come another moment like this said Holgrave Phoebe is it all terror—nothing but terror Are you conscious of no joy as I am that has made this the only point of life worth living for
It seems a sin replied Phoebe trembling to think of joy at such a time
Could you but know Phoebe how it was with me the hour before you came exclaimed the artist A dark cold miserable hour The presence of yonder dead man threw a great black shadow over everything he made the universe so far as my perception could reach a scene of guilt and of retribution more dreadful than the guilt The sense of it took away my youth I never hoped to feel young again The world looked strange wild evil hostile my past life so lonesome and dreary my future a shapeless gloom which I must mould into gloomy shapes But Phoebe you crossed the threshold and hope warmth and joy came in with you The black moment became at once a blissful one It must not pass without the spoken word I love you
How can you love a simple girl like me asked Phoebe compelled by his earnestness to speak You have many many thoughts with which I should try in vain to sympathize And I—I too—I have tendencies with which you would sympathize as little That is less matter But I have not scope enough to make you happy
You are my only possibility of happiness answered Holgrave I have no faith in it except as you bestow it on me
And then—I am afraid continued Phoebe shrinking towards Holgrave even while she told him so frankly the doubts with which he affected her You will lead me out of my own quiet path You will make me strive to follow you where it is pathless I cannot do so It is not my nature I shall sink down and perish
Ah Phoebe exclaimed Holgrave with almost a sigh and a smile that was burdened with thought
It will be far otherwise than as you forebode The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits I have a presentiment that hereafter it will be my lot to set out trees to make fences—perhaps even in due time to build a house for another generation—in a word to conform myself to laws and the peaceful practice of society Your poise will be more powerful than any oscillating tendency of mine
I would not have it so said Phoebe earnestly
Do you love me asked Holgrave If we love one another the moment has room for nothing more Let us pause upon it and be satisfied Do you love me Phoebe
You look into my heart said she letting her eyes drop You know I love you
And it was in this hour so full of doubt and awe that the one miracle was wrought without which every human existence is a blank The bliss which makes all things true beautiful and holy shone around this youth and maiden They were conscious of nothing sad nor old They transfigured the earth and made it Eden again and themselves the two first dwellers in it The dead man so close beside them was forgotten At such a crisis there is no death for immortality is revealed anew and embraces everything in its hallowed atmosphere
But how soon the heavy earthdream settled down again
Hark whispered Phoebe Somebody is at the street door
Now let us meet the world said Holgrave No doubt the rumor of Judge Pyncheons visit to this house and the flight of Hepzibah and Clifford is about to lead to the investigation of the premises We have no way but to meet it Let us open the door at once
But to their surprise before they could reach the street door—even before they quitted the room in which the foregoing interview had passed—they heard footsteps in the farther passage The door therefore which they supposed to be securely locked—which Holgrave indeed had seen to be so and at which Phoebe had vainly tried to enter—must have been opened from without The sound of footsteps was not harsh bold decided and intrusive as the gait of strangers would naturally be making authoritative entrance into a dwelling where they knew themselves unwelcome It was feeble as of persons either weak or weary there was the mingled murmur of two voices familiar to both the listeners
Can it be whispered Holgrave
It is they answered Phoebe Thank God—thank God
And then as if in sympathy with Phoebes whispered ejaculation they heard Hepzibahs voice more distinctly
Thank God my brother we are at home
Well—Yes—thank God responded Clifford A dreary home Hepzibah But you have done well to bring me hither Stay That parlor door is open I cannot pass by it Let me go and rest me in the arbor where I used—oh very long ago it seems to me after what has befallen us—where I used to be so happy with little Phoebe
But the house was not altogether so dreary as Clifford imagined it They had not made many steps—in truth they were lingering in the entry with the listlessness of an accomplished purpose uncertain what to do next—when Phoebe ran to meet them On beholding her Hepzibah burst into tears With all her might she had staggered onward beneath the burden of grief and responsibility until now that it was safe to fling it down Indeed she had not energy to fling it down but had ceased to uphold it and suffered it to press her to the earth Clifford appeared the stronger of the two
It is our own little Phoebe—Ah and Holgrave with her exclaimed he with a glance of keen and delicate insight and a smile beautiful kind but melancholy I thought of you both as we came down the street and beheld Alices Posies in full bloom And so the flower of Eden has bloomed likewise in this old darksome house today
XXI The Departure
THE sudden death of so prominent a member of the social world as the Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a sensation at least in the circles more immediately connected with the deceased which had hardly quite subsided in a fortnight
It may be remarked however that of all the events which constitute a persons biography there is scarcely one—none certainly of anything like a similar importance—to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death In most other cases and contingencies the individual is present among us mixed up with the daily revolution of affairs and affording a definite point for observation At his decease there is only a vacancy and a momentary eddy—very small as compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated object—and a bubble or two ascending out of the black depth and bursting at the surface As regarded Judge Pyncheon it seemed probable at first blush that the mode of his final departure might give him a larger and longer posthumous vogue than ordinarily attends the memory of a distinguished man But when it came to be understood on the highest professional authority that the event was a natural and—except for some unimportant particulars denoting a slight idiosyncrasy—by no means an unusual form of death the public with its customary alacrity proceeded to forget that he had ever lived In short the honorable Judge was beginning to be a stale subject before half the country newspapers had found time to put their columns in mourning and publish his exceedingly eulogistic obituary
Nevertheless creeping darkly through the places which this excellent person had haunted in his lifetime there was a hidden stream of private talk such as it would have shocked all decency to speak loudly at the streetcorners It is very singular how the fact of a mans death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character whether for good or evil than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehood or betrays its emptiness it is a touchstone that proves the gold and dishonors the baser metal Could the departed whoever he may be return in a week after his decease he would almost invariably find himself at a higher or lower point than he had formerly occupied on the scale of public appreciation But the talk or scandal to which we now allude had reference to matters of no less old a date than the supposed murder thirty or forty years ago of the late Judge Pyncheons uncle The medical opinion with regard to his own recent and regretted decease had almost entirely obviated the idea that a murder was committed in the former case Yet as the record showed there were circumstances irrefragably indicating that some person had gained access to old Jaffrey Pyncheons private apartments at or near the moment of his death His desk and private drawers in a room contiguous to his bedchamber had been ransacked money and valuable articles were missing there was a bloody handprint on the old mans linen and by a powerfully welded chain of deductive evidence the guilt of the robbery and apparent murder had been fixed on Clifford then residing with his uncle in the House of the Seven Gables
Whencesoever originating there now arose a theory that undertook so to account for these circumstances as to exclude the idea of Cliffords agency Many persons affirmed that the history and elucidation of the facts long so mysterious had been obtained by the daguerreotypist from one of those mesmerical seers who nowadays so strangely perplex the aspect of human affairs and put everybodys natural vision to the blush by the marvels which they see with their eyes shut
According to this version of the story Judge Pyncheon exemplary as we have portrayed him in our narrative was in his youth an apparently irreclaimable scapegrace The brutish the animal instincts as is often the case had been developed earlier than the intellectual qualities and the force of character for which he was afterwards remarkable He had shown himself wild dissipated addicted to low pleasures little short of ruffianly in his propensities and recklessly expensive with no other resources than the bounty of his uncle This course of conduct had alienated the old bachelors affection once strongly fixed upon him Now it is averred—but whether on authority available in a court of justice we do not pretend to have investigated—that the young man was tempted by the devil one night to search his uncles private drawers to which he had unsuspected means of access While thus criminally occupied he was startled by the opening of the chamberdoor There stood old Jaffrey Pyncheon in his nightclothes The surprise of such a discovery his agitation alarm and horror brought on the crisis of a disorder to which the old bachelor had an hereditary liability he seemed to choke with blood and fell upon the floor striking his temple a heavy blow against the corner of a table What was to be done The old man was surely dead Assistance would come too late What a misfortune indeed should it come too soon since his reviving consciousness would bring the recollection of the ignominious offence which he had beheld his nephew in the very act of committing
But he never did revive With the cool hardihood that always pertained to him the young man continued his search of the drawers and found a will of recent date in favor of Clifford—which he destroyed—and an older one in his own favor which he suffered to remain But before retiring Jaffrey bethought himself of the evidence in these ransacked drawers that some one had visited the chamber with sinister purposes Suspicion unless averted might fix upon the real offender In the very presence of the dead man therefore he laid a scheme that should free himself at the expense of Clifford his rival for whose character he had at once a contempt and a repugnance It is not probable be it said that he acted with any set purpose of involving Clifford in a charge of murder Knowing that his uncle did not die by violence it may not have occurred to him in the hurry of the crisis that such an inference might be drawn But when the affair took this darker aspect Jaffreys previous steps had already pledged him to those which remained So craftily had he arranged the circumstances that at Cliffords trial his cousin hardly found it necessary to swear to anything false but only to withhold the one decisive explanation by refraining to state what he had himself done and witnessed
Thus Jaffrey Pyncheons inward criminality as regarded Clifford was indeed black and damnable while its mere outward show and positive commission was the smallest that could possibly consist with so great a sin This is just the sort of guilt that a man of eminent respectability finds it easiest to dispose of It was suffered to fade out of sight or be reckoned a venial matter in the Honorable Judge Pyncheons long subsequent survey of his own life He shuffled it aside among the forgotten and forgiven frailties of his youth and seldom thought of it again
We leave the Judge to his repose He could not be styled fortunate at the hour of death Unknowingly he was a childless man while striving to add more wealth to his only childs inheritance Hardly a week after his decease one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of the death by cholera of Judge Pyncheons son just at the point of embarkation for his native land By this misfortune Clifford became rich so did Hepzibah so did our little village maiden and through her that sworn foe of wealth and all manner of conservatism—the wild reformer—Holgrave
It was now far too late in Cliffords life for the good opinion of society to be worth the trouble and anguish of a formal vindication What he needed was the love of a very few not the admiration or even the respect of the unknown many The latter might probably have been won for him had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had fallen deemed it advisable to expose Clifford to a miserable resuscitation of past ideas when the condition of whatever comfort he might expect lay in the calm of forgetfulness After such wrong as he had suffered there is no reparation The pitiable mockery of it which the world might have been ready enough to offer coming so long after the agony had done its utmost work would have been fit only to provoke bitterer laughter than poor Clifford was ever capable of It is a truth and it would be a very sad one but for the higher hopes which it suggests that no great mistake whether acted or endured in our mortal sphere is ever really set right Time the continual vicissitude of circumstances and the invariable inopportunity of death render it impossible If after long lapse of years the right seems to be in our power we find no niche to set it in The better remedy is for the sufferer to pass on and leave what he once thought his irreparable ruin far behind him
The shock of Judge Pyncheons death had a permanently invigorating and ultimately beneficial effect on Clifford That strong and ponderous man had been Cliffords nightmare There was no free breath to be drawn within the sphere of so malevolent an influence The first effect of freedom as we have witnessed in Cliffords aimless flight was a tremulous exhilaration Subsiding from it he did not sink into his former intellectual apathy He never it is true attained to nearly the full measure of what might have been his faculties But he recovered enough of them partially to light up his character to display some outline of the marvellous grace that was abortive in it and to make him the object of no less deep although less melancholy interest than heretofore He was evidently happy Could we pause to give another picture of his daily life with all the appliances now at command to gratify his instinct for the Beautiful the garden scenes that seemed so sweet to him would look mean and trivial in comparison
Very soon after their change of fortune Clifford Hepzibah and little Phoebe with the approval of the artist concluded to remove from the dismal old House of the Seven Gables and take up their abode for the present at the elegant countryseat of the late Judge Pyncheon Chanticleer and his family had already been transported thither where the two hens had forthwith begun an indefatigable process of egglaying with an evident design as a matter of duty and conscience to continue their illustrious breed under better auspices than for a century past On the day set for their departure the principal personages of our story including good Uncle Venner were assembled in the parlor
The countryhouse is certainly a very fine one so far as the plan goes observed Holgrave as the party were discussing their future arrangements But I wonder that the late Judge—being so opulent and with a reasonable prospect of transmitting his wealth to descendants of his own—should not have felt the propriety of embodying so excellent a piece of domestic architecture in stone rather than in wood Then every generation of the family might have altered the interior to suit its own taste and convenience while the exterior through the lapse of years might have been adding venerableness to its original beauty and thus giving that impression of permanence which I consider essential to the happiness of any one moment
Why cried Phoebe gazing into the artists face with infinite amazement how wonderfully your ideas are changed A house of stone indeed It is but two or three weeks ago that you seemed to wish people to live in something as fragile and temporary as a birdsnest
Ah Phoebe I told you how it would be said the artist with a halfmelancholy laugh You find me a conservative already Little did I think ever to become one It is especially unpardonable in this dwelling of so much hereditary misfortune and under the eye of yonder portrait of a model conservative who in that very character rendered himself so long the evil destiny of his race
That picture said Clifford seeming to shrink from its stern glance Whenever I look at it there is an old dreamy recollection haunting me but keeping just beyond the grasp of my mind Wealth it seems to say—boundless wealth—unimaginable wealth I could fancy that when I was a child or a youth that portrait had spoken and told me a rich secret or had held forth its hand with the written record of hidden opulence But those old matters are so dim with me nowadays What could this dream have been
Perhaps I can recall it answered Holgrave See There are a hundred chances to one that no person unacquainted with the secret would ever touch this spring
A secret spring cried Clifford Ah I remember now I did discover it one summer afternoon when I was idling and dreaming about the house long long ago But the mystery escapes me
The artist put his finger on the contrivance to which he had referred In former days the effect would probably have been to cause the picture to start forward But in so long a period of concealment the machinery had been eaten through with rust so that at Holgraves pressure the portrait frame and all tumbled suddenly from its position and lay face downward on the floor A recess in the wall was thus brought to light in which lay an object so covered with a centurys dust that it could not immediately be recognized as a folded sheet of parchment Holgrave opened it and displayed an ancient deed signed with the hieroglyphics of several Indian sagamores and conveying to Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs forever a vast extent of territory at the Eastward
This is the very parchment the attempt to recover which cost the beautiful Alice Pyncheon her happiness and life said the artist alluding to his legend It is what the Pyncheons sought in vain while it was valuable and now that they find the treasure it has long been worthless
Poor Cousin Jaffrey This is what deceived him exclaimed Hepzibah When they were young together Clifford probably made a kind of fairytale of this discovery He was always dreaming hither and thither about the house and lighting up its dark corners with beautiful stories And poor Jaffrey who took hold of everything as if it were real thought my brother had found out his uncles wealth He died with this delusion in his mind
But said Phoebe apart to Holgrave how came you to know the secret
My dearest Phoebe said Holgrave how will it please you to assume the name of Maule As for the secret it is the only inheritance that has come down to me from my ancestors You should have known sooner only that I was afraid of frightening you away that in this long drama of wrong and retribution I represent the old wizard and am probably as much a wizard as ever he was The son of the executed Matthew Maule while building this house took the opportunity to construct that recess and hide away the Indian deed on which depended the immense landclaim of the Pyncheons Thus they bartered their eastern territory for Maules gardenground
And now said Uncle Venner I suppose their whole claim is not worth one mans share in my farm yonder
Uncle Venner cried Phoebe taking the patched philosophers hand you must never talk any more about your farm You shall never go there as long as you live There is a cottage in our new garden—the prettiest little yellowishbrown cottage you ever saw and the sweetestlooking place for it looks just as if it were made of gingerbread—and we are going to fit it up and furnish it on purpose for you And you shall do nothing but what you choose and shall be as happy as the day is long and shall keep Cousin Clifford in spirits with the wisdom and pleasantness which is always dropping from your lips
Ah my dear child quoth good Uncle Venner quite overcome if you were to speak to a young man as you do to an old one his chance of keeping his heart another minute would not be worth one of the buttons on my waistcoat And—soul alive—that great sigh which you made me heave has burst off the very last of them But never mind It was the happiest sigh I ever did heave and it seems as if I must have drawn in a gulp of heavenly breath to make it with Well well Miss Phoebe Theyll miss me in the gardens hereabouts and round by the back doors and Pyncheon Street Im afraid will hardly look the same without old Uncle Venner who remembers it with a mowing field on one side and the garden of the Seven Gables on the other But either I must go to your countryseat or you must come to my farm—thats one of two things certain and I leave you to choose which
Oh come with us by all means Uncle Venner said Clifford who had a remarkable enjoyment of the old mans mellow quiet and simple spirit I want you always to be within five minutes saunter of my chair You are the only philosopher I ever knew of whose wisdom has not a drop of bitter essence at the bottom
Dear me cried Uncle Venner beginning partly to realize what manner of man he was And yet folks used to set me down among the simple ones in my younger days But I suppose I am like a Roxbury russet—a great deal the better the longer I can be kept Yes and my words of wisdom that you and Phoebe tell me of are like the golden dandelions which never grow in the hot months but may be seen glistening among the withered grass and under the dry leaves sometimes as late as December And you are welcome friends to my mess of dandelions if there were twice as many
A plain but handsome darkgreen barouche had now drawn up in front of the ruinous portal of the old mansionhouse The party came forth and with the exception of good Uncle Venner who was to follow in a few days proceeded to take their places They were chatting and laughing very pleasantly together and—as proves to be often the case at moments when we ought to palpitate with sensibility—Clifford and Hepzibah bade a final farewell to the abode of their forefathers with hardly more emotion than if they had made it their arrangement to return thither at teatime Several children were drawn to the spot by so unusual a spectacle as the barouche and pair of gray horses Recognizing little Ned Higgins among them Hepzibah put her hand into her pocket and presented the urchin her earliest and staunchest customer with silver enough to people the Domdaniel cavern of his interior with as various a procession of quadrupeds as passed into the ark
Two men were passing just as the barouche drove off
Well Dixey said one of them what do you think of this My wife kept a centshop three months and lost five dollars on her outlay Old Maid Pyncheon has been in trade just about as long and rides off in her carriage with a couple of hundred thousand—reckoning her share and Cliffords and Phoebes—and some say twice as much If you choose to call it luck it is all very well but if we are to take it as the will of Providence why I cant exactly fathom it
Pretty good business quoth the sagacious Dixey—pretty good business
Maules well all this time though left in solitude was throwing up a succession of kaleidoscopic pictures in which a gifted eye might have seen foreshadowed the coming fortunes of Hepzibah and Clifford and the descendant of the legendary wizard and the village maiden over whom he had thrown loves web of sorcery The Pyncheon Elm moreover with what foliage the September gale had spared to it whispered unintelligible prophecies And wise Uncle Venner passing slowly from the ruinous porch seemed to hear a strain of music and fancied that sweet Alice Pyncheon—after witnessing these deeds this bygone woe and this present happiness of her kindred mortals—had given one farewell touch of a spirits joy upon her harpsichord as she floated heavenward from the HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES