SANS Var sd bes Ih ee rs aid i vege nye 3, a ea : bd, : Oy YAAASD, 4) ES ‘ * if ih Lik mh t i i 12 UNIVERSITY: OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN BOOKSTACKS The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its return to the library from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. To renew call Telephone Center, 333-8400 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN L161—O-1096 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2021 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign https://archive.org/details/houseofsevengabloOhawt_6 BLINDLY, BUT UNDOUBTINGLY, ... THE PROUD ALICE APPROACHED HIM (page 246) Wy RIVERSIDE BOOKSHELF U ml Ze THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES A Romance BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY HELEN MASON GROSE BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riversive Press Cambridge COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE - MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. y 7 sf Ch, 4 Je te Le Ah tPA Se@ ’ 47 PUBLISHERS’ NOTE “THE House of the Seven Gables” was published a year later than “ The Scarlet Letter,” and was praised as warmly as the earlier book. The “ North American Review” said of it, ‘¢ The successive scenes of this bold and startling fiction are portrayed with a vividness and power unsurpassed and rarely equalled’’; and the “International Magazine” called it “the purest piece of imagination in our prose literature.” For almost three quarters of a century it has held its place, and it is interesting to note that in recent years it has been included in some of the best lists of required or recommended reading for young people. Certainly the young reader who comes to it now for the first time will find in it many of the most enthrall- ing elements of romance, — family feud, mysterious death, false imprisonment, valuable documents hidden in a secret recess, and a charming heroine who removes the curse. Being wise in the popular knowledge of our present-day scientific wonders, he will perhaps smile at the part that mesmerism plays in the story, and at the uncertain feeling about the telegraph, — which was a recent marvel when “The House of the Seven Gables” was written. The distinctive feature of this new edition is the series of thirty-six full-page illustrations by Mrs. Grose. These have grown out of the artist’s admiration for the story and her perception of the many points in it which il PUBLISHERS’ NOTE lend themselves so well to effective illustration. Her work has been in the best sense a labor of love. The publishers, on their part, have endeavored to produce a volume which in format serves as an appro- priate setting. Boston, July, 1924 CONTENTS. eee Intropuctory Nore ’ : ; , X PREFACE 1. Il. II. LY. Y; Vit VII. VU IX. XI. XIl. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. a dd XVIII. XIX. XXI. Tue Otp PyNCHEON FAMILY . ‘ Tue Littte SHoprp-WinDow . 4 Tue First CustoMER : : A Day BEHIND THE COUNTER May anp NOVEMBER . Mavute’s WELL ; Tue GUEST . : ; ? THe PYNCHEON OF TO-DAY . CLIFFORD AND PH@BE . THe PyncHEON GARDEN 3 : THe ARCHED WINDOW J 4 THE DAGUERREOTYPIST ALICE PYNCHEON ; “fy PH@BE’S GOOD-BY . “ x ; THE ScowL AND SMILE. i : CLIFFORD’S CHAMBER Tue Fuicut oF Two Ow.Ls GOVERNOR PYNCHEON . : . ALICE’s PosIEs . : ; ‘ 4 . THe FLOWER oF EDEN . 3 : THE DEPARTURE : M : ; e PAGE 13 17 46 60 76 92 110 123 142 162 176 192 208 224 252 266 285 300 317 336 355 366 ILLUSTRATIONS Blindly, but. undoubtingly, ...the proud Alice ap- proached him Colored frontispiece Poring over the dingy pages of his day-book 44 She stole on tiptoe to the window, as cautiously as if she conceived some bloody-minded villain to be watching behind the elm-tree, with intent to take her life 56 “Heaven help me!” she groaned, mentally. “Now is my hour of need!” (zn color) 68 “Where is the cent?” 712 It was a face to which almost any door would have opened of its own accord 90 As for the bargain, it was wrinkled slyness and craft pitted against native truth and sagacity 102 “Yes, dear cousin,’ answered Phcebe; “but, in the mean time, I hear somebody ringing it!” 106 The chicken... mustered vivacity enough to flutter upward and alight on Phcebe’s shoulder (zn color) 112 “Be careful not to drink at Maule’s Well!” said he 116 “In a moment, cousin!” answered the girl. “These matches just glimmer, and go out” 120 Phoebe could see the quivering of her gaunt shadow, as thrown by the firelight on the kitchen wall 128 **Ah! — let me see! — let me hold it!” cried the guest 136 **Good Heavens, Hepzibah! what horrible disturbances have we now in the house?”’ 140 ILLUSTRATIONS Vv **Her brother! And where can he have been?”’ 144 Pheebe, just at the critical moment, drew back (in color) 148 She unlocked a bookcase, and took down several books that had been excellent reading in their day 162 It pleased him best, however, when she sat on a low footstool at his knee (in color) 168 It was with indescribable interest, and even more than childish delight, that Clifford watched the humming- birds 180 Chanticleer, the next day, accompanied by the be- reaved mother of the egg, took his post in front of Phoebe and Clifford, and delivered himself of a ha- rangue 186 A china bowl of currants, freshly gathered from the bushes 190 With his quick professional eye he took note of the two faces watching him from the arched window (in color) 196 Fresh was Phcebe, moreover, and airy and sweet in her apparel 202 “Yes, if it is not very long,” said Phoebe 229 **My father, you sent for me,” said Alice, in her sweet and harp-like voice 240 “Tt is unaccountable how little while it takes some folks to grow just as natural to a man as his own breath” 264 “You cherish, at this moment, some black purpose against him in your heart” 272 Instinctively she paused before the arched window 286 **As for us, Hepzibah, we can dance now!” _— (zn color) 296 **For Heaven’s sake, dear Clifford, be quiet!” whis- pered his sister. “They think you mad” $12 vi ILLUSTRATIONS The Judge has not shifted his position for a long while now 318 A straw bonnet, and then the pretty figure of a young girl 350 “Tell me! — tell me!” said Phoebe, all in a tremble 356 “You look into my heart,” said she, letting her eyes drop. “You know I love you!” 360 “Hark!”? whispered Phoebe. ‘Somebody is at the street-door”’ . (an color) 364 Holgrave opened it, and displayed an ancient deed 374 INTRODUCTORY NOTE. THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. In September of the year during the February of which Hawthorne had completed “The Scarlet Leé- ter,” he began “The House of the Seven Gables.” Meanwhile, he had removed from Salem to Lenox, in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where he occupied with his family a small red wooden house, still stand- ing at the date of this edition, near the Stockbridge Bowl. * J sha’n’t have the new story ready by November,” fie explained to his publisher, on the 1st of October, “for 1 am never good for anything in the literary way till after the first autumnal frost, which has somewhat such an effect on my imagination that it does on the foliage here about me — multiplying and brightening its hues.” But by vigorous application he was able to complete the new work about the mid- dle of the January following. Since research has disclosed the manner in which the romance is interwoven with incidents from the history of the Hawthorne family, “The House of the Seven Gables” has acquired an interest apart from that by which it first appealed to the public. John Hathorne (as the name was then spelled), the great- grandfather of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a magis- 8 INTRODUCTORY NOTE. trate at Salem in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and officiated at the famous trials for witch- craft held there. It is of record that he used peculiar severity towards a certain woman who was among the accused ;. and the husband of this woman prophesied that God would take revenge upon his wife’s perse- eutors. This circumstance doubtless furnished a hint for that piece of tradition in the book which repre- sents a Pyncheon of a former generation as having persecuted one Maule, who declared’ that God would give his enemy “blood to drink.” It became a con- viction with the Hawthorne family that a curse had been pronounced upon its members, which continued in force in the time of the romancer; a conviction perhaps derived from the recorded prophecy of the in- jured woman’s husband, just mentioned; and, here again, we have a correspondence with Maule’s male- diction in the story. Furthermore, there occurs in the *¢ American Note-Books” (August 27, 1837), a remi- niscence of the author’s family, to the following effect. Philip English, a character well-known in early Salem annals, was among those who suffered from John Hathorne’s magisterial harshness, and he maintained in consequence a lasting feud with the old Puritan official. But at his death English left daughters, one of whom is said to have married the son of Justice John Hathorne, whom English had declared he would never forgive. It is scarcely necessary to point out how clearly this foreshadows the final union of those hereditary foes, the Pyncheons and Maules, through the marriage of Phebe and Holgrave. The romance, however, describes the Maules as possessing some of the traits known to have been characteristic of the Hawthornes: for example, “so long as any of the race INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 2 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 characteristic of reserve.” Thus, while the general suggestion of the Hawthorne line and its fortunes was followed in the romance, the Pyncheons taking the place of the author’s family, certain distinguishing marks of the Hawthornes were assigned to the imaginary Maule posterity. There are one or two other points tvhich indicate Hawthorne’s method of basing his compositions, the result in the main of pure invention, on the solid ground of particular facts. Allusion is made, in the first chapter of the “Seven Gables,” to a grant of lands in Waldo County, Maine, owned by the Pyn- cheon family. In the “ American Note-Books ” there is an entry, dated August 12, 1837, which speaks of the Revolutionary general, Knox, and his land-grant in Waldo County, by virtue of which the owner had hoped to establish an estate on the English plan, with a tenantry to make it profitable for him. An incident of much greater importance in the story is the sup- posed murder of one of the Pyncheons by his nephew, to whom we are introduced as Clifford Pyncheon. In all probability Hawthorne connected with this, in his mind, the murder of Mr. White, a wealthy gentleman of Salem, killed by a man whom his nephew had hired. This took place a few years after Hawthorne’s grad- uation from college, and was one of the celebrated eases of the day, Daniel Webster taking part prom- inently in the trial. But it should be observed here that such resemblances as these between sundry ele- ments in the work of Hawthorne’s fancy and details of reality are only fragmentary, and are rearranged to suit the author’s purposes. 10 INTRODUCTORY NOTE. In the same way he has made his description of Hepzibah Pyncheon’s seven-gabled mansion conform so nearly to several old dwellings formerly or still ex- tant in Salem, that strenuous efforts have been made to fix upon some one of them as the veritable edifice of the romance. A paragraph in the opening chapter has perhaps assisted this delusion that there must have been a single original House of the Seven Gables, framed by flesh-and-blood carpenters; for it runs thus :— ‘* Familiar as it stands in the writer’s 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 long-past epoch, and as the scene of events more full of interest perhaps than those of a gray feudal castle — familiar as it stands, in its rusty old age, it is therefore only the more diffi- cult to imagine the bright novelty with which it first zaught the sunshine.” Hundreds of pilgrims annually visit a house in Salem, belonging to one branch of the Ingersoll family of that place, which is stoutly maintained to have been the model for Hawthorne’s visionary dwell- ing. Others have supposed that the now vanished house of the identical Philip English, whose blood, as we have already noticed, became mingled with that of the Hawthornes, supplied the pattern; and still a third building, known as the Curwen mansion, has been declared the only genuine establishment. Not- withstanding persistent popular belief, the authenticity of all these must positively be denied; although it is possible that isolated reminiscences of all three may have blended with the ideal image in the mind of Hawthorne. He, it will be seen, remarks in the Pref- INTRODUCTORY NOTE. ii ace, alluding to himself in the third person, that he trusts not to be condemned for “laying out a street that infringes upon nobody’s private rights . . . and building a house of materials long in use for con- structing castles in the air.” More than this, he stated to persons still living that the house of the ro- mance was not copied from any actual edifice, but was simply a general reproduction of a style of archi- tecture belonging to colonial days, examples of which survived into the period of his youth, but have since been radically modified or destroyed. Here, as else- where, he exercised the liberty of a creative mind to heighten the probability of his pictures without con- fining himself to a literal description of something he had seen. While Hawthorne remained at Lenox, and during the composition of this romance, various other literary personages settled or stayed for a time in the vicinity; among them, Herman Melville, whose intercourse Hawthorne greatly enjoyed, Henry James, Sr., Doctor Holmes, J.T. Headley, James Russell Lowell, Edwin P. Whipple, Frederika Bremer, and J. T. Fields; so that there was no lack of intellectual society in the midst of the beautiful and inspiring mountain scenery of the place. “In the afternoons, nowadays,” he re- cords, shortly before beginning the work, “this valley in which I dwell seems like a vast basin filled with golden sunshine as with wine;” and, happy in the companionship of his wife and their three children, he led a simple, refined, idyllic life, despite the restric- tions of a scanty and uncertain income. A letter writ. ten by Mrs. Hawthorne, at this time, to a member of ber famiiy, gives incidentally a glimpse of the scene, which may properly find a place here. She says: “3 12 INTRODUCTORY NOTE. delight to think that you also can look forth, as I do now, upon a broad valley and a fine amphitheatre of hills, and are about to watch the stately ceremony of the sunset from your piazza. But you have not this lovely lake, nor, I suppose, the delicate purple mist which folds these slumbering mountains in airy veils, Mr. Hawthorne has been lying down in the sunshine, slightly fleckered with the shadows of a tree, and Una and Julian have been making him look like the mighty Pan, by covering his chin and breast with long grass- blades, that looked like a verdant and venerable beard.” The pleasantness and peace of his surround- ings and of his modest home, in Lenox, may be taken into account as harmonizing with the mellow serenity of the romance then produced. Of the work, when it appeared in the early spring of 1851, he wrote to Ho- ratio Bridge these words, now published for the first time : — “*'The House of the Seven Gables,’ in my opinion, is better than ‘The Scarlet Letter;’ but I should not wonder if I had refined upon the principal character a little too much for popular appreciation, nor if the ro- mance of the book should be somewhat at odds with the humble and familiar scenery in which I invest it. But I feel that portions of it are as good as anything I can hope to write, and the publisher speaks encour- agingly of its success.” From England, especially, came many warm ex- pressions of praise, —a fact which Mrs. Hawthorne, in a private letter, commented on as the fulfilment of a possibility which Hawthorne, writing in boyhood to his mother, had looked forward to. He had asked her if she would not like him to become an author and have his books read in England. G. Rae PREFACE. —e—— WHEN a writer calls his work a Romance, it need kardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the prob- able and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former — while, as a work of art, it must rigidly sub- ject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the hu- man heart —has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges here stat- ed, and, especially, to mingle the Marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor, than as any por- tion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public. He can hardly be said, however, to commit a literary crime even if he disregard this caution. In the present work, the author has proposed te himself — but with what success, fortunately, it is not for him to judge—to keep undeviatingly within his 14 PREFACE. immunities. The point of view in which this tale comes under the Romantic definition lies in the at- tempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us. It is a legend prolong- ing itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist, which the reader, ac- cording to his pleasure, may either disregard, or allow it to float almost imperceptibly about the characters and events for the sake of a picturesque effect. The narrative, it may be, is woven of so humble a texture as to require this advantage, and, at the same time, to render it the more difficult of attainment. Many writers lay very great stress upon some defi- nite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this particular, the au- thor has provided himself with a moral, —the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives . into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrol- lable mischief; and he would feel it a singular grat- ification if this romance might effectually convince mankind — or, indeed, any one man — of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, there- by to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms. In good faith, however, he is not sufficiently imagina- tive to flatter himself with the slightest hope of this kind. When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its PREFACE. 15 moral as with an iron rod,— or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly, — thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and un- aatural attitude. A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fic- tion, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first. The reader may perhaps choose to assign an actual locality to the imaginary events of this narrative. If permitted by the historical connection, — which, though slight, was essential to his plan, — the author would very willingly have avoided anything of this nature. Not to speak of other objections, it exposes the ro- mance to an inflexible and exceedingly dangerous spe- cies of criticism, by bringing his fancy-pictures almost into positive contact with the realities of the moment. It has been no part of his object, however, to describe local manners, nor in any way to meddle witb the characteristics of a community for whom he cherishes @ proper respect and a natural regard. He trusts not to be considered as unpardonably offending by laying out a street that infringes upon nobody’s private rights, and appropriating a lot of land which had no visible swner, and building a house of materials long in use for constructing castles in the air. The personages of the tale— though they give themselves out to be of ancient stability and considerable prominence — are really of the author’s own making, or, at all events, of his own mixing ; their virtues can shed no lustre, nor their defects redound, in the remotest degree, to the discredit of the venerable town of which they protess to be inhabitants. He would be glad, therefore, if 16 PREFACE. especially in the quarter to which he alludes —ths book may be read strictly as a Romance, having a great deal more to do with she clouds overhead than with any portion of the actual soil ot the County of Essex. Lenox, January 27, 188i, THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES —_——~——— I. THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY. Hatr-way down a by-street 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 elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is famil- iar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyn- cheon 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 elm-tree and the weather-beaten 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, VOL. III. 2 18 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. which might almost seem the result of artistic arrange ment. 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 conse. quently becomes imperative to make short work with most of the traditionary lore of which the old Pyn- cheon 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 ref erence to forgotten events and personages, ard to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost_or wholly ob- solete — 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 little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing gener- ation is the germ which may and must produce good. or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together with che seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals serm 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 iooks, was not the first habitation erected by civilized THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY. 19 man on precisely the same spot of ground. Pyncheon Street formerly bore the humbler appellation of Maule’s Lane, from the name of the original occupant of the soil, before whose cottage-door it was a cow-path. A natural spring of soft and pleasant water —a rare treasure on the sea-girt 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 exceed- ingly desirable in the eyes of a prominent and power- ful 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 character- ized by an iron energy of purpose. Matthew Maule, on the other hand, though an obscure man, was stub- born 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 acquaint ance 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 Pyncheon’s 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 com 20 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. troversy between two ill-matched 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 *t 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 themsétvesto be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob. lergymen, judges, statesmen, —the wisest, calmést, holiest per- sons 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 de- serve less blame than another, it was the singular in- discrimination 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 martyr’s 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 re THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY. pA membered 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 in- vidious 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 persecutor’s 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 tradi- tion, 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 wizard’s death, his humble home- stead had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel Pyncheon’s grasp. When it was understood, however, that the Colonel intended to erect a family mansion — spacious, ponderously framed of oaken timber, and calculated to endure for many generations of his posterity — over the spot first covered by the log-built 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 asa 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 apart- ments, and the chambers into which future bridegrooms 22 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. were to lead their brides, and where children of the Pyncheon blood were to be born. The terror and ugli- ness of Maule’s crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment, would darken the freshly plastered walls, and infect them early with the scent of an old and mel- ancholy 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 well-considered scheme, either by dread of the wizard’s 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 common- sense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, fas- tened together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps, he followed out his original design, prob- ably 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 impenetra- ble. 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 acurious, 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 delicious- ness 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 Maule’s Well, as it continued to be THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY. 23 ealled, grew hard and brackish. Even such we find it now ; and any old woman of the neighborhood will cer. afy that it is productive of intestinal mischief to those who quench their thirst there. The reader may deem it singular that the head car. penter 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 matter-of-fact 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 father’s deadly enemy. At all events, Thomas Maule became the ar. chitect of the House of the Seven Gables, and per- formed his duty so faithfully that the timber frame- work fastened by his hands still holds together. Thus the great house was built. Familiar as it stands in the writer’s 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 long-past epoch, and as the scene of events more full of human interest, perhaps, than those of a gray feu- dal 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, 94 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. 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 erosser sense by ale, cider, wine, and brandy, in copi- ous 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 sup- plied 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 every- body’s nostrils, was at once an invitation and an appe- tite. Maule’s 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 impos- ing 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 ir pride, not modesty. Its whole visible exterior was or- namented with quaint figures, conceived in the gro- tesqueness 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 THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY. 25 through the spiracles of one great chimney. The many lattices, with their small, diamond-shaped panes, admitted the sunlight into hall and chamber, while, — nevertheless, the second story, projecting far over the ase, 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 pcrtion 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 his- tory 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 men’s daily interests. The principal entrance, which had almost the breadth of a church-door, was in the angle between the two front gables, and was covered by an open porch, with benches beneath its shelter. Under this arched door- way, 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 elasses as freely as their betters, and in larger num- ber. Just within the entrance, however, stood two serving-men, pointing some of the guests to the neigh borhood of the kitchen, and ushering others into the statelier rooms, — hospitable alike to all, but still with ® scrutinizing regard to the high or low degree of gach. Velvet garments, sombre but rich, stiffly plaitea 26 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. 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 awe-stricken into the house which he had perhaps helped to build. One inauspicious circumstance there was, which awakened a hardly concealed displeasure in the breasts xf 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 te 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 Pyncheon’s part became still more unaccountable, when the second dignitary of the yrovince made his appearance, and found no more - ceremonious a reception. The leutenant- governor, although his visit was one of the anticipated glories of the day, had alighted from his horse, and assisted his lady from her side-saddle, and crossed the Colonel’s threshold, without other greeting than that of the prin- cipal domestic. This person —a gray-headed 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 be- fore, he had expressed a wish on no account to be dis- turbed. } “Do not you see, fellow,” said the high-sheriff of the county, taking the servant aside, “that this is no less a man than the lieutenant-governor? Summoy THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY. 97 Colonel Pyncheon at once! I know that he received letters from England this morning; and, in the pe rusal and consideration of them, an hour may have passed away without his noticing it. But he will be ill-pleased, 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 strik- ingly indicated the hard and severe character of Col- onel Pyncheon’s domestic rule; ‘my master’s 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 governor’s own voice should bid me do it!” *¢ Pooh, pooh, master high-sheriff!”’ cried the lieu- tenant-governor, who had overheard the foregoing dis- cussion, 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 remem- brancer myself!” Accordingly, with such a tramp of his ponderous riding-boots 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 reécho with a loud, free knock. Then, looking round, with a smile, to the spectators, he awaited a 28 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. 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 lieutenant-governor uplifted the heavy hilt of his sword, wherewith he so beat and banged upon the door, that, as some of the by-standers 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 op- pressive, notwithstanding that the tongues of many of the guests had already been loosened by a surrepti- tious cup or two of wine or spirits. “ Strange, forsooth ! — very strange!” cried the lieu- tenant-governor, whose smile was changed to a frown. “ But seeing that our host sets us the good example ot 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. I¢ rustled the silken garments of the ladies, and waved the long curls of the gentlemen’s wigs, and shook the window-hangings and the curtains of the bedchambers; causing everywhere a singular stir, which yet was more like ahush. A shadow of awe and half-fearful 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 lieutenant-governor, 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, some THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY. 29 what 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 Col- onel himself, in an oaken elbow-chair, 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 lieutenant-governor; and there was a frown on his dark and massive countenance, as if sternly resentful of the boldness that had impelled them into his pri- vate retirement. A little boy — the Colonel’s 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 half-way, 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 unnat- ural distortion in the fixedness of Colonel Pyncheon’s 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 iron-hearted Puritan, the relent- less persecutor, the grasping and strong-willed man, was dead! Dead, in his new house! There is a tradition, only worth alluding to as lending a tinge of supersti- tious 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, 1 to find” his way | into _ every. human dwelling, —thus early had Death stepped across the threshold of the House of the Seven Ga bles! _ 30 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. Colonel Pyncheon’s 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 indi- cated 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 dishev- elled, as if it had been fiercely clutched and pulled. It was averred, likewise, that the lattice window, near the Colonel’s chair, was open; and that, only a few minutes before the fatal occurrence, the figure of a man had been seen clambering over the yarden-fence, in tiie 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 prolung them- selves for ages afterwards, like the toadstools that in- dicate 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 lieutenant- governor was said to have seen at the Colonel’s 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 ap- pears 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 him. self, 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 ir these erudite physicians, certainly causes it in the un. learned peruser of their opinions. The coroner’s jury THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY. 31 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 char- acter 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 exe isted. 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, — tradi- tion is responsible for all contrary averments. In Colonel Pyncheon’s funeral sermon, which was printed, and is still extant, the Rev. Mr. Higginson enumer- ates, among the many felicities of his distinguished parishioner’s 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 up- ward 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 hia 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 82 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. only had his son and heir come into immediate enjoy- ment 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 pos- sessions — 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 prince’s territory, on European soil. When the pathless forest that still covered this wild princi- pality 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 sur- vived 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. Higginson’s congratulatory elo- quence, this appeared to be the one thing which Colo- nel 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 father’s 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 Colonel’s 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 hun THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY. 33 dred years afterwards, to obtain what they stubbornly persisted in deeming their right. But, in course of time, the territory was partly re-granted to more fa- vored 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 man’s asserting a right— on the strength of mouldy parchments, signed with the faded autographs of gov- ernors 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 genera- tion, 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 posses- sion 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 self-effort, while await- ing 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 Colo- nel’s 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 VOL. II. 3 84 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. there were yet.a prospect of its ultimately forming a princedom for themselves. In almost every generation, nevertheless, there hap- pened to be some one descendant of the family gifted with a portion of the hard, keen sense, and practica) energy, that had so remarkably distinguished the orig inal founder. His character, indeed, might be traced all the way down, as distinctly as if the Colonel him. self, 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 ap- pearance, 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 new-shingled!”’ From father to son, they clung to the ancestral house with singular tenacity of home at- tachment. 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 sroubled 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 ease, 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 ? THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY. 73) 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 vener- able house itself. As regards its interior life, a large, dim looking-glass 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 founda- tion, that the posterity of Matthew Maule had some connection with the mystery of the looking-glass, 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 them- selves to the world nor in their better and happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the crisis of life’s bitterest sorrow. The popular imagi- nation, 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 re- membered, 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 by- stander would be likely enough to whisper, between jest and earnest, ‘“‘ He has Maule’s blood to drink!” The sudden death of a Pyncheon, about a hundred years ago, with circumstances very similar to what 86 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. have been related of the Colonel’s 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 Pyncheon’s 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 sun- shine 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 supersti- tion in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the ghost of a dead progenitor — perhaps as a portior 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, dis- creet, well-ordered, and home-loving inhabitants, as well as for the somewhat confined scope of its sym- pathies; but in which, be it said, there are odder in- dividuals, 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 confisca- tion. For the last seventy years the most noted event in the Pyncheon annals had been likewise the heaviest THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY. 83 calamity that ever befell the race; no less than the violent death — for so it was adjudged — of one mem. ber of the family by the criminal act of another. Cer tain circumstances attending this fatal occurrence had brought the deed irresistibly home to a nephew of the leceased Pyncheon. The young man was tried and zonvicted of the crime; but either the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and possibly some lurking doubt 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 criminal’s connections, had availed to mitigate his doom from death to per- petual imprisonment. This sad affair had chanced about thirty years before the action of our story com- mences. Latterly, there were rumors (which few be- lieved, and only one or two felt greatly interested in) that this long-buried 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 ad- dition to the house and real estate which constituted what remained of the ancient Pyncheon property. Be- ing of an eccentric and melancholy turn of mind, and greatly given to rummaging old records and hearken- ing 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 home- stead, if not out of his life. Such being the case, and he, the old bachelor, in possession of the ill-gotten spoil,— with the black stain of blood sunken deep into it, and still to be scented by conscientious nos- trils,—the question oceurred, whether it were not ime 388 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. perative upon him, even at this late nour, to make restitution to Maule’s posterity. Toa 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 vropriety 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 representa- tive of Matthew Maule, but for the unspeakable tu- mult which a suspicion of the old gentleman’s project awakened among his Pyncheon relatives. Their exer- tions 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, what- ever the provocation or inducement, as to bequeath patrimonial property away from their own blood. They may love other individuals far better than their rela- tives, — 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. ‘Tn 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, accord- ingly, the mansion-house, 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 uncle’s murder. The new heir, up to the period of his acces- THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY. 89 sion, 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 un- questionably an honor to his race. He had built himself a country-seat 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 them- selves in the glow of the Judge’s prosperity. In re- spect to natural increase, the breed had not thriven ; it appeared rather to be dying out. The only mem- bers 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’ pris- oner, 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 life- estate by the will of the old bachelor. She was un- derstood to be wretchedly poor, and seerned to make it her choice to remain so; inasmuch as her affluent 40 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. 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 country-girl of seventeen, the daughter of another of the Judge’s 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 Maule’s posterity, it was supposed now to be extinct. Fora very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however, the Maules had con- tinued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had suffered so unjust a death. To all appearance, they were a quiet, honest, well-meaning 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 wizard’s 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 excel- lent 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 ante-Revolutionary days, when the aristocracy could venture to be proud, and the low were content to be abased. Thus the Maules, at all THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY. A} events, kept their resentments within their own breasts. They were generally poverty-stricken ; 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. or thirty years past, neither town-record, nor gravestone, nor the directory, nor the knowledge or memory of man, bore any trace of Matthew Maule’s 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 charac- ter of reserve. Their companions, or those who en- deavored 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 good-fellowship, 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 repug- nance and superstitious terror with which the people ot the town, even after awakening from their frenzy, 42 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES continued to regard the memory of the reputed witches The mantle, or rather the ragged cloak, of old Mat thew Maule, had fallen upon his children. They were half believed to inherit mysterious attributes ; the fam- ily eye was said to possess strange power. Among other good-for-nothing properties and privileges, one was especially assigned them, — that of exercising an influence over people’s dreams. The Pyncheons, if ali stories were true, haughtily as they bore themselves in the noonday streets of their native town, were no bet ter than bond-servants to these plebeian Maules, on entering the topsy-turvy commonwealth of sleep. Mod- ern 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 seven-gabled 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 habita- tions 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 white-oak frame, and its boards, shingles, and crum- bling plaster, and even the huge, clustered chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and meanest part of its reality. Se much of mankind’ varied experience had passed there, —so much has: been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed, — tht. THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY. 43 the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of u heart. It was itself like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and sombre reminis- cences. 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 “lm, which, in reference to such trees as one usually meets with, might well be termed gigantic. It had been planted by a great-grandson of the first Pyn- cheon, 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 sweep- ing the whole black roof with its pendent foliage. It grve 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 pre cisely on a line with it. On either side extended a ruinous wooden fence of open lattice-work, 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; ner must we fail to direct the reader’s eye te £4 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, a crop, not of weeds, but flower-shrubs, 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 Alice’s 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 Na- ture adopted to herself this desolate, decaying, gusty, rusty old house of the Pyncheon family; and how the ever-returning 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 respect- able edifice. In the front gable, under the impending brow of the second story, and contiguous to the street, was a shop-door, 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 shop-door had been a subject of no slight morti- fication to the present occupant of the august Pyn- cheon 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, lie 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 8 spurious interloper; for, instead of seeking office from the king or the royal governor, or urging hie PORING OVER THE DINGY PAGES OF HIS DAY-BOOK THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY. 45 hereditary claim to Eastern lands, he bethought him. self of no better avenue to wealth than by cutting a shop-door 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 smal in this old Pyncheon’s mode of setting about his com. mercial 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 half-penny twice over, to make sure that it was a good one. Be- yond 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 shop-door 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 shop-keeper, 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 day-book. From the look of un- utterable woe upon his face, it appeared to be his doom to spend eternity in a vain effort to make hi accounts balance. And now— in avery humble way, as will be seen— we proceed to open our narrative. id. {THE LITTLE SHOP—WINDOW. {7 still lacked half an hour of sunrise, when Misa Hepzibah Pyncheon — we will not say awoke, it be- ing 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 in- decorum of assisting, even in imagination, at a maiden lady’s toilet! Our story must therefore await Miss Hepzibah at the threshold of her chamber; only pre- suming, 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, inas- much as they could be audible to nobody save a dis- embodied 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 Hepzibah’s 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 all-comprehending love and pity in the farthest heaven, that almost agony of prayer—- now THE LITTLE SHOP-WINDOW. 47 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 seclu- sion, 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 eold, sunless, stagnant calm of a day that is to be like innumerable yesterdays ! The maiden lady’s 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, old-fashioned bureau is to be opened, with difficulty, and with a succession of spasmodic jerks ; then, all must close again, with the same fidgety re- luctance. 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, dingy-framed toilet-glass, 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 no. body ever visits, and from whom, when she shall have done her utmost, it were the best charity to turn one’s ayes 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 in- tense, as it has been, by sorrow and seclusion, — to the strong passion of her life. We heard the turning of 48 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. 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 Malbone’s most perfect style, anc representing a face worthy of no less delicate a pencil. Jt was once our good fortune to see this picture. It is a likeness of a young man, in a silken dressing-gown of an old fashion, the soft richness of which is wel! 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 volupt- uous 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 coula. she ?—nor ever knew, by her own experience, what love technically means. And yet, her undying faith and trust, her fresh remembrance, and continual de- votedness 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 toilet-glass. 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 long-closed vault, the door of which has accidentally been set ajar, — here comes Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon! Forth she steps into the dusky, time-darkened passage; a tall figure, clad in black silk, with a long and shrunken waist, feeling her way towards the stairs like a near-sighted person, as in truth she is. The sun, meanwhile, if not already above the hort zon, was ascending nearer and nearer to its verge. A few clouds, floating high upward, caught some of the THE LITTLE SHOP-WINDOW. 49 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 low-studded room, with a beam across the ceiling, panelled with dark wood, and having a large chimney-piece, set round with pictured tiles, but now closed by an iron fire-board, 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, con- structed with perplexing intricacy and exhibiting ar 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 tea-table 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 elbow: chair, 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 en 50 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. graved, but the handiwork of some skilful old draughts. man, and grotesquely illuminated with pictures of In- dians 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 fantastic- ally awry. The other adornment was the portrait of ald Colonel Pyncheon, at two thirds length, represent- ing the stern features of a Puritanic-looking personage, in a skull-cap, with a laced band and a grizzly beard ; holding a Bible with one hand, and in the other up- lifting an iron sword-hilt. 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 ill-will. But it was no such thing. She, in fact, felt a reverence for the pictured visage, of which only a far-descended and time-stricken virgin could be susceptible ; and this forbidding scowl was the innocent result of her near-sightedness, and an effort so to concentrate her powers of vision as to sub- stitute a firm outline of the object instead of a vague one. | We must linger a moment on this unfortunate ex- pression of poor Hepzibah’s brow. Her scowl, —as the world, or such part of it as sometimes caught a transitory glimpse of her at the window, wickedly per- sisted in calling it, — her scowl had done Miss Hepzi- bah a very ill office, in establishing her character as an ill-tempered old maid; nor does it appear improba- ble that, by often gazing at herself in a dim looking- THE LITTLE SHOP-WINDOW. 51 glass, and perpetually encountering her own frown within 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 havi whispered to herself; and ultimately have fancied her- self so, by a sense of inevitable doom. But her hear mever frowned. It was naturally tender, sensitive. and full of little tremors and palpitations; all ot 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 faint-heart- edly 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 coffin-lid, not only the shop-door, but the inner arrangements, had been suffered to re- main unchanged; while the dust of ages gathered inch-deep over the shelves and counter, and partly filled an old pair of scales, as if it were of valuc enough to be weighed. It treasured itself up, too, in the half-open till, where there still lingered a base six- pence, 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 Hepzibah’s childhood, when she and her brother used to play at hide-and-seek in its forsaken precincts. Soe it had remained, until within a few days past. But now, though the shop-window was still closely 62 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. curtained from the public gaze, a remarkable changes had taken place in its interior. The rich and heavy festoons of cobweb, which it had cost a long ancestral succession of spiders their life’s labor to spin and weave, had been carefully brushed away from the ceil- ing. 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 investi- gate behind the counter, would have discovered a bar- rel, — 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 pine-wood, full of soap in bars; also, another of the same size, in which were tallow-candles, ten to the yvound. 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 re- dection of the old shop-keeper Pyncheon’s 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 pickle-jar, 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 world-renowned dance, in gingerbread. A party of leaden dragoons THE LITTLE SHOP-WINDOW. 53 were galloping along one of the shelves, in equip- ments and uniform of modern cut; and there were some sugar figures, with no strong resemblance to the humanity of any epoch, but less unsatisfactorily repre- senting 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 long-retired and forgotten Mr. Pyncheon, and was about to renew the enterprise of that departed worthy, with a different set of cus- tomers. 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 com- mercial speculations ? We return to the elderly maiden. She at length withdrew her eyes from the dark countenance of the Colonel’s portrait, heaved a sigh, — indeed, her breast was a very cave of Alolus that morning, — and stept across the room on tiptoe, as is the customary gait of elderly women. Passing through an intervening pas- sage, 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 moment’s pause on the threshold, peering towards the window with her near-sighted scowl, as if frowning 54 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. down some bitter enemy, she suddenly projected her self 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 children’s playthings, and other little wares, on the shelves and at the shop-window. In the aspect of this dark-arrayed, pale-faced, lady-like 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 ab- surd 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 undoubt- edly her object. Now she places a gingerbread ele- phant against the window, but with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with the dismem- berment 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, devil-directed, into the most diffis cult obscurity that it can find. Heaven help our poo old Hepzibah, and forgive us for taking a ludicrou view of her position! As her rigid and rusty fram.. 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 THE LITTLE SHOP-WINDOW. 55 theme, — here is one of the truest points of melan: choly 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 shad- owy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose re- ligion it was that a lady’s hand soils itself irremedi- ably 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, tread- ing 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 waver of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point. The tragedy is enacted with as con- tinual a repetition as that of a popular drama on a holiday ; and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, per- haps, as when an hereditary noble sinks below his or- der. 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 im- memorial 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 wilder 56 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. ness, 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 cent-shop. 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 near-sightedness, and those tremulous fingers of hers, at once inflexible and delicate, she could not be 4 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 Hepzibah’s heart, and was now torpid, if not extinct; she watched the little people of the neighborhood from her chamber-window, and doubted whether she could tolerate a more intimate acquaintance with them. Besides, in our day, the very A BC 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 heart-quake 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 eavern-door of her hermitage —the poor thing be- thought herself of the ancient shop-window, the rusty scales, and dusty till. She might have held back a little longer; but another circumstance, not yet hinted SHE STOLE ON TIPTOE TO THE WINDOW, AS GAUTIOUSLY AS IF SHE CONCEIVED SOME BLOODY-MINDED VILLAIN TO BE WATCHING BEHIND THE ELM-TREE, WITH INTENT TO TAKE HER LIFE Jian J L j vate Ny ? i THE LITTLE SHOP-WINDOW. 5t at, had somewhat hastened her decision. Her humble preparations, therefore, were duly made, and the enter- prise 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 sev- eral 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 hon- estly 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 bloody-minded viliain to be watch- ing behind the elm-tree, with intent to take her life. Stretching out her long, lank arm, she put a paper of pearl buttons, a jew’s-harp, or whatever the small ar- ticle 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 disem- bodied divinity or enchantress, holding forth her bar- gains to the reverential and awe-stricken purchaser in an invisible hand. But Hepzibah had no such flatter- ing dream. She was well aware that she must ul- timately come forward, and stand revealed in her proper individuality; but, like other sensitive persons, she could not bear to be observed in the gradual pro- cess, and chose rather to flash forth on the world’s as tonished gaze at once. The inevitable moment was not much longer to be delayed. The sunshine might now be seen stealing 58 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. down the front of the opposite house, from the win dows of which came a reflected gleam, struggling through the boughs of the elm-tree, and enlightening the interior of the shop more distinctly than hereto- fore. The town appeared to be waking up. A baker’s eart had already rattled through the street, chasing away the latest vestige of night’s sanctity with the jingle-jangle of its dissonant bells. A milkman was distributing the contents of his cans from door to door; and the harsh peal of a fisherman’s conch shell was heard far off, around the corner. None of these tokens escaped Hepzibah’s 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 shop-door, leaving the entrance free — more than free — welcome, as if all were household friends —to every passer-by, 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 bar- rier 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 elbow-chair, and wept. Our miserable old Hepzibah! It is a heavy annoy- ance to a writer, who endeavors to represent nature, its various attitudes and circumstances, in a reasona- bly 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 THE LITTLE SHOP-WINDOW. 59 eur 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, storm-shattered by af- fliction —but a gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed maiden, iv a long-waisted silk gown, and with the strange horro1 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 near-sighted scowl. And, finally, her great life-trial seems to be, that, after sixty years of idleness, she finds it convenient to earn comfortable bread by setting up a shop ina 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 dis- cerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to as sume a garb so sordid. IIT. THE FIRST CUSTOMER. Miss Hepzipau PyNcHEON sat in the oaken elbow chair, with her hands over her face, giving way to that heavy down-sinking of the heart which most per- sons 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 cock-crow ; 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 shop- door, 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 thresh- old. Its ugly and spiteful little din (heard now for the first time, perhaps, since Hepzibah’s periwigged predecessor had retired from trade) at once set every nerve of her body in responsive and tumultuous vibra- tion. 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 ges- ture and expression, scowling portentously, and look- ing far better qualified to do fierce battle with a house< breaker than to stand smiling behind the counter, THE FIRST CUSTOMER. 61 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 Hepzibah’s poor old heart; nor had she, at the mo- ment, 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 door. way. 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 alac- rity and vigor. These qualities were not only per- ceptible, physically, in his make and motions, but made themselves felt almost immediately in his char- acter. 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, high- featured 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 daguerreo 62 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. typist, — for it was that sole other occupant ot tha seven-gabled 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 ase sist 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 sym- pathy. So it proved with poor Hepzibah; for, when she saw the young man’s 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! JI 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 ny 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 child’s story-book. 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.” THE FIRST CUSVUOMER. 63 “But I am a woman!” said Hepzibah, piteously. « T 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 half-hidden 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 life- blood 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 pur- pose, 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 sym pathize with sensibilities of this kind; though, unless I deceive myself, | have some imperfect comprehen- sion 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 64 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. entitled to bear them. In the present— and still more in the future condition of society — they 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 to-day? Never; and if the Pyncheons had always acted so nobly, I doubt whether an old wizard Maule’s 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. “Tf old Maule’s ghost, or a descendant of his, could see me behind the counter to-day, he would call it the fulfilment of his worst wishes. But I thank you for your kindness, Mr. Holgrave, and will do my utmost to be a good shop-keeper.” *“‘ Pray do,” said Holgrave, “and let me have the pleasure of being your first customer. I am about taking a walk to the sea-shore, before going to my rooms, where I misuse Heaven’s blessed sunshine by tracing out human features through its agency. A few of those biscuits dipt in sea-water, 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 Hep- zibah, with a manner of antique stateliness to which THE FIRST CUSTOMER. 65 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 fore- fathers’ 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 then 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 Hepzibah’s shop - window. She was doubly tortured; in part, with a sense ot overwhelming shame that strange and unloving eye; 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 asif the whole fortune or failure of her shop might depend on the display of a different set of arti- cles, or substituting a fairer apple for one which ap- peared 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 door-step, betwixt two laboring men, as their rough voices denote¢. them to be. After some slight talk about their own affairs, one of them chanced to notice the shop-window, and directed the other’s attention to it. “See here!” cried he; “ what do you think of VOL. IIL 5 66 THE HOUSE OF FHE SEVEN GABLES. 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 under. neath the Pyncheon Elm! Who would have thought it? Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a cent-shop!” “ Will she make it go, think you, Dixey?” said his friend. “I don’t call it a very good stand. There’s another shop just round the corner.” “Make it go!” cried Dixey, with a most cone temptuous expression, as if the very idea were impos. sible to be conceived. “Not a bit of it! Why, her face — I’ve 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 can’t stand it, I tell you! She scowls dreadfully, reason or none, out of pure ugliness of temper ! ” “ Well, that’s not so much matter,” remarked the other man. ‘These sour-tempered folks are mostly handy at business, and know pretty well what they are about. But, as you say, I don’t think she ’I1 do much. This business of keeping cent-shops is overdone, like all other kinds of trade, handicraft, and bodily labor. I know it, to my cost! My wife kept a cent-shop 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 pre vious misery about the matter as what thrilled Hepzi bah’s heart, on overhearing the above conversation. The testimony in regard to her scowl was frightfully unportant; it seemed to hold up her image wholly re THE FIRST CUSTOMER. 67 lieved from the false light of her self-partialities, and so hideous that she dared not look at it. She was ab. surdly 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 pub- lic, of which these two men were the nearest repre sentatives. A glance; a passing word or two; 4 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 ill-success, uttered from the sure wisdom of experience, fell upon her half-dead hope like a clod into a grave. The man’s 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 womap had lost five dollars on her little outlay! Success pre sented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it ax 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 magnif: icent shops as there were! Groceries, toy-shops, dry goods stores, with their immense panes of plate-glass: their gorgeous fixtures, their vast and complete assorr ments of merchandise, in which fortunes had been in vested; 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, bow: 68 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. ing, and measuring out the goods. On the other, the dusky eld House of the Seven Gables, with the anti- quated shop-window 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 expres- sion 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 shop-bell, right over her head, tinkled as if it were bewitched. The old gentle- woman’s 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 half-window. 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 creake ing 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 shab- bily (but, as it seemed, more owing to his mother’s carelessness than his father’s 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 1 fal! ye W “no MENTALLY 1»? ) SHE GROANED HOUR OF NEED {» ‘HEAVEN HELP ME / \ . THE FIRST CUSTOMER. 68 gmall 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 re garded him. “ Well, child,” said she, taking heart at sight of ¢ 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 shop-window, 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 child’s pocket-money 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 ex- perience of cent-shops, took the man of gingerbread, and quitted the premises. No sooner had he reached the sidewalk (little cannibal that he was!) than Jim Crow’s head was in his mouth. As he had not been eareful 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 pare ticularly of small boys. She had just placed anothet 70 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. representative of the renowned Jim Crow at the win dow, when again the shop-bell tinkled clamorously, and again the door being thrust open, with its charac- teristic 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 Vrow.”’ “Well, here it is for you,” said Hepzibah, reach- mg it down; but recognizing that this pertinacious gustomer would not quit her on any other terms, so long as she had a gingerbread figure in her shop, she partly be back her extended hand, ‘‘ Where is the vent ?’ The little boy had the cent ready, but, like : a true- born Yankee, would have preferred th the better bargain to the worse.” Looking somewhat chagrined, napa put the coin into Hepzibah’s 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 school-boy, aided by the impish figure of the negro dancer, had wrought an irreparable ruin. The structure of an- cient aristocracy had been demolished by-him,even_as _ if his childish gripe had torn down the seven-gabled mansion. Now let Hepzibah turn the old Pyncheor THE FIRST CUSTOMER. 71 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 ances- tral 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 cent-shop! Nevertheless, even while she paraded these ideas somewhat ostentatiously through her mind, it is alto- gether surprising what a calmness had come over her. The anxiety and misgivings which had tormented her, whether asleep or in melancholy day-dreams, 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 al- most 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 Hepzi- bah 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 school- boy’s 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 per. haps endowed with the same kind of efficacy, as a gal- vanic 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 72 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. courage, she allowed herself an extra spoonful in het infusion of black tea. Her introductory day of shop-keeping 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-thei___ powers. In the case of our old gentlewoman, after the éxcitement of new effort had subsided, the de- spondency 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, al- ways, 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 pe- culiar hue, took one that the near-sighted old lady pro- nounced 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, care- wrinkled woman, not old but haggard, and al- ready with streaks of gray among her hair, like sil- ver 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 ISS S< AK SS = ~ \ = “Ze ~ ~\ S S % I eS ~ ey B ——e “ — NN \ LZ =e A \ : FGF = SS S \ \ y = LATIONS —S_ ( =< | YS Wy 2 2 = \ A a a WAS Ce. ‘& ; _— s aed \ Wis CES : SSE m — fj SEs Fh LEZ i ep A ah = —— = = — —= ———— =. ——— ————— pee —— = yf } | } | 4 i ae | ALT, Vy) 4 SS WHERE IS THE CENT?” 6c 74 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. “Well,” said Hepzibah, heaving a deep sigh, “ per haps I had! ” Several times, moreover, besides the above instance her lady-like 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 in- sure 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 recogni- tion 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 cus: tomers 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 par. ticular case, however mechanical and innocuous it might be at other times, Hepzibah’s contortion of brow served her in good stead. “‘T never was so frightened in my life!” said the curious customer, in describing the incident to one of her acquaintances. ‘She’s 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 THE FIRST CUSTOMER. 75 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 her- self 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 aris- tocracy to which it had so recently been her pride to belong. When a lady, in a delicate and costly sum mer garb, with a floating veil and gracefully sway- ing gown, and, altogether, an etherial 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 fra- grant with her passage, as if a bouquet of tea-roses had been borne along, — then again, it is to be feared, old Hepzibah’s scowl could no longer vindicate itself entirely on the plea of near-sightedness. “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 half-day 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 ven her temporal welfare. IV. A DAY BEHIND THE COUNTER. TowaRpDs noon, Hepzibah saw an elderly gentle man, 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 rusty-visaged 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 indescrib- able 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 people’s 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 ma- terial. His gold-headed cane, too, —a serviceable staff, of dark polished wood, — had similar traits, ana, had it chosen to take a walk by itself, would have been recognized anywhere as a tolerably adequate rep- resentative of its master. This character — which showed itself so strikingly in everything about him A DAY BEHIND THE COUNTER. 1? 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 Pyn cheon Elm, and, Midas-like, 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 shop-window, and putting up a pair of gold-bowed spectacles, which he held in his hand, he minutely sur. veyed Hepzibah’s little arrangement of toys and com- modities. 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 ex. pression 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 benevo- lence. He bowed, with a happy mixture of dignity and courteous kindliness, and pursued his way. 78 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. “There he is!” said Hepzibah io 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 shop-window. 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 Hepzibah’s 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 el- derly 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 shop-window! Well! —what have you to say? —is not the Pyncheon House my own, while 1’m alive?” After this incident, Hepzibah retreated to the back varlor, where she at first caught up a half-finished 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 hur- riedly about the room. At length, she paused before the portrait of the stern old Puritan, her ancestor, and fhe founder of the house. In one sense, this picture A DAY BEHIND THE COUNTER. 79 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 promi nent, and strikingly expressive, ever since her earliest familiarity with it asa child. For, while the physica) outline and substance were darkening away from the beholder’s 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 painter’s deep conception of his subject’s 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 afraia 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 accu- rately, and to a greater depth, the face which she had lust 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 skull-cap, 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 Pyn- theon come again! He has proved himself the very 80 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. «\ 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 dry-rot 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 delicate. ly touched that the likeness remained perfect. Mal- bone’s miniature, though from the same original, was far inferior to Hepzibah’s air-drawn 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 kindling-up of their orbs! Feminine traits, moulded inseparably with those of the other sex! The miniature, likewise, had this last pe- culiarity; so that you inevitably thought of the orig- inal 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 shop-bell rang; it was like a sound from a remote distance,— so far had Hepzibah de- scended into the sepulchral depths of her reminis- cences. On entering the shop, she found an old man there, a humble resident of Pyncheon Street, and A DAY BEHIND THE COUNTER. 81 whom, for a great many years past, she had suffered to be a kind of familiar of the house. He was an ime memorial personage, who seemed always to have had a white head and wrinkles, and never to have pos- sessed but a single tooth, and that a half-decayed 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 en- abled 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 household’s foot or two of firewood, or knock to pieces an old barrel, or split up a pine board for kindling-stuff ; in summer, to dig the few yards of garden ground appertaining to a low-rented tenement, and share the produce of his labor at the halves; in win- ter, to shovel away the snow from the sidewalk, or open paths to the woodshed, or along the clothes-line; 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 clergy - man 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 dinner-pot, 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 VOL. III. 6 82 tHE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. younger — Uncle Venner was commonly regarded ag 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 defi- ciency. 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 ren- dered him less capable of fairly measuring himself, —~ the venerable man made pretensions to no little wis- dom, 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 wall-flower 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 Un- cle 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 Hepzi- bah, clad in an old blue coat, which had a fashionable air, and must have accrued to him from the cast-off wardrobe of some dashing clerk. As for his trousers, they were of tow-cloth, very short in the legs, and bag ging down strangely in the rear, but yet having a suit. ableness 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. Yous Uncle Venner was a miscellaneous old gentle A DAY BEHIND THE COUNTER. 83 man, 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, I’m 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. That’s yon- der, — the great brick house, you know, — the work- house, most folks call it; but I mean to do my work first, and go there to be idle and enjoy myself. And I’m glad to see you beginning to do your work, Miss Hepzibah ! ” “Thank you, Uncle Venner,” said Hepzibah, smil- ing ; 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 play- ing 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 grown- up 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 step- 84 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. ping so grandly up the street! Those old gentlemes 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 tow-cloth 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 steal- ing unawares into her tone; “my cousin Jaffrey is thought to have a very pleasant smile !” “And so he has!” replied Uncle Venner. ‘“ And that ’s 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 Hepzi- bah, if an old man may be bold to ask, why don’t Judge Pyncheon, with his great means, step forward, and tell his cousin to shut up her little shop at once? It’s for your credit to be doing something, but it’s not for the Judge’s credit to let you!” “We won’t talk of this, if you please, Uncle Ven- ner,” said Hepzibah, coldly. “I ought to say, how- ever, that, if I choose to earn bread for myself, it is not Judge Pyncheon’s fault. Neither will he deserve the blame,”’ added she, more kindly, remembering Un- ele Venner’s privileges of age and humble familiarity, “if I should, by and by, find it convenient to retire with you to your farm.” ‘“‘ And it’s no bad place, either, that farm of mine!” sried the old man, cheerily, as if there were something A DAY BEHIND THE COUNTER. 85 positively delightful in the prospect. ‘No bad place is the great brick farm-house, especially for them that will find a good many old cronies there, as will be my ease. 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 air-tight stove. Summer or winter, there’s 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 wood-pile, chatting with somebody as old as one’s self; or, perhaps, idling away the time with a natural-born 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 I ’ve ever been so comfortable as I mean to be at my farm, which most folks call the workhouse. But you, — you ’re a young woman yet, — you never need go there! Something still better will turn up for you. I’m sure of it!” Hepzibah fancied that there was something peculiar in her venerable friend’s look and tone; insomuch, that she gazed into his face with considerable earnest- ness, endeavoring to discover what secret meaning, if any, might be lurking there. Individuals whose af- fairs 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 ‘dea that some harlequin trick of fortune would im 86 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, tervene in her favor. For example, an uncle — whe 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 Orien- tal 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 Hepzibah’s destitution, and impelled by the splendid generosity of character with which their Vir- ginian 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 cent-shop, 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 Venner’s casual attempt at encouragement kindled a strange A DAY BEHIND THE COUNTER. 87 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 cas- tles in the air —as how should he? — or else her earnest scowl disturbed his recollection, as it might @ more courageous man’s. Instead of pursuing any weightier topic, Uncle Venner was pleased to favor flepzibah with some sage counsel in her shop-keeping eapacity. ‘Give no credit! ’”” — these were some of his golden maxims, — “‘ Never take paper-money! Look well to your change! Ring the silver on the four-pound weight! Shove back all English half-pence and base copper tokens, such as are very plenty about town! At your leisure hours, knit children’s woollen socks and mittens! Brew your own yeast, and make your own ginger-beer !” 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 all-important 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 you ’ve 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, how- ever, 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. 88 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. “ Ah? you don’t love to talk about it,” said Uncle Venner. ‘ Well, well! we ll say no more, though there ’s word of it all over town. I remember him, Miss Hepzibah, before he could run alone!” During the remainder of the day poor Hepzibah ac. yuitted herself even less creditably, as a shop-keeper, than in her earlier efforts. She appeared to be walk- ing in a dream; or, more truly, the vivid life and real- ity assumed by her emotions made all outward occur. rences unsubstantial, like the teasing phantasms of a half-conscious slumber. She still responded, mechan- ically, to the frequent summons of the shop-bell, 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 space- less 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 iife. It is like death, without death’s 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 gentle- woman. As the animosity of fate would have it, there was a great influx of custom in the course of the after- noon. Hepzibah blundered to and fro about her small place of business, committing the most unheard- of errors: now stringing up twelve, and now seven, tallow-candles, instead of ten to the pound; selling ginger for Scotch snuff, pins for needles, and needles for pins; misreckoning her change, sometimes to the A DAY BEHIND THE COUNTER. 89 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 day’s labor, to her in- explicable astonishment, she found the money-drawer 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 one’s prostrate body as they may! Hep- zibah’s 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 stand-still under the branches of the elm-tree. Hep- zibah’s 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. 90 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. 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 reéntered the wehicle. The girl then turned towards the House of the Seven Gables, to the door of which, meanwhile, — not the shop-door, but the antique portal, — the omnibus-man had car- ried a light trunk and a bandbox. First giving a sharp rap of the old iron knocker, he /eft his pas- senger and her luggage at the door-step, 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 side-lights 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 over- shadowed her, and the time-worn 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 pro- priety in being there, so did it seem altogether fit that = =, — me eae i — SS yy 1 B “ * 1 ' ¥ Se RN! — * (PA a [ke - ! Mit au) a == —___ ee - A C————_—_—_—_— ———— Le ae er, t SS ee / 4 HMG IT WAS A FACE TO WHICH ALMOST ANY DOOR WOULD HAVE OPENED OF ITS OWN ACCORD A DAY BEHIND THE COUNTER. o1 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 Phebe?” questioned she within herself. ‘6 Tt must be little Phcebe; 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 coun- try cousin, to come down upon a poor body in this way, without so much as a day’s notice, or asking whether she would be welcome! Well; she must have a night’s lodging, I suppose ; and to-morrow the child shall go back to her mother! ” Pheebe, it must be understood, was that one little offshoot of the Pyncheon race to whom we have al- ready referred, as a native of a rural part of New England, where the old fashions and feelings of rela- tionship 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 Hepzibah’s recluse way of life, a letter had actu- ally been written and despatched, conveying informa- tion of Phebe’s projected visit. This epistle, for three or four days past, had been in the pocket of the penny- postman, who, happening to have no other business in Pyncheon Street, had not yet made it convenient te zall at the House of the Seven Gables. “« No! — she can stay only one night,” said Hepzi- bah, unbolting the door. “If Clifford were to fir’ her here, it might disturb him!” V. MAY AND NOVEMBER. Puase PyncHeon slept, on the night of hei az. cival, 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 paper-hangings in its own hue. There were curtains to Phcebe’s bed; a dark, antique can- opy, 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 morning’s 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 fond- ness, and partly as a pretty hint that it is time now to unclose her eyes. At the touch of those lips of light, Pheebe 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 abso« MAY AND NOVEMBER. 93 lutely plain to her, except that it was now early morn- ing, 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 as- pect of the chamber and its furniture, especially the tall, stiff chairs; one of which stood close by her bed- aide, and looked as if some old-fashioned personage had been sitting there all night, and had vanished only just in season to escape discovery. When Phebe was quite dressed, she peeped out of the window, and saw a rose-bush in the garden. Be- ing 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 rose-bush 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 Pheebe’s great- great-grand-aunt, — in soil which, reckoning only its cultivation as a garden-plat, was now unctuous with nearly two hundred years of vegetable decay. Grow- ing 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 ac- ceptable, because Phcebe’s young breath mingled with it, as the fragrance floated past the window. Hasten- ing 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, 94 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. as their exclusive patrimony, the gift of practical an rangement. It is a kind of natural magic that enablea 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 thei home. A wild hut of underbrush, tossed together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the home aspect by one night’s lodging of such a woman, and would retain it long after her quiet fig- ure had disappeared into the surrounding shade. No less a portion of such homely witchcraft was requisite to reclaim, as it were, Phoebe’s 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 man’s happier hours. What was precisely Phoebe’s process we find it impossible to say. She appeared to have no pre- liminary 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 window-curtain ; 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 maid’s 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 inscrut able charm. The bedchamber, no doubt, was a cham- ber of very great and varied experience, as a scene of MAY AND NOVEMBER. 94 human life: the joy of bridal nights had throbbed it. self 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 sub- tile influence might be —a person of delicate instinct would have known at once that it was now a maiden’s 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 rose-bush, she had observed several other species of flowers growing there in a wilderness of neglect, and obstructing one an- other’s development (as is often the pacael 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 work-basket, and a dusty writing-desk ; 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, — net 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. 96 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. Hepzibah bade her young guest sit down, and, her- self taking a chair near by, looked as earnestly at Phebe’s trim little figure as if she expected to see right into its springs and motive secrets. “Cousin Phebe,” said she, at last, “I really can't jee my way clear to keep you with me.” _ These words, however, had not the inhospitable bluntness with which they may strike the reader; fox the two relatives, in a talk before bedtime, had arrived at a certain degree of mutual understanding. Hepzi- bah knew enough to enable her to appreciate the cir- cumstances (resulting from the second marriage of the girl’s mother) which made it desirable for Phebe to establish herself in another home. Nor did she misin- terpret Phoebe’s character, and the genial activity per- vading 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 self-respecting purpose to confer as much benefit as she could anywise receive. As one of her nearest kindred, she had naturally betaken herself to Hepzi- bah, with no idea of forcing herself on her cousin’s protection, but only for a visit of a week or two, which might be indefinitely extended, shculd it prove for the happiness of both. | To Hepzibah’s 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, Phebe, this house of mine is but a melancholy place for a young MAY AND NOVEMBER. 97 person to be in. It lets in the wind and rain, and the snow, too, in the garret and upper chambers, in winter- time, 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, Phebe), 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 Phebe, neither can I so much as give you bread to eat.” * You will find me a cheerful little body,” answered Phebe, smiling, and yet with a kind of gentle dig- nity; “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! Phebe,” 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 ny face!” —and, indeed, the contrast was very strik- ing, — “you see how pale lam! 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 Phebe. “I should keep myself healthy with exercise in the open air.” ‘And, after all, child,” exclaimed Hepzibah, sud- denly 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 Pheebe, in surprise. “Judge Pyncheon!” answered her cousin, angrily. * He will hardly cross the threshold while I live! Na, VOL. III. 7 88 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. no! But, Phebe, you shall see the face of him I speak of.” She went in quest of the miniature already de- scribed, and returned with it in her hand. Giving it to Phebe, 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. “Tt is handsome ! —- it is very beautiful!” said Phebe, admiringly. “It is as sweet a face as a man’s can be, or ought to be. It has something of a child’s expression, — and yet not childish,— only one feels so very kindly towards him! He ought never to suf- fer anything. One would bear much for the sake of sparing him toil or sorrow. Who is it, Cousin Hep- zibah ?”’ “Did you never hear,’ whispered her cousin, bend- ing towards her, “ of Clifford Pyncheon ?” “Never! I thought there were no Pyncheons left, except yourself and our cousin Jaffrey,” answered Phebe. “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 Phebe, 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 kins- woman can offer you.” With this measured, but not exactly cold assurance 4f a hospitable purpose, Hepzibah kissed her cheek. They now went below stairs, where Phoeebe— not se MAY AND NOVEMBER. 99 much assuming the office as attracting it to herself, by the magnetism of innate fitness —took the most ac- tive 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 inapti- tude would be likely to impede the business in hand. Pheebe, and the fire that boiled the teakettle, were equally bright, cheerful, and efficient, in their respect- ive offices. Hepzibah gazed forth from her habitual sluggishness, the necessary result of long solitude, as from another sphere. She could not help being in- terested, however, and even amused, at the readiness with which her new inmate adapted herself to the cir- cumstances, 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 Phebe 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 tea-set 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 gs aneient as the custom itself of tea-drinking. 100 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. “Your great-great-great-great-grandmother had these cups, when she was married,” said Hepzibah to Phebe. “‘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 Hepzibah’s youth —had contracted no small burden of dust, which Phcebe 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 thun- der-cloud. ‘Do you do other things as well? Are you as good at your book as you are at washing tea cups?” “ Not quite, I am afraid,” said Pheebe, laughing at the form of Hepzibah’s question. ‘ But I was school- mistress for the little children in our district last sum- mer, and might have been so still.” “Ah! ’t is all very well!” observed the maiden lady, drawing herself up. ‘“ But these things must have come to you with your mother’s blood. . aever 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 Hep. zibah 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, un- fortunately, a morbid one, such as is often generated MAY AND NOVEMBER. 102 in families that remain long above the surface of so ciety. Before they left the breakfast-table, the shop-bell 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 impossibil. ity of ever becoming wonted to this peevishly obstrep- erous 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 eustomer. * Do not trouble yourself, dear cousin!” cried Phebe, starting lightly up. ‘ I am shop-keeper to-day.” * 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 Phebe. ‘ 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 one’s mother’s blood. You shall see that I am as nice a little saleswoman as I am a housewife ! ” The old gentlewoman stole behind Phebe, and peeped from the passage-way 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 102 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. beads about her neck, and what looked like a nighteap 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 time- honored spinning- wheel in constant revolution. It was worth while to hear the croaking and hollow tones of the old lady, and the pleasant voice of Phebe, mingling in one twisted thread of talk; and still bet- ter 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 sa- gacity. “Was not that well done?” asked Pheebe, iaugh- ing, when the customer was gone. ‘Nicely done, indeed, child!” answered Hepzibah. “T could not have gone through with it nearly so well. As you say, it must be a knack that belongs to you on the mother’s 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 life’s stir- ring scenes ; so genuine, in fact, that the former are usually fain to make it palatable to their self-love, 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 Phcebe’s vastly superior gifts as a shop-keeper; 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 ZA | Ww oy Nw AS FOR THE BARGAIN, IT WAS WRINKLED SLYNESS AND CRAFT PITTED AGAINST NATIVE TRUTH AND SAGACITY Nok to. oe ce pete t m By Ailes dy hn 4 j'sg® MAY AND NOVEMBER. 103 fiquid 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 fox sale some little spice-cakes, 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 half-natural sigh, and a sentiment of mixed wonder, pity, and growing affection, — “‘ What a nice little body she is! If she could only be a lady, too! —but that’s impossible! Phebe is no Pyncheon. She takes everything from her mother.” As to Pheebe’s 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 judg- ment at all in any fair and healthy mind. Out of New England, it would be impossible to meet with a person combining so many lady-like 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 one’s 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 a dozen freckles, friendly remembrancers 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 grace- ful as a bird, and graceful much in the same way ; ag 104 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. pleasant about the house as a gleam of sunshine falk ing on the floor through a shadow of twinkling leaves, or as aray 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 woman’s office to move in the midst of prac- tical 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 Phcebe. 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 “dlaims to princely territory, and, in the way of accom: plishment, her recollections, it may be, of having for- merly thrummed on a harpsichord, and walked a min- uet, and worked an antique tapestry-stitch on her sam- pler. It was a fair parallel between new Plebeianism_ It really seemed as if the battered visage of the House of the Seven Gables, black and heavy-browed as it still certainly looked, must have shown a kind of cheerfulness glimmering through its dusky windows as Phebe passed to and fro in the interior. Other. wise, it is impossible to explain how the people of the neighborhood so soon became aware of the girl’s pres- ence. There was a great run of custom, setting stead- ily in, from about ten o’clock until towards noon, — relaxing, somewhat, at dinner-time, but recommencing in the afternoon, and, finally, dying away a half am MAY AND NOVEMBER. 105 hour or so before the long day’s sunset. One of the stanchest patrons was little Ned Higgins, the devourer of Jim Crow and the elephant, who to-day had signal. ized his omnivorous prowess by swallowing two drom- edaries 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 milk- maids, and most of our other playthings. There has been constant inquiry for cheap raisins, and a great ery for whistles, and trumpets, and jew’s-harps; and at least a dozen little boys have asked for molasses- candy. 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 cop. per 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, “ Here’s a girl that will never end her days at my farm! Bless my eyes, what a brisk little soul!” “* Yes, Phebe 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 don’t believe there ever was,” answered the ven- erable man. ‘“ At any rate, it never was my luck to see her like among them, nor, for that matter, any- 106 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. where else. I’ve seen a great deal of the world, not only in people’s kitchens and back-yards, but at the street-corners, and on the wharves, and in other places where my business calls me; and I’m free to say, Miss Hepzibah, that I never knew a human creature do her work so much like one of God’s angels as this child Phoebe does!” Uncle Venner’s eulogium, if it appear rather toc high-strained for the person and occasion, had, never. theless, a sense in which it was both subtile and true. There was a spiritual quality in Phebe’s activity. The life of the long and busy day — spent in occupa- tions that might so easily have taken a squalid and ugly aspect — had been made pleasant, and even love- ly, 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 Phebe. 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 confi- dence. A recluse, like Hepzibah, usually displays re- markable 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 satis- faction in leading Phebe 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 lieutenant-gov- emor’s sword-hilt in the door-panels of the apartment WMG: “YES, DEAR COUSIN,” ANSWERED PH@BE; “BUT, IN , | HEAR SOMEBODY RINGING IT” THE MEAN TIME 3 ee or ‘f var i F ‘ MAY AND NOVEMBER. 107 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 passage-way. She bade Phebe step into one of the tall chairs, and in- spect 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 Col- dnel Pyncheon himself, but only to be made known when the family claim should be recognized by govern- ment. Thus it was for the interest of all New Eng- land that the Pyncheons should have justice done them. She told, too, how that there was undoubt- edly an immense treasure of English guineas hidden somewhere about the house, or in the cellar, or pos- sibly in the garden. *“‘ If you should happen to find it, Phebe,” said Hep- zibah, glancing aside at her with a grim yet kindly smile, ‘¢ we will tie up the shop-bell for good and all!” * Yes, dear cousin,” answered Phebe; “ 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 108 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. 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 Phebe. “The very same,” said Hepzibah. “It was Alice Pyncheon’s harpsichord. When I was learning music, my father would never let me open it. So, as I could only play on my teacher’s 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 well-meaning 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 new-fangled and ill-fitting garments ; reformers, temperance lecturers, and all manner of cross-looking philanthropists; community-men, and come-outers, as Hepzibah believed, who acknowledged no law, and ate no solid food, but lived on the scent of other people’s 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 disorganiz- ing matter, at a meeting of his banditti-like associates. For her own part, she had reason to believe that he MAY AND NOVEMBER. 109 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 Phebe, “ if the young man js 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 one’s mind, that, without exactly liking him (for 1 don’t 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!” remon- strated Phebe, 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 life’s experience, she had gnashed her teeth against human law, — “I suppose he has a law of his own!” Vi. MAULE’S WELL. AFTER an early tea, the little country-girl strayed nto 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 grass-plat. surrounding a ruinous little structure, which showed just enough of its original design to indicate that it had once been a summer-house. A hop-vine, spring- ing from last year’s 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 de- parted 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. Phcebe 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 rose-bush had evidently been propped MAULE’S WELL. inh up anew against the house since the commencement of the season; and a pear-tree and three damson-trees, which, except a row of currant-bushes, constituted the only varieties of fruit, bore marks of the recent am- putation of several superfluous or defective limbs, There were also a few species of antique and hereditary Howers, in no very flourishing condition, but scrupu- lously weeded ; as if some person, either out of love or curiosity, had been anxious to bring them to such per- fection as they were capable of attaining. The re- mainder of the garden presented a well-selected assort- ment 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 string-beans, 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 prom- ised 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 Hep- zibah’s, who had no taste nor spirits for the lady-like employment of cultivating flowers, and — with her re- cluse 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, Pheebe 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 pe 112 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. culiar smile, as if glad to perceive that nature, else where overwhelmed, and driven out of the dusty town, had here been able to retain a breathing-place. 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 pear-tree, and were making themselves exceedingly busy and happy in the dark intricacy of its boughs. Bees, too, — strange, to say, — had thought i/ worth their while to come hither, possibly from thi ranye of hives beside some farm-house miles away. How many erial voyages might they have made, in quest of honey, or honey-laden, betwixt dawn and sun- set! Yet, late as it now was, there still arose a pleas- ant hum out of one or two of the squash-blossoms, 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 mosaic-work of variously colored pebbles. The play and slight agitation of the water, in its up- ward 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 moss-grown 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 hen-coop 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 soli. tary chicken. All of them were pure specimens of a breed which had been transmitted down as an heirloom siotasierdbesit: caida) MUSTERED VIVACITY ENOUGH TO FLUTTER THE CHICKEN S SHOULDER ) UPWARD AND ALIGHT ON PHBE —s ~— MAULE’S WELL. 118 fn 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 prince’s 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 beer ashamed of. Be that as it might, the hens were nov scarcely larger than pigeons, and had a queer, rusty withered aspect, and a gouty kind of movement, and ¢ sleepy and melancholy tone throughout all the varia- tions 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 pres- ent representatives, judging by their lugubrious deport- ment, 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 dis- tinguishing mark of the hens was a crest of lamenta- bly scanty growth, in these latter days, but so oddly and wickedly analogous to Hepzibah’s turban, that Phebe — to the poignant distress of her conscience, but inevitably— was led to fancy a general resem- blance betwixt these forlorn bipeds and her respecta- ble 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. Re- turning, 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; ' VOL. IL 8 114 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. while Chanticleer and the ladies of his household re. garded 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 time-honored 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 zuardian angels. “‘ Here, you odd little chicken!”’ said Phebe; “ 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, — mus- tered vivacity enough to flutter upward and alight on Phebe’s shoulder. “That little fowl pays you a high compliment!” said a voice behind Phebe. 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 Phcebe was gone in quest of the crumbs, had be- gun to busy himself with drawing up fresh earth about the roots of the tomatoes. “The chicken really treats you like an old acquaint ance,” continued he, in a quiet way, while a smile made his face pleasanter than Phebe 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 MAULE’S WELL. 115 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 un- derstand the vulgar language of a barn-yard fowl. I prefer to think —and so would Miss Hepzibah — that they recognize the family tone. For you are a Pyn- cheon ?” “¢ My name is Phoebe Pyncheon,” said the girl, with @ manner of some reserve; for she was aware that her new acquaintance could be no other than the daguerre- otypist, of whose lawless propensities the old maid had given her a disagreeable idea. “I did not know that my cousin Hepzibah’s garden was under another per- son’s care.” “ Yes,” said Holgrave, “I dig, and hoe, and weed, in this black old earth, for the sake of refreshing my- self 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 oc. cupation, so far as I have any, is with a lighter ma- terial. 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 one’s eyes, to come into it. But would you like to see a specimen of my productions ?”’ “A daguerreotype likeness, do you mean?” asked Pheebe, with less reserve; for, in spite of prejudice, 116 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. her own youthfulness sprang forward to meet his, ‘]} don’t 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.” “Tf you would permit me,” said the artist, looking at Phebe, “ I should like to try whether the daguerre- otype 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 un- amiable; but the very sufficient reason, I fancy, is, decause the originals are so. There is a wonderful insight in Heaven’s 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 mo- rocco case. Phebe merely glanced at it, and gave it back. ‘“‘ T know the face,” she replied ; “for its stern eye has been following me about all day. Itis_ my Puri- tan auoesicn arlio, Manes yondaedn Theale To be sure, you havé 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 don’t think him improved by wour alterations.” Bitty Yy We Mle YEA, ; y i Zo ff | LY By, iy A ey gag cs ' LMA FER WN nN Wie Ly, \w ahs “ii, “ es AR. Raa 2 ‘ RC sir teas ‘ 2 We %, OF gon, hte y RX Vu we, ~ Sa Ss. =— sy Way wre geht vy Wa We ae sda oe, = SSS Wes WAYAN Oe m ES & ps a ss ts ws > i ih gp ade u 0 “CG i Cf 22 . iy A> * Hele M-Grose ‘(BR CAREFUL NOT TO DRINK AT MAULE’S WELL!”’ SAID HE MAULE’S WELL. 117 “You would have seen other differences had you ooked 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 prob- ably meet. Now, the remarkable point is, that the original wears, to the world’s eye, —and, for aught I know, to his most intimate friends, —an exceedingly pleasant countenance, indicative of benevolence, open- ness of heart, sunny good-humor, and other praise- worthy 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 emi- nence, and the likeness was intended to be engraved.” “Well, I don’t wish to see it any more,” observed Phebe, 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 Phebe. “It is almost too soft and gentle for a man’s.” “Ts there nothing wild in the eye?” continued Hol- grave, so earnestly that it embarrassed Pheebe, as did also the quiet freedom with which he presumed on 118 HE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. 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?” “Tt is nonsense,” said Phcebe, a little impatiently, “for us to talk about a picture which you have never seen. You mistake it for some other. A crime, in- deed! Since you are a friend of my cousin Hepzi bah’s, you should ask her to show you the picture.” “Tt will suit my purpose still better to see the orig- inal,” 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 aa Phebe was on the point of retreating, but turned back, with some hesitation; for she did not exactly comprehend his manner, although, on better observa- tion, 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 pro- ceeded to say, rather as if the garden were his own than a place to which he was admitted merely by Hepzibah’s courtesy, “Tf agreeable to you,” he observed, ‘it would give me pleasure to turn over these flowers, and those an- cient and respectable fowls, to your care. Coming fresh from country air and occupations, you will soon feel the need of some such out-of-door 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 Hep MAULE’S WELL. 119 gibah’s table. So we will be fellow-laborers, somewhat on the community system.” | Silently, and rather surprised at her own compli- ance, Phoebe accordingly betook herself to weeding a flower-bed, but busied herself still more with cogita- tions 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 country-girl, as it might a more practised observer; for, while the tone of his zonversation had generally been playful, the impres- sion left on her mind was that of gravity, and, except as his youth modified it, almost sternness. She re- belled, as it were, against a certain magnetic element in the artist’s nature, which he exercised towards her, possibly without being conscious of it. After a little while, the twilight, deepened by the shadows of the fruit-trees and the surrounding build- ings, 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 bean- stalk. Good-night, Miss Phebe 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 pice ture of the flower and its wearer.” He retired towards his own solitary gable, but turned his head, on reaching the door, and called to Phebe, 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 Maule’s well!” said he. ‘ Neither drink nor bathe your face in it!” ‘“‘Maule’s well!’ answered Phebe. “Is that it with the rim of mossy stones? I have no thought of drinking there, — but why not?” 120 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. “ Oh,” rejoined the daguerreotypist, ‘because, like an old lady’s eup of tea, it is water bewitched ! ” He vanished ; and Phebe, lingering a moment, saw a glimmering light, and then the steady beam of a lamp, in a chamber of the gable. On returning inte Hepzibah’s apartment of the house, she found the low- studded 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 straight-backed chairs, a little withdrawn from the window, the faint gleam of which showed the blanched paleness of her cheek, turned side- way towards a corner. “Shall I light a lamp, Cousin Hepzibah?” she asked. “Do, if you please, my dear child,’’ answered Hep- zibah. ‘ 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 won- derfully responsive to every emotion of the human soul! In Hepzibah’s 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 atterance of feeling and sympathy, rather than of the a | SN n> aS =e ——* (JSS 6 ST cf “IN A MOMENT, COUSIN!’’ ANSWERED THE GIRL. ““THESE MATCHES JUST GLIMMER, AND GO OUT”’ Ve A y ou hat NOwW Ue a saa j My & *y ‘ wei Py tip Wik ke ‘ : 1 aty y 1% as SMe Ae eed en TT MAULE’S WELL. 121 intellect. So vague was it, that its impression or echo in Pheebe’s mind was that of unreality. She con- cluded that she must have mistaken some other sound for that of the human voice; or else that it was al- together in her fancy. She set the lighted lamp in the passage, and again entered the parlor. Hepzibah’s form, though its sable outline mingled with the dusk, was now less imper- fectly visible. In the remoter parts of the room, how- ever, its walls being so ill adapted to reflect light, there was nearly the same obscurity as before. “Cousin,” said Phcebe, “did you speak to me just now ?”’ “No, child!” replied Hepzibah. Fewer words than before, but with the same mys- terious music in them! Mellow, melancholy, yet not mournful, the tone seemed to gush up out of the deep well of Hepzibah’s 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 Phebe. The girl sat silently fora 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 indee finable reluctance, “is there not some one in the room with us ?” “ Phoebe, my dear little girl,” said Hepzibah, after a moment’s 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, 122 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. 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 girl’s bosom with a strong, high, and tumultuous swell. How came there to be sc much love in this desolate old heart, that it could afford to well over thus abundantly ? “Good night, cousin,” said Phebe, strangely af- — fected by Hepzibah’s 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 foot- step 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 cousin’s voice, Phebe heard that strange, vague murmur, which might be likened to an indistinct shadow of human utterance. VIL. THE GUEST. Wuen Phebe awoke, — which she did with the yarly twittering of the conjugal couple of robins in whe pear-tree,— she heard movements below stairs, and, hastening down, found Hepzibah already in the kitchen. She stood by a window, holding a book in slose 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 cer- tainly have been the one now in Hepzibah’s hand ; and the kitchen, in such an event, would forthwith have steamed with the fragrance of venison, turkeys, zapons, larded partridges, puddings, cakes, and Christ- mas pies, in all manner of elaborate mixture and con- yoction. It was a cookery book, full of innumerable gld fashions of English dishes, and illustrated with angravings, 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 culi- nary art (not one of which, probably, had been tested, within the memory of any man’s 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. 124 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. Soon, with a deep sigh, she put aside the savory vol. ume, and inquired of Phoebe whether old Speckle, as she called one of the hens, had laid an egg the preced- ing day. Phebe ran to see, but returned without the expected treasure in her hand. At that instant, however, the blast of a fish-dealer’s conch was heard, announcing his approach along the street. With energetic raps at the shop- window, Hepzibah sum- moned 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 Phebe 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 country-gizl, willing to give her utmost assistance, proposed to make an Indian cake, after her mother’s peculiar method, of easy manufacture, and which she could vouch for as posses- sing a richness, and, if rightly prepared, a delicacy, unequalled by any other mode of breakfast-cake. Hep- zibah gladly assenting, the kitchen was soon the scene of savory preparation. Perchance, amid their proper element of smoke, which eddied forth from the ill- constructed chimney, the ghosts of departed cook- maids 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 half-starved rats, at any rate, stole visibly out of their hiding-places, and sat on their hind-legs, snuffing the fumy atmosphere, and wistfully awaiting an opportu- nity to nibble. THE GUEST. 125 Hepzibah had no natural turn for cookery, and, to say the truth, had fairly incurred her present mea- greness 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, there- fore, was quite an heroic test of sentiment. It was touching, and positively worthy of tears Gf Phebe, the only spectator, except the rats and ghosts afore< said, 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 minute- ness of attention as if, — we know not how to express it otherwise, —as if her own heart were on the grid- iron, 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 well-provisioned breakfast-table. 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 ma- terial delights of the morning meal are capable of being fully enjoyed, without any very grievous re: proaches, whether gastric or conscientious, for yield. ing 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 mirth- fulness, and oftentimes a vivid truth, which more rarely find their way into the elaborate intercourse of dinner. Hepzibah’s small and ancient table, sup- ported 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 126 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. parties. ‘The vapor of the broiled fish arose like ix cense from the shrine of a barbarian idol, while the fragrance of the Mocha might have gratified the nos- trils of a tutelary Lar, or whatever power has scope over a modern breakfast-table. Phcebe’s Indian cakes were the sweetest offering of all,— in their hue befit ting 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 Pheebe herself had churned, in her own rural home, and brought it to her cousin as a propitiatory gift,— smelling of clover-blossoms, and diffusing the charm of pastoral scenery through the dark-panellied parlor. All this, with the quaint gorgeousness of the old china cups and saucers, and the crested spoons, and a silver cream-jug (Hepzibah’s only other article of plate, and shaped like the rudest porringer), set out a board at which the stateliest of old Colonel Pyncheon’s guests need not have scorned to take his place. But the Puritan’s face scowled down out of the picture, as if nothing on the table pleased his appetite. By way of contributing what grace she could, Phebe gathered some roses and a few other flowers, posses- sing 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 flower-vase. The early sunshine — as fresh as that which peeped into Eve’s bower while she and Adam sat at breakfast there— came twinkling through the branches of the pear-tree, 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 Phebe, — but what other guest did her cousin look for? THE GUEST. 127 Throughout this preparation there had been a com stant tremor in Hepzibah’s frame; an agitation so powerful that Phcebe 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 Pheebe in them, and kiss her cheek as tenderly as ever her mother had; she ap- peared 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 breath- ing-room. 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 lit- tle, 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 Phebe, 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 128 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. pardon, and the next instant renew the just-forgiven injury. At last, when their mutual labor was all finished, she took Pheebe’s 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, Phebe, 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 Pheebe, with a sunny and tearful sympathy. ‘“ What is it that moves you so?” “Hush! hush! He is coming!” whispered Hep- zibah, 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 al- ways 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 Phebe, the old gentle- woman stepped on tiptoe about the room, making such arrangements as suggested themselves at the crisis. Meanwhile there was a step in the passage-way, above stairs. Phoebe recognized it as the same which had passed upward, as through her dream, in the night-time. 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 fy / LI f . ff’ } Y/} Hf 7 A i WV ‘ PHCEBE COULD SEE THE QUIVERING OF HER GAUNT SHADOW, AS THROWN BY THE FIRELIGHT ON THE KITCHEN WALL Hclen M: Groce - ‘ 7 ase & ae i : 4) t HH THE GUEST. 129 at the foot. Each time, the delay seemed to be with- out purpose, but rather from a forgetfulness of the purpose which had set him in motion, or as if the per- son’s feet came involuntarily to a stand-still because the motive-power was too feeble to sustain his pro- gress. 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. Hepzi. bah, her hands convulsively clasped, stood gazing at the entrance. ** Dear Cousin Hepzibah, pray don’t look so!” said Phebe, trembling; for her cousin’s 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 el- derly personage, in an old-fashioned dressing-gown 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 child’s 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, notwithstand- VOL. ly 9 180 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. ing, 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 half-extinguished 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 it. self into satisfactory splendor, or be at once extin- guished. For an instant after entering the room, the guest stood still, retaining Hepzibah’s hand, instinctively, as a child does that of the grown person who guides it. He saw Phebe, however, and caught an illumination from her youthful and pleasant aspect, which, indeed, threw a cheerfulness about the parlor, like the cizcle of reflected brilliancy around the glass vase of flowers that was standing in the sunshine. He made a saluta- tion, or, to speak nearer the truth, an ill-defined, abor- tive attempt at courtesy. Imperfect as it was, how- ever, it conveyed an idea, or, at least, gave a hint, of indescribable grace, such as no practised art of exter- nal manners could have attained. It was too slight to seize upon at the instant; yet, as recollected after- wards, seemed to transfigure the whole man. “ Dear Clifford,” said Hepzibah, in the tone with which one soothes a wayward infant, “this is our cousin Phebe, — little Phoebe Pyncheon, — Arthur’s only child, you know. She has come from the country to stay with us awhile; for our old house has grows to be very lonely now.” * Phoebe? — Phebe Pyncheon? — Phebe?” ree peated the guest, with a strange, sluggish, ill-defined utterance. ‘ Arthur’s child! Ah, I forget! No mat {2 ter! She is very welcome! THE GUEST. 131 *“ Come, dear Clifford, take this chair,” said Hepzi- bah, leading him to his place. “ Pray, Phebe, 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 low-studded, cross-beamed, oaken-panelled 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, Con- tinually, as we may express it, he faded away out of his place ; or, in other words, his mind and conscious- ness 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 taper-gleam in his eyeballs. It betokened that his spiritual part had returned, and was doing its best to kindle the heart’s household fire, and light up intel- lectual 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 im- perfect animation, Phoebe became convinced of what she had at first rejected as too extravagant and start- ling an idea. She saw that the person before her must have been the original of the beautiful miniature in her cousin Hepzibah’s possession. Indeed, with a feminine eye for costume, she had at once identified the damask dressing-gown, which enveloped him, as the same in figure, material, and fashion, with that $0 elaborately represented in the picture. This old, 132 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. faded garment, with all its pristine brilliancy extinct, seemed, in some indescribable way, to translate the wearer's untold misfortune, and make it perceptible to the beholder’s eye. It was the better to be dis- cerned, by this exterior type, how worn and old were the soul’s more immediate garments; that form and countenance, the beauty and grace of which had al- most 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. “Ts 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 near-sightedness, and the fret of inward discomfort, had rendered so habitual that any vehe mence of mood invariably evoked it. But at the indis tinct murmur of his words her whole face grew tender, and even lovely, with sorrowful affection ; the harsh THE GUEST. 133 ness of her features disappeared, as it were, behind the warm and misty glow. “ Angry!” she repeated ; “ angry with you, Clif ford!” 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 @ soul-thrilling sweetness out of a cracked instrument, which makes its physical imperfection heard in the midst of ethereal harmony, — so deep was the sensi- bility that found an organ in Hepzibah’s 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, how- ever, and gone in a moment, it had a charm of won- derful beauty. It was followed by a coarser expres- sion ; 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 him- self, Hepzibah, the young girl, and everything else around him, in the sensual enjoyment which the boun- tifully spread table afforded. In his natural system, though high-wrought and delicately refined, a sensibil- ity 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 Phebe droop her eyes. 13834 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. In a little while the guest became sensible of the frar grance of the yet untasted coffee. He quaffed it ea- gerly. 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; se 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 toescape 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 sa much that his expression grew more intellectual ; this, though it had its share, was not the most peculiar ef- fect. 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 func- tion to deal with all beautiful and enjoyable things. In a character where it should exist as the chief at- tribute, 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; noth. ing 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. Te these heroic tempers, such martyrdom is the richest THE GUEST. 135 meed in the world’s 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. Clif ford’s 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 re- fined that spiritual ingredients are moulded in with it. It was betrayed in the unconscious smile with which he regarded Phebe, 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 Hepzibah’s misfortune, — not Clifford’s 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 contort- ing 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 136 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. like Clifford’s 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, with- out arecompense. 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 re- joiced — 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 pos- sessed 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 girl’s face, how cheerful, how blooming ! —a flower with the dew on it, and sunbeams in the dew-drops! Ah! this must be alla dream! A dream! zy ~ ys > \ Se & ~ — — SRR nN ’ ‘YOU LOOK INTO MY HEART,” SAID SHE, LETTING HER EYES DROP. ‘‘YOU KNOW I LOVE YoU!” THE FLOWER OF EDEN. 361 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 mo- mentary happiness he gathered from his present po- sition. It separated Phoebe and himself from the world, and bound them to each other, by their exclu- sive knowledge of Judge Pyncheon’s mysterious death, and the counsel which they were forced to hold respect- ing 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 mid-ocean; once divulged, the ocean would flow betwixt them, standing on its widely sundered shores. Meanwhile, all the circumstances of their sit- uation seemed to draw them together ; they were like two children who go hand in hand, pressing closely to one another’s side, through a shadow-haunted pas- sage. The image of awful Death, which filled the house, held them united by his stiffened grasp. These influences hastened the development of emo- tions that might not otherwise have flowered so. Pos- sibly, indeed, it had been Holgrave’s purpose to let them die in their undeveloped germs. “Why do we delay so?” asked Phebe. ‘“ This se- eret takes away my breath! Let us throw open the doors!” “Tn all our lives there can never come another mo- ment like this!” said Holgrave. ‘ Phcebe, 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 ?” “Tt seems a sin,” replied Phebe, trembling, “to think of joy at such a time!” 862 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. “ Could you but know, Pheebe, 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 dread- ful 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, Phebe, 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! ” “‘ Flow can you love a simple girl like me?” asked Phebe, 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 ten- dencies 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!” an- swered Holgrave. “I have no faith in it, except as you bestow it on me! ” “ And then —I am afraid!” continued Pheebe, 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, Phebe! ” exclaimed Holgrave, with almost a ugh, and a smile that was burdened with thought THE FLOWER OF EDEN. 368 * Tt 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 an- cient limits. I have a presentiment that, hereafter, it will be my lot to set out trees, to make fences, — per- haps, 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.” “ T would not have it so!” said Phebe, 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, Phcebe ?” “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 forgot- ten. At such a crisis, there is no death; for immor- tality is revealed anew, and embraces everything in its hallowed atmosphere. But how soon the heavy earth-dream settled down again | “ Hark!” whispered Phebe. “Somebody is at the street-door ! ” “* Now let us meet the world!” said Holgrave. ‘ No doubt, the rumor of Judge Pyncheon’s visit to this 864 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. house, and the flight of Hepzibah and Clifford, % 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 iz which the foregoing interview had passed,—they heard footsteps in the farther passage. The door, therefore which they supposed to be securely locked, — whicl Holgrave, indeed, had seen to be so, and at which Pheebe 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. “Tt is they!” answered Phebe. “ Thank God! — thank God!” And then, as if in sympathy with Pheebe’s whis- pered ejaculation, they heard Hepzibah’s voice, more distinctly. “Thank God, my brother, we are at home! ” “ Well! — Yes! — thank God!” responded Clif ford. “A dreary home, Hepzibah! But you hav 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 Phebe!” But the house was not altogether so dreary as Clif ford imagined it. They had not made many steps, ~ ‘“oARK!’’ WHISPERED PHBE. ‘‘SOMEBODY IS AT THE STREET- DOOR’ ; : a . + + a = » S a om " j “f - i P. - 4 7 4 4 : cs la . . ot at ad 4 ' = s - 7 ‘ . ty - - ‘ f ‘ ‘ a . J 3 ’ : / . : 3 { ; ra ‘ , = N ‘ 4 = ‘ : t Ps = THE FLOWER OF EDEN. 365 m truth, they were lingering in the entry, with the list- lessness of an accomplished purpose, uncertain what to do next, — when Phebe ran to meet them. On be. holding 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 mel- ancholy. “I thought of you both, as we came down the street, and beheld Alice’s Posies in full bloom. And so the flower of Eden has bloomed, likewise, in this old, darksome house to-day.” X XI, THE DEPARTURE. ‘THE sudden death of so prominent a member of tné social world as the Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a sensation (at least, in the circles more im. mediately 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 person’s biography, there is scarcely one — none, certainly, of anything like a similar im- portance —to which the world so easily reconciles it- self as to his death. In most other cases and contin- gencies, 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 oi the ingurgitated object, — and a bubble or two, ascend- ing 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 pro- fessional authority, that the event was a natural, and -— except for some unimportant particulars, denoting 2, slight idiosyncrasy — by no means an unusual form of death, the public, with its customary alacrity, pro THE DEPARTURE. 367 ceeded to forget that he had ever lived. In short, the honorable Judge was beginning to be a stale subject before half the county newspapers had found time to put their columns in mourning, and publish his exceed- ingly eulogistic obituary. Nevertheless, creeping darkly through the places which this excellent person had haunted in his life. time, there was a hidden stream of private talk, such as it would have shocked all decency to speak loudly at the street-corners. It is very singular, how the fact of a man’s 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 act- ing 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 jn a week after his decease, he would almost in- variably find himself at a higher or lower point than he had formerly occupied, on the scale of public ap- preciation. 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 Pyncheon’s 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 irrefraga- bly indicating that some person had gained access to old Jaffrey Pyncheon’s private apartments, at or near the moment of his death. His desk and private draw- ers, in a room contiguous to his bedchamber, had been ransacked ; money and valuable articles were missing ; there was a bloody hand-print on the old man’s liner ; 368 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. and, by a powerfully welded chain of deductive evi dence, 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 Clifford’s agency. Many persons affirmed that the history and elucidation ot 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 hu- man affairs, and put everybody’s natural vision to the blush, by the marvels which they see with their eyes shut. According to this version of the story, Judge Pyn- cheon, exemplary as we have portrayed him in our narrative, was, in his youth, an apparently irreclaim- able 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 pleas- ures, 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 bachelor’s affection, once strongly fixed upon him. Now it is averred, — but whether on authority available in a court of justice, we da not pretend to have investigated, — that the young man was tempted by the devil, one night, to search his uncle’s private drawers, to which he had unsus- pected means of access. While thus criminally oc- cupied, he was startled by the opening of the cham. ber-door. There stood old Jaffrey Pyncheon, in his THE DEPARTURE. 369 nightclothes! The surprise of such a discovery, his agitation, alarm, and horror, brought on the crisis oi a disorder to which the old bachelor had an hered- itary 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 com- mitting ! 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 him- self at the expense of Clifford, his rival, for whose character he had at once a contempt and a repug- nance. Itis 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, Jaffrey’s previous steps had already pledged him to those which remained. So craftily had he arranged the circum- stances, that, at Clifford’s trial, his cousin hardly VOL. III. 24 870 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. 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 Pyncheon’s inward criminality, as re- garded Clifford, was, indeed, black and damnable; while its mere outward show and positive commission was the smallest that could possibly consist with so great asin. 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 Pyncheon’s 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. Unknow- ingly, he was a childless man, while striving to add more wealth to his only child’s inheritance. Hardly a week after his decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of the death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheon’s 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 maid- en, and, through her, that sworn foe of wealth and all manner of conservatism, — the wild reformer, — Holgrave ! It was now far too late in Clifford’s 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 prob- ably have been won for him, had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had fallen deemed it ad- visable to expose Clifford to a miserable resuscitation THE DEPARTURE. oT1 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 repara- tion. 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 circum- stances, 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 itin. The better remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought his irrepa- rable ruin far behind him. The shock of Judge Pyncheon’s death had a perma- nently invigorating and ultimately beneficial effect on Clifford. That strong and ponderous man had been Clifford’s 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 Clifford’s aimless flight, was a tremulous exhilaration. Subsiding from it, he did not sink into his former in- tellectual 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 872 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. 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 Pheebe, 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 country-seat 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 egg-laying, with an evident design, as a matter of duty and con- science, 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 country-house 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 domes- tic 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 mo- ment.” “Why,” cried Phebe, gazing into the artist’s face THE DEPARTURE. 373 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 peo- ple to live in something as fragile and temporary as a bird’s-nest ! ” * Ah, Phebe, I told you how it would be!” said the artist, with a half-melancholy 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 keep- ing 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, ora 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 remem- ber 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 3874 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. probably have been to cause the picture to start fon ward. But, in so long a period of concealment, the mar chinery had been eaten through with rust; so that at Holgrave’s pressure, the portrait, frame and all, tum- bled suddenly from its position, and lay face down. ward on the floor. A recess in the wall was thus brought to light, in which lay an object so covered with a century’s 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 tiey find the treasure, it has long been worthless.” ‘“¢ Poor Cousin Jaffrey! This is what deceived him,” exclaimed Hepzibah. ‘ When they were young to- pether, Clifford probably made a kind of fairy-tale of this discovery. He was always dreaming hither and thither about the house, and lighting up its dark cor- ners with beautiful stories. And poor Jaffrey, who took hold of everything as if it were real, thought my brother had found out his uncle’s wealth. He died with this delusion in his mind! ” “But,” said Phebe, apart to Holgrave, “ how came you to know the secret ?” *“* My dearest Phebe,” 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 dowv to me from my ancestors. You should have known ee ee wae? PSHE = HOLGRAVE OPENED IT, AND DISPLAYED AN ANCIENT DEED ee THE DEPARTURE. 375 sooner (only that I was afraid of frightening you away) that, in this long drama of wrong and retribu- tion, I represent the old wizard, and am probably as much a wizard as ever he was. The son of the exe- cuted Matthew Maule, while building this house, took the opportunity to construct that recess, and hide away the Indian deed, on which depended the immense land- claim of the Pyncheons. Thus they bartered their Eastern territory for Maule’s garden-ground.” “ And now,” said Uncle Venner, “I suppose their whole claim is not worth one man’s share in my farm yonder ! ” “ Uncle Venner,” cried Phoebe, taking the patched philosopher’s 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 yellowish-brown cottage you ever saw; and the sweetest-looking 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 Phebe! They'll 3876 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. miss me in the gardens hereabouts, and round by the back doors; and Pyncheon Street, I’m afraid, wil hardly look the same without old Uncle Venner, wha 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 country-seat, or you must come to my farm, —that’s 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 man’s mellow, quiet, and simple spirit. ‘ I want you always to be within five minutes’ saunter of my chair. Yeu 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 Rox- bury russet,—a great deal the better, the longer I can be kept. Yes; and my words of wisdom, that you and Pheebe tell me of, are like the golden dande- lions, which never grow in the hot months, but may be seen glistening among the withered grass, and un- der the dry leaves, sometimes as late as December. And you are welcome, friends, to my mess of dande lions, if there were twice as many!” A plain, but handsome, dark-green barouche haa now drawn up in front of the ruinous portal of the old mansion-house. The party came forth, and (with the exception of good Uncle Venner, who was to fol- low in a few days) proceeded to take their places. They were chatting and laughing very pleasantly to gether ; and—as proves to be often the case, at mo THE DEPARTURE. 377 ments 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 tea-time. 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 cent-shop three months, and loss five dollars on her outlay. Old Maid Pyn- cheon has been in trade just about as long, and rides off in her carriage with a couple of hundred thousand, —reckoning her share, and Clifford’s, and Phebe’s, -——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 can’t exactly fathom it!” “ Pretty good business!” quoth the sagacious Dixey, — “pretty good business ! ” Maule’s 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 Love’s web of sor- cery. The Pyncheon Elm, moreover, with what folli- age the September gale had spared to it, whispered 378 THE HOUSE OP THE SEVEN GABLES. unintelligible prophecies. And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that sweet Alice Pyn- cheon — after witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and this present happiness, of her kindred mortals ~ had given one farewell touch of a spirit’s joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward from the House OF THE SEVEN GABLES ! ie. aa = — we = = S~ _ =< UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA 3 0112 001452876