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The House of the Seven Gables

by Nathaniel Hawthorne · English · Gutenberg #77 · 630,640 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The House of the Seven Gables

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne


        
Release date: August 1, 1993 [eBook #77]
                Most recently updated: July 1, 2025

Language: English

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Credits: Judith Boss. HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES ***




The House of the Seven Gables

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

With an introduction by George Parsons Lathrop


Contents

 INTRODUCTORY NOTE
 AUTHOR’S PREFACE

 I. THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY
 II. THE LITTLE SHOP-WINDOW
 III. THE FIRST CUSTOMER
 IV. A DAY BEHIND THE COUNTER
 V. MAY AND NOVEMBER
 VI. MAULE’S WELL
 VII. THE GUEST
 VIII. THE PYNCHEON OF TO-DAY
 IX. CLIFFORD AND PHŒBE
 X. THE PYNCHEON GARDEN
 XI. THE ARCHED WINDOW
 XII. THE DAGUERREOTYPIST
 XIII. ALICE PYNCHEON
 XIV. PHŒBE’S GOOD-BYE
 XV. THE SCOWL AND SMILE
 XVI. CLIFFORD’S CHAMBER
 XVII. THE FLIGHT OF TWO OWLS
 XVIII. GOVERNOR PYNCHEON
 XIX. ALICE’S POSIES
 XX. THE FLOWER OF EDEN
 XXI. THE DEPARTURE




INTRODUCTORY NOTE
THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES.


In September of the year during the February of which Hawthorne had
completed “The Scarlet Letter,” 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 standing at the date of this edition, near the
Stockbridge Bowl.

“I sha’n’t have the new story ready by November,” he explained to his
publisher, on the 1st of October, “for I 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 middle 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 magistrate at Salem in the latter part of the seventeenth
century, and officiated at the famous trials for witchcraft 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 persecutors. This
circumstance doubtless furnished a hint for that piece of tradition in
the book which represents 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 conviction 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 injured woman’s husband, just mentioned; and,
here again, we have a correspondence with Maule’s malediction in the
story. Furthermore, there occurs in the “American Note-Books” (August
27, 1837), a reminiscence 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 Phœbe 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 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 which 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 Pyncheon 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 supposed 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
graduation from college, and was one of the celebrated cases of the
day, Daniel Webster taking part prominently in the trial. But it should
be observed here that such resemblances as these between sundry
elements in the work of Hawthorne’s fancy and details of reality are
only fragmentary, and are rearranged to suit the author’s purposes.

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 extant 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 difficult to imagine the bright novelty with which it
first caught 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 dwelling.
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. Notwithstanding 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 Preface, 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 constructing castles in the air.” More than this, he stated to
persons still living that the house of the romance was not copied from
any actual edifice, but was simply a general reproduction of a style of
architecture belonging to colonial days, examples of which survived
into the period of his youth, but have since been radically modified or
destroyed. Here, as elsewhere, he exercised the liberty of a creative
mind to heighten the probability of his pictures without confining
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 records, 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 restrictions of a scanty and uncertain income. A letter
written by Mrs. Hawthorne, at this time, to a member of her family,
gives incidentally a glimpse of the scene, which may properly find a
place here. She says: “I delight to think that you also can look forth,
as I do now, upon a broad valley and a fine amphitheater 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 sun shine, 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 surroundings 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 Horatio 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 romance 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
encouragingly of its success.”

From England, especially, came many warm expressions of praise,—a fact
which Mrs. Hawthorne, in a private letter, commented on as the
fulfillment 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. P. L.




PREFACE.


When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly 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 probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The
former—while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws,
and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the
truth of the human 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 stated, and, especially, to mingle
the Marvelous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor, than
as any portion 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 to himself—but with what
success, fortunately, it is not for him to judge—to keep undeviatingly
within his immunities. The point of view in which this tale comes under
the Romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a bygone time
with the very present that is flitting away from us. It is a legend
prolonging 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, according 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 definite moral purpose, at
which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this
particular, the author 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 uncontrollable mischief; and he would feel it a
singular gratification 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, thereby 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 imaginative 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 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 unnatural attitude. A high
truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening
at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction,
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 romance to an inflexible and
exceedingly dangerous species 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 with the characteristics of a
community for whom he cherishes a 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 owner, 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 profess to be
inhabitants. He would be glad, therefore, if—especially in the quarter
to which he alludes—the book may be read strictly as a Romance, having
a great deal more to do with the clouds overhead than with any portion
of the actual soil of the County of Essex.

LENOX, January 27, 1851.




THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES




I.
The Old Pyncheon Family


Halfway 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 familiar to
every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm. On my
occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down
Pyncheon Street, for the sake of passing through the shadow of these
two antiquities,—the great 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,
which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement. But the
story would include a chain of events extending over the better part of
two centuries, and, written out with reasonable amplitude, would fill a
bigger folio volume, or a longer series of duodecimos, than could
prudently be appropriated to the annals of all New England during a
similar period. It consequently becomes imperative to make short work
with most of the traditionary lore of which the old Pyncheon House,
otherwise known as the House of the Seven Gables, has been the theme.
With a brief sketch, therefore, of the circumstances amid which the
foundation of the house was laid, and a rapid glimpse at its quaint
exterior, as it grew black in the prevalent east wind,—pointing, too,
here and there, at some spot of more verdant mossiness on its roof and
walls,—we shall commence the real action of our tale at an epoch not
very remote from the present day. Still, there will be a connection
with the long past—a reference to forgotten events and personages, and
to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete—which, if
adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how much
of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human life.
Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little-regarded
truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and
must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together
with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term
expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth,
which may darkly overshadow their posterity.

The House of the Seven Gables, antique as it now looks, was not the
first habitation erected by civilized man on precisely the same spot of
ground. Pyncheon Street formerly bore the humbler appellation of
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 exceedingly desirable in the eyes of a
prominent and powerful personage, who asserted plausible claims to the
proprietorship of this and a large adjacent tract of land, on the
strength of a grant from the legislature. Colonel Pyncheon, the
claimant, as we gather from whatever traits of him are preserved, was
characterized by an iron energy of purpose. Matthew Maule, on the other
hand, though an obscure man, was stubborn in the defence of what he
considered his right; and, for several years, he succeeded in
protecting the acre or two of earth which, with his own toil, he had
hewn out of the primeval forest, to be his garden ground and homestead.
No written record of this dispute is known to be in existence. Our
acquaintance with the whole subject is derived chiefly from tradition.
It would be bold, therefore, and possibly unjust, to venture a decisive
opinion as to its merits; although it appears to have been at least a
matter of doubt, whether Colonel 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 controversy 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 it seem
almost a religious act to drive the plough over the little area of his
habitation, and obliterate his place and memory from among men.

Old Matthew Maule, in a word, was executed for the crime of witchcraft.
He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion, which should teach
us, among its other morals, that the influential classes, and those who
take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to
all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob.
Clergymen, judges, statesmen,—the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of
their day stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to
applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably
deceived. If any one part of their proceedings can be said to deserve
less blame than another, it was the singular indiscrimination with
which they persecuted, not merely the poor and aged, as in former
judicial massacres, but people of all ranks; their own equals,
brethren, and wives. Amid the disorder of such various ruin, it is not
strange that a man of inconsiderable note, like Maule, should have
trodden the 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 remembered how loudly
Colonel Pyncheon had joined in the general cry, to purge the land from
witchcraft; nor did it fail to be whispered, that there was an
invidious acrimony in the zeal with which he had sought the
condemnation of Matthew Maule. It was well known that the victim had
recognized the bitterness of personal enmity in his 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 tradition, has preserved the very
words. “God,” said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly
look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy,—“God will give him
blood to drink!”

After the reputed wizard’s death, his humble homestead 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 as a man of conscience and
integrity throughout the proceedings which have been sketched, they,
nevertheless, hinted that he was about to build his house over an
unquiet grave. His home would include the home of the dead and buried
wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind of
privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers into which
future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where children of the
Pyncheon blood were to be born. The terror and ugliness of 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
melancholy house. Why, then,—while so much of the soil around him was
bestrewn with the virgin forest leaves,—why should Colonel Pyncheon
prefer a site that had already been accurst?

But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned aside
from his 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
commonsense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, fastened
together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps, he followed
out his original design, probably without so much as imagining an
objection to it. On the score of delicacy, or any scrupulousness which
a finer sensibility might have taught him, the Colonel, like most of
his breed and generation, was impenetrable. He therefore dug his
cellar, and laid the deep foundations of his mansion, on the square of
earth whence Matthew Maule, forty years before, had first swept away
the fallen leaves. It was a curious, and, as some people thought, an
ominous fact, that, very soon after the workmen began their operations,
the spring of water, above mentioned, entirely lost the deliciousness
of its pristine quality. Whether its sources were disturbed by the
depth of the new cellar, or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the
bottom, it is certain that the water of Maule’s Well, as it continued
to be called, grew hard and brackish. Even such we find it now; and any
old woman of the neighborhood will certify that it is productive of
intestinal mischief to those who quench their thirst there.

The reader may deem it singular that the head carpenter of the new
edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead gripe
the property of the soil had been wrested. Not improbably he was the
best workman of his time; or, perhaps, the Colonel thought it
expedient, or was impelled by some better feeling, thus openly to cast
aside all animosity against the race of his fallen antagonist. Nor was
it out of keeping with the general coarseness and 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
architect of the House of the Seven Gables, and performed his duty so
faithfully that the timber framework fastened by his hands still holds
together.

Thus the great house was built. Familiar as it stands in the 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 longpast epoch, and as the scene of events more full of human
interest, perhaps, than those of a gray feudal castle,—familiar as it
stands, in its rusty old age, it is therefore only the more difficult
to imagine the bright novelty with which it first caught the sunshine.
The impression of its actual state, at this distance of a hundred and
sixty years, darkens inevitably through the picture which we would fain
give of its appearance on the morning when the Puritan magnate bade all
the town to be his guests. A ceremony of consecration, festive as well
as religious, was now to be performed. A prayer and discourse from the
Rev. Mr. Higginson, and the outpouring of a psalm from the general
throat of the community, was to be made acceptable to the grosser sense
by ale, cider, wine, and brandy, in copious effusion, and, as some
authorities aver, by an ox, roasted whole, or at least, by the weight
and substance of an ox, in more manageable joints and sirloins. The
carcass of a deer, shot within twenty miles, had supplied material for
the vast circumference of a pasty. A codfish of sixty pounds, caught in
the bay, had been dissolved into the rich liquid of a chowder. The
chimney of the new house, in short, belching forth its kitchen smoke,
impregnated the whole air with the scent of meats, fowls, and fishes,
spicily concocted with odoriferous herbs, and onions in abundance. The
mere smell of such festivity, making its way to everybody’s nostrils,
was at once an invitation and an appetite.

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 imposing
edifice, which was henceforth to assume its rank among the habitations
of mankind. There it rose, a little withdrawn from the line of the
street, but in pride, not modesty. Its whole visible exterior was
ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the grotesqueness of a
Gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the glittering plaster, composed
of lime, pebbles, and bits of glass, with which the woodwork of the
walls was overspread. On every side the seven gables pointed sharply
towards the sky, and presented the aspect of a whole sisterhood of
edifices, breathing through the spiracles of one great chimney. The
many lattices, with their small, diamond-shaped panes, admitted the
sunlight into hall and chamber, while, nevertheless, the second story,
projecting far over the base, and itself retiring beneath the third,
threw a shadowy and thoughtful gloom into the lower rooms. Carved
globes of wood were affixed under the jutting stories. Little spiral
rods of iron beautified each of the seven peaks. On the triangular
portion of the gable, that fronted next the street, was a dial, put up
that very morning, and on which the sun was still marking the passage
of the first bright hour in a history that was not destined to be all
so bright. All around were scattered shavings, chips, shingles, and
broken halves of bricks; these, together with the lately turned earth,
on which the grass had not begun to grow, contributed to the impression
of strangeness and novelty proper to a house that had yet its place to
make among 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
doorway, scraping their feet on the unworn threshold, now trod the
clergymen, the elders, the magistrates, the deacons, and whatever of
aristocracy there was in town or county. Thither, too, thronged the
plebeian classes as freely as their betters, and in larger number. Just
within the entrance, however, stood two serving-men, pointing some of
the guests to the neighborhood of the kitchen and ushering others into
the statelier rooms,—hospitable alike to all, but still with a
scrutinizing regard to the high or low degree of each. Velvet garments
sombre but rich, stiffly plaited ruffs and bands, embroidered gloves,
venerable beards, the mien and countenance of authority, made it easy
to distinguish the gentleman of worship, at that period, from the
tradesman, with his plodding air, or the laborer, in his leathern
jerkin, stealing 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 of a few of the more punctilious
visitors. The founder of this stately mansion—a gentleman noted for the
square and ponderous courtesy of his demeanor, ought surely to have
stood in his own hall, and to have offered the first welcome to so many
eminent personages as here presented themselves in honor of his solemn
festival. He was as yet invisible; the most favored of the guests had
not beheld him. This sluggishness on Colonel Pyncheon’s part became
still more unaccountable, when the second dignitary of the province
made his appearance, and found no more ceremonious a reception. The
lieutenant-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 principal 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 before,
he had expressed a wish on no account to be disturbed.

“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? Summon Colonel Pyncheon at once! I know that he
received letters from England this morning; and, in the perusal and
consideration of them, an hour may have passed away without his
noticing it. But he will be 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 strikingly indicated the hard and severe
character of Colonel 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 lieutenant-governor, who
had overheard the foregoing discussion, and felt himself high enough in
station to play a little with his dignity. “I will take the matter into
my own hands. It is time that the good Colonel came forth to greet his
friends; else we shall be apt to suspect that he has taken a sip too
much of his Canary wine, in his extreme deliberation which cask it were
best to broach in honor of the day! But since he is so much behindhand,
I will give him a remembrancer myself!”

Accordingly, with such a tramp of his ponderous 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 reecho with a loud, free knock. Then, looking round, with a
smile, to the spectators, he awaited a response. As none came, however,
he knocked again, but with the same unsatisfactory result as at first.
And now, being a trifle choleric in his temperament, the
lieutenant-governor uplifted the heavy hilt of his sword, wherewith he
so beat and banged upon the door, that, as some of the bystanders
whispered, the racket might have disturbed the dead. Be that as it
might, it seemed to produce no awakening effect on Colonel Pyncheon.
When the sound subsided, the silence through the house was deep,
dreary, and oppressive, notwithstanding that the tongues of many of the
guests had already been loosened by a surreptitious cup or two of wine
or spirits.

“Strange, forsooth!—very strange!” cried the lieutenant-governor, whose
smile was changed to a frown. “But seeing that our host sets us the
good example of forgetting ceremony, I shall likewise throw it aside,
and make free to intrude on his privacy.”

He tried the door, which yielded to his hand, and was flung wide open
by a sudden gust of wind that passed, as with a loud sigh, from the
outermost portal through all the passages and apartments of the new
house. It rustled the silken garments of the ladies, and waved the long
curls of the gentlemen’s wigs, and shook the window-hangings and the
curtains of the bedchambers; causing everywhere a singular stir, which
yet was more like a hush. 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, somewhat
darkened by curtains; books arranged on shelves; a large map on the
wall, and likewise a portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, beneath which sat
the original Colonel himself, in an oaken 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 private 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 halfway, he began to
shriek with terror. The company, tremulous as the leaves of a tree,
when all are shaking together, drew nearer, and perceived that there
was an unnatural distortion in the fixedness of Colonel 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 relentless 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 superstitious awe to a scene perhaps
gloomy enough without it, that a voice spoke loudly among the guests,
the tones of which were like those of old Matthew Maule, the executed
wizard,—“God hath given him blood to drink!”

Thus early had that one guest,—the only guest who is certain, at one
time or another, to find his way into every human dwelling,—thus early
had Death stepped across the threshold of the House of the Seven
Gables!

Colonel 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 indicated violence; that
there were the marks of fingers on his throat, and the print of a
bloody hand on his plaited ruff; and that his peaked beard was
dishevelled, as if it had been fiercely clutched and pulled. It was
averred, likewise, that the lattice window, near the 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 garden fence, in the
rear of the house. But it were folly to lay any stress on stories of
this kind, which are sure to spring up around such an event as that now
related, and which, as in the present case, sometimes prolong
themselves for ages afterwards, like the toadstools that indicate where
the fallen and buried trunk of a tree has long since mouldered into the
earth. For our own part, we allow them just as little credence as to
that other fable of the skeleton hand which the 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 appears to have been a man of
eminence, upheld it, if we have rightly understood his terms of art, to
be a case of apoplexy. His professional brethren, each for himself,
adopted various hypotheses, more or less plausible, but all dressed out
in a perplexing mystery of phrase, which, if it do not show a
bewilderment of mind in these erudite physicians, certainly causes it
in the unlearned peruser of their opinions. The coroner’s jury sat upon
the corpse, and, like sensible men, returned an unassailable verdict of
“Sudden Death!”

It is indeed difficult to imagine that there could have been a serious
suspicion of murder, or the slightest grounds for implicating any
particular individual as the perpetrator. The rank, wealth, and eminent
character of the deceased must have insured the strictest scrutiny into
every ambiguous circumstance. As none such is on record, it is safe to
assume that none existed. Tradition,—which sometimes brings down truth
that history has let slip, but is oftener the wild babble of the time,
such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now congeals in
newspapers,—tradition is responsible for all contrary averments. In
Colonel Pyncheon’s funeral sermon, which was printed, and is still
extant, the Rev. Mr. Higginson enumerates, 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 upward step remained for this good man to take, save
the final step from earth to the golden gate of heaven! The pious
clergyman surely would not have uttered words like these had he in the
least suspected that the Colonel had been thrust into the other world
with the clutch of violence upon his throat.

The family of Colonel Pyncheon, at the epoch of his death, seemed
destined to as fortunate a permanence as can anywise consist with the
inherent instability of human affairs. It might fairly be anticipated
that the progress of time would rather increase and ripen their
prosperity, than wear away and destroy it. For, not only had his son
and heir come into immediate enjoyment of a rich estate, but there was
a claim through an Indian deed, confirmed by a subsequent grant of the
General Court, to a vast and as yet unexplored and unmeasured tract of
Eastern lands. These possessions—for as such they might almost
certainly be reckoned—comprised the greater part of what is now known
as Waldo County, in the state of Maine, and were more extensive than
many a dukedom, or even a reigning prince’s territory, on European
soil. When the pathless forest that still covered this wild
principality should give place—as it inevitably must, though perhaps
not till ages hence—to the golden fertility of human culture, it would
be the source of incalculable wealth to the Pyncheon blood. Had the
Colonel survived only a few weeks longer, it is probable that his great
political influence, and powerful connections at home and abroad, would
have consummated all that was necessary to render the claim available.
But, in spite of good Mr. Higginson’s congratulatory eloquence, this
appeared to be the one thing which Colonel Pyncheon, provident and
sagacious as he was, had allowed to go at loose ends. So far as the
prospective territory was concerned, he unquestionably died too soon.
His son lacked not merely the 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 hundred years afterwards, to obtain what
they stubbornly persisted in deeming their right. But, in course of
time, the territory was partly regranted to more favored individuals,
and partly cleared and occupied by actual settlers. These last, if they
ever heard of the Pyncheon title, would have laughed at the idea of any
man’s asserting a right—on the strength of mouldy parchments, signed
with the faded autographs of governors and legislators long dead and
forgotten—to the lands which they or their fathers had wrested from the
wild hand of nature by their own sturdy toil. This impalpable claim,
therefore, resulted in nothing more solid than to cherish, from
generation to generation, an absurd delusion of family importance,
which all along characterized the Pyncheons. It caused the poorest
member of the race to feel as if he inherited a kind of nobility, and
might yet come into the possession of princely wealth to support it. In
the better specimens of the breed, this peculiarity threw an ideal
grace over the hard material of human life, without stealing away any
truly valuable quality. In the baser sort, its effect was to increase
the liability to sluggishness and dependence, and induce the victim of
a shadowy hope to remit all self-effort, while awaiting the realization
of his dreams. Years and years after their claim had passed out of the
public memory, the Pyncheons were accustomed to consult the Colonel’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 there were yet a prospect of its ultimately
forming a princedom for themselves.

In almost every generation, nevertheless, there happened to be some one
descendant of the family gifted with a portion of the hard, keen sense,
and practical energy, that had so remarkably distinguished the original
founder. His character, indeed, might be traced all the way down, as
distinctly as if the Colonel himself, a little diluted, had been gifted
with a sort of intermittent immortality on earth. At two or three
epochs, when the fortunes of the family were low, this representative
of hereditary qualities had made his appearance, and caused the
traditionary gossips of the town to whisper among themselves, “Here is
the old Pyncheon come again! Now the Seven Gables will be
new-shingled!” From father to son, they clung to the ancestral house
with singular tenacity of home attachment. For various reasons,
however, and from impressions often too vaguely founded to be put on
paper, the writer cherishes the belief that many, if not most, of the
successive proprietors of this estate were troubled with doubts as to
their moral right to hold it. Of their legal tenure there could be no
question; but old Matthew Maule, it is to be feared, trode downward
from his own age to a far later one, planting a heavy footstep, all the
way, on the conscience of a Pyncheon. If so, we are left to dispose of
the awful query, whether each inheritor of the property—conscious of
wrong, and failing to rectify it—did not commit anew the great guilt of
his ancestor, and incur all its original responsibilities. And
supposing such to be the case, would it not be a far truer mode of
expression to say of the Pyncheon family, that they inherited a great
misfortune, than the reverse?

We have already hinted that it is not our purpose to trace down the
history of the Pyncheon family, in its unbroken connection with the
House of the Seven Gables; nor to show, as in a magic picture, how the
rustiness and infirmity of age gathered over the venerable house
itself. As regards its interior life, a large, dim 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 foundation, 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 themselves to the world, nor in their better and
happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the
crisis of life’s bitterest sorrow. The popular imagination, indeed,
long kept itself busy with the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon and
the wizard Maule; the curse which the latter flung from his scaffold
was remembered, with the very important addition, that it had become a
part of the Pyncheon inheritance. If one of the family did but gurgle
in his throat, a bystander would be likely enough to whisper, between
jest and earnest, “He has Maule’s blood to drink!” The sudden death of
a Pyncheon, about a hundred years ago, with circumstances very similar
to what have been related of the 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 sunshine of
the passing hour, that no good thoughts or purposes could ever spring
up and blossom there. To the thoughtful mind there will be no tinge of
superstition in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the
ghost of a dead progenitor—perhaps as a portion of his own
punishment—is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family.

The Pyncheons, in brief, lived along, for the better part of two
centuries, with perhaps less of outward vicissitude than has attended
most other New England families during the same period of time.
Possessing very distinctive traits of their own, they nevertheless took
the general characteristics of the little community in which they
dwelt; a town noted for its frugal, discreet, well-ordered, and
home-loving inhabitants, as well as for the somewhat confined scope of
its sympathies; but in which, be it said, there are odder individuals,
and, now and then, stranger occurrences, than one meets with almost
anywhere else. During the Revolution, the Pyncheon of that epoch,
adopting the royal side, became a refugee; but repented, and made his
reappearance, just at the point of time to preserve the House of the
Seven Gables from confiscation. For the last seventy years the most
noted event in the Pyncheon annals had been likewise the heaviest
calamity that ever befell the race; no less than the violent death—for
so it was adjudged—of one member of the family by the criminal act of
another. Certain circumstances attending this fatal occurrence had
brought the deed irresistibly home to a nephew of the deceased
Pyncheon. The young man was tried and convicted of the crime; but
either the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and possibly some
lurking doubts in the breast of the executive, or, lastly—an argument
of greater weight in a republic than it could have been under a
monarchy,—the high respectability and political influence of the
criminal’s connections, had availed to mitigate his doom from death to
perpetual imprisonment. This sad affair had chanced about thirty years
before the action of our story commences. Latterly, there were rumors
(which few believed, and only one or two felt greatly interested in)
that this 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 addition to the house and real estate which constituted what
remained of the ancient Pyncheon property. Being of an eccentric and
melancholy turn of mind, and greatly given to rummaging old records and
hearkening to old traditions, he had brought himself, it is averred, to
the conclusion that Matthew Maule, the wizard, had been foully wronged
out of his homestead, if not out of his life. Such being the case, and
he, the old bachelor, in possession of the ill-gotten spoil,—with the
black stain of blood sunken deep into it, and still to be scented by
conscientious nostrils,—the question occurred, whether it were not
imperative upon him, even at this late hour, to make restitution to
Maule’s posterity. To a man living so much in the past, and so little
in the present, as the secluded and antiquarian old bachelor, a century
and a half seemed not so vast a period as to obviate the propriety of
substituting right for wrong. It was the belief of those who knew him
best, that he would positively have taken the very singular step of
giving up the House of the Seven Gables to the representative of
Matthew Maule, but for the unspeakable tumult which a suspicion of the
old gentleman’s project awakened among his Pyncheon relatives. Their
exertions had the effect of suspending his purpose; but it was feared
that he would perform, after death, by the operation of his last will,
what he had so hardly been prevented from doing in his proper lifetime.
But there is no one thing which men so rarely do, whatever the
provocation or inducement, as to bequeath patrimonial property away
from their own blood. They may love other individuals far better than
their relatives,—they may even cherish dislike, or positive hatred, to
the latter; but yet, in view of death, the strong prejudice of
propinquity revives, and impels the testator to send down his estate in
the line marked out by custom so immemorial that it looks like nature.
In all the Pyncheons, this feeling had the energy of disease. It was
too powerful for the conscientious scruples of the old bachelor; at
whose death, accordingly, the 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
accession, was reckoned rather a dissipated youth, but had at once
reformed, and made himself an exceedingly respectable member of
society. In fact, he showed more of the Pyncheon quality, and had won
higher eminence in the world, than any of his race since the time of
the original Puritan. Applying himself in earlier manhood to the study
of the law, and having a natural tendency towards office, he had
attained, many years ago, to a judicial situation in some inferior
court, which gave him for life the very desirable and imposing title of
judge. Later, he had engaged in politics, and served a part of two
terms in Congress, besides making a considerable figure in both
branches of the State legislature. Judge Pyncheon was unquestionably an
honor to his race. He had built himself a 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 themselves in the glow of
the Judge’s prosperity. In respect to natural increase, the breed had
not thriven; it appeared rather to be dying out. The only members of
the family known to be extant were, first, the Judge himself, and a
single surviving son, who was now travelling in Europe; next, the
thirty years’ prisoner, already alluded to, and a sister of the latter,
who occupied, in an extremely retired manner, the House of the Seven
Gables, in which she had a life-estate by the will of the old bachelor.
She was understood to be wretchedly poor, and seemed to make it her
choice to remain so; inasmuch as her affluent cousin, the Judge, had
repeatedly offered her all the comforts of life, either in the old
mansion or his own modern residence. The last and youngest Pyncheon was
a little 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.
For a very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however, the
Maules had continued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had
suffered so unjust a death. To all appearance, they were a quiet,
honest, 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 excellent a counterfeit of right, that few
poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in
their secret minds. Such is the case now, after so many ancient
prejudices have been overthrown; and it was far more so in
ante-Revolutionary days, when the aristocracy could venture to be
proud, and the low were content to be abased. Thus the Maules, at all
events, kept their resentments within their own breasts. They were
generally 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.
For 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 character
of reserve. Their companions, or those who endeavored to become such,
grew conscious of a circle round about the Maules, within the sanctity
or the spell of which, in spite of an exterior of sufficient frankness
and 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 repugnance and superstitious terror with
which the people of the town, even after awakening from their frenzy,
continued to regard the memory of the reputed witches. The mantle, or
rather the ragged cloak, of old Matthew Maule had fallen upon his
children. They were half believed to inherit mysterious attributes; the
family eye was said to possess strange power. Among other
good-for-nothing properties and privileges, one was especially assigned
them,—that of exercising an influence over people’s dreams. The
Pyncheons, if all stories were true, haughtily as they bore themselves
in the noonday streets of their native town, were no better than
bond-servants to these plebeian Maules, on entering the topsy-turvy
commonwealth of sleep. Modern psychology, it may be, will endeavor to
reduce these alleged necromancies within a system, instead of rejecting
them as altogether fabulous.

A descriptive paragraph or two, treating of the 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 habitations of modern date, they were mostly small,
built entirely of wood, and typical of the most plodding uniformity of
common life. Doubtless, however, the whole story of human existence may
be latent in each of them, but with no picturesqueness, externally,
that can attract the imagination or sympathy to seek it there. But as
for the old structure of our story, its white-oak frame, and its
boards, shingles, and crumbling plaster, and even the huge, clustered
chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and meanest
part of its reality. So much of mankind’s varied experience had passed
there,—so much had been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed,—that the
very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart. It was itself
like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and
sombre reminiscences.

The deep projection of the second story gave the house such a
meditative look, that you could not pass it without the idea that it
had secrets to keep, and an eventful history to moralize upon. In
front, just on the edge of the unpaved sidewalk, grew the Pyncheon Elm,
which, in reference to such trees as one usually meets with, might well
be termed gigantic. It had been planted by a great-grandson of the
first Pyncheon, and, though now four-score years of age, or perhaps
nearer a hundred, was still in its strong and broad maturity, throwing
its shadow from side to side of the street, overtopping the seven
gables, and sweeping the whole black roof with its pendant foliage. It
gave beauty to the old edifice, and seemed to make it a part of nature.
The street having been widened about forty years ago, the front gable
was now precisely on a line with it. On either side extended a ruinous
wooden fence of open 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 nor must we fail to direct the reader’s eye
to 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 Nature 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 respectable
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 mortification to the
present occupant of the august Pyncheon House, as well as to some of
her predecessors. The matter is disagreeably delicate to handle; but,
since the reader must needs be let into the secret, he will please to
understand, that, about a century ago, the head of the Pyncheons found
himself involved in serious financial difficulties. The fellow
(gentleman, as he styled himself) can hardly have been other than a
spurious interloper; for, instead of seeking office from the king or
the royal governor, or urging his hereditary claim to Eastern lands, he
bethought himself of no better avenue to wealth than by cutting a
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 small in this old Pyncheon’s mode of setting about his
commercial operations; it was whispered, that, with his own hands, all
beruffled as they were, he used to give change for a shilling, and
would turn a half-penny twice over, to make sure that it was a good
one. Beyond all question, he had the blood of a petty huckster in his
veins, through whatever channel it may have found its way there.

Immediately on his death, the 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 unutterable woe upon his face, it appeared to be his
doom to spend eternity in a vain effort to make his accounts balance.

And now—in a very humble way, as will be seen—we proceed to open our
narrative.




II.
The Little Shop-Window


It still lacked half an hour of sunrise, when Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon—we
will not say awoke, it being doubtful whether the poor lady had so much
as closed her eyes during the brief night of midsummer—but, at all
events, arose from her solitary pillow, and began what it would be
mockery to term the adornment of her person. Far from us be the
indecorum of assisting, even in imagination, at a maiden lady’s toilet!
Our story must therefore await Miss Hepzibah at the threshold of her
chamber; only presuming, meanwhile, to note some of the heavy sighs
that labored from her bosom, with little restraint as to their
lugubrious depth and volume of sound, inasmuch as they could be audible
to nobody save a disembodied listener like ourself. The Old Maid was
alone in the old house. Alone, except for a certain respectable and
orderly young man, an artist in the daguerreotype line, who, for about
three months back, had been a lodger in a remote gable,—quite a house
by itself, indeed,—with locks, bolts, and oaken bars on all the
intervening doors. Inaudible, consequently, were poor Miss 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 whispered, now a groan, now a struggling
silence—wherewith she besought the Divine assistance through the day!
Evidently, this is to be a day of more than ordinary trial to Miss
Hepzibah, who, for above a quarter of a century gone by, has dwelt in
strict seclusion, taking no part in the business of life, and just as
little in its intercourse and pleasures. Not with such fervor prays the
torpid recluse, looking forward to the cold, sunless, stagnant calm of
a day that is to be like innumerable yesterdays.

The maiden 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 reluctance. There is a rustling of
stiff silks; a tread of backward and forward footsteps to and fro
across the chamber. We suspect Miss Hepzibah, moreover, of taking a
step upward into a chair, in order to give heedful regard to her
appearance on all sides, and at full length, in the oval, 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 nobody ever visits, and from whom, when she shall have
done her utmost, it were the best charity to turn one’s eyes another
way?

Now she is almost ready. Let us pardon her one other pause; for it is
given to the sole sentiment, or, we might better say,—heightened and
rendered intense, as it has been, by sorrow and seclusion,—to the
strong passion of her life. We heard the turning of a key in a small
lock; she has opened a secret drawer of an escritoire, and is probably
looking at a certain miniature, done in Malbone’s most perfect style,
and representing a face worthy of no less delicate a pencil. It was
once our good fortune to see this picture. It is a likeness of a young
man, in a silken dressing-gown of an old fashion, the soft richness of
which is well adapted to the countenance of reverie, with its full,
tender lips, and beautiful eyes, that seem to indicate not so much
capacity of thought, as gentle and voluptuous emotion. Of the possessor
of such features we shall have a right to ask nothing, except that he
would take the rude world easily, and make himself happy in it. Can it
have been an early lover of Miss Hepzibah? No; she never had a
lover—poor thing, how could she?—nor ever knew, by her own experience,
what love technically means. And yet, her undying faith and trust, her
fresh remembrance, and continual devotedness towards the original of
that miniature, have been the only substance for her heart to feed
upon.

She seems to have put aside the miniature, and is standing again before
the 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 horizon, was ascending
nearer and nearer to its verge. A few clouds, floating high upward,
caught some of the earliest light, and threw down its golden gleam on
the windows of all the houses in the street, not forgetting the House
of the Seven Gables, which—many such sunrises as it had
witnessed—looked cheerfully at the present one. The reflected radiance
served to show, pretty distinctly, the aspect and arrangement of the
room which Hepzibah entered, after descending the stairs. It was a
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, constructed with
perplexing intricacy and exhibiting as many feet as a centipede; the
other, most delicately wrought, with four long and slender legs, so
apparently frail that it was almost incredible what a length of time
the ancient 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 engraved, but the handiwork of some skilful old
draughtsman, and grotesquely illuminated with pictures of Indians and
wild beasts, among which was seen a lion; the natural history of the
region being as little known as its geography, which was put down most
fantastically awry. The other adornment was the portrait of old Colonel
Pyncheon, at two thirds length, representing the stern features of a
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
uplifting 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 substitute a firm outline of the object instead of a vague one.

We must linger a moment on this unfortunate expression 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
persisted in calling it,—her scowl had done Miss Hepzibah a very ill
office, in establishing her character as an ill-tempered old maid; nor
does it appear improbable that, by often gazing at herself in a dim
looking-glass, and perpetually encountering her own frown with its
ghostly sphere, she had been led to interpret the expression almost as
unjustly as the world did. “How miserably cross I look!” she must often
have whispered to herself; and ultimately have fancied herself so, by a
sense of inevitable doom. But her heart never frowned. It was naturally
tender, sensitive, and full of little tremors and palpitations; all of
which weaknesses it retained, while her visage was growing so
perversely stern, and even fierce. Nor had Hepzibah ever any hardihood,
except what came from the very warmest nook in her affections.

All this time, however, we are loitering faintheartedly on the
threshold of our story. In very truth, we have an invincible reluctance
to disclose what Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon was about to do.

It has already been observed, that, in the basement story of the gable
fronting on the street, an unworthy ancestor, nearly a century ago, had
fitted up a shop. Ever since the old gentleman retired from trade, and
fell asleep under his coffin-lid, not only the shop-door, but the inner
arrangements, had been suffered to remain 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 value enough to be weighed. It
treasured itself up, too, in the half-open till, where there still
lingered a base sixpence, worth neither more nor less than the
hereditary pride which had here been put to shame. Such had been the
state and condition of the little shop in old Hepzibah’s childhood,
when she and her brother used to play at hide-and-seek in its forsaken
precincts. So it had remained, until within a few days past.

But now, though the shop-window was still closely curtained from the
public gaze, a remarkable change had taken place in its interior. The
rich and heavy festoons of cobweb, which it had cost a long ancestral
succession of spiders their life’s labor to spin and weave, had been
carefully brushed away from the ceiling. The counter, shelves, and
floor had all been scoured, and the latter was overstrewn with fresh
blue sand. The brown scales, too, had evidently undergone rigid
discipline, in an unavailing effort to rub off the rust, which, alas!
had eaten through and through their substance. Neither was the little
old shop any longer empty of merchantable goods. A curious eye,
privileged to take an account of stock and investigate behind the
counter, would have discovered a barrel, yea, two or three barrels and
half ditto,—one containing flour, another apples, and a third, perhaps,
Indian meal. There was likewise a square box of pine-wood, full of soap
in bars; also, another of the same size, in which were tallow candles,
ten to the pound. A small stock of brown sugar, some white beans and
split peas, and a few other commodities of low price, and such as are
constantly in demand, made up the bulkier portion of the merchandise.
It might have been taken for a ghostly or phantasmagoric reflection of
the old 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 were galloping along one of the shelves, in
equipments and uniform of modern cut; and there were some sugar
figures, with no strong resemblance to the humanity of any epoch, but
less unsatisfactorily representing our own fashions than those of a
hundred years ago. Another phenomenon, still more strikingly modern,
was a package of lucifer matches, which, in old times, would have been
thought actually to borrow their instantaneous flame from the nether
fires of Tophet.

In short, to bring the matter at once to a point, it was
incontrovertibly evident that somebody had taken the shop and fixtures
of the long-retired and forgotten Mr. Pyncheon, and was about to renew
the enterprise of that departed worthy, with a different set of
customers. Who could this bold adventurer be? And, of all places in the
world, why had he chosen the House of the Seven Gables as the scene of
his commercial speculations?

We return to the elderly maiden. She at length withdrew her eyes from
the dark countenance of the Colonel’s portrait, heaved a sigh,—indeed,
her breast was a very cave of Aolus that morning,—and stept across the
room on tiptoe, as is the customary gait of elderly women. Passing
through an intervening passage, she opened a door that communicated
with the shop, just now so elaborately described. Owing to the
projection of the upper story—and still more to the thick shadow of the
Pyncheon Elm, which stood almost directly in front of the gable—the
twilight, here, was still as much akin to night as morning. Another
heavy sigh from Miss Hepzibah! After a moment’s pause on the threshold,
peering towards the window with her near-sighted scowl, as if frowning
down some bitter enemy, she suddenly projected herself into the shop.
The haste, and, as it were, the galvanic impulse of the movement, were
really quite startling.

Nervously—in a sort of frenzy, we might almost say—she began to busy
herself in arranging some children’s playthings, and other little
wares, on the shelves and at the shop-window. In the aspect of this
dark-arrayed, pale-faced, ladylike old figure there was a deeply tragic
character that contrasted irreconcilably with the ludicrous pettiness
of her employment. It seemed a queer anomaly, that so gaunt and dismal
a personage should take a toy in hand; a miracle, that the toy did not
vanish in her grasp; a miserably absurd idea, that she should go on
perplexing her stiff and sombre intellect with the question how to
tempt little boys into her premises! Yet such is undoubtedly her
object. Now she places a gingerbread elephant against the window, but
with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with the
dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it has ceased to be an
elephant, and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread. There, again,
she has upset a tumbler of marbles, all of which roll different ways,
and each individual marble, devil-directed, into the most difficult
obscurity that it can find. Heaven help our poor old Hepzibah, and
forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of her position! As her rigid
and rusty frame goes down upon its hands and knees, in quest of the
absconding marbles, we positively feel so much the more inclined to
shed tears of sympathy, from the very fact that we must needs turn
aside and laugh at her. For here,—and if we fail to impress it suitably
upon the reader, it is our own fault, not that of the theme, here is
one of the truest points of melancholy interest that occur in ordinary
life. It was the final throe of what called itself old gentility. A
lady—who had fed herself from childhood with the shadowy food of
aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was that a lady’s
hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for bread,—this born
lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain to step down from
her pedestal of imaginary rank. Poverty, treading closely at her heels
for a lifetime, has come up with her at last. She must earn her own
food, or starve! And we have stolen upon Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, too
irreverently, at the instant of time when the patrician lady is to be
transformed into the plebeian woman.

In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social
life, somebody is always at the drowning-point. The tragedy is enacted
with as continual a repetition as that of a popular drama on a holiday,
and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, perhaps, as when an hereditary
noble sinks below his order. More deeply; since, with us, rank is the
grosser substance of wealth and a splendid establishment, and has no
spiritual existence after the death of these, but dies hopelessly along
with them. And, therefore, since we have been unfortunate enough to
introduce our heroine at so inauspicious a juncture, we would entreat
for a mood of due solemnity in the spectators of her fate. Let us
behold, in poor Hepzibah, the immemorial lady—two hundred years old,
on this side of the water, and thrice as many on the other,—with her
antique portraits, pedigrees, coats of arms, records and traditions,
and her claim, as joint heiress, to that princely territory at the
eastward, no longer a wilderness, but a populous fertility,—born, too,
in Pyncheon Street, under the Pyncheon Elm, and in the Pyncheon House,
where she has spent all her days,—reduced. Now, in that very house, to
be the hucksteress of a 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 a seamstress;
although her sampler, of fifty years gone by, exhibited some of the
most recondite specimens of ornamental needlework. A school for little
children had been often in her thoughts; and, at one time, she had
begun a review of her early studies in the New England Primer, with a
view to prepare herself for the office of instructress. But the love of
children had never been quickened in 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 ABC has become a science greatly too abstruse to be any longer
taught by pointing a pin from letter to letter. A modern child could
teach old Hepzibah more than old Hepzibah could teach the child.
So—with many a cold, deep 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 cavern door of her hermitage—the poor thing bethought
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 at, had somewhat hastened her decision. Her humble
preparations, therefore, were duly made, and the enterprise was now to
be commenced. Nor was she entitled to complain of any remarkable
singularity in her fate; for, in the town of her nativity, we might
point to several little shops of a similar description, some of them in
houses as ancient as that of the Seven Gables; and one or two, it may
be, where a decayed gentlewoman stands behind the counter, as grim an
image of family pride as Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon herself.

It was overpoweringly ridiculous,—we must honestly confess it,—the
deportment of the maiden lady while setting her shop in order for the
public eye. She stole on tiptoe to the window, as cautiously as if she
conceived some bloody-minded villain to be watching 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 article might be, in its destined place, and straightway vanished
back into the dusk, as if the world need never hope for another glimpse
of her. It might have been fancied, indeed, that she expected to
minister to the wants of the community unseen, like a disembodied
divinity or enchantress, holding forth her bargains to the reverential
and awe-stricken purchaser in an invisible hand. But Hepzibah had no
such flattering dream. She was well aware that she must ultimately come
forward, and stand revealed in her proper individuality; but, like
other sensitive persons, she could not bear to be observed in the
gradual process, and chose rather to flash forth on the world’s
astonished gaze at once.

The inevitable moment was not much longer to be delayed. The sunshine
might now be seen stealing down the front of the opposite house, from
the windows of which came a reflected gleam, struggling through the
boughs of the elm-tree, and enlightening the interior of the shop more
distinctly than heretofore. The town appeared to be waking up. A
baker’s cart 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 barrier betwixt herself and the world had been thrown down, and a
flood of evil consequences would come tumbling through the gap—she fled
into the inner parlor, threw herself into the ancestral elbow-chair,
and wept.

Our miserable old Hepzibah! It is a heavy annoyance to a writer, who
endeavors to represent nature, its various attitudes and circumstances,
in a reasonably correct outline and true coloring, that so much of the
mean and ludicrous should be hopelessly mixed up with the purest pathos
which life anywhere supplies to him. What tragic dignity, for example,
can be wrought into a scene like this! How can we elevate our history
of retribution for the sin of long ago, when, as one of our most
prominent figures, we are compelled to introduce—not a young and lovely
woman, nor even the stately remains of beauty, storm-shattered by
affliction—but a gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed maiden, in a long-waisted
silk gown, and with the strange horror of a turban on her head! Her
visage is not even ugly. It is redeemed from insignificance only by the
contraction of her eyebrows into a 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
in a small way. Nevertheless, if we look through all the heroic
fortunes of mankind, we shall find this same entanglement of something
mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow. Life is
made up of marble and mud. And, without all the deeper trust in a
comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspect the
insult of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the iron
countenance of fate. What is called poetic insight is the gift of
discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty
and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.




III.
The First Customer


Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon sat in the oaken elbow-chair, with her hands
over her face, giving way to that heavy down-sinking of the heart which
most persons have experienced, when the image of hope itself seems
ponderously moulded of lead, on the eve of an enterprise at once
doubtful and momentous. She was suddenly startled by the tinkling
alarum—high, sharp, and irregular—of a little bell. The maiden lady
arose upon her feet, as pale as a ghost at 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 threshold. 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 vibration. The crisis was upon her! Her
first customer was at the door!

Without giving herself time for a second thought, she rushed into the
shop, pale, wild, desperate in gesture and expression, scowling
portentously, and looking far better qualified to do fierce battle with
a housebreaker than to stand smiling behind the counter, bartering
small wares for a copper recompense. Any ordinary customer, indeed,
would have turned his back and fled. And yet there was nothing fierce
in Hepzibah’s poor old heart; nor had she, at the moment, a single
bitter thought against the world at large, or one individual man or
woman. She wished them all well, but wished, too, that she herself were
done with them, and in her quiet grave.

The applicant, by this time, stood within the doorway. Coming freshly,
as he did, out of the morning light, he appeared to have brought some
of its cheery influences into the shop along with him. It was a slender
young man, not more than one or two and twenty years old, with rather a
grave and thoughtful expression for his years, but likewise a springy
alacrity and vigor. These qualities were not only perceptible,
physically, in his make and motions, but made themselves felt almost
immediately in his character. A brown beard, not too silken in its
texture, fringed his chin, but as yet without completely hiding it; he
wore a short mustache, too, and his dark, 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 daguerreotypist,—for it was that
sole other occupant of the 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 assist you any further in your
preparations.”

People in difficulty and distress, or in any manner at odds with the
world, can endure a vast amount of harsh treatment, and perhaps be only
the stronger for it; whereas they give way at once before the simplest
expression of what they perceive to be genuine sympathy. So it proved
with poor Hepzibah; for, when she saw the young 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! I wish I were dead, and in the
old family tomb, with all my forefathers! With my father, and my
mother, and my sister! Yes, and with my brother, who had far better
find me there than here! The world is too chill and hard,—and I am too
old, and too feeble, and too hopeless!”

“Oh, believe me, Miss Hepzibah,” said the young man quietly, “these
feelings will not trouble you any longer, after you are once fairly in
the midst of your enterprise. They are unavoidable at this moment,
standing, as you do, on the outer verge of your long seclusion, and
peopling the world with ugly shapes, which you will soon find to be as
unreal as the giants and ogres of a 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.”

“But I am a woman!” said Hepzibah piteously. “I was going to say, a
lady,—but I consider that as past.”

“Well; no matter if it be past!” answered the artist, a strange gleam
of 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 purpose, and of lending your strength be it great or
small—to the united struggle of mankind. This is success,—all the
success that anybody meets with!”

“It is natural enough, Mr. Holgrave, that you should have ideas like
these,” rejoined Hepzibah, drawing up her gaunt figure with slightly
offended dignity. “You are a man, a young man, and brought up, I
suppose, as almost everybody is nowadays, with a view to seeking your
fortune. But I was born a lady, and have always lived one; no matter in
what narrowness of means, always a lady.”

“But I was not born a gentleman; neither have I lived like one,” said
Holgrave, slightly smiling; “so, my dear madam, you will hardly expect
me to sympathize with sensibilities of this kind; though, unless I
deceive myself, I have some imperfect comprehension of them. These
names of gentleman and lady had a meaning, in the past history of the
world, and conferred privileges, desirable or otherwise, on those
entitled to bear them. In the present—and still more in the future
condition of 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. “If old Maule’s ghost, or a
descendant of his, could see me behind the counter to-day, he would
call it the fulfillment of his worst wishes. But I thank you for your
kindness, Mr. Holgrave, and will do my utmost to be a good
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 seashore, 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 Hepzibah, with a manner of
antique stateliness to which a melancholy smile lent a kind of grace.
She put the biscuits into his hand, but rejected the compensation. “A
Pyncheon must not, at all events under her forefathers’ roof, receive
money for a morsel of bread from her only friend!”

Holgrave took his departure, leaving her, for the moment, with spirits
not quite so much depressed. Soon, however, they had subsided nearly to
their former dead level. With a beating heart, she listened to the
footsteps of early passengers, which now began to be frequent along the
street. Once or twice they seemed to linger; these strangers, or
neighbors, as the case might be, were looking at the display of toys
and petty commodities in Hepzibah’s shop-window. She was doubly
tortured; in part, with a sense of overwhelming shame that strange and
unloving eyes should have the privilege of gazing, and partly because
the idea occurred to her, with ridiculous importunity, that the window
was not arranged so skilfully, nor nearly to so much advantage, as it
might have been. It seemed as if the whole fortune or failure of her
shop might depend on the display of a different set of articles, or
substituting a fairer apple for one which appeared to be specked. So
she made the change, and straightway fancied that everything was
spoiled by it; not recognizing that it was the nervousness of the
juncture, and her own native squeamishness as an old maid, that wrought
all the seeming mischief.

Anon, there was an encounter, just at the door-step, betwixt two
laboring men, as their rough voices denoted them to be. After some
slight talk about their own affairs, one of them chanced to notice the
shop-window, and directed the other’s attention to it.

“See here!” cried he; “what do you think of this? Trade seems to be
looking up in Pyncheon Street!”

“Well, well, this is a sight, to be sure!” exclaimed the other. “In the
old Pyncheon House, and underneath the Pyncheon Elm! Who would have
thought it? Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a 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 contemptuous expression, as if
the very idea were impossible 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’ll 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 previous misery about the matter as
what thrilled Hepzibah’s heart on overhearing the above conversation.
The testimony in regard to her scowl was frightfully important; it
seemed to hold up her image wholly relieved from the false light of her
self-partialities, and so hideous that she dared not look at it. She
was absurdly hurt, moreover, by the slight and idle effect that her
setting up shop—an event of such breathless interest to
herself—appeared to have upon the public, of which these two men were
the nearest representatives. A glance; a passing word or two; a coarse
laugh; and she was doubtless forgotten before they turned the corner.
They cared nothing for her dignity, and just as little for her
degradation. Then, also, the augury of 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 woman had lost five dollars on her little outlay! Success
presented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it as a wild
hallucination.

Some malevolent spirit, doing his utmost to drive Hepzibah mad,
unrolled before her imagination a kind of panorama, representing the
great thoroughfare of a city all astir with customers. So many and so
magnificent shops as there were! Groceries, toy-shops, drygoods stores,
with their immense panes of plate-glass, their gorgeous fixtures, their
vast and complete assortments of merchandise, in which fortunes had
been invested; and those noble mirrors at the farther end of each
establishment, doubling all this wealth by a brightly burnished vista
of unrealities! On one side of the street this splendid bazaar, with a
multitude of perfumed and glossy salesmen, smirking, smiling, bowing,
and measuring out the goods. On the other, the dusky old House of the
Seven Gables, with the antiquated 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 expression of the odds against which
she was to begin her struggle for a subsistence. Success? Preposterous!
She would never think of it again! The house might just as well be
buried in an eternal fog while all other houses had the sunshine on
them; for not a foot would ever cross the threshold, nor a hand so much
as try the door!

But, at this instant, the shop-bell, right over her head, tinkled as if
it were bewitched. The old gentlewoman’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 creaking and rusty hinges,
being forced quite open, a square and sturdy little urchin became
apparent, with cheeks as red as an apple. He was clad rather shabbily
(but, as it seemed, more owing to his 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 small slate,
under his arm, indicated that he was on his way to school. He stared at
Hepzibah a moment, as an elder customer than himself would have been
likely enough to do, not knowing what to make of the tragic attitude
and queer scowl wherewith she regarded him.

“Well, child,” said she, taking heart at sight of a personage so little
formidable,—“well, my child, what did you wish for?”

“That Jim Crow there in the window,” answered the urchin, holding out a
cent, and pointing to the gingerbread figure that had attracted his
notice, as he loitered along to school; “the one that has not a broken
foot.”

So Hepzibah put forth her lank arm, and, taking the effigy from the
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 experience 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 careful to shut the door, Hepzibah was at
the pains of closing it after him, with a pettish ejaculation or two
about the troublesomeness of young people, and particularly of small
boys. She had just placed another representative of the renowned Jim
Crow at the window, when again the shop-bell tinkled clamorously, and
again the door being thrust open, with its characteristic jerk and jar,
disclosed the same sturdy little urchin who, precisely two minutes ago,
had made his exit. The crumbs and discoloration of the cannibal feast,
as yet hardly consummated, were exceedingly visible about his mouth.

“What is it now, child?” asked the maiden lady rather impatiently; “did
you come back to shut the door?”

“No,” answered the urchin, pointing to the figure that had just been
put up; “I want that other Jim Crow.”

“Well, here it is for you,” said Hepzibah, reaching it down; but
recognizing that this pertinacious customer would not quit her on any
other terms, so long as she had a gingerbread figure in her shop, she
partly drew back her extended hand, “Where is the cent?”

The little boy had the cent ready, but, like a true-born Yankee, would
have preferred the better bargain to the worse. Looking somewhat
chagrined, he put the coin into Hepzibah’s hand, and departed, sending
the second Jim Crow in quest of the former one. The new shop-keeper
dropped the first solid result of her commercial enterprise into the
till. It was done! The sordid stain of that copper coin could never be
washed away from her palm. The little schoolboy, aided by the impish
figure of the negro dancer, had wrought an irreparable ruin. The
structure of ancient aristocracy had been demolished by him, even as if
his childish gripe had torn down the seven-gabled mansion. Now let
Hepzibah turn the old Pyncheon portraits with their faces to the wall,
and take the map of her Eastern territory to kindle the kitchen fire,
and blow up the flame with the empty breath of her ancestral
traditions! What had she to do with ancestry? Nothing; no more than
with posterity! No lady, now, but simply Hepzibah Pyncheon, a forlorn
old maid, and keeper of a cent-shop!

Nevertheless, even while she paraded these ideas somewhat
ostentatiously through her mind, it is altogether surprising what a
calmness had come over her. The anxiety and misgivings which had
tormented her, whether asleep or in melancholy 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 almost
youthful enjoyment. It was the invigorating breath of a fresh outward
atmosphere, after the long torpor and monotonous seclusion of her life.
So wholesome is effort! So miraculous the strength that we do not know
of! The healthiest glow that Hepzibah had known for years had come now
in the dreaded crisis, when, for the first time, she had put forth her
hand to help herself. The little circlet of the schoolboy’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 perhaps endowed with the same kind of
efficacy, as a galvanic ring! Hepzibah, at all events, was indebted to
its subtile operation both in body and spirit; so much the more, as it
inspired her with energy to get some breakfast, at which, still the
better to keep up her courage, she allowed herself an extra spoonful in
her infusion of black tea.

Her introductory day of 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 their powers. In the case of our old
gentlewoman, after the excitement of new effort had subsided, the
despondency of her whole life threatened, ever and anon, to return. It
was like the heavy mass of clouds which we may often see obscuring the
sky, and making a gray twilight everywhere, until, towards nightfall,
it yields temporarily to a glimpse of sunshine. But, always, the
envious cloud strives to gather again across the streak of celestial
azure.

Customers came in, as the forenoon advanced, but rather slowly; in some
cases, too, it must be owned, with little satisfaction either to
themselves or Miss Hepzibah; nor, on the whole, with an aggregate of
very rich emolument to the till. A little girl, sent by her mother to
match a skein of cotton thread, of a peculiar hue, took one that the
near-sighted old lady pronounced extremely like, but soon came running
back, with a blunt and cross message, that it would not do, and,
besides, was very rotten! Then, there was a pale, care-wrinkled woman,
not old but haggard, and already with streaks of gray among her hair,
like silver ribbons; one of those women, naturally delicate, whom you
at once recognize as worn to death by a brute—probably a drunken
brute—of a husband, and at least nine children. She wanted a few pounds
of flour, and offered the money, which the decayed gentlewoman silently
rejected, and gave the poor soul better measure than if she had taken
it. Shortly afterwards, a man in a blue cotton frock, much soiled, came
in and bought a pipe, filling the whole shop, meanwhile, with the hot
odor of strong drink, not only exhaled in the torrid atmosphere of his
breath, but oozing out of his entire system, like an inflammable gas.
It was impressed on Hepzibah’s mind that this was the husband of the
care-wrinkled woman. He asked for a paper of tobacco; and as she had
neglected to provide herself with the article, her brutal customer
dashed down his newly-bought pipe and left the shop, muttering some
unintelligible words, which had the tone and bitterness of a curse.
Hereupon Hepzibah threw up her eyes, unintentionally scowling in the
face of Providence!

No less than five persons, during the forenoon, inquired for
ginger-beer, or root-beer, or any drink of a similar brewage, and,
obtaining nothing of the kind, went off in an exceedingly bad humor.
Three of them left the door open, and the other two pulled it so
spitefully in going out that the little bell played the very deuce with
Hepzibah’s nerves. A round, bustling, fire-ruddy housewife of the
neighborhood burst breathless into the shop, fiercely demanding yeast;
and when the poor gentlewoman, with her cold shyness of manner, gave
her hot customer to understand that she did not keep the article, this
very capable housewife took upon herself to administer a regular
rebuke.

“A cent-shop, and no yeast!” quoth she; “That will never do! Who ever
heard of such a thing? Your loaf will never rise, no more than mine
will to-day. You had better shut up shop at once.”

“Well,” said Hepzibah, heaving a deep sigh, “perhaps I had!”

Several times, moreover, besides the above instance, her 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 insure an obeisance to her sterling gentility, or, at
least, a tacit recognition of it. On the other hand, nothing tortured
her more intolerably than when this recognition was too prominently
expressed. To one or two rather officious offers of sympathy, her
responses were little short of acrimonious; and, we regret to say,
Hepzibah was thrown into a positively unchristian state of mind by the
suspicion that one of her customers was drawn to the shop, not by any
real need of the article which she pretended to seek, but by a wicked
wish to stare at her. The vulgar creature was determined to see for
herself what sort of a figure a mildewed piece of aristocracy, after
wasting all the bloom and much of the decline of her life apart from
the world, would cut behind a counter. In this particular case, however
mechanical and innocuous it might be at other times, Hepzibah’s
contortion of brow served her in good stead.

“I never was so frightened in my life!” said the curious customer, in
describing the incident to one of her acquaintances. “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 decayed gentlewoman
to very disagreeable conclusions as to the temper and manners of what
she termed the lower classes, whom heretofore she had looked down upon
with a gentle and pitying complaisance, as herself occupying a sphere
of unquestionable superiority. But, unfortunately, she had likewise to
struggle against a bitter emotion of a directly opposite kind: a
sentiment of virulence, we mean, towards the idle aristocracy to which
it had so recently been her pride to belong. When a lady, in a delicate
and costly summer garb, with a floating veil and gracefully swaying
gown, and, altogether, an ethereal lightness that made you look at her
beautifully slippered feet, to see whether she trod on the dust or
floated in the air,—when such a vision happened to pass through this
retired street, leaving it tenderly and delusively fragrant with her
passage, as if a bouquet of 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 even her
temporal welfare.




IV.
A Day Behind the Counter


Towards noon, Hepzibah saw an elderly gentleman, large and portly, and
of remarkably dignified demeanor, passing slowly along on the opposite
side of the white and dusty street. On coming within the shadow of the
Pyncheon Elm, he stopt, and (taking off his hat, meanwhile, to wipe the
perspiration from his brow) seemed to scrutinize, with especial
interest, the dilapidated and 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 indescribable
magic, not merely expressed itself in his looks and gestures, but even
governed the fashion of his garments, and rendered them all proper and
essential to the man. Without appearing to differ, in any tangible way,
from other 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 material. His
gold-headed cane, too,—a serviceable staff, of dark polished wood,—had
similar traits, and, had it chosen to take a walk by itself, would have
been recognized anywhere as a tolerably adequate representative of its
master. This character—which showed itself so strikingly in everything
about him, and the effect of which we seek to convey to the reader—went
no deeper than his station, habits of life, and external circumstances.
One perceived him to be a personage of marked influence and authority;
and, especially, you could feel just as certain that he was opulent as
if he had exhibited his bank account, or as if you had seen him
touching the twigs of the Pyncheon Elm, and, 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 surveyed Hepzibah’s
little arrangement of toys and commodities. At first it seemed not to
please him,—nay, to cause him exceeding displeasure,—and yet, the very
next moment, he smiled. While the latter expression was yet on his
lips, he caught a glimpse of Hepzibah, who had involuntarily bent
forward to the window; and then the smile changed from acrid and
disagreeable to the sunniest complacency and benevolence. He bowed,
with a happy mixture of dignity and courteous kindliness, and pursued
his way.

“There he is!” said Hepzibah to herself, gulping down a very bitter
emotion, and, since she could not rid herself of it, trying to drive it
back into her heart. “What does he think of it, I wonder? Does it
please him? Ah! he is looking back!”

The gentleman had paused in the street, and turned himself half about,
still with his eyes fixed on the 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 elderly gentleman had
resumed his way, and turned the street corner.

“Take it as you like, Cousin Jaffrey,” muttered the maiden lady, as she
drew back, after cautiously thrusting out her head, and looking up and
down the street,—“Take it as you like! You have seen my little
shop-window. Well!—what have you to say?—is not the Pyncheon House my
own, while I’m alive?”

After this incident, Hepzibah retreated to the back parlor, 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 hurriedly about the
room. At length she paused before the portrait of the stern old
Puritan, her ancestor, and the founder of the house. In one sense, this
picture had almost faded into the canvas, and hidden itself behind the
duskiness of age; in another, she could not but fancy that it had been
growing more prominent and strikingly expressive, ever since her
earliest familiarity with it as a child. For, while the physical
outline and substance were darkening away from the 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 afraid to judge the character of the
original so harshly as a perception of the truth compelled her to do.
But still she gazed, because the face of the picture enabled her—at
least, she fancied so—to read more accurately, and to a greater depth,
the face which she had just seen in the street.

“This is the very man!” murmured she to herself. “Let Jaffrey Pyncheon
smile as he will, there is that look beneath! Put on him a 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 Pyncheon come again. He has proved himself the very man
to build up a new house! Perhaps, too, to draw down a new curse!”

Thus did Hepzibah bewilder herself with these fantasies of the old
time. She had dwelt too much alone,—too long in the Pyncheon
House,—until her very brain was impregnated with the 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 delicately touched that the likeness remained perfect. Malbone’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 peculiarity; so that you inevitably
thought of the original as resembling his mother, and she a lovely and
lovable woman, with perhaps some beautiful infirmity of character, that
made it all the pleasanter to know and easier to love her.

“Yes,” thought Hepzibah, with grief of which it was only the more
tolerable portion that welled up from her heart to her eyelids, “they
persecuted his mother in him! He never was a Pyncheon!”

But here the shop-bell rang; it was like a sound from a remote
distance,—so far had Hepzibah descended into the sepulchral depths of
her reminiscences. On entering the shop, she found an old man there, a
humble resident of Pyncheon Street, and whom, for a great many years
past, she had suffered to be a kind of familiar of the house. He was an
immemorial personage, who seemed always to have had a white head and
wrinkles, and never to have possessed but a single tooth, and that a
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 enabled him to fill a place which would
else have been vacant in the apparently crowded world. To go of errands
with his slow and shuffling gait, which made you doubt how he ever was
to arrive anywhere; to saw a small 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 winter, 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 clergyman does in the range of his parishioners. Not that he laid
claim to the tithe pig; but, as an analogous mode of reverence, he went
his rounds, every morning, to gather up the crumbs of the table and
overflowings of the 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 younger—Uncle Venner was commonly regarded as
rather deficient, than otherwise, in his wits. In truth he had
virtually pleaded guilty to the charge, by scarcely aiming at such
success as other men seek, and by taking only that humble and modest
part in the intercourse of life which belongs to the alleged
deficiency. But now, in his extreme old age,—whether it were that his
long and hard experience had actually brightened him, or that his
decaying judgment rendered him less capable of fairly measuring
himself,—the venerable man made pretensions to no little wisdom, and
really enjoyed the credit of it. There was likewise, at times, a vein
of something like poetry in him; it was the moss or 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 Uncle Venner was himself the
most ancient existence, whether of man or thing, in Pyncheon Street,
except the House of the Seven Gables, and perhaps the elm that
overshadowed it.

This patriarch now presented himself before Hepzibah, clad in an old
blue coat, which had a fashionable air, and must have accrued to him
from the cast-off wardrobe of some dashing clerk. As for his trousers,
they were of tow-cloth, very short in the legs, and bagging down
strangely in the rear, but yet having a suitableness to his figure
which his other garment entirely lacked. His hat had relation to no
other part of his dress, and but very little to the head that wore it.
Thus Uncle Venner was a miscellaneous old gentleman, partly himself,
but, in good measure, somebody else; patched together, too, of
different epochs; an epitome of times and fashions.

“So, you have really begun trade,” said he,—“really begun trade! Well,
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
yonder,—the great brick house, you know,—the workhouse, most folks call
it; but I mean to do my work first, and go there to be idle and enjoy
myself. And I’m glad to see you beginning to do your work, Miss
Hepzibah!”

“Thank you, Uncle Venner,” said Hepzibah, smiling; for she always felt
kindly towards the simple and talkative old man. Had he been an old
woman, she might probably have repelled the freedom, which she now took
in good part. “It is time for me to begin work, indeed! Or, to speak
the truth, I have just begun when I ought to be giving it up.”

“Oh, never say that, Miss Hepzibah!” answered the old man. “You are a
young woman yet. Why, I hardly thought myself younger than I am now, it
seems so little while ago since I used to see you playing about the
door of the old house, quite a small child! Oftener, though, you used
to be sitting at the threshold, and looking gravely into the street;
for you had always a grave kind of way with you,—a 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 stepping so grandly up
the street! Those old gentlemen that grew up before the Revolution used
to put on grand airs. In my young days, the great man of the town was
commonly called King; and his wife, not Queen to be sure, but Lady.
Nowadays, a man would not dare to be called King; and if he feels
himself a little above common folks, he only stoops so much the lower
to them. I met your cousin, the Judge, ten minutes ago; and, in my old
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 stealing 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 Hepzibah, 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 Venner,” said Hepzibah
coldly. “I ought to say, however, 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 Uncle 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!” cried the old man
cheerily, as if there were something 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 case.
I quite long to be among them, sometimes, of the winter evenings; for
it is but dull business for a lonesome elderly man, like me, to be
nodding, by the hour together, with no company but his 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 earnestness, endeavoring to discover what secret meaning,
if any, might be lurking there. Individuals whose affairs have reached
an utterly desperate crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive
with hopes, so much the more airily magnificent as they have the less
of solid matter within their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and
moderate expectation of good. Thus, all the while Hepzibah was
perfecting the scheme of her little shop, she had cherished an
unacknowledged idea that some harlequin trick of fortune would
intervene in her favor. For example, an uncle—who had sailed for India
fifty years before, and never been heard of since—might yet return, and
adopt her to be the comfort of his very extreme and decrepit age, and
adorn her with pearls, diamonds, and Oriental shawls and turbans, and
make her the ultimate heiress of his unreckonable riches. Or the member
of Parliament, now at the head of the English branch of the
family,—with which the elder stock, on this side of the Atlantic, had
held little or no intercourse for the last two centuries,—this eminent
gentleman might invite Hepzibah to quit the ruinous House of the Seven
Gables, and come over to dwell with her kindred at Pyncheon Hall. But,
for reasons the most imperative, she could not yield to his request. It
was more probable, therefore, that the descendants of a Pyncheon who
had emigrated to Virginia, in some past generation, and became a great
planter there,—hearing of Hepzibah’s destitution, and impelled by the
splendid generosity of character with which their Virginian mixture
must have enriched the New England blood,—would send her a remittance
of a thousand dollars, with a hint of repeating the favor annually.
Or,—and, surely, anything so undeniably just could not be beyond the
limits of reasonable anticipation,—the great claim to the heritage of
Waldo County might finally be decided in favor of the Pyncheons; so
that, instead of keeping a 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 festal glory in the poor, bare, melancholy chambers of her
brain, as if that inner world were suddenly lighted up with gas. But
either he knew nothing of her castles in the air,—as how should he?—or
else her earnest scowl disturbed his recollection, as it might a more
courageous man’s. Instead of pursuing any weightier topic, Uncle Venner
was pleased to favor Hepzibah with some sage counsel in her
shop-keeping capacity.

“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, however,
he bent forward, and, with a good deal of feeling in his ancient
visage, beckoned her nearer to him.

“When do you expect him home?” whispered he.

“Whom do you mean?” asked Hepzibah, turning pale.

“Ah!—You 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 acquitted herself even
less creditably, as a shop-keeper, than in her earlier efforts. She
appeared to be walking in a dream; or, more truly, the vivid life and
reality assumed by her emotions made all outward occurrences
unsubstantial, like the teasing phantasms of a half-conscious slumber.
She still responded, mechanically, 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 spaceless boundary betwixt its own region
and the actual world; where the body remains to guide itself as best it
may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life. It is like
death, without 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 gentlewoman. As the
animosity of fate would have it, there was a great influx of custom in
the course of the afternoon. Hepzibah blundered to and fro about her
small place of business, committing the most 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 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 inexplicable 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! Hepzibah’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. Hepzibah’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. A gentleman alighted; but it was only to
offer his hand to a young girl whose slender figure, nowise needing
such assistance, now lightly descended the steps, and made an airy
little jump from the final one to the sidewalk. She rewarded her
cavalier with a smile, the cheery glow of which was seen reflected on
his own face as he reentered the vehicle. The girl then turned towards
the House of the Seven Gables, to the door of which, meanwhile,—not the
shop-door, but the antique portal,—the omnibus-man had carried a light
trunk and a bandbox. First giving a sharp rap of the old iron knocker,
he left his passenger and her luggage at the 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 overshadowed 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 propriety in being there, so
did it seem altogether fit that the girl should be standing at the
threshold. It was no less evidently proper that the door should swing
open to admit her. The maiden lady herself, sternly inhospitable in her
first purposes, soon began to feel that the door ought to be shoved
back, and the rusty key be turned in the reluctant lock.

“Can it be Phœbe?” questioned she within herself. “It must be little
Phœbe; for it can be nobody else,—and there is a look of her father
about her, too! But what does she want here? And how like a country
cousin, to come down upon a poor body in this way, without so much as a
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.”

Phœbe, it must be understood, was that one little offshoot of the
Pyncheon race to whom we have already referred, as a native of a rural
part of New England, where the old fashions and feelings of
relationship are still partially kept up. In her own circle, it was
regarded as by no means improper for kinsfolk to visit one another
without invitation, or preliminary and ceremonious warning. Yet, in
consideration of Miss Hepzibah’s recluse way of life, a letter had
actually been written and despatched, conveying information of Phœbe’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 to call at
the House of the Seven Gables.

“No—she can stay only one night,” said Hepzibah, unbolting the door.
“If Clifford were to find her here, it might disturb him!”




V.
May and November


Phœbe Pyncheon slept, on the night of her arrival, in a chamber that
looked down on the garden of the old house. It fronted towards the
east, so that at a very seasonable hour a glow of crimson light came
flooding through the window, and bathed the dingy ceiling and
paper-hangings in its own hue. There were curtains to Phœbe’s bed; a
dark, antique canopy, and ponderous festoons of a stuff which had been
rich, and even magnificent, in its time; but which now brooded over the
girl like a cloud, making a night in that one corner, while elsewhere
it was beginning to be day. The morning light, however, soon stole into
the aperture at the foot of the bed, betwixt those faded curtains.
Finding the new guest there,—with a bloom on her cheeks like the
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 fondness, and partly as a pretty hint that it is time now
to unclose her eyes.

At the touch of those lips of light, Phœbe quietly awoke, and, for a
moment, did not recognize where she was, nor how those heavy curtains
chanced to be festooned around her. Nothing, indeed, was absolutely
plain to her, except that it was now early morning, and that, whatever
might happen next, it was proper, first of all, to get up and say her
prayers. She was the more inclined to devotion from the grim aspect of
the chamber and its furniture, especially the tall, stiff chairs; one
of which stood close by her bedside, and looked as if some
old-fashioned personage had been sitting there all night, and had
vanished only just in season to escape discovery.

When Phœbe was quite dressed, she peeped out of the window, and saw a
rosebush in the garden. Being a very tall one, and of luxuriant growth,
it had been propped up against the side of the house, and was literally
covered with a rare and very beautiful species of white rose. A large
portion of them, as the girl afterwards discovered, had blight or
mildew at their hearts; but, viewed at a fair distance, the whole
rosebush looked as if it had been brought from Eden that very summer,
together with the mould in which it grew. The truth was, nevertheless,
that it had been planted by Alice Pyncheon,—she was Phœbe’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. Growing as they did, however, out of the old earth,
the flowers still sent a fresh and sweet incense up to their Creator;
nor could it have been the less pure and acceptable because Phœbe’s
young breath mingled with it, as the fragrance floated past the window.
Hastening down the creaking and carpetless staircase, she found her way
into the garden, gathered some of the most perfect of the roses, and
brought them to her chamber.

Little Phœbe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive
patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement. It is a kind of natural
magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden
capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of
comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a
period, may happen to be their home. A wild hut of underbrush, tossed
together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the
home aspect by one night’s lodging of such a woman, and would retain it
long after her quiet figure had disappeared into the surrounding shade.
No less a portion of such homely witchcraft was requisite to reclaim,
as it were, Phœbe’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
Phœbe’s process we find it impossible to say. She appeared to have no
preliminary design, but gave a touch here and another there; brought
some articles of furniture to light and dragged others into the shadow;
looped up or let down a 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 inscrutable charm. The
bedchamber, no doubt, was a chamber of very great and varied
experience, as a scene of human life: the joy of bridal nights had
throbbed itself away here; new immortals had first drawn earthly breath
here; and here old people had died. But—whether it were the white
roses, or whatever the subtile influence might be—a person of delicate
instinct would have known at once that it was now a 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, Phœbe emerged from her
chamber, with a purpose to descend again into the garden. Besides the
rosebush, she had observed several other species of flowers growing
there in a wilderness of neglect, and obstructing one another’s
development (as is often the parallel case in human society) by their
uneducated entanglement and confusion. At the head of the stairs,
however, she met Hepzibah, who, it being still early, invited her into
a room which she would probably have called her boudoir, had her
education embraced any such French phrase. It was strewn about with a
few old books, and a 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 Phœbe was a harpsichord. It
looked more like a coffin than anything else; and, indeed,—not having
been played upon, or opened, for years,—there must have been a vast
deal of dead music in it, stifled for want of air. Human finger was
hardly known to have touched its chords since the days of Alice
Pyncheon, who had learned the sweet accomplishment of melody in Europe.

Hepzibah bade her young guest sit down, and, herself taking a chair
near by, looked as earnestly at Phœbe’s trim little figure as if she
expected to see right into its springs and motive secrets.

“Cousin Phœbe,” said she, at last, “I really can’t see my way clear to
keep you with me.”

These words, however, had not the inhospitable bluntness with which
they may strike the reader; for the two relatives, in a talk before
bedtime, had arrived at a certain degree of mutual understanding.
Hepzibah knew enough to enable her to appreciate the circumstances
(resulting from the second marriage of the girl’s mother) which made it
desirable for Phœbe to establish herself in another home. Nor did she
misinterpret Phœbe’s character, and the genial activity pervading
it,—one of the most valuable traits of the true New England
woman,—which had impelled her forth, as might be said, to seek her
fortune, but with a 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 Hepzibah, 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, should it prove for the happiness
of both.

To Hepzibah’s blunt observation, therefore, Phœbe 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, Phœbe,
this house of mine is but a melancholy place for a young person to be
in. It lets in the wind and rain, and the snow, too, in the garret and
upper chambers, in 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, Phœbe), 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 Phœbe, neither can I so much as give you bread to
eat.”

“You will find me a cheerful little body” answered Phœbe, smiling, and
yet with a kind of gentle dignity, “and I mean to earn my bread. You
know I have not been brought up a Pyncheon. A girl learns many things
in a New England village.”

“Ah! Phœbe,” said Hepzibah, sighing, “your knowledge would do but
little for you here! And then it is a wretched thought that you should
fling away your young days in a place like this. Those cheeks would not
be so rosy after a month or two. Look at my face!” and, indeed, the
contrast was very striking,—“you see how pale I am! It is my idea that
the dust and continual decay of these old houses are unwholesome for
the lungs.”

“There is the garden,—the flowers to be taken care of,” observed Phœbe.
“I should keep myself healthy with exercise in the open air.”

“And, after all, child,” exclaimed Hepzibah, suddenly rising, as if to
dismiss the subject, “it is not for me to say who shall be a guest or
inhabitant of the old Pyncheon House. Its master is coming.”

“Do you mean Judge Pyncheon?” asked Phœbe in surprise.

“Judge Pyncheon!” answered her cousin angrily. “He will hardly cross
the threshold while I live! No, no! But, Phœbe, you shall see the face
of him I speak of.”

She went in quest of the miniature already described, and returned with
it in her hand. Giving it to Phœbe, she watched her features narrowly,
and with a certain jealousy as to the mode in which the girl would show
herself affected by the picture.

“How do you like the face?” asked Hepzibah.

“It is handsome!—it is very beautiful!” said Phœbe 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 suffer anything. One would bear
much for the sake of sparing him toil or sorrow. Who is it, Cousin
Hepzibah?”

“Did you never hear,” whispered her cousin, bending towards her, “of
Clifford Pyncheon?”

“Never. I thought there were no Pyncheons left, except yourself and our
cousin Jaffrey,” answered Phœbe. “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 Phœbe, since, after
all that I have said, your courage does not fail you, we will not part
so soon. You are welcome, my child, for the present, to such a home as
your kinswoman can offer you.”

With this measured, but not exactly cold assurance of a hospitable
purpose, Hepzibah kissed her cheek.

They now went below stairs, where Phœbe—not so much assuming the office
as attracting it to herself, by the magnetism of innate fitness—took
the most active part in preparing breakfast. The mistress of the house,
meanwhile, as is usual with persons of her stiff and unmalleable cast,
stood mostly aside; willing to lend her aid, yet conscious that her
natural inaptitude would be likely to impede the business in hand.
Phœbe and the fire that boiled the teakettle were equally bright,
cheerful, and efficient, in their respective offices. Hepzibah gazed
forth from her habitual sluggishness, the necessary result of long
solitude, as from another sphere. She could not help being interested,
however, and even amused, at the readiness with which her new inmate
adapted herself to the circumstances, and brought the house, moreover,
and all its rusty old appliances, into a suitableness for her purposes.
Whatever she did, too, was done without conscious effort, and with
frequent outbreaks of song, which were exceedingly pleasant to the ear.
This natural tunefulness made Phœbe 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 as ancient as the custom itself of
tea-drinking.

“Your great-great-great-great-grandmother had these cups, when she was
married,” said Hepzibah to Phœbe. “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 Phœbe 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 thunder-cloud. “Do you do other things as well? Are
you as good at your book as you are at washing teacups?”

“Not quite, I am afraid,” said Phœbe, laughing at the form of
Hepzibah’s question. “But I was schoolmistress for the little children
in our district last summer, and might have been so still.”

“Ah! ’tis all very well!” observed the maiden lady, drawing herself up.
“But these things must have come to you with your mother’s blood. I
never knew a Pyncheon that had any turn for them.”

It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally
quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their
available gifts; as was Hepzibah of this native inapplicability, so to
speak, of the Pyncheons to any useful purpose. She regarded it as an
hereditary trait; and so, perhaps, it was, but unfortunately a morbid
one, such as is often generated in families that remain long above the
surface of society.

Before they left the 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 impossibility of ever becoming wonted to this peevishly
obstreperous little bell. Ring as often as it might, the sound always
smote upon her nervous system rudely and suddenly. And especially now,
while, with her crested teaspoons and antique china, she was flattering
herself with ideas of gentility, she felt an unspeakable disinclination
to confront a customer.

“Do not trouble yourself, dear cousin!” cried Phœbe, 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 Phœbe. “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 Phœbe, and peeped from the passageway
into the shop, to note how she would manage her undertaking. It was a
case of some intricacy. A very ancient woman, in a white short gown and
a green petticoat, with a string of gold beads about her neck, and what
looked like a nightcap on her head, had brought a quantity of yarn to
barter for the commodities of the shop. She was probably the very last
person in town who still kept the 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 Phœbe, mingling in one
twisted thread of talk; and still better to contrast their figures,—so
light and bloomy,—so decrepit and dusky,—with only the counter betwixt
them, in one sense, but more than threescore years, in another. As for
the bargain, it was wrinkled slyness and craft pitted against native
truth and sagacity.

“Was not that well done?” asked Phœbe, laughing, when the customer was
gone.

“Nicely done, indeed, child!” answered Hepzibah. “I could not have gone
through with it nearly so well. As you say, it must be a knack that
belongs to you on the 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 stirring 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 Phœbe’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 liquid and in cakes;
and should brew a certain kind of beer, nectareous to the palate, and
of rare stomachic virtues; and, moreover, should bake and exhibit for
sale some little 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 only could be a lady; too—but
that’s impossible! Phœbe is no Pyncheon. She takes everything from her
mother!”

As to Phœbe’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 judgment at all in any fair and healthy mind. Out of New
England, it would be impossible to meet with a person combining so many
ladylike attributes with so many others that form no necessary (if
compatible) part of the character. She shocked no canon of taste; she
was admirably in keeping with herself, and never jarred against
surrounding circumstances. Her figure, to be sure,—so small as to be
almost childlike, and so elastic that motion seemed as easy or easier
to it than rest, would hardly have suited 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 dozen freckles, friendly remembrances of the April
sun and breeze—precisely give us a right to call her beautiful. But
there was both lustre and depth in her eyes. She was very pretty; as
graceful as a bird, and graceful much in the same way; as pleasant
about the house as a gleam of sunshine falling on the floor through a
shadow of twinkling leaves, or as a ray of firelight that dances on the
wall while evening is drawing nigh. Instead of discussing her claim to
rank among ladies, it would be preferable to regard Phœbe 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 practical affairs, and
to gild them all, the very homeliest,—were it even the scouring of pots
and kettles,—with an atmosphere of loveliness and joy.

Such was the sphere of Phœbe. To find the born and educated lady, on
the other hand, we need look no farther than Hepzibah, our forlorn old
maid, in her rustling and rusty silks, with her deeply cherished and
ridiculous consciousness of long descent, her shadowy claims to
princely territory, and, in the way of accomplishment, her
recollections, it may be, of having formerly thrummed on a harpsichord,
and walked a minuet, and worked an antique tapestry-stitch on her
sampler. It was a fair parallel between new Plebeianism and old
Gentility.

It really seemed as if the battered visage of the House of the Seven
Gables, black and heavy-browed as it still certainly looked, must have
shown a kind of cheerfulness glimmering through its dusky windows as
Phœbe passed to and fro in the interior. Otherwise, it is impossible to
explain how the people of the neighborhood so soon became aware of the
girl’s presence. There was a great run of custom, setting steadily 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 an 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 signalized his omnivorous prowess by
swallowing two dromedaries and a locomotive. Phœbe laughed, as she
summed up her aggregate of sales upon the slate; while Hepzibah, first
drawing on a pair of silk gloves, reckoned over the sordid accumulation
of copper coin, not without silver intermixed, that had jingled into
the till.

“We must renew our stock, Cousin Hepzibah!” cried the little
saleswoman. “The gingerbread figures are all gone, and so are those
Dutch wooden milkmaids, and most of our other playthings. There has
been constant inquiry for cheap raisins, and a great cry for whistles,
and trumpets, and 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 copper mountain!”

“Well done! well done! well done!” quoth Uncle Venner, who had taken
occasion to shuffle in and out of the shop several times in the course
of the day. “Here’s a girl that will never end her days at my farm!
Bless my eyes, what a brisk little soul!”

“Yes, Phœbe 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 venerable man. “At any
rate, it never was my luck to see her like among them, nor, for that
matter, anywhere 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 Phœbe does!”

Uncle Venner’s eulogium, if it appear rather too high-strained for the
person and occasion, had, nevertheless, a sense in which it was both
subtile and true. There was a spiritual quality in Phœbe’s activity.
The life of the long and busy day—spent in occupations that might so
easily have taken a squalid and ugly aspect—had been made pleasant, and
even lovely, by the spontaneous grace with which these homely duties
seemed to bloom out of her character; so that labor, while she dealt
with it, had the easy and flexible charm of play. Angels do not toil,
but let their good works grow out of them; and so did Phœbe.

The two relatives—the young maid and the old one—found time before
nightfall, in the intervals of trade, to make rapid advances towards
affection and confidence. A recluse, like Hepzibah, usually displays
remarkable frankness, and at least temporary affability, on being
absolutely cornered, and brought to the point of personal intercourse;
like the angel whom Jacob wrestled with, she is ready to bless you when
once overcome.

The old gentlewoman took a dreary and proud satisfaction in leading
Phœbe 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-governor’s sword-hilt in
the door-panels of the apartment where old Colonel Pyncheon, a dead
host, had received his affrighted visitors with an awful frown. The
dusky terror of that frown, Hepzibah observed, was thought to be
lingering ever since in the passageway. She bade Phœbe step into one of
the tall chairs, and inspect the ancient map of the Pyncheon territory
at the eastward. In a tract of land on which she laid her finger, there
existed a silver mine, the locality of which was precisely pointed out
in some memoranda of Colonel Pyncheon himself, but only to be made
known when the family claim should be recognized by government. Thus it
was for the interest of all New England that the Pyncheons should have
justice done them. She told, too, how that there was undoubtedly an
immense treasure of English guineas hidden somewhere about the house,
or in the cellar, or possibly in the garden.

“If you should happen to find it, Phœbe,” said Hepzibah, 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 Phœbe; “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 rose-bud scents the drawer where
it has withered and perished. This lovely Alice had met with some great
and mysterious calamity, and had grown thin and white, and gradually
faded out of the world. But, even now, she was supposed to haunt the
House of the Seven Gables, and, a great many times,—especially when one
of the Pyncheons was to die,—she had been heard playing sadly and
beautifully on the harpsichord. One of these tunes, just as it had
sounded from her spiritual touch, had been written down by an amateur
of music; it was so exquisitely mournful that nobody, to this day,
could bear to hear it played, unless when a great sorrow had made them
know the still profounder sweetness of it.

“Was it the same harpsichord that you showed me?” inquired Phœbe.

“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
disorganizing matter, at a meeting of his banditti-like associates. For
her own part, she had reason to believe that he practised animal
magnetism, and, if such things were in fashion nowadays, should be apt
to suspect him of studying the Black Art up there in his lonesome
chamber.

“But, dear cousin,” said Phœbe, “if the young man is so dangerous, why
do you let him stay? If he does nothing worse, he may set the house on
fire!”

“Why, sometimes,” answered Hepzibah, “I have seriously made it a
question, whether I ought not to send him away. But, with all his
oddities, he is a quiet kind of a person, and has such a way of taking
hold of one’s mind, that, without exactly liking him (for I 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!” remonstrated Phœbe, 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 into the garden.
The enclosure had formerly been very extensive, but was now contracted
within small compass, and hemmed about, partly by high wooden fences,
and partly by the outbuildings of houses that stood on another street.
In its centre was a 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, springing 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 departed
years would naturally have sprung up again, in such rank weeds
(symbolic of the transmitted vices of society) as are always prone to
root themselves about human dwellings. Phœbe saw, however, that their
growth must have been checked by a degree of careful labor, bestowed
daily and systematically on the garden. The white double rosebush had
evidently been propped up anew against the house since the commencement
of the season; and a pear-tree and three damson-trees, which, except a
row of currant-bushes, constituted the only varieties of fruit, bore
marks of the recent amputation of several superfluous or defective
limbs. There were also a few species of antique and hereditary flowers,
in no very flourishing condition, but scrupulously weeded; as if some
person, either out of love or curiosity, had been anxious to bring them
to such perfection as they were capable of attaining. The remainder of
the garden presented a well-selected assortment of esculent vegetables,
in a praiseworthy state of advancement. Summer squashes almost in their
golden blossom; cucumbers, now evincing a tendency to spread away from
the main stock, and ramble far and wide; two or three rows of
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 promised an early and abundant
harvest.

Phœbe 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 Hepzibah’s, who had no taste nor spirits for the lady-like
employment of cultivating flowers, and—with her recluse habits, and
tendency to shelter herself within the dismal shadow of the house—would
hardly have come forth under the speck of open sky to weed and hoe
among the fraternity of beans and squashes.

It being her first day of complete estrangement from rural objects,
Phœbe found an unexpected charm in this little nook of grass, and
foliage, and aristocratic flowers, and plebeian vegetables. The eye of
Heaven seemed to look down into it pleasantly, and with a peculiar
smile, as if glad to perceive that nature, elsewhere overwhelmed, and
driven out of the dusty town, had here been able to retain a
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 it worth their while to come hither, possibly from the
range of hives beside some farm-house miles away. How many aerial
voyages might they have made, in quest of honey, or honey-laden,
betwixt dawn and sunset! Yet, late as it now was, there still arose a
pleasant 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
upward gush, wrought magically with these variegated pebbles, and made
a continually shifting apparition of quaint figures, vanishing too
suddenly to be definable. Thence, swelling over the rim of 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 solitary chicken. All of them were
pure specimens of a breed which had been transmitted down as an
heirloom in the Pyncheon family, and were said, while in their prime,
to have attained almost the size of turkeys, and, on the score of
delicate flesh, to be fit for a 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 been
ashamed of. Be that as it might, the hens were now scarcely larger than
pigeons, and had a queer, rusty, withered aspect, and a gouty kind of
movement, and a sleepy and melancholy tone throughout all the
variations of their clucking and cackling. It was evident that the race
had degenerated, like many a noble race besides, in consequence of too
strict a watchfulness to keep it pure. These feathered people had
existed too long in their distinct variety; a fact of which the present
representatives, judging by their lugubrious deportment, seemed to be
aware. They kept themselves alive, unquestionably, and laid now and
then an egg, and hatched a chicken; not for any pleasure of their own,
but that the world might not absolutely lose what had once been so
admirable a breed of fowls. The distinguishing mark of the hens was a
crest of lamentably scanty growth, in these latter days, but so oddly
and wickedly analogous to Hepzibah’s turban, that Phœbe—to the poignant
distress of her conscience, but inevitably—was led to fancy a general
resemblance betwixt these forlorn bipeds and her respectable relative.

The girl ran into the house to get some crumbs of bread, cold potatoes,
and other such scraps as were suitable to the accommodating appetite of
fowls. Returning, she gave a peculiar call, which they seemed to
recognize. The chicken crept through the pales of the coop and ran,
with some show of liveliness, to her feet; while Chanticleer and the
ladies of his household regarded her with queer, sidelong glances, and
then croaked one to another, as if communicating their sage opinions of
her character. So wise, as well as antique, was their aspect, as to
give color to the idea, not merely that they were the descendants of a
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 guardian angels.

“Here, you odd little chicken!” said Phœbe; “here are some nice crumbs
for you!”

The chicken, hereupon, though almost as venerable in appearance as its
mother—possessing, indeed, the whole antiquity of its progenitors in
miniature,—mustered vivacity enough to flutter upward and alight on
Phœbe’s shoulder.

“That little fowl pays you a high compliment!” said a voice behind
Phœbe.

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
Phœbe was gone in quest of the crumbs, had begun to busy himself with
drawing up fresh earth about the roots of the tomatoes.

“The chicken really treats you like an old acquaintance,” continued he
in a quiet way, while a smile made his face pleasanter than Phœbe at
first fancied it. “Those venerable personages in the coop, too, seem
very affably disposed. You are lucky to be in their good graces so
soon! They have known me much longer, but never honor me with any
familiarity, though hardly a day passes without my bringing them food.
Miss Hepzibah, I suppose, will interweave the fact with her other
traditions, and set it down that the fowls know you to be a Pyncheon!”

“The secret is,” said Phœbe, smiling, “that I have learned how to talk
with hens and chickens.”

“Ah, but these hens,” answered the young man,—“these hens of
aristocratic lineage would scorn to understand the vulgar language of a
barn-yard fowl. I prefer to think—and so would Miss Hepzibah—that they
recognize the family tone. For you are a Pyncheon?”

“My name is Phœbe Pyncheon,” said the girl, with a manner of some
reserve; for she was aware that her new acquaintance could be no other
than the daguerreotypist, of whose lawless propensities the old maid
had given her a disagreeable idea. “I did not know that my cousin
Hepzibah’s garden was under another person’s care.”

“Yes,” said Holgrave, “I dig, and hoe, and weed, in this black old
earth, for the sake of refreshing myself with what little nature and
simplicity may be left in it, after men have so long sown and reaped
here. I turn up the earth by way of pastime. My sober occupation, so
far as I have any, is with a lighter material. In short, I make
pictures out of sunshine; and, not to be too much dazzled with my own
trade, I have prevailed with Miss Hepzibah to let me lodge in one of
these dusky gables. It is like a bandage over 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 Phœbe with less reserve;
for, in spite of prejudice, her own youthfulness sprang forward to meet
his. “I 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.”

“If you would permit me,” said the artist, looking at Phœbe, “I should
like to try whether the daguerreotype can bring out disagreeable traits
on a perfectly amiable face. But there certainly is truth in what you
have said. Most of my likenesses do look unamiable; but the very
sufficient reason, I fancy, is, because the originals are so. There is
a wonderful insight in 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 morocco case. Phœbe merely
glanced at it, and gave it back.

“I know the face,” she replied; “for its stern eye has been following
me about all day. It is my Puritan ancestor, who hangs yonder in the
parlor. To be sure, you have found some way of copying the portrait
without its black velvet cap and gray beard, and have given him a
modern coat and satin cravat, instead of his cloak and band. I don’t
think him improved by your alterations.”

“You would have seen other differences had you looked a little longer,”
said Holgrave, laughing, yet apparently much struck. “I can assure you
that this is a modern face, and one which you will very probably meet.
Now, the remarkable point is, that the original wears, to the world’s
eye,—and, for aught I know, to his most intimate friends,—an
exceedingly pleasant countenance, indicative of benevolence, openness
of heart, sunny good-humor, and other praiseworthy qualities of that
cast. The sun, as you see, tells quite another story, and will not be
coaxed out of it, after half a dozen patient attempts on my part. Here
we have the man, sly, subtle, hard, imperious, and, withal, cold as
ice. Look at that eye! Would you like to be at its mercy? At that
mouth! Could it ever smile? And yet, if you could only see the benign
smile of the original! It is so much the more unfortunate, as he is a
public character of some eminence, and the likeness was intended to be
engraved.”

“Well, I don’t wish to see it any more,” observed Phœbe, 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 Phœbe. “It is almost too soft and
gentle for a man’s.”

“Is there nothing wild in the eye?” continued Holgrave, so earnestly
that it embarrassed Phœbe, as did also the quiet freedom with which he
presumed on their so recent acquaintance. “Is there nothing dark or
sinister anywhere? Could you not conceive the original to have been
guilty of a great crime?”

“It is nonsense,” said Phœbe a little impatiently, “for us to talk
about a picture which you have never seen. You mistake it for some
other. A crime, indeed! Since you are a friend of my cousin Hepzibah’s,
you should ask her to show you the picture.”

“It will suit my purpose still better to see the original,” replied the
daguerreotypist coolly. “As to his character, we need not discuss its
points; they have already been settled by a competent tribunal, or one
which called itself competent. But, stay! Do not go yet, if you please!
I have a proposition to make you.”

Phœbe was on the point of retreating, but turned back, with some
hesitation; for she did not exactly comprehend his manner, although, on
better observation, its feature seemed rather to be lack of ceremony
than any approach to offensive rudeness. There was an odd kind of
authority, too, in what he now proceeded to say, rather as if the
garden were his own than a place to which he was admitted merely by
Hepzibah’s courtesy.

“If agreeable to you,” he observed, “it would give me pleasure to turn
over these flowers, and those ancient and respectable fowls, to your
care. Coming fresh from country air and occupations, you will soon feel
the need of some such 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 Hepzibah’s table. So we will be
fellow-laborers, somewhat on the community system.”

Silently, and rather surprised at her own compliance, Phœbe accordingly
betook herself to weeding a flower-bed, but busied herself still more
with cogitations respecting this young man, with whom she so
unexpectedly found herself on terms approaching to familiarity. She did
not altogether like him. His character perplexed the little
country-girl, as it might a more practised observer; for, while the
tone of his conversation had generally been playful, the impression
left on her mind was that of gravity, and, except as his youth modified
it, almost sternness. She rebelled, as it were, against a certain
magnetic element in the 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 buildings, threw an obscurity over the
garden.

“There,” said Holgrave, “it is time to give over work! That last stroke
of the hoe has cut off a beanstalk. Good-night, Miss Phœbe Pyncheon!
Any bright day, if you will put one of those rosebuds in your hair, and
come to my rooms in Central Street, I will seize the purest ray of
sunshine, and make a picture of the flower and its wearer.” He retired
towards his own solitary gable, but turned his head, on reaching the
door, and called to Phœbe, 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 Phœbe. “Is that it with the rim of mossy
stones? I have no thought of drinking there,—but why not?”

“Oh,” rejoined the daguerreotypist, “because, like an old lady’s cup of
tea, it is water bewitched!”

He vanished; and Phœbe, lingering a moment, saw a glimmering light, and
then the steady beam of a lamp, in a chamber of the gable. On returning
into 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 sideways towards a corner.

“Shall I light a lamp, Cousin Hepzibah?” she asked.

“Do, if you please, my dear child,” answered Hepzibah. “But put it on
the table in the corner of the passage. My eyes are weak; and I can
seldom bear the lamplight on them.”

What an instrument is the human voice! How wonderfully responsive to
every emotion of the human soul! In 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, Phœbe fancied that her
cousin spoke to her.

“In a moment, cousin!” answered the girl. “These matches just glimmer,
and go out.”

But, instead of a response from Hepzibah, she seemed to hear the murmur
of an unknown voice. It was strangely indistinct, however, and less
like articulate words than an unshaped sound, such as would be the
utterance of feeling and sympathy, rather than of the intellect. So
vague was it, that its impression or echo in Phœbe’s mind was that of
unreality. She concluded that she must have mistaken some other sound
for that of the human voice; or else that it was altogether in her
fancy.

She set the lighted lamp in the passage, and again entered the parlor.
Hepzibah’s form, though its sable outline mingled with the dusk, was
now less imperfectly visible. In the remoter parts of the room,
however, its walls being so ill adapted to reflect light, there was
nearly the same obscurity as before.

“Cousin,” said Phœbe, “did you speak to me just now?”

“No, child!” replied Hepzibah.

Fewer words than before, but with the same mysterious music in them!
Mellow, melancholy, yet not mournful, the tone seemed to gush up out of
the deep well of 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 Phœbe. The girl sat silently for
a moment. But soon, her senses being very acute, she became conscious
of an irregular respiration in an obscure corner of the room. Her
physical organization, moreover, being at once delicate and healthy,
gave her a perception, operating with almost the effect of a spiritual
medium, that somebody was near at hand.

“My dear cousin,” asked she, overcoming an indefinable reluctance, “is
there not some one in the room with us?”

“Phœbe, 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, 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 Phœbe, 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 so much love in this desolate old heart, that it could
afford to well over thus abundantly?

“Goodnight, cousin,” said Phœbe, strangely affected 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 footstep
mounting the stairs heavily, but not with force and decision. The voice
of Hepzibah, with a hush through it, was going up along with the
footsteps; and, again, responsive to her cousin’s voice, Phœbe heard
that strange, vague murmur, which might be likened to an indistinct
shadow of human utterance.




VII.
The Guest


When Phœbe awoke,—which she did with the early twittering of the
conjugal couple of robins in the 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 close contiguity to her nose, as
if with the hope of gaining an olfactory acquaintance with its
contents, since her imperfect vision made it not very easy to read
them. If any volume could have manifested its essential wisdom in the
mode suggested, it would certainly have been the one now in Hepzibah’s
hand; and the kitchen, in such an event, would forthwith have streamed
with the fragrance of venison, turkeys, capons, larded partridges,
puddings, cakes, and Christmas pies, in all manner of elaborate mixture
and concoction. It was a cookery book, full of innumerable old fashions
of English dishes, and illustrated with engravings, which represented
the arrangements of the table at such banquets as it might have
befitted a nobleman to give in the great hall of his castle. And, amid
these rich and potent devices of the culinary art (not one of which,
probably, had been tested, within the memory of any 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.

Soon, with a deep sigh, she put aside the savory volume, and inquired
of Phœbe whether old Speckle, as she called one of the hens, had laid
an egg the preceding day. Phœbe 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 summoned the
man in, and made purchase of what he warranted as the finest mackerel
in his cart, and as fat a one as ever he felt with his finger so early
in the season. Requesting Phœbe 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-girl, 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 possessing a richness,
and, if rightly prepared, a delicacy, unequalled by any other mode of
breakfast-cake. Hepzibah 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 opportunity to nibble.

Hepzibah had no natural turn for cookery, and, to say the truth, had
fairly incurred her present meagreness by often choosing to go without
her dinner rather than be attendant on the rotation of the spit, or
ebullition of the pot. Her zeal over the fire, therefore, was quite an
heroic test of sentiment. It was touching, and positively worthy of
tears (if Phœbe, the only spectator, except the rats and ghosts
aforesaid, had not been better employed than in shedding them), to see
her rake out a bed of fresh and glowing coals, and proceed to broil the
mackerel. Her usually pale cheeks were all ablaze with heat and hurry.
She watched the fish with as much tender care and minuteness of
attention as if,—we know not how to express it otherwise,—as if her own
heart were on the gridiron, and her immortal happiness were involved in
its being done precisely to a turn!

Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged
and 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 material delights
of the morning meal are capable of being fully enjoyed, without any
very grievous reproaches, whether gastric or conscientious, for
yielding even a trifle overmuch to the animal department of our nature.
The thoughts, too, that run around the ring of familiar guests have a
piquancy and mirthfulness, and oftentimes a vivid truth, which more
rarely find their way into the elaborate intercourse of dinner.
Hepzibah’s small and ancient table, supported on its slender and
graceful legs, and covered with a cloth of the richest damask, looked
worthy to be the scene and centre of one of the cheerfullest of
parties. The vapor of the broiled fish arose like incense from the
shrine of a barbarian idol, while the fragrance of the Mocha might have
gratified the nostrils of a tutelary Lar, or whatever power has scope
over a modern breakfast-table. Phœbe’s Indian cakes were the sweetest
offering of all,—in their hue befitting the rustic altars of the
innocent and golden age,—or, so brightly yellow were they, resembling
some of the bread which was changed to glistening gold when Midas tried
to eat it. The butter must not be forgotten,—butter which Phœbe 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-panelled 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 h

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