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IT must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so
active as Phoebe could be wholly confined within the precincts of the
old Pyncheon House. Clifford's demands upon her time were usually
satisfied, in those long days, considerably earlier than sunset. Quiet
as his daily existence seemed, it nevertheless drained all the
resources by which he lived. It was not physical exercise that
overwearied him,--for except that he sometimes wrought a little with a
hoe, or paced the garden-walk, or, in rainy weather, traversed a large
unoccupied room,--it was his tendency to remain only too quiescent, as
regarded any toil of the limbs and muscles. But, either there was a
smouldering fire within him that consumed his vital energy, or the
monotony that would have dragged itself with benumbing effect over a
mind differently situated was no monotony to Clifford. Possibly, he
was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly
assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights,
sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more
practised with the world. As all is activity and vicissitude to the
new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had
undergone a kind of new creation, after its long-suspended life.
Be the cause what it might, Clifford commonly retired to rest,
thoroughly exhausted, while the sunbeams were still melting through his
window-curtains, or were thrown with late lustre on the chamber wall.
And while he thus slept early, as other children do, and dreamed of
childhood, Phoebe was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder
of the day and evening.
This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so
little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe. The old
house, as we have already said, had both the dry-rot and the damp-rot
in its walls; it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere than that.
Hepzibah, though she had her valuable and redeeming traits, had grown
to be a kind of lunatic by imprisoning herself so long in one place,
with no other company than a single series of ideas, and but one
affection, and one bitter sense of wrong. Clifford, the reader may
perhaps imagine, was too inert to operate morally on his
fellow-creatures, however intimate and exclusive their relations with
him. But the sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtile
and universal than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes
of organized life, and vibrates from one to another. A flower, for
instance, as Phoebe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in
Clifford's hand, or Hepzibah's, than in her own; and by the same law,
converting her whole daily life into a flower fragrance for these two
sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much
sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast. Unless she had
now and then indulged her brisk impulses, and breathed rural air in a
suburban walk, or ocean breezes along the shore,--had occasionally
obeyed the impulse of Nature, in New England girls, by attending a
metaphysical or philosophical lecture, or viewing a seven-mile
panorama, or listening to a concert,--had gone shopping about the city,
ransacking entire depots of splendid merchandise, and bringing home a
ribbon,--had employed, likewise, a little time to read the Bible in her
chamber, and had stolen a little more to think of her mother and her
native place--unless for such moral medicines as the above, we should
soon have beheld our poor Phoebe grow thin and put on a bleached,
unwholesome aspect, and assume strange, shy ways, prophetic of
old-maidenhood and a cheerless future.
Even as it was, a change grew visible; a change partly to be regretted,
although whatever charm it infringed upon was repaired by another,
perhaps more precious. She was not so constantly gay, but had her
moods of thought, which Clifford, on the whole, liked better than her
former phase of unmingled cheerfulness; because now she understood him
better and more delicately, and sometimes even interpreted him to
himself. Her eyes looked larger, and darker, and deeper; so deep, at
some silent moments, that they seemed like Artesian wells, down, down,
into the infinite. She was less girlish than when we first beheld her
alighting from the omnibus; less girlish, but more a woman.
The only youthful mind with which Phoebe had an opportunity of frequent
intercourse was that of the daguerreotypist. Inevitably, by the
pressure of the seclusion about them, they had been brought into habits
of some familiarity. Had they met under different circumstances,
neither of these young persons would have been likely to bestow much
thought upon the other, unless, indeed, their extreme dissimilarity
should have proved a principle of mutual attraction. Both, it is true,
were characters proper to New England life, and possessing a common
ground, therefore, in their more external developments; but as unlike,
in their respective interiors, as if their native climes had been at
world-wide distance. During the early part of their acquaintance,
Phoebe had held back rather more than was customary with her frank and
simple manners from Holgrave's not very marked advances. Nor was she
yet satisfied that she knew him well, although they almost daily met
and talked together, in a kind, friendly, and what seemed to be a
familiar way.
The artist, in a desultory manner, had imparted to Phoebe something of
his history. Young as he was, and had his career terminated at the
point already attained, there had been enough of incident to fill, very
creditably, an autobiographic volume. A romance on the plan of Gil
Blas, adapted to American society and manners, would cease to be a
romance. The experience of many individuals among us, who think it
hardly worth the telling, would equal the vicissitudes of the
Spaniard's earlier life; while their ultimate success, or the point
whither they tend, may be incomparably higher than any that a novelist
would imagine for his hero. Holgrave, as he told Phoebe somewhat
proudly, could not boast of his origin, unless as being exceedingly
humble, nor of his education, except that it had been the scantiest
possible, and obtained by a few winter-months' attendance at a district
school. Left early to his own guidance, he had begun to be
self-dependent while yet a boy; and it was a condition aptly suited to
his natural force of will. Though now but twenty-two years old
(lacking some months, which are years in such a life), he had already
been, first, a country schoolmaster; next, a salesman in a country
store; and, either at the same time or afterwards, the political editor
of a country newspaper. He had subsequently travelled New England and
the Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut
manufactory of cologne-water and other essences. In an episodical way
he had studied and practised dentistry, and with very flattering
success, especially in many of the factory-towns along our inland
streams. As a supernumerary official, of some kind or other, aboard a
packet-ship, he had visited Europe, and found means, before his return,
to see Italy, and part of France and Germany. At a later period he had
spent some months in a community of Fourierists. Still more recently
he had been a public lecturer on Mesmerism, for which science (as he
assured Phoebe, and, indeed, satisfactorily proved, by putting
Chanticleer, who happened to be scratching near by, to sleep) he had
very remarkable endowments.
His present phase, as a daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in
his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the
preceding ones. It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an
adventurer, who had his bread to earn. It would be thrown aside as
carelessly, whenever he should choose to earn his bread by some other
equally digressive means. But what was most remarkable, and, perhaps,
showed a more than common poise in the young man, was the fact that,
amid all these personal vicissitudes, he had never lost his identity.
Homeless as he had been,--continually changing his whereabout, and,
therefore, responsible neither to public opinion nor to
individuals,--putting off one exterior, and snatching up another, to be
soon shifted for a third,--he had never violated the innermost man, but
had carried his conscience along with him. It was impossible to know
Holgrave without recognizing this to be the fact. Hepzibah had seen
it. Phoebe soon saw it likewise, and gave him the sort of confidence
which such a certainty inspires. She was startled, however, and
sometimes repelled,--not by any doubt of his integrity to whatever law
he acknowledged, but by a sense that his law differed from her own. He
made her uneasy, and seemed to unsettle everything around her, by his
lack of reverence for what was fixed, unless, at a moment's warning, it
could establish its right to hold its ground.
Then, moreover, she scarcely thought him affectionate in his nature.
He was too calm and cool an observer. Phoebe felt his eye, often; his
heart, seldom or never. He took a certain kind of interest in Hepzibah
and her brother, and Phoebe herself. He studied them attentively, and
allowed no slightest circumstance of their individualities to escape
him. He was ready to do them whatever good he might; but, after all,
he never exactly made common cause with them, nor gave any reliable
evidence that he loved them better in proportion as he knew them more.
In his relations with them, he seemed to be in quest of mental food,
not heart-sustenance. Phoebe could not conceive what interested him so
much in her friends and herself, intellectually, since he cared nothing
for them, or, comparatively, so little, as objects of human affection.
Always, in his interviews with Phoebe, the artist made especial inquiry
as to the welfare of Clifford, whom, except at the Sunday festival, he
seldom saw.
"Does he still seem happy?" he asked one day.
"As happy as a child," answered Phoebe; "but--like a child, too--very
easily disturbed."
"How disturbed?" inquired Holgrave. "By things without, or by thoughts
within?"
"I cannot see his thoughts! How should I?" replied Phoebe with simple
piquancy. "Very often his humor changes without any reason that can be
guessed at, just as a cloud comes over the sun. Latterly, since I have
begun to know him better, I feel it to be not quite right to look
closely into his moods. He has had such a great sorrow, that his heart
is made all solemn and sacred by it. When he is cheerful,--when the
sun shines into his mind,--then I venture to peep in, just as far as
the light reaches, but no further. It is holy ground where the shadow
falls!"
"How prettily you express this sentiment!" said the artist. "I can
understand the feeling, without possessing it. Had I your
opportunities, no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to
the full depth of my plummet-line!"
"How strange that you should wish it!" remarked Phoebe involuntarily.
"What is Cousin Clifford to you?"
"Oh, nothing,--of course, nothing!" answered Holgrave with a smile.
"Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible world! The more I look
at it, the more it puzzles me, and I begin to suspect that a man's
bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom. Men and women, and
children, too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be
certain that he really knows them; nor ever guess what they have been
from what he sees them to be now. Judge Pyncheon! Clifford! What a
complex riddle--a complexity of complexities--do they present! It
requires intuitive sympathy, like a young girl's, to solve it. A mere
observer, like myself (who never have any intuitions, and am, at best,
only subtile and acute), is pretty certain to go astray."
The artist now turned the conversation to themes less dark than that
which they had touched upon. Phoebe and he were young together; nor
had Holgrave, in his premature experience of life, wasted entirely that
beautiful spirit of youth, which, gushing forth from one small heart
and fancy, may diffuse itself over the universe, making it all as
bright as on the first day of creation. Man's own youth is the world's
youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth's
granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould
into whatever shape he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk
sagely about the world's old age, but never actually believed what he
said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the
world--that gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without
being venerable--as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into
all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest
promise of becoming. He had that sense, or inward prophecy,--which a
young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a
mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,--that we
are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this
very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be
accomplished in his own lifetime. It seemed to Holgrave,--as doubtless
it has seemed to the hopeful of every century since the epoch of Adam's
grandchildren,--that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown
and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be
thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to
begin anew.
As to the main point,--may we never live to doubt it!--as to the better
centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right. His error lay
in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is
destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new
suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in
applying his own little life-span as the measure of an interminable
achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything
to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or
against it. Yet it was well for him to think so. This enthusiasm,
infusing itself through the calmness of his character, and thus taking
an aspect of settled thought and wisdom, would serve to keep his youth
pure, and make his aspirations high. And when, with the years settling
down more weightily upon him, his early faith should be modified by
inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution
of his sentiments. He would still have faith in man's brightening
destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he should recognize
his helplessness in his own behalf; and the haughty faith, with which
he began life, would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its
close, in discerning that man's best directed effort accomplishes a
kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities.
Holgrave had read very little, and that little in passing through the
thoroughfare of life, where the mystic language of his books was
necessarily mixed up with the babble of the multitude, so that both one
and the other were apt to lose any sense that might have been properly
their own. He considered himself a thinker, and was certainly of a
thoughtful turn, but, with his own path to discover, had perhaps hardly
yet reached the point where an educated man begins to think. The true
value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward
strength, which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely like a
change of garments; in that enthusiasm, so quiet that he scarcely knew
of its existence, but which gave a warmth to everything that he laid
his hand on; in that personal ambition, hidden--from his own as well as
other eyes--among his more generous impulses, but in which lurked a
certain efficacy, that might solidify him from a theorist into the
champion of some practicable cause. Altogether in his culture and want
of culture,--in his crude, wild, and misty philosophy, and the
practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies; in his
magnanimous zeal for man's welfare, and his recklessness of whatever
the ages had established in man's behalf; in his faith, and in his
infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lacked,--the artist might
fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his
native land.
His career it would be difficult to prefigure. There appeared to be
qualities in Holgrave, such as, in a country where everything is free
to the hand that can grasp it, could hardly fail to put some of the
world's prizes within his reach. But these matters are delightfully
uncertain. At almost every step in life, we meet with young men of
just about Holgrave's age, for whom we anticipate wonderful things, but
of whom, even after much and careful inquiry, we never happen to hear
another word. The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh
gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false
brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves and other people. Like
certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely in their
first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very
sober aspect after washing-day.
But our business is with Holgrave as we find him on this particular
afternoon, and in the arbor of the Pyncheon garden. In that point of
view, it was a pleasant sight to behold this young man, with so much
faith in himself, and so fair an appearance of admirable powers,--so
little harmed, too, by the many tests that had tried his metal,--it was
pleasant to see him in his kindly intercourse with Phoebe. Her thought
had scarcely done him justice when it pronounced him cold; or, if so,
he had grown warmer now. Without such purpose on her part, and
unconsciously on his, she made the House of the Seven Gables like a
home to him, and the garden a familiar precinct. With the insight on
which he prided himself, he fancied that he could look through Phoebe,
and all around her, and could read her off like a page of a child's
story-book. But these transparent natures are often deceptive in their
depth; those pebbles at the bottom of the fountain are farther from us
than we think. Thus the artist, whatever he might judge of Phoebe's
capacity, was beguiled, by some silent charm of hers, to talk freely of
what he dreamed of doing in the world. He poured himself out as to
another self. Very possibly, he forgot Phoebe while he talked to her,
and was moved only by the inevitable tendency of thought, when rendered
sympathetic by enthusiasm and emotion, to flow into the first safe
reservoir which it finds. But, had you peeped at them through the
chinks of the garden-fence, the young man's earnestness and heightened
color might have led you to suppose that he was making love to the
young girl!
At length, something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for
Phoebe to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin
Hepzibah, and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old Pyncheon
House. Without directly answering her, he turned from the Future,
which had heretofore been the theme of his discourse, and began to
speak of the influences of the Past. One subject, indeed, is but the
reverberation of the other.
"Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?" cried he, keeping up the
earnest tone of his preceding conversation. "It lies upon the Present
like a giant's dead body In fact, the case is just as if a young giant
were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse
of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only
needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle
you to see what slaves we are to bygone times,--to Death, if we give
the matter the right word!"
"But I do not see it," observed Phoebe.
"For example, then," continued Holgrave: "a dead man, if he happens to
have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die
intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much
longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and
living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in
dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's
pathos! We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die
of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We
worship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds.
Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand
obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man's white,
immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we
must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence
on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world
of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to
interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's
houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!"
"And why not," said Phoebe, "so long as we can be comfortable in them?"
"But we shall live to see the day, I trust," went on the artist, "when
no man shall build his house for posterity. Why should he? He might
just as reasonably order a durable suit of clothes,--leather, or
guttapercha, or whatever else lasts longest,--so that his
great-grandchildren should have the benefit of them, and cut precisely
the same figure in the world that he himself does. If each generation
were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change,
comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform
which society is now suffering for. I doubt whether even our public
edifices--our capitols, state-houses, court-houses, city-hall, and
churches,--ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or
brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty
years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and
reform the institutions which they symbolize."
"How you hate everything old!" said Phoebe in dismay. "It makes me
dizzy to think of such a shifting world!"
"I certainly love nothing mouldy," answered Holgrave. "Now, this old
Pyncheon House! Is it a wholesome place to live in, with its black
shingles, and the green moss that shows how damp they are?--its dark,
low-studded rooms--its grime and sordidness, which are the
crystallization on its walls of the human breath, that has been drawn
and exhaled here in discontent and anguish? The house ought to be
purified with fire,--purified till only its ashes remain!"
"Then why do you live in it?" asked Phoebe, a little piqued.
"Oh, I am pursuing my studies here; not in books, however," replied
Holgrave. "The house, in my view, is expressive of that odious and
abominable Past, with all its bad influences, against which I have just
been declaiming. I dwell in it for a while, that I may know the better
how to hate it. By the bye, did you ever hear the story of Maule, the
wizard, and what happened between him and your immeasurably
great-grandfather?"
"Yes, indeed!" said Phoebe; "I heard it long ago, from my father, and
two or three times from my cousin Hepzibah, in the month that I have
been here. She seems to think that all the calamities of the Pyncheons
began from that quarrel with the wizard, as you call him. And you, Mr.
Holgrave look as if you thought so too! How singular that you should
believe what is so very absurd, when you reject many things that are a
great deal worthier of credit!"
"I do believe it," said the artist seriously; "not as a superstition,
however, but as proved by unquestionable facts, and as exemplifying a
theory. Now, see: under those seven gables, at which we now look
up,--and which old Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the house of his
descendants, in prosperity and happiness, down to an epoch far beyond
the present,--under that roof, through a portion of three centuries,
there has been perpetual remorse of conscience, a constantly defeated
hope, strife amongst kindred, various misery, a strange form of death,
dark suspicion, unspeakable disgrace,--all, or most of which calamity I
have the means of tracing to the old Puritan's inordinate desire to
plant and endow a family. To plant a family! This idea is at the
bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is,
that, once in every half-century, at longest, a family should be merged
into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its
ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in
hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean
pipes. In the family existence of these Pyncheons, for
instance,--forgive me Phoebe, but I cannot think of you as one of
them,--in their brief New England pedigree, there has been time enough
to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another."
"You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred," said Phoebe, debating
with herself whether she ought to take offence.
"I speak true thoughts to a true mind!" answered Holgrave, with a
vehemence which Phoebe had not before witnessed in him. "The truth is
as I say! Furthermore, the original perpetrator and father of this
mischief appears to have perpetuated himself, and still walks the
street,--at least, his very image, in mind and body,--with the fairest
prospect of transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched an
inheritance as he has received! Do you remember the daguerreotype, and
its resemblance to the old portrait?"
"How strangely in earnest you are!" exclaimed Phoebe, looking at him
with surprise and perplexity; half alarmed and partly inclined to
laugh. "You talk of the lunacy of the Pyncheons; is it contagious?"
"I understand you!" said the artist, coloring and laughing. "I believe
I am a little mad. This subject has taken hold of my mind with the
strangest tenacity of clutch since I have lodged in yonder old gable.
As one method of throwing it off, I have put an incident of the
Pyncheon family history, with which I happen to be acquainted, into the
form of a legend, and mean to publish it in a magazine."
"Do you write for the magazines?" inquired Phoebe.
"Is it possible you did not know it?" cried Holgrave. "Well, such is
literary fame! Yes. Miss Phoebe Pyncheon, among the multitude of my
marvellous gifts I have that of writing stories; and my name has
figured, I can assure you, on the covers of Graham and Godey, making as
respectable an appearance, for aught I could see, as any of the
canonized bead-roll with which it was associated. In the humorous
line, I am thought to have a very pretty way with me; and as for
pathos, I am as provocative of tears as an onion. But shall I read you
my story?"
"Yes, if it is not very long," said Phoebe,--and added
laughingly,--"nor very dull."
As this latter point was one which the daguerreotypist could not decide
for himself, he forthwith produced his roll of manuscript, and, while
the late sunbeams gilded the seven gables, began to read.
| The Daguerreotypist: When Clifford slept, Phoebe was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder of the day and evening. This freedom was essential to Phoebe's health, for the old house had dry-rot in its walls and was not good to breathe. Phoebe began to understand Clifford better, and Clifford liked that she was not so constantly happy, for her eyes seemed larger, darker and deeper. The only youthful mind with whom Phoebe had regular contact was Holgrave. Both were true New England characters. Holgrave did not come from an elite family, and was self-dependent while still a boy. He was now twenty-two and had been a schoolmaster, a salesman and the political editor of a country newspaper. His present phase as a daguerreotypist was likely to be as impermanent as the previous professions. It was remarkable that he had not lost his identity among these various changes. Holgrave made Phoebe uneasy by his lack of reverence for what was fixed. He appeared to study Phoebe, Clifford and Hepzibah; he seemed to be in the quest of mental food, not heart-sustenance. Phoebe asks what Clifford is to Holgrave, and he answers nothing except an odd and incomprehensible world. He views Clifford and Judge Pyncheon as complexities. Holgrave's error lay in supposing that this age was to trade antiquity entirely for what is new. He had a deep consciousness of inward strength and considered himself a thinker. Holgrave hopes to see the day when no man shall build a house for posterity. He even claims that he lives in the house that he finds abominable in order to know how better to hate it. Clifford mentions the story of Maule to Phoebe. Holgrave believes that the Pyncheons that live in the house have been infected with a kind of lunacy. Holgrave has been writing a family history of the Pyncheons that he intends to publish. | summary |
IT must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so
active as Phoebe could be wholly confined within the precincts of the
old Pyncheon House. Clifford's demands upon her time were usually
satisfied, in those long days, considerably earlier than sunset. Quiet
as his daily existence seemed, it nevertheless drained all the
resources by which he lived. It was not physical exercise that
overwearied him,--for except that he sometimes wrought a little with a
hoe, or paced the garden-walk, or, in rainy weather, traversed a large
unoccupied room,--it was his tendency to remain only too quiescent, as
regarded any toil of the limbs and muscles. But, either there was a
smouldering fire within him that consumed his vital energy, or the
monotony that would have dragged itself with benumbing effect over a
mind differently situated was no monotony to Clifford. Possibly, he
was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly
assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights,
sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more
practised with the world. As all is activity and vicissitude to the
new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had
undergone a kind of new creation, after its long-suspended life.
Be the cause what it might, Clifford commonly retired to rest,
thoroughly exhausted, while the sunbeams were still melting through his
window-curtains, or were thrown with late lustre on the chamber wall.
And while he thus slept early, as other children do, and dreamed of
childhood, Phoebe was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder
of the day and evening.
This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so
little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe. The old
house, as we have already said, had both the dry-rot and the damp-rot
in its walls; it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere than that.
Hepzibah, though she had her valuable and redeeming traits, had grown
to be a kind of lunatic by imprisoning herself so long in one place,
with no other company than a single series of ideas, and but one
affection, and one bitter sense of wrong. Clifford, the reader may
perhaps imagine, was too inert to operate morally on his
fellow-creatures, however intimate and exclusive their relations with
him. But the sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtile
and universal than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes
of organized life, and vibrates from one to another. A flower, for
instance, as Phoebe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in
Clifford's hand, or Hepzibah's, than in her own; and by the same law,
converting her whole daily life into a flower fragrance for these two
sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much
sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast. Unless she had
now and then indulged her brisk impulses, and breathed rural air in a
suburban walk, or ocean breezes along the shore,--had occasionally
obeyed the impulse of Nature, in New England girls, by attending a
metaphysical or philosophical lecture, or viewing a seven-mile
panorama, or listening to a concert,--had gone shopping about the city,
ransacking entire depots of splendid merchandise, and bringing home a
ribbon,--had employed, likewise, a little time to read the Bible in her
chamber, and had stolen a little more to think of her mother and her
native place--unless for such moral medicines as the above, we should
soon have beheld our poor Phoebe grow thin and put on a bleached,
unwholesome aspect, and assume strange, shy ways, prophetic of
old-maidenhood and a cheerless future.
Even as it was, a change grew visible; a change partly to be regretted,
although whatever charm it infringed upon was repaired by another,
perhaps more precious. She was not so constantly gay, but had her
moods of thought, which Clifford, on the whole, liked better than her
former phase of unmingled cheerfulness; because now she understood him
better and more delicately, and sometimes even interpreted him to
himself. Her eyes looked larger, and darker, and deeper; so deep, at
some silent moments, that they seemed like Artesian wells, down, down,
into the infinite. She was less girlish than when we first beheld her
alighting from the omnibus; less girlish, but more a woman.
The only youthful mind with which Phoebe had an opportunity of frequent
intercourse was that of the daguerreotypist. Inevitably, by the
pressure of the seclusion about them, they had been brought into habits
of some familiarity. Had they met under different circumstances,
neither of these young persons would have been likely to bestow much
thought upon the other, unless, indeed, their extreme dissimilarity
should have proved a principle of mutual attraction. Both, it is true,
were characters proper to New England life, and possessing a common
ground, therefore, in their more external developments; but as unlike,
in their respective interiors, as if their native climes had been at
world-wide distance. During the early part of their acquaintance,
Phoebe had held back rather more than was customary with her frank and
simple manners from Holgrave's not very marked advances. Nor was she
yet satisfied that she knew him well, although they almost daily met
and talked together, in a kind, friendly, and what seemed to be a
familiar way.
The artist, in a desultory manner, had imparted to Phoebe something of
his history. Young as he was, and had his career terminated at the
point already attained, there had been enough of incident to fill, very
creditably, an autobiographic volume. A romance on the plan of Gil
Blas, adapted to American society and manners, would cease to be a
romance. The experience of many individuals among us, who think it
hardly worth the telling, would equal the vicissitudes of the
Spaniard's earlier life; while their ultimate success, or the point
whither they tend, may be incomparably higher than any that a novelist
would imagine for his hero. Holgrave, as he told Phoebe somewhat
proudly, could not boast of his origin, unless as being exceedingly
humble, nor of his education, except that it had been the scantiest
possible, and obtained by a few winter-months' attendance at a district
school. Left early to his own guidance, he had begun to be
self-dependent while yet a boy; and it was a condition aptly suited to
his natural force of will. Though now but twenty-two years old
(lacking some months, which are years in such a life), he had already
been, first, a country schoolmaster; next, a salesman in a country
store; and, either at the same time or afterwards, the political editor
of a country newspaper. He had subsequently travelled New England and
the Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut
manufactory of cologne-water and other essences. In an episodical way
he had studied and practised dentistry, and with very flattering
success, especially in many of the factory-towns along our inland
streams. As a supernumerary official, of some kind or other, aboard a
packet-ship, he had visited Europe, and found means, before his return,
to see Italy, and part of France and Germany. At a later period he had
spent some months in a community of Fourierists. Still more recently
he had been a public lecturer on Mesmerism, for which science (as he
assured Phoebe, and, indeed, satisfactorily proved, by putting
Chanticleer, who happened to be scratching near by, to sleep) he had
very remarkable endowments.
His present phase, as a daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in
his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the
preceding ones. It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an
adventurer, who had his bread to earn. It would be thrown aside as
carelessly, whenever he should choose to earn his bread by some other
equally digressive means. But what was most remarkable, and, perhaps,
showed a more than common poise in the young man, was the fact that,
amid all these personal vicissitudes, he had never lost his identity.
Homeless as he had been,--continually changing his whereabout, and,
therefore, responsible neither to public opinion nor to
individuals,--putting off one exterior, and snatching up another, to be
soon shifted for a third,--he had never violated the innermost man, but
had carried his conscience along with him. It was impossible to know
Holgrave without recognizing this to be the fact. Hepzibah had seen
it. Phoebe soon saw it likewise, and gave him the sort of confidence
which such a certainty inspires. She was startled, however, and
sometimes repelled,--not by any doubt of his integrity to whatever law
he acknowledged, but by a sense that his law differed from her own. He
made her uneasy, and seemed to unsettle everything around her, by his
lack of reverence for what was fixed, unless, at a moment's warning, it
could establish its right to hold its ground.
Then, moreover, she scarcely thought him affectionate in his nature.
He was too calm and cool an observer. Phoebe felt his eye, often; his
heart, seldom or never. He took a certain kind of interest in Hepzibah
and her brother, and Phoebe herself. He studied them attentively, and
allowed no slightest circumstance of their individualities to escape
him. He was ready to do them whatever good he might; but, after all,
he never exactly made common cause with them, nor gave any reliable
evidence that he loved them better in proportion as he knew them more.
In his relations with them, he seemed to be in quest of mental food,
not heart-sustenance. Phoebe could not conceive what interested him so
much in her friends and herself, intellectually, since he cared nothing
for them, or, comparatively, so little, as objects of human affection.
Always, in his interviews with Phoebe, the artist made especial inquiry
as to the welfare of Clifford, whom, except at the Sunday festival, he
seldom saw.
"Does he still seem happy?" he asked one day.
"As happy as a child," answered Phoebe; "but--like a child, too--very
easily disturbed."
"How disturbed?" inquired Holgrave. "By things without, or by thoughts
within?"
"I cannot see his thoughts! How should I?" replied Phoebe with simple
piquancy. "Very often his humor changes without any reason that can be
guessed at, just as a cloud comes over the sun. Latterly, since I have
begun to know him better, I feel it to be not quite right to look
closely into his moods. He has had such a great sorrow, that his heart
is made all solemn and sacred by it. When he is cheerful,--when the
sun shines into his mind,--then I venture to peep in, just as far as
the light reaches, but no further. It is holy ground where the shadow
falls!"
"How prettily you express this sentiment!" said the artist. "I can
understand the feeling, without possessing it. Had I your
opportunities, no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to
the full depth of my plummet-line!"
"How strange that you should wish it!" remarked Phoebe involuntarily.
"What is Cousin Clifford to you?"
"Oh, nothing,--of course, nothing!" answered Holgrave with a smile.
"Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible world! The more I look
at it, the more it puzzles me, and I begin to suspect that a man's
bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom. Men and women, and
children, too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be
certain that he really knows them; nor ever guess what they have been
from what he sees them to be now. Judge Pyncheon! Clifford! What a
complex riddle--a complexity of complexities--do they present! It
requires intuitive sympathy, like a young girl's, to solve it. A mere
observer, like myself (who never have any intuitions, and am, at best,
only subtile and acute), is pretty certain to go astray."
The artist now turned the conversation to themes less dark than that
which they had touched upon. Phoebe and he were young together; nor
had Holgrave, in his premature experience of life, wasted entirely that
beautiful spirit of youth, which, gushing forth from one small heart
and fancy, may diffuse itself over the universe, making it all as
bright as on the first day of creation. Man's own youth is the world's
youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth's
granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould
into whatever shape he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk
sagely about the world's old age, but never actually believed what he
said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the
world--that gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without
being venerable--as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into
all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest
promise of becoming. He had that sense, or inward prophecy,--which a
young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a
mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,--that we
are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this
very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be
accomplished in his own lifetime. It seemed to Holgrave,--as doubtless
it has seemed to the hopeful of every century since the epoch of Adam's
grandchildren,--that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown
and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be
thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to
begin anew.
As to the main point,--may we never live to doubt it!--as to the better
centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right. His error lay
in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is
destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new
suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in
applying his own little life-span as the measure of an interminable
achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything
to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or
against it. Yet it was well for him to think so. This enthusiasm,
infusing itself through the calmness of his character, and thus taking
an aspect of settled thought and wisdom, would serve to keep his youth
pure, and make his aspirations high. And when, with the years settling
down more weightily upon him, his early faith should be modified by
inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution
of his sentiments. He would still have faith in man's brightening
destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he should recognize
his helplessness in his own behalf; and the haughty faith, with which
he began life, would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its
close, in discerning that man's best directed effort accomplishes a
kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities.
Holgrave had read very little, and that little in passing through the
thoroughfare of life, where the mystic language of his books was
necessarily mixed up with the babble of the multitude, so that both one
and the other were apt to lose any sense that might have been properly
their own. He considered himself a thinker, and was certainly of a
thoughtful turn, but, with his own path to discover, had perhaps hardly
yet reached the point where an educated man begins to think. The true
value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward
strength, which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely like a
change of garments; in that enthusiasm, so quiet that he scarcely knew
of its existence, but which gave a warmth to everything that he laid
his hand on; in that personal ambition, hidden--from his own as well as
other eyes--among his more generous impulses, but in which lurked a
certain efficacy, that might solidify him from a theorist into the
champion of some practicable cause. Altogether in his culture and want
of culture,--in his crude, wild, and misty philosophy, and the
practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies; in his
magnanimous zeal for man's welfare, and his recklessness of whatever
the ages had established in man's behalf; in his faith, and in his
infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lacked,--the artist might
fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his
native land.
His career it would be difficult to prefigure. There appeared to be
qualities in Holgrave, such as, in a country where everything is free
to the hand that can grasp it, could hardly fail to put some of the
world's prizes within his reach. But these matters are delightfully
uncertain. At almost every step in life, we meet with young men of
just about Holgrave's age, for whom we anticipate wonderful things, but
of whom, even after much and careful inquiry, we never happen to hear
another word. The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh
gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false
brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves and other people. Like
certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely in their
first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very
sober aspect after washing-day.
But our business is with Holgrave as we find him on this particular
afternoon, and in the arbor of the Pyncheon garden. In that point of
view, it was a pleasant sight to behold this young man, with so much
faith in himself, and so fair an appearance of admirable powers,--so
little harmed, too, by the many tests that had tried his metal,--it was
pleasant to see him in his kindly intercourse with Phoebe. Her thought
had scarcely done him justice when it pronounced him cold; or, if so,
he had grown warmer now. Without such purpose on her part, and
unconsciously on his, she made the House of the Seven Gables like a
home to him, and the garden a familiar precinct. With the insight on
which he prided himself, he fancied that he could look through Phoebe,
and all around her, and could read her off like a page of a child's
story-book. But these transparent natures are often deceptive in their
depth; those pebbles at the bottom of the fountain are farther from us
than we think. Thus the artist, whatever he might judge of Phoebe's
capacity, was beguiled, by some silent charm of hers, to talk freely of
what he dreamed of doing in the world. He poured himself out as to
another self. Very possibly, he forgot Phoebe while he talked to her,
and was moved only by the inevitable tendency of thought, when rendered
sympathetic by enthusiasm and emotion, to flow into the first safe
reservoir which it finds. But, had you peeped at them through the
chinks of the garden-fence, the young man's earnestness and heightened
color might have led you to suppose that he was making love to the
young girl!
At length, something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for
Phoebe to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin
Hepzibah, and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old Pyncheon
House. Without directly answering her, he turned from the Future,
which had heretofore been the theme of his discourse, and began to
speak of the influences of the Past. One subject, indeed, is but the
reverberation of the other.
"Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?" cried he, keeping up the
earnest tone of his preceding conversation. "It lies upon the Present
like a giant's dead body In fact, the case is just as if a young giant
were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse
of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only
needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle
you to see what slaves we are to bygone times,--to Death, if we give
the matter the right word!"
"But I do not see it," observed Phoebe.
"For example, then," continued Holgrave: "a dead man, if he happens to
have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die
intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much
longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and
living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in
dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's
pathos! We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die
of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We
worship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds.
Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand
obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man's white,
immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we
must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence
on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world
of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to
interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's
houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!"
"And why not," said Phoebe, "so long as we can be comfortable in them?"
"But we shall live to see the day, I trust," went on the artist, "when
no man shall build his house for posterity. Why should he? He might
just as reasonably order a durable suit of clothes,--leather, or
guttapercha, or whatever else lasts longest,--so that his
great-grandchildren should have the benefit of them, and cut precisely
the same figure in the world that he himself does. If each generation
were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change,
comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform
which society is now suffering for. I doubt whether even our public
edifices--our capitols, state-houses, court-houses, city-hall, and
churches,--ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or
brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty
years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and
reform the institutions which they symbolize."
"How you hate everything old!" said Phoebe in dismay. "It makes me
dizzy to think of such a shifting world!"
"I certainly love nothing mouldy," answered Holgrave. "Now, this old
Pyncheon House! Is it a wholesome place to live in, with its black
shingles, and the green moss that shows how damp they are?--its dark,
low-studded rooms--its grime and sordidness, which are the
crystallization on its walls of the human breath, that has been drawn
and exhaled here in discontent and anguish? The house ought to be
purified with fire,--purified till only its ashes remain!"
"Then why do you live in it?" asked Phoebe, a little piqued.
"Oh, I am pursuing my studies here; not in books, however," replied
Holgrave. "The house, in my view, is expressive of that odious and
abominable Past, with all its bad influences, against which I have just
been declaiming. I dwell in it for a while, that I may know the better
how to hate it. By the bye, did you ever hear the story of Maule, the
wizard, and what happened between him and your immeasurably
great-grandfather?"
"Yes, indeed!" said Phoebe; "I heard it long ago, from my father, and
two or three times from my cousin Hepzibah, in the month that I have
been here. She seems to think that all the calamities of the Pyncheons
began from that quarrel with the wizard, as you call him. And you, Mr.
Holgrave look as if you thought so too! How singular that you should
believe what is so very absurd, when you reject many things that are a
great deal worthier of credit!"
"I do believe it," said the artist seriously; "not as a superstition,
however, but as proved by unquestionable facts, and as exemplifying a
theory. Now, see: under those seven gables, at which we now look
up,--and which old Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the house of his
descendants, in prosperity and happiness, down to an epoch far beyond
the present,--under that roof, through a portion of three centuries,
there has been perpetual remorse of conscience, a constantly defeated
hope, strife amongst kindred, various misery, a strange form of death,
dark suspicion, unspeakable disgrace,--all, or most of which calamity I
have the means of tracing to the old Puritan's inordinate desire to
plant and endow a family. To plant a family! This idea is at the
bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is,
that, once in every half-century, at longest, a family should be merged
into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its
ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in
hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean
pipes. In the family existence of these Pyncheons, for
instance,--forgive me Phoebe, but I cannot think of you as one of
them,--in their brief New England pedigree, there has been time enough
to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another."
"You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred," said Phoebe, debating
with herself whether she ought to take offence.
"I speak true thoughts to a true mind!" answered Holgrave, with a
vehemence which Phoebe had not before witnessed in him. "The truth is
as I say! Furthermore, the original perpetrator and father of this
mischief appears to have perpetuated himself, and still walks the
street,--at least, his very image, in mind and body,--with the fairest
prospect of transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched an
inheritance as he has received! Do you remember the daguerreotype, and
its resemblance to the old portrait?"
"How strangely in earnest you are!" exclaimed Phoebe, looking at him
with surprise and perplexity; half alarmed and partly inclined to
laugh. "You talk of the lunacy of the Pyncheons; is it contagious?"
"I understand you!" said the artist, coloring and laughing. "I believe
I am a little mad. This subject has taken hold of my mind with the
strangest tenacity of clutch since I have lodged in yonder old gable.
As one method of throwing it off, I have put an incident of the
Pyncheon family history, with which I happen to be acquainted, into the
form of a legend, and mean to publish it in a magazine."
"Do you write for the magazines?" inquired Phoebe.
"Is it possible you did not know it?" cried Holgrave. "Well, such is
literary fame! Yes. Miss Phoebe Pyncheon, among the multitude of my
marvellous gifts I have that of writing stories; and my name has
figured, I can assure you, on the covers of Graham and Godey, making as
respectable an appearance, for aught I could see, as any of the
canonized bead-roll with which it was associated. In the humorous
line, I am thought to have a very pretty way with me; and as for
pathos, I am as provocative of tears as an onion. But shall I read you
my story?"
"Yes, if it is not very long," said Phoebe,--and added
laughingly,--"nor very dull."
As this latter point was one which the daguerreotypist could not decide
for himself, he forthwith produced his roll of manuscript, and, while
the late sunbeams gilded the seven gables, began to read.
| While Phoebe's domestic gifts and beauty provide Hepzibah and Clifford with sustenance, living within the House of the Seven Gables is no ideal situation for the young woman, who deserves a vital existence that the house and her relatives cannot provide. Her physical appearance reflects this more mournful quality, as Phoebe ceases to appear as the idealized country maiden and becomes more pensive and aware. She does retain some measure of innocence, however; she shares with her older relatives a faith in the conservatives values that the House embodies, despite the fact that those values are contrary to her own status and longings. Among the Pyncheon dynasty, Mr. Holgrave is the one self-made man. Although the one character who is employed in a profession, he cannot be defined by his career; he retains his identity even as his career path changes from journalist to salesman and daguerreotypist. Rather, Holgrave defines himself by his belief system. He is a clear political liberal, even approaching extremism, who has a strong belief in the efficacy of the solutions he proposes for society's ills. Hawthorne portrays Holgrave as the opposite of the Pyncheon clan while they draw their value solely from posterity, Holgrave believes in regeneration and the foolishness of antiquity. Hawthorne nevertheless portrays Holgrave as a sinister character with veiled intentions. He studies the Pyncheon family as if gathering information from them, and even reveals to Phoebe aspects of the family history that indicate that he has gathered information about the Pyncheons. In fact, in this chapter Holgrave directly reveals that he has been working on a history of the Pyncheon family. This history thus brings the commercial concerns of Hawthorne's contemporary society together with the aristocratic and monarchical past of Colonel Pyncheon. Furthermore, Holgrave's sense of history serves a dual purpose, foreshadowing later events and allowing Holgrave to serve as a narrator of the Pyncheon past as a juxtaposition with the Pyncheon present | analysis |
THERE was a message brought, one day, from the worshipful Gervayse
Pyncheon to young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, desiring his immediate
presence at the House of the Seven Gables.
"And what does your master want with me?" said the carpenter to Mr.
Pyncheon's black servant. "Does the house need any repair? Well it
may, by this time; and no blame to my father who built it, neither! I
was reading the old Colonel's tombstone, no longer ago than last
Sabbath; and, reckoning from that date, the house has stood
seven-and-thirty years. No wonder if there should be a job to do on
the roof."
"Don't know what massa wants," answered Scipio. "The house is a berry
good house, and old Colonel Pyncheon think so too, I reckon;--else why
the old man haunt it so, and frighten a poor nigga, As he does?"
"Well, well, friend Scipio; let your master know that I'm coming," said
the carpenter with a laugh. "For a fair, workmanlike job, he'll find
me his man. And so the house is haunted, is it? It will take a tighter
workman than I am to keep the spirits out of the Seven Gables. Even if
the Colonel would be quiet," he added, muttering to himself, "my old
grandfather, the wizard, will be pretty sure to stick to the Pyncheons
as long as their walls hold together."
"What's that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule?" asked Scipio.
"And what for do you look so black at me?"
"No matter, darky," said the carpenter. "Do you think nobody is to
look black but yourself? Go tell your master I'm coming; and if you
happen to see Mistress Alice, his daughter, give Matthew Maule's humble
respects to her. She has brought a fair face from Italy,--fair, and
gentle, and proud,--has that same Alice Pyncheon!"
"He talk of Mistress Alice!" cried Scipio, as he returned from his
errand. "The low carpenter-man! He no business so much as to look at
her a great way off!"
This young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, it must be observed, was a
person little understood, and not very generally liked, in the town
where he resided; not that anything could be alleged against his
integrity, or his skill and diligence in the handicraft which he
exercised. The aversion (as it might justly be called) with which many
persons regarded him was partly the result of his own character and
deportment, and partly an inheritance.
He was the grandson of a former Matthew Maule, one of the early
settlers of the town, and who had been a famous and terrible wizard in
his day. This old reprobate was one of the sufferers when Cotton
Mather, and his brother ministers, and the learned judges, and other
wise men, and Sir William Phipps, the sagacious governor, made such
laudable efforts to weaken the great enemy of souls, by sending a
multitude of his adherents up the rocky pathway of Gallows Hill. Since
those days, no doubt, it had grown to be suspected that, in consequence
of an unfortunate overdoing of a work praiseworthy in itself, the
proceedings against the witches had proved far less acceptable to the
Beneficent Father than to that very Arch Enemy whom they were intended
to distress and utterly overwhelm. It is not the less certain,
however, that awe and terror brooded over the memories of those who
died for this horrible crime of witchcraft. Their graves, in the
crevices of the rocks, were supposed to be incapable of retaining the
occupants who had been so hastily thrust into them. Old Matthew Maule,
especially, was known to have as little hesitation or difficulty in
rising out of his grave as an ordinary man in getting out of bed, and
was as often seen at midnight as living people at noonday. This
pestilent wizard (in whom his just punishment seemed to have wrought no
manner of amendment) had an inveterate habit of haunting a certain
mansion, styled the House of the Seven Gables, against the owner of
which he pretended to hold an unsettled claim for ground-rent. The
ghost, it appears,--with the pertinacity which was one of his
distinguishing characteristics while alive,--insisted that he was the
rightful proprietor of the site upon which the house stood. His terms
were, that either the aforesaid ground-rent, from the day when the
cellar began to be dug, should be paid down, or the mansion itself
given up; else he, the ghostly creditor, would have his finger in all
the affairs of the Pyncheons, and make everything go wrong with them,
though it should be a thousand years after his death. It was a wild
story, perhaps, but seemed not altogether so incredible to those who
could remember what an inflexibly obstinate old fellow this wizard
Maule had been.
Now, the wizard's grandson, the young Matthew Maule of our story, was
popularly supposed to have inherited some of his ancestor's
questionable traits. It is wonderful how many absurdities were
promulgated in reference to the young man. He was fabled, for example,
to have a strange power of getting into people's dreams, and regulating
matters there according to his own fancy, pretty much like the
stage-manager of a theatre. There was a great deal of talk among the
neighbors, particularly the petticoated ones, about what they called
the witchcraft of Maule's eye. Some said that he could look into
people's minds; others, that, by the marvellous power of this eye, he
could draw people into his own mind, or send them, if he pleased, to do
errands to his grandfather, in the spiritual world; others, again, that
it was what is termed an Evil Eye, and possessed the valuable faculty
of blighting corn, and drying children into mummies with the heartburn.
But, after all, what worked most to the young carpenter's disadvantage
was, first, the reserve and sternness of his natural disposition, and
next, the fact of his not being a church-communicant, and the suspicion
of his holding heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity.
After receiving Mr. Pyncheon's message, the carpenter merely tarried to
finish a small job, which he happened to have in hand, and then took
his way towards the House of the Seven Gables. This noted edifice,
though its style might be getting a little out of fashion, was still as
respectable a family residence as that of any gentleman in town. The
present owner, Gervayse Pyncheon, was said to have contracted a dislike
to the house, in consequence of a shock to his sensibility, in early
childhood, from the sudden death of his grandfather. In the very act
of running to climb Colonel Pyncheon's knee, the boy had discovered the
old Puritan to be a corpse. On arriving at manhood, Mr. Pyncheon had
visited England, where he married a lady of fortune, and had
subsequently spent many years, partly in the mother country, and partly
in various cities on the continent of Europe. During this period, the
family mansion had been consigned to the charge of a kinsman, who was
allowed to make it his home for the time being, in consideration of
keeping the premises in thorough repair. So faithfully had this
contract been fulfilled, that now, as the carpenter approached the
house, his practised eye could detect nothing to criticise in its
condition. The peaks of the seven gables rose up sharply; the shingled
roof looked thoroughly water-tight; and the glittering plaster-work
entirely covered the exterior walls, and sparkled in the October sun,
as if it had been new only a week ago.
The house had that pleasant aspect of life which is like the cheery
expression of comfortable activity in the human countenance. You could
see, at once, that there was the stir of a large family within it. A
huge load of oak-wood was passing through the gateway, towards the
outbuildings in the rear; the fat cook--or probably it might be the
housekeeper--stood at the side door, bargaining for some turkeys and
poultry which a countryman had brought for sale. Now and then a
maid-servant, neatly dressed, and now the shining sable face of a
slave, might be seen bustling across the windows, in the lower part of
the house. At an open window of a room in the second story, hanging
over some pots of beautiful and delicate flowers,--exotics, but which
had never known a more genial sunshine than that of the New England
autumn,--was the figure of a young lady, an exotic, like the flowers,
and beautiful and delicate as they. Her presence imparted an
indescribable grace and faint witchery to the whole edifice. In other
respects, it was a substantial, jolly-looking mansion, and seemed fit
to be the residence of a patriarch, who might establish his own
headquarters in the front gable and assign one of the remainder to each
of his six children, while the great chimney in the centre should
symbolize the old fellow's hospitable heart, which kept them all warm,
and made a great whole of the seven smaller ones.
There was a vertical sundial on the front gable; and as the carpenter
passed beneath it, he looked up and noted the hour.
"Three o'clock!" said he to himself. "My father told me that dial was
put up only an hour before the old Colonel's death. How truly it has
kept time these seven-and-thirty years past! The shadow creeps and
creeps, and is always looking over the shoulder of the sunshine!"
It might have befitted a craftsman, like Matthew Maule, on being sent
for to a gentleman's house, to go to the back door, where servants and
work-people were usually admitted; or at least to the side entrance,
where the better class of tradesmen made application. But the
carpenter had a great deal of pride and stiffness in his nature; and,
at this moment, moreover, his heart was bitter with the sense of
hereditary wrong, because he considered the great Pyncheon House to be
standing on soil which should have been his own. On this very site,
beside a spring of delicious water, his grandfather had felled the
pine-trees and built a cottage, in which children had been born to him;
and it was only from a dead man's stiffened fingers that Colonel
Pyncheon had wrested away the title-deeds. So young Maule went
straight to the principal entrance, beneath a portal of carved oak, and
gave such a peal of the iron knocker that you would have imagined the
stern old wizard himself to be standing at the threshold.
Black Scipio answered the summons in a prodigious, hurry; but showed
the whites of his eyes in amazement on beholding only the carpenter.
"Lord-a-mercy, what a great man he be, this carpenter fellow!" mumbled
Scipio, down in his throat. "Anybody think he beat on the door with
his biggest hammer!"
"Here I am!" said Maule sternly. "Show me the way to your master's
parlor."
As he stept into the house, a note of sweet and melancholy music
thrilled and vibrated along the passage-way, proceeding from one of the
rooms above stairs. It was the harpsichord which Alice Pyncheon had
brought with her from beyond the sea. The fair Alice bestowed most of
her maiden leisure between flowers and music, although the former were
apt to droop, and the melodies were often sad. She was of foreign
education, and could not take kindly to the New England modes of life,
in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed.
As Mr. Pyncheon had been impatiently awaiting Maule's arrival, black
Scipio, of course, lost no time in ushering the carpenter into his
master's presence. The room in which this gentleman sat was a parlor of
moderate size, looking out upon the garden of the house, and having its
windows partly shadowed by the foliage of fruit-trees. It was Mr.
Pyncheon's peculiar apartment, and was provided with furniture, in an
elegant and costly style, principally from Paris; the floor (which was
unusual at that day) being covered with a carpet, so skilfully and
richly wrought that it seemed to glow as with living flowers. In one
corner stood a marble woman, to whom her own beauty was the sole and
sufficient garment. Some pictures--that looked old, and had a mellow
tinge diffused through all their artful splendor--hung on the walls.
Near the fireplace was a large and very beautiful cabinet of ebony,
inlaid with ivory; a piece of antique furniture, which Mr. Pyncheon had
bought in Venice, and which he used as the treasure-place for medals,
ancient coins, and whatever small and valuable curiosities he had
picked up on his travels. Through all this variety of decoration,
however, the room showed its original characteristics; its low stud,
its cross-beam, its chimney-piece, with the old-fashioned Dutch tiles;
so that it was the emblem of a mind industriously stored with foreign
ideas, and elaborated into artificial refinement, but neither larger,
nor, in its proper self, more elegant than before.
There were two objects that appeared rather out of place in this very
handsomely furnished room. One was a large map, or surveyor's plan, of
a tract of land, which looked as if it had been drawn a good many years
ago, and was now dingy with smoke, and soiled, here and there, with the
touch of fingers. The other was a portrait of a stern old man, in a
Puritan garb, painted roughly, but with a bold effect, and a remarkably
strong expression of character.
At a small table, before a fire of English sea-coal, sat Mr. Pyncheon,
sipping coffee, which had grown to be a very favorite beverage with him
in France. He was a middle-aged and really handsome man, with a wig
flowing down upon his shoulders; his coat was of blue velvet, with lace
on the borders and at the button-holes; and the firelight glistened on
the spacious breadth of his waistcoat, which was flowered all over with
gold. On the entrance of Scipio, ushering in the carpenter, Mr.
Pyncheon turned partly round, but resumed his former position, and
proceeded deliberately to finish his cup of coffee, without immediate
notice of the guest whom he had summoned to his presence. It was not
that he intended any rudeness or improper neglect,--which, indeed, he
would have blushed to be guilty of,--but it never occurred to him that
a person in Maule's station had a claim on his courtesy, or would
trouble himself about it one way or the other.
The carpenter, however, stepped at once to the hearth, and turned
himself about, so as to look Mr. Pyncheon in the face.
"You sent for me," said he. "Be pleased to explain your business, that
I may go back to my own affairs."
"Ah! excuse me," said Mr. Pyncheon quietly. "I did not mean to tax
your time without a recompense. Your name, I think, is Maule,--Thomas
or Matthew Maule,--a son or grandson of the builder of this house?"
"Matthew Maule," replied the carpenter,--"son of him who built the
house,--grandson of the rightful proprietor of the soil."
"I know the dispute to which you allude," observed Mr. Pyncheon with
undisturbed equanimity. "I am well aware that my grandfather was
compelled to resort to a suit at law, in order to establish his claim
to the foundation-site of this edifice. We will not, if you please,
renew the discussion. The matter was settled at the time, and by the
competent authorities,--equitably, it is to be presumed,--and, at all
events, irrevocably. Yet, singularly enough, there is an incidental
reference to this very subject in what I am now about to say to you.
And this same inveterate grudge,--excuse me, I mean no offence,--this
irritability, which you have just shown, is not entirely aside from the
matter."
"If you can find anything for your purpose, Mr. Pyncheon," said the
carpenter, "in a man's natural resentment for the wrongs done to his
blood, you are welcome to it."
"I take you at your word, Goodman Maule," said the owner of the Seven
Gables, with a smile, "and will proceed to suggest a mode in which your
hereditary resentments--justifiable or otherwise--may have had a
bearing on my affairs. You have heard, I suppose, that the Pyncheon
family, ever since my grandfather's days, have been prosecuting a still
unsettled claim to a very large extent of territory at the Eastward?"
"Often," replied Maule,--and it is said that a smile came over his
face,--"very often,--from my father!"
"This claim," continued Mr. Pyncheon, after pausing a moment, as if to
consider what the carpenter's smile might mean, "appeared to be on the
very verge of a settlement and full allowance, at the period of my
grandfather's decease. It was well known, to those in his confidence,
that he anticipated neither difficulty nor delay. Now, Colonel
Pyncheon, I need hardly say, was a practical man, well acquainted with
public and private business, and not at all the person to cherish
ill-founded hopes, or to attempt the following out of an impracticable
scheme. It is obvious to conclude, therefore, that he had grounds, not
apparent to his heirs, for his confident anticipation of success in the
matter of this Eastern claim. In a word, I believe,--and my legal
advisers coincide in the belief, which, moreover, is authorized, to a
certain extent, by the family traditions,--that my grandfather was in
possession of some deed, or other document, essential to this claim,
but which has since disappeared."
"Very likely," said Matthew Maule,--and again, it is said, there was a
dark smile on his face,--"but what can a poor carpenter have to do with
the grand affairs of the Pyncheon family?"
"Perhaps nothing," returned Mr. Pyncheon, "possibly much!"
Here ensued a great many words between Matthew Maule and the proprietor
of the Seven Gables, on the subject which the latter had thus broached.
It seems (although Mr. Pyncheon had some hesitation in referring to
stories so exceedingly absurd in their aspect) that the popular belief
pointed to some mysterious connection and dependence, existing between
the family of the Maules and these vast unrealized possessions of the
Pyncheons. It was an ordinary saying that the old wizard, hanged
though he was, had obtained the best end of the bargain in his contest
with Colonel Pyncheon; inasmuch as he had got possession of the great
Eastern claim, in exchange for an acre or two of garden-ground. A very
aged woman, recently dead, had often used the metaphorical expression,
in her fireside talk, that miles and miles of the Pyncheon lands had
been shovelled into Maule's grave; which, by the bye, was but a very
shallow nook, between two rocks, near the summit of Gallows Hill.
Again, when the lawyers were making inquiry for the missing document,
it was a by-word that it would never be found, unless in the wizard's
skeleton hand. So much weight had the shrewd lawyers assigned to these
fables, that (but Mr. Pyncheon did not see fit to inform the carpenter
of the fact) they had secretly caused the wizard's grave to be
searched. Nothing was discovered, however, except that, unaccountably,
the right hand of the skeleton was gone.
Now, what was unquestionably important, a portion of these popular
rumors could be traced, though rather doubtfully and indistinctly, to
chance words and obscure hints of the executed wizard's son, and the
father of this present Matthew Maule. And here Mr. Pyncheon could
bring an item of his own personal evidence into play. Though but a
child at the time, he either remembered or fancied that Matthew's
father had had some job to perform on the day before, or possibly the
very morning of the Colonel's decease, in the private room where he and
the carpenter were at this moment talking. Certain papers belonging to
Colonel Pyncheon, as his grandson distinctly recollected, had been
spread out on the table.
Matthew Maule understood the insinuated suspicion.
"My father," he said,--but still there was that dark smile, making a
riddle of his countenance,--"my father was an honester man than the
bloody old Colonel! Not to get his rights back again would he have
carried off one of those papers!"
"I shall not bandy words with you," observed the foreign-bred Mr.
Pyncheon, with haughty composure. "Nor will it become me to resent any
rudeness towards either my grandfather or myself. A gentleman, before
seeking intercourse with a person of your station and habits, will
first consider whether the urgency of the end may compensate for the
disagreeableness of the means. It does so in the present instance."
He then renewed the conversation, and made great pecuniary offers to
the carpenter, in case the latter should give information leading to
the discovery of the lost document, and the consequent success of the
Eastern claim. For a long time Matthew Maule is said to have turned a
cold ear to these propositions. At last, however, with a strange kind
of laugh, he inquired whether Mr. Pyncheon would make over to him the
old wizard's homestead-ground, together with the House of the Seven
Gables, now standing on it, in requital of the documentary evidence so
urgently required.
The wild, chimney-corner legend (which, without copying all its
extravagances, my narrative essentially follows) here gives an account
of some very strange behavior on the part of Colonel Pyncheon's
portrait. This picture, it must be understood, was supposed to be so
intimately connected with the fate of the house, and so magically built
into its walls, that, if once it should be removed, that very instant
the whole edifice would come thundering down in a heap of dusty ruin.
All through the foregoing conversation between Mr. Pyncheon and the
carpenter, the portrait had been frowning, clenching its fist, and
giving many such proofs of excessive discomposure, but without
attracting the notice of either of the two colloquists. And finally,
at Matthew Maule's audacious suggestion of a transfer of the
seven-gabled structure, the ghostly portrait is averred to have lost
all patience, and to have shown itself on the point of descending
bodily from its frame. But such incredible incidents are merely to be
mentioned aside.
"Give up this house!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, in amazement at the
proposal. "Were I to do so, my grandfather would not rest quiet in his
grave!"
"He never has, if all stories are true," remarked the carpenter
composedly. "But that matter concerns his grandson more than it does
Matthew Maule. I have no other terms to propose."
Impossible as he at first thought it to comply with Maule's conditions,
still, on a second glance, Mr. Pyncheon was of opinion that they might
at least be made matter of discussion. He himself had no personal
attachment for the house, nor any pleasant associations connected with
his childish residence in it. On the contrary, after seven-and-thirty
years, the presence of his dead grandfather seemed still to pervade it,
as on that morning when the affrighted boy had beheld him, with so
ghastly an aspect, stiffening in his chair. His long abode in foreign
parts, moreover, and familiarity with many of the castles and ancestral
halls of England, and the marble palaces of Italy, had caused him to
look contemptuously at the House of the Seven Gables, whether in point
of splendor or convenience. It was a mansion exceedingly inadequate to
the style of living which it would be incumbent on Mr. Pyncheon to
support, after realizing his territorial rights. His steward might
deign to occupy it, but never, certainly, the great landed proprietor
himself. In the event of success, indeed, it was his purpose to return
to England; nor, to say the truth, would he recently have quitted that
more congenial home, had not his own fortune, as well as his deceased
wife's, begun to give symptoms of exhaustion. The Eastern claim once
fairly settled, and put upon the firm basis of actual possession, Mr.
Pyncheon's property--to be measured by miles, not acres--would be worth
an earldom, and would reasonably entitle him to solicit, or enable him
to purchase, that elevated dignity from the British monarch. Lord
Pyncheon!--or the Earl of Waldo!--how could such a magnate be expected
to contract his grandeur within the pitiful compass of seven shingled
gables?
In short, on an enlarged view of the business, the carpenter's terms
appeared so ridiculously easy that Mr. Pyncheon could scarcely forbear
laughing in his face. He was quite ashamed, after the foregoing
reflections, to propose any diminution of so moderate a recompense for
the immense service to be rendered.
"I consent to your proposition, Maule!" cried he. "Put me in possession
of the document essential to establish my rights, and the House of the
Seven Gables is your own!"
According to some versions of the story, a regular contract to the
above effect was drawn up by a lawyer, and signed and sealed in the
presence of witnesses. Others say that Matthew Maule was contented
with a private written agreement, in which Mr. Pyncheon pledged his
honor and integrity to the fulfillment of the terms concluded upon.
The gentleman then ordered wine, which he and the carpenter drank
together, in confirmation of their bargain. During the whole preceding
discussion and subsequent formalities, the old Puritan's portrait seems
to have persisted in its shadowy gestures of disapproval; but without
effect, except that, as Mr. Pyncheon set down the emptied glass, he
thought he beheld his grandfather frown.
"This sherry is too potent a wine for me; it has affected my brain
already," he observed, after a somewhat startled look at the picture.
"On returning to Europe, I shall confine myself to the more delicate
vintages of Italy and France, the best of which will not bear
transportation."
"My Lord Pyncheon may drink what wine he will, and wherever he
pleases," replied the carpenter, as if he had been privy to Mr.
Pyncheon's ambitious projects. "But first, sir, if you desire tidings
of this lost document, I must crave the favor of a little talk with
your fair daughter Alice."
"You are mad, Maule!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon haughtily; and now, at
last, there was anger mixed up with his pride. "What can my daughter
have to do with a business like this?"
Indeed, at this new demand on the carpenter's part, the proprietor of
the Seven Gables was even more thunder-struck than at the cool
proposition to surrender his house. There was, at least, an assignable
motive for the first stipulation; there appeared to be none whatever
for the last. Nevertheless, Matthew Maule sturdily insisted on the
young lady being summoned, and even gave her father to understand, in a
mysterious kind of explanation,--which made the matter considerably
darker than it looked before,--that the only chance of acquiring the
requisite knowledge was through the clear, crystal medium of a pure and
virgin intelligence, like that of the fair Alice. Not to encumber our
story with Mr. Pyncheon's scruples, whether of conscience, pride, or
fatherly affection, he at length ordered his daughter to be called. He
well knew that she was in her chamber, and engaged in no occupation
that could not readily be laid aside; for, as it happened, ever since
Alice's name had been spoken, both her father and the carpenter had
heard the sad and sweet music of her harpsichord, and the airier
melancholy of her accompanying voice.
So Alice Pyncheon was summoned, and appeared. A portrait of this young
lady, painted by a Venetian artist, and left by her father in England,
is said to have fallen into the hands of the present Duke of
Devonshire, and to be now preserved at Chatsworth; not on account of
any associations with the original, but for its value as a picture, and
the high character of beauty in the countenance. If ever there was a
lady born, and set apart from the world's vulgar mass by a certain
gentle and cold stateliness, it was this very Alice Pyncheon. Yet
there was the womanly mixture in her; the tenderness, or, at least, the
tender capabilities. For the sake of that redeeming quality, a man of
generous nature would have forgiven all her pride, and have been
content, almost, to lie down in her path, and let Alice set her slender
foot upon his heart. All that he would have required was simply the
acknowledgment that he was indeed a man, and a fellow-being, moulded of
the same elements as she.
As Alice came into the room, her eyes fell upon the carpenter, who was
standing near its centre, clad in green woollen jacket, a pair of loose
breeches, open at the knees, and with a long pocket for his rule, the
end of which protruded; it was as proper a mark of the artisan's
calling as Mr. Pyncheon's full-dress sword of that gentleman's
aristocratic pretensions. A glow of artistic approval brightened over
Alice Pyncheon's face; she was struck with admiration--which she made
no attempt to conceal--of the remarkable comeliness, strength, and
energy of Maule's figure. But that admiring glance (which most other
men, perhaps, would have cherished as a sweet recollection all through
life) the carpenter never forgave. It must have been the devil himself
that made Maule so subtile in his preception.
"Does the girl look at me as if I were a brute beast?" thought he,
setting his teeth. "She shall know whether I have a human spirit; and
the worse for her, if it prove stronger than her own!"
"My father, you sent for me," said Alice, in her sweet and harp-like
voice. "But, if you have business with this young man, pray let me go
again. You know I do not love this room, in spite of that Claude, with
which you try to bring back sunny recollections."
"Stay a moment, young lady, if you please!" said Matthew Maule. "My
business with your father is over. With yourself, it is now to begin!"
Alice looked towards her father, in surprise and inquiry.
"Yes, Alice," said Mr. Pyncheon, with some disturbance and confusion.
"This young man--his name is Matthew Maule--professes, so far as I can
understand him, to be able to discover, through your means, a certain
paper or parchment, which was missing long before your birth. The
importance of the document in question renders it advisable to neglect
no possible, even if improbable, method of regaining it. You will
therefore oblige me, my dear Alice, by answering this person's
inquiries, and complying with his lawful and reasonable requests, so
far as they may appear to have the aforesaid object in view. As I
shall remain in the room, you need apprehend no rude nor unbecoming
deportment, on the young man's part; and, at your slightest wish, of
course, the investigation, or whatever we may call it, shall
immediately be broken off."
"Mistress Alice Pyncheon," remarked Matthew Maule, with the utmost
deference, but yet a half-hidden sarcasm in his look and tone, "will no
doubt feel herself quite safe in her father's presence, and under his
all-sufficient protection."
"I certainly shall entertain no manner of apprehension, with my father
at hand," said Alice with maidenly dignity. "Neither do I conceive
that a lady, while true to herself, can have aught to fear from
whomsoever, or in any circumstances!"
Poor Alice! By what unhappy impulse did she thus put herself at once on
terms of defiance against a strength which she could not estimate?
"Then, Mistress Alice," said Matthew Maule, handing a
chair,--gracefully enough, for a craftsman, "will it please you only to
sit down, and do me the favor (though altogether beyond a poor
carpenter's deserts) to fix your eyes on mine!"
Alice complied, She was very proud. Setting aside all advantages of
rank, this fair girl deemed herself conscious of a power--combined of
beauty, high, unsullied purity, and the preservative force of
womanhood--that could make her sphere impenetrable, unless betrayed by
treachery within. She instinctively knew, it may be, that some
sinister or evil potency was now striving to pass her barriers; nor
would she decline the contest. So Alice put woman's might against
man's might; a match not often equal on the part of woman.
Her father meanwhile had turned away, and seemed absorbed in the
contemplation of a landscape by Claude, where a shadowy and
sun-streaked vista penetrated so remotely into an ancient wood, that it
would have been no wonder if his fancy had lost itself in the picture's
bewildering depths. But, in truth, the picture was no more to him at
that moment than the blank wall against which it hung. His mind was
haunted with the many and strange tales which he had heard, attributing
mysterious if not supernatural endowments to these Maules, as well the
grandson here present as his two immediate ancestors. Mr. Pyncheon's
long residence abroad, and intercourse with men of wit and
fashion,--courtiers, worldings, and free-thinkers,--had done much
towards obliterating the grim Puritan superstitions, which no man of
New England birth at that early period could entirely escape. But, on
the other hand, had not a whole community believed Maule's grandfather
to be a wizard? Had not the crime been proved? Had not the wizard died
for it? Had he not bequeathed a legacy of hatred against the Pyncheons
to this only grandson, who, as it appeared, was now about to exercise a
subtle influence over the daughter of his enemy's house? Might not
this influence be the same that was called witchcraft?
Turning half around, he caught a glimpse of Maule's figure in the
looking-glass. At some paces from Alice, with his arms uplifted in the
air, the carpenter made a gesture as if directing downward a slow,
ponderous, and invisible weight upon the maiden.
"Stay, Maule!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, stepping forward. "I forbid
your proceeding further!"
"Pray, my dear father, do not interrupt the young man," said Alice,
without changing her position. "His efforts, I assure you, will prove
very harmless."
Again Mr. Pyncheon turned his eyes towards the Claude. It was then his
daughter's will, in opposition to his own, that the experiment should
be fully tried. Henceforth, therefore, he did but consent, not urge
it. And was it not for her sake far more than for his own that he
desired its success? That lost parchment once restored, the beautiful
Alice Pyncheon, with the rich dowry which he could then bestow, might
wed an English duke or a German reigning-prince, instead of some New
England clergyman or lawyer! At the thought, the ambitious father
almost consented, in his heart, that, if the devil's power were needed
to the accomplishment of this great object, Maule might evoke him.
Alice's own purity would be her safeguard.
With his mind full of imaginary magnificence, Mr. Pyncheon heard a
half-uttered exclamation from his daughter. It was very faint and low;
so indistinct that there seemed but half a will to shape out the words,
and too undefined a purport to be intelligible. Yet it was a call for
help!--his conscience never doubted it;--and, little more than a
whisper to his ear, it was a dismal shriek, and long reechoed so, in
the region round his heart! But this time the father did not turn.
After a further interval, Maule spoke.
"Behold your daughter," said he.
Mr. Pyncheon came hastily forward. The carpenter was standing erect in
front of Alice's chair, and pointing his finger towards the maiden with
an expression of triumphant power, the limits of which could not be
defined, as, indeed, its scope stretched vaguely towards the unseen and
the infinite. Alice sat in an attitude of profound repose, with the
long brown lashes drooping over her eyes.
"There she is!" said the carpenter. "Speak to her!"
"Alice! My daughter!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon. "My own Alice!"
She did not stir.
"Louder!" said Maule, smiling.
"Alice! Awake!" cried her father. "It troubles me to see you thus!
Awake!"
He spoke loudly, with terror in his voice, and close to that delicate
ear which had always been so sensitive to every discord. But the sound
evidently reached her not. It is indescribable what a sense of remote,
dim, unattainable distance betwixt himself and Alice was impressed on
the father by this impossibility of reaching her with his voice.
"Best touch her!" said Matthew Maule "Shake the girl, and roughly, too!
My hands are hardened with too much use of axe, saw, and plane,--else I
might help you!"
Mr. Pyncheon took her hand, and pressed it with the earnestness of
startled emotion. He kissed her, with so great a heart-throb in the
kiss, that he thought she must needs feel it. Then, in a gust of anger
at her insensibility, he shook her maiden form with a violence which,
the next moment, it affrighted him to remember. He withdrew his
encircling arms, and Alice--whose figure, though flexible, had been
wholly impassive--relapsed into the same attitude as before these
attempts to arouse her. Maule having shifted his position, her face
was turned towards him slightly, but with what seemed to be a reference
of her very slumber to his guidance.
Then it was a strange sight to behold how the man of conventionalities
shook the powder out of his periwig; how the reserved and stately
gentleman forgot his dignity; how the gold-embroidered waistcoat
flickered and glistened in the firelight with the convulsion of rage,
terror, and sorrow in the human heart that was beating under it.
"Villain!" cried Mr. Pyncheon, shaking his clenched fist at Maule.
"You and the fiend together have robbed me of my daughter. Give her
back, spawn of the old wizard, or you shall climb Gallows Hill in your
grandfather's footsteps!"
"Softly, Mr. Pyncheon!" said the carpenter with scornful composure.
"Softly, an' it please your worship, else you will spoil those rich
lace-ruffles at your wrists! Is it my crime if you have sold your
daughter for the mere hope of getting a sheet of yellow parchment into
your clutch? There sits Mistress Alice quietly asleep. Now let Matthew
Maule try whether she be as proud as the carpenter found her awhile
since."
He spoke, and Alice responded, with a soft, subdued, inward
acquiescence, and a bending of her form towards him, like the flame of
a torch when it indicates a gentle draught of air. He beckoned with
his hand, and, rising from her chair,--blindly, but undoubtingly, as
tending to her sure and inevitable centre,--the proud Alice approached
him. He waved her back, and, retreating, Alice sank again into her
seat.
"She is mine!" said Matthew Maule. "Mine, by the right of the
strongest spirit!"
In the further progress of the legend, there is a long, grotesque, and
occasionally awe-striking account of the carpenter's incantations (if
so they are to be called), with a view of discovering the lost
document. It appears to have been his object to convert the mind of
Alice into a kind of telescopic medium, through which Mr. Pyncheon and
himself might obtain a glimpse into the spiritual world. He succeeded,
accordingly, in holding an imperfect sort of intercourse, at one
remove, with the departed personages in whose custody the so much
valued secret had been carried beyond the precincts of earth. During
her trance, Alice described three figures as being present to her
spiritualized perception. One was an aged, dignified, stern-looking
gentleman, clad as for a solemn festival in grave and costly attire,
but with a great blood-stain on his richly wrought band; the second, an
aged man, meanly dressed, with a dark and malign countenance, and a
broken halter about his neck; the third, a person not so advanced in
life as the former two, but beyond the middle age, wearing a coarse
woollen tunic and leather breeches, and with a carpenter's rule
sticking out of his side pocket. These three visionary characters
possessed a mutual knowledge of the missing document. One of them, in
truth,--it was he with the blood-stain on his band,--seemed, unless his
gestures were misunderstood, to hold the parchment in his immediate
keeping, but was prevented by his two partners in the mystery from
disburdening himself of the trust. Finally, when he showed a purpose
of shouting forth the secret loudly enough to be heard from his own
sphere into that of mortals, his companions struggled with him, and
pressed their hands over his mouth; and forthwith--whether that he were
choked by it, or that the secret itself was of a crimson hue--there was
a fresh flow of blood upon his band. Upon this, the two meanly dressed
figures mocked and jeered at the much-abashed old dignitary, and
pointed their fingers at the stain.
At this juncture, Maule turned to Mr. Pyncheon.
"It will never be allowed," said he. "The custody of this secret, that
would so enrich his heirs, makes part of your grandfather's
retribution. He must choke with it until it is no longer of any value.
And keep you the House of the Seven Gables! It is too dear bought an
inheritance, and too heavy with the curse upon it, to be shifted yet
awhile from the Colonel's posterity."
Mr. Pyncheon tried to speak, but--what with fear and passion--could
make only a gurgling murmur in his throat. The carpenter smiled.
"Aha, worshipful sir!--so you have old Maule's blood to drink!" said he
jeeringly.
"Fiend in man's shape! why dost thou keep dominion over my child?"
cried Mr. Pyncheon, when his choked utterance could make way. "Give me
back my daughter. Then go thy ways; and may we never meet again!"
"Your daughter!" said Matthew Maule. "Why, she is fairly mine!
Nevertheless, not to be too hard with fair Mistress Alice, I will leave
her in your keeping; but I do not warrant you that she shall never have
occasion to remember Maule, the carpenter."
He waved his hands with an upward motion; and, after a few repetitions
of similar gestures, the beautiful Alice Pyncheon awoke from her
strange trance. She awoke without the slightest recollection of her
visionary experience; but as one losing herself in a momentary reverie,
and returning to the consciousness of actual life, in almost as brief
an interval as the down-sinking flame of the hearth should quiver again
up the chimney. On recognizing Matthew Maule, she assumed an air of
somewhat cold but gentle dignity, the rather, as there was a certain
peculiar smile on the carpenter's visage that stirred the native pride
of the fair Alice. So ended, for that time, the quest for the lost
title-deed of the Pyncheon territory at the Eastward; nor, though often
subsequently renewed, has it ever yet befallen a Pyncheon to set his
eye upon that parchment.
But, alas for the beautiful, the gentle, yet too haughty Alice! A
power that she little dreamed of had laid its grasp upon her maiden
soul. A will, most unlike her own, constrained her to do its grotesque
and fantastic bidding. Her father as it proved, had martyred his poor
child to an inordinate desire for measuring his land by miles instead
of acres. And, therefore, while Alice Pyncheon lived, she was Maule's
slave, in a bondage more humiliating, a thousand-fold, than that which
binds its chain around the body. Seated by his humble fireside, Maule
had but to wave his hand; and, wherever the proud lady chanced to
be,--whether in her chamber, or entertaining her father's stately
guests, or worshipping at church,--whatever her place or occupation,
her spirit passed from beneath her own control, and bowed itself to
Maule. "Alice, laugh!"--the carpenter, beside his hearth, would say;
or perhaps intensely will it, without a spoken word. And, even were it
prayer-time, or at a funeral, Alice must break into wild laughter.
"Alice, be sad!"--and, at the instant, down would come her tears,
quenching all the mirth of those around her like sudden rain upon a
bonfire. "Alice, dance."--and dance she would, not in such court-like
measures as she had learned abroad, but some high-paced jig, or
hop-skip rigadoon, befitting the brisk lasses at a rustic merry-making.
It seemed to be Maule's impulse, not to ruin Alice, nor to visit her
with any black or gigantic mischief, which would have crowned her
sorrows with the grace of tragedy, but to wreak a low, ungenerous scorn
upon her. Thus all the dignity of life was lost. She felt herself too
much abased, and longed to change natures with some worm!
One evening, at a bridal party (but not her own; for, so lost from
self-control, she would have deemed it sin to marry), poor Alice was
beckoned forth by her unseen despot, and constrained, in her gossamer
white dress and satin slippers, to hasten along the street to the mean
dwelling of a laboring-man. There was laughter and good cheer within;
for Matthew Maule, that night, was to wed the laborer's daughter, and
had summoned proud Alice Pyncheon to wait upon his bride. And so she
did; and when the twain were one, Alice awoke out of her enchanted
sleep. Yet, no longer proud,--humbly, and with a smile all steeped in
sadness,--she kissed Maule's wife, and went her way. It was an
inclement night; the southeast wind drove the mingled snow and rain
into her thinly sheltered bosom; her satin slippers were wet through
and through, as she trod the muddy sidewalks. The next day a cold;
soon, a settled cough; anon, a hectic cheek, a wasted form, that sat
beside the harpsichord, and filled the house with music! Music in
which a strain of the heavenly choristers was echoed! Oh; joy! For
Alice had borne her last humiliation! Oh, greater joy! For Alice was
penitent of her one earthly sin, and proud no more!
The Pyncheons made a great funeral for Alice. The kith and kin were
there, and the whole respectability of the town besides. But, last in
the procession, came Matthew Maule, gnashing his teeth, as if he would
have bitten his own heart in twain,--the darkest and wofullest man that
ever walked behind a corpse! He meant to humble Alice, not to kill her;
but he had taken a woman's delicate soul into his rude gripe, to play
with--and she was dead!
| Alice Pyncheon: This chapter, narrated by Holgrave, is a flashback to the years following the construction of the House of the Seven Gables. It has been forty years since the house was built. Scipio, the black servant of Gervayse Pyncheon, brings a message to young Matthew Maule, the grandson of the old wizard of the same name, desiring his presence at the House of the Seven Gables. Scipio claims that Colonel Pyncheon still haunts the house, proof that it is a very good one. Matthew Maule refuses, but does tell Scipio to give his respects to Gervayse's daughter, Alice. The grandson supposedly had inherited some of his ancestor's questionable traits, such as a strange power of getting into people's dreams and heretical religious beliefs. Matthew Maule visits the house, and goes to the front door instead of the side or back doors proper for a worker, for his heart was bitter with the sense of hereditary wrong. Maule meets Mr. Pyncheon in the parlor, where two objects appear prominently. One is a large map of a tract of land, the other is a portrait of a stern old man in Puritan garb. Matthew Maule brings up the dispute over ownership of the house, but Mr. Pyncheon does not want to discuss it. He brings up a claim that the Pyncheon family has on an Eastern tract of land. He tells Maule that Colonel Pyncheon had a deed to this land that has since disappeared. Mr. Pyncheon suspects that the disappearance of this deed had something to do with the Maule family, and there is an ordinary saying that Maule took miles and miles of the Pyncheon land to his grave. Mr. Pyncheon theorizes that Maule's father took the deeds when he was working for Colonel Pyncheon on the day before the Colonel died. Mr. Pyncheon offers Matthew Maule monetary compensation for information leading to the discovery of the lost deed, and Matthew Maule inquires whether Pyncheon would give him the old wizard's rightful land. It is rumored that as Mr. Pyncheon and Matthew Maule spoke, the portrait of the Colonel appeared to frown and clench its fists and finally the picture descended bodily from the frame, but such an incredible incident is mere legend. Mr. Pyncheon does consider the offer, since he does not plan to live in the house and considers it inadequate, and consents to the offer. The two men draw up a deed, and Maule asks the favor of talking with Alice Pyncheon. Mr. Pyncheon claims that he is mad for wanting anything to do with his daughter. Still, he calls for his daughter, a lady born and set apart from the vulgar masses by a gentle and cold stateliness, but still retaining a womanly capability of tenderness. Maule believes that Alice looks upon him as a cold brute. With a wave of his hand, by some magic Maule renders Alice incapable of movement, then awakens her. Matthew Maule claims that he now controls her spirit. She describes seeing three figures while in her trance: an aged, stern-looking gentleman with a bloodstain on his richly wrought band, an aged man with a halter about his neck, and a middle-aged man with a carpenter's rule. These three visionary characters possessed a mutual knowledge of the missing document. From this point Matthew Maule could control Alice Pyncheon's actions. He did not use this power to ruin her, but to wreak a low, ungenerous scorn upon her. One night Matthew Maule summons Alice to wait upon his fiancee. She returns home that night in inclement weather; from this she falls sick and eventually dies. Matthew Maule did not mean to kill her, but to humble her. | summary |
THERE was a message brought, one day, from the worshipful Gervayse
Pyncheon to young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, desiring his immediate
presence at the House of the Seven Gables.
"And what does your master want with me?" said the carpenter to Mr.
Pyncheon's black servant. "Does the house need any repair? Well it
may, by this time; and no blame to my father who built it, neither! I
was reading the old Colonel's tombstone, no longer ago than last
Sabbath; and, reckoning from that date, the house has stood
seven-and-thirty years. No wonder if there should be a job to do on
the roof."
"Don't know what massa wants," answered Scipio. "The house is a berry
good house, and old Colonel Pyncheon think so too, I reckon;--else why
the old man haunt it so, and frighten a poor nigga, As he does?"
"Well, well, friend Scipio; let your master know that I'm coming," said
the carpenter with a laugh. "For a fair, workmanlike job, he'll find
me his man. And so the house is haunted, is it? It will take a tighter
workman than I am to keep the spirits out of the Seven Gables. Even if
the Colonel would be quiet," he added, muttering to himself, "my old
grandfather, the wizard, will be pretty sure to stick to the Pyncheons
as long as their walls hold together."
"What's that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule?" asked Scipio.
"And what for do you look so black at me?"
"No matter, darky," said the carpenter. "Do you think nobody is to
look black but yourself? Go tell your master I'm coming; and if you
happen to see Mistress Alice, his daughter, give Matthew Maule's humble
respects to her. She has brought a fair face from Italy,--fair, and
gentle, and proud,--has that same Alice Pyncheon!"
"He talk of Mistress Alice!" cried Scipio, as he returned from his
errand. "The low carpenter-man! He no business so much as to look at
her a great way off!"
This young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, it must be observed, was a
person little understood, and not very generally liked, in the town
where he resided; not that anything could be alleged against his
integrity, or his skill and diligence in the handicraft which he
exercised. The aversion (as it might justly be called) with which many
persons regarded him was partly the result of his own character and
deportment, and partly an inheritance.
He was the grandson of a former Matthew Maule, one of the early
settlers of the town, and who had been a famous and terrible wizard in
his day. This old reprobate was one of the sufferers when Cotton
Mather, and his brother ministers, and the learned judges, and other
wise men, and Sir William Phipps, the sagacious governor, made such
laudable efforts to weaken the great enemy of souls, by sending a
multitude of his adherents up the rocky pathway of Gallows Hill. Since
those days, no doubt, it had grown to be suspected that, in consequence
of an unfortunate overdoing of a work praiseworthy in itself, the
proceedings against the witches had proved far less acceptable to the
Beneficent Father than to that very Arch Enemy whom they were intended
to distress and utterly overwhelm. It is not the less certain,
however, that awe and terror brooded over the memories of those who
died for this horrible crime of witchcraft. Their graves, in the
crevices of the rocks, were supposed to be incapable of retaining the
occupants who had been so hastily thrust into them. Old Matthew Maule,
especially, was known to have as little hesitation or difficulty in
rising out of his grave as an ordinary man in getting out of bed, and
was as often seen at midnight as living people at noonday. This
pestilent wizard (in whom his just punishment seemed to have wrought no
manner of amendment) had an inveterate habit of haunting a certain
mansion, styled the House of the Seven Gables, against the owner of
which he pretended to hold an unsettled claim for ground-rent. The
ghost, it appears,--with the pertinacity which was one of his
distinguishing characteristics while alive,--insisted that he was the
rightful proprietor of the site upon which the house stood. His terms
were, that either the aforesaid ground-rent, from the day when the
cellar began to be dug, should be paid down, or the mansion itself
given up; else he, the ghostly creditor, would have his finger in all
the affairs of the Pyncheons, and make everything go wrong with them,
though it should be a thousand years after his death. It was a wild
story, perhaps, but seemed not altogether so incredible to those who
could remember what an inflexibly obstinate old fellow this wizard
Maule had been.
Now, the wizard's grandson, the young Matthew Maule of our story, was
popularly supposed to have inherited some of his ancestor's
questionable traits. It is wonderful how many absurdities were
promulgated in reference to the young man. He was fabled, for example,
to have a strange power of getting into people's dreams, and regulating
matters there according to his own fancy, pretty much like the
stage-manager of a theatre. There was a great deal of talk among the
neighbors, particularly the petticoated ones, about what they called
the witchcraft of Maule's eye. Some said that he could look into
people's minds; others, that, by the marvellous power of this eye, he
could draw people into his own mind, or send them, if he pleased, to do
errands to his grandfather, in the spiritual world; others, again, that
it was what is termed an Evil Eye, and possessed the valuable faculty
of blighting corn, and drying children into mummies with the heartburn.
But, after all, what worked most to the young carpenter's disadvantage
was, first, the reserve and sternness of his natural disposition, and
next, the fact of his not being a church-communicant, and the suspicion
of his holding heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity.
After receiving Mr. Pyncheon's message, the carpenter merely tarried to
finish a small job, which he happened to have in hand, and then took
his way towards the House of the Seven Gables. This noted edifice,
though its style might be getting a little out of fashion, was still as
respectable a family residence as that of any gentleman in town. The
present owner, Gervayse Pyncheon, was said to have contracted a dislike
to the house, in consequence of a shock to his sensibility, in early
childhood, from the sudden death of his grandfather. In the very act
of running to climb Colonel Pyncheon's knee, the boy had discovered the
old Puritan to be a corpse. On arriving at manhood, Mr. Pyncheon had
visited England, where he married a lady of fortune, and had
subsequently spent many years, partly in the mother country, and partly
in various cities on the continent of Europe. During this period, the
family mansion had been consigned to the charge of a kinsman, who was
allowed to make it his home for the time being, in consideration of
keeping the premises in thorough repair. So faithfully had this
contract been fulfilled, that now, as the carpenter approached the
house, his practised eye could detect nothing to criticise in its
condition. The peaks of the seven gables rose up sharply; the shingled
roof looked thoroughly water-tight; and the glittering plaster-work
entirely covered the exterior walls, and sparkled in the October sun,
as if it had been new only a week ago.
The house had that pleasant aspect of life which is like the cheery
expression of comfortable activity in the human countenance. You could
see, at once, that there was the stir of a large family within it. A
huge load of oak-wood was passing through the gateway, towards the
outbuildings in the rear; the fat cook--or probably it might be the
housekeeper--stood at the side door, bargaining for some turkeys and
poultry which a countryman had brought for sale. Now and then a
maid-servant, neatly dressed, and now the shining sable face of a
slave, might be seen bustling across the windows, in the lower part of
the house. At an open window of a room in the second story, hanging
over some pots of beautiful and delicate flowers,--exotics, but which
had never known a more genial sunshine than that of the New England
autumn,--was the figure of a young lady, an exotic, like the flowers,
and beautiful and delicate as they. Her presence imparted an
indescribable grace and faint witchery to the whole edifice. In other
respects, it was a substantial, jolly-looking mansion, and seemed fit
to be the residence of a patriarch, who might establish his own
headquarters in the front gable and assign one of the remainder to each
of his six children, while the great chimney in the centre should
symbolize the old fellow's hospitable heart, which kept them all warm,
and made a great whole of the seven smaller ones.
There was a vertical sundial on the front gable; and as the carpenter
passed beneath it, he looked up and noted the hour.
"Three o'clock!" said he to himself. "My father told me that dial was
put up only an hour before the old Colonel's death. How truly it has
kept time these seven-and-thirty years past! The shadow creeps and
creeps, and is always looking over the shoulder of the sunshine!"
It might have befitted a craftsman, like Matthew Maule, on being sent
for to a gentleman's house, to go to the back door, where servants and
work-people were usually admitted; or at least to the side entrance,
where the better class of tradesmen made application. But the
carpenter had a great deal of pride and stiffness in his nature; and,
at this moment, moreover, his heart was bitter with the sense of
hereditary wrong, because he considered the great Pyncheon House to be
standing on soil which should have been his own. On this very site,
beside a spring of delicious water, his grandfather had felled the
pine-trees and built a cottage, in which children had been born to him;
and it was only from a dead man's stiffened fingers that Colonel
Pyncheon had wrested away the title-deeds. So young Maule went
straight to the principal entrance, beneath a portal of carved oak, and
gave such a peal of the iron knocker that you would have imagined the
stern old wizard himself to be standing at the threshold.
Black Scipio answered the summons in a prodigious, hurry; but showed
the whites of his eyes in amazement on beholding only the carpenter.
"Lord-a-mercy, what a great man he be, this carpenter fellow!" mumbled
Scipio, down in his throat. "Anybody think he beat on the door with
his biggest hammer!"
"Here I am!" said Maule sternly. "Show me the way to your master's
parlor."
As he stept into the house, a note of sweet and melancholy music
thrilled and vibrated along the passage-way, proceeding from one of the
rooms above stairs. It was the harpsichord which Alice Pyncheon had
brought with her from beyond the sea. The fair Alice bestowed most of
her maiden leisure between flowers and music, although the former were
apt to droop, and the melodies were often sad. She was of foreign
education, and could not take kindly to the New England modes of life,
in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed.
As Mr. Pyncheon had been impatiently awaiting Maule's arrival, black
Scipio, of course, lost no time in ushering the carpenter into his
master's presence. The room in which this gentleman sat was a parlor of
moderate size, looking out upon the garden of the house, and having its
windows partly shadowed by the foliage of fruit-trees. It was Mr.
Pyncheon's peculiar apartment, and was provided with furniture, in an
elegant and costly style, principally from Paris; the floor (which was
unusual at that day) being covered with a carpet, so skilfully and
richly wrought that it seemed to glow as with living flowers. In one
corner stood a marble woman, to whom her own beauty was the sole and
sufficient garment. Some pictures--that looked old, and had a mellow
tinge diffused through all their artful splendor--hung on the walls.
Near the fireplace was a large and very beautiful cabinet of ebony,
inlaid with ivory; a piece of antique furniture, which Mr. Pyncheon had
bought in Venice, and which he used as the treasure-place for medals,
ancient coins, and whatever small and valuable curiosities he had
picked up on his travels. Through all this variety of decoration,
however, the room showed its original characteristics; its low stud,
its cross-beam, its chimney-piece, with the old-fashioned Dutch tiles;
so that it was the emblem of a mind industriously stored with foreign
ideas, and elaborated into artificial refinement, but neither larger,
nor, in its proper self, more elegant than before.
There were two objects that appeared rather out of place in this very
handsomely furnished room. One was a large map, or surveyor's plan, of
a tract of land, which looked as if it had been drawn a good many years
ago, and was now dingy with smoke, and soiled, here and there, with the
touch of fingers. The other was a portrait of a stern old man, in a
Puritan garb, painted roughly, but with a bold effect, and a remarkably
strong expression of character.
At a small table, before a fire of English sea-coal, sat Mr. Pyncheon,
sipping coffee, which had grown to be a very favorite beverage with him
in France. He was a middle-aged and really handsome man, with a wig
flowing down upon his shoulders; his coat was of blue velvet, with lace
on the borders and at the button-holes; and the firelight glistened on
the spacious breadth of his waistcoat, which was flowered all over with
gold. On the entrance of Scipio, ushering in the carpenter, Mr.
Pyncheon turned partly round, but resumed his former position, and
proceeded deliberately to finish his cup of coffee, without immediate
notice of the guest whom he had summoned to his presence. It was not
that he intended any rudeness or improper neglect,--which, indeed, he
would have blushed to be guilty of,--but it never occurred to him that
a person in Maule's station had a claim on his courtesy, or would
trouble himself about it one way or the other.
The carpenter, however, stepped at once to the hearth, and turned
himself about, so as to look Mr. Pyncheon in the face.
"You sent for me," said he. "Be pleased to explain your business, that
I may go back to my own affairs."
"Ah! excuse me," said Mr. Pyncheon quietly. "I did not mean to tax
your time without a recompense. Your name, I think, is Maule,--Thomas
or Matthew Maule,--a son or grandson of the builder of this house?"
"Matthew Maule," replied the carpenter,--"son of him who built the
house,--grandson of the rightful proprietor of the soil."
"I know the dispute to which you allude," observed Mr. Pyncheon with
undisturbed equanimity. "I am well aware that my grandfather was
compelled to resort to a suit at law, in order to establish his claim
to the foundation-site of this edifice. We will not, if you please,
renew the discussion. The matter was settled at the time, and by the
competent authorities,--equitably, it is to be presumed,--and, at all
events, irrevocably. Yet, singularly enough, there is an incidental
reference to this very subject in what I am now about to say to you.
And this same inveterate grudge,--excuse me, I mean no offence,--this
irritability, which you have just shown, is not entirely aside from the
matter."
"If you can find anything for your purpose, Mr. Pyncheon," said the
carpenter, "in a man's natural resentment for the wrongs done to his
blood, you are welcome to it."
"I take you at your word, Goodman Maule," said the owner of the Seven
Gables, with a smile, "and will proceed to suggest a mode in which your
hereditary resentments--justifiable or otherwise--may have had a
bearing on my affairs. You have heard, I suppose, that the Pyncheon
family, ever since my grandfather's days, have been prosecuting a still
unsettled claim to a very large extent of territory at the Eastward?"
"Often," replied Maule,--and it is said that a smile came over his
face,--"very often,--from my father!"
"This claim," continued Mr. Pyncheon, after pausing a moment, as if to
consider what the carpenter's smile might mean, "appeared to be on the
very verge of a settlement and full allowance, at the period of my
grandfather's decease. It was well known, to those in his confidence,
that he anticipated neither difficulty nor delay. Now, Colonel
Pyncheon, I need hardly say, was a practical man, well acquainted with
public and private business, and not at all the person to cherish
ill-founded hopes, or to attempt the following out of an impracticable
scheme. It is obvious to conclude, therefore, that he had grounds, not
apparent to his heirs, for his confident anticipation of success in the
matter of this Eastern claim. In a word, I believe,--and my legal
advisers coincide in the belief, which, moreover, is authorized, to a
certain extent, by the family traditions,--that my grandfather was in
possession of some deed, or other document, essential to this claim,
but which has since disappeared."
"Very likely," said Matthew Maule,--and again, it is said, there was a
dark smile on his face,--"but what can a poor carpenter have to do with
the grand affairs of the Pyncheon family?"
"Perhaps nothing," returned Mr. Pyncheon, "possibly much!"
Here ensued a great many words between Matthew Maule and the proprietor
of the Seven Gables, on the subject which the latter had thus broached.
It seems (although Mr. Pyncheon had some hesitation in referring to
stories so exceedingly absurd in their aspect) that the popular belief
pointed to some mysterious connection and dependence, existing between
the family of the Maules and these vast unrealized possessions of the
Pyncheons. It was an ordinary saying that the old wizard, hanged
though he was, had obtained the best end of the bargain in his contest
with Colonel Pyncheon; inasmuch as he had got possession of the great
Eastern claim, in exchange for an acre or two of garden-ground. A very
aged woman, recently dead, had often used the metaphorical expression,
in her fireside talk, that miles and miles of the Pyncheon lands had
been shovelled into Maule's grave; which, by the bye, was but a very
shallow nook, between two rocks, near the summit of Gallows Hill.
Again, when the lawyers were making inquiry for the missing document,
it was a by-word that it would never be found, unless in the wizard's
skeleton hand. So much weight had the shrewd lawyers assigned to these
fables, that (but Mr. Pyncheon did not see fit to inform the carpenter
of the fact) they had secretly caused the wizard's grave to be
searched. Nothing was discovered, however, except that, unaccountably,
the right hand of the skeleton was gone.
Now, what was unquestionably important, a portion of these popular
rumors could be traced, though rather doubtfully and indistinctly, to
chance words and obscure hints of the executed wizard's son, and the
father of this present Matthew Maule. And here Mr. Pyncheon could
bring an item of his own personal evidence into play. Though but a
child at the time, he either remembered or fancied that Matthew's
father had had some job to perform on the day before, or possibly the
very morning of the Colonel's decease, in the private room where he and
the carpenter were at this moment talking. Certain papers belonging to
Colonel Pyncheon, as his grandson distinctly recollected, had been
spread out on the table.
Matthew Maule understood the insinuated suspicion.
"My father," he said,--but still there was that dark smile, making a
riddle of his countenance,--"my father was an honester man than the
bloody old Colonel! Not to get his rights back again would he have
carried off one of those papers!"
"I shall not bandy words with you," observed the foreign-bred Mr.
Pyncheon, with haughty composure. "Nor will it become me to resent any
rudeness towards either my grandfather or myself. A gentleman, before
seeking intercourse with a person of your station and habits, will
first consider whether the urgency of the end may compensate for the
disagreeableness of the means. It does so in the present instance."
He then renewed the conversation, and made great pecuniary offers to
the carpenter, in case the latter should give information leading to
the discovery of the lost document, and the consequent success of the
Eastern claim. For a long time Matthew Maule is said to have turned a
cold ear to these propositions. At last, however, with a strange kind
of laugh, he inquired whether Mr. Pyncheon would make over to him the
old wizard's homestead-ground, together with the House of the Seven
Gables, now standing on it, in requital of the documentary evidence so
urgently required.
The wild, chimney-corner legend (which, without copying all its
extravagances, my narrative essentially follows) here gives an account
of some very strange behavior on the part of Colonel Pyncheon's
portrait. This picture, it must be understood, was supposed to be so
intimately connected with the fate of the house, and so magically built
into its walls, that, if once it should be removed, that very instant
the whole edifice would come thundering down in a heap of dusty ruin.
All through the foregoing conversation between Mr. Pyncheon and the
carpenter, the portrait had been frowning, clenching its fist, and
giving many such proofs of excessive discomposure, but without
attracting the notice of either of the two colloquists. And finally,
at Matthew Maule's audacious suggestion of a transfer of the
seven-gabled structure, the ghostly portrait is averred to have lost
all patience, and to have shown itself on the point of descending
bodily from its frame. But such incredible incidents are merely to be
mentioned aside.
"Give up this house!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, in amazement at the
proposal. "Were I to do so, my grandfather would not rest quiet in his
grave!"
"He never has, if all stories are true," remarked the carpenter
composedly. "But that matter concerns his grandson more than it does
Matthew Maule. I have no other terms to propose."
Impossible as he at first thought it to comply with Maule's conditions,
still, on a second glance, Mr. Pyncheon was of opinion that they might
at least be made matter of discussion. He himself had no personal
attachment for the house, nor any pleasant associations connected with
his childish residence in it. On the contrary, after seven-and-thirty
years, the presence of his dead grandfather seemed still to pervade it,
as on that morning when the affrighted boy had beheld him, with so
ghastly an aspect, stiffening in his chair. His long abode in foreign
parts, moreover, and familiarity with many of the castles and ancestral
halls of England, and the marble palaces of Italy, had caused him to
look contemptuously at the House of the Seven Gables, whether in point
of splendor or convenience. It was a mansion exceedingly inadequate to
the style of living which it would be incumbent on Mr. Pyncheon to
support, after realizing his territorial rights. His steward might
deign to occupy it, but never, certainly, the great landed proprietor
himself. In the event of success, indeed, it was his purpose to return
to England; nor, to say the truth, would he recently have quitted that
more congenial home, had not his own fortune, as well as his deceased
wife's, begun to give symptoms of exhaustion. The Eastern claim once
fairly settled, and put upon the firm basis of actual possession, Mr.
Pyncheon's property--to be measured by miles, not acres--would be worth
an earldom, and would reasonably entitle him to solicit, or enable him
to purchase, that elevated dignity from the British monarch. Lord
Pyncheon!--or the Earl of Waldo!--how could such a magnate be expected
to contract his grandeur within the pitiful compass of seven shingled
gables?
In short, on an enlarged view of the business, the carpenter's terms
appeared so ridiculously easy that Mr. Pyncheon could scarcely forbear
laughing in his face. He was quite ashamed, after the foregoing
reflections, to propose any diminution of so moderate a recompense for
the immense service to be rendered.
"I consent to your proposition, Maule!" cried he. "Put me in possession
of the document essential to establish my rights, and the House of the
Seven Gables is your own!"
According to some versions of the story, a regular contract to the
above effect was drawn up by a lawyer, and signed and sealed in the
presence of witnesses. Others say that Matthew Maule was contented
with a private written agreement, in which Mr. Pyncheon pledged his
honor and integrity to the fulfillment of the terms concluded upon.
The gentleman then ordered wine, which he and the carpenter drank
together, in confirmation of their bargain. During the whole preceding
discussion and subsequent formalities, the old Puritan's portrait seems
to have persisted in its shadowy gestures of disapproval; but without
effect, except that, as Mr. Pyncheon set down the emptied glass, he
thought he beheld his grandfather frown.
"This sherry is too potent a wine for me; it has affected my brain
already," he observed, after a somewhat startled look at the picture.
"On returning to Europe, I shall confine myself to the more delicate
vintages of Italy and France, the best of which will not bear
transportation."
"My Lord Pyncheon may drink what wine he will, and wherever he
pleases," replied the carpenter, as if he had been privy to Mr.
Pyncheon's ambitious projects. "But first, sir, if you desire tidings
of this lost document, I must crave the favor of a little talk with
your fair daughter Alice."
"You are mad, Maule!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon haughtily; and now, at
last, there was anger mixed up with his pride. "What can my daughter
have to do with a business like this?"
Indeed, at this new demand on the carpenter's part, the proprietor of
the Seven Gables was even more thunder-struck than at the cool
proposition to surrender his house. There was, at least, an assignable
motive for the first stipulation; there appeared to be none whatever
for the last. Nevertheless, Matthew Maule sturdily insisted on the
young lady being summoned, and even gave her father to understand, in a
mysterious kind of explanation,--which made the matter considerably
darker than it looked before,--that the only chance of acquiring the
requisite knowledge was through the clear, crystal medium of a pure and
virgin intelligence, like that of the fair Alice. Not to encumber our
story with Mr. Pyncheon's scruples, whether of conscience, pride, or
fatherly affection, he at length ordered his daughter to be called. He
well knew that she was in her chamber, and engaged in no occupation
that could not readily be laid aside; for, as it happened, ever since
Alice's name had been spoken, both her father and the carpenter had
heard the sad and sweet music of her harpsichord, and the airier
melancholy of her accompanying voice.
So Alice Pyncheon was summoned, and appeared. A portrait of this young
lady, painted by a Venetian artist, and left by her father in England,
is said to have fallen into the hands of the present Duke of
Devonshire, and to be now preserved at Chatsworth; not on account of
any associations with the original, but for its value as a picture, and
the high character of beauty in the countenance. If ever there was a
lady born, and set apart from the world's vulgar mass by a certain
gentle and cold stateliness, it was this very Alice Pyncheon. Yet
there was the womanly mixture in her; the tenderness, or, at least, the
tender capabilities. For the sake of that redeeming quality, a man of
generous nature would have forgiven all her pride, and have been
content, almost, to lie down in her path, and let Alice set her slender
foot upon his heart. All that he would have required was simply the
acknowledgment that he was indeed a man, and a fellow-being, moulded of
the same elements as she.
As Alice came into the room, her eyes fell upon the carpenter, who was
standing near its centre, clad in green woollen jacket, a pair of loose
breeches, open at the knees, and with a long pocket for his rule, the
end of which protruded; it was as proper a mark of the artisan's
calling as Mr. Pyncheon's full-dress sword of that gentleman's
aristocratic pretensions. A glow of artistic approval brightened over
Alice Pyncheon's face; she was struck with admiration--which she made
no attempt to conceal--of the remarkable comeliness, strength, and
energy of Maule's figure. But that admiring glance (which most other
men, perhaps, would have cherished as a sweet recollection all through
life) the carpenter never forgave. It must have been the devil himself
that made Maule so subtile in his preception.
"Does the girl look at me as if I were a brute beast?" thought he,
setting his teeth. "She shall know whether I have a human spirit; and
the worse for her, if it prove stronger than her own!"
"My father, you sent for me," said Alice, in her sweet and harp-like
voice. "But, if you have business with this young man, pray let me go
again. You know I do not love this room, in spite of that Claude, with
which you try to bring back sunny recollections."
"Stay a moment, young lady, if you please!" said Matthew Maule. "My
business with your father is over. With yourself, it is now to begin!"
Alice looked towards her father, in surprise and inquiry.
"Yes, Alice," said Mr. Pyncheon, with some disturbance and confusion.
"This young man--his name is Matthew Maule--professes, so far as I can
understand him, to be able to discover, through your means, a certain
paper or parchment, which was missing long before your birth. The
importance of the document in question renders it advisable to neglect
no possible, even if improbable, method of regaining it. You will
therefore oblige me, my dear Alice, by answering this person's
inquiries, and complying with his lawful and reasonable requests, so
far as they may appear to have the aforesaid object in view. As I
shall remain in the room, you need apprehend no rude nor unbecoming
deportment, on the young man's part; and, at your slightest wish, of
course, the investigation, or whatever we may call it, shall
immediately be broken off."
"Mistress Alice Pyncheon," remarked Matthew Maule, with the utmost
deference, but yet a half-hidden sarcasm in his look and tone, "will no
doubt feel herself quite safe in her father's presence, and under his
all-sufficient protection."
"I certainly shall entertain no manner of apprehension, with my father
at hand," said Alice with maidenly dignity. "Neither do I conceive
that a lady, while true to herself, can have aught to fear from
whomsoever, or in any circumstances!"
Poor Alice! By what unhappy impulse did she thus put herself at once on
terms of defiance against a strength which she could not estimate?
"Then, Mistress Alice," said Matthew Maule, handing a
chair,--gracefully enough, for a craftsman, "will it please you only to
sit down, and do me the favor (though altogether beyond a poor
carpenter's deserts) to fix your eyes on mine!"
Alice complied, She was very proud. Setting aside all advantages of
rank, this fair girl deemed herself conscious of a power--combined of
beauty, high, unsullied purity, and the preservative force of
womanhood--that could make her sphere impenetrable, unless betrayed by
treachery within. She instinctively knew, it may be, that some
sinister or evil potency was now striving to pass her barriers; nor
would she decline the contest. So Alice put woman's might against
man's might; a match not often equal on the part of woman.
Her father meanwhile had turned away, and seemed absorbed in the
contemplation of a landscape by Claude, where a shadowy and
sun-streaked vista penetrated so remotely into an ancient wood, that it
would have been no wonder if his fancy had lost itself in the picture's
bewildering depths. But, in truth, the picture was no more to him at
that moment than the blank wall against which it hung. His mind was
haunted with the many and strange tales which he had heard, attributing
mysterious if not supernatural endowments to these Maules, as well the
grandson here present as his two immediate ancestors. Mr. Pyncheon's
long residence abroad, and intercourse with men of wit and
fashion,--courtiers, worldings, and free-thinkers,--had done much
towards obliterating the grim Puritan superstitions, which no man of
New England birth at that early period could entirely escape. But, on
the other hand, had not a whole community believed Maule's grandfather
to be a wizard? Had not the crime been proved? Had not the wizard died
for it? Had he not bequeathed a legacy of hatred against the Pyncheons
to this only grandson, who, as it appeared, was now about to exercise a
subtle influence over the daughter of his enemy's house? Might not
this influence be the same that was called witchcraft?
Turning half around, he caught a glimpse of Maule's figure in the
looking-glass. At some paces from Alice, with his arms uplifted in the
air, the carpenter made a gesture as if directing downward a slow,
ponderous, and invisible weight upon the maiden.
"Stay, Maule!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, stepping forward. "I forbid
your proceeding further!"
"Pray, my dear father, do not interrupt the young man," said Alice,
without changing her position. "His efforts, I assure you, will prove
very harmless."
Again Mr. Pyncheon turned his eyes towards the Claude. It was then his
daughter's will, in opposition to his own, that the experiment should
be fully tried. Henceforth, therefore, he did but consent, not urge
it. And was it not for her sake far more than for his own that he
desired its success? That lost parchment once restored, the beautiful
Alice Pyncheon, with the rich dowry which he could then bestow, might
wed an English duke or a German reigning-prince, instead of some New
England clergyman or lawyer! At the thought, the ambitious father
almost consented, in his heart, that, if the devil's power were needed
to the accomplishment of this great object, Maule might evoke him.
Alice's own purity would be her safeguard.
With his mind full of imaginary magnificence, Mr. Pyncheon heard a
half-uttered exclamation from his daughter. It was very faint and low;
so indistinct that there seemed but half a will to shape out the words,
and too undefined a purport to be intelligible. Yet it was a call for
help!--his conscience never doubted it;--and, little more than a
whisper to his ear, it was a dismal shriek, and long reechoed so, in
the region round his heart! But this time the father did not turn.
After a further interval, Maule spoke.
"Behold your daughter," said he.
Mr. Pyncheon came hastily forward. The carpenter was standing erect in
front of Alice's chair, and pointing his finger towards the maiden with
an expression of triumphant power, the limits of which could not be
defined, as, indeed, its scope stretched vaguely towards the unseen and
the infinite. Alice sat in an attitude of profound repose, with the
long brown lashes drooping over her eyes.
"There she is!" said the carpenter. "Speak to her!"
"Alice! My daughter!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon. "My own Alice!"
She did not stir.
"Louder!" said Maule, smiling.
"Alice! Awake!" cried her father. "It troubles me to see you thus!
Awake!"
He spoke loudly, with terror in his voice, and close to that delicate
ear which had always been so sensitive to every discord. But the sound
evidently reached her not. It is indescribable what a sense of remote,
dim, unattainable distance betwixt himself and Alice was impressed on
the father by this impossibility of reaching her with his voice.
"Best touch her!" said Matthew Maule "Shake the girl, and roughly, too!
My hands are hardened with too much use of axe, saw, and plane,--else I
might help you!"
Mr. Pyncheon took her hand, and pressed it with the earnestness of
startled emotion. He kissed her, with so great a heart-throb in the
kiss, that he thought she must needs feel it. Then, in a gust of anger
at her insensibility, he shook her maiden form with a violence which,
the next moment, it affrighted him to remember. He withdrew his
encircling arms, and Alice--whose figure, though flexible, had been
wholly impassive--relapsed into the same attitude as before these
attempts to arouse her. Maule having shifted his position, her face
was turned towards him slightly, but with what seemed to be a reference
of her very slumber to his guidance.
Then it was a strange sight to behold how the man of conventionalities
shook the powder out of his periwig; how the reserved and stately
gentleman forgot his dignity; how the gold-embroidered waistcoat
flickered and glistened in the firelight with the convulsion of rage,
terror, and sorrow in the human heart that was beating under it.
"Villain!" cried Mr. Pyncheon, shaking his clenched fist at Maule.
"You and the fiend together have robbed me of my daughter. Give her
back, spawn of the old wizard, or you shall climb Gallows Hill in your
grandfather's footsteps!"
"Softly, Mr. Pyncheon!" said the carpenter with scornful composure.
"Softly, an' it please your worship, else you will spoil those rich
lace-ruffles at your wrists! Is it my crime if you have sold your
daughter for the mere hope of getting a sheet of yellow parchment into
your clutch? There sits Mistress Alice quietly asleep. Now let Matthew
Maule try whether she be as proud as the carpenter found her awhile
since."
He spoke, and Alice responded, with a soft, subdued, inward
acquiescence, and a bending of her form towards him, like the flame of
a torch when it indicates a gentle draught of air. He beckoned with
his hand, and, rising from her chair,--blindly, but undoubtingly, as
tending to her sure and inevitable centre,--the proud Alice approached
him. He waved her back, and, retreating, Alice sank again into her
seat.
"She is mine!" said Matthew Maule. "Mine, by the right of the
strongest spirit!"
In the further progress of the legend, there is a long, grotesque, and
occasionally awe-striking account of the carpenter's incantations (if
so they are to be called), with a view of discovering the lost
document. It appears to have been his object to convert the mind of
Alice into a kind of telescopic medium, through which Mr. Pyncheon and
himself might obtain a glimpse into the spiritual world. He succeeded,
accordingly, in holding an imperfect sort of intercourse, at one
remove, with the departed personages in whose custody the so much
valued secret had been carried beyond the precincts of earth. During
her trance, Alice described three figures as being present to her
spiritualized perception. One was an aged, dignified, stern-looking
gentleman, clad as for a solemn festival in grave and costly attire,
but with a great blood-stain on his richly wrought band; the second, an
aged man, meanly dressed, with a dark and malign countenance, and a
broken halter about his neck; the third, a person not so advanced in
life as the former two, but beyond the middle age, wearing a coarse
woollen tunic and leather breeches, and with a carpenter's rule
sticking out of his side pocket. These three visionary characters
possessed a mutual knowledge of the missing document. One of them, in
truth,--it was he with the blood-stain on his band,--seemed, unless his
gestures were misunderstood, to hold the parchment in his immediate
keeping, but was prevented by his two partners in the mystery from
disburdening himself of the trust. Finally, when he showed a purpose
of shouting forth the secret loudly enough to be heard from his own
sphere into that of mortals, his companions struggled with him, and
pressed their hands over his mouth; and forthwith--whether that he were
choked by it, or that the secret itself was of a crimson hue--there was
a fresh flow of blood upon his band. Upon this, the two meanly dressed
figures mocked and jeered at the much-abashed old dignitary, and
pointed their fingers at the stain.
At this juncture, Maule turned to Mr. Pyncheon.
"It will never be allowed," said he. "The custody of this secret, that
would so enrich his heirs, makes part of your grandfather's
retribution. He must choke with it until it is no longer of any value.
And keep you the House of the Seven Gables! It is too dear bought an
inheritance, and too heavy with the curse upon it, to be shifted yet
awhile from the Colonel's posterity."
Mr. Pyncheon tried to speak, but--what with fear and passion--could
make only a gurgling murmur in his throat. The carpenter smiled.
"Aha, worshipful sir!--so you have old Maule's blood to drink!" said he
jeeringly.
"Fiend in man's shape! why dost thou keep dominion over my child?"
cried Mr. Pyncheon, when his choked utterance could make way. "Give me
back my daughter. Then go thy ways; and may we never meet again!"
"Your daughter!" said Matthew Maule. "Why, she is fairly mine!
Nevertheless, not to be too hard with fair Mistress Alice, I will leave
her in your keeping; but I do not warrant you that she shall never have
occasion to remember Maule, the carpenter."
He waved his hands with an upward motion; and, after a few repetitions
of similar gestures, the beautiful Alice Pyncheon awoke from her
strange trance. She awoke without the slightest recollection of her
visionary experience; but as one losing herself in a momentary reverie,
and returning to the consciousness of actual life, in almost as brief
an interval as the down-sinking flame of the hearth should quiver again
up the chimney. On recognizing Matthew Maule, she assumed an air of
somewhat cold but gentle dignity, the rather, as there was a certain
peculiar smile on the carpenter's visage that stirred the native pride
of the fair Alice. So ended, for that time, the quest for the lost
title-deed of the Pyncheon territory at the Eastward; nor, though often
subsequently renewed, has it ever yet befallen a Pyncheon to set his
eye upon that parchment.
But, alas for the beautiful, the gentle, yet too haughty Alice! A
power that she little dreamed of had laid its grasp upon her maiden
soul. A will, most unlike her own, constrained her to do its grotesque
and fantastic bidding. Her father as it proved, had martyred his poor
child to an inordinate desire for measuring his land by miles instead
of acres. And, therefore, while Alice Pyncheon lived, she was Maule's
slave, in a bondage more humiliating, a thousand-fold, than that which
binds its chain around the body. Seated by his humble fireside, Maule
had but to wave his hand; and, wherever the proud lady chanced to
be,--whether in her chamber, or entertaining her father's stately
guests, or worshipping at church,--whatever her place or occupation,
her spirit passed from beneath her own control, and bowed itself to
Maule. "Alice, laugh!"--the carpenter, beside his hearth, would say;
or perhaps intensely will it, without a spoken word. And, even were it
prayer-time, or at a funeral, Alice must break into wild laughter.
"Alice, be sad!"--and, at the instant, down would come her tears,
quenching all the mirth of those around her like sudden rain upon a
bonfire. "Alice, dance."--and dance she would, not in such court-like
measures as she had learned abroad, but some high-paced jig, or
hop-skip rigadoon, befitting the brisk lasses at a rustic merry-making.
It seemed to be Maule's impulse, not to ruin Alice, nor to visit her
with any black or gigantic mischief, which would have crowned her
sorrows with the grace of tragedy, but to wreak a low, ungenerous scorn
upon her. Thus all the dignity of life was lost. She felt herself too
much abased, and longed to change natures with some worm!
One evening, at a bridal party (but not her own; for, so lost from
self-control, she would have deemed it sin to marry), poor Alice was
beckoned forth by her unseen despot, and constrained, in her gossamer
white dress and satin slippers, to hasten along the street to the mean
dwelling of a laboring-man. There was laughter and good cheer within;
for Matthew Maule, that night, was to wed the laborer's daughter, and
had summoned proud Alice Pyncheon to wait upon his bride. And so she
did; and when the twain were one, Alice awoke out of her enchanted
sleep. Yet, no longer proud,--humbly, and with a smile all steeped in
sadness,--she kissed Maule's wife, and went her way. It was an
inclement night; the southeast wind drove the mingled snow and rain
into her thinly sheltered bosom; her satin slippers were wet through
and through, as she trod the muddy sidewalks. The next day a cold;
soon, a settled cough; anon, a hectic cheek, a wasted form, that sat
beside the harpsichord, and filled the house with music! Music in
which a strain of the heavenly choristers was echoed! Oh; joy! For
Alice had borne her last humiliation! Oh, greater joy! For Alice was
penitent of her one earthly sin, and proud no more!
The Pyncheons made a great funeral for Alice. The kith and kin were
there, and the whole respectability of the town besides. But, last in
the procession, came Matthew Maule, gnashing his teeth, as if he would
have bitten his own heart in twain,--the darkest and wofullest man that
ever walked behind a corpse! He meant to humble Alice, not to kill her;
but he had taken a woman's delicate soul into his rude gripe, to play
with--and she was dead!
| In this chapter Hawthorne returns to the history of the Pyncheon family in order to bolster the story of the contemporary Pyncheons. This story serves as a bridge between generations. Gervayse Pyncheon is the young grandson of Colonel Pyncheon who found the old man dead, and the Matthew Maule of this chapter is the grandson of the original wizard of the same name. The chapter establishes a continuity among the generations of the Pyncheon family. The Pyncheon line may be directly connected from Colonel Pyncheon to Gervayse to Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, all of whom share identical qualities. Even Matthew Maule the younger seems a replica of his grandfather; both men share heretical beliefs and the ability to possess others' dreams. The reintroduction of the Maule family into the Pyncheon history demonstrates how closely the two families are connected. They share the same fate even generations after the event that first brought Colonel Pyncheon in contact with Matthew Maule. The Maule family holds a serious grudge against the Pyncheons that has not abated. The sin that has remained as a mark among the Pyncheons also exists as a continued injustice against the Maules. The continuity in both families' histories suggests that there may be a contemporary connection between the Maules and the Pyncheons that has not yet been revealed and may be a critical factor in absolving the family sin. The chapter, told as legend rather than as direct history, includes a number of supernatural manifestations of the perpetuation of Colonel Pyncheon's misdeeds. Scipio mentions that Colonel Pyncheon haunts the house, and folklore claims that when Matthew Maule argues with Gervayse the Colonel descended from his own portrait. Along with these incidents relating to Colonel Pyncheon is the mysterious fate of Alice Pyncheon, who is subjected by Maule's mystical powers. Since the chapter is narrated by a character with a reputation as a fanatic, the literal events may be dismissed as exaggeration or rumor. The fate of the eastern lands becomes an even more significant part of the Pyncheon family history upon its mention in this chapter. The eastern province proved an obsession for Colonel Pyncheon and Gervayse; since Hawthorne establishes that events recur, one can safely assume that Judge Pyncheon, the character who shares characteristics similar to these two ancestors, will show an interest in the eastern land. The solution to this, however, requires three disparate characters. The stern-looking gentleman is Judge Pyncheon, while the aged man with a halter about his neck is likely Clifford. The one figure who remains unclear is the middle-aged man with a carpenter's rule. Hawthorne associates Alice Pyncheon with the elderly Hepzibah. While the young Alice does not have the disadvantage of Hepzibah in her old age, they both share a stately adherence to the codes of conduct for a lady while remaining capable of kindness and generosity. Both characters also serve as the victims among the Pyncheon family, cursed with scorn and humbled by fate. For Hepzibah the indignity comes from a poverty late in life, while Alice suffers humiliation wrought upon her by Matthew Maule | analysis |
HOLGRAVE, plunging into his tale with the energy and absorption natural
to a young author, had given a good deal of action to the parts capable
of being developed and exemplified in that manner. He now observed
that a certain remarkable drowsiness (wholly unlike that with which the
reader possibly feels himself affected) had been flung over the senses
of his auditress. It was the effect, unquestionably, of the mystic
gesticulations by which he had sought to bring bodily before Phoebe's
perception the figure of the mesmerizing carpenter. With the lids
drooping over her eyes,--now lifted for an instant, and drawn down
again as with leaden weights,--she leaned slightly towards him, and
seemed almost to regulate her breath by his. Holgrave gazed at her, as
he rolled up his manuscript, and recognized an incipient stage of that
curious psychological condition which, as he had himself told Phoebe,
he possessed more than an ordinary faculty of producing. A veil was
beginning to be muffled about her, in which she could behold only him,
and live only in his thoughts and emotions. His glance, as he fastened
it on the young girl, grew involuntarily more concentrated; in his
attitude there was the consciousness of power, investing his hardly
mature figure with a dignity that did not belong to its physical
manifestation. It was evident, that, with but one wave of his hand and
a corresponding effort of his will, he could complete his mastery over
Phoebe's yet free and virgin spirit: he could establish an influence
over this good, pure, and simple child, as dangerous, and perhaps as
disastrous, as that which the carpenter of his legend had acquired and
exercised over the ill-fated Alice.
To a disposition like Holgrave's, at once speculative and active, there
is no temptation so great as the opportunity of acquiring empire over
the human spirit; nor any idea more seductive to a young man than to
become the arbiter of a young girl's destiny. Let us,
therefore,--whatever his defects of nature and education, and in spite
of his scorn for creeds and institutions,--concede to the
daguerreotypist the rare and high quality of reverence for another's
individuality. Let us allow him integrity, also, forever after to be
confided in; since he forbade himself to twine that one link more which
might have rendered his spell over Phoebe indissoluble.
He made a slight gesture upward with his hand.
"You really mortify me, my dear Miss Phoebe!" he exclaimed, smiling
half-sarcastically at her. "My poor story, it is but too evident, will
never do for Godey or Graham! Only think of your falling asleep at what
I hoped the newspaper critics would pronounce a most brilliant,
powerful, imaginative, pathetic, and original winding up! Well, the
manuscript must serve to light lamps with;--if, indeed, being so imbued
with my gentle dulness, it is any longer capable of flame!"
"Me asleep! How can you say so?" answered Phoebe, as unconscious of the
crisis through which she had passed as an infant of the precipice to
the verge of which it has rolled. "No, no! I consider myself as having
been very attentive; and, though I don't remember the incidents quite
distinctly, yet I have an impression of a vast deal of trouble and
calamity,--so, no doubt, the story will prove exceedingly attractive."
By this time the sun had gone down, and was tinting the clouds towards
the zenith with those bright hues which are not seen there until some
time after sunset, and when the horizon has quite lost its richer
brilliancy. The moon, too, which had long been climbing overhead, and
unobtrusively melting its disk into the azure,--like an ambitious
demagogue, who hides his aspiring purpose by assuming the prevalent hue
of popular sentiment,--now began to shine out, broad and oval, in its
middle pathway. These silvery beams were already powerful enough to
change the character of the lingering daylight. They softened and
embellished the aspect of the old house; although the shadows fell
deeper into the angles of its many gables, and lay brooding under the
projecting story, and within the half-open door. With the lapse of
every moment, the garden grew more picturesque; the fruit-trees,
shrubbery, and flower-bushes had a dark obscurity among them. The
commonplace characteristics--which, at noontide, it seemed to have
taken a century of sordid life to accumulate--were now transfigured by
a charm of romance. A hundred mysterious years were whispering among
the leaves, whenever the slight sea-breeze found its way thither and
stirred them. Through the foliage that roofed the little summer-house
the moonlight flickered to and fro, and fell silvery white on the dark
floor, the table, and the circular bench, with a continual shift and
play, according as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs
admitted or shut out the glimmer.
So sweetly cool was the atmosphere, after all the feverish day, that
the summer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid
moonlight, with a dash of icy temper in them, out of a silver vase.
Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human
heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of
nature. The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence
fell. It made him feel--what he sometimes almost forgot, thrust so
early as he had been into the rude struggle of man with man--how
youthful he still was.
"It seems to me," he observed, "that I never watched the coming of so
beautiful an eve, and never felt anything so very much like happiness
as at this moment. After all, what a good world we live in! How good,
and beautiful! How young it is, too, with nothing really rotten or
age-worn in it! This old house, for example, which sometimes has
positively oppressed my breath with its smell of decaying timber! And
this garden, where the black mould always clings to my spade, as if I
were a sexton delving in a graveyard! Could I keep the feeling that now
possesses me, the garden would every day be virgin soil, with the
earth's first freshness in the flavor of its beans and squashes; and
the house!--it would be like a bower in Eden, blossoming with the
earliest roses that God ever made. Moonlight, and the sentiment in
man's heart responsive to it, are the greatest of renovators and
reformers. And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove
to be no better than moonshine!"
"I have been happier than I am now; at least, much gayer," said Phoebe
thoughtfully. "Yet I am sensible of a great charm in this brightening
moonlight; and I love to watch how the day, tired as it is, lags away
reluctantly, and hates to be called yesterday so soon. I never cared
much about moonlight before. What is there, I wonder, so beautiful in
it, to-night?"
"And you have never felt it before?" inquired the artist, looking
earnestly at the girl through the twilight.
"Never," answered Phoebe; "and life does not look the same, now that I
have felt it so. It seems as if I had looked at everything, hitherto,
in broad daylight, or else in the ruddy light of a cheerful fire,
glimmering and dancing through a room. Ah, poor me!" she added, with a
half-melancholy laugh. "I shall never be so merry as before I knew
Cousin Hepzibah and poor Cousin Clifford. I have grown a great deal
older, in this little time. Older, and, I hope, wiser, and,--not
exactly sadder,--but, certainly, with not half so much lightness in my
spirits! I have given them my sunshine, and have been glad to give it;
but, of course, I cannot both give and keep it. They are welcome,
notwithstanding!"
"You have lost nothing, Phoebe, worth keeping, nor which it was
possible to keep," said Holgrave after a pause. "Our first youth is of
no value; for we are never conscious of it until after it is gone. But
sometimes--always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly
unfortunate--there comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the
heart's joy at being in love; or, possibly, it may come to crown some
other grand festival in life, if any other such there be. This
bemoaning of one's self (as you do now) over the first, careless,
shallow gayety of youth departed, and this profound happiness at youth
regained,--so much deeper and richer than that we lost,--are essential
to the soul's development. In some cases, the two states come almost
simultaneously, and mingle the sadness and the rapture in one
mysterious emotion."
"I hardly think I understand you," said Phoebe.
"No wonder," replied Holgrave, smiling; "for I have told you a secret
which I hardly began to know before I found myself giving it utterance.
Remember it, however; and when the truth becomes clear to you, then
think of this moonlight scene!"
"It is entirely moonlight now, except only a little flush of faint
crimson, upward from the west, between those buildings," remarked
Phoebe. "I must go in. Cousin Hepzibah is not quick at figures, and
will give herself a headache over the day's accounts, unless I help
her."
But Holgrave detained her a little longer.
"Miss Hepzibah tells me," observed he, "that you return to the country
in a few days."
"Yes, but only for a little while," answered Phoebe; "for I look upon
this as my present home. I go to make a few arrangements, and to take
a more deliberate leave of my mother and friends. It is pleasant to
live where one is much desired and very useful; and I think I may have
the satisfaction of feeling myself so here."
"You surely may, and more than you imagine," said the artist.
"Whatever health, comfort, and natural life exists in the house is
embodied in your person. These blessings came along with you, and will
vanish when you leave the threshold. Miss Hepzibah, by secluding
herself from society, has lost all true relation with it, and is, in
fact, dead; although she galvanizes herself into a semblance of life,
and stands behind her counter, afflicting the world with a
greatly-to-be-deprecated scowl. Your poor cousin Clifford is another
dead and long-buried person, on whom the governor and council have
wrought a necromantic miracle. I should not wonder if he were to
crumble away, some morning, after you are gone, and nothing be seen of
him more, except a heap of dust. Miss Hepzibah, at any rate, will lose
what little flexibility she has. They both exist by you."
"I should be very sorry to think so," answered Phoebe gravely. "But it
is true that my small abilities were precisely what they needed; and I
have a real interest in their welfare,--an odd kind of motherly
sentiment,--which I wish you would not laugh at! And let me tell you
frankly, Mr. Holgrave, I am sometimes puzzled to know whether you wish
them well or ill."
"Undoubtedly," said the daguerreotypist, "I do feel an interest in this
antiquated, poverty-stricken old maiden lady, and this degraded and
shattered gentleman,--this abortive lover of the beautiful. A kindly
interest, too, helpless old children that they are! But you have no
conception what a different kind of heart mine is from your own. It is
not my impulse, as regards these two individuals, either to help or
hinder; but to look on, to analyze, to explain matters to myself, and
to comprehend the drama which, for almost two hundred years, has been
dragging its slow length over the ground where you and I now tread. If
permitted to witness the close, I doubt not to derive a moral
satisfaction from it, go matters how they may. There is a conviction
within me that the end draws nigh. But, though Providence sent you
hither to help, and sends me only as a privileged and meet spectator, I
pledge myself to lend these unfortunate beings whatever aid I can!"
"I wish you would speak more plainly," cried Phoebe, perplexed and
displeased; "and, above all, that you would feel more like a Christian
and a human being! How is it possible to see people in distress without
desiring, more than anything else, to help and comfort them? You talk
as if this old house were a theatre; and you seem to look at Hepzibah's
and Clifford's misfortunes, and those of generations before them, as a
tragedy, such as I have seen acted in the hall of a country hotel, only
the present one appears to be played exclusively for your amusement. I
do not like this. The play costs the performers too much, and the
audience is too cold-hearted."
"You are severe," said Holgrave, compelled to recognize a degree of
truth in the piquant sketch of his own mood.
"And then," continued Phoebe, "what can you mean by your conviction,
which you tell me of, that the end is drawing near? Do you know of any
new trouble hanging over my poor relatives? If so, tell me at once, and
I will not leave them!"
"Forgive me, Phoebe!" said the daguerreotypist, holding out his hand,
to which the girl was constrained to yield her own. "I am somewhat of
a mystic, it must be confessed. The tendency is in my blood, together
with the faculty of mesmerism, which might have brought me to Gallows
Hill, in the good old times of witchcraft. Believe me, if I were
really aware of any secret, the disclosure of which would benefit your
friends,--who are my own friends, likewise,--you should learn it before
we part. But I have no such knowledge."
"You hold something back!" said Phoebe.
"Nothing,--no secrets but my own," answered Holgrave. "I can perceive,
indeed, that Judge Pyncheon still keeps his eye on Clifford, in whose
ruin he had so large a share. His motives and intentions, however are
a mystery to me. He is a determined and relentless man, with the
genuine character of an inquisitor; and had he any object to gain by
putting Clifford to the rack, I verily believe that he would wrench his
joints from their sockets, in order to accomplish it. But, so wealthy
and eminent as he is,--so powerful in his own strength, and in the
support of society on all sides,--what can Judge Pyncheon have to hope
or fear from the imbecile, branded, half-torpid Clifford?"
"Yet," urged Phoebe, "you did speak as if misfortune were impending!"
"Oh, that was because I am morbid!" replied the artist. "My mind has a
twist aside, like almost everybody's mind, except your own. Moreover,
it is so strange to find myself an inmate of this old Pyncheon House,
and sitting in this old garden--(hark, how Maule's well is
murmuring!)--that, were it only for this one circumstance, I cannot
help fancying that Destiny is arranging its fifth act for a
catastrophe."
"There!" cried Phoebe with renewed vexation; for she was by nature as
hostile to mystery as the sunshine to a dark corner. "You puzzle me
more than ever!"
"Then let us part friends!" said Holgrave, pressing her hand. "Or, if
not friends, let us part before you entirely hate me. You, who love
everybody else in the world!"
"Good-by, then," said Phoebe frankly. "I do not mean to be angry a
great while, and should be sorry to have you think so. There has
Cousin Hepzibah been standing in the shadow of the doorway, this
quarter of an hour past! She thinks I stay too long in the damp garden.
So, good-night, and good-by."
On the second morning thereafter, Phoebe might have been seen, in her
straw bonnet, with a shawl on one arm and a little carpet-bag on the
other, bidding adieu to Hepzibah and Cousin Clifford. She was to take
a seat in the next train of cars, which would transport her to within
half a dozen miles of her country village.
The tears were in Phoebe's eyes; a smile, dewy with affectionate
regret, was glimmering around her pleasant mouth. She wondered how it
came to pass, that her life of a few weeks, here in this heavy-hearted
old mansion, had taken such hold of her, and so melted into her
associations, as now to seem a more important centre-point of
remembrance than all which had gone before. How had Hepzibah--grim,
silent, and irresponsive to her overflow of cordial sentiment--contrived
to win so much love? And Clifford,--in his abortive decay, with the
mystery of fearful crime upon him, and the close prison-atmosphere yet
lurking in his breath,--how had he transformed himself into the simplest
child, whom Phoebe felt bound to watch over, and be, as it were, the
providence of his unconsidered hours! Everything, at that instant of
farewell, stood out prominently to her view. Look where she would, lay
her hand on what she might, the object responded to her consciousness,
as if a moist human heart were in it.
She peeped from the window into the garden, and felt herself more
regretful at leaving this spot of black earth, vitiated with such an
age-long growth of weeds, than joyful at the idea of again scenting her
pine forests and fresh clover-fields. She called Chanticleer, his two
wives, and the venerable chicken, and threw them some crumbs of bread
from the breakfast-table. These being hastily gobbled up, the chicken
spread its wings, and alighted close by Phoebe on the window-sill,
where it looked gravely into her face and vented its emotions in a
croak. Phoebe bade it be a good old chicken during her absence, and
promised to bring it a little bag of buckwheat.
"Ah, Phoebe!" remarked Hepzibah, "you do not smile so naturally as when
you came to us! Then, the smile chose to shine out; now, you choose it
should. It is well that you are going back, for a little while, into
your native air. There has been too much weight on your spirits. The
house is too gloomy and lonesome; the shop is full of vexations; and as
for me, I have no faculty of making things look brighter than they are.
Dear Clifford has been your only comfort!"
"Come hither, Phoebe," suddenly cried her cousin Clifford, who had said
very little all the morning. "Close!--closer!--and look me in the
face!"
Phoebe put one of her small hands on each elbow of his chair, and
leaned her face towards him, so that he might peruse it as carefully as
he would. It is probable that the latent emotions of this parting hour
had revived, in some degree, his bedimmed and enfeebled faculties. At
any rate, Phoebe soon felt that, if not the profound insight of a seer,
yet a more than feminine delicacy of appreciation, was making her heart
the subject of its regard. A moment before, she had known nothing
which she would have sought to hide. Now, as if some secret were
hinted to her own consciousness through the medium of another's
perception, she was fain to let her eyelids droop beneath Clifford's
gaze. A blush, too,--the redder, because she strove hard to keep it
down,--ascended bigger and higher, in a tide of fitful progress, until
even her brow was all suffused with it.
"It is enough, Phoebe," said Clifford, with a melancholy smile. "When
I first saw you, you were the prettiest little maiden in the world; and
now you have deepened into beauty. Girlhood has passed into womanhood;
the bud is a bloom! Go, now--I feel lonelier than I did."
Phoebe took leave of the desolate couple, and passed through the shop,
twinkling her eyelids to shake off a dew-drop; for--considering how
brief her absence was to be, and therefore the folly of being cast down
about it--she would not so far acknowledge her tears as to dry them
with her handkerchief. On the doorstep, she met the little urchin
whose marvellous feats of gastronomy have been recorded in the earlier
pages of our narrative. She took from the window some specimen or
other of natural history,--her eyes being too dim with moisture to
inform her accurately whether it was a rabbit or a hippopotamus,--put
it into the child's hand as a parting gift, and went her way. Old
Uncle Venner was just coming out of his door, with a wood-horse and saw
on his shoulder; and, trudging along the street, he scrupled not to
keep company with Phoebe, so far as their paths lay together; nor, in
spite of his patched coat and rusty beaver, and the curious fashion of
his tow-cloth trousers, could she find it in her heart to outwalk him.
"We shall miss you, next Sabbath afternoon," observed the street
philosopher. "It is unaccountable how little while it takes some folks
to grow just as natural to a man as his own breath; and, begging your
pardon, Miss Phoebe (though there can be no offence in an old man's
saying it), that's just what you've grown to me! My years have been a
great many, and your life is but just beginning; and yet, you are
somehow as familiar to me as if I had found you at my mother's door,
and you had blossomed, like a running vine, all along my pathway since.
Come back soon, or I shall be gone to my farm; for I begin to find
these wood-sawing jobs a little too tough for my back-ache."
"Very soon, Uncle Venner," replied Phoebe.
"And let it be all the sooner, Phoebe, for the sake of those poor souls
yonder," continued her companion. "They can never do without you,
now,--never, Phoebe; never--no more than if one of God's angels had
been living with them, and making their dismal house pleasant and
comfortable! Don't it seem to you they'd be in a sad case, if, some
pleasant summer morning like this, the angel should spread his wings,
and fly to the place he came from? Well, just so they feel, now that
you're going home by the railroad! They can't bear it, Miss Phoebe; so
be sure to come back!"
"I am no angel, Uncle Venner," said Phoebe, smiling, as she offered him
her hand at the street-corner. "But, I suppose, people never feel so
much like angels as when they are doing what little good they may. So
I shall certainly come back!"
Thus parted the old man and the rosy girl; and Phoebe took the wings of
the morning, and was soon flitting almost as rapidly away as if endowed
with the aerial locomotion of the angels to whom Uncle Venner had so
graciously compared her.
| Phoebe's Goodbye: Holgrave finishes his story and finds Phoebe to appear as if she were in a trance. To a person like Holgrave, there is no temptation greater than the opportunity to acquire empire over the human spirit, but he also possesses a high quality of reverence for another's individuality. He makes a gesture with his hand and Phoebe becomes alert. That night is a beautiful one, with a cool atmosphere after a feverish day. Holgrave believes that he has never seen a more beautiful eve, while Phoebe senses a great charm in the moonlight. Phoebe claims that she will never be as merry as before she knew Hepzibah and Clifford. Holgrave tells her that she has lost nothing, for one's first youth is of little value. The departure of shallow gaiety is essential to the soul's development, he says. Phoebe plans to return to the country in a few days. Holgrave tells Phoebe that Hepzibah and Clifford both exist by Phoebe, who tells Holgrave that he talks as if the old house were a theater. Holgrave says that Judge Pyncheon still keeps his eye on Clifford, but his motives remain a mystery. He wonders what Jaffrey has to fear from Clifford. Phoebe wonders how it came to pass that the old mansion had taken such hold of her in so few weeks and how grim Hepzibah contrived to win so much love. Clifford later remarks to Phoebe how she has deepened into beauty. Phoebe departed, bidding farewell to everyone, including Uncle Venner, who compares her to an angel. | summary |
HOLGRAVE, plunging into his tale with the energy and absorption natural
to a young author, had given a good deal of action to the parts capable
of being developed and exemplified in that manner. He now observed
that a certain remarkable drowsiness (wholly unlike that with which the
reader possibly feels himself affected) had been flung over the senses
of his auditress. It was the effect, unquestionably, of the mystic
gesticulations by which he had sought to bring bodily before Phoebe's
perception the figure of the mesmerizing carpenter. With the lids
drooping over her eyes,--now lifted for an instant, and drawn down
again as with leaden weights,--she leaned slightly towards him, and
seemed almost to regulate her breath by his. Holgrave gazed at her, as
he rolled up his manuscript, and recognized an incipient stage of that
curious psychological condition which, as he had himself told Phoebe,
he possessed more than an ordinary faculty of producing. A veil was
beginning to be muffled about her, in which she could behold only him,
and live only in his thoughts and emotions. His glance, as he fastened
it on the young girl, grew involuntarily more concentrated; in his
attitude there was the consciousness of power, investing his hardly
mature figure with a dignity that did not belong to its physical
manifestation. It was evident, that, with but one wave of his hand and
a corresponding effort of his will, he could complete his mastery over
Phoebe's yet free and virgin spirit: he could establish an influence
over this good, pure, and simple child, as dangerous, and perhaps as
disastrous, as that which the carpenter of his legend had acquired and
exercised over the ill-fated Alice.
To a disposition like Holgrave's, at once speculative and active, there
is no temptation so great as the opportunity of acquiring empire over
the human spirit; nor any idea more seductive to a young man than to
become the arbiter of a young girl's destiny. Let us,
therefore,--whatever his defects of nature and education, and in spite
of his scorn for creeds and institutions,--concede to the
daguerreotypist the rare and high quality of reverence for another's
individuality. Let us allow him integrity, also, forever after to be
confided in; since he forbade himself to twine that one link more which
might have rendered his spell over Phoebe indissoluble.
He made a slight gesture upward with his hand.
"You really mortify me, my dear Miss Phoebe!" he exclaimed, smiling
half-sarcastically at her. "My poor story, it is but too evident, will
never do for Godey or Graham! Only think of your falling asleep at what
I hoped the newspaper critics would pronounce a most brilliant,
powerful, imaginative, pathetic, and original winding up! Well, the
manuscript must serve to light lamps with;--if, indeed, being so imbued
with my gentle dulness, it is any longer capable of flame!"
"Me asleep! How can you say so?" answered Phoebe, as unconscious of the
crisis through which she had passed as an infant of the precipice to
the verge of which it has rolled. "No, no! I consider myself as having
been very attentive; and, though I don't remember the incidents quite
distinctly, yet I have an impression of a vast deal of trouble and
calamity,--so, no doubt, the story will prove exceedingly attractive."
By this time the sun had gone down, and was tinting the clouds towards
the zenith with those bright hues which are not seen there until some
time after sunset, and when the horizon has quite lost its richer
brilliancy. The moon, too, which had long been climbing overhead, and
unobtrusively melting its disk into the azure,--like an ambitious
demagogue, who hides his aspiring purpose by assuming the prevalent hue
of popular sentiment,--now began to shine out, broad and oval, in its
middle pathway. These silvery beams were already powerful enough to
change the character of the lingering daylight. They softened and
embellished the aspect of the old house; although the shadows fell
deeper into the angles of its many gables, and lay brooding under the
projecting story, and within the half-open door. With the lapse of
every moment, the garden grew more picturesque; the fruit-trees,
shrubbery, and flower-bushes had a dark obscurity among them. The
commonplace characteristics--which, at noontide, it seemed to have
taken a century of sordid life to accumulate--were now transfigured by
a charm of romance. A hundred mysterious years were whispering among
the leaves, whenever the slight sea-breeze found its way thither and
stirred them. Through the foliage that roofed the little summer-house
the moonlight flickered to and fro, and fell silvery white on the dark
floor, the table, and the circular bench, with a continual shift and
play, according as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs
admitted or shut out the glimmer.
So sweetly cool was the atmosphere, after all the feverish day, that
the summer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid
moonlight, with a dash of icy temper in them, out of a silver vase.
Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human
heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of
nature. The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence
fell. It made him feel--what he sometimes almost forgot, thrust so
early as he had been into the rude struggle of man with man--how
youthful he still was.
"It seems to me," he observed, "that I never watched the coming of so
beautiful an eve, and never felt anything so very much like happiness
as at this moment. After all, what a good world we live in! How good,
and beautiful! How young it is, too, with nothing really rotten or
age-worn in it! This old house, for example, which sometimes has
positively oppressed my breath with its smell of decaying timber! And
this garden, where the black mould always clings to my spade, as if I
were a sexton delving in a graveyard! Could I keep the feeling that now
possesses me, the garden would every day be virgin soil, with the
earth's first freshness in the flavor of its beans and squashes; and
the house!--it would be like a bower in Eden, blossoming with the
earliest roses that God ever made. Moonlight, and the sentiment in
man's heart responsive to it, are the greatest of renovators and
reformers. And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove
to be no better than moonshine!"
"I have been happier than I am now; at least, much gayer," said Phoebe
thoughtfully. "Yet I am sensible of a great charm in this brightening
moonlight; and I love to watch how the day, tired as it is, lags away
reluctantly, and hates to be called yesterday so soon. I never cared
much about moonlight before. What is there, I wonder, so beautiful in
it, to-night?"
"And you have never felt it before?" inquired the artist, looking
earnestly at the girl through the twilight.
"Never," answered Phoebe; "and life does not look the same, now that I
have felt it so. It seems as if I had looked at everything, hitherto,
in broad daylight, or else in the ruddy light of a cheerful fire,
glimmering and dancing through a room. Ah, poor me!" she added, with a
half-melancholy laugh. "I shall never be so merry as before I knew
Cousin Hepzibah and poor Cousin Clifford. I have grown a great deal
older, in this little time. Older, and, I hope, wiser, and,--not
exactly sadder,--but, certainly, with not half so much lightness in my
spirits! I have given them my sunshine, and have been glad to give it;
but, of course, I cannot both give and keep it. They are welcome,
notwithstanding!"
"You have lost nothing, Phoebe, worth keeping, nor which it was
possible to keep," said Holgrave after a pause. "Our first youth is of
no value; for we are never conscious of it until after it is gone. But
sometimes--always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly
unfortunate--there comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the
heart's joy at being in love; or, possibly, it may come to crown some
other grand festival in life, if any other such there be. This
bemoaning of one's self (as you do now) over the first, careless,
shallow gayety of youth departed, and this profound happiness at youth
regained,--so much deeper and richer than that we lost,--are essential
to the soul's development. In some cases, the two states come almost
simultaneously, and mingle the sadness and the rapture in one
mysterious emotion."
"I hardly think I understand you," said Phoebe.
"No wonder," replied Holgrave, smiling; "for I have told you a secret
which I hardly began to know before I found myself giving it utterance.
Remember it, however; and when the truth becomes clear to you, then
think of this moonlight scene!"
"It is entirely moonlight now, except only a little flush of faint
crimson, upward from the west, between those buildings," remarked
Phoebe. "I must go in. Cousin Hepzibah is not quick at figures, and
will give herself a headache over the day's accounts, unless I help
her."
But Holgrave detained her a little longer.
"Miss Hepzibah tells me," observed he, "that you return to the country
in a few days."
"Yes, but only for a little while," answered Phoebe; "for I look upon
this as my present home. I go to make a few arrangements, and to take
a more deliberate leave of my mother and friends. It is pleasant to
live where one is much desired and very useful; and I think I may have
the satisfaction of feeling myself so here."
"You surely may, and more than you imagine," said the artist.
"Whatever health, comfort, and natural life exists in the house is
embodied in your person. These blessings came along with you, and will
vanish when you leave the threshold. Miss Hepzibah, by secluding
herself from society, has lost all true relation with it, and is, in
fact, dead; although she galvanizes herself into a semblance of life,
and stands behind her counter, afflicting the world with a
greatly-to-be-deprecated scowl. Your poor cousin Clifford is another
dead and long-buried person, on whom the governor and council have
wrought a necromantic miracle. I should not wonder if he were to
crumble away, some morning, after you are gone, and nothing be seen of
him more, except a heap of dust. Miss Hepzibah, at any rate, will lose
what little flexibility she has. They both exist by you."
"I should be very sorry to think so," answered Phoebe gravely. "But it
is true that my small abilities were precisely what they needed; and I
have a real interest in their welfare,--an odd kind of motherly
sentiment,--which I wish you would not laugh at! And let me tell you
frankly, Mr. Holgrave, I am sometimes puzzled to know whether you wish
them well or ill."
"Undoubtedly," said the daguerreotypist, "I do feel an interest in this
antiquated, poverty-stricken old maiden lady, and this degraded and
shattered gentleman,--this abortive lover of the beautiful. A kindly
interest, too, helpless old children that they are! But you have no
conception what a different kind of heart mine is from your own. It is
not my impulse, as regards these two individuals, either to help or
hinder; but to look on, to analyze, to explain matters to myself, and
to comprehend the drama which, for almost two hundred years, has been
dragging its slow length over the ground where you and I now tread. If
permitted to witness the close, I doubt not to derive a moral
satisfaction from it, go matters how they may. There is a conviction
within me that the end draws nigh. But, though Providence sent you
hither to help, and sends me only as a privileged and meet spectator, I
pledge myself to lend these unfortunate beings whatever aid I can!"
"I wish you would speak more plainly," cried Phoebe, perplexed and
displeased; "and, above all, that you would feel more like a Christian
and a human being! How is it possible to see people in distress without
desiring, more than anything else, to help and comfort them? You talk
as if this old house were a theatre; and you seem to look at Hepzibah's
and Clifford's misfortunes, and those of generations before them, as a
tragedy, such as I have seen acted in the hall of a country hotel, only
the present one appears to be played exclusively for your amusement. I
do not like this. The play costs the performers too much, and the
audience is too cold-hearted."
"You are severe," said Holgrave, compelled to recognize a degree of
truth in the piquant sketch of his own mood.
"And then," continued Phoebe, "what can you mean by your conviction,
which you tell me of, that the end is drawing near? Do you know of any
new trouble hanging over my poor relatives? If so, tell me at once, and
I will not leave them!"
"Forgive me, Phoebe!" said the daguerreotypist, holding out his hand,
to which the girl was constrained to yield her own. "I am somewhat of
a mystic, it must be confessed. The tendency is in my blood, together
with the faculty of mesmerism, which might have brought me to Gallows
Hill, in the good old times of witchcraft. Believe me, if I were
really aware of any secret, the disclosure of which would benefit your
friends,--who are my own friends, likewise,--you should learn it before
we part. But I have no such knowledge."
"You hold something back!" said Phoebe.
"Nothing,--no secrets but my own," answered Holgrave. "I can perceive,
indeed, that Judge Pyncheon still keeps his eye on Clifford, in whose
ruin he had so large a share. His motives and intentions, however are
a mystery to me. He is a determined and relentless man, with the
genuine character of an inquisitor; and had he any object to gain by
putting Clifford to the rack, I verily believe that he would wrench his
joints from their sockets, in order to accomplish it. But, so wealthy
and eminent as he is,--so powerful in his own strength, and in the
support of society on all sides,--what can Judge Pyncheon have to hope
or fear from the imbecile, branded, half-torpid Clifford?"
"Yet," urged Phoebe, "you did speak as if misfortune were impending!"
"Oh, that was because I am morbid!" replied the artist. "My mind has a
twist aside, like almost everybody's mind, except your own. Moreover,
it is so strange to find myself an inmate of this old Pyncheon House,
and sitting in this old garden--(hark, how Maule's well is
murmuring!)--that, were it only for this one circumstance, I cannot
help fancying that Destiny is arranging its fifth act for a
catastrophe."
"There!" cried Phoebe with renewed vexation; for she was by nature as
hostile to mystery as the sunshine to a dark corner. "You puzzle me
more than ever!"
"Then let us part friends!" said Holgrave, pressing her hand. "Or, if
not friends, let us part before you entirely hate me. You, who love
everybody else in the world!"
"Good-by, then," said Phoebe frankly. "I do not mean to be angry a
great while, and should be sorry to have you think so. There has
Cousin Hepzibah been standing in the shadow of the doorway, this
quarter of an hour past! She thinks I stay too long in the damp garden.
So, good-night, and good-by."
On the second morning thereafter, Phoebe might have been seen, in her
straw bonnet, with a shawl on one arm and a little carpet-bag on the
other, bidding adieu to Hepzibah and Cousin Clifford. She was to take
a seat in the next train of cars, which would transport her to within
half a dozen miles of her country village.
The tears were in Phoebe's eyes; a smile, dewy with affectionate
regret, was glimmering around her pleasant mouth. She wondered how it
came to pass, that her life of a few weeks, here in this heavy-hearted
old mansion, had taken such hold of her, and so melted into her
associations, as now to seem a more important centre-point of
remembrance than all which had gone before. How had Hepzibah--grim,
silent, and irresponsive to her overflow of cordial sentiment--contrived
to win so much love? And Clifford,--in his abortive decay, with the
mystery of fearful crime upon him, and the close prison-atmosphere yet
lurking in his breath,--how had he transformed himself into the simplest
child, whom Phoebe felt bound to watch over, and be, as it were, the
providence of his unconsidered hours! Everything, at that instant of
farewell, stood out prominently to her view. Look where she would, lay
her hand on what she might, the object responded to her consciousness,
as if a moist human heart were in it.
She peeped from the window into the garden, and felt herself more
regretful at leaving this spot of black earth, vitiated with such an
age-long growth of weeds, than joyful at the idea of again scenting her
pine forests and fresh clover-fields. She called Chanticleer, his two
wives, and the venerable chicken, and threw them some crumbs of bread
from the breakfast-table. These being hastily gobbled up, the chicken
spread its wings, and alighted close by Phoebe on the window-sill,
where it looked gravely into her face and vented its emotions in a
croak. Phoebe bade it be a good old chicken during her absence, and
promised to bring it a little bag of buckwheat.
"Ah, Phoebe!" remarked Hepzibah, "you do not smile so naturally as when
you came to us! Then, the smile chose to shine out; now, you choose it
should. It is well that you are going back, for a little while, into
your native air. There has been too much weight on your spirits. The
house is too gloomy and lonesome; the shop is full of vexations; and as
for me, I have no faculty of making things look brighter than they are.
Dear Clifford has been your only comfort!"
"Come hither, Phoebe," suddenly cried her cousin Clifford, who had said
very little all the morning. "Close!--closer!--and look me in the
face!"
Phoebe put one of her small hands on each elbow of his chair, and
leaned her face towards him, so that he might peruse it as carefully as
he would. It is probable that the latent emotions of this parting hour
had revived, in some degree, his bedimmed and enfeebled faculties. At
any rate, Phoebe soon felt that, if not the profound insight of a seer,
yet a more than feminine delicacy of appreciation, was making her heart
the subject of its regard. A moment before, she had known nothing
which she would have sought to hide. Now, as if some secret were
hinted to her own consciousness through the medium of another's
perception, she was fain to let her eyelids droop beneath Clifford's
gaze. A blush, too,--the redder, because she strove hard to keep it
down,--ascended bigger and higher, in a tide of fitful progress, until
even her brow was all suffused with it.
"It is enough, Phoebe," said Clifford, with a melancholy smile. "When
I first saw you, you were the prettiest little maiden in the world; and
now you have deepened into beauty. Girlhood has passed into womanhood;
the bud is a bloom! Go, now--I feel lonelier than I did."
Phoebe took leave of the desolate couple, and passed through the shop,
twinkling her eyelids to shake off a dew-drop; for--considering how
brief her absence was to be, and therefore the folly of being cast down
about it--she would not so far acknowledge her tears as to dry them
with her handkerchief. On the doorstep, she met the little urchin
whose marvellous feats of gastronomy have been recorded in the earlier
pages of our narrative. She took from the window some specimen or
other of natural history,--her eyes being too dim with moisture to
inform her accurately whether it was a rabbit or a hippopotamus,--put
it into the child's hand as a parting gift, and went her way. Old
Uncle Venner was just coming out of his door, with a wood-horse and saw
on his shoulder; and, trudging along the street, he scrupled not to
keep company with Phoebe, so far as their paths lay together; nor, in
spite of his patched coat and rusty beaver, and the curious fashion of
his tow-cloth trousers, could she find it in her heart to outwalk him.
"We shall miss you, next Sabbath afternoon," observed the street
philosopher. "It is unaccountable how little while it takes some folks
to grow just as natural to a man as his own breath; and, begging your
pardon, Miss Phoebe (though there can be no offence in an old man's
saying it), that's just what you've grown to me! My years have been a
great many, and your life is but just beginning; and yet, you are
somehow as familiar to me as if I had found you at my mother's door,
and you had blossomed, like a running vine, all along my pathway since.
Come back soon, or I shall be gone to my farm; for I begin to find
these wood-sawing jobs a little too tough for my back-ache."
"Very soon, Uncle Venner," replied Phoebe.
"And let it be all the sooner, Phoebe, for the sake of those poor souls
yonder," continued her companion. "They can never do without you,
now,--never, Phoebe; never--no more than if one of God's angels had
been living with them, and making their dismal house pleasant and
comfortable! Don't it seem to you they'd be in a sad case, if, some
pleasant summer morning like this, the angel should spread his wings,
and fly to the place he came from? Well, just so they feel, now that
you're going home by the railroad! They can't bear it, Miss Phoebe; so
be sure to come back!"
"I am no angel, Uncle Venner," said Phoebe, smiling, as she offered him
her hand at the street-corner. "But, I suppose, people never feel so
much like angels as when they are doing what little good they may. So
I shall certainly come back!"
Thus parted the old man and the rosy girl; and Phoebe took the wings of
the morning, and was soon flitting almost as rapidly away as if endowed
with the aerial locomotion of the angels to whom Uncle Venner had so
graciously compared her.
| The parallels between Holgrave and both Matthew Maules become even more explicit in this chapter. Hawthorne writes that Holgrave has the temptation to acquire domination over the human spirit, a power that Matthew Maule used against Alice Pyncheon in Holgrave's story. The wave of his hand that awakens Phoebe echoes the same action that Matthew Maule used against Alice. Where Holgrave departs from the typical Maule prototype is his democratic ethos. As the one modern character in The House of the Seven Gables, Holgrave embodies contemporary values; his respect for individuality aligns with his liberal ideals to counteract his more fantastical tendencies. Hawthorne leaves the motive for Phoebe's departure somewhat ambiguous. However, the main reason seems to be the desperation surrounding the house. She is noticeably disturbed by the story that Holgrave tells concerning the Pyncheon history, the event which immediately precedes her decision to depart. Phoebe makes this decision with some regret. She admits to herself that she greatly cares for Hepzibah and Clifford, but still decides to escape from the stifling house. Staying at the House of the Seven Gables has taken a noticeable toll on Phoebe; although she is still as angelic as she was when she first arrived, Phoebe now has the marks of sadness and regret. Holgrave attempts to frame this change in her as a positive attribute that shows new maturity, but this cannot outweigh the feeling that life at the House of the Seven Gables has taken its toll upon her | analysis |
SEVERAL days passed over the Seven Gables, heavily and drearily enough.
In fact (not to attribute the whole gloom of sky and earth to the one
inauspicious circumstance of Phoebe's departure), an easterly storm had
set in, and indefatigably apply itself to the task of making the black
roof and walls of the old house look more cheerless than ever before.
Yet was the outside not half so cheerless as the interior. Poor
Clifford was cut off, at once, from all his scanty resources of
enjoyment. Phoebe was not there; nor did the sunshine fall upon the
floor. The garden, with its muddy walks, and the chill, dripping
foliage of its summer-house, was an image to be shuddered at. Nothing
flourished in the cold, moist, pitiless atmosphere, drifting with the
brackish scud of sea-breezes, except the moss along the joints of the
shingle-roof, and the great bunch of weeds, that had lately been
suffering from drought, in the angle between the two front gables.
As for Hepzibah, she seemed not merely possessed with the east wind,
but to be, in her very person, only another phase of this gray and
sullen spell of weather; the East-Wind itself, grim and disconsolate,
in a rusty black silk gown, and with a turban of cloud-wreaths on its
head. The custom of the shop fell off, because a story got abroad that
she soured her small beer and other damageable commodities, by scowling
on them. It is, perhaps, true that the public had something reasonably
to complain of in her deportment; but towards Clifford she was neither
ill-tempered nor unkind, nor felt less warmth of heart than always, had
it been possible to make it reach him. The inutility of her best
efforts, however, palsied the poor old gentlewoman. She could do
little else than sit silently in a corner of the room, when the wet
pear-tree branches, sweeping across the small windows, created a
noonday dusk, which Hepzibah unconsciously darkened with her woe-begone
aspect. It was no fault of Hepzibah's. Everything--even the old
chairs and tables, that had known what weather was for three or four
such lifetimes as her own--looked as damp and chill as if the present
were their worst experience. The picture of the Puritan Colonel
shivered on the wall. The house itself shivered, from every attic of
its seven gables down to the great kitchen fireplace, which served all
the better as an emblem of the mansion's heart, because, though built
for warmth, it was now so comfortless and empty.
Hepzibah attempted to enliven matters by a fire in the parlor. But the
storm demon kept watch above, and, whenever a flame was kindled, drove
the smoke back again, choking the chimney's sooty throat with its own
breath. Nevertheless, during four days of this miserable storm,
Clifford wrapt himself in an old cloak, and occupied his customary
chair. On the morning of the fifth, when summoned to breakfast, he
responded only by a broken-hearted murmur, expressive of a
determination not to leave his bed. His sister made no attempt to
change his purpose. In fact, entirely as she loved him, Hepzibah could
hardly have borne any longer the wretched duty--so impracticable by her
few and rigid faculties--of seeking pastime for a still sensitive, but
ruined mind, critical and fastidious, without force or volition. It
was at least something short of positive despair, that to-day she might
sit shivering alone, and not suffer continually a new grief, and
unreasonable pang of remorse, at every fitful sigh of her fellow
sufferer.
But Clifford, it seemed, though he did not make his appearance below
stairs, had, after all, bestirred himself in quest of amusement. In
the course of the forenoon, Hepzibah heard a note of music, which
(there being no other tuneful contrivance in the House of the Seven
Gables) she knew must proceed from Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord. She
was aware that Clifford, in his youth, had possessed a cultivated taste
for music, and a considerable degree of skill in its practice. It was
difficult, however, to conceive of his retaining an accomplishment to
which daily exercise is so essential, in the measure indicated by the
sweet, airy, and delicate, though most melancholy strain, that now
stole upon her ear. Nor was it less marvellous that the long-silent
instrument should be capable of so much melody. Hepzibah involuntarily
thought of the ghostly harmonies, prelusive of death in the family,
which were attributed to the legendary Alice. But it was, perhaps,
proof of the agency of other than spiritual fingers, that, after a few
touches, the chords seemed to snap asunder with their own vibrations,
and the music ceased.
But a harsher sound succeeded to the mysterious notes; nor was the
easterly day fated to pass without an event sufficient in itself to
poison, for Hepzibah and Clifford, the balmiest air that ever brought
the humming-birds along with it. The final echoes of Alice Pyncheon's
performance (or Clifford's, if his we must consider it) were driven
away by no less vulgar a dissonance than the ringing of the shop-bell.
A foot was heard scraping itself on the threshold, and thence somewhat
ponderously stepping on the floor. Hepzibah delayed a moment, while
muffling herself in a faded shawl, which had been her defensive armor
in a forty years' warfare against the east wind. A characteristic
sound, however,--neither a cough nor a hem, but a kind of rumbling and
reverberating spasm in somebody's capacious depth of chest;--impelled
her to hurry forward, with that aspect of fierce faint-heartedness so
common to women in cases of perilous emergency. Few of her sex, on
such occasions, have ever looked so terrible as our poor scowling
Hepzibah. But the visitor quietly closed the shop-door behind him,
stood up his umbrella against the counter, and turned a visage of
composed benignity, to meet the alarm and anger which his appearance
had excited.
Hepzibah's presentiment had not deceived her. It was no other than
Judge Pyncheon, who, after in vain trying the front door, had now
effected his entrance into the shop.
"How do you do, Cousin Hepzibah?--and how does this most inclement
weather affect our poor Clifford?" began the Judge; and wonderful it
seemed, indeed, that the easterly storm was not put to shame, or, at
any rate, a little mollified, by the genial benevolence of his smile.
"I could not rest without calling to ask, once more, whether I can in
any manner promote his comfort, or your own."
"You can do nothing," said Hepzibah, controlling her agitation as well
as she could. "I devote myself to Clifford. He has every comfort
which his situation admits of."
"But allow me to suggest, dear cousin," rejoined the Judge, "you
err,--in all affection and kindness, no doubt, and with the very best
intentions,--but you do err, nevertheless, in keeping your brother so
secluded. Why insulate him thus from all sympathy and kindness?
Clifford, alas! has had too much of solitude. Now let him try
society,--the society, that is to say, of kindred and old friends. Let
me, for instance, but see Clifford, and I will answer for the good
effect of the interview."
"You cannot see him," answered Hepzibah. "Clifford has kept his bed
since yesterday."
"What! How! Is he ill?" exclaimed Judge Pyncheon, starting with what
seemed to be angry alarm; for the very frown of the old Puritan
darkened through the room as he spoke. "Nay, then, I must and will see
him! What if he should die?"
"He is in no danger of death," said Hepzibah,--and added, with
bitterness that she could repress no longer, "none; unless he shall be
persecuted to death, now, by the same man who long ago attempted it!"
"Cousin Hepzibah," said the Judge, with an impressive earnestness of
manner, which grew even to tearful pathos as he proceeded, "is it
possible that you do not perceive how unjust, how unkind, how
unchristian, is this constant, this long-continued bitterness against
me, for a part which I was constrained by duty and conscience, by the
force of law, and at my own peril, to act? What did I do, in detriment
to Clifford, which it was possible to leave undone? How could you, his
sister,--if, for your never-ending sorrow, as it has been for mine, you
had known what I did,--have, shown greater tenderness? And do you
think, cousin, that it has cost me no pang?--that it has left no
anguish in my bosom, from that day to this, amidst all the prosperity
with which Heaven has blessed me?--or that I do not now rejoice, when
it is deemed consistent with the dues of public justice and the welfare
of society that this dear kinsman, this early friend, this nature so
delicately and beautifully constituted,--so unfortunate, let us
pronounce him, and forbear to say, so guilty,--that our own Clifford,
in fine, should be given back to life, and its possibilities of
enjoyment? Ah, you little know me, Cousin Hepzibah! You little know
this heart! It now throbs at the thought of meeting him! There lives
not the human being (except yourself,--and you not more than I) who has
shed so many tears for Clifford's calamity. You behold some of them
now. There is none who would so delight to promote his happiness! Try
me, Hepzibah!--try me, Cousin!--try the man whom you have treated as
your enemy and Clifford's!--try Jaffrey Pyncheon, and you shall find
him true, to the heart's core!"
"In the name of Heaven," cried Hepzibah, provoked only to intenser
indignation by this outgush of the inestimable tenderness of a stern
nature,--"in God's name, whom you insult, and whose power I could
almost question, since he hears you utter so many false words without
palsying your tongue,--give over, I beseech you, this loathsome
pretence of affection for your victim! You hate him! Say so, like a
man! You cherish, at this moment, some black purpose against him in
your heart! Speak it out, at once!--or, if you hope so to promote it
better, hide it till you can triumph in its success! But never speak
again of your love for my poor brother. I cannot bear it! It will
drive me beyond a woman's decency! It will drive me mad! Forbear! Not
another word! It will make me spurn you!"
For once, Hepzibah's wrath had given her courage. She had spoken.
But, after all, was this unconquerable distrust of Judge Pyncheon's
integrity, and this utter denial, apparently, of his claim to stand in
the ring of human sympathies,--were they founded in any just perception
of his character, or merely the offspring of a woman's unreasonable
prejudice, deduced from nothing?
The Judge, beyond all question, was a man of eminent respectability.
The church acknowledged it; the state acknowledged it. It was denied
by nobody. In all the very extensive sphere of those who knew him,
whether in his public or private capacities, there was not an
individual--except Hepzibah, and some lawless mystic, like the
daguerreotypist, and, possibly, a few political opponents--who would
have dreamed of seriously disputing his claim to a high and honorable
place in the world's regard. Nor (we must do him the further justice
to say) did Judge Pyncheon himself, probably, entertain many or very
frequent doubts, that his enviable reputation accorded with his
deserts. His conscience, therefore, usually considered the surest
witness to a man's integrity,--his conscience, unless it might be for
the little space of five minutes in the twenty-four hours, or, now and
then, some black day in the whole year's circle,--his conscience bore
an accordant testimony with the world's laudatory voice. And yet,
strong as this evidence may seem to be, we should hesitate to peril our
own conscience on the assertion, that the Judge and the consenting
world were right, and that poor Hepzibah with her solitary prejudice
was wrong. Hidden from mankind,--forgotten by himself, or buried so
deeply under a sculptured and ornamented pile of ostentatious deeds
that his daily life could take no note of it,--there may have lurked
some evil and unsightly thing. Nay, we could almost venture to say,
further, that a daily guilt might have been acted by him, continually
renewed, and reddening forth afresh, like the miraculous blood-stain of
a murder, without his necessarily and at every moment being aware of it.
Men of strong minds, great force of character, and a hard texture of
the sensibilities, are very capable of falling into mistakes of this
kind. They are ordinarily men to whom forms are of paramount
importance. Their field of action lies among the external phenomena of
life. They possess vast ability in grasping, and arranging, and
appropriating to themselves, the big, heavy, solid unrealities, such as
gold, landed estate, offices of trust and emolument, and public honors.
With these materials, and with deeds of goodly aspect, done in the
public eye, an individual of this class builds up, as it were, a tall
and stately edifice, which, in the view of other people, and ultimately
in his own view, is no other than the man's character, or the man
himself. Behold, therefore, a palace! Its splendid halls and suites of
spacious apartments are floored with a mosaic-work of costly marbles;
its windows, the whole height of each room, admit the sunshine through
the most transparent of plate-glass; its high cornices are gilded, and
its ceilings gorgeously painted; and a lofty dome--through which, from
the central pavement, you may gaze up to the sky, as with no
obstructing medium between--surmounts the whole. With what fairer and
nobler emblem could any man desire to shadow forth his character? Ah!
but in some low and obscure nook,--some narrow closet on the
ground-floor, shut, locked and bolted, and the key flung away,--or
beneath the marble pavement, in a stagnant water-puddle, with the
richest pattern of mosaic-work above,--may lie a corpse, half decayed,
and still decaying, and diffusing its death-scent all through the
palace! The inhabitant will not be conscious of it, for it has long
been his daily breath! Neither will the visitors, for they smell only
the rich odors which the master sedulously scatters through the palace,
and the incense which they bring, and delight to burn before him! Now
and then, perchance, comes in a seer, before whose sadly gifted eye the
whole structure melts into thin air, leaving only the hidden nook, the
bolted closet, with the cobwebs festooned over its forgotten door, or
the deadly hole under the pavement, and the decaying corpse within.
Here, then, we are to seek the true emblem of the man's character, and
of the deed that gives whatever reality it possesses to his life. And,
beneath the show of a marble palace, that pool of stagnant water, foul
with many impurities, and, perhaps, tinged with blood,--that secret
abomination, above which, possibly, he may say his prayers, without
remembering it,--is this man's miserable soul!
To apply this train of remark somewhat more closely to Judge Pyncheon.
We might say (without in the least imputing crime to a personage of his
eminent respectability) that there was enough of splendid rubbish in
his life to cover up and paralyze a more active and subtile conscience
than the Judge was ever troubled with. The purity of his judicial
character, while on the bench; the faithfulness of his public service
in subsequent capacities; his devotedness to his party, and the rigid
consistency with which he had adhered to its principles, or, at all
events, kept pace with its organized movements; his remarkable zeal as
president of a Bible society; his unimpeachable integrity as treasurer
of a widow's and orphan's fund; his benefits to horticulture, by
producing two much esteemed varieties of the pear and to agriculture,
through the agency of the famous Pyncheon bull; the cleanliness of his
moral deportment, for a great many years past; the severity with which
he had frowned upon, and finally cast off, an expensive and dissipated
son, delaying forgiveness until within the final quarter of an hour of
the young man's life; his prayers at morning and eventide, and graces
at meal-time; his efforts in furtherance of the temperance cause; his
confining himself, since the last attack of the gout, to five diurnal
glasses of old sherry wine; the snowy whiteness of his linen, the
polish of his boots, the handsomeness of his gold-headed cane, the
square and roomy fashion of his coat, and the fineness of its material,
and, in general, the studied propriety of his dress and equipment; the
scrupulousness with which he paid public notice, in the street, by a
bow, a lifting of the hat, a nod, or a motion of the hand, to all and
sundry of his acquaintances, rich or poor; the smile of broad
benevolence wherewith he made it a point to gladden the whole
world,--what room could possibly be found for darker traits in a
portrait made up of lineaments like these? This proper face was what he
beheld in the looking-glass. This admirably arranged life was what he
was conscious of in the progress of every day. Then might not he claim
to be its result and sum, and say to himself and the community, "Behold
Judge Pyncheon there"?
And allowing that, many, many years ago, in his early and reckless
youth, he had committed some one wrong act,--or that, even now, the
inevitable force of circumstances should occasionally make him do one
questionable deed among a thousand praiseworthy, or, at least,
blameless ones,--would you characterize the Judge by that one necessary
deed, and that half-forgotten act, and let it overshadow the fair
aspect of a lifetime? What is there so ponderous in evil, that a
thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil which
were heaped into the other scale! This scale and balance system is a
favorite one with people of Judge Pyncheon's brotherhood. A hard, cold
man, thus unfortunately situated, seldom or never looking inward, and
resolutely taking his idea of himself from what purports to be his
image as reflected in the mirror of public opinion, can scarcely arrive
at true self-knowledge, except through loss of property and reputation.
Sickness will not always help him do it; not always the death-hour!
But our affair now is with Judge Pyncheon as he stood confronting the
fierce outbreak of Hepzibah's wrath. Without premeditation, to her own
surprise, and indeed terror, she had given vent, for once, to the
inveteracy of her resentment, cherished against this kinsman for thirty
years.
Thus far the Judge's countenance had expressed mild forbearance,--grave
and almost gentle deprecation of his cousin's unbecoming
violence,--free and Christian-like forgiveness of the wrong inflicted
by her words. But when those words were irrevocably spoken, his look
assumed sternness, the sense of power, and immitigable resolve; and
this with so natural and imperceptible a change, that it seemed as if
the iron man had stood there from the first, and the meek man not at
all. The effect was as when the light, vapory clouds, with their soft
coloring, suddenly vanish from the stony brow of a precipitous
mountain, and leave there the frown which you at once feel to be
eternal. Hepzibah almost adopted the insane belief that it was her old
Puritan ancestor, and not the modern Judge, on whom she had just been
wreaking the bitterness of her heart. Never did a man show stronger
proof of the lineage attributed to him than Judge Pyncheon, at this
crisis, by his unmistakable resemblance to the picture in the inner
room.
"Cousin Hepzibah," said he very calmly, "it is time to have done with
this."
"With all my heart!" answered she. "Then, why do you persecute us any
longer? Leave poor Clifford and me in peace. Neither of us desires
anything better!"
"It is my purpose to see Clifford before I leave this house," continued
the Judge. "Do not act like a madwoman, Hepzibah! I am his only
friend, and an all-powerful one. Has it never occurred to you,--are
you so blind as not to have seen,--that, without not merely my consent,
but my efforts, my representations, the exertion of my whole influence,
political, official, personal, Clifford would never have been what you
call free? Did you think his release a triumph over me? Not so, my good
cousin; not so, by any means! The furthest possible from that! No; but
it was the accomplishment of a purpose long entertained on my part. I
set him free!"
"You!" answered Hepzibah. "I never will believe it! He owed his
dungeon to you; his freedom to God's providence!"
"I set him free!" reaffirmed Judge Pyncheon, with the calmest
composure. "And I came hither now to decide whether he shall retain
his freedom. It will depend upon himself. For this purpose, I must
see him."
"Never!--it would drive him mad!" exclaimed Hepzibah, but with an
irresoluteness sufficiently perceptible to the keen eye of the Judge;
for, without the slightest faith in his good intentions, she knew not
whether there was most to dread in yielding or resistance. "And why
should you wish to see this wretched, broken man, who retains hardly a
fraction of his intellect, and will hide even that from an eye which
has no love in it?"
"He shall see love enough in mine, if that be all!" said the Judge,
with well-grounded confidence in the benignity of his aspect. "But,
Cousin Hepzibah, you confess a great deal, and very much to the
purpose. Now, listen, and I will frankly explain my reasons for
insisting on this interview. At the death, thirty years since, of our
uncle Jaffrey, it was found,--I know not whether the circumstance ever
attracted much of your attention, among the sadder interests that
clustered round that event,--but it was found that his visible estate,
of every kind, fell far short of any estimate ever made of it. He was
supposed to be immensely rich. Nobody doubted that he stood among the
weightiest men of his day. It was one of his eccentricities,
however,--and not altogether a folly, neither,--to conceal the amount
of his property by making distant and foreign investments, perhaps
under other names than his own, and by various means, familiar enough
to capitalists, but unnecessary here to be specified. By Uncle
Jaffrey's last will and testament, as you are aware, his entire
property was bequeathed to me, with the single exception of a life
interest to yourself in this old family mansion, and the strip of
patrimonial estate remaining attached to it."
"And do you seek to deprive us of that?" asked Hepzibah, unable to
restrain her bitter contempt. "Is this your price for ceasing to
persecute poor Clifford?"
"Certainly not, my dear cousin!" answered the Judge, smiling
benevolently. "On the contrary, as you must do me the justice to own,
I have constantly expressed my readiness to double or treble your
resources, whenever you should make up your mind to accept any kindness
of that nature at the hands of your kinsman. No, no! But here lies
the gist of the matter. Of my uncle's unquestionably great estate, as
I have said, not the half--no, not one third, as I am fully
convinced--was apparent after his death. Now, I have the best possible
reasons for believing that your brother Clifford can give me a clew to
the recovery of the remainder."
"Clifford!--Clifford know of any hidden wealth? Clifford have it in his
power to make you rich?" cried the old gentlewoman, affected with a
sense of something like ridicule at the idea. "Impossible! You
deceive yourself! It is really a thing to laugh at!"
"It is as certain as that I stand here!" said Judge Pyncheon, striking
his gold-headed cane on the floor, and at the same time stamping his
foot, as if to express his conviction the more forcibly by the whole
emphasis of his substantial person. "Clifford told me so himself!"
"No, no!" exclaimed Hepzibah incredulously. "You are dreaming, Cousin
Jaffrey."
"I do not belong to the dreaming class of men," said the Judge quietly.
"Some months before my uncle's death, Clifford boasted to me of the
possession of the secret of incalculable wealth. His purpose was to
taunt me, and excite my curiosity. I know it well. But, from a pretty
distinct recollection of the particulars of our conversation, I am
thoroughly convinced that there was truth in what he said. Clifford,
at this moment, if he chooses,--and choose he must!--can inform me
where to find the schedule, the documents, the evidences, in whatever
shape they exist, of the vast amount of Uncle Jaffrey's missing
property. He has the secret. His boast was no idle word. It had a
directness, an emphasis, a particularity, that showed a backbone of
solid meaning within the mystery of his expression."
"But what could have been Clifford's object," asked Hepzibah, "in
concealing it so long?"
"It was one of the bad impulses of our fallen nature," replied the
Judge, turning up his eyes. "He looked upon me as his enemy. He
considered me as the cause of his overwhelming disgrace, his imminent
peril of death, his irretrievable ruin. There was no great
probability, therefore, of his volunteering information, out of his
dungeon, that should elevate me still higher on the ladder of
prosperity. But the moment has now come when he must give up his
secret."
"And what if he should refuse?" inquired Hepzibah. "Or,--as I
steadfastly believe,--what if he has no knowledge of this wealth?"
"My dear cousin," said Judge Pyncheon, with a quietude which he had the
power of making more formidable than any violence, "since your
brother's return, I have taken the precaution (a highly proper one in
the near kinsman and natural guardian of an individual so situated) to
have his deportment and habits constantly and carefully overlooked.
Your neighbors have been eye-witnesses to whatever has passed in the
garden. The butcher, the baker, the fish-monger, some of the customers
of your shop, and many a prying old woman, have told me several of the
secrets of your interior. A still larger circle--I myself, among the
rest--can testify to his extravagances at the arched window. Thousands
beheld him, a week or two ago, on the point of flinging himself thence
into the street. From all this testimony, I am led to
apprehend--reluctantly, and with deep grief--that Clifford's
misfortunes have so affected his intellect, never very strong, that he
cannot safely remain at large. The alternative, you must be
aware,--and its adoption will depend entirely on the decision which I
am now about to make,--the alternative is his confinement, probably for
the remainder of his life, in a public asylum for persons in his
unfortunate state of mind."
"You cannot mean it!" shrieked Hepzibah.
"Should my cousin Clifford," continued Judge Pyncheon, wholly
undisturbed, "from mere malice, and hatred of one whose interests ought
naturally to be dear to him,--a mode of passion that, as often as any
other, indicates mental disease,--should he refuse me the information
so important to myself, and which he assuredly possesses, I shall
consider it the one needed jot of evidence to satisfy my mind of his
insanity. And, once sure of the course pointed out by conscience, you
know me too well, Cousin Hepzibah, to entertain a doubt that I shall
pursue it."
"O Jaffrey,--Cousin Jaffrey," cried Hepzibah mournfully, not
passionately, "it is you that are diseased in mind, not Clifford! You
have forgotten that a woman was your mother!--that you have had
sisters, brothers, children of your own!--or that there ever was
affection between man and man, or pity from one man to another, in this
miserable world! Else, how could you have dreamed of this? You are not
young, Cousin Jaffrey!--no, nor middle-aged,--but already an old man!
The hair is white upon your head! How many years have you to live? Are
you not rich enough for that little time? Shall you be hungry,--shall
you lack clothes, or a roof to shelter you,--between this point and the
grave? No! but, with the half of what you now possess, you could revel
in costly food and wines, and build a house twice as splendid as you
now inhabit, and make a far greater show to the world,--and yet leave
riches to your only son, to make him bless the hour of your death!
Then, why should you do this cruel, cruel thing?--so mad a thing, that
I know not whether to call it wicked! Alas, Cousin Jaffrey, this hard
and grasping spirit has run in our blood these two hundred years. You
are but doing over again, in another shape, what your ancestor before
you did, and sending down to your posterity the curse inherited from
him!"
"Talk sense, Hepzibah, for Heaven's sake!" exclaimed the Judge, with
the impatience natural to a reasonable man, on hearing anything so
utterly absurd as the above, in a discussion about matters of business.
"I have told you my determination. I am not apt to change. Clifford
must give up his secret, or take the consequences. And let him decide
quickly; for I have several affairs to attend to this morning, and an
important dinner engagement with some political friends."
"Clifford has no secret!" answered Hepzibah. "And God will not let you
do the thing you meditate!"
"We shall see," said the unmoved Judge. "Meanwhile, choose whether you
will summon Clifford, and allow this business to be amicably settled by
an interview between two kinsmen, or drive me to harsher measures,
which I should be most happy to feel myself justified in avoiding. The
responsibility is altogether on your part."
"You are stronger than I," said Hepzibah, after a brief consideration;
"and you have no pity in your strength! Clifford is not now insane; but
the interview which you insist upon may go far to make him so.
Nevertheless, knowing you as I do, I believe it to be my best course to
allow you to judge for yourself as to the improbability of his
possessing any valuable secret. I will call Clifford. Be merciful in
your dealings with him!--be far more merciful than your heart bids you
be!--for God is looking at you, Jaffrey Pyncheon!"
The Judge followed his cousin from the shop, where the foregoing
conversation had passed, into the parlor, and flung himself heavily
into the great ancestral chair. Many a former Pyncheon had found
repose in its capacious arms: rosy children, after their sports; young
men, dreamy with love; grown men, weary with cares; old men, burdened
with winters,--they had mused, and slumbered, and departed to a yet
profounder sleep. It had been a long tradition, though a doubtful one,
that this was the very chair, seated in which the earliest of the
Judge's New England forefathers--he whose picture still hung upon the
wall--had given a dead man's silent and stern reception to the throng
of distinguished guests. From that hour of evil omen until the
present, it may be,--though we know not the secret of his heart,--but
it may be that no wearier and sadder man had ever sunk into the chair
than this same Judge Pyncheon, whom we have just beheld so immitigably
hard and resolute. Surely, it must have been at no slight cost that he
had thus fortified his soul with iron. Such calmness is a mightier
effort than the violence of weaker men. And there was yet a heavy task
for him to do. Was it a little matter--a trifle to be prepared for in
a single moment, and to be rested from in another moment,--that he must
now, after thirty years, encounter a kinsman risen from a living tomb,
and wrench a secret from him, or else consign him to a living tomb
again?
"Did you speak?" asked Hepzibah, looking in from the threshold of the
parlor; for she imagined that the Judge had uttered some sound which
she was anxious to interpret as a relenting impulse. "I thought you
called me back."
"No, no" gruffly answered Judge Pyncheon with a harsh frown, while his
brow grew almost a black purple, in the shadow of the room. "Why
should I call you back? Time flies! Bid Clifford come to me!"
The Judge had taken his watch from his vest pocket and now held it in
his hand, measuring the interval which was to ensue before the
appearance of Clifford.
| The Scowl and Smile: Without Phoebe, Clifford is cut off from whatever enjoyment he once had. An easterly storm sets in, preventing him from taking walks in the garden. Hepzibah seems to be possessed by the east wind, grim and disconsolate. The shop loses customers because of a story that she soured her small beer by scowling at it. Both Hepzibah and Clifford hear musical notes from Alice's harpsichord succeeded by a harsher sound, the ringing of the shop bell. Judge Pyncheon visits and offers assistance, which Hepzibah refuses. She tells the Judge that Clifford is bedridden with a minor illness. Jaffrey wonders why Hepzibah protects Clifford from him, for he only wishes to promote his happiness. Hepzibah claims that Jaffrey hates Clifford. Jaffrey's claim that he bears no ill will toward Clifford seems founded, for he is a man of respectable character, but Hepzibah's prejudice may be founded despite his reputation. Men of his character possess vast ability in grasping and appropriating. Hepzibah seems to adopt the belief that it was her Puritan ancestor and not the modern judge on whom she had been wreaking bitterness. Judge Pyncheon demands to see Clifford before he leaves this house. Hepzibah claims that it would drive Clifford mad. Judge Pyncheon claims that Clifford could reveal the location of the deed to the lost land. He says that Clifford once boasted that he possessed the secret of incalculable wealth. Judge Pyncheon says that Clifford has concealed this because he considers him the enemy. Judge Pyncheon warns Hepzibah that he has taken the precaution to have Clifford looked after, and people have noticed his odd behavior. The Judge threatens Hepzibah with the possibility of having Clifford committed. Hepzibah accuses the Judge of committing the same crime as Colonel Pyncheon. | summary |
SEVERAL days passed over the Seven Gables, heavily and drearily enough.
In fact (not to attribute the whole gloom of sky and earth to the one
inauspicious circumstance of Phoebe's departure), an easterly storm had
set in, and indefatigably apply itself to the task of making the black
roof and walls of the old house look more cheerless than ever before.
Yet was the outside not half so cheerless as the interior. Poor
Clifford was cut off, at once, from all his scanty resources of
enjoyment. Phoebe was not there; nor did the sunshine fall upon the
floor. The garden, with its muddy walks, and the chill, dripping
foliage of its summer-house, was an image to be shuddered at. Nothing
flourished in the cold, moist, pitiless atmosphere, drifting with the
brackish scud of sea-breezes, except the moss along the joints of the
shingle-roof, and the great bunch of weeds, that had lately been
suffering from drought, in the angle between the two front gables.
As for Hepzibah, she seemed not merely possessed with the east wind,
but to be, in her very person, only another phase of this gray and
sullen spell of weather; the East-Wind itself, grim and disconsolate,
in a rusty black silk gown, and with a turban of cloud-wreaths on its
head. The custom of the shop fell off, because a story got abroad that
she soured her small beer and other damageable commodities, by scowling
on them. It is, perhaps, true that the public had something reasonably
to complain of in her deportment; but towards Clifford she was neither
ill-tempered nor unkind, nor felt less warmth of heart than always, had
it been possible to make it reach him. The inutility of her best
efforts, however, palsied the poor old gentlewoman. She could do
little else than sit silently in a corner of the room, when the wet
pear-tree branches, sweeping across the small windows, created a
noonday dusk, which Hepzibah unconsciously darkened with her woe-begone
aspect. It was no fault of Hepzibah's. Everything--even the old
chairs and tables, that had known what weather was for three or four
such lifetimes as her own--looked as damp and chill as if the present
were their worst experience. The picture of the Puritan Colonel
shivered on the wall. The house itself shivered, from every attic of
its seven gables down to the great kitchen fireplace, which served all
the better as an emblem of the mansion's heart, because, though built
for warmth, it was now so comfortless and empty.
Hepzibah attempted to enliven matters by a fire in the parlor. But the
storm demon kept watch above, and, whenever a flame was kindled, drove
the smoke back again, choking the chimney's sooty throat with its own
breath. Nevertheless, during four days of this miserable storm,
Clifford wrapt himself in an old cloak, and occupied his customary
chair. On the morning of the fifth, when summoned to breakfast, he
responded only by a broken-hearted murmur, expressive of a
determination not to leave his bed. His sister made no attempt to
change his purpose. In fact, entirely as she loved him, Hepzibah could
hardly have borne any longer the wretched duty--so impracticable by her
few and rigid faculties--of seeking pastime for a still sensitive, but
ruined mind, critical and fastidious, without force or volition. It
was at least something short of positive despair, that to-day she might
sit shivering alone, and not suffer continually a new grief, and
unreasonable pang of remorse, at every fitful sigh of her fellow
sufferer.
But Clifford, it seemed, though he did not make his appearance below
stairs, had, after all, bestirred himself in quest of amusement. In
the course of the forenoon, Hepzibah heard a note of music, which
(there being no other tuneful contrivance in the House of the Seven
Gables) she knew must proceed from Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord. She
was aware that Clifford, in his youth, had possessed a cultivated taste
for music, and a considerable degree of skill in its practice. It was
difficult, however, to conceive of his retaining an accomplishment to
which daily exercise is so essential, in the measure indicated by the
sweet, airy, and delicate, though most melancholy strain, that now
stole upon her ear. Nor was it less marvellous that the long-silent
instrument should be capable of so much melody. Hepzibah involuntarily
thought of the ghostly harmonies, prelusive of death in the family,
which were attributed to the legendary Alice. But it was, perhaps,
proof of the agency of other than spiritual fingers, that, after a few
touches, the chords seemed to snap asunder with their own vibrations,
and the music ceased.
But a harsher sound succeeded to the mysterious notes; nor was the
easterly day fated to pass without an event sufficient in itself to
poison, for Hepzibah and Clifford, the balmiest air that ever brought
the humming-birds along with it. The final echoes of Alice Pyncheon's
performance (or Clifford's, if his we must consider it) were driven
away by no less vulgar a dissonance than the ringing of the shop-bell.
A foot was heard scraping itself on the threshold, and thence somewhat
ponderously stepping on the floor. Hepzibah delayed a moment, while
muffling herself in a faded shawl, which had been her defensive armor
in a forty years' warfare against the east wind. A characteristic
sound, however,--neither a cough nor a hem, but a kind of rumbling and
reverberating spasm in somebody's capacious depth of chest;--impelled
her to hurry forward, with that aspect of fierce faint-heartedness so
common to women in cases of perilous emergency. Few of her sex, on
such occasions, have ever looked so terrible as our poor scowling
Hepzibah. But the visitor quietly closed the shop-door behind him,
stood up his umbrella against the counter, and turned a visage of
composed benignity, to meet the alarm and anger which his appearance
had excited.
Hepzibah's presentiment had not deceived her. It was no other than
Judge Pyncheon, who, after in vain trying the front door, had now
effected his entrance into the shop.
"How do you do, Cousin Hepzibah?--and how does this most inclement
weather affect our poor Clifford?" began the Judge; and wonderful it
seemed, indeed, that the easterly storm was not put to shame, or, at
any rate, a little mollified, by the genial benevolence of his smile.
"I could not rest without calling to ask, once more, whether I can in
any manner promote his comfort, or your own."
"You can do nothing," said Hepzibah, controlling her agitation as well
as she could. "I devote myself to Clifford. He has every comfort
which his situation admits of."
"But allow me to suggest, dear cousin," rejoined the Judge, "you
err,--in all affection and kindness, no doubt, and with the very best
intentions,--but you do err, nevertheless, in keeping your brother so
secluded. Why insulate him thus from all sympathy and kindness?
Clifford, alas! has had too much of solitude. Now let him try
society,--the society, that is to say, of kindred and old friends. Let
me, for instance, but see Clifford, and I will answer for the good
effect of the interview."
"You cannot see him," answered Hepzibah. "Clifford has kept his bed
since yesterday."
"What! How! Is he ill?" exclaimed Judge Pyncheon, starting with what
seemed to be angry alarm; for the very frown of the old Puritan
darkened through the room as he spoke. "Nay, then, I must and will see
him! What if he should die?"
"He is in no danger of death," said Hepzibah,--and added, with
bitterness that she could repress no longer, "none; unless he shall be
persecuted to death, now, by the same man who long ago attempted it!"
"Cousin Hepzibah," said the Judge, with an impressive earnestness of
manner, which grew even to tearful pathos as he proceeded, "is it
possible that you do not perceive how unjust, how unkind, how
unchristian, is this constant, this long-continued bitterness against
me, for a part which I was constrained by duty and conscience, by the
force of law, and at my own peril, to act? What did I do, in detriment
to Clifford, which it was possible to leave undone? How could you, his
sister,--if, for your never-ending sorrow, as it has been for mine, you
had known what I did,--have, shown greater tenderness? And do you
think, cousin, that it has cost me no pang?--that it has left no
anguish in my bosom, from that day to this, amidst all the prosperity
with which Heaven has blessed me?--or that I do not now rejoice, when
it is deemed consistent with the dues of public justice and the welfare
of society that this dear kinsman, this early friend, this nature so
delicately and beautifully constituted,--so unfortunate, let us
pronounce him, and forbear to say, so guilty,--that our own Clifford,
in fine, should be given back to life, and its possibilities of
enjoyment? Ah, you little know me, Cousin Hepzibah! You little know
this heart! It now throbs at the thought of meeting him! There lives
not the human being (except yourself,--and you not more than I) who has
shed so many tears for Clifford's calamity. You behold some of them
now. There is none who would so delight to promote his happiness! Try
me, Hepzibah!--try me, Cousin!--try the man whom you have treated as
your enemy and Clifford's!--try Jaffrey Pyncheon, and you shall find
him true, to the heart's core!"
"In the name of Heaven," cried Hepzibah, provoked only to intenser
indignation by this outgush of the inestimable tenderness of a stern
nature,--"in God's name, whom you insult, and whose power I could
almost question, since he hears you utter so many false words without
palsying your tongue,--give over, I beseech you, this loathsome
pretence of affection for your victim! You hate him! Say so, like a
man! You cherish, at this moment, some black purpose against him in
your heart! Speak it out, at once!--or, if you hope so to promote it
better, hide it till you can triumph in its success! But never speak
again of your love for my poor brother. I cannot bear it! It will
drive me beyond a woman's decency! It will drive me mad! Forbear! Not
another word! It will make me spurn you!"
For once, Hepzibah's wrath had given her courage. She had spoken.
But, after all, was this unconquerable distrust of Judge Pyncheon's
integrity, and this utter denial, apparently, of his claim to stand in
the ring of human sympathies,--were they founded in any just perception
of his character, or merely the offspring of a woman's unreasonable
prejudice, deduced from nothing?
The Judge, beyond all question, was a man of eminent respectability.
The church acknowledged it; the state acknowledged it. It was denied
by nobody. In all the very extensive sphere of those who knew him,
whether in his public or private capacities, there was not an
individual--except Hepzibah, and some lawless mystic, like the
daguerreotypist, and, possibly, a few political opponents--who would
have dreamed of seriously disputing his claim to a high and honorable
place in the world's regard. Nor (we must do him the further justice
to say) did Judge Pyncheon himself, probably, entertain many or very
frequent doubts, that his enviable reputation accorded with his
deserts. His conscience, therefore, usually considered the surest
witness to a man's integrity,--his conscience, unless it might be for
the little space of five minutes in the twenty-four hours, or, now and
then, some black day in the whole year's circle,--his conscience bore
an accordant testimony with the world's laudatory voice. And yet,
strong as this evidence may seem to be, we should hesitate to peril our
own conscience on the assertion, that the Judge and the consenting
world were right, and that poor Hepzibah with her solitary prejudice
was wrong. Hidden from mankind,--forgotten by himself, or buried so
deeply under a sculptured and ornamented pile of ostentatious deeds
that his daily life could take no note of it,--there may have lurked
some evil and unsightly thing. Nay, we could almost venture to say,
further, that a daily guilt might have been acted by him, continually
renewed, and reddening forth afresh, like the miraculous blood-stain of
a murder, without his necessarily and at every moment being aware of it.
Men of strong minds, great force of character, and a hard texture of
the sensibilities, are very capable of falling into mistakes of this
kind. They are ordinarily men to whom forms are of paramount
importance. Their field of action lies among the external phenomena of
life. They possess vast ability in grasping, and arranging, and
appropriating to themselves, the big, heavy, solid unrealities, such as
gold, landed estate, offices of trust and emolument, and public honors.
With these materials, and with deeds of goodly aspect, done in the
public eye, an individual of this class builds up, as it were, a tall
and stately edifice, which, in the view of other people, and ultimately
in his own view, is no other than the man's character, or the man
himself. Behold, therefore, a palace! Its splendid halls and suites of
spacious apartments are floored with a mosaic-work of costly marbles;
its windows, the whole height of each room, admit the sunshine through
the most transparent of plate-glass; its high cornices are gilded, and
its ceilings gorgeously painted; and a lofty dome--through which, from
the central pavement, you may gaze up to the sky, as with no
obstructing medium between--surmounts the whole. With what fairer and
nobler emblem could any man desire to shadow forth his character? Ah!
but in some low and obscure nook,--some narrow closet on the
ground-floor, shut, locked and bolted, and the key flung away,--or
beneath the marble pavement, in a stagnant water-puddle, with the
richest pattern of mosaic-work above,--may lie a corpse, half decayed,
and still decaying, and diffusing its death-scent all through the
palace! The inhabitant will not be conscious of it, for it has long
been his daily breath! Neither will the visitors, for they smell only
the rich odors which the master sedulously scatters through the palace,
and the incense which they bring, and delight to burn before him! Now
and then, perchance, comes in a seer, before whose sadly gifted eye the
whole structure melts into thin air, leaving only the hidden nook, the
bolted closet, with the cobwebs festooned over its forgotten door, or
the deadly hole under the pavement, and the decaying corpse within.
Here, then, we are to seek the true emblem of the man's character, and
of the deed that gives whatever reality it possesses to his life. And,
beneath the show of a marble palace, that pool of stagnant water, foul
with many impurities, and, perhaps, tinged with blood,--that secret
abomination, above which, possibly, he may say his prayers, without
remembering it,--is this man's miserable soul!
To apply this train of remark somewhat more closely to Judge Pyncheon.
We might say (without in the least imputing crime to a personage of his
eminent respectability) that there was enough of splendid rubbish in
his life to cover up and paralyze a more active and subtile conscience
than the Judge was ever troubled with. The purity of his judicial
character, while on the bench; the faithfulness of his public service
in subsequent capacities; his devotedness to his party, and the rigid
consistency with which he had adhered to its principles, or, at all
events, kept pace with its organized movements; his remarkable zeal as
president of a Bible society; his unimpeachable integrity as treasurer
of a widow's and orphan's fund; his benefits to horticulture, by
producing two much esteemed varieties of the pear and to agriculture,
through the agency of the famous Pyncheon bull; the cleanliness of his
moral deportment, for a great many years past; the severity with which
he had frowned upon, and finally cast off, an expensive and dissipated
son, delaying forgiveness until within the final quarter of an hour of
the young man's life; his prayers at morning and eventide, and graces
at meal-time; his efforts in furtherance of the temperance cause; his
confining himself, since the last attack of the gout, to five diurnal
glasses of old sherry wine; the snowy whiteness of his linen, the
polish of his boots, the handsomeness of his gold-headed cane, the
square and roomy fashion of his coat, and the fineness of its material,
and, in general, the studied propriety of his dress and equipment; the
scrupulousness with which he paid public notice, in the street, by a
bow, a lifting of the hat, a nod, or a motion of the hand, to all and
sundry of his acquaintances, rich or poor; the smile of broad
benevolence wherewith he made it a point to gladden the whole
world,--what room could possibly be found for darker traits in a
portrait made up of lineaments like these? This proper face was what he
beheld in the looking-glass. This admirably arranged life was what he
was conscious of in the progress of every day. Then might not he claim
to be its result and sum, and say to himself and the community, "Behold
Judge Pyncheon there"?
And allowing that, many, many years ago, in his early and reckless
youth, he had committed some one wrong act,--or that, even now, the
inevitable force of circumstances should occasionally make him do one
questionable deed among a thousand praiseworthy, or, at least,
blameless ones,--would you characterize the Judge by that one necessary
deed, and that half-forgotten act, and let it overshadow the fair
aspect of a lifetime? What is there so ponderous in evil, that a
thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil which
were heaped into the other scale! This scale and balance system is a
favorite one with people of Judge Pyncheon's brotherhood. A hard, cold
man, thus unfortunately situated, seldom or never looking inward, and
resolutely taking his idea of himself from what purports to be his
image as reflected in the mirror of public opinion, can scarcely arrive
at true self-knowledge, except through loss of property and reputation.
Sickness will not always help him do it; not always the death-hour!
But our affair now is with Judge Pyncheon as he stood confronting the
fierce outbreak of Hepzibah's wrath. Without premeditation, to her own
surprise, and indeed terror, she had given vent, for once, to the
inveteracy of her resentment, cherished against this kinsman for thirty
years.
Thus far the Judge's countenance had expressed mild forbearance,--grave
and almost gentle deprecation of his cousin's unbecoming
violence,--free and Christian-like forgiveness of the wrong inflicted
by her words. But when those words were irrevocably spoken, his look
assumed sternness, the sense of power, and immitigable resolve; and
this with so natural and imperceptible a change, that it seemed as if
the iron man had stood there from the first, and the meek man not at
all. The effect was as when the light, vapory clouds, with their soft
coloring, suddenly vanish from the stony brow of a precipitous
mountain, and leave there the frown which you at once feel to be
eternal. Hepzibah almost adopted the insane belief that it was her old
Puritan ancestor, and not the modern Judge, on whom she had just been
wreaking the bitterness of her heart. Never did a man show stronger
proof of the lineage attributed to him than Judge Pyncheon, at this
crisis, by his unmistakable resemblance to the picture in the inner
room.
"Cousin Hepzibah," said he very calmly, "it is time to have done with
this."
"With all my heart!" answered she. "Then, why do you persecute us any
longer? Leave poor Clifford and me in peace. Neither of us desires
anything better!"
"It is my purpose to see Clifford before I leave this house," continued
the Judge. "Do not act like a madwoman, Hepzibah! I am his only
friend, and an all-powerful one. Has it never occurred to you,--are
you so blind as not to have seen,--that, without not merely my consent,
but my efforts, my representations, the exertion of my whole influence,
political, official, personal, Clifford would never have been what you
call free? Did you think his release a triumph over me? Not so, my good
cousin; not so, by any means! The furthest possible from that! No; but
it was the accomplishment of a purpose long entertained on my part. I
set him free!"
"You!" answered Hepzibah. "I never will believe it! He owed his
dungeon to you; his freedom to God's providence!"
"I set him free!" reaffirmed Judge Pyncheon, with the calmest
composure. "And I came hither now to decide whether he shall retain
his freedom. It will depend upon himself. For this purpose, I must
see him."
"Never!--it would drive him mad!" exclaimed Hepzibah, but with an
irresoluteness sufficiently perceptible to the keen eye of the Judge;
for, without the slightest faith in his good intentions, she knew not
whether there was most to dread in yielding or resistance. "And why
should you wish to see this wretched, broken man, who retains hardly a
fraction of his intellect, and will hide even that from an eye which
has no love in it?"
"He shall see love enough in mine, if that be all!" said the Judge,
with well-grounded confidence in the benignity of his aspect. "But,
Cousin Hepzibah, you confess a great deal, and very much to the
purpose. Now, listen, and I will frankly explain my reasons for
insisting on this interview. At the death, thirty years since, of our
uncle Jaffrey, it was found,--I know not whether the circumstance ever
attracted much of your attention, among the sadder interests that
clustered round that event,--but it was found that his visible estate,
of every kind, fell far short of any estimate ever made of it. He was
supposed to be immensely rich. Nobody doubted that he stood among the
weightiest men of his day. It was one of his eccentricities,
however,--and not altogether a folly, neither,--to conceal the amount
of his property by making distant and foreign investments, perhaps
under other names than his own, and by various means, familiar enough
to capitalists, but unnecessary here to be specified. By Uncle
Jaffrey's last will and testament, as you are aware, his entire
property was bequeathed to me, with the single exception of a life
interest to yourself in this old family mansion, and the strip of
patrimonial estate remaining attached to it."
"And do you seek to deprive us of that?" asked Hepzibah, unable to
restrain her bitter contempt. "Is this your price for ceasing to
persecute poor Clifford?"
"Certainly not, my dear cousin!" answered the Judge, smiling
benevolently. "On the contrary, as you must do me the justice to own,
I have constantly expressed my readiness to double or treble your
resources, whenever you should make up your mind to accept any kindness
of that nature at the hands of your kinsman. No, no! But here lies
the gist of the matter. Of my uncle's unquestionably great estate, as
I have said, not the half--no, not one third, as I am fully
convinced--was apparent after his death. Now, I have the best possible
reasons for believing that your brother Clifford can give me a clew to
the recovery of the remainder."
"Clifford!--Clifford know of any hidden wealth? Clifford have it in his
power to make you rich?" cried the old gentlewoman, affected with a
sense of something like ridicule at the idea. "Impossible! You
deceive yourself! It is really a thing to laugh at!"
"It is as certain as that I stand here!" said Judge Pyncheon, striking
his gold-headed cane on the floor, and at the same time stamping his
foot, as if to express his conviction the more forcibly by the whole
emphasis of his substantial person. "Clifford told me so himself!"
"No, no!" exclaimed Hepzibah incredulously. "You are dreaming, Cousin
Jaffrey."
"I do not belong to the dreaming class of men," said the Judge quietly.
"Some months before my uncle's death, Clifford boasted to me of the
possession of the secret of incalculable wealth. His purpose was to
taunt me, and excite my curiosity. I know it well. But, from a pretty
distinct recollection of the particulars of our conversation, I am
thoroughly convinced that there was truth in what he said. Clifford,
at this moment, if he chooses,--and choose he must!--can inform me
where to find the schedule, the documents, the evidences, in whatever
shape they exist, of the vast amount of Uncle Jaffrey's missing
property. He has the secret. His boast was no idle word. It had a
directness, an emphasis, a particularity, that showed a backbone of
solid meaning within the mystery of his expression."
"But what could have been Clifford's object," asked Hepzibah, "in
concealing it so long?"
"It was one of the bad impulses of our fallen nature," replied the
Judge, turning up his eyes. "He looked upon me as his enemy. He
considered me as the cause of his overwhelming disgrace, his imminent
peril of death, his irretrievable ruin. There was no great
probability, therefore, of his volunteering information, out of his
dungeon, that should elevate me still higher on the ladder of
prosperity. But the moment has now come when he must give up his
secret."
"And what if he should refuse?" inquired Hepzibah. "Or,--as I
steadfastly believe,--what if he has no knowledge of this wealth?"
"My dear cousin," said Judge Pyncheon, with a quietude which he had the
power of making more formidable than any violence, "since your
brother's return, I have taken the precaution (a highly proper one in
the near kinsman and natural guardian of an individual so situated) to
have his deportment and habits constantly and carefully overlooked.
Your neighbors have been eye-witnesses to whatever has passed in the
garden. The butcher, the baker, the fish-monger, some of the customers
of your shop, and many a prying old woman, have told me several of the
secrets of your interior. A still larger circle--I myself, among the
rest--can testify to his extravagances at the arched window. Thousands
beheld him, a week or two ago, on the point of flinging himself thence
into the street. From all this testimony, I am led to
apprehend--reluctantly, and with deep grief--that Clifford's
misfortunes have so affected his intellect, never very strong, that he
cannot safely remain at large. The alternative, you must be
aware,--and its adoption will depend entirely on the decision which I
am now about to make,--the alternative is his confinement, probably for
the remainder of his life, in a public asylum for persons in his
unfortunate state of mind."
"You cannot mean it!" shrieked Hepzibah.
"Should my cousin Clifford," continued Judge Pyncheon, wholly
undisturbed, "from mere malice, and hatred of one whose interests ought
naturally to be dear to him,--a mode of passion that, as often as any
other, indicates mental disease,--should he refuse me the information
so important to myself, and which he assuredly possesses, I shall
consider it the one needed jot of evidence to satisfy my mind of his
insanity. And, once sure of the course pointed out by conscience, you
know me too well, Cousin Hepzibah, to entertain a doubt that I shall
pursue it."
"O Jaffrey,--Cousin Jaffrey," cried Hepzibah mournfully, not
passionately, "it is you that are diseased in mind, not Clifford! You
have forgotten that a woman was your mother!--that you have had
sisters, brothers, children of your own!--or that there ever was
affection between man and man, or pity from one man to another, in this
miserable world! Else, how could you have dreamed of this? You are not
young, Cousin Jaffrey!--no, nor middle-aged,--but already an old man!
The hair is white upon your head! How many years have you to live? Are
you not rich enough for that little time? Shall you be hungry,--shall
you lack clothes, or a roof to shelter you,--between this point and the
grave? No! but, with the half of what you now possess, you could revel
in costly food and wines, and build a house twice as splendid as you
now inhabit, and make a far greater show to the world,--and yet leave
riches to your only son, to make him bless the hour of your death!
Then, why should you do this cruel, cruel thing?--so mad a thing, that
I know not whether to call it wicked! Alas, Cousin Jaffrey, this hard
and grasping spirit has run in our blood these two hundred years. You
are but doing over again, in another shape, what your ancestor before
you did, and sending down to your posterity the curse inherited from
him!"
"Talk sense, Hepzibah, for Heaven's sake!" exclaimed the Judge, with
the impatience natural to a reasonable man, on hearing anything so
utterly absurd as the above, in a discussion about matters of business.
"I have told you my determination. I am not apt to change. Clifford
must give up his secret, or take the consequences. And let him decide
quickly; for I have several affairs to attend to this morning, and an
important dinner engagement with some political friends."
"Clifford has no secret!" answered Hepzibah. "And God will not let you
do the thing you meditate!"
"We shall see," said the unmoved Judge. "Meanwhile, choose whether you
will summon Clifford, and allow this business to be amicably settled by
an interview between two kinsmen, or drive me to harsher measures,
which I should be most happy to feel myself justified in avoiding. The
responsibility is altogether on your part."
"You are stronger than I," said Hepzibah, after a brief consideration;
"and you have no pity in your strength! Clifford is not now insane; but
the interview which you insist upon may go far to make him so.
Nevertheless, knowing you as I do, I believe it to be my best course to
allow you to judge for yourself as to the improbability of his
possessing any valuable secret. I will call Clifford. Be merciful in
your dealings with him!--be far more merciful than your heart bids you
be!--for God is looking at you, Jaffrey Pyncheon!"
The Judge followed his cousin from the shop, where the foregoing
conversation had passed, into the parlor, and flung himself heavily
into the great ancestral chair. Many a former Pyncheon had found
repose in its capacious arms: rosy children, after their sports; young
men, dreamy with love; grown men, weary with cares; old men, burdened
with winters,--they had mused, and slumbered, and departed to a yet
profounder sleep. It had been a long tradition, though a doubtful one,
that this was the very chair, seated in which the earliest of the
Judge's New England forefathers--he whose picture still hung upon the
wall--had given a dead man's silent and stern reception to the throng
of distinguished guests. From that hour of evil omen until the
present, it may be,--though we know not the secret of his heart,--but
it may be that no wearier and sadder man had ever sunk into the chair
than this same Judge Pyncheon, whom we have just beheld so immitigably
hard and resolute. Surely, it must have been at no slight cost that he
had thus fortified his soul with iron. Such calmness is a mightier
effort than the violence of weaker men. And there was yet a heavy task
for him to do. Was it a little matter--a trifle to be prepared for in
a single moment, and to be rested from in another moment,--that he must
now, after thirty years, encounter a kinsman risen from a living tomb,
and wrench a secret from him, or else consign him to a living tomb
again?
"Did you speak?" asked Hepzibah, looking in from the threshold of the
parlor; for she imagined that the Judge had uttered some sound which
she was anxious to interpret as a relenting impulse. "I thought you
called me back."
"No, no" gruffly answered Judge Pyncheon with a harsh frown, while his
brow grew almost a black purple, in the shadow of the room. "Why
should I call you back? Time flies! Bid Clifford come to me!"
The Judge had taken his watch from his vest pocket and now held it in
his hand, measuring the interval which was to ensue before the
appearance of Clifford.
| Phoebe's departure from the House of the Seven Gables is a pivotal event for both Clifford and Hepzibah; without the young girl to provide economic assistance to Hepzibah and a sense of emotional stability to Clifford, the two older Pyncheons are now more fragile than ever. Hepzibah continues to suffer because of her unpleasant appearance; her greatest flaw is her scowl, a physical feature that has no correlation to her fragile and kindly demeanor. In this chapter, Hawthorne leaves behind the studied character description of the inhabitants of the House of the Seven Gables for a melodramatic tone that reflects the Pyncheon mythology. It is here that the feverish and lurid events of the Pyncheon past enter the contemporary setting. Hawthorne adds details appropriate to a ghost story: the chapter occurs in the midst of a dark and stormy evening, while Clifford even hears mysterious music from Alice's harpsichord. When Jaffrey arrives, Judge Pyncheon reveals himself to be the grasping villain that his affinity with Colonel Pyncheon suggests. He, like the Colonel and Gervayse, seeks the deed to the lost land. However, in this chapter of the Pyncheon chronology, the victim is not a Maule, but instead another Pyncheon. Jaffrey's threatening behavior toward Hepzibah and Clifford suggests that the perpetuation of this family sin has caused the Pyncheon family to collapse on itself; Judge Pyncheon is willing to harm his family in order to establish it as a dynasty. The consequences of Clifford's odd behavior become apparent in this chapter. Although Clifford has attempted to remain confined from the rest of society, he cannot hide his actions from the rest of the world. Even though Clifford believes himself to be safe within the House of the Seven Gables, he must accept that he does exist within the larger world | analysis |
NEVER had the old house appeared so dismal to poor Hepzibah as when she
departed on that wretched errand. There was a strange aspect in it.
As she trode along the foot-worn passages, and opened one crazy door
after another, and ascended the creaking staircase, she gazed wistfully
and fearfully around. It would have been no marvel, to her excited
mind, if, behind or beside her, there had been the rustle of dead
people's garments, or pale visages awaiting her on the landing-place
above. Her nerves were set all ajar by the scene of passion and terror
through which she had just struggled. Her colloquy with Judge
Pyncheon, who so perfectly represented the person and attributes of the
founder of the family, had called back the dreary past. It weighed
upon her heart. Whatever she had heard, from legendary aunts and
grandmothers, concerning the good or evil fortunes of the
Pyncheons,--stories which had heretofore been kept warm in her
remembrance by the chimney-corner glow that was associated with
them,--now recurred to her, sombre, ghastly, cold, like most passages
of family history, when brooded over in melancholy mood. The whole
seemed little else but a series of calamity, reproducing itself in
successive generations, with one general hue, and varying in little,
save the outline. But Hepzibah now felt as if the Judge, and Clifford,
and herself,--they three together,--were on the point of adding another
incident to the annals of the house, with a bolder relief of wrong and
sorrow, which would cause it to stand out from all the rest. Thus it
is that the grief of the passing moment takes upon itself an
individuality, and a character of climax, which it is destined to lose
after a while, and to fade into the dark gray tissue common to the
grave or glad events of many years ago. It is but for a moment,
comparatively, that anything looks strange or startling,--a truth that
has the bitter and the sweet in it.
But Hepzibah could not rid herself of the sense of something
unprecedented at that instant passing and soon to be accomplished. Her
nerves were in a shake. Instinctively she paused before the arched
window, and looked out upon the street, in order to seize its permanent
objects with her mental grasp, and thus to steady herself from the reel
and vibration which affected her more immediate sphere. It brought her
up, as we may say, with a kind of shock, when she beheld everything
under the same appearance as the day before, and numberless preceding
days, except for the difference between sunshine and sullen storm. Her
eyes travelled along the street, from doorstep to doorstep, noting the
wet sidewalks, with here and there a puddle in hollows that had been
imperceptible until filled with water. She screwed her dim optics to
their acutest point, in the hope of making out, with greater
distinctness, a certain window, where she half saw, half guessed, that
a tailor's seamstress was sitting at her work. Hepzibah flung herself
upon that unknown woman's companionship, even thus far off. Then she
was attracted by a chaise rapidly passing, and watched its moist and
glistening top, and its splashing wheels, until it had turned the
corner, and refused to carry any further her idly trifling, because
appalled and overburdened, mind. When the vehicle had disappeared, she
allowed herself still another loitering moment; for the patched figure
of good Uncle Venner was now visible, coming slowly from the head of
the street downward, with a rheumatic limp, because the east wind had
got into his joints. Hepzibah wished that he would pass yet more
slowly, and befriend her shivering solitude a little longer. Anything
that would take her out of the grievous present, and interpose human
beings betwixt herself and what was nearest to her,--whatever would
defer for an instant the inevitable errand on which she was bound,--all
such impediments were welcome. Next to the lightest heart, the
heaviest is apt to be most playful.
Hepzibah had little hardihood for her own proper pain, and far less for
what she must inflict on Clifford. Of so slight a nature, and so
shattered by his previous calamities, it could not well be short of
utter ruin to bring him face to face with the hard, relentless man who
had been his evil destiny through life. Even had there been no bitter
recollections, nor any hostile interest now at stake between them, the
mere natural repugnance of the more sensitive system to the massive,
weighty, and unimpressible one, must, in itself, have been disastrous
to the former. It would be like flinging a porcelain vase, with
already a crack in it, against a granite column. Never before had
Hepzibah so adequately estimated the powerful character of her cousin
Jaffrey,--powerful by intellect, energy of will, the long habit of
acting among men, and, as she believed, by his unscrupulous pursuit of
selfish ends through evil means. It did but increase the difficulty
that Judge Pyncheon was under a delusion as to the secret which he
supposed Clifford to possess. Men of his strength of purpose and
customary sagacity, if they chance to adopt a mistaken opinion in
practical matters, so wedge it and fasten it among things known to be
true, that to wrench it out of their minds is hardly less difficult
than pulling up an oak. Thus, as the Judge required an impossibility
of Clifford, the latter, as he could not perform it, must needs perish.
For what, in the grasp of a man like this, was to become of Clifford's
soft poetic nature, that never should have had a task more stubborn
than to set a life of beautiful enjoyment to the flow and rhythm of
musical cadences! Indeed, what had become of it already? Broken!
Blighted! All but annihilated! Soon to be wholly so!
For a moment, the thought crossed Hepzibah's mind, whether Clifford
might not really have such knowledge of their deceased uncle's vanished
estate as the Judge imputed to him. She remembered some vague
intimations, on her brother's part, which--if the supposition were not
essentially preposterous--might have been so interpreted. There had
been schemes of travel and residence abroad, day-dreams of brilliant
life at home, and splendid castles in the air, which it would have
required boundless wealth to build and realize. Had this wealth been
in her power, how gladly would Hepzibah have bestowed it all upon her
iron-hearted kinsman, to buy for Clifford the freedom and seclusion of
the desolate old house! But she believed that her brother's schemes
were as destitute of actual substance and purpose as a child's pictures
of its future life, while sitting in a little chair by its mother's
knee. Clifford had none but shadowy gold at his command; and it was
not the stuff to satisfy Judge Pyncheon!
Was there no help in their extremity? It seemed strange that there
should be none, with a city round about her. It would be so easy to
throw up the window, and send forth a shriek, at the strange agony of
which everybody would come hastening to the rescue, well understanding
it to be the cry of a human soul, at some dreadful crisis! But how
wild, how almost laughable, the fatality,--and yet how continually it
comes to pass, thought Hepzibah, in this dull delirium of a
world,--that whosoever, and with however kindly a purpose, should come
to help, they would be sure to help the strongest side! Might and wrong
combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible
attraction. There would be Judge Pyncheon,--a person eminent in the
public view, of high station and great wealth, a philanthropist, a
member of Congress and of the church, and intimately associated with
whatever else bestows good name,--so imposing, in these advantageous
lights, that Hepzibah herself could hardly help shrinking from her own
conclusions as to his hollow integrity. The Judge, on one side! And
who, on the other? The guilty Clifford! Once a byword! Now, an
indistinctly remembered ignominy!
Nevertheless, in spite of this perception that the Judge would draw all
human aid to his own behalf, Hepzibah was so unaccustomed to act for
herself, that the least word of counsel would have swayed her to any
mode of action. Little Phoebe Pyncheon would at once have lighted up
the whole scene, if not by any available suggestion, yet simply by the
warm vivacity of her character. The idea of the artist occurred to
Hepzibah. Young and unknown, mere vagrant adventurer as he was, she had
been conscious of a force in Holgrave which might well adapt him to be
the champion of a crisis. With this thought in her mind, she unbolted a
door, cobwebbed and long disused, but which had served as a former
medium of communication between her own part of the house and the gable
where the wandering daguerreotypist had now established his temporary
home. He was not there. A book, face downward, on the table, a roll of
manuscript, a half-written sheet, a newspaper, some tools of his
present occupation, and several rejected daguerreotypes, conveyed an
impression as if he were close at hand. But, at this period of the day,
as Hepzibah might have anticipated, the artist was at his public rooms.
With an impulse of idle curiosity, that flickered among her heavy
thoughts, she looked at one of the daguerreotypes, and beheld Judge
Pyncheon frowning at her. Fate stared her in the face. She turned back
from her fruitless quest, with a heartsinking sense of disappointment.
In all her years of seclusion, she had never felt, as now, what it was
to be alone. It seemed as if the house stood in a desert, or, by some
spell, was made invisible to those who dwelt around, or passed beside
it; so that any mode of misfortune, miserable accident, or crime might
happen in it without the possibility of aid. In her grief and wounded
pride, Hepzibah had spent her life in divesting herself of friends; she
had wilfully cast off the support which God has ordained his creatures
to need from one another; and it was now her punishment, that Clifford
and herself would fall the easier victims to their kindred enemy.
Returning to the arched window, she lifted her eyes,--scowling, poor,
dim-sighted Hepzibah, in the face of Heaven!--and strove hard to send
up a prayer through the dense gray pavement of clouds. Those mists had
gathered, as if to symbolize a great, brooding mass of human trouble,
doubt, confusion, and chill indifference, between earth and the better
regions. Her faith was too weak; the prayer too heavy to be thus
uplifted. It fell back, a lump of lead, upon her heart. It smote her
with the wretched conviction that Providence intermeddled not in these
petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor had any balm for
these little agonies of a solitary soul; but shed its justice, and its
mercy, in a broad, sunlike sweep, over half the universe at once. Its
vastness made it nothing. But Hepzibah did not see that, just as there
comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of
God's care and pity for every separate need.
At last, finding no other pretext for deferring the torture that she
was to inflict on Clifford,--her reluctance to which was the true cause
of her loitering at the window, her search for the artist, and even her
abortive prayer,--dreading, also, to hear the stern voice of Judge
Pyncheon from below stairs, chiding her delay,--she crept slowly, a
pale, grief-stricken figure, a dismal shape of woman, with almost
torpid limbs, slowly to her brother's door, and knocked!
There was no reply.
And how should there have been? Her hand, tremulous with the shrinking
purpose which directed it, had smitten so feebly against the door that
the sound could hardly have gone inward. She knocked again. Still no
response! Nor was it to be wondered at. She had struck with the entire
force of her heart's vibration, communicating, by some subtile
magnetism, her own terror to the summons. Clifford would turn his face
to the pillow, and cover his head beneath the bedclothes, like a
startled child at midnight. She knocked a third time, three regular
strokes, gentle, but perfectly distinct, and with meaning in them; for,
modulate it with what cautious art we will, the hand cannot help
playing some tune of what we feel upon the senseless wood.
Clifford returned no answer.
"Clifford! Dear brother!" said Hepzibah. "Shall I come in?"
A silence.
Two or three times, and more, Hepzibah repeated his name, without
result; till, thinking her brother's sleep unwontedly profound, she
undid the door, and entering, found the chamber vacant. How could he
have come forth, and when, without her knowledge? Was it possible
that, in spite of the stormy day, and worn out with the irksomeness
within doors he had betaken himself to his customary haunt in the
garden, and was now shivering under the cheerless shelter of the
summer-house? She hastily threw up a window, thrust forth her turbaned
head and the half of her gaunt figure, and searched the whole garden
through, as completely as her dim vision would allow. She could see
the interior of the summer-house, and its circular seat, kept moist by
the droppings of the roof. It had no occupant. Clifford was not
thereabouts; unless, indeed, he had crept for concealment (as, for a
moment, Hepzibah fancied might be the case) into a great, wet mass of
tangled and broad-leaved shadow, where the squash-vines were clambering
tumultuously upon an old wooden framework, set casually aslant against
the fence. This could not be, however; he was not there; for, while
Hepzibah was looking, a strange grimalkin stole forth from the very
spot, and picked his way across the garden. Twice he paused to snuff
the air, and then anew directed his course towards the parlor window.
Whether it was only on account of the stealthy, prying manner common to
the race, or that this cat seemed to have more than ordinary mischief
in his thoughts, the old gentlewoman, in spite of her much perplexity,
felt an impulse to drive the animal away, and accordingly flung down a
window stick. The cat stared up at her, like a detected thief or
murderer, and, the next instant, took to flight. No other living
creature was visible in the garden. Chanticleer and his family had
either not left their roost, disheartened by the interminable rain, or
had done the next wisest thing, by seasonably returning to it.
Hepzibah closed the window.
But where was Clifford? Could it be that, aware of the presence of his
Evil Destiny, he had crept silently down the staircase, while the Judge
and Hepzibah stood talking in the shop, and had softly undone the
fastenings of the outer door, and made his escape into the street?
With that thought, she seemed to behold his gray, wrinkled, yet
childlike aspect, in the old-fashioned garments which he wore about the
house; a figure such as one sometimes imagines himself to be, with the
world's eye upon him, in a troubled dream. This figure of her wretched
brother would go wandering through the city, attracting all eyes, and
everybody's wonder and repugnance, like a ghost, the more to be
shuddered at because visible at noontide. To incur the ridicule of the
younger crowd, that knew him not,--the harsher scorn and indignation of
a few old men, who might recall his once familiar features! To be the
sport of boys, who, when old enough to run about the streets, have no
more reverence for what is beautiful and holy, nor pity for what is
sad,--no more sense of sacred misery, sanctifying the human shape in
which it embodies itself,--than if Satan were the father of them all!
Goaded by their taunts, their loud, shrill cries, and cruel
laughter,--insulted by the filth of the public ways, which they would
fling upon him,--or, as it might well be, distracted by the mere
strangeness of his situation, though nobody should afflict him with so
much as a thoughtless word,--what wonder if Clifford were to break into
some wild extravagance which was certain to be interpreted as lunacy?
Thus Judge Pyncheon's fiendish scheme would be ready accomplished to
his hands!
Then Hepzibah reflected that the town was almost completely
water-girdled. The wharves stretched out towards the centre of the
harbor, and, in this inclement weather, were deserted by the ordinary
throng of merchants, laborers, and sea-faring men; each wharf a
solitude, with the vessels moored stem and stern, along its misty
length. Should her brother's aimless footsteps stray thitherward, and
he but bend, one moment, over the deep, black tide, would he not
bethink himself that here was the sure refuge within his reach, and
that, with a single step, or the slightest overbalance of his body, he
might be forever beyond his kinsman's gripe? Oh, the temptation! To
make of his ponderous sorrow a security! To sink, with its leaden
weight upon him, and never rise again!
The horror of this last conception was too much for Hepzibah. Even
Jaffrey Pyncheon must help her now She hastened down the staircase,
shrieking as she went.
"Clifford is gone!" she cried. "I cannot find my brother. Help,
Jaffrey Pyncheon! Some harm will happen to him!"
She threw open the parlor-door. But, what with the shade of branches
across the windows, and the smoke-blackened ceiling, and the dark
oak-panelling of the walls, there was hardly so much daylight in the
room that Hepzibah's imperfect sight could accurately distinguish the
Judge's figure. She was certain, however, that she saw him sitting in
the ancestral arm-chair, near the centre of the floor, with his face
somewhat averted, and looking towards a window. So firm and quiet is
the nervous system of such men as Judge Pyncheon, that he had perhaps
stirred not more than once since her departure, but, in the hard
composure of his temperament, retained the position into which accident
had thrown him.
"I tell you, Jaffrey," cried Hepzibah impatiently, as she turned from
the parlor-door to search other rooms, "my brother is not in his
chamber! You must help me seek him!"
But Judge Pyncheon was not the man to let himself be startled from an
easy-chair with haste ill-befitting either the dignity of his character
or his broad personal basis, by the alarm of an hysteric woman. Yet,
considering his own interest in the matter, he might have bestirred
himself with a little more alacrity.
"Do you hear me, Jaffrey Pyncheon?" screamed Hepzibah, as she again
approached the parlor-door, after an ineffectual search elsewhere.
"Clifford is gone."
At this instant, on the threshold of the parlor, emerging from within,
appeared Clifford himself! His face was preternaturally pale; so deadly
white, indeed, that, through all the glimmering indistinctness of the
passageway, Hepzibah could discern his features, as if a light fell on
them alone. Their vivid and wild expression seemed likewise sufficient
to illuminate them; it was an expression of scorn and mockery,
coinciding with the emotions indicated by his gesture. As Clifford
stood on the threshold, partly turning back, he pointed his finger
within the parlor, and shook it slowly as though he would have
summoned, not Hepzibah alone, but the whole world, to gaze at some
object inconceivably ridiculous. This action, so ill-timed and
extravagant,--accompanied, too, with a look that showed more like joy
than any other kind of excitement,--compelled Hepzibah to dread that
her stern kinsman's ominous visit had driven her poor brother to
absolute insanity. Nor could she otherwise account for the Judge's
quiescent mood than by supposing him craftily on the watch, while
Clifford developed these symptoms of a distracted mind.
"Be quiet, Clifford!" whispered his sister, raising her hand to impress
caution. "Oh, for Heaven's sake, be quiet!"
"Let him be quiet! What can he do better?" answered Clifford, with a
still wilder gesture, pointing into the room which he had just quitted.
"As for us, Hepzibah, we can dance now!--we can sing, laugh, play, do
what we will! The weight is gone, Hepzibah! It is gone off this weary
old world, and we may be as light-hearted as little Phoebe herself."
And, in accordance with his words, he began to laugh, still pointing
his finger at the object, invisible to Hepzibah, within the parlor.
She was seized with a sudden intuition of some horrible thing. She
thrust herself past Clifford, and disappeared into the room; but almost
immediately returned, with a cry choking in her throat. Gazing at her
brother with an affrighted glance of inquiry, she beheld him all in a
tremor and a quake, from head to foot, while, amid these commoted
elements of passion or alarm, still flickered his gusty mirth.
"My God! what is to become of us?" gasped Hepzibah.
"Come!" said Clifford in a tone of brief decision, most unlike what was
usual with him. "We stay here too long! Let us leave the old house to
our cousin Jaffrey! He will take good care of it!"
Hepzibah now noticed that Clifford had on a cloak,--a garment of long
ago,--in which he had constantly muffled himself during these days of
easterly storm. He beckoned with his hand, and intimated, so far as
she could comprehend him, his purpose that they should go together from
the house. There are chaotic, blind, or drunken moments, in the lives
of persons who lack real force of character,--moments of test, in which
courage would most assert itself,--but where these individuals, if left
to themselves, stagger aimlessly along, or follow implicitly whatever
guidance may befall them, even if it be a child's. No matter how
preposterous or insane, a purpose is a Godsend to them. Hepzibah had
reached this point. Unaccustomed to action or responsibility,--full of
horror at what she had seen, and afraid to inquire, or almost to
imagine, how it had come to pass,--affrighted at the fatality which
seemed to pursue her brother,--stupefied by the dim, thick, stifling
atmosphere of dread which filled the house as with a death-smell, and
obliterated all definiteness of thought,--she yielded without a
question, and on the instant, to the will which Clifford expressed.
For herself, she was like a person in a dream, when the will always
sleeps. Clifford, ordinarily so destitute of this faculty, had found
it in the tension of the crisis.
"Why do you delay so?" cried he sharply. "Put on your cloak and hood,
or whatever it pleases you to wear! No matter what; you cannot look
beautiful nor brilliant, my poor Hepzibah! Take your purse, with money
in it, and come along!"
Hepzibah obeyed these instructions, as if nothing else were to be done
or thought of. She began to wonder, it is true, why she did not wake
up, and at what still more intolerable pitch of dizzy trouble her
spirit would struggle out of the maze, and make her conscious that
nothing of all this had actually happened. Of course it was not real;
no such black, easterly day as this had yet begun to be; Judge Pyncheon
had not talked with, her. Clifford had not laughed, pointed, beckoned
her away with him; but she had merely been afflicted--as lonely
sleepers often are--with a great deal of unreasonable misery, in a
morning dream!
"Now--now--I shall certainly awake!" thought Hepzibah, as she went to
and fro, making her little preparations. "I can bear it no longer I
must wake up now!"
But it came not, that awakening moment! It came not, even when, just
before they left the house, Clifford stole to the parlor-door, and made
a parting obeisance to the sole occupant of the room.
"What an absurd figure the old fellow cuts now!" whispered he to
Hepzibah. "Just when he fancied he had me completely under his thumb!
Come, come; make haste! or he will start up, like Giant Despair in
pursuit of Christian and Hopeful, and catch us yet!"
As they passed into the street, Clifford directed Hepzibah's attention
to something on one of the posts of the front door. It was merely the
initials of his own name, which, with somewhat of his characteristic
grace about the forms of the letters, he had cut there when a boy. The
brother and sister departed, and left Judge Pyncheon sitting in the old
home of his forefathers, all by himself; so heavy and lumpish that we
can liken him to nothing better than a defunct nightmare, which had
perished in the midst of its wickedness, and left its flabby corpse on
the breast of the tormented one, to be gotten rid of as it might!
| Clifford's Chamber: Hepzibah felt that she, Clifford and Judge Pyncheon were on the brink of adding another disturbing incident to the house. She cannot rid herself of the sense of something unprecedented occurring. She had never adequately estimated how powerful Jaffrey was in intellect and energy of will and had never felt as alone. She goes to Clifford's room, but does not find him there. She calls for help from Jaffrey, telling him that Clifford is not in his room, but then Clifford appears from the parlor. Judge Pyncheon still remains there, slumped over and unresponsive. Clifford points to the dead Judge and says that they can live without such weight anymore, but they must escape the house. | summary |
NEVER had the old house appeared so dismal to poor Hepzibah as when she
departed on that wretched errand. There was a strange aspect in it.
As she trode along the foot-worn passages, and opened one crazy door
after another, and ascended the creaking staircase, she gazed wistfully
and fearfully around. It would have been no marvel, to her excited
mind, if, behind or beside her, there had been the rustle of dead
people's garments, or pale visages awaiting her on the landing-place
above. Her nerves were set all ajar by the scene of passion and terror
through which she had just struggled. Her colloquy with Judge
Pyncheon, who so perfectly represented the person and attributes of the
founder of the family, had called back the dreary past. It weighed
upon her heart. Whatever she had heard, from legendary aunts and
grandmothers, concerning the good or evil fortunes of the
Pyncheons,--stories which had heretofore been kept warm in her
remembrance by the chimney-corner glow that was associated with
them,--now recurred to her, sombre, ghastly, cold, like most passages
of family history, when brooded over in melancholy mood. The whole
seemed little else but a series of calamity, reproducing itself in
successive generations, with one general hue, and varying in little,
save the outline. But Hepzibah now felt as if the Judge, and Clifford,
and herself,--they three together,--were on the point of adding another
incident to the annals of the house, with a bolder relief of wrong and
sorrow, which would cause it to stand out from all the rest. Thus it
is that the grief of the passing moment takes upon itself an
individuality, and a character of climax, which it is destined to lose
after a while, and to fade into the dark gray tissue common to the
grave or glad events of many years ago. It is but for a moment,
comparatively, that anything looks strange or startling,--a truth that
has the bitter and the sweet in it.
But Hepzibah could not rid herself of the sense of something
unprecedented at that instant passing and soon to be accomplished. Her
nerves were in a shake. Instinctively she paused before the arched
window, and looked out upon the street, in order to seize its permanent
objects with her mental grasp, and thus to steady herself from the reel
and vibration which affected her more immediate sphere. It brought her
up, as we may say, with a kind of shock, when she beheld everything
under the same appearance as the day before, and numberless preceding
days, except for the difference between sunshine and sullen storm. Her
eyes travelled along the street, from doorstep to doorstep, noting the
wet sidewalks, with here and there a puddle in hollows that had been
imperceptible until filled with water. She screwed her dim optics to
their acutest point, in the hope of making out, with greater
distinctness, a certain window, where she half saw, half guessed, that
a tailor's seamstress was sitting at her work. Hepzibah flung herself
upon that unknown woman's companionship, even thus far off. Then she
was attracted by a chaise rapidly passing, and watched its moist and
glistening top, and its splashing wheels, until it had turned the
corner, and refused to carry any further her idly trifling, because
appalled and overburdened, mind. When the vehicle had disappeared, she
allowed herself still another loitering moment; for the patched figure
of good Uncle Venner was now visible, coming slowly from the head of
the street downward, with a rheumatic limp, because the east wind had
got into his joints. Hepzibah wished that he would pass yet more
slowly, and befriend her shivering solitude a little longer. Anything
that would take her out of the grievous present, and interpose human
beings betwixt herself and what was nearest to her,--whatever would
defer for an instant the inevitable errand on which she was bound,--all
such impediments were welcome. Next to the lightest heart, the
heaviest is apt to be most playful.
Hepzibah had little hardihood for her own proper pain, and far less for
what she must inflict on Clifford. Of so slight a nature, and so
shattered by his previous calamities, it could not well be short of
utter ruin to bring him face to face with the hard, relentless man who
had been his evil destiny through life. Even had there been no bitter
recollections, nor any hostile interest now at stake between them, the
mere natural repugnance of the more sensitive system to the massive,
weighty, and unimpressible one, must, in itself, have been disastrous
to the former. It would be like flinging a porcelain vase, with
already a crack in it, against a granite column. Never before had
Hepzibah so adequately estimated the powerful character of her cousin
Jaffrey,--powerful by intellect, energy of will, the long habit of
acting among men, and, as she believed, by his unscrupulous pursuit of
selfish ends through evil means. It did but increase the difficulty
that Judge Pyncheon was under a delusion as to the secret which he
supposed Clifford to possess. Men of his strength of purpose and
customary sagacity, if they chance to adopt a mistaken opinion in
practical matters, so wedge it and fasten it among things known to be
true, that to wrench it out of their minds is hardly less difficult
than pulling up an oak. Thus, as the Judge required an impossibility
of Clifford, the latter, as he could not perform it, must needs perish.
For what, in the grasp of a man like this, was to become of Clifford's
soft poetic nature, that never should have had a task more stubborn
than to set a life of beautiful enjoyment to the flow and rhythm of
musical cadences! Indeed, what had become of it already? Broken!
Blighted! All but annihilated! Soon to be wholly so!
For a moment, the thought crossed Hepzibah's mind, whether Clifford
might not really have such knowledge of their deceased uncle's vanished
estate as the Judge imputed to him. She remembered some vague
intimations, on her brother's part, which--if the supposition were not
essentially preposterous--might have been so interpreted. There had
been schemes of travel and residence abroad, day-dreams of brilliant
life at home, and splendid castles in the air, which it would have
required boundless wealth to build and realize. Had this wealth been
in her power, how gladly would Hepzibah have bestowed it all upon her
iron-hearted kinsman, to buy for Clifford the freedom and seclusion of
the desolate old house! But she believed that her brother's schemes
were as destitute of actual substance and purpose as a child's pictures
of its future life, while sitting in a little chair by its mother's
knee. Clifford had none but shadowy gold at his command; and it was
not the stuff to satisfy Judge Pyncheon!
Was there no help in their extremity? It seemed strange that there
should be none, with a city round about her. It would be so easy to
throw up the window, and send forth a shriek, at the strange agony of
which everybody would come hastening to the rescue, well understanding
it to be the cry of a human soul, at some dreadful crisis! But how
wild, how almost laughable, the fatality,--and yet how continually it
comes to pass, thought Hepzibah, in this dull delirium of a
world,--that whosoever, and with however kindly a purpose, should come
to help, they would be sure to help the strongest side! Might and wrong
combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible
attraction. There would be Judge Pyncheon,--a person eminent in the
public view, of high station and great wealth, a philanthropist, a
member of Congress and of the church, and intimately associated with
whatever else bestows good name,--so imposing, in these advantageous
lights, that Hepzibah herself could hardly help shrinking from her own
conclusions as to his hollow integrity. The Judge, on one side! And
who, on the other? The guilty Clifford! Once a byword! Now, an
indistinctly remembered ignominy!
Nevertheless, in spite of this perception that the Judge would draw all
human aid to his own behalf, Hepzibah was so unaccustomed to act for
herself, that the least word of counsel would have swayed her to any
mode of action. Little Phoebe Pyncheon would at once have lighted up
the whole scene, if not by any available suggestion, yet simply by the
warm vivacity of her character. The idea of the artist occurred to
Hepzibah. Young and unknown, mere vagrant adventurer as he was, she had
been conscious of a force in Holgrave which might well adapt him to be
the champion of a crisis. With this thought in her mind, she unbolted a
door, cobwebbed and long disused, but which had served as a former
medium of communication between her own part of the house and the gable
where the wandering daguerreotypist had now established his temporary
home. He was not there. A book, face downward, on the table, a roll of
manuscript, a half-written sheet, a newspaper, some tools of his
present occupation, and several rejected daguerreotypes, conveyed an
impression as if he were close at hand. But, at this period of the day,
as Hepzibah might have anticipated, the artist was at his public rooms.
With an impulse of idle curiosity, that flickered among her heavy
thoughts, she looked at one of the daguerreotypes, and beheld Judge
Pyncheon frowning at her. Fate stared her in the face. She turned back
from her fruitless quest, with a heartsinking sense of disappointment.
In all her years of seclusion, she had never felt, as now, what it was
to be alone. It seemed as if the house stood in a desert, or, by some
spell, was made invisible to those who dwelt around, or passed beside
it; so that any mode of misfortune, miserable accident, or crime might
happen in it without the possibility of aid. In her grief and wounded
pride, Hepzibah had spent her life in divesting herself of friends; she
had wilfully cast off the support which God has ordained his creatures
to need from one another; and it was now her punishment, that Clifford
and herself would fall the easier victims to their kindred enemy.
Returning to the arched window, she lifted her eyes,--scowling, poor,
dim-sighted Hepzibah, in the face of Heaven!--and strove hard to send
up a prayer through the dense gray pavement of clouds. Those mists had
gathered, as if to symbolize a great, brooding mass of human trouble,
doubt, confusion, and chill indifference, between earth and the better
regions. Her faith was too weak; the prayer too heavy to be thus
uplifted. It fell back, a lump of lead, upon her heart. It smote her
with the wretched conviction that Providence intermeddled not in these
petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor had any balm for
these little agonies of a solitary soul; but shed its justice, and its
mercy, in a broad, sunlike sweep, over half the universe at once. Its
vastness made it nothing. But Hepzibah did not see that, just as there
comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of
God's care and pity for every separate need.
At last, finding no other pretext for deferring the torture that she
was to inflict on Clifford,--her reluctance to which was the true cause
of her loitering at the window, her search for the artist, and even her
abortive prayer,--dreading, also, to hear the stern voice of Judge
Pyncheon from below stairs, chiding her delay,--she crept slowly, a
pale, grief-stricken figure, a dismal shape of woman, with almost
torpid limbs, slowly to her brother's door, and knocked!
There was no reply.
And how should there have been? Her hand, tremulous with the shrinking
purpose which directed it, had smitten so feebly against the door that
the sound could hardly have gone inward. She knocked again. Still no
response! Nor was it to be wondered at. She had struck with the entire
force of her heart's vibration, communicating, by some subtile
magnetism, her own terror to the summons. Clifford would turn his face
to the pillow, and cover his head beneath the bedclothes, like a
startled child at midnight. She knocked a third time, three regular
strokes, gentle, but perfectly distinct, and with meaning in them; for,
modulate it with what cautious art we will, the hand cannot help
playing some tune of what we feel upon the senseless wood.
Clifford returned no answer.
"Clifford! Dear brother!" said Hepzibah. "Shall I come in?"
A silence.
Two or three times, and more, Hepzibah repeated his name, without
result; till, thinking her brother's sleep unwontedly profound, she
undid the door, and entering, found the chamber vacant. How could he
have come forth, and when, without her knowledge? Was it possible
that, in spite of the stormy day, and worn out with the irksomeness
within doors he had betaken himself to his customary haunt in the
garden, and was now shivering under the cheerless shelter of the
summer-house? She hastily threw up a window, thrust forth her turbaned
head and the half of her gaunt figure, and searched the whole garden
through, as completely as her dim vision would allow. She could see
the interior of the summer-house, and its circular seat, kept moist by
the droppings of the roof. It had no occupant. Clifford was not
thereabouts; unless, indeed, he had crept for concealment (as, for a
moment, Hepzibah fancied might be the case) into a great, wet mass of
tangled and broad-leaved shadow, where the squash-vines were clambering
tumultuously upon an old wooden framework, set casually aslant against
the fence. This could not be, however; he was not there; for, while
Hepzibah was looking, a strange grimalkin stole forth from the very
spot, and picked his way across the garden. Twice he paused to snuff
the air, and then anew directed his course towards the parlor window.
Whether it was only on account of the stealthy, prying manner common to
the race, or that this cat seemed to have more than ordinary mischief
in his thoughts, the old gentlewoman, in spite of her much perplexity,
felt an impulse to drive the animal away, and accordingly flung down a
window stick. The cat stared up at her, like a detected thief or
murderer, and, the next instant, took to flight. No other living
creature was visible in the garden. Chanticleer and his family had
either not left their roost, disheartened by the interminable rain, or
had done the next wisest thing, by seasonably returning to it.
Hepzibah closed the window.
But where was Clifford? Could it be that, aware of the presence of his
Evil Destiny, he had crept silently down the staircase, while the Judge
and Hepzibah stood talking in the shop, and had softly undone the
fastenings of the outer door, and made his escape into the street?
With that thought, she seemed to behold his gray, wrinkled, yet
childlike aspect, in the old-fashioned garments which he wore about the
house; a figure such as one sometimes imagines himself to be, with the
world's eye upon him, in a troubled dream. This figure of her wretched
brother would go wandering through the city, attracting all eyes, and
everybody's wonder and repugnance, like a ghost, the more to be
shuddered at because visible at noontide. To incur the ridicule of the
younger crowd, that knew him not,--the harsher scorn and indignation of
a few old men, who might recall his once familiar features! To be the
sport of boys, who, when old enough to run about the streets, have no
more reverence for what is beautiful and holy, nor pity for what is
sad,--no more sense of sacred misery, sanctifying the human shape in
which it embodies itself,--than if Satan were the father of them all!
Goaded by their taunts, their loud, shrill cries, and cruel
laughter,--insulted by the filth of the public ways, which they would
fling upon him,--or, as it might well be, distracted by the mere
strangeness of his situation, though nobody should afflict him with so
much as a thoughtless word,--what wonder if Clifford were to break into
some wild extravagance which was certain to be interpreted as lunacy?
Thus Judge Pyncheon's fiendish scheme would be ready accomplished to
his hands!
Then Hepzibah reflected that the town was almost completely
water-girdled. The wharves stretched out towards the centre of the
harbor, and, in this inclement weather, were deserted by the ordinary
throng of merchants, laborers, and sea-faring men; each wharf a
solitude, with the vessels moored stem and stern, along its misty
length. Should her brother's aimless footsteps stray thitherward, and
he but bend, one moment, over the deep, black tide, would he not
bethink himself that here was the sure refuge within his reach, and
that, with a single step, or the slightest overbalance of his body, he
might be forever beyond his kinsman's gripe? Oh, the temptation! To
make of his ponderous sorrow a security! To sink, with its leaden
weight upon him, and never rise again!
The horror of this last conception was too much for Hepzibah. Even
Jaffrey Pyncheon must help her now She hastened down the staircase,
shrieking as she went.
"Clifford is gone!" she cried. "I cannot find my brother. Help,
Jaffrey Pyncheon! Some harm will happen to him!"
She threw open the parlor-door. But, what with the shade of branches
across the windows, and the smoke-blackened ceiling, and the dark
oak-panelling of the walls, there was hardly so much daylight in the
room that Hepzibah's imperfect sight could accurately distinguish the
Judge's figure. She was certain, however, that she saw him sitting in
the ancestral arm-chair, near the centre of the floor, with his face
somewhat averted, and looking towards a window. So firm and quiet is
the nervous system of such men as Judge Pyncheon, that he had perhaps
stirred not more than once since her departure, but, in the hard
composure of his temperament, retained the position into which accident
had thrown him.
"I tell you, Jaffrey," cried Hepzibah impatiently, as she turned from
the parlor-door to search other rooms, "my brother is not in his
chamber! You must help me seek him!"
But Judge Pyncheon was not the man to let himself be startled from an
easy-chair with haste ill-befitting either the dignity of his character
or his broad personal basis, by the alarm of an hysteric woman. Yet,
considering his own interest in the matter, he might have bestirred
himself with a little more alacrity.
"Do you hear me, Jaffrey Pyncheon?" screamed Hepzibah, as she again
approached the parlor-door, after an ineffectual search elsewhere.
"Clifford is gone."
At this instant, on the threshold of the parlor, emerging from within,
appeared Clifford himself! His face was preternaturally pale; so deadly
white, indeed, that, through all the glimmering indistinctness of the
passageway, Hepzibah could discern his features, as if a light fell on
them alone. Their vivid and wild expression seemed likewise sufficient
to illuminate them; it was an expression of scorn and mockery,
coinciding with the emotions indicated by his gesture. As Clifford
stood on the threshold, partly turning back, he pointed his finger
within the parlor, and shook it slowly as though he would have
summoned, not Hepzibah alone, but the whole world, to gaze at some
object inconceivably ridiculous. This action, so ill-timed and
extravagant,--accompanied, too, with a look that showed more like joy
than any other kind of excitement,--compelled Hepzibah to dread that
her stern kinsman's ominous visit had driven her poor brother to
absolute insanity. Nor could she otherwise account for the Judge's
quiescent mood than by supposing him craftily on the watch, while
Clifford developed these symptoms of a distracted mind.
"Be quiet, Clifford!" whispered his sister, raising her hand to impress
caution. "Oh, for Heaven's sake, be quiet!"
"Let him be quiet! What can he do better?" answered Clifford, with a
still wilder gesture, pointing into the room which he had just quitted.
"As for us, Hepzibah, we can dance now!--we can sing, laugh, play, do
what we will! The weight is gone, Hepzibah! It is gone off this weary
old world, and we may be as light-hearted as little Phoebe herself."
And, in accordance with his words, he began to laugh, still pointing
his finger at the object, invisible to Hepzibah, within the parlor.
She was seized with a sudden intuition of some horrible thing. She
thrust herself past Clifford, and disappeared into the room; but almost
immediately returned, with a cry choking in her throat. Gazing at her
brother with an affrighted glance of inquiry, she beheld him all in a
tremor and a quake, from head to foot, while, amid these commoted
elements of passion or alarm, still flickered his gusty mirth.
"My God! what is to become of us?" gasped Hepzibah.
"Come!" said Clifford in a tone of brief decision, most unlike what was
usual with him. "We stay here too long! Let us leave the old house to
our cousin Jaffrey! He will take good care of it!"
Hepzibah now noticed that Clifford had on a cloak,--a garment of long
ago,--in which he had constantly muffled himself during these days of
easterly storm. He beckoned with his hand, and intimated, so far as
she could comprehend him, his purpose that they should go together from
the house. There are chaotic, blind, or drunken moments, in the lives
of persons who lack real force of character,--moments of test, in which
courage would most assert itself,--but where these individuals, if left
to themselves, stagger aimlessly along, or follow implicitly whatever
guidance may befall them, even if it be a child's. No matter how
preposterous or insane, a purpose is a Godsend to them. Hepzibah had
reached this point. Unaccustomed to action or responsibility,--full of
horror at what she had seen, and afraid to inquire, or almost to
imagine, how it had come to pass,--affrighted at the fatality which
seemed to pursue her brother,--stupefied by the dim, thick, stifling
atmosphere of dread which filled the house as with a death-smell, and
obliterated all definiteness of thought,--she yielded without a
question, and on the instant, to the will which Clifford expressed.
For herself, she was like a person in a dream, when the will always
sleeps. Clifford, ordinarily so destitute of this faculty, had found
it in the tension of the crisis.
"Why do you delay so?" cried he sharply. "Put on your cloak and hood,
or whatever it pleases you to wear! No matter what; you cannot look
beautiful nor brilliant, my poor Hepzibah! Take your purse, with money
in it, and come along!"
Hepzibah obeyed these instructions, as if nothing else were to be done
or thought of. She began to wonder, it is true, why she did not wake
up, and at what still more intolerable pitch of dizzy trouble her
spirit would struggle out of the maze, and make her conscious that
nothing of all this had actually happened. Of course it was not real;
no such black, easterly day as this had yet begun to be; Judge Pyncheon
had not talked with, her. Clifford had not laughed, pointed, beckoned
her away with him; but she had merely been afflicted--as lonely
sleepers often are--with a great deal of unreasonable misery, in a
morning dream!
"Now--now--I shall certainly awake!" thought Hepzibah, as she went to
and fro, making her little preparations. "I can bear it no longer I
must wake up now!"
But it came not, that awakening moment! It came not, even when, just
before they left the house, Clifford stole to the parlor-door, and made
a parting obeisance to the sole occupant of the room.
"What an absurd figure the old fellow cuts now!" whispered he to
Hepzibah. "Just when he fancied he had me completely under his thumb!
Come, come; make haste! or he will start up, like Giant Despair in
pursuit of Christian and Hopeful, and catch us yet!"
As they passed into the street, Clifford directed Hepzibah's attention
to something on one of the posts of the front door. It was merely the
initials of his own name, which, with somewhat of his characteristic
grace about the forms of the letters, he had cut there when a boy. The
brother and sister departed, and left Judge Pyncheon sitting in the old
home of his forefathers, all by himself; so heavy and lumpish that we
can liken him to nothing better than a defunct nightmare, which had
perished in the midst of its wickedness, and left its flabby corpse on
the breast of the tormented one, to be gotten rid of as it might!
| As Hepzibah searches for Clifford on Jaffrey's request, she even realizes the weight of the Pyncheon history upon her. This chapter adds yet another mysterious and tragic death to the House of the Seven Gables. Hawthorne presents Judge Pyncheon's sudden demise as an ambiguous event. All of the apparent evidence points to Clifford as a murderer. Hepzibah finds him in the room alone with the dead body, and he immediately suggests that they escape from the House of the Seven Gables. This fulfills Hawthorne's prophecy earlier in the story: Hawthorne suggested that it would take no less than death to cure Clifford of his sensitivity and solipsism, yet fulfills this with the death of Jaffrey instead of the assumed death of Clifford. Despite the obvious conclusion that Clifford murdered Jaffrey, Hawthorne leaves great room for the possibility that another situation occurred. Judge Pyncheon's death is a replica of the mysterious death of Colonel Pyncheon, yet another parallel between the two generations. Also, despite his earlier conviction, the frail Clifford seems unlikely as a murderer, particularly in his present state | analysis |
SUMMER as it was, the east wind set poor Hepzibah's few remaining teeth
chattering in her head, as she and Clifford faced it, on their way up
Pyncheon Street, and towards the centre of the town. Not merely was it
the shiver which this pitiless blast brought to her frame (although her
feet and hands, especially, had never seemed so death-a-cold as now),
but there was a moral sensation, mingling itself with the physical
chill, and causing her to shake more in spirit than in body. The
world's broad, bleak atmosphere was all so comfortless! Such, indeed,
is the impression which it makes on every new adventurer, even if he
plunge into it while the warmest tide of life is bubbling through his
veins. What, then, must it have been to Hepzibah and Clifford,--so
time-stricken as they were, yet so like children in their
inexperience,--as they left the doorstep, and passed from beneath the
wide shelter of the Pyncheon Elm! They were wandering all abroad, on
precisely such a pilgrimage as a child often meditates, to the world's
end, with perhaps a sixpence and a biscuit in his pocket. In
Hepzibah's mind, there was the wretched consciousness of being adrift.
She had lost the faculty of self-guidance; but, in view of the
difficulties around her, felt it hardly worth an effort to regain it,
and was, moreover, incapable of making one.
As they proceeded on their strange expedition, she now and then cast a
look sidelong at Clifford, and could not but observe that he was
possessed and swayed by a powerful excitement. It was this, indeed,
that gave him the control which he had at once, and so irresistibly,
established over his movements. It not a little resembled the
exhilaration of wine. Or, it might more fancifully be compared to a
joyous piece of music, played with wild vivacity, but upon a disordered
instrument. As the cracked jarring note might always be heard, and as
it jarred loudest amidst the loftiest exultation of the melody, so was
there a continual quake through Clifford, causing him most to quiver
while he wore a triumphant smile, and seemed almost under a necessity
to skip in his gait.
They met few people abroad, even on passing from the retired
neighborhood of the House of the Seven Gables into what was ordinarily
the more thronged and busier portion of the town. Glistening
sidewalks, with little pools of rain, here and there, along their
unequal surface; umbrellas displayed ostentatiously in the
shop-windows, as if the life of trade had concentrated itself in that
one article; wet leaves of the horse-chestnut or elm-trees, torn off
untimely by the blast and scattered along the public way; an unsightly,
accumulation of mud in the middle of the street, which perversely grew
the more unclean for its long and laborious washing,--these were the
more definable points of a very sombre picture. In the way of movement
and human life, there was the hasty rattle of a cab or coach, its
driver protected by a waterproof cap over his head and shoulders; the
forlorn figure of an old man, who seemed to have crept out of some
subterranean sewer, and was stooping along the kennel, and poking the
wet rubbish with a stick, in quest of rusty nails; a merchant or two,
at the door of the post-office, together with an editor and a
miscellaneous politician, awaiting a dilatory mail; a few visages of
retired sea-captains at the window of an insurance office, looking out
vacantly at the vacant street, blaspheming at the weather, and fretting
at the dearth as well of public news as local gossip. What a
treasure-trove to these venerable quidnuncs, could they have guessed
the secret which Hepzibah and Clifford were carrying along with them!
But their two figures attracted hardly so much notice as that of a
young girl, who passed at the same instant, and happened to raise her
skirt a trifle too high above her ankles. Had it been a sunny and
cheerful day, they could hardly have gone through the streets without
making themselves obnoxious to remark. Now, probably, they were felt
to be in keeping with the dismal and bitter weather, and therefore did
not stand out in strong relief, as if the sun were shining on them, but
melted into the gray gloom and were forgotten as soon as gone.
Poor Hepzibah! Could she have understood this fact, it would have
brought her some little comfort; for, to all her other
troubles,--strange to say!--there was added the womanish and
old-maiden-like misery arising from a sense of unseemliness in her
attire. Thus, she was fain to shrink deeper into herself, as it were,
as if in the hope of making people suppose that here was only a cloak
and hood, threadbare and woefully faded, taking an airing in the midst
of the storm, without any wearer!
As they went on, the feeling of indistinctness and unreality kept dimly
hovering round about her, and so diffusing itself into her system that
one of her hands was hardly palpable to the touch of the other. Any
certainty would have been preferable to this. She whispered to
herself, again and again, "Am I awake?--Am I awake?" and sometimes
exposed her face to the chill spatter of the wind, for the sake of its
rude assurance that she was. Whether it was Clifford's purpose, or
only chance, had led them thither, they now found themselves passing
beneath the arched entrance of a large structure of gray stone.
Within, there was a spacious breadth, and an airy height from floor to
roof, now partially filled with smoke and steam, which eddied
voluminously upward and formed a mimic cloud-region over their heads.
A train of cars was just ready for a start; the locomotive was fretting
and fuming, like a steed impatient for a headlong rush; and the bell
rang out its hasty peal, so well expressing the brief summons which
life vouchsafes to us in its hurried career. Without question or
delay,--with the irresistible decision, if not rather to be called
recklessness, which had so strangely taken possession of him, and
through him of Hepzibah,--Clifford impelled her towards the cars, and
assisted her to enter. The signal was given; the engine puffed forth
its short, quick breaths; the train began its movement; and, along with
a hundred other passengers, these two unwonted travellers sped onward
like the wind.
At last, therefore, and after so long estrangement from everything that
the world acted or enjoyed, they had been drawn into the great current
of human life, and were swept away with it, as by the suction of fate
itself.
Still haunted with the idea that not one of the past incidents,
inclusive of Judge Pyncheon's visit, could be real, the recluse of the
Seven Gables murmured in her brother's ear,--
"Clifford! Clifford! Is not this a dream?"
"A dream, Hepzibah!" repeated he, almost laughing in her face. "On the
contrary, I have never been awake before!"
Meanwhile, looking from the window, they could see the world racing
past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the
next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it
had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of
meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the
broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its
age-long rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to
their own.
Within the car there was the usual interior life of the railroad,
offering little to the observation of other passengers, but full of
novelty for this pair of strangely enfranchised prisoners. It was
novelty enough, indeed, that there were fifty human beings in close
relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by
the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its
grasp. It seemed marvellous how all these people could remain so
quietly in their seats, while so much noisy strength was at work in
their behalf. Some, with tickets in their hats (long travellers these,
before whom lay a hundred miles of railroad), had plunged into the
English scenery and adventures of pamphlet novels, and were keeping
company with dukes and earls. Others, whose briefer span forbade their
devoting themselves to studies so abstruse, beguiled the little tedium
of the way with penny-papers. A party of girls, and one young man, on
opposite sides of the car, found huge amusement in a game of ball.
They tossed it to and fro, with peals of laughter that might be
measured by mile-lengths; for, faster than the nimble ball could fly,
the merry players fled unconsciously along, leaving the trail of their
mirth afar behind, and ending their game under another sky than had
witnessed its commencement. Boys, with apples, cakes, candy, and rolls
of variously tinctured lozenges,--merchandise that reminded Hepzibah of
her deserted shop,--appeared at each momentary stopping-place, doing up
their business in a hurry, or breaking it short off, lest the market
should ravish them away with it. New people continually entered. Old
acquaintances--for such they soon grew to be, in this rapid current of
affairs--continually departed. Here and there, amid the rumble and the
tumult, sat one asleep. Sleep; sport; business; graver or lighter
study; and the common and inevitable movement onward! It was life
itself!
Clifford's naturally poignant sympathies were all aroused. He caught
the color of what was passing about him, and threw it back more vividly
than he received it, but mixed, nevertheless, with a lurid and
portentous hue. Hepzibah, on the other hand, felt herself more apart
from human kind than even in the seclusion which she had just quitted.
"You are not happy, Hepzibah!" said Clifford apart, in a tone of
approach. "You are thinking of that dismal old house, and of Cousin
Jaffrey"--here came the quake through him,--"and of Cousin Jaffrey
sitting there, all by himself! Take my advice,--follow my example,--and
let such things slip aside. Here we are, in the world, Hepzibah!--in
the midst of life!--in the throng of our fellow beings! Let you and I
be happy! As happy as that youth and those pretty girls, at their game
of ball!"
"Happy--" thought Hepzibah, bitterly conscious, at the word, of her
dull and heavy heart, with the frozen pain in it,--"happy. He is mad
already; and, if I could once feel myself broad awake, I should go mad
too!"
If a fixed idea be madness, she was perhaps not remote from it. Fast
and far as they had rattled and clattered along the iron track, they
might just as well, as regarded Hepzibah's mental images, have been
passing up and down Pyncheon Street. With miles and miles of varied
scenery between, there was no scene for her save the seven old
gable-peaks, with their moss, and the tuft of weeds in one of the
angles, and the shop-window, and a customer shaking the door, and
compelling the little bell to jingle fiercely, but without disturbing
Judge Pyncheon! This one old house was everywhere! It transported its
great, lumbering bulk with more than railroad speed, and set itself
phlegmatically down on whatever spot she glanced at. The quality of
Hepzibah's mind was too unmalleable to take new impressions so readily
as Clifford's. He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable
kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots.
Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her
brother and herself was changed. At home, she was his guardian; here,
Clifford had become hers, and seemed to comprehend whatever belonged to
their new position with a singular rapidity of intelligence. He had
been startled into manhood and intellectual vigor; or, at least, into a
condition that resembled them, though it might be both diseased and
transitory.
The conductor now applied for their tickets; and Clifford, who had made
himself the purse-bearer, put a bank-note into his hand, as he had
observed others do.
"For the lady and yourself?" asked the conductor. "And how far?"
"As far as that will carry us," said Clifford. "It is no great matter.
We are riding for pleasure merely."
"You choose a strange day for it, sir!" remarked a gimlet-eyed old
gentleman on the other side of the car, looking at Clifford and his
companion, as if curious to make them out. "The best chance of
pleasure, in an easterly rain, I take it, is in a man's own house, with
a nice little fire in the chimney."
"I cannot precisely agree with you," said Clifford, courteously bowing
to the old gentleman, and at once taking up the clew of conversation
which the latter had proffered. "It had just occurred to me, on the
contrary, that this admirable invention of the railroad--with the vast
and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and
convenience--is destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and
fireside, and substitute something better."
"In the name of common-sense," asked the old gentleman rather testily,
"what can be better for a man than his own parlor and chimney-corner?"
"These things have not the merit which many good people attribute to
them," replied Clifford. "They may be said, in few and pithy words, to
have ill served a poor purpose. My impression is, that our wonderfully
increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to
bring us around again to the nomadic state. You are aware, my dear
sir,--you must have observed it in your own experience,--that all human
progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful
figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going
straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new
position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried
and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and
perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy
of the present and the future. To apply this truth to the topic now
under discussion. In the early epochs of our race, men dwelt in
temporary huts, of bowers of branches, as easily constructed as a
bird's-nest, and which they built,--if it should be called building,
when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made
with hands,--which Nature, we will say, assisted them to rear where
fruit abounded, where fish and game were plentiful, or, most
especially, where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier
shade than elsewhere, and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood,
and hill. This life possessed a charm which, ever since man quitted
it, has vanished from existence. And it typified something better than
itself. It had its drawbacks; such as hunger and thirst, inclement
weather, hot sunshine, and weary and foot-blistering marches over
barren and ugly tracts, that lay between the sites desirable for their
fertility and beauty. But in our ascending spiral, we escape all this.
These railroads--could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble
and the jar got rid of--are positively the greatest blessing that the
ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the
toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being
so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why,
therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily
be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life
in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as
easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,--in a better sense, wherever the
fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?"
Clifford's countenance glowed, as he divulged this theory; a youthful
character shone out from within, converting the wrinkles and pallid
duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask. The merry girls let
their ball drop upon the floor, and gazed at him. They said to
themselves, perhaps, that, before his hair was gray and the crow's-feet
tracked his temples, this now decaying man must have stamped the
impress of his features on many a woman's heart. But, alas! no woman's
eye had seen his face while it was beautiful.
"I should scarcely call it an improved state of things," observed
Clifford's new acquaintance, "to live everywhere and nowhere!"
"Would you not?" exclaimed Clifford, with singular energy. "It is as
clear to me as sunshine,--were there any in the sky,--that the greatest
possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and
improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with
mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men
painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home!
The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it. Morbid
influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about hearths, and
pollute the life of households. There is no such unwholesome
atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one's defunct
forefathers and relatives. I speak of what I know. There is a certain
house within my familiar recollection,--one of those peaked-gable
(there are seven of them), projecting-storied edifices, such as you
occasionally see in our older towns,--a rusty, crazy, creaky,
dry-rotted, dingy, dark, and miserable old dungeon, with an arched
window over the porch, and a little shop-door on one side, and a great,
melancholy elm before it! Now, sir, whenever my thoughts recur to this
seven-gabled mansion (the fact is so very curious that I must needs
mention it), immediately I have a vision or image of an elderly man, of
remarkably stern countenance, sitting in an oaken elbow-chair, dead,
stone-dead, with an ugly flow of blood upon his shirt-bosom! Dead, but
with open eyes! He taints the whole house, as I remember it. I could
never flourish there, nor be happy, nor do nor enjoy what God meant me
to do and enjoy."
His face darkened, and seemed to contract, and shrivel itself up, and
wither into age.
"Never, sir!" he repeated. "I could never draw cheerful breath there!"
"I should think not," said the old gentleman, eyeing Clifford
earnestly, and rather apprehensively. "I should conceive not, sir,
with that notion in your head!"
"Surely not," continued Clifford; "and it were a relief to me if that
house could be torn down, or burnt up, and so the earth be rid of it,
and grass be sown abundantly over its foundation. Not that I should
ever visit its site again! for, sir, the farther I get away from it,
the more does the joy, the lightsome freshness, the heart-leap, the
intellectual dance, the youth, in short,--yes, my youth, my youth!--the
more does it come back to me. No longer ago than this morning, I was
old. I remember looking in the glass, and wondering at my own gray
hair, and the wrinkles, many and deep, right across my brow, and the
furrows down my cheeks, and the prodigious trampling of crow's-feet
about my temples! It was too soon! I could not bear it! Age had no
right to come! I had not lived! But now do I look old? If so, my
aspect belies me strangely; for--a great weight being off my mind--I
feel in the very heyday of my youth, with the world and my best days
before me!"
"I trust you may find it so," said the old gentleman, who seemed rather
embarrassed, and desirous of avoiding the observation which Clifford's
wild talk drew on them both. "You have my best wishes for it."
"For Heaven's sake, dear Clifford, be quiet!" whispered his sister.
"They think you mad."
"Be quiet yourself, Hepzibah!" returned her brother. "No matter what
they think! I am not mad. For the first time in thirty years my
thoughts gush up and find words ready for them. I must talk, and I
will!"
He turned again towards the old gentleman, and renewed the conversation.
"Yes, my dear sir," said he, "it is my firm belief and hope that these
terms of roof and hearth-stone, which have so long been held to embody
something sacred, are soon to pass out of men's daily use, and be
forgotten. Just imagine, for a moment, how much of human evil will
crumble away, with this one change! What we call real estate--the solid
ground to build a house on--is the broad foundation on which nearly all
the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit almost any wrong,--he
will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and
which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages,--only to
build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in,
and for his posterity to be miserable in. He lays his own dead corpse
beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning
picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an evil
destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there. I
do not speak wildly. I have just such a house in my mind's eye!"
"Then, sir," said the old gentleman, getting anxious to drop the
subject, "you are not to blame for leaving it."
"Within the lifetime of the child already born," Clifford went on, "all
this will be done away. The world is growing too ethereal and
spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer. To me,
though, for a considerable period of time, I have lived chiefly in
retirement, and know less of such things than most men,--even to me,
the harbingers of a better era are unmistakable. Mesmerism, now! Will
that effect nothing, think you, towards purging away the grossness out
of human life?"
"All a humbug!" growled the old gentleman.
"These rapping spirits, that little Phoebe told us of, the other day,"
said Clifford,--"what are these but the messengers of the spiritual
world, knocking at the door of substance? And it shall be flung wide
open!"
"A humbug, again!" cried the old gentleman, growing more and more testy
at these glimpses of Clifford's metaphysics. "I should like to rap
with a good stick on the empty pates of the dolts who circulate such
nonsense!"
"Then there is electricity,--the demon, the angel, the mighty physical
power, the all-pervading intelligence!" exclaimed Clifford. "Is that a
humbug, too? Is it a fact--or have I dreamt it--that, by means of
electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating
thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round
globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall
we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the
substance which we deemed it!"
"If you mean the telegraph," said the old gentleman, glancing his eye
toward its wire, alongside the rail-track, "it is an excellent
thing,--that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics
don't get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly
as regards the detection of bank-robbers and murderers."
"I don't quite like it, in that point of view," replied Clifford. "A
bank-robber, and what you call a murderer, likewise, has his rights,
which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard in so
much the more liberal spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to
controvert their existence. An almost spiritual medium, like the
electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and
holy missions. Lovers, day by, day--hour by hour, if so often moved to
do it,--might send their heart-throbs from Maine to Florida, with some
such words as these 'I love you forever!'--'My heart runs over with
love!'--'I love you more than I can!' and, again, at the next message
'I have lived an hour longer, and love you twice as much!' Or, when a
good man has departed, his distant friend should be conscious of an
electric thrill, as from the world of happy spirits, telling him 'Your
dear friend is in bliss!' Or, to an absent husband, should come tidings
thus 'An immortal being, of whom you are the father, has this moment
come from God!' and immediately its little voice would seem to have
reached so far, and to be echoing in his heart. But for these poor
rogues, the bank-robbers,--who, after all, are about as honest as nine
people in ten, except that they disregard certain formalities, and
prefer to transact business at midnight rather than 'Change-hours,--and
for these murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the
motives of their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public
benefactors, if we consider only its result,--for unfortunate
individuals like these, I really cannot applaud the enlistment of an
immaterial and miraculous power in the universal world-hunt at their
heels!"
"You can't, hey?" cried the old gentleman, with a hard look.
"Positively, no!" answered Clifford. "It puts them too miserably at
disadvantage. For example, sir, in a dark, low, cross-beamed, panelled
room of an old house, let us suppose a dead man, sitting in an
arm-chair, with a blood-stain on his shirt-bosom,--and let us add to
our hypothesis another man, issuing from the house, which he feels to
be over-filled with the dead man's presence,--and let us lastly imagine
him fleeing, Heaven knows whither, at the speed of a hurricane, by
railroad! Now, sir, if the fugitive alight in some distant town, and
find all the people babbling about that self-same dead man, whom he has
fled so far to avoid the sight and thought of, will you not allow that
his natural rights have been infringed? He has been deprived of his
city of refuge, and, in my humble opinion, has suffered infinite wrong!"
"You are a strange man; Sir!" said the old gentleman, bringing his
gimlet-eye to a point on Clifford, as if determined to bore right into
him. "I can't see through you!"
"No, I'll be bound you can't!" cried Clifford, laughing. "And yet, my
dear sir, I am as transparent as the water of Maule's well! But come,
Hepzibah! We have flown far enough for once. Let us alight, as the
birds do, and perch ourselves on the nearest twig, and consult wither
we shall fly next!"
Just then, as it happened, the train reached a solitary way-station.
Taking advantage of the brief pause, Clifford left the car, and drew
Hepzibah along with him. A moment afterwards, the train--with all the
life of its interior, amid which Clifford had made himself so
conspicuous an object--was gliding away in the distance, and rapidly
lessening to a point which, in another moment, vanished. The world had
fled away from these two wanderers. They gazed drearily about them.
At a little distance stood a wooden church, black with age, and in a
dismal state of ruin and decay, with broken windows, a great rift
through the main body of the edifice, and a rafter dangling from the
top of the square tower. Farther off was a farm-house, in the old
style, as venerably black as the church, with a roof sloping downward
from the three-story peak, to within a man's height of the ground. It
seemed uninhabited. There were the relics of a wood-pile, indeed, near
the door, but with grass sprouting up among the chips and scattered
logs. The small rain-drops came down aslant; the wind was not
turbulent, but sullen, and full of chilly moisture.
Clifford shivered from head to foot. The wild effervescence of his
mood--which had so readily supplied thoughts, fantasies, and a strange
aptitude of words, and impelled him to talk from the mere necessity of
giving vent to this bubbling-up gush of ideas had entirely subsided. A
powerful excitement had given him energy and vivacity. Its operation
over, he forthwith began to sink.
"You must take the lead now, Hepzibah!" murmured he, with a torpid and
reluctant utterance. "Do with me as you will!" She knelt down upon the
platform where they were standing and lifted her clasped hands to the
sky. The dull, gray weight of clouds made it invisible; but it was no
hour for disbelief,--no juncture this to question that there was a sky
above, and an Almighty Father looking from it!
"O God!"--ejaculated poor, gaunt Hepzibah,--then paused a moment, to
consider what her prayer should be,--"O God,--our Father,--are we not
thy children? Have mercy on us!"
| The Flight of Two Owls: Hepzibah and Clifford began their strange expedition away from the house. They attracted a great deal of notice as they reached the train station, but got on the train unhindered. Hepzibah wonders if this is a dream, but Clifford says that he has never been so awake before. The train was a novelty to the two travelers, for there were so many people in such an enclosed space. Clifford claims that this is life, surrounded by human beings. At home, Hepzibah was guardian, but here Clifford seems to comprehend what belongs to their new position. Clifford chats with the conductor on the train, and says that the railroad is destined to do away with stale ideas of home and fireside, substituting something better. Clifford, talking to an old man, says that men find themselves returning to the ideal of living outside of their defined homes. He says that the greatest possible stumbling block in the path of human happiness is the idea of a home as heaps of brick and stone. He muses about the House of the Seven Gables, which he envisions as an elderly man of stern countenance. Hepzibah tells him to be quiet, for others will think that he's insane, but he continues his conversation. The old man becomes vexed by Clifford's musings about such things as the telegraph. When the old man concedes that telegraphs may be useful for detecting bank-robbers and murderers, Clifford defends these criminals as possibly enlightened and still having their rights. He posits that there might be a dead man with a blood-stain on his shirt in the house of another man who has fled on a railroad, and asks the old man whether the fleeing man's rights should not be infringed. The train reaches a solitary way-station; Clifford and Hepzibah leave the train at this station, finding themselves in a desolate little town. | summary |
SUMMER as it was, the east wind set poor Hepzibah's few remaining teeth
chattering in her head, as she and Clifford faced it, on their way up
Pyncheon Street, and towards the centre of the town. Not merely was it
the shiver which this pitiless blast brought to her frame (although her
feet and hands, especially, had never seemed so death-a-cold as now),
but there was a moral sensation, mingling itself with the physical
chill, and causing her to shake more in spirit than in body. The
world's broad, bleak atmosphere was all so comfortless! Such, indeed,
is the impression which it makes on every new adventurer, even if he
plunge into it while the warmest tide of life is bubbling through his
veins. What, then, must it have been to Hepzibah and Clifford,--so
time-stricken as they were, yet so like children in their
inexperience,--as they left the doorstep, and passed from beneath the
wide shelter of the Pyncheon Elm! They were wandering all abroad, on
precisely such a pilgrimage as a child often meditates, to the world's
end, with perhaps a sixpence and a biscuit in his pocket. In
Hepzibah's mind, there was the wretched consciousness of being adrift.
She had lost the faculty of self-guidance; but, in view of the
difficulties around her, felt it hardly worth an effort to regain it,
and was, moreover, incapable of making one.
As they proceeded on their strange expedition, she now and then cast a
look sidelong at Clifford, and could not but observe that he was
possessed and swayed by a powerful excitement. It was this, indeed,
that gave him the control which he had at once, and so irresistibly,
established over his movements. It not a little resembled the
exhilaration of wine. Or, it might more fancifully be compared to a
joyous piece of music, played with wild vivacity, but upon a disordered
instrument. As the cracked jarring note might always be heard, and as
it jarred loudest amidst the loftiest exultation of the melody, so was
there a continual quake through Clifford, causing him most to quiver
while he wore a triumphant smile, and seemed almost under a necessity
to skip in his gait.
They met few people abroad, even on passing from the retired
neighborhood of the House of the Seven Gables into what was ordinarily
the more thronged and busier portion of the town. Glistening
sidewalks, with little pools of rain, here and there, along their
unequal surface; umbrellas displayed ostentatiously in the
shop-windows, as if the life of trade had concentrated itself in that
one article; wet leaves of the horse-chestnut or elm-trees, torn off
untimely by the blast and scattered along the public way; an unsightly,
accumulation of mud in the middle of the street, which perversely grew
the more unclean for its long and laborious washing,--these were the
more definable points of a very sombre picture. In the way of movement
and human life, there was the hasty rattle of a cab or coach, its
driver protected by a waterproof cap over his head and shoulders; the
forlorn figure of an old man, who seemed to have crept out of some
subterranean sewer, and was stooping along the kennel, and poking the
wet rubbish with a stick, in quest of rusty nails; a merchant or two,
at the door of the post-office, together with an editor and a
miscellaneous politician, awaiting a dilatory mail; a few visages of
retired sea-captains at the window of an insurance office, looking out
vacantly at the vacant street, blaspheming at the weather, and fretting
at the dearth as well of public news as local gossip. What a
treasure-trove to these venerable quidnuncs, could they have guessed
the secret which Hepzibah and Clifford were carrying along with them!
But their two figures attracted hardly so much notice as that of a
young girl, who passed at the same instant, and happened to raise her
skirt a trifle too high above her ankles. Had it been a sunny and
cheerful day, they could hardly have gone through the streets without
making themselves obnoxious to remark. Now, probably, they were felt
to be in keeping with the dismal and bitter weather, and therefore did
not stand out in strong relief, as if the sun were shining on them, but
melted into the gray gloom and were forgotten as soon as gone.
Poor Hepzibah! Could she have understood this fact, it would have
brought her some little comfort; for, to all her other
troubles,--strange to say!--there was added the womanish and
old-maiden-like misery arising from a sense of unseemliness in her
attire. Thus, she was fain to shrink deeper into herself, as it were,
as if in the hope of making people suppose that here was only a cloak
and hood, threadbare and woefully faded, taking an airing in the midst
of the storm, without any wearer!
As they went on, the feeling of indistinctness and unreality kept dimly
hovering round about her, and so diffusing itself into her system that
one of her hands was hardly palpable to the touch of the other. Any
certainty would have been preferable to this. She whispered to
herself, again and again, "Am I awake?--Am I awake?" and sometimes
exposed her face to the chill spatter of the wind, for the sake of its
rude assurance that she was. Whether it was Clifford's purpose, or
only chance, had led them thither, they now found themselves passing
beneath the arched entrance of a large structure of gray stone.
Within, there was a spacious breadth, and an airy height from floor to
roof, now partially filled with smoke and steam, which eddied
voluminously upward and formed a mimic cloud-region over their heads.
A train of cars was just ready for a start; the locomotive was fretting
and fuming, like a steed impatient for a headlong rush; and the bell
rang out its hasty peal, so well expressing the brief summons which
life vouchsafes to us in its hurried career. Without question or
delay,--with the irresistible decision, if not rather to be called
recklessness, which had so strangely taken possession of him, and
through him of Hepzibah,--Clifford impelled her towards the cars, and
assisted her to enter. The signal was given; the engine puffed forth
its short, quick breaths; the train began its movement; and, along with
a hundred other passengers, these two unwonted travellers sped onward
like the wind.
At last, therefore, and after so long estrangement from everything that
the world acted or enjoyed, they had been drawn into the great current
of human life, and were swept away with it, as by the suction of fate
itself.
Still haunted with the idea that not one of the past incidents,
inclusive of Judge Pyncheon's visit, could be real, the recluse of the
Seven Gables murmured in her brother's ear,--
"Clifford! Clifford! Is not this a dream?"
"A dream, Hepzibah!" repeated he, almost laughing in her face. "On the
contrary, I have never been awake before!"
Meanwhile, looking from the window, they could see the world racing
past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the
next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it
had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of
meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the
broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its
age-long rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to
their own.
Within the car there was the usual interior life of the railroad,
offering little to the observation of other passengers, but full of
novelty for this pair of strangely enfranchised prisoners. It was
novelty enough, indeed, that there were fifty human beings in close
relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by
the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its
grasp. It seemed marvellous how all these people could remain so
quietly in their seats, while so much noisy strength was at work in
their behalf. Some, with tickets in their hats (long travellers these,
before whom lay a hundred miles of railroad), had plunged into the
English scenery and adventures of pamphlet novels, and were keeping
company with dukes and earls. Others, whose briefer span forbade their
devoting themselves to studies so abstruse, beguiled the little tedium
of the way with penny-papers. A party of girls, and one young man, on
opposite sides of the car, found huge amusement in a game of ball.
They tossed it to and fro, with peals of laughter that might be
measured by mile-lengths; for, faster than the nimble ball could fly,
the merry players fled unconsciously along, leaving the trail of their
mirth afar behind, and ending their game under another sky than had
witnessed its commencement. Boys, with apples, cakes, candy, and rolls
of variously tinctured lozenges,--merchandise that reminded Hepzibah of
her deserted shop,--appeared at each momentary stopping-place, doing up
their business in a hurry, or breaking it short off, lest the market
should ravish them away with it. New people continually entered. Old
acquaintances--for such they soon grew to be, in this rapid current of
affairs--continually departed. Here and there, amid the rumble and the
tumult, sat one asleep. Sleep; sport; business; graver or lighter
study; and the common and inevitable movement onward! It was life
itself!
Clifford's naturally poignant sympathies were all aroused. He caught
the color of what was passing about him, and threw it back more vividly
than he received it, but mixed, nevertheless, with a lurid and
portentous hue. Hepzibah, on the other hand, felt herself more apart
from human kind than even in the seclusion which she had just quitted.
"You are not happy, Hepzibah!" said Clifford apart, in a tone of
approach. "You are thinking of that dismal old house, and of Cousin
Jaffrey"--here came the quake through him,--"and of Cousin Jaffrey
sitting there, all by himself! Take my advice,--follow my example,--and
let such things slip aside. Here we are, in the world, Hepzibah!--in
the midst of life!--in the throng of our fellow beings! Let you and I
be happy! As happy as that youth and those pretty girls, at their game
of ball!"
"Happy--" thought Hepzibah, bitterly conscious, at the word, of her
dull and heavy heart, with the frozen pain in it,--"happy. He is mad
already; and, if I could once feel myself broad awake, I should go mad
too!"
If a fixed idea be madness, she was perhaps not remote from it. Fast
and far as they had rattled and clattered along the iron track, they
might just as well, as regarded Hepzibah's mental images, have been
passing up and down Pyncheon Street. With miles and miles of varied
scenery between, there was no scene for her save the seven old
gable-peaks, with their moss, and the tuft of weeds in one of the
angles, and the shop-window, and a customer shaking the door, and
compelling the little bell to jingle fiercely, but without disturbing
Judge Pyncheon! This one old house was everywhere! It transported its
great, lumbering bulk with more than railroad speed, and set itself
phlegmatically down on whatever spot she glanced at. The quality of
Hepzibah's mind was too unmalleable to take new impressions so readily
as Clifford's. He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable
kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots.
Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her
brother and herself was changed. At home, she was his guardian; here,
Clifford had become hers, and seemed to comprehend whatever belonged to
their new position with a singular rapidity of intelligence. He had
been startled into manhood and intellectual vigor; or, at least, into a
condition that resembled them, though it might be both diseased and
transitory.
The conductor now applied for their tickets; and Clifford, who had made
himself the purse-bearer, put a bank-note into his hand, as he had
observed others do.
"For the lady and yourself?" asked the conductor. "And how far?"
"As far as that will carry us," said Clifford. "It is no great matter.
We are riding for pleasure merely."
"You choose a strange day for it, sir!" remarked a gimlet-eyed old
gentleman on the other side of the car, looking at Clifford and his
companion, as if curious to make them out. "The best chance of
pleasure, in an easterly rain, I take it, is in a man's own house, with
a nice little fire in the chimney."
"I cannot precisely agree with you," said Clifford, courteously bowing
to the old gentleman, and at once taking up the clew of conversation
which the latter had proffered. "It had just occurred to me, on the
contrary, that this admirable invention of the railroad--with the vast
and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and
convenience--is destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and
fireside, and substitute something better."
"In the name of common-sense," asked the old gentleman rather testily,
"what can be better for a man than his own parlor and chimney-corner?"
"These things have not the merit which many good people attribute to
them," replied Clifford. "They may be said, in few and pithy words, to
have ill served a poor purpose. My impression is, that our wonderfully
increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to
bring us around again to the nomadic state. You are aware, my dear
sir,--you must have observed it in your own experience,--that all human
progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful
figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going
straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new
position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried
and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and
perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy
of the present and the future. To apply this truth to the topic now
under discussion. In the early epochs of our race, men dwelt in
temporary huts, of bowers of branches, as easily constructed as a
bird's-nest, and which they built,--if it should be called building,
when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made
with hands,--which Nature, we will say, assisted them to rear where
fruit abounded, where fish and game were plentiful, or, most
especially, where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier
shade than elsewhere, and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood,
and hill. This life possessed a charm which, ever since man quitted
it, has vanished from existence. And it typified something better than
itself. It had its drawbacks; such as hunger and thirst, inclement
weather, hot sunshine, and weary and foot-blistering marches over
barren and ugly tracts, that lay between the sites desirable for their
fertility and beauty. But in our ascending spiral, we escape all this.
These railroads--could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble
and the jar got rid of--are positively the greatest blessing that the
ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the
toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being
so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why,
therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily
be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life
in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as
easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,--in a better sense, wherever the
fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?"
Clifford's countenance glowed, as he divulged this theory; a youthful
character shone out from within, converting the wrinkles and pallid
duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask. The merry girls let
their ball drop upon the floor, and gazed at him. They said to
themselves, perhaps, that, before his hair was gray and the crow's-feet
tracked his temples, this now decaying man must have stamped the
impress of his features on many a woman's heart. But, alas! no woman's
eye had seen his face while it was beautiful.
"I should scarcely call it an improved state of things," observed
Clifford's new acquaintance, "to live everywhere and nowhere!"
"Would you not?" exclaimed Clifford, with singular energy. "It is as
clear to me as sunshine,--were there any in the sky,--that the greatest
possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and
improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with
mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men
painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home!
The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it. Morbid
influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about hearths, and
pollute the life of households. There is no such unwholesome
atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one's defunct
forefathers and relatives. I speak of what I know. There is a certain
house within my familiar recollection,--one of those peaked-gable
(there are seven of them), projecting-storied edifices, such as you
occasionally see in our older towns,--a rusty, crazy, creaky,
dry-rotted, dingy, dark, and miserable old dungeon, with an arched
window over the porch, and a little shop-door on one side, and a great,
melancholy elm before it! Now, sir, whenever my thoughts recur to this
seven-gabled mansion (the fact is so very curious that I must needs
mention it), immediately I have a vision or image of an elderly man, of
remarkably stern countenance, sitting in an oaken elbow-chair, dead,
stone-dead, with an ugly flow of blood upon his shirt-bosom! Dead, but
with open eyes! He taints the whole house, as I remember it. I could
never flourish there, nor be happy, nor do nor enjoy what God meant me
to do and enjoy."
His face darkened, and seemed to contract, and shrivel itself up, and
wither into age.
"Never, sir!" he repeated. "I could never draw cheerful breath there!"
"I should think not," said the old gentleman, eyeing Clifford
earnestly, and rather apprehensively. "I should conceive not, sir,
with that notion in your head!"
"Surely not," continued Clifford; "and it were a relief to me if that
house could be torn down, or burnt up, and so the earth be rid of it,
and grass be sown abundantly over its foundation. Not that I should
ever visit its site again! for, sir, the farther I get away from it,
the more does the joy, the lightsome freshness, the heart-leap, the
intellectual dance, the youth, in short,--yes, my youth, my youth!--the
more does it come back to me. No longer ago than this morning, I was
old. I remember looking in the glass, and wondering at my own gray
hair, and the wrinkles, many and deep, right across my brow, and the
furrows down my cheeks, and the prodigious trampling of crow's-feet
about my temples! It was too soon! I could not bear it! Age had no
right to come! I had not lived! But now do I look old? If so, my
aspect belies me strangely; for--a great weight being off my mind--I
feel in the very heyday of my youth, with the world and my best days
before me!"
"I trust you may find it so," said the old gentleman, who seemed rather
embarrassed, and desirous of avoiding the observation which Clifford's
wild talk drew on them both. "You have my best wishes for it."
"For Heaven's sake, dear Clifford, be quiet!" whispered his sister.
"They think you mad."
"Be quiet yourself, Hepzibah!" returned her brother. "No matter what
they think! I am not mad. For the first time in thirty years my
thoughts gush up and find words ready for them. I must talk, and I
will!"
He turned again towards the old gentleman, and renewed the conversation.
"Yes, my dear sir," said he, "it is my firm belief and hope that these
terms of roof and hearth-stone, which have so long been held to embody
something sacred, are soon to pass out of men's daily use, and be
forgotten. Just imagine, for a moment, how much of human evil will
crumble away, with this one change! What we call real estate--the solid
ground to build a house on--is the broad foundation on which nearly all
the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit almost any wrong,--he
will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and
which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages,--only to
build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in,
and for his posterity to be miserable in. He lays his own dead corpse
beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning
picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an evil
destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there. I
do not speak wildly. I have just such a house in my mind's eye!"
"Then, sir," said the old gentleman, getting anxious to drop the
subject, "you are not to blame for leaving it."
"Within the lifetime of the child already born," Clifford went on, "all
this will be done away. The world is growing too ethereal and
spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer. To me,
though, for a considerable period of time, I have lived chiefly in
retirement, and know less of such things than most men,--even to me,
the harbingers of a better era are unmistakable. Mesmerism, now! Will
that effect nothing, think you, towards purging away the grossness out
of human life?"
"All a humbug!" growled the old gentleman.
"These rapping spirits, that little Phoebe told us of, the other day,"
said Clifford,--"what are these but the messengers of the spiritual
world, knocking at the door of substance? And it shall be flung wide
open!"
"A humbug, again!" cried the old gentleman, growing more and more testy
at these glimpses of Clifford's metaphysics. "I should like to rap
with a good stick on the empty pates of the dolts who circulate such
nonsense!"
"Then there is electricity,--the demon, the angel, the mighty physical
power, the all-pervading intelligence!" exclaimed Clifford. "Is that a
humbug, too? Is it a fact--or have I dreamt it--that, by means of
electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating
thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round
globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall
we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the
substance which we deemed it!"
"If you mean the telegraph," said the old gentleman, glancing his eye
toward its wire, alongside the rail-track, "it is an excellent
thing,--that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics
don't get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly
as regards the detection of bank-robbers and murderers."
"I don't quite like it, in that point of view," replied Clifford. "A
bank-robber, and what you call a murderer, likewise, has his rights,
which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard in so
much the more liberal spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to
controvert their existence. An almost spiritual medium, like the
electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and
holy missions. Lovers, day by, day--hour by hour, if so often moved to
do it,--might send their heart-throbs from Maine to Florida, with some
such words as these 'I love you forever!'--'My heart runs over with
love!'--'I love you more than I can!' and, again, at the next message
'I have lived an hour longer, and love you twice as much!' Or, when a
good man has departed, his distant friend should be conscious of an
electric thrill, as from the world of happy spirits, telling him 'Your
dear friend is in bliss!' Or, to an absent husband, should come tidings
thus 'An immortal being, of whom you are the father, has this moment
come from God!' and immediately its little voice would seem to have
reached so far, and to be echoing in his heart. But for these poor
rogues, the bank-robbers,--who, after all, are about as honest as nine
people in ten, except that they disregard certain formalities, and
prefer to transact business at midnight rather than 'Change-hours,--and
for these murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the
motives of their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public
benefactors, if we consider only its result,--for unfortunate
individuals like these, I really cannot applaud the enlistment of an
immaterial and miraculous power in the universal world-hunt at their
heels!"
"You can't, hey?" cried the old gentleman, with a hard look.
"Positively, no!" answered Clifford. "It puts them too miserably at
disadvantage. For example, sir, in a dark, low, cross-beamed, panelled
room of an old house, let us suppose a dead man, sitting in an
arm-chair, with a blood-stain on his shirt-bosom,--and let us add to
our hypothesis another man, issuing from the house, which he feels to
be over-filled with the dead man's presence,--and let us lastly imagine
him fleeing, Heaven knows whither, at the speed of a hurricane, by
railroad! Now, sir, if the fugitive alight in some distant town, and
find all the people babbling about that self-same dead man, whom he has
fled so far to avoid the sight and thought of, will you not allow that
his natural rights have been infringed? He has been deprived of his
city of refuge, and, in my humble opinion, has suffered infinite wrong!"
"You are a strange man; Sir!" said the old gentleman, bringing his
gimlet-eye to a point on Clifford, as if determined to bore right into
him. "I can't see through you!"
"No, I'll be bound you can't!" cried Clifford, laughing. "And yet, my
dear sir, I am as transparent as the water of Maule's well! But come,
Hepzibah! We have flown far enough for once. Let us alight, as the
birds do, and perch ourselves on the nearest twig, and consult wither
we shall fly next!"
Just then, as it happened, the train reached a solitary way-station.
Taking advantage of the brief pause, Clifford left the car, and drew
Hepzibah along with him. A moment afterwards, the train--with all the
life of its interior, amid which Clifford had made himself so
conspicuous an object--was gliding away in the distance, and rapidly
lessening to a point which, in another moment, vanished. The world had
fled away from these two wanderers. They gazed drearily about them.
At a little distance stood a wooden church, black with age, and in a
dismal state of ruin and decay, with broken windows, a great rift
through the main body of the edifice, and a rafter dangling from the
top of the square tower. Farther off was a farm-house, in the old
style, as venerably black as the church, with a roof sloping downward
from the three-story peak, to within a man's height of the ground. It
seemed uninhabited. There were the relics of a wood-pile, indeed, near
the door, but with grass sprouting up among the chips and scattered
logs. The small rain-drops came down aslant; the wind was not
turbulent, but sullen, and full of chilly moisture.
Clifford shivered from head to foot. The wild effervescence of his
mood--which had so readily supplied thoughts, fantasies, and a strange
aptitude of words, and impelled him to talk from the mere necessity of
giving vent to this bubbling-up gush of ideas had entirely subsided. A
powerful excitement had given him energy and vivacity. Its operation
over, he forthwith began to sink.
"You must take the lead now, Hepzibah!" murmured he, with a torpid and
reluctant utterance. "Do with me as you will!" She knelt down upon the
platform where they were standing and lifted her clasped hands to the
sky. The dull, gray weight of clouds made it invisible; but it was no
hour for disbelief,--no juncture this to question that there was a sky
above, and an Almighty Father looking from it!
"O God!"--ejaculated poor, gaunt Hepzibah,--then paused a moment, to
consider what her prayer should be,--"O God,--our Father,--are we not
thy children? Have mercy on us!"
| The escape from the House of the Seven Gables brings Clifford to life once more, yet even alive he and Hepzibah are largely obsolete. Both travelers find the train a terrifying novelty, but approach this new experience in different manners. Clifford draws energy from the rush of new experience, while Hepzibah approaches their flight tentatively, more aware that they are obsolete. When the two leave the train, they are physically and metaphorically isolated, alone in an empty, abandoned town. While chatting with other travelers, Clifford indulges in progressive social sentiments to which he is entirely unsuited. He echoes the beliefs of Holgrave, who also promotes the idea of homes and familial legacies as burdens that must be taken down. His picture of the House of the Seven Gables bears a striking resemblance to Judge Pyncheon; to Clifford, the house represents that aspect of the Pyncheon legacy. However, the ideas that Clifford proposes do not suit him; his musings about the future indicate emotions contrary to those of Holgrave. While Holgrave approaches a changed future as a great thing, for Clifford there is the sense of chaos and confusion, as if he does not truly understand what he is saying. Only when the conversation turns to murder does Clifford take a more realistic approach; he projects his own situation onto the conversation, revealing his fear and desperation over the fate of Judge Pyncheon and his belief that a supposed criminal can still be redeemable | analysis |
JUDGE PYNCHEON, while his two relatives have fled away with such
ill-considered haste, still sits in the old parlor, keeping house, as
the familiar phrase is, in the absence of its ordinary occupants. To
him, and to the venerable House of the Seven Gables, does our story now
betake itself, like an owl, bewildered in the daylight, and hastening
back to his hollow tree.
The Judge has not shifted his position for a long while now. He has
not stirred hand or foot, nor withdrawn his eyes so much as a
hair's-breadth from their fixed gaze towards the corner of the room,
since the footsteps of Hepzibah and Clifford creaked along the passage,
and the outer door was closed cautiously behind their exit. He holds
his watch in his left hand, but clutched in such a manner that you
cannot see the dial-plate. How profound a fit of meditation! Or,
supposing him asleep, how infantile a quietude of conscience, and what
wholesome order in the gastric region, are betokened by slumber so
entirely undisturbed with starts, cramp, twitches, muttered dreamtalk,
trumpet-blasts through the nasal organ, or any slightest irregularity
of breath! You must hold your own breath, to satisfy yourself whether
he breathes at all. It is quite inaudible. You hear the ticking of
his watch; his breath you do not hear. A most refreshing slumber,
doubtless! And yet, the Judge cannot be asleep. His eyes are open! A
veteran politician, such as he, would never fall asleep with wide-open
eyes, lest some enemy or mischief-maker, taking him thus at unawares,
should peep through these windows into his consciousness, and make
strange discoveries among the reminiscences, projects, hopes,
apprehensions, weaknesses, and strong points, which he has heretofore
shared with nobody. A cautious man is proverbially said to sleep with
one eye open. That may be wisdom. But not with both; for this were
heedlessness! No, no! Judge Pyncheon cannot be asleep.
It is odd, however, that a gentleman so burdened with engagements,--and
noted, too, for punctuality,--should linger thus in an old lonely
mansion, which he has never seemed very fond of visiting. The oaken
chair, to be sure, may tempt him with its roominess. It is, indeed, a
spacious, and, allowing for the rude age that fashioned it, a
moderately easy seat, with capacity enough, at all events, and offering
no restraint to the Judge's breadth of beam. A bigger man might find
ample accommodation in it. His ancestor, now pictured upon the wall,
with all his English beef about him, used hardly to present a front
extending from elbow to elbow of this chair, or a base that would cover
its whole cushion. But there are better chairs than this,--mahogany,
black walnut, rosewood, spring-seated and damask-cushioned, with varied
slopes, and innumerable artifices to make them easy, and obviate the
irksomeness of too tame an ease,--a score of such might be at Judge
Pyncheon's service. Yes! in a score of drawing-rooms he would be more
than welcome. Mamma would advance to meet him, with outstretched hand;
the virgin daughter, elderly as he has now got to be,--an old widower,
as he smilingly describes himself,--would shake up the cushion for the
Judge, and do her pretty utmost to make him comfortable. For the Judge
is a prosperous man. He cherishes his schemes, moreover, like other
people, and reasonably brighter than most others; or did so, at least,
as he lay abed this morning, in an agreeable half-drowse, planning the
business of the day, and speculating on the probabilities of the next
fifteen years. With his firm health, and the little inroad that age
has made upon him, fifteen years or twenty--yes, or perhaps
five-and-twenty!--are no more than he may fairly call his own.
Five-and-twenty years for the enjoyment of his real estate in town and
country, his railroad, bank, and insurance shares, his United States
stock,--his wealth, in short, however invested, now in possession, or
soon to be acquired; together with the public honors that have fallen
upon him, and the weightier ones that are yet to fall! It is good! It
is excellent! It is enough!
Still lingering in the old chair! If the Judge has a little time to
throw away, why does not he visit the insurance office, as is his
frequent custom, and sit awhile in one of their leathern-cushioned
arm-chairs, listening to the gossip of the day, and dropping some
deeply designed chance-word, which will be certain to become the gossip
of to-morrow. And have not the bank directors a meeting at which it
was the Judge's purpose to be present, and his office to preside?
Indeed they have; and the hour is noted on a card, which is, or ought
to be, in Judge Pyncheon's right vest-pocket. Let him go thither, and
loll at ease upon his moneybags! He has lounged long enough in the old
chair!
This was to have been such a busy day. In the first place, the
interview with Clifford. Half an hour, by the Judge's reckoning, was
to suffice for that; it would probably be less, but--taking into
consideration that Hepzibah was first to be dealt with, and that these
women are apt to make many words where a few would do much better--it
might be safest to allow half an hour. Half an hour? Why, Judge, it is
already two hours, by your own undeviatingly accurate chronometer.
Glance your eye down at it and see! Ah; he will not give himself the
trouble either to bend his head, or elevate his hand, so as to bring
the faithful time-keeper within his range of vision! Time, all at once,
appears to have become a matter of no moment with the Judge!
And has he forgotten all the other items of his memoranda? Clifford's
affair arranged, he was to meet a State Street broker, who has
undertaken to procure a heavy percentage, and the best of paper, for a
few loose thousands which the Judge happens to have by him, uninvested.
The wrinkled note-shaver will have taken his railroad trip in vain.
Half an hour later, in the street next to this, there was to be an
auction of real estate, including a portion of the old Pyncheon
property, originally belonging to Maule's garden ground. It has been
alienated from the Pyncheons these four-score years; but the Judge had
kept it in his eye, and had set his heart on reannexing it to the small
demesne still left around the Seven Gables; and now, during this odd
fit of oblivion, the fatal hammer must have fallen, and transferred our
ancient patrimony to some alien possessor. Possibly, indeed, the sale
may have been postponed till fairer weather. If so, will the Judge
make it convenient to be present, and favor the auctioneer with his
bid, On the proximate occasion?
The next affair was to buy a horse for his own driving. The one
heretofore his favorite stumbled, this very morning, on the road to
town, and must be at once discarded. Judge Pyncheon's neck is too
precious to be risked on such a contingency as a stumbling steed.
Should all the above business be seasonably got through with, he might
attend the meeting of a charitable society; the very name of which,
however, in the multiplicity of his benevolence, is quite forgotten; so
that this engagement may pass unfulfilled, and no great harm done. And
if he have time, amid the press of more urgent matters, he must take
measures for the renewal of Mrs. Pyncheon's tombstone, which, the
sexton tells him, has fallen on its marble face, and is cracked quite
in twain. She was a praiseworthy woman enough, thinks the Judge, in
spite of her nervousness, and the tears that she was so oozy with, and
her foolish behavior about the coffee; and as she took her departure so
seasonably, he will not grudge the second tombstone. It is better, at
least, than if she had never needed any! The next item on his list was
to give orders for some fruit-trees, of a rare variety, to be
deliverable at his country-seat in the ensuing autumn. Yes, buy them,
by all means; and may the peaches be luscious in your mouth, Judge
Pyncheon! After this comes something more important. A committee of
his political party has besought him for a hundred or two of dollars,
in addition to his previous disbursements, towards carrying on the fall
campaign. The Judge is a patriot; the fate of the country is staked on
the November election; and besides, as will be shadowed forth in
another paragraph, he has no trifling stake of his own in the same
great game. He will do what the committee asks; nay, he will be
liberal beyond their expectations; they shall have a check for five
hundred dollars, and more anon, if it be needed. What next? A decayed
widow, whose husband was Judge Pyncheon's early friend, has laid her
case of destitution before him, in a very moving letter. She and her
fair daughter have scarcely bread to eat. He partly intends to call on
her to-day,--perhaps so--perhaps not,--accordingly as he may happen to
have leisure, and a small bank-note.
Another business, which, however, he puts no great weight on (it is
well, you know, to be heedful, but not over-anxious, as respects one's
personal health),--another business, then, was to consult his family
physician. About what, for Heaven's sake? Why, it is rather difficult
to describe the symptoms. A mere dimness of sight and dizziness of
brain, was it?--or disagreeable choking, or stifling, or gurgling, or
bubbling, in the region of the thorax, as the anatomists say?--or was
it a pretty severe throbbing and kicking of the heart, rather
creditable to him than otherwise, as showing that the organ had not
been left out of the Judge's physical contrivance? No matter what it
was. The doctor probably would smile at the statement of such trifles
to his professional ear; the Judge would smile in his turn; and meeting
one another's eyes, they would enjoy a hearty laugh together! But a fig
for medical advice. The Judge will never need it.
Pray, pray, Judge Pyncheon, look at your watch, Now! What--not a
glance! It is within ten minutes of the dinner hour! It surely cannot
have slipped your memory that the dinner of to-day is to be the most
important, in its consequences, of all the dinners you ever ate. Yes,
precisely the most important; although, in the course of your somewhat
eminent career, you have been placed high towards the head of the
table, at splendid banquets, and have poured out your festive eloquence
to ears yet echoing with Webster's mighty organ-tones. No public
dinner this, however. It is merely a gathering of some dozen or so of
friends from several districts of the State; men of distinguished
character and influence, assembling, almost casually, at the house of a
common friend, likewise distinguished, who will make them welcome to a
little better than his ordinary fare. Nothing in the way of French
cookery, but an excellent dinner, nevertheless. Real turtle, we
understand, and salmon, tautog, canvas-backs, pig, English mutton, good
roast beef, or dainties of that serious kind, fit for substantial
country gentlemen, as these honorable persons mostly are. The
delicacies of the season, in short, and flavored by a brand of old
Madeira which has been the pride of many seasons. It is the Juno
brand; a glorious wine, fragrant, and full of gentle might; a
bottled-up happiness, put by for use; a golden liquid, worth more than
liquid gold; so rare and admirable, that veteran wine-bibbers count it
among their epochs to have tasted it! It drives away the heart-ache,
and substitutes no head-ache! Could the Judge but quaff a glass, it
might enable him to shake off the unaccountable lethargy which (for the
ten intervening minutes, and five to boot, are already past) has made
him such a laggard at this momentous dinner. It would all but revive a
dead man! Would you like to sip it now, Judge Pyncheon?
Alas, this dinner. Have you really forgotten its true object? Then
let us whisper it, that you may start at once out of the oaken chair,
which really seems to be enchanted, like the one in Comus, or that in
which Moll Pitcher imprisoned your own grandfather. But ambition is a
talisman more powerful than witchcraft. Start up, then, and, hurrying
through the streets, burst in upon the company, that they may begin
before the fish is spoiled! They wait for you; and it is little for
your interest that they should wait. These gentlemen--need you be told
it?--have assembled, not without purpose, from every quarter of the
State. They are practised politicians, every man of them, and skilled
to adjust those preliminary measures which steal from the people,
without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers. The
popular voice, at the next gubernatorial election, though loud as
thunder, will be really but an echo of what these gentlemen shall
speak, under their breath, at your friend's festive board. They meet
to decide upon their candidate. This little knot of subtle schemers
will control the convention, and, through it, dictate to the party.
And what worthier candidate,--more wise and learned, more noted for
philanthropic liberality, truer to safe principles, tried oftener by
public trusts, more spotless in private character, with a larger stake
in the common welfare, and deeper grounded, by hereditary descent, in
the faith and practice of the Puritans,--what man can be presented for
the suffrage of the people, so eminently combining all these claims to
the chief-rulership as Judge Pyncheon here before us?
Make haste, then! Do your part! The meed for which you have toiled, and
fought, and climbed, and crept, is ready for your grasp! Be present at
this dinner!--drink a glass or two of that noble wine!--make your
pledges in as low a whisper as you will!--and you rise up from table
virtually governor of the glorious old State! Governor Pyncheon of
Massachusetts!
And is there no potent and exhilarating cordial in a certainty like
this? It has been the grand purpose of half your lifetime to obtain it.
Now, when there needs little more than to signify your acceptance, why
do you sit so lumpishly in your great-great-grandfather's oaken chair,
as if preferring it to the gubernatorial one? We have all heard of King
Log; but, in these jostling times, one of that royal kindred will
hardly win the race for an elective chief-magistracy.
Well; it is absolutely too late for dinner! Turtle, salmon, tautog,
woodcock, boiled turkey, South-Down mutton, pig, roast-beef, have
vanished, or exist only in fragments, with lukewarm potatoes, and
gravies crusted over with cold fat. The Judge, had he done nothing
else, would have achieved wonders with his knife and fork. It was he,
you know, of whom it used to be said, in reference to his ogre-like
appetite, that his Creator made him a great animal, but that the
dinner-hour made him a great beast. Persons of his large sensual
endowments must claim indulgence, at their feeding-time. But, for
once, the Judge is entirely too late for dinner! Too late, we fear,
even to join the party at their wine! The guests are warm and merry;
they have given up the Judge; and, concluding that the Free-Soilers
have him, they will fix upon another candidate. Were our friend now to
stalk in among them, with that wide-open stare, at once wild and
stolid, his ungenial presence would be apt to change their cheer.
Neither would it be seemly in Judge Pyncheon, generally so scrupulous
in his attire, to show himself at a dinner-table with that crimson
stain upon his shirt-bosom. By the bye, how came it there? It is an
ugly sight, at any rate; and the wisest way for the Judge is to button
his coat closely over his breast, and, taking his horse and chaise from
the livery stable, to make all speed to his own house. There, after a
glass of brandy and water, and a mutton-chop, a beefsteak, a broiled
fowl, or some such hasty little dinner and supper all in one, he had
better spend the evening by the fireside. He must toast his slippers a
long while, in order to get rid of the chilliness which the air of this
vile old house has sent curdling through his veins.
Up, therefore, Judge Pyncheon, up! You have lost a day. But to-morrow
will be here anon. Will you rise, betimes, and make the most of it?
To-morrow. To-morrow! To-morrow. We, that are alive, may rise betimes
to-morrow. As for him that has died to-day, his morrow will be the
resurrection morn.
Meanwhile the twilight is glooming upward out of the corners of the
room. The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper, and at first
become more definite; then, spreading wider, they lose their
distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion, as it were,
that creeps slowly over the various objects, and the one human figure
sitting in the midst of them. The gloom has not entered from without;
it has brooded here all day, and now, taking its own inevitable time,
will possess itself of everything. The Judge's face, indeed, rigid and
singularly white, refuses to melt into this universal solvent. Fainter
and fainter grows the light. It is as if another double-handful of
darkness had been scattered through the air. Now it is no longer gray,
but sable. There is still a faint appearance at the window; neither a
glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmer,--any phrase of light would express
something far brighter than this doubtful perception, or sense, rather,
that there is a window there. Has it yet vanished? No!--yes!--not
quite! And there is still the swarthy whiteness,--we shall venture to
marry these ill-agreeing words,--the swarthy whiteness of Judge
Pyncheon's face. The features are all gone: there is only the paleness
of them left. And how looks it now? There is no window! There is no
face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where
is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos,
may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and
murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!
Is there no other sound? One other, and a fearful one. It is the
ticking of the Judge's watch, which, ever since Hepzibah left the room
in search of Clifford, he has been holding in his hand. Be the cause
what it may, this little, quiet, never-ceasing throb of Time's pulse,
repeating its small strokes with such busy regularity, in Judge
Pyncheon's motionless hand, has an effect of terror, which we do not
find in any other accompaniment of the scene.
But, listen! That puff of the breeze was louder. It had a tone unlike
the dreary and sullen one which has bemoaned itself, and afflicted all
mankind with miserable sympathy, for five days past. The wind has
veered about! It now comes boisterously from the northwest, and, taking
hold of the aged framework of the Seven Gables, gives it a shake, like
a wrestler that would try strength with his antagonist. Another and
another sturdy tussle with the blast! The old house creaks again, and
makes a vociferous but somewhat unintelligible bellowing in its sooty
throat (the big flue, we mean, of its wide chimney), partly in
complaint at the rude wind, but rather, as befits their century and a
half of hostile intimacy, in tough defiance. A rumbling kind of a
bluster roars behind the fire-board. A door has slammed above stairs.
A window, perhaps, has been left open, or else is driven in by an
unruly gust. It is not to be conceived, before-hand, what wonderful
wind-instruments are these old timber mansions, and how haunted with
the strangest noises, which immediately begin to sing, and sigh, and
sob, and shriek,--and to smite with sledge-hammers, airy but ponderous,
in some distant chamber,--and to tread along the entries as with
stately footsteps, and rustle up and down the staircase, as with silks
miraculously stiff,--whenever the gale catches the house with a window
open, and gets fairly into it. Would that we were not an attendant
spirit here! It is too awful! This clamor of the wind through the
lonely house; the Judge's quietude, as he sits invisible; and that
pertinacious ticking of his watch!
As regards Judge Pyncheon's invisibility, however, that matter will
soon be remedied. The northwest wind has swept the sky clear. The
window is distinctly seen. Through its panes, moreover, we dimly catch
the sweep of the dark, clustering foliage outside, fluttering with a
constant irregularity of movement, and letting in a peep of starlight,
now here, now there. Oftener than any other object, these glimpses
illuminate the Judge's face. But here comes more effectual light.
Observe that silvery dance upon the upper branches of the pear-tree,
and now a little lower, and now on the whole mass of boughs, while,
through their shifting intricacies, the moonbeams fall aslant into the
room. They play over the Judge's figure and show that he has not
stirred throughout the hours of darkness. They follow the shadows, in
changeful sport, across his unchanging features. They gleam upon his
watch. His grasp conceals the dial-plate,--but we know that the
faithful hands have met; for one of the city clocks tells midnight.
A man of sturdy understanding, like Judge Pyncheon, cares no more for
twelve o'clock at night than for the corresponding hour of noon.
However just the parallel drawn, in some of the preceding pages,
between his Puritan ancestor and himself, it fails in this point. The
Pyncheon of two centuries ago, in common with most of his
contemporaries, professed his full belief in spiritual ministrations,
although reckoning them chiefly of a malignant character. The Pyncheon
of to-night, who sits in yonder arm-chair, believes in no such
nonsense. Such, at least, was his creed, some few hours since. His
hair will not bristle, therefore, at the stories which--in times when
chimney-corners had benches in them, where old people sat poking into
the ashes of the past, and raking out traditions like live coals--used
to be told about this very room of his ancestral house. In fact, these
tales are too absurd to bristle even childhood's hair. What sense,
meaning, or moral, for example, such as even ghost-stories should be
susceptible of, can be traced in the ridiculous legend, that, at
midnight, all the dead Pyncheons are bound to assemble in this parlor?
And, pray, for what? Why, to see whether the portrait of their ancestor
still keeps its place upon the wall, in compliance with his
testamentary directions! Is it worth while to come out of their graves
for that?
We are tempted to make a little sport with the idea. Ghost-stories are
hardly to be treated seriously any longer. The family-party of the
defunct Pyncheons, we presume, goes off in this wise.
First comes the ancestor himself, in his black cloak, steeple-hat, and
trunk-breeches, girt about the waist with a leathern belt, in which
hangs his steel-hilted sword; he has a long staff in his hand, such as
gentlemen in advanced life used to carry, as much for the dignity of
the thing as for the support to be derived from it. He looks up at the
portrait; a thing of no substance, gazing at its own painted image! All
is safe. The picture is still there. The purpose of his brain has
been kept sacred thus long after the man himself has sprouted up in
graveyard grass. See! he lifts his ineffectual hand, and tries the
frame. All safe! But is that a smile?--is it not, rather a frown of
deadly import, that darkens over the shadow of his features? The stout
Colonel is dissatisfied! So decided is his look of discontent as to
impart additional distinctness to his features; through which,
nevertheless, the moonlight passes, and flickers on the wall beyond.
Something has strangely vexed the ancestor! With a grim shake of the
head, he turns away. Here come other Pyncheons, the whole tribe, in
their half a dozen generations, jostling and elbowing one another, to
reach the picture. We behold aged men and grandames, a clergyman with
the Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien, and a red-coated
officer of the old French war; and there comes the shop-keeping
Pyncheon of a century ago, with the ruffles turned back from his
wrists; and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artist's
legend, with the beautiful and pensive Alice, who brings no pride out
of her virgin grave. All try the picture-frame. What do these ghostly
people seek? A mother lifts her child, that his little hands may touch
it! There is evidently a mystery about the picture, that perplexes
these poor Pyncheons when they ought to be at rest. In a corner,
meanwhile, stands the figure of an elderly man, in a leathern jerkin
and breeches, with a carpenter's rule sticking out of his side pocket;
he points his finger at the bearded Colonel and his descendants,
nodding, jeering, mocking, and finally bursting into obstreperous,
though inaudible laughter.
Indulging our fancy in this freak, we have partly lost the power of
restraint and guidance. We distinguish an unlooked-for figure in our
visionary scene. Among those ancestral people there is a young man,
dressed in the very fashion of to-day: he wears a dark frock-coat,
almost destitute of skirts, gray pantaloons, gaiter boots of patent
leather, and has a finely wrought gold chain across his breast, and a
little silver-headed whalebone stick in his hand. Were we to meet this
figure at noonday, we should greet him as young Jaffrey Pyncheon, the
Judge's only surviving child, who has been spending the last two years
in foreign travel. If still in life, how comes his shadow hither? If
dead, what a misfortune! The old Pyncheon property, together with the
great estate acquired by the young man's father, would devolve on whom?
On poor, foolish Clifford, gaunt Hepzibah, and rustic little Phoebe!
But another and a greater marvel greets us! Can we believe our eyes? A
stout, elderly gentleman has made his appearance; he has an aspect of
eminent respectability, wears a black coat and pantaloons, of roomy
width, and might be pronounced scrupulously neat in his attire, but for
a broad crimson stain across his snowy neckcloth and down his
shirt-bosom. Is it the Judge, or no? How can it be Judge Pyncheon? We
discern his figure, as plainly as the flickering moonbeams can show us
anything, still seated in the oaken chair! Be the apparition whose it
may, it advances to the picture, seems to seize the frame, tries to
peep behind it, and turns away, with a frown as black as the ancestral
one.
The fantastic scene just hinted at must by no means be considered as
forming an actual portion of our story. We were betrayed into this
brief extravagance by the quiver of the moonbeams; they dance
hand-in-hand with shadows, and are reflected in the looking-glass,
which, you are aware, is always a kind of window or doorway into the
spiritual world. We needed relief, moreover, from our too long and
exclusive contemplation of that figure in the chair. This wild wind,
too, has tossed our thoughts into strange confusion, but without
tearing them away from their one determined centre. Yonder leaden
Judge sits immovably upon our soul. Will he never stir again? We shall
go mad unless he stirs! You may the better estimate his quietude by the
fearlessness of a little mouse, which sits on its hind legs, in a
streak of moonlight, close by Judge Pyncheon's foot, and seems to
meditate a journey of exploration over this great black bulk. Ha! what
has startled the nimble little mouse? It is the visage of grimalkin,
outside of the window, where he appears to have posted himself for a
deliberate watch. This grimalkin has a very ugly look. Is it a cat
watching for a mouse, or the devil for a human soul? Would we could
scare him from the window!
Thank Heaven, the night is well-nigh past! The moonbeams have no longer
so silvery a gleam, nor contrast so strongly with the blackness of the
shadows among which they fall. They are paler now; the shadows look
gray, not black. The boisterous wind is hushed. What is the hour? Ah!
the watch has at last ceased to tick; for the Judge's forgetful fingers
neglected to wind it up, as usual, at ten o'clock, being half an hour
or so before his ordinary bedtime,--and it has run down, for the first
time in five years. But the great world-clock of Time still keeps its
beat. The dreary night--for, oh, how dreary seems its haunted waste,
behind us!--gives place to a fresh, transparent, cloudless morn.
Blessed, blessed radiance! The daybeam--even what little of it finds
its way into this always dusky parlor--seems part of the universal
benediction, annulling evil, and rendering all goodness possible, and
happiness attainable. Will Judge Pyncheon now rise up from his chair?
Will he go forth, and receive the early sunbeams on his brow? Will he
begin this new day,--which God has smiled upon, and blessed, and given
to mankind,--will he begin it with better purposes than the many that
have been spent amiss? Or are all the deep-laid schemes of yesterday as
stubborn in his heart, and as busy in his brain, as ever?
In this latter case, there is much to do. Will the Judge still insist
with Hepzibah on the interview with Clifford? Will he buy a safe,
elderly gentleman's horse? Will he persuade the purchaser of the old
Pyncheon property to relinquish the bargain in his favor? Will he see
his family physician, and obtain a medicine that shall preserve him, to
be an honor and blessing to his race, until the utmost term of
patriarchal longevity? Will Judge Pyncheon, above all, make due
apologies to that company of honorable friends, and satisfy them that
his absence from the festive board was unavoidable, and so fully
retrieve himself in their good opinion that he shall yet be Governor of
Massachusetts? And all these great purposes accomplished, will he walk
the streets again, with that dog-day smile of elaborate benevolence,
sultry enough to tempt flies to come and buzz in it? Or will he, after
the tomb-like seclusion of the past day and night, go forth a humbled
and repentant man, sorrowful, gentle, seeking no profit, shrinking from
worldly honor, hardly daring to love God, but bold to love his fellow
man, and to do him what good he may? Will he bear about with him,--no
odious grin of feigned benignity, insolent in its pretence, and
loathsome in its falsehood,--but the tender sadness of a contrite
heart, broken, at last, beneath its own weight of sin? For it is our
belief, whatever show of honor he may have piled upon it, that there
was heavy sin at the base of this man's being.
Rise up, Judge Pyncheon! The morning sunshine glimmers through the
foliage, and, beautiful and holy as it is, shuns not to kindle up your
face. Rise up, thou subtle, worldly, selfish, iron-hearted hypocrite,
and make thy choice whether still to be subtle, worldly, selfish,
iron-hearted, and hypocritical, or to tear these sins out of thy
nature, though they bring the lifeblood with them! The Avenger is upon
thee! Rise up, before it be too late!
What! Thou art not stirred by this last appeal? No, not a jot! And
there we see a fly,--one of your common house-flies, such as are always
buzzing on the window-pane,--which has smelt out Governor Pyncheon, and
alights, now on his forehead, now on his chin, and now, Heaven help us!
is creeping over the bridge of his nose, towards the would-be
chief-magistrate's wide-open eyes! Canst thou not brush the fly away?
Art thou too sluggish? Thou man, that hadst so many busy projects
yesterday! Art thou too weak, that wast so powerful? Not brush away a
fly? Nay, then, we give thee up!
And hark! the shop-bell rings. After hours like these latter ones,
through which we have borne our heavy tale, it is good to be made
sensible that there is a living world, and that even this old, lonely
mansion retains some manner of connection with it. We breathe more
freely, emerging from Judge Pyncheon's presence into the street before
the Seven Gables.
| Governor Pyncheon: Judge Pyncheon remains in the House of the Seven Gables, dead but with his eyes open. He continues to hold his watch, which continues to move without him. It was supposed to be a busy day for Jaffrey, and he currently is missing all that he had planned. He was to visit a family physician, whom the Judge would have told that he was experiencing dimness of sight and dizziness. That night, instead of sitting dead in the House of the Seven Gables, Jaffrey Pyncheon was to meet with members of his party and announce his candidacy for governor. | summary |
JUDGE PYNCHEON, while his two relatives have fled away with such
ill-considered haste, still sits in the old parlor, keeping house, as
the familiar phrase is, in the absence of its ordinary occupants. To
him, and to the venerable House of the Seven Gables, does our story now
betake itself, like an owl, bewildered in the daylight, and hastening
back to his hollow tree.
The Judge has not shifted his position for a long while now. He has
not stirred hand or foot, nor withdrawn his eyes so much as a
hair's-breadth from their fixed gaze towards the corner of the room,
since the footsteps of Hepzibah and Clifford creaked along the passage,
and the outer door was closed cautiously behind their exit. He holds
his watch in his left hand, but clutched in such a manner that you
cannot see the dial-plate. How profound a fit of meditation! Or,
supposing him asleep, how infantile a quietude of conscience, and what
wholesome order in the gastric region, are betokened by slumber so
entirely undisturbed with starts, cramp, twitches, muttered dreamtalk,
trumpet-blasts through the nasal organ, or any slightest irregularity
of breath! You must hold your own breath, to satisfy yourself whether
he breathes at all. It is quite inaudible. You hear the ticking of
his watch; his breath you do not hear. A most refreshing slumber,
doubtless! And yet, the Judge cannot be asleep. His eyes are open! A
veteran politician, such as he, would never fall asleep with wide-open
eyes, lest some enemy or mischief-maker, taking him thus at unawares,
should peep through these windows into his consciousness, and make
strange discoveries among the reminiscences, projects, hopes,
apprehensions, weaknesses, and strong points, which he has heretofore
shared with nobody. A cautious man is proverbially said to sleep with
one eye open. That may be wisdom. But not with both; for this were
heedlessness! No, no! Judge Pyncheon cannot be asleep.
It is odd, however, that a gentleman so burdened with engagements,--and
noted, too, for punctuality,--should linger thus in an old lonely
mansion, which he has never seemed very fond of visiting. The oaken
chair, to be sure, may tempt him with its roominess. It is, indeed, a
spacious, and, allowing for the rude age that fashioned it, a
moderately easy seat, with capacity enough, at all events, and offering
no restraint to the Judge's breadth of beam. A bigger man might find
ample accommodation in it. His ancestor, now pictured upon the wall,
with all his English beef about him, used hardly to present a front
extending from elbow to elbow of this chair, or a base that would cover
its whole cushion. But there are better chairs than this,--mahogany,
black walnut, rosewood, spring-seated and damask-cushioned, with varied
slopes, and innumerable artifices to make them easy, and obviate the
irksomeness of too tame an ease,--a score of such might be at Judge
Pyncheon's service. Yes! in a score of drawing-rooms he would be more
than welcome. Mamma would advance to meet him, with outstretched hand;
the virgin daughter, elderly as he has now got to be,--an old widower,
as he smilingly describes himself,--would shake up the cushion for the
Judge, and do her pretty utmost to make him comfortable. For the Judge
is a prosperous man. He cherishes his schemes, moreover, like other
people, and reasonably brighter than most others; or did so, at least,
as he lay abed this morning, in an agreeable half-drowse, planning the
business of the day, and speculating on the probabilities of the next
fifteen years. With his firm health, and the little inroad that age
has made upon him, fifteen years or twenty--yes, or perhaps
five-and-twenty!--are no more than he may fairly call his own.
Five-and-twenty years for the enjoyment of his real estate in town and
country, his railroad, bank, and insurance shares, his United States
stock,--his wealth, in short, however invested, now in possession, or
soon to be acquired; together with the public honors that have fallen
upon him, and the weightier ones that are yet to fall! It is good! It
is excellent! It is enough!
Still lingering in the old chair! If the Judge has a little time to
throw away, why does not he visit the insurance office, as is his
frequent custom, and sit awhile in one of their leathern-cushioned
arm-chairs, listening to the gossip of the day, and dropping some
deeply designed chance-word, which will be certain to become the gossip
of to-morrow. And have not the bank directors a meeting at which it
was the Judge's purpose to be present, and his office to preside?
Indeed they have; and the hour is noted on a card, which is, or ought
to be, in Judge Pyncheon's right vest-pocket. Let him go thither, and
loll at ease upon his moneybags! He has lounged long enough in the old
chair!
This was to have been such a busy day. In the first place, the
interview with Clifford. Half an hour, by the Judge's reckoning, was
to suffice for that; it would probably be less, but--taking into
consideration that Hepzibah was first to be dealt with, and that these
women are apt to make many words where a few would do much better--it
might be safest to allow half an hour. Half an hour? Why, Judge, it is
already two hours, by your own undeviatingly accurate chronometer.
Glance your eye down at it and see! Ah; he will not give himself the
trouble either to bend his head, or elevate his hand, so as to bring
the faithful time-keeper within his range of vision! Time, all at once,
appears to have become a matter of no moment with the Judge!
And has he forgotten all the other items of his memoranda? Clifford's
affair arranged, he was to meet a State Street broker, who has
undertaken to procure a heavy percentage, and the best of paper, for a
few loose thousands which the Judge happens to have by him, uninvested.
The wrinkled note-shaver will have taken his railroad trip in vain.
Half an hour later, in the street next to this, there was to be an
auction of real estate, including a portion of the old Pyncheon
property, originally belonging to Maule's garden ground. It has been
alienated from the Pyncheons these four-score years; but the Judge had
kept it in his eye, and had set his heart on reannexing it to the small
demesne still left around the Seven Gables; and now, during this odd
fit of oblivion, the fatal hammer must have fallen, and transferred our
ancient patrimony to some alien possessor. Possibly, indeed, the sale
may have been postponed till fairer weather. If so, will the Judge
make it convenient to be present, and favor the auctioneer with his
bid, On the proximate occasion?
The next affair was to buy a horse for his own driving. The one
heretofore his favorite stumbled, this very morning, on the road to
town, and must be at once discarded. Judge Pyncheon's neck is too
precious to be risked on such a contingency as a stumbling steed.
Should all the above business be seasonably got through with, he might
attend the meeting of a charitable society; the very name of which,
however, in the multiplicity of his benevolence, is quite forgotten; so
that this engagement may pass unfulfilled, and no great harm done. And
if he have time, amid the press of more urgent matters, he must take
measures for the renewal of Mrs. Pyncheon's tombstone, which, the
sexton tells him, has fallen on its marble face, and is cracked quite
in twain. She was a praiseworthy woman enough, thinks the Judge, in
spite of her nervousness, and the tears that she was so oozy with, and
her foolish behavior about the coffee; and as she took her departure so
seasonably, he will not grudge the second tombstone. It is better, at
least, than if she had never needed any! The next item on his list was
to give orders for some fruit-trees, of a rare variety, to be
deliverable at his country-seat in the ensuing autumn. Yes, buy them,
by all means; and may the peaches be luscious in your mouth, Judge
Pyncheon! After this comes something more important. A committee of
his political party has besought him for a hundred or two of dollars,
in addition to his previous disbursements, towards carrying on the fall
campaign. The Judge is a patriot; the fate of the country is staked on
the November election; and besides, as will be shadowed forth in
another paragraph, he has no trifling stake of his own in the same
great game. He will do what the committee asks; nay, he will be
liberal beyond their expectations; they shall have a check for five
hundred dollars, and more anon, if it be needed. What next? A decayed
widow, whose husband was Judge Pyncheon's early friend, has laid her
case of destitution before him, in a very moving letter. She and her
fair daughter have scarcely bread to eat. He partly intends to call on
her to-day,--perhaps so--perhaps not,--accordingly as he may happen to
have leisure, and a small bank-note.
Another business, which, however, he puts no great weight on (it is
well, you know, to be heedful, but not over-anxious, as respects one's
personal health),--another business, then, was to consult his family
physician. About what, for Heaven's sake? Why, it is rather difficult
to describe the symptoms. A mere dimness of sight and dizziness of
brain, was it?--or disagreeable choking, or stifling, or gurgling, or
bubbling, in the region of the thorax, as the anatomists say?--or was
it a pretty severe throbbing and kicking of the heart, rather
creditable to him than otherwise, as showing that the organ had not
been left out of the Judge's physical contrivance? No matter what it
was. The doctor probably would smile at the statement of such trifles
to his professional ear; the Judge would smile in his turn; and meeting
one another's eyes, they would enjoy a hearty laugh together! But a fig
for medical advice. The Judge will never need it.
Pray, pray, Judge Pyncheon, look at your watch, Now! What--not a
glance! It is within ten minutes of the dinner hour! It surely cannot
have slipped your memory that the dinner of to-day is to be the most
important, in its consequences, of all the dinners you ever ate. Yes,
precisely the most important; although, in the course of your somewhat
eminent career, you have been placed high towards the head of the
table, at splendid banquets, and have poured out your festive eloquence
to ears yet echoing with Webster's mighty organ-tones. No public
dinner this, however. It is merely a gathering of some dozen or so of
friends from several districts of the State; men of distinguished
character and influence, assembling, almost casually, at the house of a
common friend, likewise distinguished, who will make them welcome to a
little better than his ordinary fare. Nothing in the way of French
cookery, but an excellent dinner, nevertheless. Real turtle, we
understand, and salmon, tautog, canvas-backs, pig, English mutton, good
roast beef, or dainties of that serious kind, fit for substantial
country gentlemen, as these honorable persons mostly are. The
delicacies of the season, in short, and flavored by a brand of old
Madeira which has been the pride of many seasons. It is the Juno
brand; a glorious wine, fragrant, and full of gentle might; a
bottled-up happiness, put by for use; a golden liquid, worth more than
liquid gold; so rare and admirable, that veteran wine-bibbers count it
among their epochs to have tasted it! It drives away the heart-ache,
and substitutes no head-ache! Could the Judge but quaff a glass, it
might enable him to shake off the unaccountable lethargy which (for the
ten intervening minutes, and five to boot, are already past) has made
him such a laggard at this momentous dinner. It would all but revive a
dead man! Would you like to sip it now, Judge Pyncheon?
Alas, this dinner. Have you really forgotten its true object? Then
let us whisper it, that you may start at once out of the oaken chair,
which really seems to be enchanted, like the one in Comus, or that in
which Moll Pitcher imprisoned your own grandfather. But ambition is a
talisman more powerful than witchcraft. Start up, then, and, hurrying
through the streets, burst in upon the company, that they may begin
before the fish is spoiled! They wait for you; and it is little for
your interest that they should wait. These gentlemen--need you be told
it?--have assembled, not without purpose, from every quarter of the
State. They are practised politicians, every man of them, and skilled
to adjust those preliminary measures which steal from the people,
without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers. The
popular voice, at the next gubernatorial election, though loud as
thunder, will be really but an echo of what these gentlemen shall
speak, under their breath, at your friend's festive board. They meet
to decide upon their candidate. This little knot of subtle schemers
will control the convention, and, through it, dictate to the party.
And what worthier candidate,--more wise and learned, more noted for
philanthropic liberality, truer to safe principles, tried oftener by
public trusts, more spotless in private character, with a larger stake
in the common welfare, and deeper grounded, by hereditary descent, in
the faith and practice of the Puritans,--what man can be presented for
the suffrage of the people, so eminently combining all these claims to
the chief-rulership as Judge Pyncheon here before us?
Make haste, then! Do your part! The meed for which you have toiled, and
fought, and climbed, and crept, is ready for your grasp! Be present at
this dinner!--drink a glass or two of that noble wine!--make your
pledges in as low a whisper as you will!--and you rise up from table
virtually governor of the glorious old State! Governor Pyncheon of
Massachusetts!
And is there no potent and exhilarating cordial in a certainty like
this? It has been the grand purpose of half your lifetime to obtain it.
Now, when there needs little more than to signify your acceptance, why
do you sit so lumpishly in your great-great-grandfather's oaken chair,
as if preferring it to the gubernatorial one? We have all heard of King
Log; but, in these jostling times, one of that royal kindred will
hardly win the race for an elective chief-magistracy.
Well; it is absolutely too late for dinner! Turtle, salmon, tautog,
woodcock, boiled turkey, South-Down mutton, pig, roast-beef, have
vanished, or exist only in fragments, with lukewarm potatoes, and
gravies crusted over with cold fat. The Judge, had he done nothing
else, would have achieved wonders with his knife and fork. It was he,
you know, of whom it used to be said, in reference to his ogre-like
appetite, that his Creator made him a great animal, but that the
dinner-hour made him a great beast. Persons of his large sensual
endowments must claim indulgence, at their feeding-time. But, for
once, the Judge is entirely too late for dinner! Too late, we fear,
even to join the party at their wine! The guests are warm and merry;
they have given up the Judge; and, concluding that the Free-Soilers
have him, they will fix upon another candidate. Were our friend now to
stalk in among them, with that wide-open stare, at once wild and
stolid, his ungenial presence would be apt to change their cheer.
Neither would it be seemly in Judge Pyncheon, generally so scrupulous
in his attire, to show himself at a dinner-table with that crimson
stain upon his shirt-bosom. By the bye, how came it there? It is an
ugly sight, at any rate; and the wisest way for the Judge is to button
his coat closely over his breast, and, taking his horse and chaise from
the livery stable, to make all speed to his own house. There, after a
glass of brandy and water, and a mutton-chop, a beefsteak, a broiled
fowl, or some such hasty little dinner and supper all in one, he had
better spend the evening by the fireside. He must toast his slippers a
long while, in order to get rid of the chilliness which the air of this
vile old house has sent curdling through his veins.
Up, therefore, Judge Pyncheon, up! You have lost a day. But to-morrow
will be here anon. Will you rise, betimes, and make the most of it?
To-morrow. To-morrow! To-morrow. We, that are alive, may rise betimes
to-morrow. As for him that has died to-day, his morrow will be the
resurrection morn.
Meanwhile the twilight is glooming upward out of the corners of the
room. The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper, and at first
become more definite; then, spreading wider, they lose their
distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion, as it were,
that creeps slowly over the various objects, and the one human figure
sitting in the midst of them. The gloom has not entered from without;
it has brooded here all day, and now, taking its own inevitable time,
will possess itself of everything. The Judge's face, indeed, rigid and
singularly white, refuses to melt into this universal solvent. Fainter
and fainter grows the light. It is as if another double-handful of
darkness had been scattered through the air. Now it is no longer gray,
but sable. There is still a faint appearance at the window; neither a
glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmer,--any phrase of light would express
something far brighter than this doubtful perception, or sense, rather,
that there is a window there. Has it yet vanished? No!--yes!--not
quite! And there is still the swarthy whiteness,--we shall venture to
marry these ill-agreeing words,--the swarthy whiteness of Judge
Pyncheon's face. The features are all gone: there is only the paleness
of them left. And how looks it now? There is no window! There is no
face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where
is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos,
may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and
murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!
Is there no other sound? One other, and a fearful one. It is the
ticking of the Judge's watch, which, ever since Hepzibah left the room
in search of Clifford, he has been holding in his hand. Be the cause
what it may, this little, quiet, never-ceasing throb of Time's pulse,
repeating its small strokes with such busy regularity, in Judge
Pyncheon's motionless hand, has an effect of terror, which we do not
find in any other accompaniment of the scene.
But, listen! That puff of the breeze was louder. It had a tone unlike
the dreary and sullen one which has bemoaned itself, and afflicted all
mankind with miserable sympathy, for five days past. The wind has
veered about! It now comes boisterously from the northwest, and, taking
hold of the aged framework of the Seven Gables, gives it a shake, like
a wrestler that would try strength with his antagonist. Another and
another sturdy tussle with the blast! The old house creaks again, and
makes a vociferous but somewhat unintelligible bellowing in its sooty
throat (the big flue, we mean, of its wide chimney), partly in
complaint at the rude wind, but rather, as befits their century and a
half of hostile intimacy, in tough defiance. A rumbling kind of a
bluster roars behind the fire-board. A door has slammed above stairs.
A window, perhaps, has been left open, or else is driven in by an
unruly gust. It is not to be conceived, before-hand, what wonderful
wind-instruments are these old timber mansions, and how haunted with
the strangest noises, which immediately begin to sing, and sigh, and
sob, and shriek,--and to smite with sledge-hammers, airy but ponderous,
in some distant chamber,--and to tread along the entries as with
stately footsteps, and rustle up and down the staircase, as with silks
miraculously stiff,--whenever the gale catches the house with a window
open, and gets fairly into it. Would that we were not an attendant
spirit here! It is too awful! This clamor of the wind through the
lonely house; the Judge's quietude, as he sits invisible; and that
pertinacious ticking of his watch!
As regards Judge Pyncheon's invisibility, however, that matter will
soon be remedied. The northwest wind has swept the sky clear. The
window is distinctly seen. Through its panes, moreover, we dimly catch
the sweep of the dark, clustering foliage outside, fluttering with a
constant irregularity of movement, and letting in a peep of starlight,
now here, now there. Oftener than any other object, these glimpses
illuminate the Judge's face. But here comes more effectual light.
Observe that silvery dance upon the upper branches of the pear-tree,
and now a little lower, and now on the whole mass of boughs, while,
through their shifting intricacies, the moonbeams fall aslant into the
room. They play over the Judge's figure and show that he has not
stirred throughout the hours of darkness. They follow the shadows, in
changeful sport, across his unchanging features. They gleam upon his
watch. His grasp conceals the dial-plate,--but we know that the
faithful hands have met; for one of the city clocks tells midnight.
A man of sturdy understanding, like Judge Pyncheon, cares no more for
twelve o'clock at night than for the corresponding hour of noon.
However just the parallel drawn, in some of the preceding pages,
between his Puritan ancestor and himself, it fails in this point. The
Pyncheon of two centuries ago, in common with most of his
contemporaries, professed his full belief in spiritual ministrations,
although reckoning them chiefly of a malignant character. The Pyncheon
of to-night, who sits in yonder arm-chair, believes in no such
nonsense. Such, at least, was his creed, some few hours since. His
hair will not bristle, therefore, at the stories which--in times when
chimney-corners had benches in them, where old people sat poking into
the ashes of the past, and raking out traditions like live coals--used
to be told about this very room of his ancestral house. In fact, these
tales are too absurd to bristle even childhood's hair. What sense,
meaning, or moral, for example, such as even ghost-stories should be
susceptible of, can be traced in the ridiculous legend, that, at
midnight, all the dead Pyncheons are bound to assemble in this parlor?
And, pray, for what? Why, to see whether the portrait of their ancestor
still keeps its place upon the wall, in compliance with his
testamentary directions! Is it worth while to come out of their graves
for that?
We are tempted to make a little sport with the idea. Ghost-stories are
hardly to be treated seriously any longer. The family-party of the
defunct Pyncheons, we presume, goes off in this wise.
First comes the ancestor himself, in his black cloak, steeple-hat, and
trunk-breeches, girt about the waist with a leathern belt, in which
hangs his steel-hilted sword; he has a long staff in his hand, such as
gentlemen in advanced life used to carry, as much for the dignity of
the thing as for the support to be derived from it. He looks up at the
portrait; a thing of no substance, gazing at its own painted image! All
is safe. The picture is still there. The purpose of his brain has
been kept sacred thus long after the man himself has sprouted up in
graveyard grass. See! he lifts his ineffectual hand, and tries the
frame. All safe! But is that a smile?--is it not, rather a frown of
deadly import, that darkens over the shadow of his features? The stout
Colonel is dissatisfied! So decided is his look of discontent as to
impart additional distinctness to his features; through which,
nevertheless, the moonlight passes, and flickers on the wall beyond.
Something has strangely vexed the ancestor! With a grim shake of the
head, he turns away. Here come other Pyncheons, the whole tribe, in
their half a dozen generations, jostling and elbowing one another, to
reach the picture. We behold aged men and grandames, a clergyman with
the Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien, and a red-coated
officer of the old French war; and there comes the shop-keeping
Pyncheon of a century ago, with the ruffles turned back from his
wrists; and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artist's
legend, with the beautiful and pensive Alice, who brings no pride out
of her virgin grave. All try the picture-frame. What do these ghostly
people seek? A mother lifts her child, that his little hands may touch
it! There is evidently a mystery about the picture, that perplexes
these poor Pyncheons when they ought to be at rest. In a corner,
meanwhile, stands the figure of an elderly man, in a leathern jerkin
and breeches, with a carpenter's rule sticking out of his side pocket;
he points his finger at the bearded Colonel and his descendants,
nodding, jeering, mocking, and finally bursting into obstreperous,
though inaudible laughter.
Indulging our fancy in this freak, we have partly lost the power of
restraint and guidance. We distinguish an unlooked-for figure in our
visionary scene. Among those ancestral people there is a young man,
dressed in the very fashion of to-day: he wears a dark frock-coat,
almost destitute of skirts, gray pantaloons, gaiter boots of patent
leather, and has a finely wrought gold chain across his breast, and a
little silver-headed whalebone stick in his hand. Were we to meet this
figure at noonday, we should greet him as young Jaffrey Pyncheon, the
Judge's only surviving child, who has been spending the last two years
in foreign travel. If still in life, how comes his shadow hither? If
dead, what a misfortune! The old Pyncheon property, together with the
great estate acquired by the young man's father, would devolve on whom?
On poor, foolish Clifford, gaunt Hepzibah, and rustic little Phoebe!
But another and a greater marvel greets us! Can we believe our eyes? A
stout, elderly gentleman has made his appearance; he has an aspect of
eminent respectability, wears a black coat and pantaloons, of roomy
width, and might be pronounced scrupulously neat in his attire, but for
a broad crimson stain across his snowy neckcloth and down his
shirt-bosom. Is it the Judge, or no? How can it be Judge Pyncheon? We
discern his figure, as plainly as the flickering moonbeams can show us
anything, still seated in the oaken chair! Be the apparition whose it
may, it advances to the picture, seems to seize the frame, tries to
peep behind it, and turns away, with a frown as black as the ancestral
one.
The fantastic scene just hinted at must by no means be considered as
forming an actual portion of our story. We were betrayed into this
brief extravagance by the quiver of the moonbeams; they dance
hand-in-hand with shadows, and are reflected in the looking-glass,
which, you are aware, is always a kind of window or doorway into the
spiritual world. We needed relief, moreover, from our too long and
exclusive contemplation of that figure in the chair. This wild wind,
too, has tossed our thoughts into strange confusion, but without
tearing them away from their one determined centre. Yonder leaden
Judge sits immovably upon our soul. Will he never stir again? We shall
go mad unless he stirs! You may the better estimate his quietude by the
fearlessness of a little mouse, which sits on its hind legs, in a
streak of moonlight, close by Judge Pyncheon's foot, and seems to
meditate a journey of exploration over this great black bulk. Ha! what
has startled the nimble little mouse? It is the visage of grimalkin,
outside of the window, where he appears to have posted himself for a
deliberate watch. This grimalkin has a very ugly look. Is it a cat
watching for a mouse, or the devil for a human soul? Would we could
scare him from the window!
Thank Heaven, the night is well-nigh past! The moonbeams have no longer
so silvery a gleam, nor contrast so strongly with the blackness of the
shadows among which they fall. They are paler now; the shadows look
gray, not black. The boisterous wind is hushed. What is the hour? Ah!
the watch has at last ceased to tick; for the Judge's forgetful fingers
neglected to wind it up, as usual, at ten o'clock, being half an hour
or so before his ordinary bedtime,--and it has run down, for the first
time in five years. But the great world-clock of Time still keeps its
beat. The dreary night--for, oh, how dreary seems its haunted waste,
behind us!--gives place to a fresh, transparent, cloudless morn.
Blessed, blessed radiance! The daybeam--even what little of it finds
its way into this always dusky parlor--seems part of the universal
benediction, annulling evil, and rendering all goodness possible, and
happiness attainable. Will Judge Pyncheon now rise up from his chair?
Will he go forth, and receive the early sunbeams on his brow? Will he
begin this new day,--which God has smiled upon, and blessed, and given
to mankind,--will he begin it with better purposes than the many that
have been spent amiss? Or are all the deep-laid schemes of yesterday as
stubborn in his heart, and as busy in his brain, as ever?
In this latter case, there is much to do. Will the Judge still insist
with Hepzibah on the interview with Clifford? Will he buy a safe,
elderly gentleman's horse? Will he persuade the purchaser of the old
Pyncheon property to relinquish the bargain in his favor? Will he see
his family physician, and obtain a medicine that shall preserve him, to
be an honor and blessing to his race, until the utmost term of
patriarchal longevity? Will Judge Pyncheon, above all, make due
apologies to that company of honorable friends, and satisfy them that
his absence from the festive board was unavoidable, and so fully
retrieve himself in their good opinion that he shall yet be Governor of
Massachusetts? And all these great purposes accomplished, will he walk
the streets again, with that dog-day smile of elaborate benevolence,
sultry enough to tempt flies to come and buzz in it? Or will he, after
the tomb-like seclusion of the past day and night, go forth a humbled
and repentant man, sorrowful, gentle, seeking no profit, shrinking from
worldly honor, hardly daring to love God, but bold to love his fellow
man, and to do him what good he may? Will he bear about with him,--no
odious grin of feigned benignity, insolent in its pretence, and
loathsome in its falsehood,--but the tender sadness of a contrite
heart, broken, at last, beneath its own weight of sin? For it is our
belief, whatever show of honor he may have piled upon it, that there
was heavy sin at the base of this man's being.
Rise up, Judge Pyncheon! The morning sunshine glimmers through the
foliage, and, beautiful and holy as it is, shuns not to kindle up your
face. Rise up, thou subtle, worldly, selfish, iron-hearted hypocrite,
and make thy choice whether still to be subtle, worldly, selfish,
iron-hearted, and hypocritical, or to tear these sins out of thy
nature, though they bring the lifeblood with them! The Avenger is upon
thee! Rise up, before it be too late!
What! Thou art not stirred by this last appeal? No, not a jot! And
there we see a fly,--one of your common house-flies, such as are always
buzzing on the window-pane,--which has smelt out Governor Pyncheon, and
alights, now on his forehead, now on his chin, and now, Heaven help us!
is creeping over the bridge of his nose, towards the would-be
chief-magistrate's wide-open eyes! Canst thou not brush the fly away?
Art thou too sluggish? Thou man, that hadst so many busy projects
yesterday! Art thou too weak, that wast so powerful? Not brush away a
fly? Nay, then, we give thee up!
And hark! the shop-bell rings. After hours like these latter ones,
through which we have borne our heavy tale, it is good to be made
sensible that there is a living world, and that even this old, lonely
mansion retains some manner of connection with it. We breathe more
freely, emerging from Judge Pyncheon's presence into the street before
the Seven Gables.
| Hawthorne uses this chapter for lightly comic purposes directed at Judge Pyncheon. The chapter details all of the appointments that the Judge is missing, on the account of his untimely death, approaching the situation as if the stern old man were remiss in his duties. It also begins to shed light on the actual cause of Jaffrey's death. The dizziness and vision problems demonstrate a problem with Jaffrey's brain; his death was likely caused by his impending stroke, an explanation that holds true for the earlier death of Colonel Pyncheon. The timing of the stroke was such that it seemingly implicated Clifford. Hawthorne includes the details of Jaffrey's schedule to show the power that he may have attained. If he had not died that evening, Judge Pyncheon may have become governor, a situation that was mercifully averted | analysis |
UNCLE VENNER, trundling a wheelbarrow, was the earliest person stirring
in the neighborhood the day after the storm.
Pyncheon Street, in front of the House of the Seven Gables, was a far
pleasanter scene than a by-lane, confined by shabby fences, and
bordered with wooden dwellings of the meaner class, could reasonably be
expected to present. Nature made sweet amends, that morning, for the
five unkindly days which had preceded it. It would have been enough to
live for, merely to look up at the wide benediction of the sky, or as
much of it as was visible between the houses, genial once more with
sunshine. Every object was agreeable, whether to be gazed at in the
breadth, or examined more minutely. Such, for example, were the
well-washed pebbles and gravel of the sidewalk; even the sky-reflecting
pools in the centre of the street; and the grass, now freshly verdant,
that crept along the base of the fences, on the other side of which, if
one peeped over, was seen the multifarious growth of gardens.
Vegetable productions, of whatever kind, seemed more than negatively
happy, in the juicy warmth and abundance of their life. The Pyncheon
Elm, throughout its great circumference, was all alive, and full of the
morning sun and a sweet-tempered little breeze, which lingered within
this verdant sphere, and set a thousand leafy tongues a-whispering all
at once. This aged tree appeared to have suffered nothing from the
gale. It had kept its boughs unshattered, and its full complement of
leaves; and the whole in perfect verdure, except a single branch, that,
by the earlier change with which the elm-tree sometimes prophesies the
autumn, had been transmuted to bright gold. It was like the golden
branch that gained Aeneas and the Sibyl admittance into Hades.
This one mystic branch hung down before the main entrance of the Seven
Gables, so nigh the ground that any passer-by might have stood on
tiptoe and plucked it off. Presented at the door, it would have been a
symbol of his right to enter, and be made acquainted with all the
secrets of the house. So little faith is due to external appearance,
that there was really an inviting aspect over the venerable edifice,
conveying an idea that its history must be a decorous and happy one,
and such as would be delightful for a fireside tale. Its windows
gleamed cheerfully in the slanting sunlight. The lines and tufts of
green moss, here and there, seemed pledges of familiarity and
sisterhood with Nature; as if this human dwelling-place, being of such
old date, had established its prescriptive title among primeval oaks
and whatever other objects, by virtue of their long continuance, have
acquired a gracious right to be. A person of imaginative temperament,
while passing by the house, would turn, once and again, and peruse it
well: its many peaks, consenting together in the clustered chimney;
the deep projection over its basement-story; the arched window,
imparting a look, if not of grandeur, yet of antique gentility, to the
broken portal over which it opened; the luxuriance of gigantic
burdocks, near the threshold; he would note all these characteristics,
and be conscious of something deeper than he saw. He would conceive
the mansion to have been the residence of the stubborn old Puritan,
Integrity, who, dying in some forgotten generation, had left a blessing
in all its rooms and chambers, the efficacy of which was to be seen in
the religion, honesty, moderate competence, or upright poverty and
solid happiness, of his descendants, to this day.
One object, above all others, would take root in the imaginative
observer's memory. It was the great tuft of flowers,--weeds, you would
have called them, only a week ago,--the tuft of crimson-spotted
flowers, in the angle between the two front gables. The old people used
to give them the name of Alice's Posies, in remembrance of fair Alice
Pyncheon, who was believed to have brought their seeds from Italy.
They were flaunting in rich beauty and full bloom to-day, and seemed,
as it were, a mystic expression that something within the house was
consummated.
It was but little after sunrise, when Uncle Venner made his appearance,
as aforesaid, impelling a wheelbarrow along the street. He was going
his matutinal rounds to collect cabbage-leaves, turnip-tops,
potato-skins, and the miscellaneous refuse of the dinner-pot, which the
thrifty housewives of the neighborhood were accustomed to put aside, as
fit only to feed a pig. Uncle Venner's pig was fed entirely, and kept
in prime order, on these eleemosynary contributions; insomuch that the
patched philosopher used to promise that, before retiring to his farm,
he would make a feast of the portly grunter, and invite all his
neighbors to partake of the joints and spare-ribs which they had helped
to fatten. Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon's housekeeping had so greatly
improved, since Clifford became a member of the family, that her share
of the banquet would have been no lean one; and Uncle Venner,
accordingly, was a good deal disappointed not to find the large earthen
pan, full of fragmentary eatables, that ordinarily awaited his coming
at the back doorstep of the Seven Gables.
"I never knew Miss Hepzibah so forgetful before," said the patriarch to
himself. "She must have had a dinner yesterday,--no question of that!
She always has one, nowadays. So where's the pot-liquor and
potato-skins, I ask? Shall I knock, and see if she's stirring yet? No,
no,--'t won't do! If little Phoebe was about the house, I should not
mind knocking; but Miss Hepzibah, likely as not, would scowl down at me
out of the window, and look cross, even if she felt pleasantly. So,
I'll come back at noon."
With these reflections, the old man was shutting the gate of the little
back-yard. Creaking on its hinges, however, like every other gate and
door about the premises, the sound reached the ears of the occupant of
the northern gable, one of the windows of which had a side-view towards
the gate.
"Good-morning, Uncle Venner!" said the daguerreotypist, leaning out of
the window. "Do you hear nobody stirring?"
"Not a soul," said the man of patches. "But that's no wonder. 'Tis
barely half an hour past sunrise, yet. But I'm really glad to see you,
Mr. Holgrave! There's a strange, lonesome look about this side of the
house; so that my heart misgave me, somehow or other, and I felt as if
there was nobody alive in it. The front of the house looks a good deal
cheerier; and Alice's Posies are blooming there beautifully; and if I
were a young man, Mr. Holgrave, my sweetheart should have one of those
flowers in her bosom, though I risked my neck climbing for it! Well,
and did the wind keep you awake last night?"
"It did, indeed!" answered the artist, smiling. "If I were a believer
in ghosts,--and I don't quite know whether I am or not,--I should have
concluded that all the old Pyncheons were running riot in the lower
rooms, especially in Miss Hepzibah's part of the house. But it is very
quiet now."
"Yes, Miss Hepzibah will be apt to over-sleep herself, after being
disturbed, all night, with the racket," said Uncle Venner. "But it
would be odd, now, wouldn't it, if the Judge had taken both his cousins
into the country along with him? I saw him go into the shop yesterday."
"At what hour?" inquired Holgrave.
"Oh, along in the forenoon," said the old man. "Well, well! I must go
my rounds, and so must my wheelbarrow. But I'll be back here at
dinner-time; for my pig likes a dinner as well as a breakfast. No
meal-time, and no sort of victuals, ever seems to come amiss to my pig.
Good morning to you! And, Mr. Holgrave, if I were a young man, like
you, I'd get one of Alice's Posies, and keep it in water till Phoebe
comes back."
"I have heard," said the daguerreotypist, as he drew in his head, "that
the water of Maule's well suits those flowers best."
Here the conversation ceased, and Uncle Venner went on his way. For
half an hour longer, nothing disturbed the repose of the Seven Gables;
nor was there any visitor, except a carrier-boy, who, as he passed the
front doorstep, threw down one of his newspapers; for Hepzibah, of
late, had regularly taken it in. After a while, there came a fat
woman, making prodigious speed, and stumbling as she ran up the steps
of the shop-door. Her face glowed with fire-heat, and, it being a
pretty warm morning, she bubbled and hissed, as it were, as if all
a-fry with chimney-warmth, and summer-warmth, and the warmth of her own
corpulent velocity. She tried the shop-door; it was fast. She tried
it again, with so angry a jar that the bell tinkled angrily back at her.
"The deuce take Old Maid Pyncheon!" muttered the irascible housewife.
"Think of her pretending to set up a cent-shop, and then lying abed
till noon! These are what she calls gentlefolk's airs, I suppose! But
I'll either start her ladyship, or break the door down!"
She shook it accordingly, and the bell, having a spiteful little temper
of its own, rang obstreperously, making its remonstrances heard,--not,
indeed, by the ears for which they were intended,--but by a good lady
on the opposite side of the street. She opened the window, and
addressed the impatient applicant.
"You'll find nobody there, Mrs. Gubbins."
"But I must and will find somebody here!" cried Mrs. Gubbins,
inflicting another outrage on the bell. "I want a half-pound of pork,
to fry some first-rate flounders for Mr. Gubbins's breakfast; and, lady
or not, Old Maid Pyncheon shall get up and serve me with it!"
"But do hear reason, Mrs. Gubbins!" responded the lady opposite. "She,
and her brother too, have both gone to their cousin's, Judge Pyncheon's
at his country-seat. There's not a soul in the house, but that young
daguerreotype-man that sleeps in the north gable. I saw old Hepzibah
and Clifford go away yesterday; and a queer couple of ducks they were,
paddling through the mud-puddles! They're gone, I'll assure you."
"And how do you know they're gone to the Judge's?" asked Mrs. Gubbins.
"He's a rich man; and there's been a quarrel between him and Hepzibah
this many a day, because he won't give her a living. That's the main
reason of her setting up a cent-shop."
"I know that well enough," said the neighbor. "But they're
gone,--that's one thing certain. And who but a blood relation, that
couldn't help himself, I ask you, would take in that awful-tempered old
maid, and that dreadful Clifford? That's it, you may be sure."
Mrs. Gubbins took her departure, still brimming over with hot wrath
against the absent Hepzibah. For another half-hour, or, perhaps,
considerably more, there was almost as much quiet on the outside of the
house as within. The elm, however, made a pleasant, cheerful, sunny
sigh, responsive to the breeze that was elsewhere imperceptible; a
swarm of insects buzzed merrily under its drooping shadow, and became
specks of light whenever they darted into the sunshine; a locust sang,
once or twice, in some inscrutable seclusion of the tree; and a
solitary little bird, with plumage of pale gold, came and hovered about
Alice's Posies.
At last our small acquaintance, Ned Higgins, trudged up the street, on
his way to school; and happening, for the first time in a fortnight, to
be the possessor of a cent, he could by no means get past the shop-door
of the Seven Gables. But it would not open. Again and again, however,
and half a dozen other agains, with the inexorable pertinacity of a
child intent upon some object important to itself, did he renew his
efforts for admittance. He had, doubtless, set his heart upon an
elephant; or, possibly, with Hamlet, he meant to eat a crocodile. In
response to his more violent attacks, the bell gave, now and then, a
moderate tinkle, but could not be stirred into clamor by any exertion
of the little fellow's childish and tiptoe strength. Holding by the
door-handle, he peeped through a crevice of the curtain, and saw that
the inner door, communicating with the passage towards the parlor, was
closed.
"Miss Pyncheon!" screamed the child, rapping on the window-pane, "I
want an elephant!"
There being no answer to several repetitions of the summons, Ned began
to grow impatient; and his little pot of passion quickly boiling over,
he picked up a stone, with a naughty purpose to fling it through the
window; at the same time blubbering and sputtering with wrath. A
man--one of two who happened to be passing by--caught the urchin's arm.
"What's the trouble, old gentleman?" he asked.
"I want old Hepzibah, or Phoebe, or any of them!" answered Ned,
sobbing. "They won't open the door; and I can't get my elephant!"
"Go to school, you little scamp!" said the man. "There's another
cent-shop round the corner. 'T is very strange, Dixey," added he to
his companion, "what's become of all these Pyncheon's! Smith, the
livery-stable keeper, tells me Judge Pyncheon put his horse up
yesterday, to stand till after dinner, and has not taken him away yet.
And one of the Judge's hired men has been in, this morning, to make
inquiry about him. He's a kind of person, they say, that seldom breaks
his habits, or stays out o' nights."
"Oh, he'll turn up safe enough!" said Dixey. "And as for Old Maid
Pyncheon, take my word for it, she has run in debt, and gone off from
her creditors. I foretold, you remember, the first morning she set up
shop, that her devilish scowl would frighten away customers. They
couldn't stand it!"
"I never thought she'd make it go," remarked his friend. "This
business of cent-shops is overdone among the women-folks. My wife
tried it, and lost five dollars on her outlay!"
"Poor business!" said Dixey, shaking his head. "Poor business!"
In the course of the morning, there were various other attempts to open
a communication with the supposed inhabitants of this silent and
impenetrable mansion. The man of root-beer came, in his neatly painted
wagon, with a couple of dozen full bottles, to be exchanged for empty
ones; the baker, with a lot of crackers which Hepzibah had ordered for
her retail custom; the butcher, with a nice titbit which he fancied she
would be eager to secure for Clifford. Had any observer of these
proceedings been aware of the fearful secret hidden within the house,
it would have affected him with a singular shape and modification of
horror, to see the current of human life making this small eddy
hereabouts,--whirling sticks, straws and all such trifles, round and
round, right over the black depth where a dead corpse lay unseen!
The butcher was so much in earnest with his sweetbread of lamb, or
whatever the dainty might be, that he tried every accessible door of
the Seven Gables, and at length came round again to the shop, where he
ordinarily found admittance.
"It's a nice article, and I know the old lady would jump at it," said
he to himself. "She can't be gone away! In fifteen years that I have
driven my cart through Pyncheon Street, I've never known her to be away
from home; though often enough, to be sure, a man might knock all day
without bringing her to the door. But that was when she'd only herself
to provide for."
Peeping through the same crevice of the curtain where, only a little
while before, the urchin of elephantine appetite had peeped, the
butcher beheld the inner door, not closed, as the child had seen it,
but ajar, and almost wide open. However it might have happened, it was
the fact. Through the passage-way there was a dark vista into the
lighter but still obscure interior of the parlor. It appeared to the
butcher that he could pretty clearly discern what seemed to be the
stalwart legs, clad in black pantaloons, of a man sitting in a large
oaken chair, the back of which concealed all the remainder of his
figure. This contemptuous tranquillity on the part of an occupant of
the house, in response to the butcher's indefatigable efforts to
attract notice, so piqued the man of flesh that he determined to
withdraw.
"So," thought he, "there sits Old Maid Pyncheon's bloody brother, while
I've been giving myself all this trouble! Why, if a hog hadn't more
manners, I'd stick him! I call it demeaning a man's business to trade
with such people; and from this time forth, if they want a sausage or
an ounce of liver, they shall run after the cart for it!"
He tossed the titbit angrily into his cart, and drove off in a pet.
Not a great while afterwards there was a sound of music turning the
corner and approaching down the street, with several intervals of
silence, and then a renewed and nearer outbreak of brisk melody. A mob
of children was seen moving onward, or stopping, in unison with the
sound, which appeared to proceed from the centre of the throng; so that
they were loosely bound together by slender strains of harmony, and
drawn along captive; with ever and anon an accession of some little
fellow in an apron and straw-hat, capering forth from door or gateway.
Arriving under the shadow of the Pyncheon Elm, it proved to be the
Italian boy, who, with his monkey and show of puppets, had once before
played his hurdy-gurdy beneath the arched window. The pleasant face of
Phoebe--and doubtless, too, the liberal recompense which she had flung
him--still dwelt in his remembrance. His expressive features kindled
up, as he recognized the spot where this trifling incident of his
erratic life had chanced. He entered the neglected yard (now wilder
than ever, with its growth of hog-weed and burdock), stationed himself
on the doorstep of the main entrance, and, opening his show-box, began
to play. Each individual of the automatic community forthwith set to
work, according to his or her proper vocation: the monkey, taking off
his Highland bonnet, bowed and scraped to the by-standers most
obsequiously, with ever an observant eye to pick up a stray cent; and
the young foreigner himself, as he turned the crank of his machine,
glanced upward to the arched window, expectant of a presence that would
make his music the livelier and sweeter. The throng of children stood
near; some on the sidewalk; some within the yard; two or three
establishing themselves on the very door-step; and one squatting on the
threshold. Meanwhile, the locust kept singing in the great old
Pyncheon Elm.
"I don't hear anybody in the house," said one of the children to
another. "The monkey won't pick up anything here."
"There is somebody at home," affirmed the urchin on the threshold. "I
heard a step!"
Still the young Italian's eye turned sidelong upward; and it really
seemed as if the touch of genuine, though slight and almost playful,
emotion communicated a juicier sweetness to the dry, mechanical process
of his minstrelsy. These wanderers are readily responsive to any
natural kindness--be it no more than a smile, or a word itself not
understood, but only a warmth in it--which befalls them on the roadside
of life. They remember these things, because they are the little
enchantments which, for the instant,--for the space that reflects a
landscape in a soap-bubble,--build up a home about them. Therefore,
the Italian boy would not be discouraged by the heavy silence with
which the old house seemed resolute to clog the vivacity of his
instrument. He persisted in his melodious appeals; he still looked
upward, trusting that his dark, alien countenance would soon be
brightened by Phoebe's sunny aspect. Neither could he be willing to
depart without again beholding Clifford, whose sensibility, like
Phoebe's smile, had talked a kind of heart's language to the foreigner.
He repeated all his music over and over again, until his auditors were
getting weary. So were the little wooden people in his show-box, and
the monkey most of all. There was no response, save the singing of the
locust.
"No children live in this house," said a schoolboy, at last. "Nobody
lives here but an old maid and an old man. You'll get nothing here!
Why don't you go along?"
"You fool, you, why do you tell him?" whispered a shrewd little Yankee,
caring nothing for the music, but a good deal for the cheap rate at
which it was had. "Let him play as he likes! If there's nobody to pay
him, that's his own lookout!"
Once more, however, the Italian ran over his round of melodies. To the
common observer--who could understand nothing of the case, except the
music and the sunshine on the hither side of the door--it might have
been amusing to watch the pertinacity of the street-performer. Will he
succeed at last? Will that stubborn door be suddenly flung open? Will a
group of joyous children, the young ones of the house, come dancing,
shouting, laughing, into the open air, and cluster round the show-box,
looking with eager merriment at the puppets, and tossing each a copper
for long-tailed Mammon, the monkey, to pick up?
But to us, who know the inner heart of the Seven Gables as well as its
exterior face, there is a ghastly effect in this repetition of light
popular tunes at its door-step. It would be an ugly business, indeed,
if Judge Pyncheon (who would not have cared a fig for Paganini's fiddle
in his most harmonious mood) should make his appearance at the door,
with a bloody shirt-bosom, and a grim frown on his swarthily white
visage, and motion the foreign vagabond away! Was ever before such a
grinding out of jigs and waltzes, where nobody was in the cue to dance?
Yes, very often. This contrast, or intermingling of tragedy with mirth,
happens daily, hourly, momently. The gloomy and desolate old house,
deserted of life, and with awful Death sitting sternly in its solitude,
was the emblem of many a human heart, which, nevertheless, is compelled
to hear the thrill and echo of the world's gayety around it.
Before the conclusion of the Italian's performance, a couple of men
happened to be passing, On their way to dinner. "I say, you young
French fellow!" called out one of them,--"come away from that doorstep,
and go somewhere else with your nonsense! The Pyncheon family live
there; and they are in great trouble, just about this time. They don't
feel musical to-day. It is reported all over town that Judge Pyncheon,
who owns the house, has been murdered; and the city marshal is going to
look into the matter. So be off with you, at once!"
As the Italian shouldered his hurdy-gurdy, he saw on the doorstep a
card, which had been covered, all the morning, by the newspaper that
the carrier had flung upon it, but was now shuffled into sight. He
picked it up, and perceiving something written in pencil, gave it to
the man to read. In fact, it was an engraved card of Judge Pyncheon's
with certain pencilled memoranda on the back, referring to various
businesses which it had been his purpose to transact during the
preceding day. It formed a prospective epitome of the day's history;
only that affairs had not turned out altogether in accordance with the
programme. The card must have been lost from the Judge's vest-pocket
in his preliminary attempt to gain access by the main entrance of the
house. Though well soaked with rain, it was still partially legible.
"Look here; Dixey!" cried the man. "This has something to do with
Judge Pyncheon. See!--here's his name printed on it; and here, I
suppose, is some of his handwriting."
"Let's go to the city marshal with it!" said Dixey. "It may give him
just the clew he wants. After all," whispered he in his companion's
ear, "it would be no wonder if the Judge has gone into that door and
never come out again! A certain cousin of his may have been at his old
tricks. And Old Maid Pyncheon having got herself in debt by the
cent-shop,--and the Judge's pocket-book being well filled,--and bad
blood amongst them already! Put all these things together and see what
they make!"
"Hush, hush!" whispered the other. "It seems like a sin to be the
first to speak of such a thing. But I think, with you, that we had
better go to the city marshal."
"Yes, yes!" said Dixey. "Well!--I always said there was something
devilish in that woman's scowl!"
The men wheeled about, accordingly, and retraced their steps up the
street. The Italian, also, made the best of his way off, with a
parting glance up at the arched window. As for the children, they took
to their heels, with one accord, and scampered as if some giant or ogre
were in pursuit, until, at a good distance from the house, they stopped
as suddenly and simultaneously as they had set out. Their susceptible
nerves took an indefinite alarm from what they had overheard. Looking
back at the grotesque peaks and shadowy angles of the old mansion, they
fancied a gloom diffused about it which no brightness of the sunshine
could dispel. An imaginary Hepzibah scowled and shook her finger at
them, from several windows at the same moment. An imaginary
Clifford--for (and it would have deeply wounded him to know it) he had
always been a horror to these small people--stood behind the unreal
Hepzibah, making awful gestures, in a faded dressing-gown. Children
are even more apt, if possible, than grown people, to catch the
contagion of a panic terror. For the rest of the day, the more timid
went whole streets about, for the sake of avoiding the Seven Gables;
while the bolder signalized their hardihood by challenging their
comrades to race past the mansion at full speed.
It could not have been more than half an hour after the disappearance
of the Italian boy, with his unseasonable melodies, when a cab drove
down the street. It stopped beneath the Pyncheon Elm; the cabman took
a trunk, a canvas bag, and a bandbox, from the top of his vehicle, and
deposited them on the doorstep of the old house; a straw bonnet, and
then the pretty figure of a young girl, came into view from the
interior of the cab. It was Phoebe! Though not altogether so blooming
as when she first tripped into our story,--for, in the few intervening
weeks, her experiences had made her graver, more womanly, and
deeper-eyed, in token of a heart that had begun to suspect its
depths,--still there was the quiet glow of natural sunshine over her.
Neither had she forfeited her proper gift of making things look real,
rather than fantastic, within her sphere. Yet we feel it to be a
questionable venture, even for Phoebe, at this juncture, to cross the
threshold of the Seven Gables. Is her healthful presence potent enough
to chase away the crowd of pale, hideous, and sinful phantoms, that
have gained admittance there since her departure? Or will she,
likewise, fade, sicken, sadden, and grow into deformity, and be only
another pallid phantom, to glide noiselessly up and down the stairs,
and affright children as she pauses at the window?
At least, we would gladly forewarn the unsuspecting girl that there is
nothing in human shape or substance to receive her, unless it be the
figure of Judge Pyncheon, who--wretched spectacle that he is, and
frightful in our remembrance, since our night-long vigil with
him!--still keeps his place in the oaken chair.
Phoebe first tried the shop-door. It did not yield to her hand; and
the white curtain, drawn across the window which formed the upper
section of the door, struck her quick perceptive faculty as something
unusual. Without making another effort to enter here, she betook
herself to the great portal, under the arched window. Finding it
fastened, she knocked. A reverberation came from the emptiness within.
She knocked again, and a third time; and, listening intently, fancied
that the floor creaked, as if Hepzibah were coming, with her ordinary
tiptoe movement, to admit her. But so dead a silence ensued upon this
imaginary sound, that she began to question whether she might not have
mistaken the house, familiar as she thought herself with its exterior.
Her notice was now attracted by a child's voice, at some distance. It
appeared to call her name. Looking in the direction whence it
proceeded, Phoebe saw little Ned Higgins, a good way down the street,
stamping, shaking his head violently, making deprecatory gestures with
both hands, and shouting to her at mouth-wide screech.
"No, no, Phoebe!" he screamed. "Don't you go in! There's something
wicked there! Don't--don't--don't go in!"
But, as the little personage could not be induced to approach near
enough to explain himself, Phoebe concluded that he had been
frightened, on some of his visits to the shop, by her cousin Hepzibah;
for the good lady's manifestations, in truth, ran about an equal chance
of scaring children out of their wits, or compelling them to unseemly
laughter. Still, she felt the more, for this incident, how
unaccountably silent and impenetrable the house had become. As her
next resort, Phoebe made her way into the garden, where on so warm and
bright a day as the present, she had little doubt of finding Clifford,
and perhaps Hepzibah also, idling away the noontide in the shadow of
the arbor. Immediately on her entering the garden gate, the family of
hens half ran, half flew to meet her; while a strange grimalkin, which
was prowling under the parlor window, took to his heels, clambered
hastily over the fence, and vanished. The arbor was vacant, and its
floor, table, and circular bench were still damp, and bestrewn with
twigs and the disarray of the past storm. The growth of the garden
seemed to have got quite out of bounds; the weeds had taken advantage
of Phoebe's absence, and the long-continued rain, to run rampant over
the flowers and kitchen-vegetables. Maule's well had overflowed its
stone border, and made a pool of formidable breadth in that corner of
the garden.
The impression of the whole scene was that of a spot where no human
foot had left its print for many preceding days,--probably not since
Phoebe's departure,--for she saw a side-comb of her own under the table
of the arbor, where it must have fallen on the last afternoon when she
and Clifford sat there.
The girl knew that her two relatives were capable of far greater
oddities than that of shutting themselves up in their old house, as
they appeared now to have done. Nevertheless, with indistinct
misgivings of something amiss, and apprehensions to which she could not
give shape, she approached the door that formed the customary
communication between the house and garden. It was secured within,
like the two which she had already tried. She knocked, however; and
immediately, as if the application had been expected, the door was
drawn open, by a considerable exertion of some unseen person's
strength, not wide, but far enough to afford her a sidelong entrance.
As Hepzibah, in order not to expose herself to inspection from without,
invariably opened a door in this manner, Phoebe necessarily concluded
that it was her cousin who now admitted her.
Without hesitation, therefore, she stepped across the threshold, and
had no sooner entered than the door closed behind her.
| Alice's Posies: Uncle Venner was the first person to stir the day after the storm. He traveled down Pyncheon street, where one mystic branch hung down before the main entrance of the Seven Gables. This golden branch was like the branch that gained Aeneas and the Sibyl admittance into Hades. Uncle Venner observes the posies that remained in the angle between the two front gables, traditionally known as Alice's Posies. Tradition held that Alice brought the seeds for these flowers from Italy. Uncle Venner goes to the house to inquire about Hepzibah, for he wonders why there was not the pan of scraps for his pig that Hepzibah usually sets out. Holgrave greets Uncle Venner. The two of them wonder where Clifford and Hepzibah are, and Uncle Venner presumes that Jaffrey took them into the country. Mrs. Gubbins, an old maid, comes to the shop to complain about how Hepzibah didn't have it open that day. The little boy Ned complains that he can't get gingerbread. Other people wonder why Judge Pyncheon's affairs were not in order. Various people attempt to communicate with the inhabitants of the mansion. The butcher visits the house to make a delivery and looks in the house; he sees the legs of Judge Pyncheon from the door. The Italian boy plays his music in front of the house, expecting to have Clifford watch him. The Italian boy finds Judge Pyncheon's schedule near the door, which he had likely lost the day before. The various townsfolk decide to go to the city marshal, and say that there was always something sinister in Hepzibah's scowl. Not more than a half hour later Phoebe returns to the House of the Seven Gables. Ned Higgins tells her that there is something sinister in the house, but she goes inside with some apprehension. | summary |
UNCLE VENNER, trundling a wheelbarrow, was the earliest person stirring
in the neighborhood the day after the storm.
Pyncheon Street, in front of the House of the Seven Gables, was a far
pleasanter scene than a by-lane, confined by shabby fences, and
bordered with wooden dwellings of the meaner class, could reasonably be
expected to present. Nature made sweet amends, that morning, for the
five unkindly days which had preceded it. It would have been enough to
live for, merely to look up at the wide benediction of the sky, or as
much of it as was visible between the houses, genial once more with
sunshine. Every object was agreeable, whether to be gazed at in the
breadth, or examined more minutely. Such, for example, were the
well-washed pebbles and gravel of the sidewalk; even the sky-reflecting
pools in the centre of the street; and the grass, now freshly verdant,
that crept along the base of the fences, on the other side of which, if
one peeped over, was seen the multifarious growth of gardens.
Vegetable productions, of whatever kind, seemed more than negatively
happy, in the juicy warmth and abundance of their life. The Pyncheon
Elm, throughout its great circumference, was all alive, and full of the
morning sun and a sweet-tempered little breeze, which lingered within
this verdant sphere, and set a thousand leafy tongues a-whispering all
at once. This aged tree appeared to have suffered nothing from the
gale. It had kept its boughs unshattered, and its full complement of
leaves; and the whole in perfect verdure, except a single branch, that,
by the earlier change with which the elm-tree sometimes prophesies the
autumn, had been transmuted to bright gold. It was like the golden
branch that gained Aeneas and the Sibyl admittance into Hades.
This one mystic branch hung down before the main entrance of the Seven
Gables, so nigh the ground that any passer-by might have stood on
tiptoe and plucked it off. Presented at the door, it would have been a
symbol of his right to enter, and be made acquainted with all the
secrets of the house. So little faith is due to external appearance,
that there was really an inviting aspect over the venerable edifice,
conveying an idea that its history must be a decorous and happy one,
and such as would be delightful for a fireside tale. Its windows
gleamed cheerfully in the slanting sunlight. The lines and tufts of
green moss, here and there, seemed pledges of familiarity and
sisterhood with Nature; as if this human dwelling-place, being of such
old date, had established its prescriptive title among primeval oaks
and whatever other objects, by virtue of their long continuance, have
acquired a gracious right to be. A person of imaginative temperament,
while passing by the house, would turn, once and again, and peruse it
well: its many peaks, consenting together in the clustered chimney;
the deep projection over its basement-story; the arched window,
imparting a look, if not of grandeur, yet of antique gentility, to the
broken portal over which it opened; the luxuriance of gigantic
burdocks, near the threshold; he would note all these characteristics,
and be conscious of something deeper than he saw. He would conceive
the mansion to have been the residence of the stubborn old Puritan,
Integrity, who, dying in some forgotten generation, had left a blessing
in all its rooms and chambers, the efficacy of which was to be seen in
the religion, honesty, moderate competence, or upright poverty and
solid happiness, of his descendants, to this day.
One object, above all others, would take root in the imaginative
observer's memory. It was the great tuft of flowers,--weeds, you would
have called them, only a week ago,--the tuft of crimson-spotted
flowers, in the angle between the two front gables. The old people used
to give them the name of Alice's Posies, in remembrance of fair Alice
Pyncheon, who was believed to have brought their seeds from Italy.
They were flaunting in rich beauty and full bloom to-day, and seemed,
as it were, a mystic expression that something within the house was
consummated.
It was but little after sunrise, when Uncle Venner made his appearance,
as aforesaid, impelling a wheelbarrow along the street. He was going
his matutinal rounds to collect cabbage-leaves, turnip-tops,
potato-skins, and the miscellaneous refuse of the dinner-pot, which the
thrifty housewives of the neighborhood were accustomed to put aside, as
fit only to feed a pig. Uncle Venner's pig was fed entirely, and kept
in prime order, on these eleemosynary contributions; insomuch that the
patched philosopher used to promise that, before retiring to his farm,
he would make a feast of the portly grunter, and invite all his
neighbors to partake of the joints and spare-ribs which they had helped
to fatten. Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon's housekeeping had so greatly
improved, since Clifford became a member of the family, that her share
of the banquet would have been no lean one; and Uncle Venner,
accordingly, was a good deal disappointed not to find the large earthen
pan, full of fragmentary eatables, that ordinarily awaited his coming
at the back doorstep of the Seven Gables.
"I never knew Miss Hepzibah so forgetful before," said the patriarch to
himself. "She must have had a dinner yesterday,--no question of that!
She always has one, nowadays. So where's the pot-liquor and
potato-skins, I ask? Shall I knock, and see if she's stirring yet? No,
no,--'t won't do! If little Phoebe was about the house, I should not
mind knocking; but Miss Hepzibah, likely as not, would scowl down at me
out of the window, and look cross, even if she felt pleasantly. So,
I'll come back at noon."
With these reflections, the old man was shutting the gate of the little
back-yard. Creaking on its hinges, however, like every other gate and
door about the premises, the sound reached the ears of the occupant of
the northern gable, one of the windows of which had a side-view towards
the gate.
"Good-morning, Uncle Venner!" said the daguerreotypist, leaning out of
the window. "Do you hear nobody stirring?"
"Not a soul," said the man of patches. "But that's no wonder. 'Tis
barely half an hour past sunrise, yet. But I'm really glad to see you,
Mr. Holgrave! There's a strange, lonesome look about this side of the
house; so that my heart misgave me, somehow or other, and I felt as if
there was nobody alive in it. The front of the house looks a good deal
cheerier; and Alice's Posies are blooming there beautifully; and if I
were a young man, Mr. Holgrave, my sweetheart should have one of those
flowers in her bosom, though I risked my neck climbing for it! Well,
and did the wind keep you awake last night?"
"It did, indeed!" answered the artist, smiling. "If I were a believer
in ghosts,--and I don't quite know whether I am or not,--I should have
concluded that all the old Pyncheons were running riot in the lower
rooms, especially in Miss Hepzibah's part of the house. But it is very
quiet now."
"Yes, Miss Hepzibah will be apt to over-sleep herself, after being
disturbed, all night, with the racket," said Uncle Venner. "But it
would be odd, now, wouldn't it, if the Judge had taken both his cousins
into the country along with him? I saw him go into the shop yesterday."
"At what hour?" inquired Holgrave.
"Oh, along in the forenoon," said the old man. "Well, well! I must go
my rounds, and so must my wheelbarrow. But I'll be back here at
dinner-time; for my pig likes a dinner as well as a breakfast. No
meal-time, and no sort of victuals, ever seems to come amiss to my pig.
Good morning to you! And, Mr. Holgrave, if I were a young man, like
you, I'd get one of Alice's Posies, and keep it in water till Phoebe
comes back."
"I have heard," said the daguerreotypist, as he drew in his head, "that
the water of Maule's well suits those flowers best."
Here the conversation ceased, and Uncle Venner went on his way. For
half an hour longer, nothing disturbed the repose of the Seven Gables;
nor was there any visitor, except a carrier-boy, who, as he passed the
front doorstep, threw down one of his newspapers; for Hepzibah, of
late, had regularly taken it in. After a while, there came a fat
woman, making prodigious speed, and stumbling as she ran up the steps
of the shop-door. Her face glowed with fire-heat, and, it being a
pretty warm morning, she bubbled and hissed, as it were, as if all
a-fry with chimney-warmth, and summer-warmth, and the warmth of her own
corpulent velocity. She tried the shop-door; it was fast. She tried
it again, with so angry a jar that the bell tinkled angrily back at her.
"The deuce take Old Maid Pyncheon!" muttered the irascible housewife.
"Think of her pretending to set up a cent-shop, and then lying abed
till noon! These are what she calls gentlefolk's airs, I suppose! But
I'll either start her ladyship, or break the door down!"
She shook it accordingly, and the bell, having a spiteful little temper
of its own, rang obstreperously, making its remonstrances heard,--not,
indeed, by the ears for which they were intended,--but by a good lady
on the opposite side of the street. She opened the window, and
addressed the impatient applicant.
"You'll find nobody there, Mrs. Gubbins."
"But I must and will find somebody here!" cried Mrs. Gubbins,
inflicting another outrage on the bell. "I want a half-pound of pork,
to fry some first-rate flounders for Mr. Gubbins's breakfast; and, lady
or not, Old Maid Pyncheon shall get up and serve me with it!"
"But do hear reason, Mrs. Gubbins!" responded the lady opposite. "She,
and her brother too, have both gone to their cousin's, Judge Pyncheon's
at his country-seat. There's not a soul in the house, but that young
daguerreotype-man that sleeps in the north gable. I saw old Hepzibah
and Clifford go away yesterday; and a queer couple of ducks they were,
paddling through the mud-puddles! They're gone, I'll assure you."
"And how do you know they're gone to the Judge's?" asked Mrs. Gubbins.
"He's a rich man; and there's been a quarrel between him and Hepzibah
this many a day, because he won't give her a living. That's the main
reason of her setting up a cent-shop."
"I know that well enough," said the neighbor. "But they're
gone,--that's one thing certain. And who but a blood relation, that
couldn't help himself, I ask you, would take in that awful-tempered old
maid, and that dreadful Clifford? That's it, you may be sure."
Mrs. Gubbins took her departure, still brimming over with hot wrath
against the absent Hepzibah. For another half-hour, or, perhaps,
considerably more, there was almost as much quiet on the outside of the
house as within. The elm, however, made a pleasant, cheerful, sunny
sigh, responsive to the breeze that was elsewhere imperceptible; a
swarm of insects buzzed merrily under its drooping shadow, and became
specks of light whenever they darted into the sunshine; a locust sang,
once or twice, in some inscrutable seclusion of the tree; and a
solitary little bird, with plumage of pale gold, came and hovered about
Alice's Posies.
At last our small acquaintance, Ned Higgins, trudged up the street, on
his way to school; and happening, for the first time in a fortnight, to
be the possessor of a cent, he could by no means get past the shop-door
of the Seven Gables. But it would not open. Again and again, however,
and half a dozen other agains, with the inexorable pertinacity of a
child intent upon some object important to itself, did he renew his
efforts for admittance. He had, doubtless, set his heart upon an
elephant; or, possibly, with Hamlet, he meant to eat a crocodile. In
response to his more violent attacks, the bell gave, now and then, a
moderate tinkle, but could not be stirred into clamor by any exertion
of the little fellow's childish and tiptoe strength. Holding by the
door-handle, he peeped through a crevice of the curtain, and saw that
the inner door, communicating with the passage towards the parlor, was
closed.
"Miss Pyncheon!" screamed the child, rapping on the window-pane, "I
want an elephant!"
There being no answer to several repetitions of the summons, Ned began
to grow impatient; and his little pot of passion quickly boiling over,
he picked up a stone, with a naughty purpose to fling it through the
window; at the same time blubbering and sputtering with wrath. A
man--one of two who happened to be passing by--caught the urchin's arm.
"What's the trouble, old gentleman?" he asked.
"I want old Hepzibah, or Phoebe, or any of them!" answered Ned,
sobbing. "They won't open the door; and I can't get my elephant!"
"Go to school, you little scamp!" said the man. "There's another
cent-shop round the corner. 'T is very strange, Dixey," added he to
his companion, "what's become of all these Pyncheon's! Smith, the
livery-stable keeper, tells me Judge Pyncheon put his horse up
yesterday, to stand till after dinner, and has not taken him away yet.
And one of the Judge's hired men has been in, this morning, to make
inquiry about him. He's a kind of person, they say, that seldom breaks
his habits, or stays out o' nights."
"Oh, he'll turn up safe enough!" said Dixey. "And as for Old Maid
Pyncheon, take my word for it, she has run in debt, and gone off from
her creditors. I foretold, you remember, the first morning she set up
shop, that her devilish scowl would frighten away customers. They
couldn't stand it!"
"I never thought she'd make it go," remarked his friend. "This
business of cent-shops is overdone among the women-folks. My wife
tried it, and lost five dollars on her outlay!"
"Poor business!" said Dixey, shaking his head. "Poor business!"
In the course of the morning, there were various other attempts to open
a communication with the supposed inhabitants of this silent and
impenetrable mansion. The man of root-beer came, in his neatly painted
wagon, with a couple of dozen full bottles, to be exchanged for empty
ones; the baker, with a lot of crackers which Hepzibah had ordered for
her retail custom; the butcher, with a nice titbit which he fancied she
would be eager to secure for Clifford. Had any observer of these
proceedings been aware of the fearful secret hidden within the house,
it would have affected him with a singular shape and modification of
horror, to see the current of human life making this small eddy
hereabouts,--whirling sticks, straws and all such trifles, round and
round, right over the black depth where a dead corpse lay unseen!
The butcher was so much in earnest with his sweetbread of lamb, or
whatever the dainty might be, that he tried every accessible door of
the Seven Gables, and at length came round again to the shop, where he
ordinarily found admittance.
"It's a nice article, and I know the old lady would jump at it," said
he to himself. "She can't be gone away! In fifteen years that I have
driven my cart through Pyncheon Street, I've never known her to be away
from home; though often enough, to be sure, a man might knock all day
without bringing her to the door. But that was when she'd only herself
to provide for."
Peeping through the same crevice of the curtain where, only a little
while before, the urchin of elephantine appetite had peeped, the
butcher beheld the inner door, not closed, as the child had seen it,
but ajar, and almost wide open. However it might have happened, it was
the fact. Through the passage-way there was a dark vista into the
lighter but still obscure interior of the parlor. It appeared to the
butcher that he could pretty clearly discern what seemed to be the
stalwart legs, clad in black pantaloons, of a man sitting in a large
oaken chair, the back of which concealed all the remainder of his
figure. This contemptuous tranquillity on the part of an occupant of
the house, in response to the butcher's indefatigable efforts to
attract notice, so piqued the man of flesh that he determined to
withdraw.
"So," thought he, "there sits Old Maid Pyncheon's bloody brother, while
I've been giving myself all this trouble! Why, if a hog hadn't more
manners, I'd stick him! I call it demeaning a man's business to trade
with such people; and from this time forth, if they want a sausage or
an ounce of liver, they shall run after the cart for it!"
He tossed the titbit angrily into his cart, and drove off in a pet.
Not a great while afterwards there was a sound of music turning the
corner and approaching down the street, with several intervals of
silence, and then a renewed and nearer outbreak of brisk melody. A mob
of children was seen moving onward, or stopping, in unison with the
sound, which appeared to proceed from the centre of the throng; so that
they were loosely bound together by slender strains of harmony, and
drawn along captive; with ever and anon an accession of some little
fellow in an apron and straw-hat, capering forth from door or gateway.
Arriving under the shadow of the Pyncheon Elm, it proved to be the
Italian boy, who, with his monkey and show of puppets, had once before
played his hurdy-gurdy beneath the arched window. The pleasant face of
Phoebe--and doubtless, too, the liberal recompense which she had flung
him--still dwelt in his remembrance. His expressive features kindled
up, as he recognized the spot where this trifling incident of his
erratic life had chanced. He entered the neglected yard (now wilder
than ever, with its growth of hog-weed and burdock), stationed himself
on the doorstep of the main entrance, and, opening his show-box, began
to play. Each individual of the automatic community forthwith set to
work, according to his or her proper vocation: the monkey, taking off
his Highland bonnet, bowed and scraped to the by-standers most
obsequiously, with ever an observant eye to pick up a stray cent; and
the young foreigner himself, as he turned the crank of his machine,
glanced upward to the arched window, expectant of a presence that would
make his music the livelier and sweeter. The throng of children stood
near; some on the sidewalk; some within the yard; two or three
establishing themselves on the very door-step; and one squatting on the
threshold. Meanwhile, the locust kept singing in the great old
Pyncheon Elm.
"I don't hear anybody in the house," said one of the children to
another. "The monkey won't pick up anything here."
"There is somebody at home," affirmed the urchin on the threshold. "I
heard a step!"
Still the young Italian's eye turned sidelong upward; and it really
seemed as if the touch of genuine, though slight and almost playful,
emotion communicated a juicier sweetness to the dry, mechanical process
of his minstrelsy. These wanderers are readily responsive to any
natural kindness--be it no more than a smile, or a word itself not
understood, but only a warmth in it--which befalls them on the roadside
of life. They remember these things, because they are the little
enchantments which, for the instant,--for the space that reflects a
landscape in a soap-bubble,--build up a home about them. Therefore,
the Italian boy would not be discouraged by the heavy silence with
which the old house seemed resolute to clog the vivacity of his
instrument. He persisted in his melodious appeals; he still looked
upward, trusting that his dark, alien countenance would soon be
brightened by Phoebe's sunny aspect. Neither could he be willing to
depart without again beholding Clifford, whose sensibility, like
Phoebe's smile, had talked a kind of heart's language to the foreigner.
He repeated all his music over and over again, until his auditors were
getting weary. So were the little wooden people in his show-box, and
the monkey most of all. There was no response, save the singing of the
locust.
"No children live in this house," said a schoolboy, at last. "Nobody
lives here but an old maid and an old man. You'll get nothing here!
Why don't you go along?"
"You fool, you, why do you tell him?" whispered a shrewd little Yankee,
caring nothing for the music, but a good deal for the cheap rate at
which it was had. "Let him play as he likes! If there's nobody to pay
him, that's his own lookout!"
Once more, however, the Italian ran over his round of melodies. To the
common observer--who could understand nothing of the case, except the
music and the sunshine on the hither side of the door--it might have
been amusing to watch the pertinacity of the street-performer. Will he
succeed at last? Will that stubborn door be suddenly flung open? Will a
group of joyous children, the young ones of the house, come dancing,
shouting, laughing, into the open air, and cluster round the show-box,
looking with eager merriment at the puppets, and tossing each a copper
for long-tailed Mammon, the monkey, to pick up?
But to us, who know the inner heart of the Seven Gables as well as its
exterior face, there is a ghastly effect in this repetition of light
popular tunes at its door-step. It would be an ugly business, indeed,
if Judge Pyncheon (who would not have cared a fig for Paganini's fiddle
in his most harmonious mood) should make his appearance at the door,
with a bloody shirt-bosom, and a grim frown on his swarthily white
visage, and motion the foreign vagabond away! Was ever before such a
grinding out of jigs and waltzes, where nobody was in the cue to dance?
Yes, very often. This contrast, or intermingling of tragedy with mirth,
happens daily, hourly, momently. The gloomy and desolate old house,
deserted of life, and with awful Death sitting sternly in its solitude,
was the emblem of many a human heart, which, nevertheless, is compelled
to hear the thrill and echo of the world's gayety around it.
Before the conclusion of the Italian's performance, a couple of men
happened to be passing, On their way to dinner. "I say, you young
French fellow!" called out one of them,--"come away from that doorstep,
and go somewhere else with your nonsense! The Pyncheon family live
there; and they are in great trouble, just about this time. They don't
feel musical to-day. It is reported all over town that Judge Pyncheon,
who owns the house, has been murdered; and the city marshal is going to
look into the matter. So be off with you, at once!"
As the Italian shouldered his hurdy-gurdy, he saw on the doorstep a
card, which had been covered, all the morning, by the newspaper that
the carrier had flung upon it, but was now shuffled into sight. He
picked it up, and perceiving something written in pencil, gave it to
the man to read. In fact, it was an engraved card of Judge Pyncheon's
with certain pencilled memoranda on the back, referring to various
businesses which it had been his purpose to transact during the
preceding day. It formed a prospective epitome of the day's history;
only that affairs had not turned out altogether in accordance with the
programme. The card must have been lost from the Judge's vest-pocket
in his preliminary attempt to gain access by the main entrance of the
house. Though well soaked with rain, it was still partially legible.
"Look here; Dixey!" cried the man. "This has something to do with
Judge Pyncheon. See!--here's his name printed on it; and here, I
suppose, is some of his handwriting."
"Let's go to the city marshal with it!" said Dixey. "It may give him
just the clew he wants. After all," whispered he in his companion's
ear, "it would be no wonder if the Judge has gone into that door and
never come out again! A certain cousin of his may have been at his old
tricks. And Old Maid Pyncheon having got herself in debt by the
cent-shop,--and the Judge's pocket-book being well filled,--and bad
blood amongst them already! Put all these things together and see what
they make!"
"Hush, hush!" whispered the other. "It seems like a sin to be the
first to speak of such a thing. But I think, with you, that we had
better go to the city marshal."
"Yes, yes!" said Dixey. "Well!--I always said there was something
devilish in that woman's scowl!"
The men wheeled about, accordingly, and retraced their steps up the
street. The Italian, also, made the best of his way off, with a
parting glance up at the arched window. As for the children, they took
to their heels, with one accord, and scampered as if some giant or ogre
were in pursuit, until, at a good distance from the house, they stopped
as suddenly and simultaneously as they had set out. Their susceptible
nerves took an indefinite alarm from what they had overheard. Looking
back at the grotesque peaks and shadowy angles of the old mansion, they
fancied a gloom diffused about it which no brightness of the sunshine
could dispel. An imaginary Hepzibah scowled and shook her finger at
them, from several windows at the same moment. An imaginary
Clifford--for (and it would have deeply wounded him to know it) he had
always been a horror to these small people--stood behind the unreal
Hepzibah, making awful gestures, in a faded dressing-gown. Children
are even more apt, if possible, than grown people, to catch the
contagion of a panic terror. For the rest of the day, the more timid
went whole streets about, for the sake of avoiding the Seven Gables;
while the bolder signalized their hardihood by challenging their
comrades to race past the mansion at full speed.
It could not have been more than half an hour after the disappearance
of the Italian boy, with his unseasonable melodies, when a cab drove
down the street. It stopped beneath the Pyncheon Elm; the cabman took
a trunk, a canvas bag, and a bandbox, from the top of his vehicle, and
deposited them on the doorstep of the old house; a straw bonnet, and
then the pretty figure of a young girl, came into view from the
interior of the cab. It was Phoebe! Though not altogether so blooming
as when she first tripped into our story,--for, in the few intervening
weeks, her experiences had made her graver, more womanly, and
deeper-eyed, in token of a heart that had begun to suspect its
depths,--still there was the quiet glow of natural sunshine over her.
Neither had she forfeited her proper gift of making things look real,
rather than fantastic, within her sphere. Yet we feel it to be a
questionable venture, even for Phoebe, at this juncture, to cross the
threshold of the Seven Gables. Is her healthful presence potent enough
to chase away the crowd of pale, hideous, and sinful phantoms, that
have gained admittance there since her departure? Or will she,
likewise, fade, sicken, sadden, and grow into deformity, and be only
another pallid phantom, to glide noiselessly up and down the stairs,
and affright children as she pauses at the window?
At least, we would gladly forewarn the unsuspecting girl that there is
nothing in human shape or substance to receive her, unless it be the
figure of Judge Pyncheon, who--wretched spectacle that he is, and
frightful in our remembrance, since our night-long vigil with
him!--still keeps his place in the oaken chair.
Phoebe first tried the shop-door. It did not yield to her hand; and
the white curtain, drawn across the window which formed the upper
section of the door, struck her quick perceptive faculty as something
unusual. Without making another effort to enter here, she betook
herself to the great portal, under the arched window. Finding it
fastened, she knocked. A reverberation came from the emptiness within.
She knocked again, and a third time; and, listening intently, fancied
that the floor creaked, as if Hepzibah were coming, with her ordinary
tiptoe movement, to admit her. But so dead a silence ensued upon this
imaginary sound, that she began to question whether she might not have
mistaken the house, familiar as she thought herself with its exterior.
Her notice was now attracted by a child's voice, at some distance. It
appeared to call her name. Looking in the direction whence it
proceeded, Phoebe saw little Ned Higgins, a good way down the street,
stamping, shaking his head violently, making deprecatory gestures with
both hands, and shouting to her at mouth-wide screech.
"No, no, Phoebe!" he screamed. "Don't you go in! There's something
wicked there! Don't--don't--don't go in!"
But, as the little personage could not be induced to approach near
enough to explain himself, Phoebe concluded that he had been
frightened, on some of his visits to the shop, by her cousin Hepzibah;
for the good lady's manifestations, in truth, ran about an equal chance
of scaring children out of their wits, or compelling them to unseemly
laughter. Still, she felt the more, for this incident, how
unaccountably silent and impenetrable the house had become. As her
next resort, Phoebe made her way into the garden, where on so warm and
bright a day as the present, she had little doubt of finding Clifford,
and perhaps Hepzibah also, idling away the noontide in the shadow of
the arbor. Immediately on her entering the garden gate, the family of
hens half ran, half flew to meet her; while a strange grimalkin, which
was prowling under the parlor window, took to his heels, clambered
hastily over the fence, and vanished. The arbor was vacant, and its
floor, table, and circular bench were still damp, and bestrewn with
twigs and the disarray of the past storm. The growth of the garden
seemed to have got quite out of bounds; the weeds had taken advantage
of Phoebe's absence, and the long-continued rain, to run rampant over
the flowers and kitchen-vegetables. Maule's well had overflowed its
stone border, and made a pool of formidable breadth in that corner of
the garden.
The impression of the whole scene was that of a spot where no human
foot had left its print for many preceding days,--probably not since
Phoebe's departure,--for she saw a side-comb of her own under the table
of the arbor, where it must have fallen on the last afternoon when she
and Clifford sat there.
The girl knew that her two relatives were capable of far greater
oddities than that of shutting themselves up in their old house, as
they appeared now to have done. Nevertheless, with indistinct
misgivings of something amiss, and apprehensions to which she could not
give shape, she approached the door that formed the customary
communication between the house and garden. It was secured within,
like the two which she had already tried. She knocked, however; and
immediately, as if the application had been expected, the door was
drawn open, by a considerable exertion of some unseen person's
strength, not wide, but far enough to afford her a sidelong entrance.
As Hepzibah, in order not to expose herself to inspection from without,
invariably opened a door in this manner, Phoebe necessarily concluded
that it was her cousin who now admitted her.
Without hesitation, therefore, she stepped across the threshold, and
had no sooner entered than the door closed behind her.
| Hawthorne approaches the situations that the Pyncheon family faces from a number of perspectives; in this chapter, he views the Pyncheons from the eyes of the disabled Uncle Venner. Each of the characters selects certain aspects of the Pyncheon family tradition: Jaffrey focused on the lost eastern territory, while Holgrave dwells upon the lurid details of Matthew Maule and the Colonel. Uncle Venner views the Pyncheons from an entirely different perspective; he sees the family history as mythology, as shown by the reference to Aeneas, and remembers the positive stories about Alice Pyncheon. However, most of the townspeople view the Pyncheons in instrumental terms. Even Uncle Venner wonders why Hepzibah has not left scraps for his pig. The other townsfolk have more harsh complaints. Ned Higgins wants only gingerbread from Hepzibah, while Mrs. Gubbins complains that she cannot get good service from Hepzibah. This illustrates the different perspective that the town takes of Hepzibah and Clifford. They live within a commercial, market-oriented society, while Hepzibah and Clifford belong to an altogether different tradition in which dynastic norms apply. Phoebe's return to the house is an unexpected yet propitious event. Her return seems to lack a strong motivation; she comes back from the country without any particular reason, just as she left without any concrete motive. However, her return to the house signals an impending sense of closure, as she prepares to face the family legacy | analysis |
PHOEBE, coming so suddenly from the sunny daylight, was altogether
bedimmed in such density of shadow as lurked in most of the passages of
the old house. She was not at first aware by whom she had been
admitted. Before her eyes had adapted themselves to the obscurity, a
hand grasped her own with a firm but gentle and warm pressure, thus
imparting a welcome which caused her heart to leap and thrill with an
indefinable shiver of enjoyment. She felt herself drawn along, not
towards the parlor, but into a large and unoccupied apartment, which
had formerly been the grand reception-room of the Seven Gables. The
sunshine came freely into all the uncurtained windows of this room, and
fell upon the dusty floor; so that Phoebe now clearly saw--what,
indeed, had been no secret, after the encounter of a warm hand with
hers--that it was not Hepzibah nor Clifford, but Holgrave, to whom she
owed her reception. The subtile, intuitive communication, or, rather,
the vague and formless impression of something to be told, had made her
yield unresistingly to his impulse. Without taking away her hand, she
looked eagerly in his face, not quick to forebode evil, but unavoidably
conscious that the state of the family had changed since her departure,
and therefore anxious for an explanation.
The artist looked paler than ordinary; there was a thoughtful and
severe contraction of his forehead, tracing a deep, vertical line
between the eyebrows. His smile, however, was full of genuine warmth,
and had in it a joy, by far the most vivid expression that Phoebe had
ever witnessed, shining out of the New England reserve with which
Holgrave habitually masked whatever lay near his heart. It was the
look wherewith a man, brooding alone over some fearful object, in a
dreary forest or illimitable desert, would recognize the familiar
aspect of his dearest friend, bringing up all the peaceful ideas that
belong to home, and the gentle current of every-day affairs. And yet,
as he felt the necessity of responding to her look of inquiry, the
smile disappeared.
"I ought not to rejoice that you have come, Phoebe," said he. "We meet
at a strange moment!"
"What has happened!" she exclaimed. "Why is the house so deserted?
Where are Hepzibah and Clifford?"
"Gone! I cannot imagine where they are!" answered Holgrave. "We are
alone in the house!"
"Hepzibah and Clifford gone?" cried Phoebe. "It is not possible! And
why have you brought me into this room, instead of the parlor? Ah,
something terrible has happened! I must run and see!"
"No, no, Phoebe!" said Holgrave holding her back. "It is as I have
told you. They are gone, and I know not whither. A terrible event
has, indeed happened, but not to them, nor, as I undoubtingly believe,
through any agency of theirs. If I read your character rightly,
Phoebe," he continued, fixing his eyes on hers with stern anxiety,
intermixed with tenderness, "gentle as you are, and seeming to have
your sphere among common things, you yet possess remarkable strength.
You have wonderful poise, and a faculty which, when tested, will prove
itself capable of dealing with matters that fall far out of the
ordinary rule."
"Oh, no, I am very weak!" replied Phoebe, trembling. "But tell me what
has happened!"
"You are strong!" persisted Holgrave. "You must be both strong and
wise; for I am all astray, and need your counsel. It may be you can
suggest the one right thing to do!"
"Tell me!--tell me!" said Phoebe, all in a tremble. "It oppresses,--it
terrifies me,--this mystery! Anything else I can bear!"
The artist hesitated. Notwithstanding what he had just said, and most
sincerely, in regard to the self-balancing power with which Phoebe
impressed him, it still seemed almost wicked to bring the awful secret
of yesterday to her knowledge. It was like dragging a hideous shape of
death into the cleanly and cheerful space before a household fire,
where it would present all the uglier aspect, amid the decorousness of
everything about it. Yet it could not be concealed from her; she must
needs know it.
"Phoebe," said he, "do you remember this?" He put into her hand a
daguerreotype; the same that he had shown her at their first interview
in the garden, and which so strikingly brought out the hard and
relentless traits of the original.
"What has this to do with Hepzibah and Clifford?" asked Phoebe, with
impatient surprise that Holgrave should so trifle with her at such a
moment. "It is Judge Pyncheon! You have shown it to me before!"
"But here is the same face, taken within this half-hour" said the
artist, presenting her with another miniature. "I had just finished it
when I heard you at the door."
"This is death!" shuddered Phoebe, turning very pale. "Judge Pyncheon
dead!"
"Such as there represented," said Holgrave, "he sits in the next room.
The Judge is dead, and Clifford and Hepzibah have vanished! I know no
more. All beyond is conjecture. On returning to my solitary chamber,
last evening, I noticed no light, either in the parlor, or Hepzibah's
room, or Clifford's; no stir nor footstep about the house. This
morning, there was the same death-like quiet. From my window, I
overheard the testimony of a neighbor, that your relatives were seen
leaving the house in the midst of yesterday's storm. A rumor reached
me, too, of Judge Pyncheon being missed. A feeling which I cannot
describe--an indefinite sense of some catastrophe, or
consummation--impelled me to make my way into this part of the house,
where I discovered what you see. As a point of evidence that may be
useful to Clifford, and also as a memorial valuable to myself,--for,
Phoebe, there are hereditary reasons that connect me strangely with
that man's fate,--I used the means at my disposal to preserve this
pictorial record of Judge Pyncheon's death."
Even in her agitation, Phoebe could not help remarking the calmness of
Holgrave's demeanor. He appeared, it is true, to feel the whole
awfulness of the Judge's death, yet had received the fact into his mind
without any mixture of surprise, but as an event preordained, happening
inevitably, and so fitting itself into past occurrences that it could
almost have been prophesied.
"Why have you not thrown open the doors, and called in witnesses?"
inquired she with a painful shudder. "It is terrible to be here alone!"
"But Clifford!" suggested the artist. "Clifford and Hepzibah! We must
consider what is best to be done in their behalf. It is a wretched
fatality that they should have disappeared! Their flight will throw the
worst coloring over this event of which it is susceptible. Yet how
easy is the explanation, to those who know them! Bewildered and
terror-stricken by the similarity of this death to a former one, which
was attended with such disastrous consequences to Clifford, they have
had no idea but of removing themselves from the scene. How miserably
unfortunate! Had Hepzibah but shrieked aloud,--had Clifford flung wide
the door, and proclaimed Judge Pyncheon's death,--it would have been,
however awful in itself, an event fruitful of good consequences to
them. As I view it, it would have gone far towards obliterating the
black stain on Clifford's character."
"And how," asked Phoebe, "could any good come from what is so very
dreadful?"
"Because," said the artist, "if the matter can be fairly considered and
candidly interpreted, it must be evident that Judge Pyncheon could not
have come unfairly to his end. This mode of death had been an
idiosyncrasy with his family, for generations past; not often
occurring, indeed, but, when it does occur, usually attacking
individuals about the Judge's time of life, and generally in the
tension of some mental crisis, or, perhaps, in an access of wrath. Old
Maule's prophecy was probably founded on a knowledge of this physical
predisposition in the Pyncheon race. Now, there is a minute and almost
exact similarity in the appearances connected with the death that
occurred yesterday and those recorded of the death of Clifford's uncle
thirty years ago. It is true, there was a certain arrangement of
circumstances, unnecessary to be recounted, which made it possible nay,
as men look at these things, probable, or even certain--that old
Jaffrey Pyncheon came to a violent death, and by Clifford's hands."
"Whence came those circumstances?" exclaimed Phoebe. "He being
innocent, as we know him to be!"
"They were arranged," said Holgrave,--"at least such has long been my
conviction,--they were arranged after the uncle's death, and before it
was made public, by the man who sits in yonder parlor. His own death,
so like that former one, yet attended by none of those suspicious
circumstances, seems the stroke of God upon him, at once a punishment
for his wickedness, and making plain the innocence of Clifford. But
this flight,--it distorts everything! He may be in concealment, near at
hand. Could we but bring him back before the discovery of the Judge's
death, the evil might be rectified."
"We must not hide this thing a moment longer!" said Phoebe. "It is
dreadful to keep it so closely in our hearts. Clifford is innocent.
God will make it manifest! Let us throw open the doors, and call all
the neighborhood to see the truth!"
"You are right, Phoebe," rejoined Holgrave. "Doubtless you are right."
Yet the artist did not feel the horror, which was proper to Phoebe's
sweet and order-loving character, at thus finding herself at issue with
society, and brought in contact with an event that transcended ordinary
rules. Neither was he in haste, like her, to betake himself within the
precincts of common life. On the contrary, he gathered a wild
enjoyment,--as it were, a flower of strange beauty, growing in a
desolate spot, and blossoming in the wind,--such a flower of momentary
happiness he gathered from his present position. It separated Phoebe
and himself from the world, and bound them to each other, by their
exclusive knowledge of Judge Pyncheon's mysterious death, and the
counsel which they were forced to hold respecting it. The secret, so
long as it should continue such, kept them within the circle of a
spell, a solitude in the midst of men, a remoteness as entire as that
of an island in mid-ocean; once divulged, the ocean would flow betwixt
them, standing on its widely sundered shores. Meanwhile, all the
circumstances of their situation seemed to draw them together; they
were like two children who go hand in hand, pressing closely to one
another's side, through a shadow-haunted passage. The image of awful
Death, which filled the house, held them united by his stiffened grasp.
These influences hastened the development of emotions that might not
otherwise have flowered so. Possibly, indeed, it had been Holgrave's
purpose to let them die in their undeveloped germs. "Why do we delay
so?" asked Phoebe. "This secret takes away my breath! Let us throw
open the doors!"
"In all our lives there can never come another moment like this!" said
Holgrave. "Phoebe, is it all terror?--nothing but terror? Are you
conscious of no joy, as I am, that has made this the only point of life
worth living for?"
"It seems a sin," replied Phoebe, trembling, "to think of joy at such a
time!"
"Could you but know, Phoebe, how it was with me the hour before you
came!" exclaimed the artist. "A dark, cold, miserable hour! The
presence of yonder dead man threw a great black shadow over everything;
he made the universe, so far as my perception could reach, a scene of
guilt and of retribution more dreadful than the guilt. The sense of it
took away my youth. I never hoped to feel young again! The world
looked strange, wild, evil, hostile; my past life, so lonesome and
dreary; my future, a shapeless gloom, which I must mould into gloomy
shapes! But, Phoebe, you crossed the threshold; and hope, warmth, and
joy came in with you! The black moment became at once a blissful one.
It must not pass without the spoken word. I love you!"
"How can you love a simple girl like me?" asked Phoebe, compelled by
his earnestness to speak. "You have many, many thoughts, with which I
should try in vain to sympathize. And I,--I, too,--I have tendencies
with which you would sympathize as little. That is less matter. But I
have not scope enough to make you happy."
"You are my only possibility of happiness!" answered Holgrave. "I have
no faith in it, except as you bestow it on me!"
"And then--I am afraid!" continued Phoebe, shrinking towards Holgrave,
even while she told him so frankly the doubts with which he affected
her. "You will lead me out of my own quiet path. You will make me
strive to follow you where it is pathless. I cannot do so. It is not
my nature. I shall sink down and perish!"
"Ah, Phoebe!" exclaimed Holgrave, with almost a sigh, and a smile that
was burdened with thought.
"It will be far otherwise than as you forebode. The world owes all its
onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines
himself within ancient limits. I have a presentiment that, hereafter,
it will be my lot to set out trees, to make fences,--perhaps, even, in
due time, to build a house for another generation,--in a word, to
conform myself to laws and the peaceful practice of society. Your
poise will be more powerful than any oscillating tendency of mine."
"I would not have it so!" said Phoebe earnestly.
"Do you love me?" asked Holgrave. "If we love one another, the moment
has room for nothing more. Let us pause upon it, and be satisfied. Do
you love me, Phoebe?"
"You look into my heart," said she, letting her eyes drop. "You know I
love you!"
And it was in this hour, so full of doubt and awe, that the one miracle
was wrought, without which every human existence is a blank. The bliss
which makes all things true, beautiful, and holy shone around this
youth and maiden. They were conscious of nothing sad nor old. They
transfigured the earth, and made it Eden again, and themselves the two
first dwellers in it. The dead man, so close beside them, was
forgotten. At such a crisis, there is no death; for immortality is
revealed anew, and embraces everything in its hallowed atmosphere.
But how soon the heavy earth-dream settled down again!
"Hark!" whispered Phoebe. "Somebody is at the street door!"
"Now let us meet the world!" said Holgrave. "No doubt, the rumor of
Judge Pyncheon's visit to this house, and the flight of Hepzibah and
Clifford, is about to lead to the investigation of the premises. We
have no way but to meet it. Let us open the door at once."
But, to their surprise, before they could reach the street door,--even
before they quitted the room in which the foregoing interview had
passed,--they heard footsteps in the farther passage. The door,
therefore, which they supposed to be securely locked,--which Holgrave,
indeed, had seen to be so, and at which Phoebe had vainly tried to
enter,--must have been opened from without. The sound of footsteps was
not harsh, bold, decided, and intrusive, as the gait of strangers would
naturally be, making authoritative entrance into a dwelling where they
knew themselves unwelcome. It was feeble, as of persons either weak or
weary; there was the mingled murmur of two voices, familiar to both the
listeners.
"Can it be?" whispered Holgrave.
"It is they!" answered Phoebe. "Thank God!--thank God!"
And then, as if in sympathy with Phoebe's whispered ejaculation, they
heard Hepzibah's voice more distinctly.
"Thank God, my brother, we are at home!"
"Well!--Yes!--thank God!" responded Clifford. "A dreary home,
Hepzibah! But you have done well to bring me hither! Stay! That parlor
door is open. I cannot pass by it! Let me go and rest me in the arbor,
where I used,--oh, very long ago, it seems to me, after what has
befallen us,--where I used to be so happy with little Phoebe!"
But the house was not altogether so dreary as Clifford imagined it.
They had not made many steps,--in truth, they were lingering in the
entry, with the listlessness of an accomplished purpose, uncertain what
to do next,--when Phoebe ran to meet them. On beholding her, Hepzibah
burst into tears. With all her might, she had staggered onward beneath
the burden of grief and responsibility, until now that it was safe to
fling it down. Indeed, she had not energy to fling it down, but had
ceased to uphold it, and suffered it to press her to the earth.
Clifford appeared the stronger of the two.
"It is our own little Phoebe!--Ah! and Holgrave with, her" exclaimed
he, with a glance of keen and delicate insight, and a smile, beautiful,
kind, but melancholy. "I thought of you both, as we came down the
street, and beheld Alice's Posies in full bloom. And so the flower of
Eden has bloomed, likewise, in this old, darksome house to-day."
| The Flower of Eden: Holgrave, looking paler than ordinary, grasps Phoebe's hand. He smiles at her with genuine warmth. He tells her that they are alone in the house: a terrible event has occurred. He shows her a daguerreotype of Judge Pyncheon. He had taken it within the last hour. He tells her that the Judge is dead and the others have vanished. He admits that there are hereditary reasons that connect him strangely with that man's fate and tells her that he has not opened the doors to call in witnesses because it is better for Clifford and Hepzibah. Holgrave believes that Judge Pyncheon could not have come unfairly to his end: there is a physical predisposition among the Pyncheons to die in this way. However, Clifford's uncle died in the same manner thirty years ago, and Clifford would automatically come under suspicion again. His escape further distorts the matter. Holgrave feels some joy at that moment, for he realizes that he loves Phoebe and declares his love for her. There is a knock at the door; Clifford and Hepzibah have returned home. Clifford appears to be the stronger of the two. He says that he thought immediately of Phoebe when he saw Alice's Posies in bloom. He says that the flower of Eden has bloomed likewise in the old house. | summary |
PHOEBE, coming so suddenly from the sunny daylight, was altogether
bedimmed in such density of shadow as lurked in most of the passages of
the old house. She was not at first aware by whom she had been
admitted. Before her eyes had adapted themselves to the obscurity, a
hand grasped her own with a firm but gentle and warm pressure, thus
imparting a welcome which caused her heart to leap and thrill with an
indefinable shiver of enjoyment. She felt herself drawn along, not
towards the parlor, but into a large and unoccupied apartment, which
had formerly been the grand reception-room of the Seven Gables. The
sunshine came freely into all the uncurtained windows of this room, and
fell upon the dusty floor; so that Phoebe now clearly saw--what,
indeed, had been no secret, after the encounter of a warm hand with
hers--that it was not Hepzibah nor Clifford, but Holgrave, to whom she
owed her reception. The subtile, intuitive communication, or, rather,
the vague and formless impression of something to be told, had made her
yield unresistingly to his impulse. Without taking away her hand, she
looked eagerly in his face, not quick to forebode evil, but unavoidably
conscious that the state of the family had changed since her departure,
and therefore anxious for an explanation.
The artist looked paler than ordinary; there was a thoughtful and
severe contraction of his forehead, tracing a deep, vertical line
between the eyebrows. His smile, however, was full of genuine warmth,
and had in it a joy, by far the most vivid expression that Phoebe had
ever witnessed, shining out of the New England reserve with which
Holgrave habitually masked whatever lay near his heart. It was the
look wherewith a man, brooding alone over some fearful object, in a
dreary forest or illimitable desert, would recognize the familiar
aspect of his dearest friend, bringing up all the peaceful ideas that
belong to home, and the gentle current of every-day affairs. And yet,
as he felt the necessity of responding to her look of inquiry, the
smile disappeared.
"I ought not to rejoice that you have come, Phoebe," said he. "We meet
at a strange moment!"
"What has happened!" she exclaimed. "Why is the house so deserted?
Where are Hepzibah and Clifford?"
"Gone! I cannot imagine where they are!" answered Holgrave. "We are
alone in the house!"
"Hepzibah and Clifford gone?" cried Phoebe. "It is not possible! And
why have you brought me into this room, instead of the parlor? Ah,
something terrible has happened! I must run and see!"
"No, no, Phoebe!" said Holgrave holding her back. "It is as I have
told you. They are gone, and I know not whither. A terrible event
has, indeed happened, but not to them, nor, as I undoubtingly believe,
through any agency of theirs. If I read your character rightly,
Phoebe," he continued, fixing his eyes on hers with stern anxiety,
intermixed with tenderness, "gentle as you are, and seeming to have
your sphere among common things, you yet possess remarkable strength.
You have wonderful poise, and a faculty which, when tested, will prove
itself capable of dealing with matters that fall far out of the
ordinary rule."
"Oh, no, I am very weak!" replied Phoebe, trembling. "But tell me what
has happened!"
"You are strong!" persisted Holgrave. "You must be both strong and
wise; for I am all astray, and need your counsel. It may be you can
suggest the one right thing to do!"
"Tell me!--tell me!" said Phoebe, all in a tremble. "It oppresses,--it
terrifies me,--this mystery! Anything else I can bear!"
The artist hesitated. Notwithstanding what he had just said, and most
sincerely, in regard to the self-balancing power with which Phoebe
impressed him, it still seemed almost wicked to bring the awful secret
of yesterday to her knowledge. It was like dragging a hideous shape of
death into the cleanly and cheerful space before a household fire,
where it would present all the uglier aspect, amid the decorousness of
everything about it. Yet it could not be concealed from her; she must
needs know it.
"Phoebe," said he, "do you remember this?" He put into her hand a
daguerreotype; the same that he had shown her at their first interview
in the garden, and which so strikingly brought out the hard and
relentless traits of the original.
"What has this to do with Hepzibah and Clifford?" asked Phoebe, with
impatient surprise that Holgrave should so trifle with her at such a
moment. "It is Judge Pyncheon! You have shown it to me before!"
"But here is the same face, taken within this half-hour" said the
artist, presenting her with another miniature. "I had just finished it
when I heard you at the door."
"This is death!" shuddered Phoebe, turning very pale. "Judge Pyncheon
dead!"
"Such as there represented," said Holgrave, "he sits in the next room.
The Judge is dead, and Clifford and Hepzibah have vanished! I know no
more. All beyond is conjecture. On returning to my solitary chamber,
last evening, I noticed no light, either in the parlor, or Hepzibah's
room, or Clifford's; no stir nor footstep about the house. This
morning, there was the same death-like quiet. From my window, I
overheard the testimony of a neighbor, that your relatives were seen
leaving the house in the midst of yesterday's storm. A rumor reached
me, too, of Judge Pyncheon being missed. A feeling which I cannot
describe--an indefinite sense of some catastrophe, or
consummation--impelled me to make my way into this part of the house,
where I discovered what you see. As a point of evidence that may be
useful to Clifford, and also as a memorial valuable to myself,--for,
Phoebe, there are hereditary reasons that connect me strangely with
that man's fate,--I used the means at my disposal to preserve this
pictorial record of Judge Pyncheon's death."
Even in her agitation, Phoebe could not help remarking the calmness of
Holgrave's demeanor. He appeared, it is true, to feel the whole
awfulness of the Judge's death, yet had received the fact into his mind
without any mixture of surprise, but as an event preordained, happening
inevitably, and so fitting itself into past occurrences that it could
almost have been prophesied.
"Why have you not thrown open the doors, and called in witnesses?"
inquired she with a painful shudder. "It is terrible to be here alone!"
"But Clifford!" suggested the artist. "Clifford and Hepzibah! We must
consider what is best to be done in their behalf. It is a wretched
fatality that they should have disappeared! Their flight will throw the
worst coloring over this event of which it is susceptible. Yet how
easy is the explanation, to those who know them! Bewildered and
terror-stricken by the similarity of this death to a former one, which
was attended with such disastrous consequences to Clifford, they have
had no idea but of removing themselves from the scene. How miserably
unfortunate! Had Hepzibah but shrieked aloud,--had Clifford flung wide
the door, and proclaimed Judge Pyncheon's death,--it would have been,
however awful in itself, an event fruitful of good consequences to
them. As I view it, it would have gone far towards obliterating the
black stain on Clifford's character."
"And how," asked Phoebe, "could any good come from what is so very
dreadful?"
"Because," said the artist, "if the matter can be fairly considered and
candidly interpreted, it must be evident that Judge Pyncheon could not
have come unfairly to his end. This mode of death had been an
idiosyncrasy with his family, for generations past; not often
occurring, indeed, but, when it does occur, usually attacking
individuals about the Judge's time of life, and generally in the
tension of some mental crisis, or, perhaps, in an access of wrath. Old
Maule's prophecy was probably founded on a knowledge of this physical
predisposition in the Pyncheon race. Now, there is a minute and almost
exact similarity in the appearances connected with the death that
occurred yesterday and those recorded of the death of Clifford's uncle
thirty years ago. It is true, there was a certain arrangement of
circumstances, unnecessary to be recounted, which made it possible nay,
as men look at these things, probable, or even certain--that old
Jaffrey Pyncheon came to a violent death, and by Clifford's hands."
"Whence came those circumstances?" exclaimed Phoebe. "He being
innocent, as we know him to be!"
"They were arranged," said Holgrave,--"at least such has long been my
conviction,--they were arranged after the uncle's death, and before it
was made public, by the man who sits in yonder parlor. His own death,
so like that former one, yet attended by none of those suspicious
circumstances, seems the stroke of God upon him, at once a punishment
for his wickedness, and making plain the innocence of Clifford. But
this flight,--it distorts everything! He may be in concealment, near at
hand. Could we but bring him back before the discovery of the Judge's
death, the evil might be rectified."
"We must not hide this thing a moment longer!" said Phoebe. "It is
dreadful to keep it so closely in our hearts. Clifford is innocent.
God will make it manifest! Let us throw open the doors, and call all
the neighborhood to see the truth!"
"You are right, Phoebe," rejoined Holgrave. "Doubtless you are right."
Yet the artist did not feel the horror, which was proper to Phoebe's
sweet and order-loving character, at thus finding herself at issue with
society, and brought in contact with an event that transcended ordinary
rules. Neither was he in haste, like her, to betake himself within the
precincts of common life. On the contrary, he gathered a wild
enjoyment,--as it were, a flower of strange beauty, growing in a
desolate spot, and blossoming in the wind,--such a flower of momentary
happiness he gathered from his present position. It separated Phoebe
and himself from the world, and bound them to each other, by their
exclusive knowledge of Judge Pyncheon's mysterious death, and the
counsel which they were forced to hold respecting it. The secret, so
long as it should continue such, kept them within the circle of a
spell, a solitude in the midst of men, a remoteness as entire as that
of an island in mid-ocean; once divulged, the ocean would flow betwixt
them, standing on its widely sundered shores. Meanwhile, all the
circumstances of their situation seemed to draw them together; they
were like two children who go hand in hand, pressing closely to one
another's side, through a shadow-haunted passage. The image of awful
Death, which filled the house, held them united by his stiffened grasp.
These influences hastened the development of emotions that might not
otherwise have flowered so. Possibly, indeed, it had been Holgrave's
purpose to let them die in their undeveloped germs. "Why do we delay
so?" asked Phoebe. "This secret takes away my breath! Let us throw
open the doors!"
"In all our lives there can never come another moment like this!" said
Holgrave. "Phoebe, is it all terror?--nothing but terror? Are you
conscious of no joy, as I am, that has made this the only point of life
worth living for?"
"It seems a sin," replied Phoebe, trembling, "to think of joy at such a
time!"
"Could you but know, Phoebe, how it was with me the hour before you
came!" exclaimed the artist. "A dark, cold, miserable hour! The
presence of yonder dead man threw a great black shadow over everything;
he made the universe, so far as my perception could reach, a scene of
guilt and of retribution more dreadful than the guilt. The sense of it
took away my youth. I never hoped to feel young again! The world
looked strange, wild, evil, hostile; my past life, so lonesome and
dreary; my future, a shapeless gloom, which I must mould into gloomy
shapes! But, Phoebe, you crossed the threshold; and hope, warmth, and
joy came in with you! The black moment became at once a blissful one.
It must not pass without the spoken word. I love you!"
"How can you love a simple girl like me?" asked Phoebe, compelled by
his earnestness to speak. "You have many, many thoughts, with which I
should try in vain to sympathize. And I,--I, too,--I have tendencies
with which you would sympathize as little. That is less matter. But I
have not scope enough to make you happy."
"You are my only possibility of happiness!" answered Holgrave. "I have
no faith in it, except as you bestow it on me!"
"And then--I am afraid!" continued Phoebe, shrinking towards Holgrave,
even while she told him so frankly the doubts with which he affected
her. "You will lead me out of my own quiet path. You will make me
strive to follow you where it is pathless. I cannot do so. It is not
my nature. I shall sink down and perish!"
"Ah, Phoebe!" exclaimed Holgrave, with almost a sigh, and a smile that
was burdened with thought.
"It will be far otherwise than as you forebode. The world owes all its
onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines
himself within ancient limits. I have a presentiment that, hereafter,
it will be my lot to set out trees, to make fences,--perhaps, even, in
due time, to build a house for another generation,--in a word, to
conform myself to laws and the peaceful practice of society. Your
poise will be more powerful than any oscillating tendency of mine."
"I would not have it so!" said Phoebe earnestly.
"Do you love me?" asked Holgrave. "If we love one another, the moment
has room for nothing more. Let us pause upon it, and be satisfied. Do
you love me, Phoebe?"
"You look into my heart," said she, letting her eyes drop. "You know I
love you!"
And it was in this hour, so full of doubt and awe, that the one miracle
was wrought, without which every human existence is a blank. The bliss
which makes all things true, beautiful, and holy shone around this
youth and maiden. They were conscious of nothing sad nor old. They
transfigured the earth, and made it Eden again, and themselves the two
first dwellers in it. The dead man, so close beside them, was
forgotten. At such a crisis, there is no death; for immortality is
revealed anew, and embraces everything in its hallowed atmosphere.
But how soon the heavy earth-dream settled down again!
"Hark!" whispered Phoebe. "Somebody is at the street door!"
"Now let us meet the world!" said Holgrave. "No doubt, the rumor of
Judge Pyncheon's visit to this house, and the flight of Hepzibah and
Clifford, is about to lead to the investigation of the premises. We
have no way but to meet it. Let us open the door at once."
But, to their surprise, before they could reach the street door,--even
before they quitted the room in which the foregoing interview had
passed,--they heard footsteps in the farther passage. The door,
therefore, which they supposed to be securely locked,--which Holgrave,
indeed, had seen to be so, and at which Phoebe had vainly tried to
enter,--must have been opened from without. The sound of footsteps was
not harsh, bold, decided, and intrusive, as the gait of strangers would
naturally be, making authoritative entrance into a dwelling where they
knew themselves unwelcome. It was feeble, as of persons either weak or
weary; there was the mingled murmur of two voices, familiar to both the
listeners.
"Can it be?" whispered Holgrave.
"It is they!" answered Phoebe. "Thank God!--thank God!"
And then, as if in sympathy with Phoebe's whispered ejaculation, they
heard Hepzibah's voice more distinctly.
"Thank God, my brother, we are at home!"
"Well!--Yes!--thank God!" responded Clifford. "A dreary home,
Hepzibah! But you have done well to bring me hither! Stay! That parlor
door is open. I cannot pass by it! Let me go and rest me in the arbor,
where I used,--oh, very long ago, it seems to me, after what has
befallen us,--where I used to be so happy with little Phoebe!"
But the house was not altogether so dreary as Clifford imagined it.
They had not made many steps,--in truth, they were lingering in the
entry, with the listlessness of an accomplished purpose, uncertain what
to do next,--when Phoebe ran to meet them. On beholding her, Hepzibah
burst into tears. With all her might, she had staggered onward beneath
the burden of grief and responsibility, until now that it was safe to
fling it down. Indeed, she had not energy to fling it down, but had
ceased to uphold it, and suffered it to press her to the earth.
Clifford appeared the stronger of the two.
"It is our own little Phoebe!--Ah! and Holgrave with, her" exclaimed
he, with a glance of keen and delicate insight, and a smile, beautiful,
kind, but melancholy. "I thought of you both, as we came down the
street, and beheld Alice's Posies in full bloom. And so the flower of
Eden has bloomed, likewise, in this old, darksome house to-day."
| Holgrave's behavior toward Phoebe is completely out of character, a romantic overture toward a character to whom he has shown little interest. They fit together primarily because they are the only young characters in the novel. Even the timing of the proposal is strange at best; The pairing of the two characters is a symbolic union, representing a rejuvenation within the House of the Seven Gables and a move to the future instead of the constant obsession with the past. Holgrave explains more about what happened to the Judge. The death of Jaffrey is caused by the same physical affliction that caused the death of Clifford's uncle. It was this death for which Clifford was blamed and sentenced to prison. Since it is now clear that Clifford did not murder either Judge Pyncheon or his uncle, the one question that remains is whether he will be implicated in this second death. His return to the house with Hepzibah allows this question to be settled | analysis |
THE sudden death of so prominent a member of the social world as the
Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a sensation (at least, in the
circles more immediately connected with the deceased) which had hardly
quite subsided in a fortnight.
It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which constitute a
person's biography, there is scarcely one--none, certainly, of anything
like a similar importance--to which the world so easily reconciles
itself as to his death. In most other cases and contingencies, the
individual is present among us, mixed up with the daily revolution of
affairs, and affording a definite point for observation. At his
decease, there is only a vacancy, and a momentary eddy,--very small, as
compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated object,--and a
bubble or two, ascending out of the black depth and bursting at the
surface. As regarded Judge Pyncheon, it seemed probable, at first
blush, that the mode of his final departure might give him a larger and
longer posthumous vogue than ordinarily attends the memory of a
distinguished man. But when it came to be understood, on the highest
professional authority, that the event was a natural, and--except for
some unimportant particulars, denoting a slight idiosyncrasy--by no
means an unusual form of death, the public, with its customary
alacrity, proceeded to forget that he had ever lived. In short, the
honorable Judge was beginning to be a stale subject before half the
country newspapers had found time to put their columns in mourning, and
publish his exceedingly eulogistic obituary.
Nevertheless, creeping darkly through the places which this excellent
person had haunted in his lifetime, there was a hidden stream of
private talk, such as it would have shocked all decency to speak loudly
at the street-corners. It is very singular, how the fact of a man's
death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether
for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and
acting among them. Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes
falsehood, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the
gold, and dishonors the baser metal. Could the departed, whoever he
may be, return in a week after his decease, he would almost invariably
find himself at a higher or lower point than he had formerly occupied,
on the scale of public appreciation. But the talk, or scandal, to
which we now allude, had reference to matters of no less old a date
than the supposed murder, thirty or forty years ago, of the late Judge
Pyncheon's uncle. The medical opinion with regard to his own recent
and regretted decease had almost entirely obviated the idea that a
murder was committed in the former case. Yet, as the record showed,
there were circumstances irrefragably indicating that some person had
gained access to old Jaffrey Pyncheon's private apartments, at or near
the moment of his death. His desk and private drawers, in a room
contiguous to his bedchamber, had been ransacked; money and valuable
articles were missing; there was a bloody hand-print on the old man's
linen; and, by a powerfully welded chain of deductive evidence, the
guilt of the robbery and apparent murder had been fixed on Clifford,
then residing with his uncle in the House of the Seven Gables.
Whencesoever originating, there now arose a theory that undertook so to
account for these circumstances as to exclude the idea of Clifford's
agency. Many persons affirmed that the history and elucidation of the
facts, long so mysterious, had been obtained by the daguerreotypist
from one of those mesmerical seers who, nowadays, so strangely perplex
the aspect of human affairs, and put everybody's natural vision to the
blush, by the marvels which they see with their eyes shut.
According to this version of the story, Judge Pyncheon, exemplary as we
have portrayed him in our narrative, was, in his youth, an apparently
irreclaimable scapegrace. The brutish, the animal instincts, as is
often the case, had been developed earlier than the intellectual
qualities, and the force of character, for which he was afterwards
remarkable. He had shown himself wild, dissipated, addicted to low
pleasures, little short of ruffianly in his propensities, and
recklessly expensive, with no other resources than the bounty of his
uncle. This course of conduct had alienated the old bachelor's
affection, once strongly fixed upon him. Now it is averred,--but
whether on authority available in a court of justice, we do not pretend
to have investigated,--that the young man was tempted by the devil, one
night, to search his uncle's private drawers, to which he had
unsuspected means of access. While thus criminally occupied, he was
startled by the opening of the chamber-door. There stood old Jaffrey
Pyncheon, in his nightclothes! The surprise of such a discovery, his
agitation, alarm, and horror, brought on the crisis of a disorder to
which the old bachelor had an hereditary liability; he seemed to choke
with blood, and fell upon the floor, striking his temple a heavy blow
against the corner of a table. What was to be done? The old man was
surely dead! Assistance would come too late! What a misfortune, indeed,
should it come too soon, since his reviving consciousness would bring
the recollection of the ignominious offence which he had beheld his
nephew in the very act of committing!
But he never did revive. With the cool hardihood that always pertained
to him, the young man continued his search of the drawers, and found a
will, of recent date, in favor of Clifford,--which he destroyed,--and
an older one, in his own favor, which he suffered to remain. But
before retiring, Jaffrey bethought himself of the evidence, in these
ransacked drawers, that some one had visited the chamber with sinister
purposes. Suspicion, unless averted, might fix upon the real offender.
In the very presence of the dead man, therefore, he laid a scheme that
should free himself at the expense of Clifford, his rival, for whose
character he had at once a contempt and a repugnance. It is not
probable, be it said, that he acted with any set purpose of involving
Clifford in a charge of murder. Knowing that his uncle did not die by
violence, it may not have occurred to him, in the hurry of the crisis,
that such an inference might be drawn. But, when the affair took this
darker aspect, Jaffrey's previous steps had already pledged him to
those which remained. So craftily had he arranged the circumstances,
that, at Clifford's trial, his cousin hardly found it necessary to
swear to anything false, but only to withhold the one decisive
explanation, by refraining to state what he had himself done and
witnessed.
Thus Jaffrey Pyncheon's inward criminality, as regarded Clifford, was,
indeed, black and damnable; while its mere outward show and positive
commission was the smallest that could possibly consist with so great a
sin. This is just the sort of guilt that a man of eminent
respectability finds it easiest to dispose of. It was suffered to fade
out of sight or be reckoned a venial matter, in the Honorable Judge
Pyncheon's long subsequent survey of his own life. He shuffled it
aside, among the forgotten and forgiven frailties of his youth, and
seldom thought of it again.
We leave the Judge to his repose. He could not be styled fortunate at
the hour of death. Unknowingly, he was a childless man, while striving
to add more wealth to his only child's inheritance. Hardly a week
after his decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of
the death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheon's son, just at the point of
embarkation for his native land. By this misfortune Clifford became
rich; so did Hepzibah; so did our little village maiden, and, through
her, that sworn foe of wealth and all manner of conservatism,--the wild
reformer,--Holgrave!
It was now far too late in Clifford's life for the good opinion of
society to be worth the trouble and anguish of a formal vindication.
What he needed was the love of a very few; not the admiration, or even
the respect, of the unknown many. The latter might probably have been
won for him, had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had
fallen deemed it advisable to expose Clifford to a miserable
resuscitation of past ideas, when the condition of whatever comfort he
might expect lay in the calm of forgetfulness. After such wrong as he
had suffered, there is no reparation. The pitiable mockery of it,
which the world might have been ready enough to offer, coming so long
after the agony had done its utmost work, would have been fit only to
provoke bitterer laughter than poor Clifford was ever capable of. It
is a truth (and it would be a very sad one but for the higher hopes
which it suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in
our mortal sphere, is ever really set right. Time, the continual
vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of
death, render it impossible. If, after long lapse of years, the right
seems to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in. The better
remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought
his irreparable ruin far behind him.
The shock of Judge Pyncheon's death had a permanently invigorating and
ultimately beneficial effect on Clifford. That strong and ponderous
man had been Clifford's nightmare. There was no free breath to be
drawn, within the sphere of so malevolent an influence. The first
effect of freedom, as we have witnessed in Clifford's aimless flight,
was a tremulous exhilaration. Subsiding from it, he did not sink into
his former intellectual apathy. He never, it is true, attained to
nearly the full measure of what might have been his faculties. But he
recovered enough of them partially to light up his character, to
display some outline of the marvellous grace that was abortive in it,
and to make him the object of no less deep, although less melancholy
interest than heretofore. He was evidently happy. Could we pause to
give another picture of his daily life, with all the appliances now at
command to gratify his instinct for the Beautiful, the garden scenes,
that seemed so sweet to him, would look mean and trivial in comparison.
Very soon after their change of fortune, Clifford, Hepzibah, and little
Phoebe, with the approval of the artist, concluded to remove from the
dismal old House of the Seven Gables, and take up their abode, for the
present, at the elegant country-seat of the late Judge Pyncheon.
Chanticleer and his family had already been transported thither, where
the two hens had forthwith begun an indefatigable process of
egg-laying, with an evident design, as a matter of duty and conscience,
to continue their illustrious breed under better auspices than for a
century past. On the day set for their departure, the principal
personages of our story, including good Uncle Venner, were assembled in
the parlor.
"The country-house is certainly a very fine one, so far as the plan
goes," observed Holgrave, as the party were discussing their future
arrangements. "But I wonder that the late Judge--being so opulent, and
with a reasonable prospect of transmitting his wealth to descendants of
his own--should not have felt the propriety of embodying so excellent a
piece of domestic architecture in stone, rather than in wood. Then,
every generation of the family might have altered the interior, to suit
its own taste and convenience; while the exterior, through the lapse of
years, might have been adding venerableness to its original beauty, and
thus giving that impression of permanence which I consider essential to
the happiness of any one moment."
"Why," cried Phoebe, gazing into the artist's face with infinite
amazement, "how wonderfully your ideas are changed! A house of stone,
indeed! It is but two or three weeks ago that you seemed to wish people
to live in something as fragile and temporary as a bird's-nest!"
"Ah, Phoebe, I told you how it would be!" said the artist, with a
half-melancholy laugh. "You find me a conservative already! Little
did I think ever to become one. It is especially unpardonable in this
dwelling of so much hereditary misfortune, and under the eye of yonder
portrait of a model conservative, who, in that very character, rendered
himself so long the evil destiny of his race."
"That picture!" said Clifford, seeming to shrink from its stern glance.
"Whenever I look at it, there is an old dreamy recollection haunting
me, but keeping just beyond the grasp of my mind. Wealth, it seems to
say!--boundless wealth!--unimaginable wealth! I could fancy that, when
I was a child, or a youth, that portrait had spoken, and told me a rich
secret, or had held forth its hand, with the written record of hidden
opulence. But those old matters are so dim with me, nowadays! What
could this dream have been?"
"Perhaps I can recall it," answered Holgrave. "See! There are a
hundred chances to one that no person, unacquainted with the secret,
would ever touch this spring."
"A secret spring!" cried Clifford. "Ah, I remember now! I did discover
it, one summer afternoon, when I was idling and dreaming about the
house, long, long ago. But the mystery escapes me."
The artist put his finger on the contrivance to which he had referred.
In former days, the effect would probably have been to cause the
picture to start forward. But, in so long a period of concealment, the
machinery had been eaten through with rust; so that at Holgrave's
pressure, the portrait, frame and all, tumbled suddenly from its
position, and lay face downward on the floor. A recess in the wall was
thus brought to light, in which lay an object so covered with a
century's dust that it could not immediately be recognized as a folded
sheet of parchment. Holgrave opened it, and displayed an ancient deed,
signed with the hieroglyphics of several Indian sagamores, and
conveying to Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs, forever, a vast extent of
territory at the Eastward.
"This is the very parchment, the attempt to recover which cost the
beautiful Alice Pyncheon her happiness and life," said the artist,
alluding to his legend. "It is what the Pyncheons sought in vain,
while it was valuable; and now that they find the treasure, it has long
been worthless."
"Poor Cousin Jaffrey! This is what deceived him," exclaimed Hepzibah.
"When they were young together, Clifford probably made a kind of
fairy-tale of this discovery. He was always dreaming hither and
thither about the house, and lighting up its dark corners with
beautiful stories. And poor Jaffrey, who took hold of everything as if
it were real, thought my brother had found out his uncle's wealth. He
died with this delusion in his mind!"
"But," said Phoebe, apart to Holgrave, "how came you to know the
secret?"
"My dearest Phoebe," said Holgrave, "how will it please you to assume
the name of Maule? As for the secret, it is the only inheritance that
has come down to me from my ancestors. You should have known sooner
(only that I was afraid of frightening you away) that, in this long
drama of wrong and retribution, I represent the old wizard, and am
probably as much a wizard as ever he was. The son of the executed
Matthew Maule, while building this house, took the opportunity to
construct that recess, and hide away the Indian deed, on which depended
the immense land-claim of the Pyncheons. Thus they bartered their
eastern territory for Maule's garden-ground."
"And now" said Uncle Venner "I suppose their whole claim is not worth
one man's share in my farm yonder!"
"Uncle Venner," cried Phoebe, taking the patched philosopher's hand,
"you must never talk any more about your farm! You shall never go
there, as long as you live! There is a cottage in our new garden,--the
prettiest little yellowish-brown cottage you ever saw; and the
sweetest-looking place, for it looks just as if it were made of
gingerbread,--and we are going to fit it up and furnish it, on purpose
for you. And you shall do nothing but what you choose, and shall be as
happy as the day is long, and shall keep Cousin Clifford in spirits
with the wisdom and pleasantness which is always dropping from your
lips!"
"Ah! my dear child," quoth good Uncle Venner, quite overcome, "if you
were to speak to a young man as you do to an old one, his chance of
keeping his heart another minute would not be worth one of the buttons
on my waistcoat! And--soul alive!--that great sigh, which you made me
heave, has burst off the very last of them! But, never mind! It was the
happiest sigh I ever did heave; and it seems as if I must have drawn in
a gulp of heavenly breath, to make it with. Well, well, Miss Phoebe!
They'll miss me in the gardens hereabouts, and round by the back doors;
and Pyncheon Street, I'm afraid, will hardly look the same without old
Uncle Venner, who remembers it with a mowing field on one side, and the
garden of the Seven Gables on the other. But either I must go to your
country-seat, or you must come to my farm,--that's one of two things
certain; and I leave you to choose which!"
"Oh, come with us, by all means, Uncle Venner!" said Clifford, who had
a remarkable enjoyment of the old man's mellow, quiet, and simple
spirit. "I want you always to be within five minutes, saunter of my
chair. You are the only philosopher I ever knew of whose wisdom has
not a drop of bitter essence at the bottom!"
"Dear me!" cried Uncle Venner, beginning partly to realize what manner
of man he was. "And yet folks used to set me down among the simple
ones, in my younger days! But I suppose I am like a Roxbury russet,--a
great deal the better, the longer I can be kept. Yes; and my words of
wisdom, that you and Phoebe tell me of, are like the golden dandelions,
which never grow in the hot months, but may be seen glistening among
the withered grass, and under the dry leaves, sometimes as late as
December. And you are welcome, friends, to my mess of dandelions, if
there were twice as many!"
A plain, but handsome, dark-green barouche had now drawn up in front of
the ruinous portal of the old mansion-house. The party came forth, and
(with the exception of good Uncle Venner, who was to follow in a few
days) proceeded to take their places. They were chatting and laughing
very pleasantly together; and--as proves to be often the case, at
moments when we ought to palpitate with sensibility--Clifford and
Hepzibah bade a final farewell to the abode of their forefathers, with
hardly more emotion than if they had made it their arrangement to
return thither at tea-time. Several children were drawn to the spot by
so unusual a spectacle as the barouche and pair of gray horses.
Recognizing little Ned Higgins among them, Hepzibah put her hand into
her pocket, and presented the urchin, her earliest and staunchest
customer, with silver enough to people the Domdaniel cavern of his
interior with as various a procession of quadrupeds as passed into the
ark.
Two men were passing, just as the barouche drove off.
"Well, Dixey," said one of them, "what do you think of this? My wife
kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay.
Old Maid Pyncheon has been in trade just about as long, and rides off
in her carriage with a couple of hundred thousand,--reckoning her
share, and Clifford's, and Phoebe's,--and some say twice as much! If
you choose to call it luck, it is all very well; but if we are to take
it as the will of Providence, why, I can't exactly fathom it!"
"Pretty good business!" quoth the sagacious Dixey,--"pretty good
business!"
Maule's well, all this time, though left in solitude, was throwing up a
succession of kaleidoscopic pictures, in which a gifted eye might have
seen foreshadowed the coming fortunes of Hepzibah and Clifford, and the
descendant of the legendary wizard, and the village maiden, over whom
he had thrown love's web of sorcery. The Pyncheon Elm, moreover, with
what foliage the September gale had spared to it, whispered
unintelligible prophecies. And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from
the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that
sweet Alice Pyncheon--after witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and
this present happiness, of her kindred mortals--had given one farewell
touch of a spirit's joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward
from the HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES!
| The Departure: The sudden death of Judge Pyncheon created a sensation that did not immediately subside. Among the talk of how excellent the judge was lingers a hidden stream of private talk that would shock all decency to speak aloud. Judge Pyncheon was in his youth a wild and brutish man. When he was searching through his uncle's clothes many years before, the old man found him and was startled. He had a stroke and died immediately. Jaffrey found his uncle's will, which favored Clifford, and destroyed it, leaving an older will in his favor. Jaffrey made it appear as if Clifford committed murder. That was Jaffrey's inward criminality. Soon after Jaffrey's death, news arrives that his son died over in Europe. By this misfortune Clifford and Hepzibah became rich. The shock of Judge Pyncheon's death had an invigorating effect on Clifford; the Judge had been a weight on Clifford's psyche. Soon after receiving their inheritance, Clifford, Hepzibah and Phoebe move into the Judge's mansion. Holgrave wonders why the Judge built a house of wood instead of stone, for then he could have passed this house down among the generations. Phoebe remarks how much Holgrave's character has changed. Holgrave finds a recess in the wall behind the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon in which the map and deed to the eastern land has been hidden. Holgrave admits that he knew this because he is actually a Maule, the descendant of the old wizard. Clifford invites Uncle Venner to join them in the Judge's country house. As the Pyncheons leave, two men remark how Hepzibah opened a cent shop and seemingly became rich from it. | summary |
THE sudden death of so prominent a member of the social world as the
Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a sensation (at least, in the
circles more immediately connected with the deceased) which had hardly
quite subsided in a fortnight.
It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which constitute a
person's biography, there is scarcely one--none, certainly, of anything
like a similar importance--to which the world so easily reconciles
itself as to his death. In most other cases and contingencies, the
individual is present among us, mixed up with the daily revolution of
affairs, and affording a definite point for observation. At his
decease, there is only a vacancy, and a momentary eddy,--very small, as
compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated object,--and a
bubble or two, ascending out of the black depth and bursting at the
surface. As regarded Judge Pyncheon, it seemed probable, at first
blush, that the mode of his final departure might give him a larger and
longer posthumous vogue than ordinarily attends the memory of a
distinguished man. But when it came to be understood, on the highest
professional authority, that the event was a natural, and--except for
some unimportant particulars, denoting a slight idiosyncrasy--by no
means an unusual form of death, the public, with its customary
alacrity, proceeded to forget that he had ever lived. In short, the
honorable Judge was beginning to be a stale subject before half the
country newspapers had found time to put their columns in mourning, and
publish his exceedingly eulogistic obituary.
Nevertheless, creeping darkly through the places which this excellent
person had haunted in his lifetime, there was a hidden stream of
private talk, such as it would have shocked all decency to speak loudly
at the street-corners. It is very singular, how the fact of a man's
death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether
for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and
acting among them. Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes
falsehood, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the
gold, and dishonors the baser metal. Could the departed, whoever he
may be, return in a week after his decease, he would almost invariably
find himself at a higher or lower point than he had formerly occupied,
on the scale of public appreciation. But the talk, or scandal, to
which we now allude, had reference to matters of no less old a date
than the supposed murder, thirty or forty years ago, of the late Judge
Pyncheon's uncle. The medical opinion with regard to his own recent
and regretted decease had almost entirely obviated the idea that a
murder was committed in the former case. Yet, as the record showed,
there were circumstances irrefragably indicating that some person had
gained access to old Jaffrey Pyncheon's private apartments, at or near
the moment of his death. His desk and private drawers, in a room
contiguous to his bedchamber, had been ransacked; money and valuable
articles were missing; there was a bloody hand-print on the old man's
linen; and, by a powerfully welded chain of deductive evidence, the
guilt of the robbery and apparent murder had been fixed on Clifford,
then residing with his uncle in the House of the Seven Gables.
Whencesoever originating, there now arose a theory that undertook so to
account for these circumstances as to exclude the idea of Clifford's
agency. Many persons affirmed that the history and elucidation of the
facts, long so mysterious, had been obtained by the daguerreotypist
from one of those mesmerical seers who, nowadays, so strangely perplex
the aspect of human affairs, and put everybody's natural vision to the
blush, by the marvels which they see with their eyes shut.
According to this version of the story, Judge Pyncheon, exemplary as we
have portrayed him in our narrative, was, in his youth, an apparently
irreclaimable scapegrace. The brutish, the animal instincts, as is
often the case, had been developed earlier than the intellectual
qualities, and the force of character, for which he was afterwards
remarkable. He had shown himself wild, dissipated, addicted to low
pleasures, little short of ruffianly in his propensities, and
recklessly expensive, with no other resources than the bounty of his
uncle. This course of conduct had alienated the old bachelor's
affection, once strongly fixed upon him. Now it is averred,--but
whether on authority available in a court of justice, we do not pretend
to have investigated,--that the young man was tempted by the devil, one
night, to search his uncle's private drawers, to which he had
unsuspected means of access. While thus criminally occupied, he was
startled by the opening of the chamber-door. There stood old Jaffrey
Pyncheon, in his nightclothes! The surprise of such a discovery, his
agitation, alarm, and horror, brought on the crisis of a disorder to
which the old bachelor had an hereditary liability; he seemed to choke
with blood, and fell upon the floor, striking his temple a heavy blow
against the corner of a table. What was to be done? The old man was
surely dead! Assistance would come too late! What a misfortune, indeed,
should it come too soon, since his reviving consciousness would bring
the recollection of the ignominious offence which he had beheld his
nephew in the very act of committing!
But he never did revive. With the cool hardihood that always pertained
to him, the young man continued his search of the drawers, and found a
will, of recent date, in favor of Clifford,--which he destroyed,--and
an older one, in his own favor, which he suffered to remain. But
before retiring, Jaffrey bethought himself of the evidence, in these
ransacked drawers, that some one had visited the chamber with sinister
purposes. Suspicion, unless averted, might fix upon the real offender.
In the very presence of the dead man, therefore, he laid a scheme that
should free himself at the expense of Clifford, his rival, for whose
character he had at once a contempt and a repugnance. It is not
probable, be it said, that he acted with any set purpose of involving
Clifford in a charge of murder. Knowing that his uncle did not die by
violence, it may not have occurred to him, in the hurry of the crisis,
that such an inference might be drawn. But, when the affair took this
darker aspect, Jaffrey's previous steps had already pledged him to
those which remained. So craftily had he arranged the circumstances,
that, at Clifford's trial, his cousin hardly found it necessary to
swear to anything false, but only to withhold the one decisive
explanation, by refraining to state what he had himself done and
witnessed.
Thus Jaffrey Pyncheon's inward criminality, as regarded Clifford, was,
indeed, black and damnable; while its mere outward show and positive
commission was the smallest that could possibly consist with so great a
sin. This is just the sort of guilt that a man of eminent
respectability finds it easiest to dispose of. It was suffered to fade
out of sight or be reckoned a venial matter, in the Honorable Judge
Pyncheon's long subsequent survey of his own life. He shuffled it
aside, among the forgotten and forgiven frailties of his youth, and
seldom thought of it again.
We leave the Judge to his repose. He could not be styled fortunate at
the hour of death. Unknowingly, he was a childless man, while striving
to add more wealth to his only child's inheritance. Hardly a week
after his decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of
the death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheon's son, just at the point of
embarkation for his native land. By this misfortune Clifford became
rich; so did Hepzibah; so did our little village maiden, and, through
her, that sworn foe of wealth and all manner of conservatism,--the wild
reformer,--Holgrave!
It was now far too late in Clifford's life for the good opinion of
society to be worth the trouble and anguish of a formal vindication.
What he needed was the love of a very few; not the admiration, or even
the respect, of the unknown many. The latter might probably have been
won for him, had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had
fallen deemed it advisable to expose Clifford to a miserable
resuscitation of past ideas, when the condition of whatever comfort he
might expect lay in the calm of forgetfulness. After such wrong as he
had suffered, there is no reparation. The pitiable mockery of it,
which the world might have been ready enough to offer, coming so long
after the agony had done its utmost work, would have been fit only to
provoke bitterer laughter than poor Clifford was ever capable of. It
is a truth (and it would be a very sad one but for the higher hopes
which it suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in
our mortal sphere, is ever really set right. Time, the continual
vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of
death, render it impossible. If, after long lapse of years, the right
seems to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in. The better
remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought
his irreparable ruin far behind him.
The shock of Judge Pyncheon's death had a permanently invigorating and
ultimately beneficial effect on Clifford. That strong and ponderous
man had been Clifford's nightmare. There was no free breath to be
drawn, within the sphere of so malevolent an influence. The first
effect of freedom, as we have witnessed in Clifford's aimless flight,
was a tremulous exhilaration. Subsiding from it, he did not sink into
his former intellectual apathy. He never, it is true, attained to
nearly the full measure of what might have been his faculties. But he
recovered enough of them partially to light up his character, to
display some outline of the marvellous grace that was abortive in it,
and to make him the object of no less deep, although less melancholy
interest than heretofore. He was evidently happy. Could we pause to
give another picture of his daily life, with all the appliances now at
command to gratify his instinct for the Beautiful, the garden scenes,
that seemed so sweet to him, would look mean and trivial in comparison.
Very soon after their change of fortune, Clifford, Hepzibah, and little
Phoebe, with the approval of the artist, concluded to remove from the
dismal old House of the Seven Gables, and take up their abode, for the
present, at the elegant country-seat of the late Judge Pyncheon.
Chanticleer and his family had already been transported thither, where
the two hens had forthwith begun an indefatigable process of
egg-laying, with an evident design, as a matter of duty and conscience,
to continue their illustrious breed under better auspices than for a
century past. On the day set for their departure, the principal
personages of our story, including good Uncle Venner, were assembled in
the parlor.
"The country-house is certainly a very fine one, so far as the plan
goes," observed Holgrave, as the party were discussing their future
arrangements. "But I wonder that the late Judge--being so opulent, and
with a reasonable prospect of transmitting his wealth to descendants of
his own--should not have felt the propriety of embodying so excellent a
piece of domestic architecture in stone, rather than in wood. Then,
every generation of the family might have altered the interior, to suit
its own taste and convenience; while the exterior, through the lapse of
years, might have been adding venerableness to its original beauty, and
thus giving that impression of permanence which I consider essential to
the happiness of any one moment."
"Why," cried Phoebe, gazing into the artist's face with infinite
amazement, "how wonderfully your ideas are changed! A house of stone,
indeed! It is but two or three weeks ago that you seemed to wish people
to live in something as fragile and temporary as a bird's-nest!"
"Ah, Phoebe, I told you how it would be!" said the artist, with a
half-melancholy laugh. "You find me a conservative already! Little
did I think ever to become one. It is especially unpardonable in this
dwelling of so much hereditary misfortune, and under the eye of yonder
portrait of a model conservative, who, in that very character, rendered
himself so long the evil destiny of his race."
"That picture!" said Clifford, seeming to shrink from its stern glance.
"Whenever I look at it, there is an old dreamy recollection haunting
me, but keeping just beyond the grasp of my mind. Wealth, it seems to
say!--boundless wealth!--unimaginable wealth! I could fancy that, when
I was a child, or a youth, that portrait had spoken, and told me a rich
secret, or had held forth its hand, with the written record of hidden
opulence. But those old matters are so dim with me, nowadays! What
could this dream have been?"
"Perhaps I can recall it," answered Holgrave. "See! There are a
hundred chances to one that no person, unacquainted with the secret,
would ever touch this spring."
"A secret spring!" cried Clifford. "Ah, I remember now! I did discover
it, one summer afternoon, when I was idling and dreaming about the
house, long, long ago. But the mystery escapes me."
The artist put his finger on the contrivance to which he had referred.
In former days, the effect would probably have been to cause the
picture to start forward. But, in so long a period of concealment, the
machinery had been eaten through with rust; so that at Holgrave's
pressure, the portrait, frame and all, tumbled suddenly from its
position, and lay face downward on the floor. A recess in the wall was
thus brought to light, in which lay an object so covered with a
century's dust that it could not immediately be recognized as a folded
sheet of parchment. Holgrave opened it, and displayed an ancient deed,
signed with the hieroglyphics of several Indian sagamores, and
conveying to Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs, forever, a vast extent of
territory at the Eastward.
"This is the very parchment, the attempt to recover which cost the
beautiful Alice Pyncheon her happiness and life," said the artist,
alluding to his legend. "It is what the Pyncheons sought in vain,
while it was valuable; and now that they find the treasure, it has long
been worthless."
"Poor Cousin Jaffrey! This is what deceived him," exclaimed Hepzibah.
"When they were young together, Clifford probably made a kind of
fairy-tale of this discovery. He was always dreaming hither and
thither about the house, and lighting up its dark corners with
beautiful stories. And poor Jaffrey, who took hold of everything as if
it were real, thought my brother had found out his uncle's wealth. He
died with this delusion in his mind!"
"But," said Phoebe, apart to Holgrave, "how came you to know the
secret?"
"My dearest Phoebe," said Holgrave, "how will it please you to assume
the name of Maule? As for the secret, it is the only inheritance that
has come down to me from my ancestors. You should have known sooner
(only that I was afraid of frightening you away) that, in this long
drama of wrong and retribution, I represent the old wizard, and am
probably as much a wizard as ever he was. The son of the executed
Matthew Maule, while building this house, took the opportunity to
construct that recess, and hide away the Indian deed, on which depended
the immense land-claim of the Pyncheons. Thus they bartered their
eastern territory for Maule's garden-ground."
"And now" said Uncle Venner "I suppose their whole claim is not worth
one man's share in my farm yonder!"
"Uncle Venner," cried Phoebe, taking the patched philosopher's hand,
"you must never talk any more about your farm! You shall never go
there, as long as you live! There is a cottage in our new garden,--the
prettiest little yellowish-brown cottage you ever saw; and the
sweetest-looking place, for it looks just as if it were made of
gingerbread,--and we are going to fit it up and furnish it, on purpose
for you. And you shall do nothing but what you choose, and shall be as
happy as the day is long, and shall keep Cousin Clifford in spirits
with the wisdom and pleasantness which is always dropping from your
lips!"
"Ah! my dear child," quoth good Uncle Venner, quite overcome, "if you
were to speak to a young man as you do to an old one, his chance of
keeping his heart another minute would not be worth one of the buttons
on my waistcoat! And--soul alive!--that great sigh, which you made me
heave, has burst off the very last of them! But, never mind! It was the
happiest sigh I ever did heave; and it seems as if I must have drawn in
a gulp of heavenly breath, to make it with. Well, well, Miss Phoebe!
They'll miss me in the gardens hereabouts, and round by the back doors;
and Pyncheon Street, I'm afraid, will hardly look the same without old
Uncle Venner, who remembers it with a mowing field on one side, and the
garden of the Seven Gables on the other. But either I must go to your
country-seat, or you must come to my farm,--that's one of two things
certain; and I leave you to choose which!"
"Oh, come with us, by all means, Uncle Venner!" said Clifford, who had
a remarkable enjoyment of the old man's mellow, quiet, and simple
spirit. "I want you always to be within five minutes, saunter of my
chair. You are the only philosopher I ever knew of whose wisdom has
not a drop of bitter essence at the bottom!"
"Dear me!" cried Uncle Venner, beginning partly to realize what manner
of man he was. "And yet folks used to set me down among the simple
ones, in my younger days! But I suppose I am like a Roxbury russet,--a
great deal the better, the longer I can be kept. Yes; and my words of
wisdom, that you and Phoebe tell me of, are like the golden dandelions,
which never grow in the hot months, but may be seen glistening among
the withered grass, and under the dry leaves, sometimes as late as
December. And you are welcome, friends, to my mess of dandelions, if
there were twice as many!"
A plain, but handsome, dark-green barouche had now drawn up in front of
the ruinous portal of the old mansion-house. The party came forth, and
(with the exception of good Uncle Venner, who was to follow in a few
days) proceeded to take their places. They were chatting and laughing
very pleasantly together; and--as proves to be often the case, at
moments when we ought to palpitate with sensibility--Clifford and
Hepzibah bade a final farewell to the abode of their forefathers, with
hardly more emotion than if they had made it their arrangement to
return thither at tea-time. Several children were drawn to the spot by
so unusual a spectacle as the barouche and pair of gray horses.
Recognizing little Ned Higgins among them, Hepzibah put her hand into
her pocket, and presented the urchin, her earliest and staunchest
customer, with silver enough to people the Domdaniel cavern of his
interior with as various a procession of quadrupeds as passed into the
ark.
Two men were passing, just as the barouche drove off.
"Well, Dixey," said one of them, "what do you think of this? My wife
kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay.
Old Maid Pyncheon has been in trade just about as long, and rides off
in her carriage with a couple of hundred thousand,--reckoning her
share, and Clifford's, and Phoebe's,--and some say twice as much! If
you choose to call it luck, it is all very well; but if we are to take
it as the will of Providence, why, I can't exactly fathom it!"
"Pretty good business!" quoth the sagacious Dixey,--"pretty good
business!"
Maule's well, all this time, though left in solitude, was throwing up a
succession of kaleidoscopic pictures, in which a gifted eye might have
seen foreshadowed the coming fortunes of Hepzibah and Clifford, and the
descendant of the legendary wizard, and the village maiden, over whom
he had thrown love's web of sorcery. The Pyncheon Elm, moreover, with
what foliage the September gale had spared to it, whispered
unintelligible prophecies. And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from
the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that
sweet Alice Pyncheon--after witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and
this present happiness, of her kindred mortals--had given one farewell
touch of a spirit's joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward
from the HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES!
| Hawthorne does not redeem Judge Pyncheon in his death; rather, he frames Jaffrey as an irredeemable villain whose death is a blessing for the other Pyncheons. It was he who framed Clifford for murder, when in fact the uncle died of natural causes. His death, as well as the death of his son in Europe, becomes a blessing for the remaining Pyncheons, who profit from his demise. Hawthorne even explicitly states that Judge Pyncheon was the weight upon Clifford's psyche that prevented him from living normally. The final destruction of Judge Pyncheon's reputation permits a resuscitation of Clifford's, as he is apparently not blamed for the judge's murder and even granted Jaffrey's property as his closest remaining heir. Holgrave completely abandons his progressive sociopolitical ideas for a more traditional value system, thus giving up his most distinguishing characteristic. Significantly, he does this when he gains the status and privilege that he once opposed. The views that he once espoused were not strongly held as ideals, but rather as a tactic; he opposed status because it worked against him, then accepts the benefits of the Pyncheon family name once he becomes one. The events of the final chapter, particularly the intended marriage between Holgrave and Phoebe, absolve the Pyncheon family of its accumulated sins. Since Holgrave is actually a descendant of Matthew Maule, his union with Phoebe brings the two families together harmoniously. As the new heir to the Pyncheon fortune with Phoebe, Holgrave thus will receive the land that his ancestors rightly deserved. By finding the deed and map, the remaining Pyncheons end the family tradition of seeking this legendary fortune for sinister ends. The ending of The House of the Seven Gables is a case of pure fantasy in the romantic tradition. Not only does it dish out the appropriate rewards to each of the characters, it does so to an absurd extreme. Clifford and Hepzibah do not just escape poverty. They move into their wealthy cousin's mansion and find the deed to the vast eastern property for which generations of Pyncheons have searched. Hawthorne even forces a marriage into the plot in order to complete the requirements of the genre. However, he ends the novel with a sly critique on the romantic form. The two men who remark on Hepzibah's newfound fortune think that she came about it through the modern method of hard work and industry. Rather, the Pyncheons' wealth comes from a more traditional, perhaps even outdated mode, of accumulation. Even when the Pyncheons are redeemed, they still belong to an obsolete romantic tradition | analysis |
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.
| In a New England town, on a street called Pyncheon Street, there is an old house with seven gables belonging to the Pyncheon family. Before the street became Pyncheon Street, it was called Maule's Lane. Our narrator takes us back in time about 150 years, to the late 1600s. In the early days of the Puritan settlement, Matthew Maule builds a hut there. As the town grows up around Matthew Maule, a powerful man named Colonel Pyncheon starts trying to take Maule's land. Maule's acre sits next to a much larger property owned by the Colonel. It also has an excellent spring of water, "a rare treasure on the sea-girt peninsula" . But Maule refuses to give up his acre, which he has worked hard to build up. This fight between Colonel Pyncheon and Matthew Maule over Maule's land goes on for years. It is only resolved with the Maule's death: he is executed for witchcraft. The narrator calls the witch hunts of the Massachusetts colony a "terrible delusion" . The motives of Colonel Pyncheon in particular seem less than pure, since he is the most insistent accuser of Matthew Maule. When Maule is executed, he points at Colonel Pyncheon and says, "God will give him blood to drink!" . When Colonel Pyncheon decides to build his family home over the place where Matthew Maule's hut had once been, the townspeople get a little freaked out. They don't actually say that he falsely accused Maule to steal his land, but they do hint "that he about to build his house over an unquiet grave" . Colonel Pyncheon doesn't care at all about these superstitions. It is a bit weird that, as Colonel Pyncheon starts digging the foundations for his new house, the spring suddenly stops being drinkable. Maybe the digging ruined the water source, but maybe it's something more sinister. The head architect for the House of the Seven Gables is none other than Thomas Maule, Matthew Maule's son. Thomas Maule builds the house so "faithfully" that it's still standing today. It's hard to imagine now - looking at this old, dark house 160 years later - what it must have been like when Colonel Pyncheon held his housewarming party. This housewarming party is supposed to bless the enormous, lavish new home. But something odd happens on the day of the party. The Lieutenant Governor arrives and expects to meet with Colonel Pyncheon. But Colonel Pyncheon's servant refuses to disturb his master, even if it is for the Governor of the colony. The Governor won't listen to this and goes straight upstairs to find Colonel Pyncheon. He opens the door to Colonel Pyncheon's bedroom. All the other guests crowd around in the doorway. The Colonel's young grandson walks up to his grandfather, who is seated below a portrait of himself. Gervayse starts to scream. Colonel Pyncheon's throat is covered with blood. He is dead! The town gossips swear that, just then, a "voice spoke loudly among the guests" , saying: "God hath given him blood to drink!" . Colonel Pyncheon's sudden death in his new house is a huge scandal. One famous doctor, John Swinnerton, claims that Pyncheon died from "a case of apoplexy" - in other words, a stroke. No one thinks Colonel Pyncheon can have been murdered because he was so highly ranked and rich. Before Colonel Pyncheon's death, his family seemed set to become one of the richest, most established families in Massachusetts. In addition to his personal wealth, Colonel Pyncheon had successfully made a claim to a huge parcel of land in Maine. But with his death, this claim falls to pieces. His son lacks the "talent and force of character" to make this claim stick legally. For almost 100 years the Pyncheon family tries to reclaim this land in Maine, but they always fail. Their claim seems academic and hard to take seriously once English settlers start actually living on this land in Maine. All the same, the Pyncheon family's belief that they own huge tracts of land gives them a sense of personal pride and importance. The Pyncheon family also hangs on to the House of the Seven Gables, even though many of them feel the guilt of that original wrong against Matthew Maule. The villagers don't forget either: whenever a Pyncheon chokes on something, bystanders will say, "He has Maule's blood to drink" . The Pyncheons sided with King George III during the American Revolution. But the head of the Pyncheon family changed his mind just in time to keep the House of the Seven Gables from getting confiscated after the establishment of the United States. Thirty years before the novel takes place, another terrible death occurs in the Pyncheon family. This one seems to be the murder of an uncle by his nephew. The nephew has enough political connections to get his death sentence changed to life imprisonment. The murder victim was the head of the Pyncheon family at the time, an elderly bachelor named Uncle Jaffrey Pyncheon. He had been researching the case of Matthew Maule, "the wizard" . He decided that the Pyncheon family had cheated Matthew Maule out of his rightful property. He felt that the Pyncheon family was "in possession of ill gotten spoil with the black stain of blood sunken deep into it" . So Uncle Jaffrey Pyncheon resolved that the only thing to do was to hand the House of the Seven Gables over to a representative of the Maule family. But he dies before he can complete his plans. The next heir in line is another nephew, the cousin of the "miserable young man" who murdered his uncle. This heir is very well placed in Massachusetts society. In fact, he is more successful than any other Pyncheon since "the original Puritan" , Colonel Pyncheon. He is a judge. His name is also Jaffrey Pyncheon, so we will call him Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon to avoid confusion. By this time, the Pyncheon family appears to be dying out. Judge Pyncheon has one son, who is traveling in Europe. He has his cousin, the murderer, who has been in prison for the last 30 years. The unmarried sister of this murdering cousin lives in the House of the Seven Gables. Judge Pyncheon has offered to support her, but she refuses all of his promises of money. Judge Pyncheon also has a 17-year-old orphan niece. The Maule family seems to have died out entirely. The Maules have two characteristics: 1) They are unusually reserved ; and 2) they are supposed to have unusual power over other people's dreams. Meanwhile, the House of the Seven Gables has also changed. It's no longer in a fashionable part of town. It has an enormous elm out front called the Pyncheon-elm. This elm was planted by a great-grandson of Colonel Pyncheon and is now over 80 years old. The house has grown mossy and run-down with age. In one corner of the house's roof, near the chimney, there are some flowering plants called Alice's Posies. Alice Pyncheon was supposed to have thrown the seeds into the air as a game many, many years before. Against all odds, they took root. The narrator finds it sad and touching to see how Nature tries to cheer up the gloomy old Pyncheon house. The most embarrassing thing about the Pyncheon house is that there is a shop door under one gable. All the Pyncheons are embarrassed at this sign of declining financial and social status. This door was put in about a hundred years before by a Pyncheon head of the household who found himself in a bad financial position. He was forced to buy and sell goods in his own home. As soon as he died, the shop door was closed and locked forever. All of his shelves and ledgers are intact. The villagers say you can see his ghost looking frantically through the shop at night, trying to balance his checkbook. | summary |
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.
| Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, the elderly unmarried cousin of Judge Pyncheon, gets out of bed early one midsummer morning. Hepzibah is a recluse, which means she doesn't go out and socialize with other people at all. She's alone in the house except for a lodger, an artist who lives in a distant part of the house. This particular morning, Hepzibah looks as though she's preparing for some terrible task. She looks at a miniature portrait of a handsome young man with an emotional face. She puts away the portrait and continues with her preparations for the day. Hepzibah is setting up the long-forgotten shop to open again, for the first time in 100 years. The shop is going to sell soap, candles, toys, gingerbread - a pretty random assortment of stuff. She is completely awkward as she tries to decide where to place her goods. It's obvious that Hepzibah does not want to open this shop. But she truly feels that she has no choice - she doesn't know enough to teach children, and she's not strong enough to sew professionally. But she keeps approaching the opening of the store as though it's a crime. It's dawn and the town is waking up. She has to open the door and declare her shop open sooner or later. Reluctantly, Hepzibah opens the lock on the shop door and leaves it open for customers. This accomplished, she throws herself into a chair and starts to cry. | summary |
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.
| The door to the shop opens. It's a handsome, somewhat impoverished looking young man: the Pyncheon house lodger, Mr. Holgrave. He congratulates Hepzibah on following through with her plan. She begins to sob: "I wish I were dead, and in the old family-tomb, with all my forefathers!" . Mr. Holgrave promises that Hepzibah is doing a braver thing now than any Pyncheon woman has ever done. Hepzibah cheers up a bit, but she still thinks that "Maule's ghost" must be pleased to see what has become of the Pyncheon family. She gives Mr. Holgrave half a dozen biscuits and refuses to accept any money for them. Two working men walk past the shop. One of the men, Dixey, comments: "Who would have thought it! Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a cent-shop" . Dixey tells his friend that there's no way Hepzibah will succeed. These little stores never work out. Hepzibah overhears this conversation and feels hurt. She broods for a bit before the shop door opens again. A little boy named Ned Higgins comes in and asks for one of the Jim Crows in the window. The House of the Seven Gables was published in 1851, long before Jim Crow laws were first passed. Here, "Jim Crow" refers to the stereotyped character.) Hepzibah feels bad asking for the kid's allowance, so she just gives him the cookie without charging him. Ned Higgins runs out of the shop without closing the door, which riles Hepzibah up. Ned Higgins comes in again and asks for the other Jim Crow in the widow. Hepzibah gives it to him, but this time she charges him for it. Hepzibah looks at the copper coin that is her first payment. Even though Hepzibah still feels that her Pyncheon relatives would be ashamed of her, she starts to get excited. She is doing something new for the first time in many years. She feels enlivened in body and in spirit. After this first success, things do not go so well. She gets several customers, but she doesn't have a lot of the things they need - yeast, tobacco, good thread, or ginger beer. Hepzibah is truly annoyed that all her customers treat her as though they are better than her - don't they know that she is a Pyncheon?! But even if she's left with a lot of rage at "the lower classes" , she also isn't happy with ladies who don't have to work. Hepzibah sees a lovely woman walking past who is plainly rich and idle. Hepzibah thinks, "Must the whole world toil, that the palms of her hands may be kept white and delicate?" . Then Hepzibah feels ashamed and asks for God's forgiveness. | summary |
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 Phoebe?" questioned she within herself. "It must be little
Phoebe; for it can be nobody else,--and there is a look of her father
about her, too! But what does she want here? And how like a country
cousin, to come down upon a poor body in this way, without so much as a
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."
Phoebe, it must be understood, was that one little offshoot of the
Pyncheon race to whom we have already referred, as a native of a rural
part of New England, where the old fashions and feelings of
relationship are still partially kept up. In her own circle, it was
regarded as by no means improper for kinsfolk to visit one another
without invitation, or preliminary and ceremonious warning. Yet, in
consideration of Miss Hepzibah's recluse way of life, a letter had
actually been written and despatched, conveying information of Phoebe'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!"
| Around noon, Hepzibah sees a man walking by. He's elderly and rich-looking, with a cold, heavy face. He sees Hepzibah's shop and looks displeased, then suddenly smiles. This is Hepzibah's cousin Jaffrey Pyncheon - the judge who is head of the Pyncheon family. Just then, little Ned Higgins comes in to buy a gingerbread elephant. Hepzibah's cousin Jaffrey continues on his way. Hepzibah thinks to herself, "Take it as you like! You have seen my little shop-window! Is not the Pyncheon-house my own, while I'm alive?" . Hepzibah retreats back into the house and looks at the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon. She sees his hard, direct face. She thinks to herself that Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon is the living image of their Puritan ancestor, no matter how much he tries to cover it with smiles. Looking at this portrait reminds her of the miniature of the young man she was studying earlier. She thinks mysteriously: "they persecuted his mother in him! He never was a Pyncheon!" . Hepzibah is startled to hear someone coming into the shop, and she rushes out. It's Uncle Venner. Uncle Venner is a very elderly handyman who has lived in the neighborhood for as long as Hepzibah can remember. He is a little odd, but much loved in the area. Uncle Venner congratulates Hepzibah on starting her shop. He mentions having seen her cousin Judge Pyncheon and compliments his smile. Hepzibah agrees bitterly, "my Cousin Jaffrey is thought to have a very pleasant smile!" . Uncle Venner promises that something good is coming Hepzibah's way. She starts to dream of reclaiming that land in Maine or joining up with the other Pyncheons back in England. But Uncle Venner seems to have something more immediate in mind: "When do you expect him home?" . He won't explain who "he" is. After Uncle Venner's visit, Hepzibah is even more disastrous with business than before. She is truly glad when her busy day in the shop is over. Hepzibah locks the door and looks outside. She sees a young woman getting off the public coach in front of her house. She realizes that this must by Phoebe Pyncheon, her young relative from the country. Hepzibah is surprised to see her and decides that she can stay, but only for one night. Hepzibah doesn't want Phoebe to disturb Clifford - though who Clifford might be we don't know yet. | summary |
PHOEBE PYNCHEON slept, on the night of her arrival, in a chamber that
looked down on the garden of the old house. It fronted towards the
east, so that at a very seasonable hour a glow of crimson light came
flooding through the window, and bathed the dingy ceiling and
paper-hangings in its own hue. There were curtains to Phoebe'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, Phoebe quietly awoke, and, for a
moment, did not recognize where she was, nor how those heavy curtains
chanced to be festooned around her. Nothing, indeed, was absolutely
plain to her, except that it was now early morning, and that, whatever
might happen next, it was proper, first of all, to get up and say her
prayers. She was the more inclined to devotion from the grim aspect of
the chamber and its furniture, especially the tall, stiff chairs; one
of which stood close by her bedside, and looked as if some
old-fashioned personage had been sitting there all night, and had
vanished only just in season to escape discovery.
When Phoebe was quite dressed, she peeped out of the window, and saw a
rosebush in the garden. Being a very tall one, and of luxuriant
growth, it had been propped up against the side of the house, and was
literally covered with a rare and very beautiful species of white rose.
A large portion of them, as the girl afterwards discovered, had blight
or mildew at their hearts; but, viewed at a fair distance, the whole
rosebush looked as if it had been brought from Eden that very summer,
together with the mould in which it grew. The truth was, nevertheless,
that it had been planted by Alice Pyncheon,--she was Phoebe'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 Phoebe'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 Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive
patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement. It is a kind of natural
magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden
capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of
comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a
period, may happen to be their home. A wild hut of underbrush, tossed
together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the
home aspect by one 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, Phoebe's waste, cheerless, and dusky chamber, which had
been untenanted so long--except by spiders, and mice, and rats, and
ghosts--that it was all overgrown with the desolation which watches to
obliterate every trace of man's happier hours. What was precisely
Phoebe's process we find it impossible to say. She appeared to have no
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, Phoebe emerged from her
chamber, with a purpose to descend again into the garden. Besides the
rosebush, she had observed several other species of flowers growing
there in a wilderness of neglect, and obstructing one 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 Phoebe was a harpsichord.
It looked more like a coffin than anything else; and, indeed,--not
having been played upon, or opened, for years,--there must have been a
vast deal of dead music in it, stifled for want of air. Human finger
was hardly known to have touched its chords since the days of Alice
Pyncheon, who had learned the sweet accomplishment of melody in Europe.
Hepzibah bade her young guest sit down, and, herself taking a chair
near by, looked as earnestly at Phoebe's trim little figure as if she
expected to see right into its springs and motive secrets.
"Cousin Phoebe," 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 Phoebe to establish herself in another home. Nor did she
misinterpret Phoebe'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, Phoebe replied as frankly,
and more cheerfully.
"Dear cousin, I cannot tell how it will be," said she. "But I really
think we may suit one another much better than you suppose."
"You are a nice girl,--I see it plainly," continued Hepzibah; "and it
is not any question as to that point which makes me hesitate. But,
Phoebe, this house of mine is but a melancholy place for a young person
to be in. It lets in the wind and rain, and the snow, too, in the
garret and upper chambers, in 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, Phoebe), whose temper, I am
afraid, is none of the best, and whose spirits are as bad as can be! I
cannot make your life pleasant, Cousin Phoebe, neither can I so much as
give you bread to eat."
"You will find me a cheerful little body" answered Phoebe, smiling, and
yet with a kind of gentle dignity, "and I mean to earn my bread. You
know I have not been brought up a Pyncheon. A girl learns many things
in a New England village."
"Ah! Phoebe," said Hepzibah, sighing, "your knowledge would do but
little for you here! And then it is a wretched thought that you should
fling away your young days in a place like this. Those cheeks would
not be so rosy after a month or two. Look at my face!" and, indeed,
the contrast was very striking,--"you see how pale I am! It is my idea
that the dust and continual decay of these old houses are unwholesome
for the lungs."
"There is the garden,--the flowers to be taken care of," observed
Phoebe. "I should keep myself healthy with exercise in the open air."
"And, after all, child," exclaimed Hepzibah, suddenly rising, as if to
dismiss the subject, "it is not for me to say who shall be a guest or
inhabitant of the old Pyncheon House. Its master is coming."
"Do you mean Judge Pyncheon?" asked Phoebe in surprise.
"Judge Pyncheon!" answered her cousin angrily. "He will hardly cross
the threshold while I live! No, no! But, Phoebe, you shall see the face
of him I speak of."
She went in quest of the miniature already described, and returned with
it in her hand. Giving it to Phoebe, she watched her features
narrowly, and with a certain jealousy as to the mode in which the girl
would show herself affected by the picture.
"How do you like the face?" asked Hepzibah.
"It is handsome!--it is very beautiful!" said Phoebe admiringly. "It
is as sweet a face as a 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 Phoebe. "And yet I seem to have heard
the name of Clifford Pyncheon. Yes!--from my father or my mother; but
has he not been a long while dead?"
"Well, well, child, perhaps he has!" said Hepzibah with a sad, hollow
laugh; "but, in old houses like this, you know, dead people are very
apt to come back again! We shall see. And, Cousin Phoebe, since, after
all that I have said, your courage does not fail you, we will not part
so soon. You are welcome, my child, for the present, to such a home as
your kinswoman can offer you."
With this measured, but not exactly cold assurance of a hospitable
purpose, Hepzibah kissed her cheek.
They now went below stairs, where Phoebe--not so much assuming the
office as attracting it to herself, by the magnetism of innate
fitness--took the most active part in preparing breakfast. The
mistress of the house, meanwhile, as is usual with persons of her stiff
and unmalleable cast, stood mostly aside; willing to lend her aid, yet
conscious that her natural inaptitude would be likely to impede the
business in hand. Phoebe and the fire that boiled the teakettle were
equally bright, cheerful, and efficient, in their respective offices.
Hepzibah gazed forth from her habitual sluggishness, the necessary
result of long solitude, as from another sphere. She could not help
being interested, however, and even amused, at the readiness with which
her new inmate adapted herself to the circumstances, and brought the
house, moreover, and all its rusty old appliances, into a suitableness
for her purposes. Whatever she did, too, was done without conscious
effort, and with frequent outbreaks of song, which were exceedingly
pleasant to the ear. This natural tunefulness made Phoebe seem like a
bird in a shadowy tree; or conveyed the idea that the stream of life
warbled through her heart as a brook sometimes warbles through a
pleasant little dell. It betokened the cheeriness of an active
temperament, finding joy in its activity, and, therefore, rendering it
beautiful; it was a New England trait,--the stern old stuff of
Puritanism with a gold thread in the web.
Hepzibah brought out some old silver spoons with the family crest upon
them, and a china 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 Phoebe. "She was a Davenport, of a good
family. They were almost the first teacups ever seen in the colony;
and if one of them were to be broken, my heart would break with it.
But it is nonsense to speak so about a brittle teacup, when I remember
what my heart has gone through without breaking."
The cups--not having been used, perhaps, since Hepzibah's youth--had
contracted no small burden of dust, which Phoebe washed away with so
much care and delicacy as to satisfy even the proprietor of this
invaluable china.
"What a nice little housewife you are!" exclaimed the latter, smiling,
and at the same time frowning so prodigiously that the smile was
sunshine under a 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 Phoebe, 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 Phoebe, 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 Phoebe. "And I have had a table at a fancy fair, and made better
sales than anybody. These things are not to be learnt; they depend
upon a knack that comes, I suppose," added she, smiling, "with 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 Phoebe, and peeped from the passageway
into the shop, to note how she would manage her undertaking. It was a
case of some intricacy. A very ancient woman, in a white short gown
and a green petticoat, with a string of gold beads about her neck, and
what looked like a nightcap on her head, had brought a quantity of yarn
to barter for the commodities of the shop. She was probably the very
last person in town who still kept the 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 Phoebe,
mingling in one twisted thread of talk; and still better to contrast
their figures,--so light and bloomy,--so decrepit and dusky,--with only
the counter betwixt them, in one sense, but more than threescore years,
in another. As for the bargain, it was wrinkled slyness and craft
pitted against native truth and sagacity.
"Was not that well done?" asked Phoebe, laughing, when the customer was
gone.
"Nicely done, indeed, child!" answered Hepzibah. "I could not have
gone through with it nearly so well. As you say, it must be a knack
that belongs to you on the 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 Phoebe'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! Phoebe is no Pyncheon. She takes everything from
her mother!"
As to Phoebe'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 Phoebe as the
example of feminine grace and availability combined, in a state of
society, if there were any such, where ladies did not exist. There it
should be woman's office to move in the midst of practical affairs, and
to gild them all, the very homeliest,--were it even the scouring of
pots and kettles,--with an atmosphere of loveliness and joy.
Such was the sphere of Phoebe. To find the born and educated lady, on
the other hand, we need look no farther than Hepzibah, our forlorn old
maid, in her rustling and rusty silks, with her deeply cherished and
ridiculous consciousness of long descent, her shadowy claims to
princely territory, and, in the way of accomplishment, her
recollections, it may be, of having formerly thrummed on a harpsichord,
and walked a minuet, and worked an antique 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
Phoebe passed to and fro in the interior. Otherwise, it is impossible
to explain how the people of the neighborhood so soon became aware of
the 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. Phoebe laughed, as she
summed up her aggregate of sales upon the slate; while Hepzibah, first
drawing on a pair of silk gloves, reckoned over the sordid accumulation
of copper coin, not without silver intermixed, that had jingled into
the till.
"We must renew our stock, Cousin Hepzibah!" cried the little
saleswoman. "The gingerbread figures are all gone, and so are those
Dutch wooden milkmaids, and most of our other playthings. There has
been constant inquiry for cheap raisins, and a great cry for whistles,
and trumpets, and 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, Phoebe is a nice girl!" said Hepzibah, with a scowl of austere
approbation. "But, Uncle Venner, you have known the family a great
many years. Can you tell me whether there ever was a Pyncheon whom she
takes after?"
"I 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 Phoebe 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 Phoebe'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 Phoebe.
The two relatives--the young maid and the old one--found time before
nightfall, in the intervals of trade, to make rapid advances towards
affection and confidence. A recluse, like Hepzibah, usually displays
remarkable frankness, and at least temporary affability, on being
absolutely cornered, and brought to the point of personal intercourse;
like the angel whom Jacob wrestled with, she is ready to bless you when
once overcome.
The old gentlewoman took a dreary and proud satisfaction in leading
Phoebe from room to room of the house, and recounting the traditions
with which, as we may say, the walls were lugubriously frescoed. She
showed the indentations made by the 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 Phoebe step into one
of the tall chairs, and inspect the ancient map of the Pyncheon
territory at the eastward. In a tract of land on which she laid her
finger, there existed a silver mine, the locality of which was
precisely pointed out in some memoranda of Colonel Pyncheon himself,
but only to be made known when the family claim should be recognized by
government. Thus it was for the interest of all New England that the
Pyncheons should have justice done them. She told, too, how that there
was undoubtedly an immense treasure of English guineas hidden somewhere
about the house, or in the cellar, or possibly in the garden.
"If you should happen to find it, Phoebe," said Hepzibah, glancing
aside at her with a grim yet kindly smile, "we will tie up the
shop-bell for good and all!"
"Yes, dear cousin," answered Phoebe; "but, in the mean time, I hear
somebody ringing it!"
When the customer was gone, Hepzibah talked rather vaguely, and at
great length, about a certain Alice Pyncheon, who had been exceedingly
beautiful and accomplished in her lifetime, a hundred years ago. The
fragrance of her rich and delightful character still lingered about the
place where she had lived, as a dried 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 Phoebe.
"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 Phoebe, "if the young man is so dangerous, why
do you let him stay? If he does nothing worse, he may set the house on
fire!"
"Why, sometimes," answered Hepzibah, "I have seriously made it a
question, whether I ought not to send him away. But, with all his
oddities, he is a quiet kind of a person, and has such a way of taking
hold of 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 Phoebe, a part
of whose essence it was to keep within the limits of law.
"Oh!" said Hepzibah carelessly,--for, formal as she was, still, in her
life's experience, she had gnashed her teeth against human law,--"I
suppose he has a law of his own!"
| Phoebe wakes up the next morning in a room overlooking the garden. She sees a lush rosebush that had been planted generations before by Alice Pyncheon. Phoebe rearranges the old, dusty room to try to make it more lovely and homey. She emerges dressed and ready for the day. Hepzibah and Phoebe chat over breakfast. Phoebe has been trying to get out of the house because her father has just remarried and she doesn't like her stepmother. Phoebe wants to come and live at the House of the Seven Gables. Hepzibah says she can't because it's too sad a place for a young girl. Phoebe insists that she is cheerful and that she will happily earn her keep. Hepzibah then pulls out her miniature portrait. She explains that the portrait is of Clifford Pyncheon. Phoebe has never heard of him. She thought the only Pyncheons left were Hepzibah and Judge Pyncheon. Hepzibah remarks mysteriously: "But, in old houses like this, you know, dead people are very apt to come back again!" . Hepzibah says that Phoebe can stay as long as she likes. Phoebe starts taking over the duties of the household. She quickly washes up and puts the kitchen in order. When the shop doorbell rings, Hepzibah starts reluctantly heading out to her customer. Phoebe offers, "Do not trouble yourself, dear Cousin! I am shopkeeper to-day" . Hepzibah stands by to watch Phoebe bargain with her customer. She is impressed. She thinks to herself that Phoebe is very nice, so it's a shame that she's not a lady. But the narrator believes that Phoebe shows all of the friendliness, tastefulness, and prettiness that a lady could possibly want. Phoebe quickly organizes the shop and arranges for new stock. Ned Higgins comes by and eats three more pieces of gingerbread. By the end of the day, there is "an enormous heap of copper!" - in other words, Phoebe has made a lot of money. Uncle Venner compliments Phoebe's skills. He agrees with Hepzibah that there has never been a Pyncheon like Phoebe. He thinks Phoebe is like one of God's angels. Throughout the day, Hepzibah tells Phoebe about the Pyncheon family: their claim to the land in Maine and the mysterious death of Colonel Pyncheon. She also mentions Mr. Holgrave, the lodger. Hepzibah doesn't know what to make of Mr. Holgrave. He seems like a very nice young man, but he's got a bunch of free-thinking friends who seem very odd. Phoebe asks why Hepzibah lets Mr. Holgrave stay if he's such a troublemaker. Hepzibah hedges; she says Mr. Holgrave is "a quiet kind of person" , and that he is good company for her. Phoebe thinks Mr. Holgrave sounds like "a lawless person" . Hepzibah concludes: "Oh I suppose he has a law of his own!" . | summary |
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. Phoebe saw, however, that their
growth must have been checked by a degree of careful labor, bestowed
daily and systematically on the garden. The white double rosebush had
evidently been propped up anew against the house since the commencement
of the season; and a 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.
Phoebe wondered whose care and toil it could have been that had planted
these vegetables, and kept the soil so clean and orderly. Not surely
her cousin 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,
Phoebe found an unexpected charm in this little nook of grass, and
foliage, and aristocratic flowers, and plebeian vegetables. The eye of
Heaven seemed to look down into it pleasantly, and with a peculiar
smile, as if glad to perceive that nature, elsewhere overwhelmed, and
driven out of the dusty town, had here been able to retain a
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 Phoebe--to the
poignant distress of her conscience, but inevitably--was led to fancy a
general resemblance betwixt these forlorn bipeds and her respectable
relative.
The girl ran into the house to get some crumbs of bread, cold potatoes,
and other such scraps as were suitable to the accommodating appetite of
fowls. Returning, she gave a peculiar call, which they seemed to
recognize. The chicken crept through the pales of the coop and ran,
with some show of liveliness, to her feet; while Chanticleer and the
ladies of his household regarded her with queer, sidelong glances, and
then croaked one to another, as if communicating their sage opinions of
her character. So wise, as well as antique, was their aspect, as to
give color to the idea, not merely that they were the descendants of a
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 Phoebe; "here are some nice crumbs
for you!"
The chicken, hereupon, though almost as venerable in appearance as its
mother--possessing, indeed, the whole antiquity of its progenitors in
miniature,--mustered vivacity enough to flutter upward and alight on
Phoebe's shoulder.
"That little fowl pays you a high compliment!" said a voice behind
Phoebe.
Turning quickly, she was surprised at sight of a young man, who had
found access into the garden by a door opening out of another gable
than that whence she had emerged. He held a hoe in his hand, and,
while Phoebe was gone in quest of the crumbs, had begun to busy himself
with drawing up fresh earth about the roots of the tomatoes.
"The chicken really treats you like an old acquaintance," continued he
in a quiet way, while a smile made his face pleasanter than Phoebe at
first fancied it. "Those venerable personages in the coop, too, seem
very affably disposed. You are lucky to be in their good graces so
soon! They have known me much longer, but never honor me with any
familiarity, though hardly a day passes without my bringing them food.
Miss Hepzibah, I suppose, will interweave the fact with her other
traditions, and set it down that the fowls know you to be a Pyncheon!"
"The secret is," said Phoebe, smiling, "that I have learned how to talk
with hens and chickens."
"Ah, but these hens," answered the young man,--"these hens of
aristocratic lineage would scorn to understand the vulgar language of a
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 Phoebe Pyncheon," said the girl, with a manner of some
reserve; for she was aware that her new acquaintance could be no other
than the daguerreotypist, of whose lawless propensities the old maid
had given her a disagreeable idea. "I did not know that my cousin
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 Phoebe 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 Phoebe, "I should
like to try whether the daguerreotype can bring out disagreeable traits
on a perfectly amiable face. But there certainly is truth in what you
have said. Most of my likenesses do look unamiable; but the very
sufficient reason, I fancy, is, because the originals are so. There is
a wonderful insight in 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. Phoebe
merely glanced at it, and gave it back.
"I know the face," she replied; "for its stern eye has been following
me about all day. It is my Puritan ancestor, who hangs yonder in the
parlor. To be sure, you have found some way of copying the portrait
without its black velvet cap and gray beard, and have given him a
modern coat and satin cravat, instead of his cloak and band. I 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 Phoebe, turning away
her eyes. "It is certainly very like the old portrait. But my cousin
Hepzibah has another picture,--a miniature. If the original is still
in the world, I think he might defy the sun to make him look stern and
hard."
"You have seen that picture, then!" exclaimed the artist, with an
expression of much interest. "I never did, but have a great curiosity
to do so. And you judge favorably of the face?"
"There never was a sweeter one," said Phoebe. "It is almost too soft
and gentle for a man's."
"Is there nothing wild in the eye?" continued Holgrave, so earnestly
that it embarrassed Phoebe, as did also the quiet freedom with which he
presumed on their so recent acquaintance. "Is there nothing dark or
sinister anywhere? Could you not conceive the original to have been
guilty of a great crime?"
"It is nonsense," said Phoebe a little impatiently, "for us to talk
about a picture which you have never seen. You mistake it for some
other. A crime, indeed! Since you are a friend of my cousin
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."
Phoebe was on the point of retreating, but turned back, with some
hesitation; for she did not exactly comprehend his manner, although, on
better observation, its feature seemed rather to be lack of ceremony
than any approach to offensive rudeness. There was an odd kind of
authority, too, in what he now proceeded to say, rather as if the
garden were his own than a place to which he was admitted merely by
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, Phoebe
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 Phoebe Pyncheon!
Any bright day, if you will put one of those rosebuds in your hair, and
come to my rooms in Central Street, I will seize the purest ray of
sunshine, and make a picture of the flower and its wearer." He retired
towards his own solitary gable, but turned his head, on reaching the
door, and called to Phoebe, with a tone which certainly had laughter in
it, yet which seemed to be more than half in earnest.
"Be careful not to drink at Maule's well!" said he. "Neither drink nor
bathe your face in it!"
"Maule's well!" answered Phoebe. "Is that it with the rim of mossy
stones? I have no thought of drinking there,--but why not?"
"Oh," rejoined the daguerreotypist, "because, like an old lady's cup of
tea, it is water bewitched!"
He vanished; and Phoebe, lingering a moment, saw a glimmering light,
and then the steady beam of a lamp, in a chamber of the gable. On
returning into 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, Phoebe fancied that her
cousin spoke to her.
"In a moment, cousin!" answered the girl. "These matches just glimmer,
and go out."
But, instead of a response from Hepzibah, she seemed to hear the murmur
of an unknown voice. It was strangely indistinct, however, and less
like articulate words than an unshaped sound, such as would be the
utterance of feeling and sympathy, rather than of the intellect. So
vague was it, that its impression or echo in Phoebe'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 Phoebe, "did you speak to me just now?"
"No, child!" replied Hepzibah.
Fewer words than before, but with the same mysterious music in them!
Mellow, melancholy, yet not mournful, the tone seemed to gush up out of
the deep well of 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 Phoebe. The girl sat silently
for a moment. But soon, her senses being very acute, she became
conscious of an irregular respiration in an obscure corner of the room.
Her physical organization, moreover, being at once delicate and
healthy, gave her a perception, operating with almost the effect of a
spiritual medium, that somebody was near at hand.
"My dear cousin," asked she, overcoming an indefinable reluctance, "is
there not some one in the room with us?"
"Phoebe, my dear little girl," said Hepzibah, after a 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 Phoebe, and pressed her to her heart, which beat
against the girl's bosom with a strong, high, and tumultuous swell.
How came there to be so much love in this desolate old heart, that it
could afford to well over thus abundantly?
"Goodnight, cousin," said Phoebe, 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, Phoebe
heard that strange, vague murmur, which might be likened to an
indistinct shadow of human utterance.
| Phoebe goes out into the garden. She sees signs that the garden has been well-cared for. She can't figure out who's doing the upkeep, but she's sure it's not Hepzibah. She finds a corner of the garden with a lovely old mossy fountain. There is also a chicken coop. Phoebe runs inside to get breadcrumbs for the chickens. As she feeds them, one of the baby chickens flies up to land on her shoulder. A voice says, "That little fowl pays you a high compliment!" . Phoebe turns around and sees the lodger, Mr. Holgrave. Phoebe introduces herself. Mr. Holgrave tells her that he is the one who hoes and weeds the garden. He asks if Phoebe wants to see a portrait he has taken. He points out that this particular portrait is unusual. Generally, photographs show the faces of their subjects as they always appear. But this portrait is of a man who shows "a very different expression" during his ordinary life. Phoebe identifies the face as that of her "Puritan ancestor" , Colonel Pyncheon. It's not Colonel Pyncheon, though, since it's a modern face. Usually this stern, hard man looks "exceedingly pleasant, indicative of benevolence, openness of heart, sunny good humor" . But the photograph makes him look "sly, subtle and cold as ice" . Phoebe points out the contrast between the man in this photograph and her cousin Hepzibah's miniature portrait. Mr. Holgrave has never seen the portrait but he has heard of it. He asks if Phoebe can imagine that figure being guilty of a crime. Phoebe thinks he's talking a lot of nonsense: of course not. Mr. Holgrave changes the subject. He suggests that Phoebe help out with the garden, since she will need something to do with her energy while she's staying with Hepzibah. Phoebe agrees, and they start working silently side by side. Phoebe doesn't really like Mr. Holgrave. He seems serious, almost stern, and she doesn't understand him. As the sun sets, Mr. Holgrave tells her good night. He suggests that Phoebe come and see him sometime. He also warns Phoebe not to drink or wash at Maule's Well . He says the fountain is bewitched. Then he goes inside. Phoebe returns to Hepzibah's part of the house. Hepzibah seems in a strange mood, as though she is listening for something. The room is very dark. Phoebe asks if Hepzibah has just said something. Hepzibah says no. Phoebe asks if there is someone in the room with them. Hepzibah suggests that Phoebe go and rest; she's had a busy day. Hepzibah hugs Phoebe before Phoebe goes to bed. As Phoebe lies down, she hears what sounds like the murmur of human voices. | summary |
WHEN Phoebe 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 Phoebe whether old Speckle, as she called one of the hens, had laid
an egg the preceding day. Phoebe ran to see, but returned without the
expected treasure in her hand. At that instant, however, the blast of
a 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 Phoebe to roast some coffee,--which she
casually observed was the real Mocha, and so long kept that each of the
small berries ought to be worth its weight in gold,--the maiden lady
heaped fuel into the vast receptacle of the ancient fireplace in such
quantity as soon to drive the lingering dusk out of the kitchen. The
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 Phoebe, the only spectator, except the rats and ghosts
aforesaid, had not been better employed than in shedding them), to see
her rake out a bed of fresh and glowing coals, and proceed to broil the
mackerel. Her usually pale cheeks were all ablaze with heat and hurry.
She watched the fish with as much tender care and minuteness of
attention as if,--we know not how to express it otherwise,--as if her
own heart were on the gridiron, and her immortal happiness were
involved in its being done precisely to a turn!
Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged
and 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. Phoebe'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 Phoebe
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 have scorned to take his place. But the Puritan's face
scowled down out of the picture, as if nothing on the table pleased his
appetite.
By way of contributing what grace she could, Phoebe gathered some roses
and a few other flowers, possessing either scent or beauty, and
arranged them in a glass pitcher, which, having long ago lost its
handle, was so much the fitter for a flower-vase. The early
sunshine--as fresh as that which peeped into Eve's bower while she and
Adam sat at breakfast there--came twinkling through the branches of the
pear-tree, and fell quite across the table. All was now ready. There
were chairs and plates for three. A chair and plate for Hepzibah,--the
same for Phoebe,--but what other guest did her cousin look for?
Throughout this preparation there had been a constant tremor in
Hepzibah's frame; an agitation so powerful that Phoebe could see the
quivering of her gaunt shadow, as thrown by the firelight on the
kitchen wall, or by the sunshine on the parlor floor. Its
manifestations were so various, and agreed so little with one another,
that the girl knew not what to make of it. Sometimes it seemed an
ecstasy of delight and happiness. At such moments, Hepzibah would
fling out her arms, and infold Phoebe in them, and kiss her cheek as
tenderly as ever her mother had; she appeared to do so by an inevitable
impulse, and as if her bosom were oppressed with tenderness, of which
she must needs pour out a little, in order to gain breathing-room. The
next moment, without any visible cause for the change, her unwonted joy
shrank back, appalled, as it were, and clothed itself in mourning; or
it ran and hid itself, so to speak, in the dungeon of her heart, where
it had long lain chained, while a cold, spectral sorrow took the place
of the imprisoned joy, that was afraid to be enfranchised,--a sorrow as
black as that was bright. She often broke into a little, nervous,
hysteric laugh, more touching than any tears could be; and forthwith,
as if to try which was the most touching, a gush of tears would follow;
or perhaps the laughter and tears came both at once, and surrounded our
poor Hepzibah, in a moral sense, with a kind of pale, dim rainbow.
Towards Phoebe, as we have said, she was affectionate,--far tenderer
than ever before, in their brief acquaintance, except for that one kiss
on the preceding night,--yet with a continually recurring pettishness
and irritability. She would speak sharply to her; then, throwing aside
all the starched reserve of her ordinary manner, ask pardon, and the
next instant renew the just-forgiven injury.
At last, when their mutual labor was all finished, she took Phoebe's
hand in her own trembling one.
"Bear with me, my dear child," she cried; "for truly my heart is full
to the brim! Bear with me; for I love you, Phoebe, though I speak so
roughly. Think nothing of it, dearest child! By and by, I shall be
kind, and only kind!"
"My dearest cousin, cannot you tell me what has happened?" asked
Phoebe, with a sunny and tearful sympathy. "What is it that moves you
so?"
"Hush! hush! He is coming!" whispered Hepzibah, hastily wiping her
eyes. "Let him see you first, Phoebe; for you are young and rosy, and
cannot help letting a smile break out whether or no. He always liked
bright faces! And mine is old now, and the tears are hardly dry on it.
He never could abide tears. There; draw the curtain a little, so that
the shadow may fall across his side of the table! But let there be a
good deal of sunshine, too; for he never was fond of gloom, as some
people are. He has had but little sunshine in his life,--poor
Clifford,--and, oh, what a black shadow. Poor, poor Clifford!"
Thus murmuring in an undertone, as if speaking rather to her own heart
than to Phoebe, the old gentlewoman stepped on tiptoe about the room,
making such arrangements as suggested themselves at the crisis.
Meanwhile there was a step in the passage-way, above stairs. Phoebe
recognized it as the same which had passed upward, as through her
dream, in the night-time. The approaching guest, whoever it might be,
appeared to pause at the head of the staircase; he paused twice or
thrice in the descent; he paused again at the foot. Each time, the
delay seemed to be without purpose, but rather from a forgetfulness of
the purpose which had set him in motion, or as if the person's feet
came involuntarily to a stand-still because the motive-power was too
feeble to sustain his progress. Finally, he made a long pause at the
threshold of the parlor. He took hold of the knob of the door; then
loosened his grasp without opening it. Hepzibah, her hands
convulsively clasped, stood gazing at the entrance.
"Dear Cousin Hepzibah, pray don't look so!" said Phoebe, trembling; for
her cousin's emotion, and this mysteriously reluctant step, made her
feel as if a ghost were coming into the room. "You really frighten me!
Is something awful going to happen?"
"Hush!" whispered Hepzibah. "Be cheerful! whatever may happen, be
nothing but cheerful!"
The final pause at the threshold proved so long, that Hepzibah, unable
to endure the suspense, rushed forward, threw open the door, and led in
the stranger by the hand. At the first glance, Phoebe saw an elderly
personage, in an old-fashioned dressing-gown of faded damask, and
wearing his gray or almost white hair of an unusual length. It quite
overshadowed his forehead, except when he thrust it back, and stared
vaguely about the room. After a very brief inspection of his face, it
was easy to conceive that his footstep must necessarily be such an one
as that which, slowly and with as indefinite an aim as a child's first
journey across a floor, had just brought him hitherward. Yet there
were no tokens that his physical strength might not have sufficed for a
free and determined gait. It was the spirit of the man that could not
walk. The expression of his countenance--while, notwithstanding it had
the light of reason in it--seemed to waver, and glimmer, and nearly to
die away, and feebly to recover itself again. It was like a flame
which we see twinkling among half-extinguished embers; we gaze at it
more intently than if it were a positive blaze, gushing vividly
upward,--more intently, but with a certain impatience, as if it ought
either to kindle itself into satisfactory splendor, or be at once
extinguished.
For an instant after entering the room, the guest stood still,
retaining Hepzibah's hand instinctively, as a child does that of the
grown person who guides it. He saw Phoebe, however, and caught an
illumination from her youthful and pleasant aspect, which, indeed,
threw a cheerfulness about the parlor, like the circle of reflected
brilliancy around the glass vase of flowers that was standing in the
sunshine. He made a salutation, or, to speak nearer the truth, an
ill-defined, abortive attempt at curtsy. Imperfect as it was, however,
it conveyed an idea, or, at least, gave a hint, of indescribable grace,
such as no practised art of external manners could have attained. It
was too slight to seize upon at the instant; yet, as recollected
afterwards, seemed to transfigure the whole man.
"Dear Clifford," said Hepzibah, in the tone with which one soothes a
wayward infant, "this is our cousin Phoebe,--little Phoebe
Pyncheon,--Arthur's only child, you know. She has come from the
country to stay with us awhile; for our old house has grown to be very
lonely now."
"Phoebe--Phoebe Pyncheon?--Phoebe?" repeated the guest, with a strange,
sluggish, ill-defined utterance. "Arthur's child! Ah, I forget! No
matter. She is very welcome!"
"Come, dear Clifford, take this chair," said Hepzibah, leading him to
his place. "Pray, Phoebe, lower the curtain a very little more. Now
let us begin breakfast."
The guest seated himself in the place assigned him, and looked
strangely around. He was evidently trying to grapple with the present
scene, and bring it home to his mind with a more satisfactory
distinctness. He desired to be certain, at least, that he was here, in
the low-studded, cross-beamed, oaken-panelled parlor, and not in some
other spot, which had stereotyped itself into his senses. But the
effort was too great to be sustained with more than a fragmentary
success. Continually, as we may express it, he faded away out of his
place; or, in other words, his mind and consciousness took their
departure, leaving his wasted, gray, and melancholy figure--a
substantial emptiness, a material ghost--to occupy his seat at table.
Again, after a blank moment, there would be a flickering taper-gleam in
his eyeballs. It betokened that his spiritual part had returned, and
was doing its best to kindle the heart's household fire, and light up
intellectual lamps in the dark and ruinous mansion, where it was doomed
to be a forlorn inhabitant.
At one of these moments of less torpid, yet still imperfect animation,
Phoebe became convinced of what she had at first rejected as too
extravagant and startling an idea. She saw that the person before her
must have been the original of the beautiful miniature in her cousin
Hepzibah's possession. Indeed, with a feminine eye for costume, she
had at once identified the damask dressing-gown, which enveloped him,
as the same in figure, material, and fashion, with that so elaborately
represented in the picture. This old, faded garment, with all its
pristine brilliancy extinct, seemed, in some indescribable way, to
translate the wearer's untold misfortune, and make it perceptible to
the beholder's eye. It was the better to be discerned, by this
exterior type, how worn and old were the soul's more immediate
garments; that form and countenance, the beauty and grace of which had
almost transcended the skill of the most exquisite of artists. It
could the more adequately be known that the soul of the man must have
suffered some miserable wrong, from its earthly experience. There he
seemed to sit, with a dim veil of decay and ruin betwixt him and the
world, but through which, at flitting intervals, might be caught the
same expression, so refined, so softly imaginative, which
Malbone--venturing a happy touch, with suspended breath--had imparted
to the miniature! There had been something so innately characteristic
in this look, that all the dusky years, and the burden of unfit
calamity which had fallen upon him, did not suffice utterly to destroy
it.
Hepzibah had now poured out a cup of deliciously fragrant coffee, and
presented it to her guest. As his eyes met hers, he seemed bewildered
and disquieted.
"Is this you, Hepzibah?" he murmured sadly; then, more apart, and
perhaps unconscious that he was overheard, "How changed! how changed!
And is she angry with me? Why does she bend her brow so?"
Poor Hepzibah! It was that wretched scowl which time and her
near-sightedness, and the fret of inward discomfort, had rendered so
habitual that any vehemence of mood invariably evoked it. But at the
indistinct murmur of his words her whole face grew tender, and even
lovely, with sorrowful affection; the harshness of her features
disappeared, as it were, behind the warm and misty glow.
"Angry!" she repeated; "angry with you, Clifford!"
Her tone, as she uttered the exclamation, had a plaintive and really
exquisite melody thrilling through it, yet without subduing a certain
something which an obtuse auditor might still have mistaken for
asperity. It was as if some transcendent musician should draw a
soul-thrilling sweetness out of a cracked instrument, which makes its
physical imperfection heard in the midst of ethereal harmony,--so deep
was the sensibility that found an organ in Hepzibah's voice!
"There is nothing but love here, Clifford," she added,--"nothing but
love! You are at home!"
The guest responded to her tone by a smile, which did not half light up
his face. Feeble as it was, however, and gone in a moment, it had a
charm of wonderful beauty. It was followed by a coarser expression; or
one that had the effect of coarseness on the fine mould and outline of
his countenance, because there was nothing intellectual to temper it.
It was a look of appetite. He ate food with what might almost be
termed voracity; and seemed to forget himself, Hepzibah, the young
girl, and everything else around him, in the sensual enjoyment which
the bountifully spread table afforded. In his natural system, though
high-wrought and delicately refined, a sensibility to the delights of
the palate was probably inherent. It would have been kept in check,
however, and even converted into an accomplishment, and one of the
thousand modes of intellectual culture, had his more ethereal
characteristics retained their vigor. But as it existed now, the
effect was painful and made Phoebe droop her eyes.
In a little while the guest became sensible of the fragrance of the yet
untasted coffee. He quaffed it eagerly. The subtle essence acted on
him like a charmed draught, and caused the opaque substance of his
animal being to grow transparent, or, at least, translucent; so that a
spiritual gleam was transmitted through it, with a clearer lustre than
hitherto.
"More, more!" he cried, with nervous haste in his utterance, as if
anxious to retain his grasp of what sought to escape him. "This is
what I need! Give me more!"
Under this delicate and powerful influence he sat more erect, and
looked out from his eyes with a glance that took note of what it rested
on. It was not so much that his expression grew more intellectual;
this, though it had its share, was not the most peculiar effect.
Neither was what we call the moral nature so forcibly awakened as to
present itself in remarkable prominence. But a certain fine temper of
being was now not brought out in full relief, but changeably and
imperfectly betrayed, of which it was the function to deal with all
beautiful and enjoyable things. In a character where it should exist
as the chief attribute, it would bestow on its possessor an exquisite
taste, and an enviable susceptibility of happiness. Beauty would be
his life; his aspirations would all tend toward it; and, allowing his
frame and physical organs to be in consonance, his own developments
would likewise be beautiful. Such a man should have nothing to do with
sorrow; nothing with strife; nothing with the martyrdom which, in an
infinite variety of shapes, awaits those who have the heart, and will,
and conscience, to fight a battle with the world. To these heroic
tempers, such martyrdom is the richest meed in the world's gift. To
the individual before us, it could only be a grief, intense in due
proportion with the severity of the infliction. He had no right to be
a martyr; and, beholding him so fit to be happy and so feeble for all
other purposes, a generous, strong, and noble spirit would, methinks,
have been ready to sacrifice what little enjoyment it might have
planned for itself,--it would have flung down the hopes, so paltry in
its regard,--if thereby the wintry blasts of our rude sphere might come
tempered to such a man.
Not to speak it harshly or scornfully, it seemed Clifford's nature to
be a Sybarite. It was perceptible, even there, in the dark old parlor,
in the inevitable polarity with which his eyes were attracted towards
the quivering play of sunbeams through the shadowy foliage. It was
seen in his appreciating notice of the vase of flowers, the scent of
which he inhaled with a zest almost peculiar to a physical organization
so refined that spiritual ingredients are moulded in with it. It was
betrayed in the unconscious smile with which he regarded Phoebe, whose
fresh and maidenly figure was both sunshine and flowers,--their
essence, in a prettier and more agreeable mode of manifestation. Not
less evident was this love and necessity for the Beautiful, in the
instinctive caution with which, even so soon, his eyes turned away from
his hostess, and wandered to any quarter rather than come back. It was
Hepzibah's misfortune,--not Clifford's fault. How could he,--so yellow
as she was, so wrinkled, so sad of mien, with that odd uncouthness of a
turban on her head, and that most perverse of scowls contorting her
brow,--how could he love to gaze at her? But, did he owe her no
affection for so much as she had silently given? He owed her nothing.
A nature like Clifford's can contract no debts of that kind. It is--we
say it without censure, nor in diminution of the claim which it
indefeasibly possesses on beings of another mould--it is always selfish
in its essence; and we must give it leave to be so, and heap up our
heroic and disinterested love upon it so much the more, without a
recompense. Poor Hepzibah knew this truth, or, at least, acted on the
instinct of it. So long estranged from what was lovely as Clifford had
been, she rejoiced--rejoiced, though with a present sigh, and a secret
purpose to shed tears in her own chamber that he had brighter objects
now before his eyes than her aged and uncomely features. They never
possessed a charm; and if they had, the canker of her grief for him
would long since have destroyed it.
The guest leaned back in his chair. Mingled in his countenance with a
dreamy delight, there was a troubled look of effort and unrest. He was
seeking to make himself more fully sensible of the scene around him;
or, perhaps, dreading it to be a dream, or a play of imagination, was
vexing the fair moment with a struggle for some added brilliancy and
more durable illusion.
"How pleasant!--How delightful!" he murmured, but not as if addressing
any one. "Will it last? How balmy the atmosphere through that open
window! An open window! How beautiful that play of sunshine! Those
flowers, how very fragrant! That young girl's face, how cheerful, how
blooming!--a flower with the dew on it, and sunbeams in the dew-drops!
Ah! this must be all a dream! A dream! A dream! But it has quite
hidden the four stone walls!"
Then his face darkened, as if the shadow of a cavern or a dungeon had
come over it; there was no more light in its expression than might have
come through the iron grates of a prison-window--still lessening, too,
as if he were sinking farther into the depths. Phoebe (being of that
quickness and activity of temperament that she seldom long refrained
from taking a part, and generally a good one, in what was going
forward) now felt herself moved to address the stranger.
"Here is a new kind of rose, which I found this morning in the garden,"
said she, choosing a small crimson one from among the flowers in the
vase. "There will be but five or six on the bush this season. This is
the most perfect of them all; not a speck of blight or mildew in it.
And how sweet it is!--sweet like no other rose! One can never forget
that scent!"
"Ah!--let me see!--let me hold it!" cried the guest, eagerly seizing
the flower, which, by the spell peculiar to remembered odors, brought
innumerable associations along with the fragrance that it exhaled.
"Thank you! This has done me good. I remember how I used to prize this
flower,--long ago, I suppose, very long ago!--or was it only yesterday?
It makes me feel young again! Am I young? Either this remembrance is
singularly distinct, or this consciousness strangely dim! But how kind
of the fair young girl! Thank you! Thank you!"
The favorable excitement derived from this little crimson rose afforded
Clifford the brightest moment which he enjoyed at the breakfast-table.
It might have lasted longer, but that his eyes happened, soon
afterwards, to rest on the face of the old Puritan, who, out of his
dingy frame and lustreless canvas, was looking down on the scene like a
ghost, and a most ill-tempered and ungenial one. The guest made an
impatient gesture of the hand, and addressed Hepzibah with what might
easily be recognized as the licensed irritability of a petted member of
the family.
"Hepzibah!--Hepzibah!" cried he with no little force and distinctness,
"why do you keep that odious picture on the wall? Yes, yes!--that is
precisely your taste! I have told you, a thousand times, that it was
the evil genius of the house!--my evil genius particularly! Take it
down, at once!"
"Dear Clifford," said Hepzibah sadly, "you know it cannot be!"
"Then, at all events," continued he, still speaking with some energy,
"pray cover it with a crimson curtain, broad enough to hang in folds,
and with a golden border and tassels. I cannot bear it! It must not
stare me in the face!"
"Yes, dear Clifford, the picture shall be covered," said Hepzibah
soothingly. "There is a crimson curtain in a trunk above stairs,--a
little faded and moth-eaten, I'm afraid,--but Phoebe and I will do
wonders with it."
"This very day, remember" said he; and then added, in a low,
self-communing voice, "Why should we live in this dismal house at all?
Why not go to the South of France?--to Italy?--Paris, Naples, Venice,
Rome? Hepzibah will say we have not the means. A droll idea that!"
He smiled to himself, and threw a glance of fine sarcastic meaning
towards Hepzibah.
But the several moods of feeling, faintly as they were marked, through
which he had passed, occurring in so brief an interval of time, had
evidently wearied the stranger. He was probably accustomed to a sad
monotony of life, not so much flowing in a stream, however sluggish, as
stagnating in a pool around his feet. A slumberous veil diffused
itself over his countenance, and had an effect, morally speaking, on
its naturally delicate and elegant outline, like that which a brooding
mist, with no sunshine in it, throws over the features of a landscape.
He appeared to become grosser,--almost cloddish. If aught of interest
or beauty--even ruined beauty--had heretofore been visible in this man,
the beholder might now begin to doubt it, and to accuse his own
imagination of deluding him with whatever grace had flickered over that
visage, and whatever exquisite lustre had gleamed in those filmy eyes.
Before he had quite sunken away, however, the sharp and peevish tinkle
of the shop-bell made itself audible. Striking most disagreeably on
Clifford's auditory organs and the characteristic sensibility of his
nerves, it caused him to start upright out of his chair.
"Good heavens, Hepzibah! what horrible disturbance have we now in the
house?" cried he, wreaking his resentful impatience--as a matter of
course, and a custom of old--on the one person in the world that loved
him. "I have never heard such a hateful clamor! Why do you permit it?
In the name of all dissonance, what can it be?"
It was very remarkable into what prominent relief--even as if a dim
picture should leap suddenly from its canvas--Clifford's character was
thrown by this apparently trifling annoyance. The secret was, that an
individual of his temper can always be pricked more acutely through his
sense of the beautiful and harmonious than through his heart. It is
even possible--for similar cases have often happened--that if Clifford,
in his foregoing life, had enjoyed the means of cultivating his taste
to its utmost perfectibility, that subtile attribute might, before this
period, have completely eaten out or filed away his affections. Shall
we venture to pronounce, therefore, that his long and black calamity
may not have had a redeeming drop of mercy at the bottom?
"Dear Clifford, I wish I could keep the sound from your ears," said
Hepzibah, patiently, but reddening with a painful suffusion of shame.
"It is very disagreeable even to me. But, do you know, Clifford, I
have something to tell you? This ugly noise,--pray run, Phoebe, and see
who is there!--this naughty little tinkle is nothing but our shop-bell!"
"Shop-bell!" repeated Clifford, with a bewildered stare.
"Yes, our shop-bell," said Hepzibah, a certain natural dignity, mingled
with deep emotion, now asserting itself in her manner. "For you must
know, dearest Clifford, that we are very poor. And there was no other
resource, but either to accept assistance from a hand that I would push
aside (and so would you!) were it to offer bread when we were dying for
it,--no help, save from him, or else to earn our subsistence with my
own hands! Alone, I might have been content to starve. But you were to
be given back to me! Do you think, then, dear Clifford," added she,
with a wretched smile, "that I have brought an irretrievable disgrace
on the old house, by opening a little shop in the front gable? Our
great-great-grandfather did the same, when there was far less need! Are
you ashamed of me?"
"Shame! Disgrace! Do you speak these words to me, Hepzibah?" said
Clifford,--not angrily, however; for when a man's spirit has been
thoroughly crushed, he may be peevish at small offences, but never
resentful of great ones. So he spoke with only a grieved emotion. "It
was not kind to say so, Hepzibah! What shame can befall me now?"
And then the unnerved man--he that had been born for enjoyment, but had
met a doom so very wretched--burst into a woman's passion of tears. It
was but of brief continuance, however; soon leaving him in a quiescent,
and, to judge by his countenance, not an uncomfortable state. From
this mood, too, he partially rallied for an instant, and looked at
Hepzibah with a smile, the keen, half-derisory purport of which was a
puzzle to her.
"Are we so very poor, Hepzibah?" said he.
Finally, his chair being deep and softly cushioned, Clifford fell
asleep. Hearing the more regular rise and fall of his breath (which,
however, even then, instead of being strong and full, had a feeble kind
of tremor, corresponding with the lack of vigor in his
character),--hearing these tokens of settled slumber, Hepzibah seized
the opportunity to peruse his face more attentively than she had yet
dared to do. Her heart melted away in tears; her profoundest spirit
sent forth a moaning voice, low, gentle, but inexpressibly sad. In
this depth of grief and pity she felt that there was no irreverence in
gazing at his altered, aged, faded, ruined face. But no sooner was she
a little relieved than her conscience smote her for gazing curiously at
him, now that he was so changed; and, turning hastily away, Hepzibah
let down the curtain over the sunny window, and left Clifford to
slumber there.
| Phoebe wakes up the next morning and walks downstairs. She finds Hepzibah looking at a cookbook. Hepzibah asks Phoebe to go look for an egg in the hen coop. Hepzibah begins cooking energetically. Phoebe, the rats, and the ghosts of the household are all surprised at this unusual activity. Phoebe gathers some flowers to put on the table. She is surprised to see that Hepzibah has set the table for three. Who is the third visitor? Throughout all of this preparation, Hepzibah has been trembling anxiously. Finally Hepzibah asks Phoebe to "bear with" her. Phoebe asks what's upsetting Hepzibah so much. Hepzibah hushes Phoebe because "He is coming!" . There is a step in the passageway. The approaching footsteps come slowly in fits and starts. Finally the footsteps hesitate at the threshold of the door. Hepzibah warns Phoebe: "Whatever may happen, be nothing but cheerful!" . Hepzibah jumps up and leads an elderly man into the room. This man has unusually long white hair and a broken face. He looks like he is capable of thinking and feeling, but only sometimes - otherwise, his mind seems to "waver, and glimmer" . Hepzibah introduces Phoebe to Clifford Pyncheon. Clifford keeps looking around the room as though he cannot believe that he is there. Finally Phoebe realizes that she is seeing the face of the man in Hepzibah's miniature portrait. She can see, now and again, the remnants of that sensitive spirit captured in the portrait. Clifford thinks that Hepzibah is angry with him. Poor Hepzibah's permanent scowl - the result of heavy eyebrows and nearsightedness - freaks him out. But Hepzibah feels nothing but love and pity for her brother. Clifford eats a lot very quickly. He also quaffs down a pot of coffee. Clifford is unable to believe that this pleasant life will last. Phoebe, noticing Clifford's pleasure in the beauties of the garden, quickly distracts him from dark thoughts by pointing out a new kind of rose. Clifford is excited and asks to hold the rose. After enjoying the beauty of the rose for a time, Clifford is distracted by the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon. He demands that Hepzibah take it down. She replies that it cannot be taken down. Clifford asks that she cover it with a red cloth. Clifford insists that "It must not stare in the face!" . Clifford slowly seems to be tiring: he's not used to so much excitement. When he hears the shop bell, he is horrified by the ugly noise. Hepzibah explains that she has had to open a shop. Hepzibah asks if Clifford is ashamed of her. Clifford asks Hepzibah how he could possibly be ashamed of her when he has just spent the last 30 years in jail. Clifford bursts in to tears before asking, with an odd smile, "Are we so very poor, Hepzibah?" . Clifford then falls asleep in his chair. Hepzibah feels filled with grief and pity at the sight. | summary |
PHOEBE, on entering the shop, beheld there the already familiar face of
the little devourer--if we can reckon his mighty deeds aright--of Jim
Crow, the elephant, the camel, the dromedaries, and the locomotive.
Having expended his private fortune, on the two preceding days, in the
purchase of the above unheard-of luxuries, the young gentleman's
present errand was on the part of his mother, in quest of three eggs
and half a pound of raisins. These articles Phoebe accordingly
supplied, and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a
slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a
whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of
Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of
fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him. This remarkable
urchin, in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, both in
respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because
he, as well as Time, after ingulfing thus much of creation, looked
almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made.
After partly closing the door, the child turned back, and mumbled
something to Phoebe, which, as the whale was but half disposed of, she
could not perfectly understand.
"What did you say, my little fellow?" asked she.
"Mother wants to know" repeated Ned Higgins more distinctly, "how Old
Maid Pyncheon's brother does? Folks say he has got home."
"My cousin Hepzibah's brother?" exclaimed Phoebe, surprised at this
sudden explanation of the relationship between Hepzibah and her guest.
"Her brother! And where can he have been?"
The little boy only put his thumb to his broad snub-nose, with that
look of shrewdness which a child, spending much of his time in the
street, so soon learns to throw over his features, however
unintelligent in themselves. Then as Phoebe continued to gaze at him,
without answering his mother's message, he took his departure.
As the child went down the steps, a gentleman ascended them, and made
his entrance into the shop. It was the portly, and, had it possessed
the advantage of a little more height, would have been the stately
figure of a man considerably in the decline of life, dressed in a black
suit of some thin stuff, resembling broadcloth as closely as possible.
A gold-headed cane, of rare Oriental wood, added materially to the high
respectability of his aspect, as did also a neckcloth of the utmost
snowy purity, and the conscientious polish of his boots. His dark,
square countenance, with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows, was
naturally impressive, and would, perhaps, have been rather stern, had
not the gentleman considerately taken upon himself to mitigate the
harsh effect by a look of exceeding good-humor and benevolence. Owing,
however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about
the lower region of his face, the look was, perhaps, unctuous rather
than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshly effulgence, not
altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be. A
susceptible observer, at any rate, might have regarded it as affording
very little evidence of the general benignity of soul whereof it
purported to be the outward reflection. And if the observer chanced to
be ill-natured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably
suspect that the smile on the gentleman's face was a good deal akin to
the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his
boot-black, respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and
preserve them.
As the stranger entered the little shop, where the projection of the
second story and the thick foliage of the elm-tree, as well as the
commodities at the window, created a sort of gray medium, his smile
grew as intense as if he had set his heart on counteracting the whole
gloom of the atmosphere (besides any moral gloom pertaining to Hepzibah
and her inmates) by the unassisted light of his countenance. On
perceiving a young rose-bud of a girl, instead of the gaunt presence of
the old maid, a look of surprise was manifest. He at first knit his
brows; then smiled with more unctuous benignity than ever.
"Ah, I see how it is!" said he in a deep voice,--a voice which, had it
come from the throat of an uncultivated man, would have been gruff,
but, by dint of careful training, was now sufficiently agreeable,--"I
was not aware that Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon had commenced business under
such favorable auspices. You are her assistant, I suppose?"
"I certainly am," answered Phoebe, and added, with a little air of
lady-like assumption (for, civil as the gentleman was, he evidently
took her to be a young person serving for wages), "I am a cousin of
Miss Hepzibah, on a visit to her."
"Her cousin?--and from the country? Pray pardon me, then," said the
gentleman, bowing and smiling, as Phoebe never had been bowed to nor
smiled on before; "in that case, we must be better acquainted; for,
unless I am sadly mistaken, you are my own little kinswoman likewise!
Let me see,--Mary?--Dolly?--Phoebe?--yes, Phoebe is the name! Is it
possible that you are Phoebe Pyncheon, only child of my dear cousin and
classmate, Arthur? Ah, I see your father now, about your mouth! Yes,
yes! we must be better acquainted! I am your kinsman, my dear. Surely
you must have heard of Judge Pyncheon?"
As Phoebe curtsied in reply, the Judge bent forward, with the
pardonable and even praiseworthy purpose--considering the nearness of
blood and the difference of age--of bestowing on his young relative a
kiss of acknowledged kindred and natural affection. Unfortunately
(without design, or only with such instinctive design as gives no
account of itself to the intellect) Phoebe, just at the critical
moment, drew back; so that her highly respectable kinsman, with his
body bent over the counter and his lips protruded, was betrayed into
the rather absurd predicament of kissing the empty air. It was a
modern parallel to the case of Ixion embracing a cloud, and was so much
the more ridiculous as the Judge prided himself on eschewing all airy
matter, and never mistaking a shadow for a substance. The truth
was,--and it is Phoebe's only excuse,--that, although Judge Pyncheon's
glowing benignity might not be absolutely unpleasant to the feminine
beholder, with the width of a street, or even an ordinary-sized room,
interposed between, yet it became quite too intense, when this dark,
full-fed physiognomy (so roughly bearded, too, that no razor could ever
make it smooth) sought to bring itself into actual contact with the
object of its regards. The man, the sex, somehow or other, was
entirely too prominent in the Judge's demonstrations of that sort.
Phoebe's eyes sank, and, without knowing why, she felt herself blushing
deeply under his look. Yet she had been kissed before, and without
any particular squeamishness, by perhaps half a dozen different
cousins, younger as well as older than this dark-browned,
grisly-bearded, white-neck-clothed, and unctuously-benevolent Judge!
Then, why not by him?
On raising her eyes, Phoebe was startled by the change in Judge
Pyncheon's face. It was quite as striking, allowing for the difference
of scale, as that betwixt a landscape under a broad sunshine and just
before a thunder-storm; not that it had the passionate intensity of the
latter aspect, but was cold, hard, immitigable, like a day-long
brooding cloud.
"Dear me! what is to be done now?" thought the country-girl to herself.
"He looks as if there were nothing softer in him than a rock, nor
milder than the east wind! I meant no harm! Since he is really my
cousin, I would have let him kiss me, if I could!"
Then, all at once, it struck Phoebe that this very Judge Pyncheon was
the original of the miniature which the daguerreotypist had shown her
in the garden, and that the hard, stern, relentless look, now on his
face, was the same that the sun had so inflexibly persisted in bringing
out. Was it, therefore, no momentary mood, but, however skilfully
concealed, the settled temper of his life? And not merely so, but was
it hereditary in him, and transmitted down, as a precious heirloom,
from that bearded ancestor, in whose picture both the expression and,
to a singular degree, the features of the modern Judge were shown as by
a kind of prophecy? A deeper philosopher than Phoebe might have found
something very terrible in this idea. It implied that the weaknesses
and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral
diseases which lead to crime are handed down from one generation to
another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been
able to establish in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to
entail upon posterity.
But, as it happened, scarcely had Phoebe's eyes rested again on the
Judge's countenance than all its ugly sternness vanished; and she found
herself quite overpowered by the sultry, dog-day heat, as it were, of
benevolence, which this excellent man diffused out of his great heart
into the surrounding atmosphere,--very much like a serpent, which, as a
preliminary to fascination, is said to fill the air with his peculiar
odor.
"I like that, Cousin Phoebe!" cried he, with an emphatic nod of
approbation. "I like it much, my little cousin! You are a good child,
and know how to take care of yourself. A young girl--especially if she
be a very pretty one--can never be too chary of her lips."
"Indeed, sir," said Phoebe, trying to laugh the matter off, "I did not
mean to be unkind."
Nevertheless, whether or no it were entirely owing to the inauspicious
commencement of their acquaintance, she still acted under a certain
reserve, which was by no means customary to her frank and genial
nature. The fantasy would not quit her, that the original Puritan, of
whom she had heard so many sombre traditions,--the progenitor of the
whole race of New England Pyncheons, the founder of the House of the
Seven Gables, and who had died so strangely in it,--had now stept into
the shop. In these days of off-hand equipment, the matter was easily
enough arranged. On his arrival from the other world, he had merely
found it necessary to spend a quarter of an hour at a barber's, who had
trimmed down the Puritan's full beard into a pair of grizzled whiskers,
then, patronizing a ready-made clothing establishment, he had exchanged
his velvet doublet and sable cloak, with the richly worked band under
his chin, for a white collar and cravat, coat, vest, and pantaloons;
and lastly, putting aside his steel-hilted broadsword to take up a
gold-headed cane, the Colonel Pyncheon of two centuries ago steps
forward as the Judge of the passing moment!
Of course, Phoebe was far too sensible a girl to entertain this idea in
any other way than as matter for a smile. Possibly, also, could the
two personages have stood together before her eye, many points of
difference would have been perceptible, and perhaps only a general
resemblance. The long lapse of intervening years, in a climate so
unlike that which had fostered the ancestral Englishman, must
inevitably have wrought important changes in the physical system of his
descendant. The Judge's volume of muscle could hardly be the same as
the Colonel's; there was undoubtedly less beef in him. Though looked
upon as a weighty man among his contemporaries in respect of animal
substance, and as favored with a remarkable degree of fundamental
development, well adapting him for the judicial bench, we conceive that
the modern Judge Pyncheon, if weighed in the same balance with his
ancestor, would have required at least an old-fashioned fifty-six to
keep the scale in equilibrio. Then the Judge's face had lost the ruddy
English hue that showed its warmth through all the duskiness of the
Colonel's weather-beaten cheek, and had taken a sallow shade, the
established complexion of his countrymen. If we mistake not, moreover,
a certain quality of nervousness had become more or less manifest, even
in so solid a specimen of Puritan descent as the gentleman now under
discussion. As one of its effects, it bestowed on his countenance a
quicker mobility than the old Englishman's had possessed, and keener
vivacity, but at the expense of a sturdier something, on which these
acute endowments seemed to act like dissolving acids. This process,
for aught we know, may belong to the great system of human progress,
which, with every ascending footstep, as it diminishes the necessity
for animal force, may be destined gradually to spiritualize us, by
refining away our grosser attributes of body. If so, Judge Pyncheon
could endure a century or two more of such refinement as well as most
other men.
The similarity, intellectual and moral, between the Judge and his
ancestor appears to have been at least as strong as the resemblance of
mien and feature would afford reason to anticipate. In old Colonel
Pyncheon's funeral discourse the clergyman absolutely canonized his
deceased parishioner, and opening, as it were, a vista through the roof
of the church, and thence through the firmament above, showed him
seated, harp in hand, among the crowned choristers of the spiritual
world. On his tombstone, too, the record is highly eulogistic; nor
does history, so far as he holds a place upon its page, assail the
consistency and uprightness of his character. So also, as regards the
Judge Pyncheon of to-day, neither clergyman, nor legal critic, nor
inscriber of tombstones, nor historian of general or local politics,
would venture a word against this eminent person's sincerity as a
Christian, or respectability as a man, or integrity as a judge, or
courage and faithfulness as the often-tried representative of his
political party. But, besides these cold, formal, and empty words of
the chisel that inscribes, the voice that speaks, and the pen that
writes, for the public eye and for distant time,--and which inevitably
lose much of their truth and freedom by the fatal consciousness of so
doing,--there were traditions about the ancestor, and private diurnal
gossip about the Judge, remarkably accordant in their testimony. It is
often instructive to take the woman's, the private and domestic, view
of a public man; nor can anything be more curious than the vast
discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving and the
pencil-sketches that pass from hand to hand behind the original's back.
For example: tradition affirmed that the Puritan had been greedy of
wealth; the Judge, too, with all the show of liberal expenditure, was
said to be as close-fisted as if his gripe were of iron. The ancestor
had clothed himself in a grim assumption of kindliness, a rough
heartiness of word and manner, which most people took to be the genuine
warmth of nature, making its way through the thick and inflexible hide
of a manly character. His descendant, in compliance with the
requirements of a nicer age, had etherealized this rude benevolence
into that broad benignity of smile wherewith he shone like a noonday
sun along the streets, or glowed like a household fire in the
drawing-rooms of his private acquaintance. The Puritan--if not belied
by some singular stories, murmured, even at this day, under the
narrator's breath--had fallen into certain transgressions to which men
of his great animal development, whatever their faith or principles,
must continue liable, until they put off impurity, along with the gross
earthly substance that involves it. We must not stain our page with
any contemporary scandal, to a similar purport, that may have been
whispered against the Judge. The Puritan, again, an autocrat in his
own household, had worn out three wives, and, merely by the remorseless
weight and hardness of his character in the conjugal relation, had sent
them, one after another, broken-hearted, to their graves. Here the
parallel, in some sort, fails. The Judge had wedded but a single wife,
and lost her in the third or fourth year of their marriage. There was
a fable, however,--for such we choose to consider it, though, not
impossibly, typical of Judge Pyncheon's marital deportment,--that the
lady got her death-blow in the honeymoon, and never smiled again,
because her husband compelled her to serve him with coffee every
morning at his bedside, in token of fealty to her liege-lord and master.
But it is too fruitful a subject, this of hereditary resemblances,--the
frequent recurrence of which, in a direct line, is truly unaccountable,
when we consider how large an accumulation of ancestry lies behind
every man at the distance of one or two centuries. We shall only add,
therefore, that the Puritan--so, at least, says chimney-corner
tradition, which often preserves traits of character with marvellous
fidelity--was bold, imperious, relentless, crafty; laying his purposes
deep, and following them out with an inveteracy of pursuit that knew
neither rest nor conscience; trampling on the weak, and, when essential
to his ends, doing his utmost to beat down the strong. Whether the
Judge in any degree resembled him, the further progress of our
narrative may show.
Scarcely any of the items in the above-drawn parallel occurred to
Phoebe, whose country birth and residence, in truth, had left her
pitifully ignorant of most of the family traditions, which lingered,
like cobwebs and incrustations of smoke, about the rooms and
chimney-corners of the House of the Seven Gables. Yet there was a
circumstance, very trifling in itself, which impressed her with an odd
degree of horror. She had heard of the anathema flung by Maule, the
executed wizard, against Colonel Pyncheon and his posterity,--that God
would give them blood to drink,--and likewise of the popular notion,
that this miraculous blood might now and then be heard gurgling in
their throats. The latter scandal--as became a person of sense, and,
more especially, a member of the Pyncheon family--Phoebe had set down
for the absurdity which it unquestionably was. But ancient
superstitions, after being steeped in human hearts and embodied in
human breath, and passing from lip to ear in manifold repetition,
through a series of generations, become imbued with an effect of homely
truth. The smoke of the domestic hearth has scented them through and
through. By long transmission among household facts, they grow to look
like them, and have such a familiar way of making themselves at home
that their influence is usually greater than we suspect. Thus it
happened, that when Phoebe heard a certain noise in Judge Pyncheon's
throat,--rather habitual with him, not altogether voluntary, yet
indicative of nothing, unless it were a slight bronchial complaint, or,
as some people hinted, an apoplectic symptom,--when the girl heard this
queer and awkward ingurgitation (which the writer never did hear, and
therefore cannot describe), she very foolishly started, and clasped her
hands.
Of course, it was exceedingly ridiculous in Phoebe to be discomposed by
such a trifle, and still more unpardonable to show her discomposure to
the individual most concerned in it. But the incident chimed in so
oddly with her previous fancies about the Colonel and the Judge, that,
for the moment, it seemed quite to mingle their identity.
"What is the matter with you, young woman?" said Judge Pyncheon, giving
her one of his harsh looks. "Are you afraid of anything?"
"Oh, nothing, sir--nothing in the world!" answered Phoebe, with a
little laugh of vexation at herself. "But perhaps you wish to speak
with my cousin Hepzibah. Shall I call her?"
"Stay a moment, if you please," said the Judge, again beaming sunshine
out of his face. "You seem to be a little nervous this morning. The
town air, Cousin Phoebe, does not agree with your good, wholesome
country habits. Or has anything happened to disturb you?--anything
remarkable in Cousin Hepzibah's family?-- An arrival, eh? I thought
so! No wonder you are out of sorts, my little cousin. To be an inmate
with such a guest may well startle an innocent young girl!"
"You quite puzzle me, sir," replied Phoebe, gazing inquiringly at the
Judge. "There is no frightful guest in the house, but only a poor,
gentle, childlike man, whom I believe to be Cousin Hepzibah's brother.
I am afraid (but you, sir, will know better than I) that he is not
quite in his sound senses; but so mild and quiet he seems to be, that a
mother might trust her baby with him; and I think he would play with
the baby as if he were only a few years older than itself. He startle
me!--Oh, no indeed!"
"I rejoice to hear so favorable and so ingenuous an account of my
cousin Clifford," said the benevolent Judge. "Many years ago, when we
were boys and young men together, I had a great affection for him, and
still feel a tender interest in all his concerns. You say, Cousin
Phoebe, he appears to be weak minded. Heaven grant him at least enough
of intellect to repent of his past sins!"
"Nobody, I fancy," observed Phoebe, "can have fewer to repent of."
"And is it possible, my dear," rejoined the Judge, with a commiserating
look, "that you have never heard of Clifford Pyncheon?--that you know
nothing of his history? Well, it is all right; and your mother has
shown a very proper regard for the good name of the family with which
she connected herself. Believe the best you can of this unfortunate
person, and hope the best! It is a rule which Christians should always
follow, in their judgments of one another; and especially is it right
and wise among near relatives, whose characters have necessarily a
degree of mutual dependence. But is Clifford in the parlor? I will
just step in and see."
"Perhaps, sir, I had better call my cousin Hepzibah," said Phoebe;
hardly knowing, however, whether she ought to obstruct the entrance of
so affectionate a kinsman into the private regions of the house. "Her
brother seemed to be just falling asleep after breakfast; and I am sure
she would not like him to be disturbed. Pray, sir, let me give her
notice!"
But the Judge showed a singular determination to enter unannounced; and
as Phoebe, with the vivacity of a person whose movements unconsciously
answer to her thoughts, had stepped towards the door, he used little or
no ceremony in putting her aside.
"No, no, Miss Phoebe!" said Judge Pyncheon in a voice as deep as a
thunder-growl, and with a frown as black as the cloud whence it issues.
"Stay you here! I know the house, and know my cousin Hepzibah, and know
her brother Clifford likewise.--nor need my little country cousin put
herself to the trouble of announcing me!"--in these latter words, by
the bye, there were symptoms of a change from his sudden harshness into
his previous benignity of manner. "I am at home here, Phoebe, you must
recollect, and you are the stranger. I will just step in, therefore,
and see for myself how Clifford is, and assure him and Hepzibah of my
kindly feelings and best wishes. It is right, at this juncture, that
they should both hear from my own lips how much I desire to serve them.
Ha! here is Hepzibah herself!"
Such was the case. The vibrations of the Judge's voice had reached the
old gentlewoman in the parlor, where she sat, with face averted,
waiting on her brother's slumber. She now issued forth, as would
appear, to defend the entrance, looking, we must needs say, amazingly
like the dragon which, in fairy tales, is wont to be the guardian over
an enchanted beauty. The habitual scowl of her brow was undeniably too
fierce, at this moment, to pass itself off on the innocent score of
near-sightedness; and it was bent on Judge Pyncheon in a way that
seemed to confound, if not alarm him, so inadequately had he estimated
the moral force of a deeply grounded antipathy. She made a repelling
gesture with her hand, and stood a perfect picture of prohibition, at
full length, in the dark frame of the doorway. But we must betray
Hepzibah's secret, and confess that the native timorousness of her
character even now developed itself in a quick tremor, which, to her
own perception, set each of her joints at variance with its fellows.
Possibly, the Judge was aware how little true hardihood lay behind
Hepzibah's formidable front. At any rate, being a gentleman of steady
nerves, he soon recovered himself, and failed not to approach his
cousin with outstretched hand; adopting the sensible precaution,
however, to cover his advance with a smile, so broad and sultry, that,
had it been only half as warm as it looked, a trellis of grapes might
at once have turned purple under its summer-like exposure. It may have
been his purpose, indeed, to melt poor Hepzibah on the spot, as if she
were a figure of yellow wax.
"Hepzibah, my beloved cousin, I am rejoiced!" exclaimed the Judge most
emphatically. "Now, at length, you have something to live for. Yes,
and all of us, let me say, your friends and kindred, have more to live
for than we had yesterday. I have lost no time in hastening to offer
any assistance in my power towards making Clifford comfortable. He
belongs to us all. I know how much he requires,--how much he used to
require,--with his delicate taste, and his love of the beautiful.
Anything in my house,--pictures, books, wine, luxuries of the
table,--he may command them all! It would afford me most heartfelt
gratification to see him! Shall I step in, this moment?"
"No," replied Hepzibah, her voice quivering too painfully to allow of
many words. "He cannot see visitors!"
"A visitor, my dear cousin!--do you call me so?" cried the Judge, whose
sensibility, it seems, was hurt by the coldness of the phrase. "Nay,
then, let me be Clifford's host, and your own likewise. Come at once
to my house. The country air, and all the conveniences,--I may say
luxuries,--that I have gathered about me, will do wonders for him. And
you and I, dear Hepzibah, will consult together, and watch together,
and labor together, to make our dear Clifford happy. Come! why should
we make more words about what is both a duty and a pleasure on my part?
Come to me at once!"
On hearing these so hospitable offers, and such generous recognition of
the claims of kindred, Phoebe felt very much in the mood of running up
to Judge Pyncheon, and giving him, of her own accord, the kiss from
which she had so recently shrunk away. It was quite otherwise with
Hepzibah; the Judge's smile seemed to operate on her acerbity of heart
like sunshine upon vinegar, making it ten times sourer than ever.
"Clifford," said she,--still too agitated to utter more than an abrupt
sentence,--"Clifford has a home here!"
"May Heaven forgive you, Hepzibah," said Judge Pyncheon,--reverently
lifting his eyes towards that high court of equity to which he
appealed,--"if you suffer any ancient prejudice or animosity to weigh
with you in this matter. I stand here with an open heart, willing and
anxious to receive yourself and Clifford into it. Do not refuse my
good offices,--my earnest propositions for your welfare! They are such,
in all respects, as it behooves your nearest kinsman to make. It will
be a heavy responsibility, cousin, if you confine your brother to this
dismal house and stifled air, when the delightful freedom of my
country-seat is at his command."
"It would never suit Clifford," said Hepzibah, as briefly as before.
"Woman!" broke forth the Judge, giving way to his resentment, "what is
the meaning of all this? Have you other resources? Nay, I suspected as
much! Take care, Hepzibah, take care! Clifford is on the brink of as
black a ruin as ever befell him yet! But why do I talk with you, woman
as you are? Make way!--I must see Clifford!"
Hepzibah spread out her gaunt figure across the door, and seemed really
to increase in bulk; looking the more terrible, also, because there was
so much terror and agitation in her heart. But Judge Pyncheon's
evident purpose of forcing a passage was interrupted by a voice from
the inner room; a weak, tremulous, wailing voice, indicating helpless
alarm, with no more energy for self-defence than belongs to a
frightened infant.
"Hepzibah, Hepzibah!" cried the voice; "go down on your knees to him!
Kiss his feet! Entreat him not to come in! Oh, let him have mercy on
me! Mercy! mercy!"
For the instant, it appeared doubtful whether it were not the Judge's
resolute purpose to set Hepzibah aside, and step across the threshold
into the parlor, whence issued that broken and miserable murmur of
entreaty. It was not pity that restrained him, for, at the first sound
of the enfeebled voice, a red fire kindled in his eyes, and he made a
quick pace forward, with something inexpressibly fierce and grim
darkening forth, as it were, out of the whole man. To know Judge
Pyncheon was to see him at that moment. After such a revelation, let
him smile with what sultriness he would, he could much sooner turn
grapes purple, or pumpkins yellow, than melt the iron-branded
impression out of the beholder's memory. And it rendered his aspect
not the less, but more frightful, that it seemed not to express wrath
or hatred, but a certain hot fellness of purpose, which annihilated
everything but itself.
Yet, after all, are we not slandering an excellent and amiable man?
Look at the Judge now! He is apparently conscious of having erred, in
too energetically pressing his deeds of loving-kindness on persons
unable to appreciate them. He will await their better mood, and hold
himself as ready to assist them then as at this moment. As he draws
back from the door, an all-comprehensive benignity blazes from his
visage, indicating that he gathers Hepzibah, little Phoebe, and the
invisible Clifford, all three, together with the whole world besides,
into his immense heart, and gives them a warm bath in its flood of
affection.
"You do me great wrong, dear Cousin Hepzibah!" said he, first kindly
offering her his hand, and then drawing on his glove preparatory to
departure. "Very great wrong! But I forgive it, and will study to make
you think better of me. Of course, our poor Clifford being in so
unhappy a state of mind, I cannot think of urging an interview at
present. But I shall watch over his welfare as if he were my own
beloved brother; nor do I at all despair, my dear cousin, of
constraining both him and you to acknowledge your injustice. When that
shall happen, I desire no other revenge than your acceptance of the
best offices in my power to do you."
With a bow to Hepzibah, and a degree of paternal benevolence in his
parting nod to Phoebe, the Judge left the shop, and went smiling along
the street. As is customary with the rich, when they aim at the honors
of a republic, he apologized, as it were, to the people, for his
wealth, prosperity, and elevated station, by a free and hearty manner
towards those who knew him; putting off the more of his dignity in due
proportion with the humbleness of the man whom he saluted, and thereby
proving a haughty consciousness of his advantages as irrefragably as if
he had marched forth preceded by a troop of lackeys to clear the way.
On this particular forenoon, so excessive was the warmth of Judge
Pyncheon's kindly aspect, that (such, at least, was the rumor about
town) an extra passage of the water-carts was found essential, in order
to lay the dust occasioned by so much extra sunshine!
No sooner had he disappeared than Hepzibah grew deadly white, and,
staggering towards Phoebe, let her head fall on the young girl's
shoulder.
"O Phoebe!" murmured she, "that man has been the horror of my life!
Shall I never, never have the courage,--will my voice never cease from
trembling long enough to let me tell him what he is?"
"Is he so very wicked?" asked Phoebe. "Yet his offers were surely
kind!"
"Do not speak of them,--he has a heart of iron!" rejoined Hepzibah.
"Go, now, and talk to Clifford! Amuse and keep him quiet! It would
disturb him wretchedly to see me so agitated as I am. There, go, dear
child, and I will try to look after the shop."
Phoebe went accordingly, but perplexed herself, meanwhile, with queries
as to the purport of the scene which she had just witnessed, and also
whether judges, clergymen, and other characters of that eminent stamp
and respectability, could really, in any single instance, be otherwise
than just and upright men. A doubt of this nature has a most
disturbing influence, and, if shown to be a fact, comes with fearful
and startling effect on minds of the trim, orderly, and limit-loving
class, in which we find our little country-girl. Dispositions more
boldly speculative may derive a stern enjoyment from the discovery,
since there must be evil in the world, that a high man is as likely to
grasp his share of it as a low one. A wider scope of view, and a
deeper insight, may see rank, dignity, and station, all proved
illusory, so far as regards their claim to human reverence, and yet not
feel as if the universe were thereby tumbled headlong into chaos. But
Phoebe, in order to keep the universe in its old place, was fain to
smother, in some degree, her own intuitions as to Judge Pyncheon's
character. And as for her cousin's testimony in disparagement of it,
she concluded that Hepzibah's judgment was embittered by one of those
family feuds which render hatred the more deadly by the dead and
corrupted love that they intermingle with its native poison.
| Phoebe goes down to the shop to find Ned Higgins waiting. This time little Ned is on a chore for his mother. Ned buys some eggs, but he also asks Phoebe how Hepzibah's brother is getting along. It's only with this question that Phoebe realizes how Clifford Pyncheon is related to Hepzibah. But she still doesn't know where Clifford has been all of this time. As Ned Higgins leaves the shop, an older gentleman comes in. He is tall, large, and carrying a gold-headed cane. It's Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon. The Judge introduces himself and figures out that Phoebe must be the daughter of his cousin Arthur. Phoebe curtsies. When the Judge leans over to give her a kiss, however, Phoebe suddenly startles backward. Phoebe can't explain why she has been so rude to this elderly relative when she has kissed many other cousins without even thinking about it. When Phoebe looks back at the Judge, she suddenly sees a cold expression on his face. That's when Phoebe realizes that Judge Pyncheon looks exactly like Colonel Pyncheon in that old portrait. Almost as soon as she notices his ugly sternness, his face suddenly returns to its usual kind expression. Phoebe apologizes for being rude. But she can't quite get over that first perception that Judge Pyncheon looks just like his Puritan ancestor. She recognizes that there are many differences between the two, but even so, that impression remains. It's not just physical appearance that draws together the Colonel and Judge Pyncheon. They share two other things: first, they are both widely respected and spoken of in glowing terms by the clergyman and local officials of their day. And second, they both have bad reputations in local gossip. They are known to be miserly tyrants. Phoebe is unaware of all these rumors. She does know the story of Matthew Maule and his last words about blood to drink, though. So when the Judge clears his throat in an odd way, Phoebe startles. Judge Pyncheon asks if Phoebe is afraid of something. Phoebe says no, no, everything is fine. But Judge Pyncheon has heard a rumor of an odd guest in the House of the Seven Gables. Phoebe says this guest is not "frightful"; he is a "poor, gentle, childlike man" , Hepzibah's brother Clifford. Judge Pyncheon wonders whether Phoebe has heard of Clifford's history. He decides it would be inappropriate for a young girl to know Clifford's past. Judge Pyncheon wants to step in to visit Clifford. Phoebe offers to go and ask Hepzibah, since last she saw, Clifford was sleeping. Judge Pyncheon refuses to wait. He insists, "Stay you here! I know the house, and know my Cousin Hepzibah" . At this, Hepzibah comes into the shop. She looks furious and is shaking. Judge Pyncheon greets Hepzibah warmly. Hepzibah refuses to let Judge Pyncheon see Clifford. Judge Pyncheon offers to let both Clifford and Hepzibah stay with him at the seaside. Phoebe is impressed by Judge Pyncheon's generous offer. Hepzibah looks even angrier than before. Hepzibah assures Judge Pyncheon that "Clifford has a home here" . Judge Pyncheon asks how Hepzibah can keep her brother trapped in this old, dank house. Hepzibah still refuses to let Clifford go to Judge Pyncheon's country house. Hepzibah physically blocks the door to the house. Clifford's voice comes from upstairs. He begs Hepzibah to keep Judge Pyncheon from coming in. Once more, Judge Pyncheon looks furious for a moment before returning to his usual, loving expression. Judge Pyncheon scolds Hepzibah for treating him this way. He takes his leave of Hepzibah and Phoebe. As soon as he leaves, Hepzibah staggers and grows pale. She tells Phoebe that Judge Pyncheon has been "the horror of life" . Phoebe can't believe he is so wicked - his offers to Hepzibah and Clifford were so kind! Hepzibah tells Phoebe not to be fooled. She asks Phoebe to go and look after Clifford. Phoebe wonders what this is all about. She thinks Hepzibah is probably giving in to old family resentments. | summary |
TRULY was there something high, generous, and noble in the native
composition of our poor old Hepzibah! Or else,--and it was quite as
probably the case,--she had been enriched by poverty, developed by
sorrow, elevated by the strong and solitary affection of her life, and
thus endowed with heroism, which never could have characterized her in
what are called happier circumstances. Through dreary years Hepzibah
had looked forward--for the most part despairingly, never with any
confidence of hope, but always with the feeling that it was her
brightest possibility--to the very position in which she now found
herself. In her own behalf, she had asked nothing of Providence but
the opportunity of devoting herself to this brother, whom she had so
loved,--so admired for what he was, or might have been,--and to whom
she had kept her faith, alone of all the world, wholly, unfalteringly,
at every instant, and throughout life. And here, in his late decline,
the lost one had come back out of his long and strange misfortune, and
was thrown on her sympathy, as it seemed, not merely for the bread of
his physical existence, but for everything that should keep him morally
alive. She had responded to the call. She had come forward,--our
poor, gaunt Hepzibah, in her rusty silks, with her rigid joints, and
the sad perversity of her scowl,--ready to do her utmost; and with
affection enough, if that were all, to do a hundred times as much!
There could be few more tearful sights,--and Heaven forgive us if a
smile insist on mingling with our conception of it!--few sights with
truer pathos in them, than Hepzibah presented on that first afternoon.
How patiently did she endeavor to wrap Clifford up in her great, warm
love, and make it all the world to him, so that he should retain no
torturing sense of the coldness and dreariness without! Her little
efforts to amuse him! How pitiful, yet magnanimous, they were!
Remembering his early love of poetry and fiction, she unlocked a
bookcase, and took down several books that had been excellent reading
in their day. There was a volume of Pope, with the Rape of the Lock in
it, and another of the Tatler, and an odd one of Dryden's Miscellanies,
all with tarnished gilding on their covers, and thoughts of tarnished
brilliancy inside. They had no success with Clifford. These, and all
such writers of society, whose new works glow like the rich texture of
a just-woven carpet, must be content to relinquish their charm, for
every reader, after an age or two, and could hardly be supposed to
retain any portion of it for a mind that had utterly lost its estimate
of modes and manners. Hepzibah then took up Rasselas, and began to
read of the Happy Valley, with a vague idea that some secret of a
contented life had there been elaborated, which might at least serve
Clifford and herself for this one day. But the Happy Valley had a
cloud over it. Hepzibah troubled her auditor, moreover, by innumerable
sins of emphasis, which he seemed to detect, without any reference to
the meaning; nor, in fact, did he appear to take much note of the sense
of what she read, but evidently felt the tedium of the lecture, without
harvesting its profit. His sister's voice, too, naturally harsh, had,
in the course of her sorrowful lifetime, contracted a kind of croak,
which, when it once gets into the human throat, is as ineradicable as
sin. In both sexes, occasionally, this lifelong croak, accompanying
each word of joy or sorrow, is one of the symptoms of a settled
melancholy; and wherever it occurs, the whole history of misfortune is
conveyed in its slightest accent. The effect is as if the voice had
been dyed black; or,--if we must use a more moderate simile,--this
miserable croak, running through all the variations of the voice, is
like a black silken thread, on which the crystal beads of speech are
strung, and whence they take their hue. Such voices have put on
mourning for dead hopes; and they ought to die and be buried along with
them!
Discerning that Clifford was not gladdened by her efforts, Hepzibah
searched about the house for the means of more exhilarating pastime.
At one time, her eyes chanced to rest on Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord.
It was a moment of great peril; for,--despite the traditionary awe that
had gathered over this instrument of music, and the dirges which
spiritual fingers were said to play on it,--the devoted sister had
solemn thoughts of thrumming on its chords for Clifford's benefit, and
accompanying the performance with her voice. Poor Clifford! Poor
Hepzibah! Poor harpsichord! All three would have been miserable
together. By some good agency,--possibly, by the unrecognized
interposition of the long-buried Alice herself,--the threatening
calamity was averted.
But the worst of all--the hardest stroke of fate for Hepzibah to
endure, and perhaps for Clifford, too was his invincible distaste for
her appearance. Her features, never the most agreeable, and now harsh
with age and grief, and resentment against the world for his sake; her
dress, and especially her turban; the queer and quaint manners, which
had unconsciously grown upon her in solitude,--such being the poor
gentlewoman's outward characteristics, it is no great marvel, although
the mournfullest of pities, that the instinctive lover of the Beautiful
was fain to turn away his eyes. There was no help for it. It would be
the latest impulse to die within him. In his last extremity, the
expiring breath stealing faintly through Clifford's lips, he would
doubtless press Hepzibah's hand, in fervent recognition of all her
lavished love, and close his eyes,--but not so much to die, as to be
constrained to look no longer on her face! Poor Hepzibah! She took
counsel with herself what might be done, and thought of putting ribbons
on her turban; but, by the instant rush of several guardian angels, was
withheld from an experiment that could hardly have proved less than
fatal to the beloved object of her anxiety.
To be brief, besides Hepzibah's disadvantages of person, there was an
uncouthness pervading all her deeds; a clumsy something, that could but
ill adapt itself for use, and not at all for ornament. She was a grief
to Clifford, and she knew it. In this extremity, the antiquated virgin
turned to Phoebe. No grovelling jealousy was in her heart. Had it
pleased Heaven to crown the heroic fidelity of her life by making her
personally the medium of Clifford's happiness, it would have rewarded
her for all the past, by a joy with no bright tints, indeed, but deep
and true, and worth a thousand gayer ecstasies. This could not be.
She therefore turned to Phoebe, and resigned the task into the young
girl's hands. The latter took it up cheerfully, as she did everything,
but with no sense of a mission to perform, and succeeding all the
better for that same simplicity.
By the involuntary effect of a genial temperament, Phoebe soon grew to
be absolutely essential to the daily comfort, if not the daily life, of
her two forlorn companions. The grime and sordidness of the House of
the Seven Gables seemed to have vanished since her appearance there;
the gnawing tooth of the dry-rot was stayed among the old timbers of
its skeleton frame; the dust had ceased to settle down so densely, from
the antique ceilings, upon the floors and furniture of the rooms
below,--or, at any rate, there was a little housewife, as light-footed
as the breeze that sweeps a garden walk, gliding hither and thither to
brush it all away. The shadows of gloomy events that haunted the else
lonely and desolate apartments; the heavy, breathless scent which death
had left in more than one of the bedchambers, ever since his visits of
long ago,--these were less powerful than the purifying influence
scattered throughout the atmosphere of the household by the presence of
one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly wholesome heart. There was no
morbidness in Phoebe; if there had been, the old Pyncheon House was the
very locality to ripen it into incurable disease. But now her spirit
resembled, in its potency, a minute quantity of ottar of rose in one of
Hepzibah's huge, iron-bound trunks, diffusing its fragrance through the
various articles of linen and wrought-lace, kerchiefs, caps, stockings,
folded dresses, gloves, and whatever else was treasured there. As
every article in the great trunk was the sweeter for the rose-scent, so
did all the thoughts and emotions of Hepzibah and Clifford, sombre as
they might seem, acquire a subtle attribute of happiness from Phoebe's
intermixture with them. Her activity of body, intellect, and heart
impelled her continually to perform the ordinary little toils that
offered themselves around her, and to think the thought proper for the
moment, and to sympathize,--now with the twittering gayety of the
robins in the pear-tree, and now to such a depth as she could with
Hepzibah's dark anxiety, or the vague moan of her brother. This facile
adaptation was at once the symptom of perfect health and its best
preservative.
A nature like Phoebe's has invariably its due influence, but is seldom
regarded with due honor. Its spiritual force, however, may be
partially estimated by the fact of her having found a place for
herself, amid circumstances so stern as those which surrounded the
mistress of the house; and also by the effect which she produced on a
character of so much more mass than her own. For the gaunt, bony
frame and limbs of Hepzibah, as compared with the tiny lightsomeness of
Phoebe's figure, were perhaps in some fit proportion with the moral
weight and substance, respectively, of the woman and the girl.
To the guest,--to Hepzibah's brother,--or Cousin Clifford, as Phoebe
now began to call him,--she was especially necessary. Not that he could
ever be said to converse with her, or often manifest, in any other very
definite mode, his sense of a charm in her society. But if she were a
long while absent he became pettish and nervously restless, pacing the
room to and fro with the uncertainty that characterized all his
movements; or else would sit broodingly in his great chair, resting his
head on his hands, and evincing life only by an electric sparkle of
ill-humor, whenever Hepzibah endeavored to arouse him. Phoebe's
presence, and the contiguity of her fresh life to his blighted one, was
usually all that he required. Indeed, such was the native gush and play
of her spirit, that she was seldom perfectly quiet and undemonstrative,
any more than a fountain ever ceases to dimple and warble with its
flow. She possessed the gift of song, and that, too, so naturally, that
you would as little think of inquiring whence she had caught it, or
what master had taught her, as of asking the same questions about a
bird, in whose small strain of music we recognize the voice of the
Creator as distinctly as in the loudest accents of his thunder. So long
as Phoebe sang, she might stray at her own will about the house.
Clifford was content, whether the sweet, airy homeliness of her tones
came down from the upper chambers, or along the passageway from the
shop, or was sprinkled through the foliage of the pear-tree, inward
from the garden, with the twinkling sunbeams. He would sit quietly,
with a gentle pleasure gleaming over his face, brighter now, and now a
little dimmer, as the song happened to float near him, or was more
remotely heard. It pleased him best, however, when she sat on a low
footstool at his knee.
It is perhaps remarkable, considering her temperament, that Phoebe
oftener chose a strain of pathos than of gayety. But the young and
happy are not ill pleased to temper their life with a transparent
shadow. The deepest pathos of Phoebe's voice and song, moreover, came
sifted through the golden texture of a cheery spirit, and was somehow
so interfused with the quality thence acquired, that one's heart felt
all the lighter for having wept at it. Broad mirth, in the sacred
presence of dark misfortune, would have jarred harshly and irreverently
with the solemn symphony that rolled its undertone through Hepzibah's
and her brother's life. Therefore, it was well that Phoebe so often
chose sad themes, and not amiss that they ceased to be so sad while she
was singing them.
Becoming habituated to her companionship, Clifford readily showed how
capable of imbibing pleasant tints and gleams of cheerful light from
all quarters his nature must originally have been. He grew youthful
while she sat by him. A beauty,--not precisely real, even in its
utmost manifestation, and which a painter would have watched long to
seize and fix upon his canvas, and, after all, in vain,--beauty,
nevertheless, that was not a mere dream, would sometimes play upon and
illuminate his face. It did more than to illuminate; it transfigured
him with an expression that could only be interpreted as the glow of an
exquisite and happy spirit. That gray hair, and those furrows,--with
their record of infinite sorrow so deeply written across his brow, and
so compressed, as with a futile effort to crowd in all the tale, that
the whole inscription was made illegible,--these, for the moment,
vanished. An eye at once tender and acute might have beheld in the man
some shadow of what he was meant to be. Anon, as age came stealing,
like a sad twilight, back over his figure, you would have felt tempted
to hold an argument with Destiny, and affirm, that either this being
should not have been made mortal, or mortal existence should have been
tempered to his qualities. There seemed no necessity for his having
drawn breath at all; the world never wanted him; but, as he had
breathed, it ought always to have been the balmiest of summer air. The
same perplexity will invariably haunt us with regard to natures that
tend to feed exclusively upon the Beautiful, let their earthly fate be
as lenient as it may.
Phoebe, it is probable, had but a very imperfect comprehension of the
character over which she had thrown so beneficent a spell. Nor was it
necessary. The fire upon the hearth can gladden a whole semicircle of
faces round about it, but need not know the individuality of one among
them all. Indeed, there was something too fine and delicate in
Clifford's traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose sphere lay
so much in the Actual as Phoebe's did. For Clifford, however, the
reality, and simplicity, and thorough homeliness of the girl's nature
were as powerful a charm as any that she possessed. Beauty, it is
true, and beauty almost perfect in its own style, was indispensable.
Had Phoebe been coarse in feature, shaped clumsily, of a harsh voice,
and uncouthly mannered, she might have been rich with all good gifts,
beneath this unfortunate exterior, and still, so long as she wore the
guise of woman, she would have shocked Clifford, and depressed him by
her lack of beauty. But nothing more beautiful--nothing prettier, at
least--was ever made than Phoebe. And, therefore, to this man,--whose
whole poor and impalpable enjoyment of existence heretofore, and until
both his heart and fancy died within him, had been a dream,--whose
images of women had more and more lost their warmth and substance, and
been frozen, like the pictures of secluded artists, into the chillest
ideality,--to him, this little figure of the cheeriest household life
was just what he required to bring him back into the breathing world.
Persons who have wandered, or been expelled, out of the common track of
things, even were it for a better system, desire nothing so much as to
be led back. They shiver in their loneliness, be it on a mountain-top
or in a dungeon. Now, Phoebe's presence made a home about her,--that
very sphere which the outcast, the prisoner, the potentate,--the wretch
beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above
it,--instinctively pines after,--a home! She was real! Holding her
hand, you felt something; a tender something; a substance, and a warm
one: and so long as you should feel its grasp, soft as it was, you
might be certain that your place was good in the whole sympathetic
chain of human nature. The world was no longer a delusion.
By looking a little further in this direction, we might suggest an
explanation of an often-suggested mystery. Why are poets so apt to
choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for
qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman
as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because,
probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human
intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.
There was something very beautiful in the relation that grew up between
this pair, so closely and constantly linked together, yet with such a
waste of gloomy and mysterious years from his birthday to hers. On
Clifford's part it was the feeling of a man naturally endowed with the
liveliest sensibility to feminine influence, but who had never quaffed
the cup of passionate love, and knew that it was now too late. He knew
it, with the instinctive delicacy that had survived his intellectual
decay. Thus, his sentiment for Phoebe, without being paternal, was not
less chaste than if she had been his daughter. He was a man, it is
true, and recognized her as a woman. She was his only representative
of womankind. He took unfailing note of every charm that appertained
to her sex, and saw the ripeness of her lips, and the virginal
development of her bosom. All her little womanly ways, budding out of
her like blossoms on a young fruit-tree, had their effect on him, and
sometimes caused his very heart to tingle with the keenest thrills of
pleasure. At such moments,--for the effect was seldom more than
momentary,--the half-torpid man would be full of harmonious life, just
as a long-silent harp is full of sound, when the musician's fingers
sweep across it. But, after all, it seemed rather a perception, or a
sympathy, than a sentiment belonging to himself as an individual. He
read Phoebe as he would a sweet and simple story; he listened to her as
if she were a verse of household poetry, which God, in requital of his
bleak and dismal lot, had permitted some angel, that most pitied him,
to warble through the house. She was not an actual fact for him, but
the interpretation of all that he lacked on earth brought warmly home
to his conception; so that this mere symbol, or life-like picture, had
almost the comfort of reality.
But we strive in vain to put the idea into words. No adequate
expression of the beauty and profound pathos with which it impresses us
is attainable. This being, made only for happiness, and heretofore so
miserably failing to be happy,--his tendencies so hideously thwarted,
that, some unknown time ago, the delicate springs of his character,
never morally or intellectually strong, had given way, and he was now
imbecile,--this poor, forlorn voyager from the Islands of the Blest, in
a frail bark, on a tempestuous sea, had been flung, by the last
mountain-wave of his shipwreck, into a quiet harbor. There, as he lay
more than half lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly
rose-bud had come to his nostrils, and, as odors will, had summoned up
reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid
which he should have had his home. With his native susceptibility of
happy influences, he inhales the slight, ethereal rapture into his
soul, and expires!
And how did Phoebe regard Clifford? The girl's was not one of those
natures which are most attracted by what is strange and exceptional in
human character. The path which would best have suited her was the
well-worn track of ordinary life; the companions in whom she would most
have delighted were such as one encounters at every turn. The mystery
which enveloped Clifford, so far as it affected her at all, was an
annoyance, rather than the piquant charm which many women might have
found in it. Still, her native kindliness was brought strongly into
play, not by what was darkly picturesque in his situation, nor so much,
even, by the finer graces of his character, as by the simple appeal of
a heart so forlorn as his to one so full of genuine sympathy as hers.
She gave him an affectionate regard, because he needed so much love,
and seemed to have received so little. With a ready tact, the result
of ever-active and wholesome sensibility, she discerned what was good
for him, and did it. Whatever was morbid in his mind and experience
she ignored; and thereby kept their intercourse healthy, by the
incautious, but, as it were, heaven-directed freedom of her whole
conduct. The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more
darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease,
mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them;
they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in
infinite repetition. But Phoebe afforded her poor patient a supply of
purer air. She impregnated it, too, not with a wild-flower scent,--for
wildness was no trait of hers,--but with the perfume of garden-roses,
pinks, and other blossoms of much sweetness, which nature and man have
consented together in making grow from summer to summer, and from
century to century. Such a flower was Phoebe in her relation with
Clifford, and such the delight that he inhaled from her.
Yet, it must be said, her petals sometimes drooped a little, in
consequence of the heavy atmosphere about her. She grew more
thoughtful than heretofore. Looking aside at Clifford's face, and
seeing the dim, unsatisfactory elegance and the intellect almost
quenched, she would try to inquire what had been his life. Was he
always thus? Had this veil been over him from his birth?--this veil,
under which far more of his spirit was hidden than revealed, and
through which he so imperfectly discerned the actual world,--or was its
gray texture woven of some dark calamity? Phoebe loved no riddles, and
would have been glad to escape the perplexity of this one.
Nevertheless, there was so far a good result of her meditations on
Clifford's character, that, when her involuntary conjectures, together
with the tendency of every strange circumstance to tell its own story,
had gradually taught her the fact, it had no terrible effect upon her.
Let the world have done him what vast wrong it might, she knew Cousin
Clifford too well--or fancied so--ever to shudder at the touch of his
thin, delicate fingers.
Within a few days after the appearance of this remarkable inmate, the
routine of life had established itself with a good deal of uniformity
in the old house of our narrative. In the morning, very shortly after
breakfast, it was Clifford's custom to fall asleep in his chair; nor,
unless accidentally disturbed, would he emerge from a dense cloud of
slumber or the thinner mists that flitted to and fro, until well
towards noonday. These hours of drowsihead were the season of the old
gentlewoman's attendance on her brother, while Phoebe took charge of
the shop; an arrangement which the public speedily understood, and
evinced their decided preference of the younger shopwoman by the
multiplicity of their calls during her administration of affairs.
Dinner over, Hepzibah took her knitting-work,--a long stocking of gray
yarn, for her brother's winter wear,--and with a sigh, and a scowl of
affectionate farewell to Clifford, and a gesture enjoining watchfulness
on Phoebe, went to take her seat behind the counter. It was now the
young girl's turn to be the nurse,--the guardian, the playmate,--or
whatever is the fitter phrase,--of the gray-haired man.
| Hepzibah has spent her entire life patiently waiting to get her beloved brother back home again. Now that he is out of prison, she does her best to make him feel warm and loved again. She brings down his old books of poetry and fiction. But Clifford doesn't seem to enjoy listening to Hepzibah read. Her voice is harsh, and her reading sounds like a lecture. Worst of all, Clifford cannot seem to get over his distaste for her ugly appearance. There is just something clumsy and distressing about Hepzibah. So Hepzibah asks Phoebe to look after Clifford. Phoebe becomes essential to the daily comfort of her two elderly housemates, especially Clifford. She lifts his spirits with her singing and her bustling presence. Clifford appears younger when she is nearby. Clifford isn't sexually attracted to Phoebe, mind you. He just sees in her the kind of girl he might once have loved, before his life was ruined. Phoebe is annoyed that she doesn't know the secret of Clifford's life before this. But she is always kind and patient with him. She helps Clifford avoid his dark spells of depression. Even Phoebe can't be entirely unaware of the dark gloom of the House of the Seven Gables. She is growing more thoughtful and quieter than she was before. Soon, Clifford, Hepzibah, and Phoebe fall into a daily routine. Hepzibah and Phoebe take turns looking after the shop and after Clifford. | summary |
CLIFFORD, except for Phoebe's More active instigation would ordinarily
have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of
being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair
till eventide. But the girl seldom failed to propose a removal to the
garden, where Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist had made such
repairs on the roof of the ruinous arbor, or summer-house, that it was
now a sufficient shelter from sunshine and casual showers. The
hop-vine, too, had begun to grow luxuriantly over the sides of the
little edifice, and made an interior of verdant seclusion, with
innumerable peeps and glimpses into the wider solitude of the garden.
Here, sometimes, in this green play-place of flickering light, Phoebe
read to Clifford. Her acquaintance, the artist, who appeared to have a
literary turn, had supplied her with works of fiction, in pamphlet
form,--and a few volumes of poetry, in altogether a different style and
taste from those which Hepzibah selected for his amusement. Small
thanks were due to the books, however, if the girl's readings were in
any degree more successful than her elderly cousin's. Phoebe's voice
had always a pretty music in it, and could either enliven Clifford by
its sparkle and gayety of tone, or soothe him by a continued flow of
pebbly and brook-like cadences. But the fictions--in which the
country-girl, unused to works of that nature, often became deeply
absorbed--interested her strange auditor very little, or not at all.
Pictures of life, scenes of passion or sentiment, wit, humor, and
pathos, were all thrown away, or worse than thrown away, on Clifford;
either because he lacked an experience by which to test their truth, or
because his own griefs were a touch-stone of reality that few feigned
emotions could withstand. When Phoebe broke into a peal of merry
laughter at what she read, he would now and then laugh for sympathy,
but oftener respond with a troubled, questioning look. If a tear--a
maiden's sunshiny tear over imaginary woe--dropped upon some melancholy
page, Clifford either took it as a token of actual calamity, or else
grew peevish, and angrily motioned her to close the volume. And wisely
too! Is not the world sad enough, in genuine earnest, without making a
pastime of mock sorrows?
With poetry it was rather better. He delighted in the swell and
subsidence of the rhythm, and the happily recurring rhyme. Nor was
Clifford incapable of feeling the sentiment of poetry,--not, perhaps,
where it was highest or deepest, but where it was most flitting and
ethereal. It was impossible to foretell in what exquisite verse the
awakening spell might lurk; but, on raising her eyes from the page to
Clifford's face, Phoebe would be made aware, by the light breaking
through it, that a more delicate intelligence than her own had caught a
lambent flame from what she read. One glow of this kind, however, was
often the precursor of gloom for many hours afterward; because, when
the glow left him, he seemed conscious of a missing sense and power,
and groped about for them, as if a blind man should go seeking his lost
eyesight.
It pleased him more, and was better for his inward welfare, that Phoebe
should talk, and make passing occurrences vivid to his mind by her
accompanying description and remarks. The life of the garden offered
topics enough for such discourse as suited Clifford best. He never
failed to inquire what flowers had bloomed since yesterday. His
feeling for flowers was very exquisite, and seemed not so much a taste
as an emotion; he was fond of sitting with one in his hand, intently
observing it, and looking from its petals into Phoebe's face, as if the
garden flower were the sister of the household maiden. Not merely was
there a delight in the flower's perfume, or pleasure in its beautiful
form, and the delicacy or brightness of its hue; but Clifford's
enjoyment was accompanied with a perception of life, character, and
individuality, that made him love these blossoms of the garden, as if
they were endowed with sentiment and intelligence. This affection and
sympathy for flowers is almost exclusively a woman's trait. Men, if
endowed with it by nature, soon lose, forget, and learn to despise it,
in their contact with coarser things than flowers. Clifford, too, had
long forgotten it; but found it again now, as he slowly revived from
the chill torpor of his life.
It is wonderful how many pleasant incidents continually came to pass in
that secluded garden-spot when once Phoebe had set herself to look for
them. She had seen or heard a bee there, on the first day of her
acquaintance with the place. And often,--almost continually,
indeed,--since then, the bees kept coming thither, Heaven knows why, or
by what pertinacious desire, for far-fetched sweets, when, no doubt,
there were broad clover-fields, and all kinds of garden growth, much
nearer home than this. Thither the bees came, however, and plunged
into the squash-blossoms, as if there were no other squash-vines within
a long day's flight, or as if the soil of Hepzibah's garden gave its
productions just the very quality which these laborious little wizards
wanted, in order to impart the Hymettus odor to their whole hive of New
England honey. When Clifford heard their sunny, buzzing murmur, in the
heart of the great yellow blossoms, he looked about him with a joyful
sense of warmth, and blue sky, and green grass, and of God's free air
in the whole height from earth to heaven. After all, there need be no
question why the bees came to that one green nook in the dusty town.
God sent them thither to gladden our poor Clifford. They brought the
rich summer with them, in requital of a little honey.
When the bean-vines began to flower on the poles, there was one
particular variety which bore a vivid scarlet blossom. The
daguerreotypist had found these beans in a garret, over one of the
seven gables, treasured up in an old chest of drawers by some
horticultural Pyncheon of days gone by, who doubtless meant to sow them
the next summer, but was himself first sown in Death's garden-ground.
By way of testing whether there were still a living germ in such
ancient seeds, Holgrave had planted some of them; and the result of his
experiment was a splendid row of bean-vines, clambering, early, to the
full height of the poles, and arraying them, from top to bottom, in a
spiral profusion of red blossoms. And, ever since the unfolding of the
first bud, a multitude of humming-birds had been attracted thither. At
times, it seemed as if for every one of the hundred blossoms there was
one of these tiniest fowls of the air,--a thumb's bigness of burnished
plumage, hovering and vibrating about the bean-poles. It was with
indescribable interest, and even more than childish delight, that
Clifford watched the humming-birds. He used to thrust his head softly
out of the arbor to see them the better; all the while, too, motioning
Phoebe to be quiet, and snatching glimpses of the smile upon her face,
so as to heap his enjoyment up the higher with her sympathy. He had
not merely grown young;--he was a child again.
Hepzibah, whenever she happened to witness one of these fits of
miniature enthusiasm, would shake her head, with a strange mingling of
the mother and sister, and of pleasure and sadness, in her aspect. She
said that it had always been thus with Clifford when the humming-birds
came,--always, from his babyhood,--and that his delight in them had
been one of the earliest tokens by which he showed his love for
beautiful things. And it was a wonderful coincidence, the good lady
thought, that the artist should have planted these scarlet-flowering
beans--which the humming-birds sought far and wide, and which had not
grown in the Pyncheon garden before for forty years--on the very summer
of Clifford's return.
Then would the tears stand in poor Hepzibah's eyes, or overflow them
with a too abundant gush, so that she was fain to betake herself into
some corner, lest Clifford should espy her agitation. Indeed, all the
enjoyments of this period were provocative of tears. Coming so late as
it did, it was a kind of Indian summer, with a mist in its balmiest
sunshine, and decay and death in its gaudiest delight. The more
Clifford seemed to taste the happiness of a child, the sadder was the
difference to be recognized. With a mysterious and terrible Past,
which had annihilated his memory, and a blank Future before him, he had
only this visionary and impalpable Now, which, if you once look closely
at it, is nothing. He himself, as was perceptible by many symptoms,
lay darkly behind his pleasure, and knew it to be a baby-play, which he
was to toy and trifle with, instead of thoroughly believing. Clifford
saw, it may be, in the mirror of his deeper consciousness, that he was
an example and representative of that great class of people whom an
inexplicable Providence is continually putting at cross-purposes with
the world: breaking what seems its own promise in their nature;
withholding their proper food, and setting poison before them for a
banquet; and thus--when it might so easily, as one would think, have
been adjusted otherwise--making their existence a strangeness, a
solitude, and torment. All his life long, he had been learning how to
be wretched, as one learns a foreign tongue; and now, with the lesson
thoroughly by heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little
airy happiness. Frequently there was a dim shadow of doubt in his
eyes. "Take my hand, Phoebe," he would say, "and pinch it hard with
your little fingers! Give me a rose, that I may press its thorns, and
prove myself awake by the sharp touch of pain!" Evidently, he desired
this prick of a trifling anguish, in order to assure himself, by that
quality which he best knew to be real, that the garden, and the seven
weather-beaten gables, and Hepzibah's scowl, and Phoebe's smile, were
real likewise. Without this signet in his flesh, he could have
attributed no more substance to them than to the empty confusion of
imaginary scenes with which he had fed his spirit, until even that poor
sustenance was exhausted.
The author needs great faith in his reader's sympathy; else he must
hesitate to give details so minute, and incidents apparently so
trifling, as are essential to make up the idea of this garden-life. It
was the Eden of a thunder-smitten Adam, who had fled for refuge thither
out of the same dreary and perilous wilderness into which the original
Adam was expelled.
One of the available means of amusement, of which Phoebe made the most
in Clifford's behalf, was that feathered society, the hens, a breed of
whom, as we have already said, was an immemorial heirloom in the
Pyncheon family. In compliance with a whim of Clifford, as it troubled
him to see them in confinement, they had been set at liberty, and now
roamed at will about the garden; doing some little mischief, but
hindered from escape by buildings on three sides, and the difficult
peaks of a wooden fence on the other. They spent much of their
abundant leisure on the margin of Maule's well, which was haunted by a
kind of snail, evidently a titbit to their palates; and the brackish
water itself, however nauseous to the rest of the world, was so greatly
esteemed by these fowls, that they might be seen tasting, turning up
their heads, and smacking their bills, with precisely the air of
wine-bibbers round a probationary cask. Their generally quiet, yet
often brisk, and constantly diversified talk, one to another, or
sometimes in soliloquy,--as they scratched worms out of the rich, black
soil, or pecked at such plants as suited their taste,--had such a
domestic tone, that it was almost a wonder why you could not establish
a regular interchange of ideas about household matters, human and
gallinaceous. All hens are well worth studying for the piquancy and
rich variety of their manners; but by no possibility can there have
been other fowls of such odd appearance and deportment as these
ancestral ones. They probably embodied the traditionary peculiarities
of their whole line of progenitors, derived through an unbroken
succession of eggs; or else this individual Chanticleer and his two
wives had grown to be humorists, and a little crack-brained withal, on
account of their solitary way of life, and out of sympathy for
Hepzibah, their lady-patroness.
Queer, indeed, they looked! Chanticleer himself, though stalking on two
stilt-like legs, with the dignity of interminable descent in all his
gestures, was hardly bigger than an ordinary partridge; his two wives
were about the size of quails; and as for the one chicken, it looked
small enough to be still in the egg, and, at the same time,
sufficiently old, withered, wizened, and experienced, to have been
founder of the antiquated race. Instead of being the youngest of the
family, it rather seemed to have aggregated into itself the ages, not
only of these living specimens of the breed, but of all its forefathers
and foremothers, whose united excellences and oddities were squeezed
into its little body. Its mother evidently regarded it as the one
chicken of the world, and as necessary, in fact, to the world's
continuance, or, at any rate, to the equilibrium of the present system
of affairs, whether in church or state. No lesser sense of the infant
fowl's importance could have justified, even in a mother's eyes, the
perseverance with which she watched over its safety, ruffling her small
person to twice its proper size, and flying in everybody's face that so
much as looked towards her hopeful progeny. No lower estimate could
have vindicated the indefatigable zeal with which she scratched, and
her unscrupulousness in digging up the choicest flower or vegetable,
for the sake of the fat earthworm at its root. Her nervous cluck, when
the chicken happened to be hidden in the long grass or under the
squash-leaves; her gentle croak of satisfaction, while sure of it
beneath her wing; her note of ill-concealed fear and obstreperous
defiance, when she saw her arch-enemy, a neighbor's cat, on the top of
the high fence,--one or other of these sounds was to be heard at almost
every moment of the day. By degrees, the observer came to feel nearly
as much interest in this chicken of illustrious race as the mother-hen
did.
Phoebe, after getting well acquainted with the old hen, was sometimes
permitted to take the chicken in her hand, which was quite capable of
grasping its cubic inch or two of body. While she curiously examined
its hereditary marks,--the peculiar speckle of its plumage, the funny
tuft on its head, and a knob on each of its legs,--the little biped, as
she insisted, kept giving her a sagacious wink. The daguerreotypist
once whispered her that these marks betokened the oddities of the
Pyncheon family, and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life
of the old house, embodying its interpretation, likewise, although an
unintelligible one, as such clews generally are. It was a feathered
riddle; a mystery hatched out of an egg, and just as mysterious as if
the egg had been addle!
The second of Chanticleer's two wives, ever since Phoebe's arrival, had
been in a state of heavy despondency, caused, as it afterwards
appeared, by her inability to lay an egg. One day, however, by her
self-important gait, the sideways turn of her head, and the cock of her
eye, as she pried into one and another nook of the garden,--croaking to
herself, all the while, with inexpressible complacency,--it was made
evident that this identical hen, much as mankind undervalued her,
carried something about her person the worth of which was not to be
estimated either in gold or precious stones. Shortly after, there was
a prodigious cackling and gratulation of Chanticleer and all his
family, including the wizened chicken, who appeared to understand the
matter quite as well as did his sire, his mother, or his aunt. That
afternoon Phoebe found a diminutive egg,--not in the regular nest, it
was far too precious to be trusted there,--but cunningly hidden under
the currant-bushes, on some dry stalks of last year's grass. Hepzibah,
on learning the fact, took possession of the egg and appropriated it to
Clifford's breakfast, on account of a certain delicacy of flavor, for
which, as she affirmed, these eggs had always been famous. Thus
unscrupulously did the old gentlewoman sacrifice the continuance,
perhaps, of an ancient feathered race, with no better end than to
supply her brother with a dainty that hardly filled the bowl of a
tea-spoon! It must have been in reference to this outrage that
Chanticleer, the next day, accompanied by the bereaved mother of the
egg, took his post in front of Phoebe and Clifford, and delivered
himself of a harangue that might have proved as long as his own
pedigree, but for a fit of merriment on Phoebe's part. Hereupon, the
offended fowl stalked away on his long stilts, and utterly withdrew his
notice from Phoebe and the rest of human nature, until she made her
peace with an offering of spice-cake, which, next to snails, was the
delicacy most in favor with his aristocratic taste.
We linger too long, no doubt, beside this paltry rivulet of life that
flowed through the garden of the Pyncheon House. But we deem it
pardonable to record these mean incidents and poor delights, because
they proved so greatly to Clifford's benefit. They had the earth-smell
in them, and contributed to give him health and substance. Some of his
occupations wrought less desirably upon him. He had a singular
propensity, for example, to hang over Maule's well, and look at the
constantly shifting phantasmagoria of figures produced by the agitation
of the water over the mosaic-work of colored pebbles at the bottom. He
said that faces looked upward to him there,--beautiful faces, arrayed
in bewitching smiles,--each momentary face so fair and rosy, and every
smile so sunny, that he felt wronged at its departure, until the same
flitting witchcraft made a new one. But sometimes he would suddenly
cry out, "The dark face gazes at me!" and be miserable the whole day
afterwards. Phoebe, when she hung over the fountain by Clifford's
side, could see nothing of all this,--neither the beauty nor the
ugliness,--but only the colored pebbles, looking as if the gush of the
waters shook and disarranged them. And the dark face, that so troubled
Clifford, was no more than the shadow thrown from a branch of one of
the damson-trees, and breaking the inner light of Maule's well. The
truth was, however, that his fancy--reviving faster than his will and
judgment, and always stronger than they--created shapes of loveliness
that were symbolic of his native character, and now and then a stern
and dreadful shape that typified his fate.
On Sundays, after Phoebe had been at church,--for the girl had a
church-going conscience, and would hardly have been at ease had she
missed either prayer, singing, sermon, or benediction,--after
church-time, therefore, there was, ordinarily, a sober little festival
in the garden. In addition to Clifford, Hepzibah, and Phoebe, two
guests made up the company. One was the artist Holgrave, who, in spite
of his consociation with reformers, and his other queer and
questionable traits, continued to hold an elevated place in Hepzibah's
regard. The other, we are almost ashamed to say, was the venerable
Uncle Venner, in a clean shirt, and a broadcloth coat, more respectable
than his ordinary wear, inasmuch as it was neatly patched on each
elbow, and might be called an entire garment, except for a slight
inequality in the length of its skirts. Clifford, on several
occasions, had seemed to enjoy the old man's intercourse, for the sake
of his mellow, cheerful vein, which was like the sweet flavor of a
frost-bitten apple, such as one picks up under the tree in December. A
man at the very lowest point of the social scale was easier and more
agreeable for the fallen gentleman to encounter than a person at any of
the intermediate degrees; and, moreover, as Clifford's young manhood
had been lost, he was fond of feeling himself comparatively youthful,
now, in apposition with the patriarchal age of Uncle Venner. In fact,
it was sometimes observable that Clifford half wilfully hid from
himself the consciousness of being stricken in years, and cherished
visions of an earthly future still before him; visions, however, too
indistinctly drawn to be followed by disappointment--though, doubtless,
by depression--when any casual incident or recollection made him
sensible of the withered leaf.
So this oddly composed little social party used to assemble under the
ruinous arbor. Hepzibah--stately as ever at heart, and yielding not an
inch of her old gentility, but resting upon it so much the more, as
justifying a princess-like condescension--exhibited a not ungraceful
hospitality. She talked kindly to the vagrant artist, and took sage
counsel--lady as she was--with the wood-sawyer, the messenger of
everybody's petty errands, the patched philosopher. And Uncle Venner,
who had studied the world at street-corners, and other posts equally
well adapted for just observation, was as ready to give out his wisdom
as a town-pump to give water.
"Miss Hepzibah, ma'am," said he once, after they had all been cheerful
together, "I really enjoy these quiet little meetings of a Sabbath
afternoon. They are very much like what I expect to have after I
retire to my farm!"
"Uncle Venner" observed Clifford in a drowsy, inward tone, "is always
talking about his farm. But I have a better scheme for him, by and by.
We shall see!"
"Ah, Mr. Clifford Pyncheon!" said the man of patches, "you may scheme
for me as much as you please; but I'm not going to give up this one
scheme of my own, even if I never bring it really to pass. It does
seem to me that men make a wonderful mistake in trying to heap up
property upon property. If I had done so, I should feel as if
Providence was not bound to take care of me; and, at all events, the
city wouldn't be! I'm one of those people who think that infinity is
big enough for us all--and eternity long enough."
"Why, so they are, Uncle Venner," remarked Phoebe after a pause; for
she had been trying to fathom the profundity and appositeness of this
concluding apothegm. "But for this short life of ours, one would like
a house and a moderate garden-spot of one's own."
"It appears to me," said the daguerreotypist, smiling, "that Uncle
Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom; only
they have not quite so much distinctness in his mind as in that of the
systematizing Frenchman."
"Come, Phoebe," said Hepzibah, "it is time to bring the currants."
And then, while the yellow richness of the declining sunshine still
fell into the open space of the garden, Phoebe brought out a loaf of
bread and a china bowl of currants, freshly gathered from the bushes,
and crushed with sugar. These, with water,--but not from the fountain
of ill omen, close at hand,--constituted all the entertainment.
Meanwhile, Holgrave took some pains to establish an intercourse with
Clifford, actuated, it might seem, entirely by an impulse of
kindliness, in order that the present hour might be cheerfuller than
most which the poor recluse had spent, or was destined yet to spend.
Nevertheless, in the artist's deep, thoughtful, all-observant eyes,
there was, now and then, an expression, not sinister, but questionable;
as if he had some other interest in the scene than a stranger, a
youthful and unconnected adventurer, might be supposed to have. With
great mobility of outward mood, however, he applied himself to the task
of enlivening the party; and with so much success, that even dark-hued
Hepzibah threw off one tint of melancholy, and made what shift she
could with the remaining portion. Phoebe said to herself,--"How
pleasant he can be!" As for Uncle Venner, as a mark of friendship and
approbation, he readily consented to afford the young man his
countenance in the way of his profession,--not metaphorically, be it
understood, but literally, by allowing a daguerreotype of his face, so
familiar to the town, to be exhibited at the entrance of Holgrave's
studio.
Clifford, as the company partook of their little banquet, grew to be
the gayest of them all. Either it was one of those up-quivering
flashes of the spirit, to which minds in an abnormal state are liable,
or else the artist had subtly touched some chord that made musical
vibration. Indeed, what with the pleasant summer evening, and the
sympathy of this little circle of not unkindly souls, it was perhaps
natural that a character so susceptible as Clifford's should become
animated, and show itself readily responsive to what was said around
him. But he gave out his own thoughts, likewise, with an airy and
fanciful glow; so that they glistened, as it were, through the arbor,
and made their escape among the interstices of the foliage. He had
been as cheerful, no doubt, while alone with Phoebe, but never with
such tokens of acute, although partial intelligence.
But, as the sunlight left the peaks of the Seven Gables, so did the
excitement fade out of Clifford's eyes. He gazed vaguely and
mournfully about him, as if he missed something precious, and missed it
the more drearily for not knowing precisely what it was.
"I want my happiness!" at last he murmured hoarsely and indistinctly,
hardly shaping out the words. "Many, many years have I waited for it!
It is late! It is late! I want my happiness!"
Alas, poor Clifford! You are old, and worn with troubles that ought
never to have befallen you. You are partly crazy and partly imbecile;
a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is,--though some in less degree,
or less perceptibly, than their fellows. Fate has no happiness in
store for you; unless your quiet home in the old family residence with
the faithful Hepzibah, and your long summer afternoons with Phoebe, and
these Sabbath festivals with Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist,
deserve to be called happiness! Why not? If not the thing itself, it
is marvellously like it, and the more so for that ethereal and
intangible quality which causes it all to vanish at too close an
introspection. Take it, therefore, while you may. Murmur
not,--question not,--but make the most of it!
| Phoebe suggests that Clifford go out into the garden for some sunshine. She reads to Clifford outside, choosing from Mr. Holgrave's fiction and poetry collection. Clifford still doesn't think much of fiction, but he does enjoy the poetry, with its rhythmic language. Even more than Phoebe's reading, though, Clifford enjoys listening her talk. Phoebe chats about the garden and the flowers that are blooming. Mr. Holgrave plants a row of scarlet runner beans, whose red flowers attract hummingbirds. Clifford feels so happy to watch them that he becomes like "a child again" . Hepzibah sometimes cries when she sees Clifford's excitement because she can remember him just like this as a child. The narrator wants to give one anecdote of the garden life Clifford and Phoebe share. Phoebe often talks about the chickens to entertain Clifford. They are all rather amusing looking: there is one rooster, two hens, and one tiny, ancient-looking chick. One of the hens has a great deal of trouble laying an egg, but she finally manages it. Without a thought for the feelings of the hen, Hepzibah takes the egg to make Clifford's breakfast. The next day, the rooster and the hen stand in front of Clifford and caw angrily in revenge. They stop only when Phoebe offers them a piece of spice cake. The narrator explains that he's telling this trivial story as one example of the kind of ordinary event that was so good for Clifford's health. Clifford also gets into the habit of looking into Maule's well. He says he sees beautiful faces there. But every now and then Clifford will yell, "The dark face gazes at me!" and run away. On Sundays after church, Phoebe, Clifford, Hepzibah, Uncle Venner, and Mr. Holgrave have little parties in the garden. Clifford quite enjoys being younger than someone for once - in this case, Uncle Venner. One afternoon Uncle Venner says that he expects life after he retires on his farm will be a lot like these Sunday afternoons. Clifford makes the strange comment that Uncle Venner "is always talking about his farm. But I have a better scheme for him, by and by. We shall see!" . Hepzibah asks Phoebe to help her gather the currants. Mr. Holgrave falls into conversation with Clifford. Clifford really starts to cheer up. But as the sun sets, he gets gloomy again. He whispers, "I want my happiness! Many, many years have I waited for it! It is late!" . But, the narrator tells us, that happiness isn't going to come to Clifford, unless it's the happiness of sitting in the garden with his family. | summary |
FROM the inertness, or what we may term the vegetative character, of
his ordinary mood, Clifford would perhaps have been content to spend
one day after another, interminably,--or, at least, throughout the
summer-time,--in just the kind of life described in the preceding
pages. Fancying, however, that it might be for his benefit
occasionally to diversify the scene, Phoebe sometimes suggested that he
should look out upon the life of the street. For this purpose, they
used to mount the staircase together, to the second story of the house,
where, at the termination of a wide entry, there was an arched window,
of uncommonly large dimensions, shaded by a pair of curtains. It
opened above the porch, where there had formerly been a balcony, the
balustrade of which had long since gone to decay, and been removed. At
this arched window, throwing it open, but keeping himself in
comparative obscurity by means of the curtain, Clifford had an
opportunity of witnessing such a portion of the great world's movement
as might be supposed to roll through one of the retired streets of a
not very populous city. But he and Phoebe made a sight as well worth
seeing as any that the city could exhibit. The pale, gray, childish,
aged, melancholy, yet often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicately
intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson
of the curtain,--watching the monotony of every-day occurrences with a
kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and, at every petty
throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of the
bright young girl!
If once he were fairly seated at the window, even Pyncheon Street would
hardly be so dull and lonely but that, somewhere or other along its
extent, Clifford might discover matter to occupy his eye, and
titillate, if not engross, his observation. Things familiar to the
youngest child that had begun its outlook at existence seemed strange
to him. A cab; an omnibus, with its populous interior, dropping here
and there a passenger, and picking up another, and thus typifying that
vast rolling vehicle, the world, the end of whose journey is everywhere
and nowhere; these objects he followed eagerly with his eyes, but
forgot them before the dust raised by the horses and wheels had settled
along their track. As regarded novelties (among which cabs and
omnibuses were to be reckoned), his mind appeared to have lost its
proper gripe and retentiveness. Twice or thrice, for example, during
the sunny hours of the day, a water-cart went along by the Pyncheon
House, leaving a broad wake of moistened earth, instead of the white
dust that had risen at a lady's lightest footfall; it was like a summer
shower, which the city authorities had caught and tamed, and compelled
it into the commonest routine of their convenience. With the
water-cart Clifford could never grow familiar; it always affected him
with just the same surprise as at first. His mind took an apparently
sharp impression from it, but lost the recollection of this
perambulatory shower, before its next reappearance, as completely as
did the street itself, along which the heat so quickly strewed white
dust again. It was the same with the railroad. Clifford could hear
the obstreperous howl of the steam-devil, and, by leaning a little way
from the arched window, could catch a glimpse of the trains of cars,
flashing a brief transit across the extremity of the street. The idea
of terrible energy thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence,
and seemed to affect him as disagreeably, and with almost as much
surprise, the hundredth time as the first.
Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of
the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the
swiftness of the passing moment. It can merely be a suspended
animation; for, were the power actually to perish, there would be
little use of immortality. We are less than ghosts, for the time
being, whenever this calamity befalls us.
Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives. All the
antique fashions of the street were dear to him; even such as were
characterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed his
fastidious senses. He loved the old rumbling and jolting carts, the
former track of which he still found in his long-buried remembrance, as
the observer of to-day finds the wheel-tracks of ancient vehicles in
Herculaneum. The butcher's cart, with its snowy canopy, was an
acceptable object; so was the fish-cart, heralded by its horn; so,
likewise, was the countryman's cart of vegetables, plodding from door
to door, with long pauses of the patient horse, while his owner drove a
trade in turnips, carrots, summer-squashes, string-beans, green peas,
and new potatoes, with half the housewives of the neighborhood. The
baker's cart, with the harsh music of its bells, had a pleasant effect
on Clifford, because, as few things else did, it jingled the very
dissonance of yore. One afternoon a scissor-grinder chanced to set his
wheel a-going under the Pyncheon Elm, and just in front of the arched
window. Children came running with their mothers' scissors, or the
carving-knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an
edge (except, indeed, poor Clifford's wits), that the grinder might
apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new.
Round went the busily revolving machinery, kept in motion by the
scissor-grinder's foot, and wore away the hard steel against the hard
stone, whence issued an intense and spiteful prolongation of a hiss as
fierce as those emitted by Satan and his compeers in Pandemonium,
though squeezed into smaller compass. It was an ugly, little, venomous
serpent of a noise, as ever did petty violence to human ears. But
Clifford listened with rapturous delight. The sound, however
disagreeable, had very brisk life in it, and, together with the circle
of curious children watching the revolutions of the wheel, appeared to
give him a more vivid sense of active, bustling, and sunshiny existence
than he had attained in almost any other way. Nevertheless, its charm
lay chiefly in the past; for the scissor-grinder's wheel had hissed in
his childish ears.
He sometimes made doleful complaint that there were no stage-coaches
nowadays. And he asked in an injured tone what had become of all those
old square-topped chaises, with wings sticking out on either side, that
used to be drawn by a plough-horse, and driven by a farmer's wife and
daughter, peddling whortle-berries and blackberries about the town.
Their disappearance made him doubt, he said, whether the berries had
not left off growing in the broad pastures and along the shady country
lanes.
But anything that appealed to the sense of beauty, in however humble a
way, did not require to be recommended by these old associations. This
was observable when one of those Italian boys (who are rather a modern
feature of our streets) came along with his barrel-organ, and stopped
under the wide and cool shadows of the elm. With his quick
professional eye he took note of the two faces watching him from the
arched window, and, opening his instrument, began to scatter its
melodies abroad. He had a monkey on his shoulder, dressed in a
Highland plaid; and, to complete the sum of splendid attractions
wherewith he presented himself to the public, there was a company of
little figures, whose sphere and habitation was in the mahogany case of
his organ, and whose principle of life was the music which the Italian
made it his business to grind out. In all their variety of
occupation,--the cobbler, the blacksmith, the soldier, the lady with
her fan, the toper with his bottle, the milk-maid sitting by her
cow--this fortunate little society might truly be said to enjoy a
harmonious existence, and to make life literally a dance. The Italian
turned a crank; and, behold! every one of these small individuals
started into the most curious vivacity. The cobbler wrought upon a
shoe; the blacksmith hammered his iron, the soldier waved his
glittering blade; the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan; the jolly
toper swigged lustily at his bottle; a scholar opened his book with
eager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to and fro along the
page; the milkmaid energetically drained her cow; and a miser counted
gold into his strong-box,--all at the same turning of a crank. Yes;
and, moved by the self-same impulse, a lover saluted his mistress on
her lips! Possibly some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to
signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our
business or amusement,--however serious, however trifling,--all dance
to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring
nothing finally to pass. For the most remarkable aspect of the affair
was, that, at the cessation of the music, everybody was petrified at
once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor. Neither was
the cobbler's shoe finished, nor the blacksmith's iron shaped out; nor
was there a drop less of brandy in the toper's bottle, nor a drop more
of milk in the milkmaid's pail, nor one additional coin in the miser's
strong-box, nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book. All were
precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so
ridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to
become wise. Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier
for the maiden's granted kiss! But, rather than swallow this last too
acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show.
The monkey, meanwhile, with a thick tail curling out into preposterous
prolixity from beneath his tartans, took his station at the Italian's
feet. He turned a wrinkled and abominable little visage to every
passer-by, and to the circle of children that soon gathered round, and
to Hepzibah's shop-door, and upward to the arched window, whence Phoebe
and Clifford were looking down. Every moment, also, he took off his
Highland bonnet, and performed a bow and scrape. Sometimes, moreover,
he made personal application to individuals, holding out his small
black palm, and otherwise plainly signifying his excessive desire for
whatever filthy lucre might happen to be in anybody's pocket. The mean
and low, yet strangely man-like expression of his wilted countenance;
the prying and crafty glance, that showed him ready to gripe at every
miserable advantage; his enormous tail (too enormous to be decently
concealed under his gabardine), and the deviltry of nature which it
betokened,--take this monkey just as he was, in short, and you could
desire no better image of the Mammon of copper coin, symbolizing the
grossest form of the love of money. Neither was there any possibility
of satisfying the covetous little devil. Phoebe threw down a whole
handful of cents, which he picked up with joyless eagerness, handed
them over to the Italian for safekeeping, and immediately recommenced a
series of pantomimic petitions for more.
Doubtless, more than one New-Englander--or, let him be of what country
he might, it is as likely to be the case--passed by, and threw a look
at the monkey, and went on, without imagining how nearly his own moral
condition was here exemplified. Clifford, however, was a being of
another order. He had taken childish delight in the music, and smiled,
too, at the figures which it set in motion. But, after looking awhile
at the long-tailed imp, he was so shocked by his horrible ugliness,
spiritual as well as physical, that he actually began to shed tears; a
weakness which men of merely delicate endowments, and destitute of the
fiercer, deeper, and more tragic power of laughter, can hardly avoid,
when the worst and meanest aspect of life happens to be presented to
them.
Pyncheon Street was sometimes enlivened by spectacles of more imposing
pretensions than the above, and which brought the multitude along with
them. With a shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact with
the world, a powerful impulse still seized on Clifford, whenever the
rush and roar of the human tide grew strongly audible to him. This was
made evident, one day, when a political procession, with hundreds of
flaunting banners, and drums, fifes, clarions, and cymbals,
reverberating between the rows of buildings, marched all through town,
and trailed its length of trampling footsteps, and most infrequent
uproar, past the ordinarily quiet House of the Seven Gables. As a mere
object of sight, nothing is more deficient in picturesque features than
a procession seen in its passage through narrow streets. The spectator
feels it to be fool's play, when he can distinguish the tedious
commonplace of each man's visage, with the perspiration and weary
self-importance on it, and the very cut of his pantaloons, and the
stiffness or laxity of his shirt-collar, and the dust on the back of
his black coat. In order to become majestic, it should be viewed from
some vantage point, as it rolls its slow and long array through the
centre of a wide plain, or the stateliest public square of a city; for
then, by its remoteness, it melts all the petty personalities, of which
it is made up, into one broad mass of existence,--one great life,--one
collected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animating
it. But, on the other hand, if an impressible person, standing alone
over the brink of one of these processions, should behold it, not in
its atoms, but in its aggregate,--as a mighty river of life, massive in
its tide, and black with mystery, and, out of its depths, calling to
the kindred depth within him,--then the contiguity would add to the
effect. It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained
from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies.
So it proved with Clifford. He shuddered; he grew pale; he threw an
appealing look at Hepzibah and Phoebe, who were with him at the window.
They comprehended nothing of his emotions, and supposed him merely
disturbed by the unaccustomed tumult. At last, with tremulous limbs,
he started up, set his foot on the window-sill, and in an instant more
would have been in the unguarded balcony. As it was, the whole
procession might have seen him, a wild, haggard figure, his gray locks
floating in the wind that waved their banners; a lonely being,
estranged from his race, but now feeling himself man again, by virtue
of the irrepressible instinct that possessed him. Had Clifford
attained the balcony, he would probably have leaped into the street;
but whether impelled by the species of terror that sometimes urges its
victim over the very precipice which he shrinks from, or by a natural
magnetism, tending towards the great centre of humanity, it were not
easy to decide. Both impulses might have wrought on him at once.
But his companions, affrighted by his gesture,--which was that of a man
hurried away in spite of himself,--seized Clifford's garment and held
him back. Hepzibah shrieked. Phoebe, to whom all extravagance was a
horror, burst into sobs and tears.
"Clifford, Clifford! are you crazy?" cried his sister.
"I hardly know, Hepzibah," said Clifford, drawing a long breath. "Fear
nothing,--it is over now,--but had I taken that plunge, and survived
it, methinks it would have made me another man!"
Possibly, in some sense, Clifford may have been right. He needed a
shock; or perhaps he required to take a deep, deep plunge into the
ocean of human life, and to sink down and be covered by its
profoundness, and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to the
world and to himself. Perhaps again, he required nothing less than the
great final remedy--death!
A similar yearning to renew the broken links of brotherhood with his
kind sometimes showed itself in a milder form; and once it was made
beautiful by the religion that lay even deeper than itself. In the
incident now to be sketched, there was a touching recognition, on
Clifford's part, of God's care and love towards him,--towards this
poor, forsaken man, who, if any mortal could, might have been pardoned
for regarding himself as thrown aside, forgotten, and left to be the
sport of some fiend, whose playfulness was an ecstasy of mischief.
It was the Sabbath morning; one of those bright, calm Sabbaths, with
its own hallowed atmosphere, when Heaven seems to diffuse itself over
the earth's face in a solemn smile, no less sweet than solemn. On such
a Sabbath morn, were we pure enough to be its medium, we should be
conscious of the earth's natural worship ascending through our frames,
on whatever spot of ground we stood. The church-bells, with various
tones, but all in harmony, were calling out and responding to one
another,--"It is the Sabbath!--The Sabbath!--Yea; the Sabbath!"--and
over the whole city the bells scattered the blessed sounds, now slowly,
now with livelier joy, now one bell alone, now all the bells together,
crying earnestly,--"It is the Sabbath!"--and flinging their accents
afar off, to melt into the air and pervade it with the holy word. The
air with God's sweetest and tenderest sunshine in it, was meet for
mankind to breathe into their hearts, and send it forth again as the
utterance of prayer.
Clifford sat at the window with Hepzibah, watching the neighbors as
they stepped into the street. All of them, however unspiritual on
other days, were transfigured by the Sabbath influence; so that their
very garments--whether it were an old man's decent coat well brushed
for the thousandth time, or a little boy's first sack and trousers
finished yesterday by his mother's needle--had somewhat of the quality
of ascension-robes. Forth, likewise, from the portal of the old house
stepped Phoebe, putting up her small green sunshade, and throwing
upward a glance and smile of parting kindness to the faces at the
arched window. In her aspect there was a familiar gladness, and a
holiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as
ever. She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of
one's mother-tongue. Fresh was Phoebe, moreover, and airy and sweet in
her apparel; as if nothing that she wore--neither her gown, nor her
small straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowy
stockings--had ever been put on before; or, if worn, were all the
fresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the
rosebuds.
The girl waved her hand to Hepzibah and Clifford, and went up the
street; a religion in herself, warm, simple, true, with a substance
that could walk on earth, and a spirit that was capable of heaven.
"Hepzibah," asked Clifford, after watching Phoebe to the corner, "do
you never go to church?"
"No, Clifford!" she replied,--"not these many, many years!"
"Were I to be there," he rejoined, "it seems to me that I could pray
once more, when so many human souls were praying all around me!"
She looked into Clifford's face, and beheld there a soft natural
effusion; for his heart gushed out, as it were, and ran over at his
eyes, in delightful reverence for God, and kindly affection for his
human brethren. The emotion communicated itself to Hepzibah. She
yearned to take him by the hand, and go and kneel down, they two
together,--both so long separate from the world, and, as she now
recognized, scarcely friends with Him above,--to kneel down among the
people, and be reconciled to God and man at once.
"Dear brother," said she earnestly, "let us go! We belong nowhere. We
have not a foot of space in any church to kneel upon; but let us go to
some place of worship, even if we stand in the broad aisle. Poor and
forsaken as we are, some pew-door will be opened to us!"
So Hepzibah and her brother made themselves, ready--as ready as they
could in the best of their old-fashioned garments, which had hung on
pegs, or been laid away in trunks, so long that the dampness and mouldy
smell of the past was on them,--made themselves ready, in their faded
bettermost, to go to church. They descended the staircase
together,--gaunt, sallow Hepzibah, and pale, emaciated, age-stricken
Clifford! They pulled open the front door, and stepped across the
threshold, and felt, both of them, as if they were standing in the
presence of the whole world, and with mankind's great and terrible eye
on them alone. The eye of their Father seemed to be withdrawn, and
gave them no encouragement. The warm sunny air of the street made them
shiver. Their hearts quaked within them at the idea of taking one
step farther.
"It cannot be, Hepzibah!--it is too late," said Clifford with deep
sadness. "We are ghosts! We have no right among human beings,--no
right anywhere but in this old house, which has a curse on it, and
which, therefore, we are doomed to haunt! And, besides," he continued,
with a fastidious sensibility, inalienably characteristic of the man,
"it would not be fit nor beautiful to go! It is an ugly thought that I
should be frightful to my fellow-beings, and that children would cling
to their mothers' gowns at sight of me!"
They shrank back into the dusky passage-way, and closed the door. But,
going up the staircase again, they found the whole interior of the
house tenfold more dismal, and the air closer and heavier, for the
glimpse and breath of freedom which they had just snatched. They could
not flee; their jailer had but left the door ajar in mockery, and stood
behind it to watch them stealing out. At the threshold, they felt his
pitiless gripe upon them. For, what other dungeon is so dark as one's
own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
But it would be no fair picture of Clifford's state of mind were we to
represent him as continually or prevailingly wretched. On the
contrary, there was no other man in the city, we are bold to affirm, of
so much as half his years, who enjoyed so many lightsome and griefless
moments as himself. He had no burden of care upon him; there were none
of those questions and contingencies with the future to be settled
which wear away all other lives, and render them not worth having by
the very process of providing for their support. In this respect he
was a child,--a child for the whole term of his existence, be it long
or short. Indeed, his life seemed to be standing still at a period
little in advance of childhood, and to cluster all his reminiscences
about that epoch; just as, after the torpor of a heavy blow, the
sufferer's reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerably
behind the accident that stupefied him. He sometimes told Phoebe and
Hepzibah his dreams, in which he invariably played the part of a child,
or a very young man. So vivid were they, in his relation of them, that
he once held a dispute with his sister as to the particular figure or
print of a chintz morning-dress which he had seen their mother wear, in
the dream of the preceding night. Hepzibah, piquing herself on a
woman's accuracy in such matters, held it to be slightly different from
what Clifford described; but, producing the very gown from an old
trunk, it proved to be identical with his remembrance of it. Had
Clifford, every time that he emerged out of dreams so lifelike,
undergone the torture of transformation from a boy into an old and
broken man, the daily recurrence of the shock would have been too much
to bear. It would have caused an acute agony to thrill from the
morning twilight, all the day through, until bedtime; and even then
would have mingled a dull, inscrutable pain and pallid hue of
misfortune with the visionary bloom and adolescence of his slumber.
But the nightly moonshine interwove itself with the morning mist, and
enveloped him as in a robe, which he hugged about his person, and
seldom let realities pierce through; he was not often quite awake, but
slept open-eyed, and perhaps fancied himself most dreaming then.
Thus, lingering always so near his childhood, he had sympathies with
children, and kept his heart the fresher thereby, like a reservoir into
which rivulets were pouring not far from the fountain-head. Though
prevented, by a subtile sense of propriety, from desiring to associate
with them, he loved few things better than to look out of the arched
window and see a little girl driving her hoop along the sidewalk, or
schoolboys at a game of ball. Their voices, also, were very pleasant
to him, heard at a distance, all swarming and intermingling together as
flies do in a sunny room.
Clifford would, doubtless, have been glad to share their sports. One
afternoon he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow
soap-bubbles; an amusement, as Hepzibah told Phoebe apart, that had
been a favorite one with her brother when they were both children.
Behold him, therefore, at the arched window, with an earthen pipe in
his mouth! Behold him, with his gray hair, and a wan, unreal smile over
his countenance, where still hovered a beautiful grace, which his worst
enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal, since it had
survived so long! Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad from the
window into the street! Little impalpable worlds were those
soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as
imagination, on the nothing of their surface. It was curious to see
how the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they came
floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them.
Some stopped to gaze, and perhaps, carried a pleasant recollection of
the bubbles onward as far as the street-corner; some looked angrily
upward, as if poor Clifford wronged them by setting an image of beauty
afloat so near their dusty pathway. A great many put out their fingers
or their walking-sticks to touch, withal; and were perversely
gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth and
sky scene, vanished as if it had never been.
At length, just as an elderly gentleman of very dignified presence
happened to be passing, a large bubble sailed majestically down, and
burst right against his nose! He looked up,--at first with a stern,
keen glance, which penetrated at once into the obscurity behind the
arched window,--then with a smile which might be conceived as diffusing
a dog-day sultriness for the space of several yards about him.
"Aha, Cousin Clifford!" cried Judge Pyncheon. "What! Still blowing
soap-bubbles!"
The tone seemed as if meant to be kind and soothing, but yet had a
bitterness of sarcasm in it. As for Clifford, an absolute palsy of
fear came over him. Apart from any definite cause of dread which his
past experience might have given him, he felt that native and original
horror of the excellent Judge which is proper to a weak, delicate, and
apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength. Strength
is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.
There is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle
of his own connections.
| Clifford would probably have been content to spend the rest of his life sitting in the garden, but Phoebe gets the idea that he should have some variety. So occasionally she brings Clifford to the window at the top of the stairs that looks out on Pyncheon Street. Clifford is quite stunned by the technological advances of the last 30 years - he can't get used to the sound of the railroad, for example. He's actually an incredible conservative: he likes everything that looks old and hates everything new. Still, Clifford does enjoy some new things if they're beautiful. He listens to a barrel-organ player with a tame dancing monkey with great pleasure. One day, a parade marches down Pyncheon Street. Clifford is so fascinated that he suddenly feels the irresistible urge to climb onto the balcony and maybe even join in the parade. He wants to join in with his fellow men for the first time in 30 years. He has a foot on the windowsill, ready to go out onto the balcony, but Hepzibah and Phoebe hold him back, thinking Clifford has gone crazy. Clifford observes that, if he had succeeded, he would have become another man - maybe a dead man, but still, another man. He experiences a similar moment of communal feeling one Sunday morning. He hears the Sunday morning church bells and watches his neighbors walking out to church. They all look their best. Phoebe waves to Clifford and Hepzibah and goes on to church. Clifford tells Hepzibah, "Were I to be there it seems to me that I could pray once more" . Hepzibah is so impressed by this sudden wish to be among other people that she suggests they both go to church together. They get ready, but once they get to the front door, they lose their nerve. Clifford decides that it's too late - they are both like ghosts and they have "no right among human beings" . They belong in this cursed House of the Seven Gables. Once they close the door and go back upstairs, the whole house seems ten times darker than before. They are trapped. Still, Clifford isn't completely miserable. He often has delightfully vivid dreams of his younger days, which brings him closer to his childhood happiness. One day he sits at the window blowing soap bubbles and watching them sail out over the street. A stern, well-dressed man stops at the sight of these bubbles. He looks up into the arched window. He comments, "Aha, Cousin Clifford! What! Still blowing soap-bubbles!" . It's Judge Pyncheon. Clifford starts to shake with terror. | summary |
IT must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so
active as Phoebe could be wholly confined within the precincts of the
old Pyncheon House. Clifford's demands upon her time were usually
satisfied, in those long days, considerably earlier than sunset. Quiet
as his daily existence seemed, it nevertheless drained all the
resources by which he lived. It was not physical exercise that
overwearied him,--for except that he sometimes wrought a little with a
hoe, or paced the garden-walk, or, in rainy weather, traversed a large
unoccupied room,--it was his tendency to remain only too quiescent, as
regarded any toil of the limbs and muscles. But, either there was a
smouldering fire within him that consumed his vital energy, or the
monotony that would have dragged itself with benumbing effect over a
mind differently situated was no monotony to Clifford. Possibly, he
was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly
assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights,
sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more
practised with the world. As all is activity and vicissitude to the
new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had
undergone a kind of new creation, after its long-suspended life.
Be the cause what it might, Clifford commonly retired to rest,
thoroughly exhausted, while the sunbeams were still melting through his
window-curtains, or were thrown with late lustre on the chamber wall.
And while he thus slept early, as other children do, and dreamed of
childhood, Phoebe was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder
of the day and evening.
This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so
little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe. The old
house, as we have already said, had both the dry-rot and the damp-rot
in its walls; it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere than that.
Hepzibah, though she had her valuable and redeeming traits, had grown
to be a kind of lunatic by imprisoning herself so long in one place,
with no other company than a single series of ideas, and but one
affection, and one bitter sense of wrong. Clifford, the reader may
perhaps imagine, was too inert to operate morally on his
fellow-creatures, however intimate and exclusive their relations with
him. But the sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtile
and universal than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes
of organized life, and vibrates from one to another. A flower, for
instance, as Phoebe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in
Clifford's hand, or Hepzibah's, than in her own; and by the same law,
converting her whole daily life into a flower fragrance for these two
sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much
sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast. Unless she had
now and then indulged her brisk impulses, and breathed rural air in a
suburban walk, or ocean breezes along the shore,--had occasionally
obeyed the impulse of Nature, in New England girls, by attending a
metaphysical or philosophical lecture, or viewing a seven-mile
panorama, or listening to a concert,--had gone shopping about the city,
ransacking entire depots of splendid merchandise, and bringing home a
ribbon,--had employed, likewise, a little time to read the Bible in her
chamber, and had stolen a little more to think of her mother and her
native place--unless for such moral medicines as the above, we should
soon have beheld our poor Phoebe grow thin and put on a bleached,
unwholesome aspect, and assume strange, shy ways, prophetic of
old-maidenhood and a cheerless future.
Even as it was, a change grew visible; a change partly to be regretted,
although whatever charm it infringed upon was repaired by another,
perhaps more precious. She was not so constantly gay, but had her
moods of thought, which Clifford, on the whole, liked better than her
former phase of unmingled cheerfulness; because now she understood him
better and more delicately, and sometimes even interpreted him to
himself. Her eyes looked larger, and darker, and deeper; so deep, at
some silent moments, that they seemed like Artesian wells, down, down,
into the infinite. She was less girlish than when we first beheld her
alighting from the omnibus; less girlish, but more a woman.
The only youthful mind with which Phoebe had an opportunity of frequent
intercourse was that of the daguerreotypist. Inevitably, by the
pressure of the seclusion about them, they had been brought into habits
of some familiarity. Had they met under different circumstances,
neither of these young persons would have been likely to bestow much
thought upon the other, unless, indeed, their extreme dissimilarity
should have proved a principle of mutual attraction. Both, it is true,
were characters proper to New England life, and possessing a common
ground, therefore, in their more external developments; but as unlike,
in their respective interiors, as if their native climes had been at
world-wide distance. During the early part of their acquaintance,
Phoebe had held back rather more than was customary with her frank and
simple manners from Holgrave's not very marked advances. Nor was she
yet satisfied that she knew him well, although they almost daily met
and talked together, in a kind, friendly, and what seemed to be a
familiar way.
The artist, in a desultory manner, had imparted to Phoebe something of
his history. Young as he was, and had his career terminated at the
point already attained, there had been enough of incident to fill, very
creditably, an autobiographic volume. A romance on the plan of Gil
Blas, adapted to American society and manners, would cease to be a
romance. The experience of many individuals among us, who think it
hardly worth the telling, would equal the vicissitudes of the
Spaniard's earlier life; while their ultimate success, or the point
whither they tend, may be incomparably higher than any that a novelist
would imagine for his hero. Holgrave, as he told Phoebe somewhat
proudly, could not boast of his origin, unless as being exceedingly
humble, nor of his education, except that it had been the scantiest
possible, and obtained by a few winter-months' attendance at a district
school. Left early to his own guidance, he had begun to be
self-dependent while yet a boy; and it was a condition aptly suited to
his natural force of will. Though now but twenty-two years old
(lacking some months, which are years in such a life), he had already
been, first, a country schoolmaster; next, a salesman in a country
store; and, either at the same time or afterwards, the political editor
of a country newspaper. He had subsequently travelled New England and
the Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut
manufactory of cologne-water and other essences. In an episodical way
he had studied and practised dentistry, and with very flattering
success, especially in many of the factory-towns along our inland
streams. As a supernumerary official, of some kind or other, aboard a
packet-ship, he had visited Europe, and found means, before his return,
to see Italy, and part of France and Germany. At a later period he had
spent some months in a community of Fourierists. Still more recently
he had been a public lecturer on Mesmerism, for which science (as he
assured Phoebe, and, indeed, satisfactorily proved, by putting
Chanticleer, who happened to be scratching near by, to sleep) he had
very remarkable endowments.
His present phase, as a daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in
his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the
preceding ones. It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an
adventurer, who had his bread to earn. It would be thrown aside as
carelessly, whenever he should choose to earn his bread by some other
equally digressive means. But what was most remarkable, and, perhaps,
showed a more than common poise in the young man, was the fact that,
amid all these personal vicissitudes, he had never lost his identity.
Homeless as he had been,--continually changing his whereabout, and,
therefore, responsible neither to public opinion nor to
individuals,--putting off one exterior, and snatching up another, to be
soon shifted for a third,--he had never violated the innermost man, but
had carried his conscience along with him. It was impossible to know
Holgrave without recognizing this to be the fact. Hepzibah had seen
it. Phoebe soon saw it likewise, and gave him the sort of confidence
which such a certainty inspires. She was startled, however, and
sometimes repelled,--not by any doubt of his integrity to whatever law
he acknowledged, but by a sense that his law differed from her own. He
made her uneasy, and seemed to unsettle everything around her, by his
lack of reverence for what was fixed, unless, at a moment's warning, it
could establish its right to hold its ground.
Then, moreover, she scarcely thought him affectionate in his nature.
He was too calm and cool an observer. Phoebe felt his eye, often; his
heart, seldom or never. He took a certain kind of interest in Hepzibah
and her brother, and Phoebe herself. He studied them attentively, and
allowed no slightest circumstance of their individualities to escape
him. He was ready to do them whatever good he might; but, after all,
he never exactly made common cause with them, nor gave any reliable
evidence that he loved them better in proportion as he knew them more.
In his relations with them, he seemed to be in quest of mental food,
not heart-sustenance. Phoebe could not conceive what interested him so
much in her friends and herself, intellectually, since he cared nothing
for them, or, comparatively, so little, as objects of human affection.
Always, in his interviews with Phoebe, the artist made especial inquiry
as to the welfare of Clifford, whom, except at the Sunday festival, he
seldom saw.
"Does he still seem happy?" he asked one day.
"As happy as a child," answered Phoebe; "but--like a child, too--very
easily disturbed."
"How disturbed?" inquired Holgrave. "By things without, or by thoughts
within?"
"I cannot see his thoughts! How should I?" replied Phoebe with simple
piquancy. "Very often his humor changes without any reason that can be
guessed at, just as a cloud comes over the sun. Latterly, since I have
begun to know him better, I feel it to be not quite right to look
closely into his moods. He has had such a great sorrow, that his heart
is made all solemn and sacred by it. When he is cheerful,--when the
sun shines into his mind,--then I venture to peep in, just as far as
the light reaches, but no further. It is holy ground where the shadow
falls!"
"How prettily you express this sentiment!" said the artist. "I can
understand the feeling, without possessing it. Had I your
opportunities, no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to
the full depth of my plummet-line!"
"How strange that you should wish it!" remarked Phoebe involuntarily.
"What is Cousin Clifford to you?"
"Oh, nothing,--of course, nothing!" answered Holgrave with a smile.
"Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible world! The more I look
at it, the more it puzzles me, and I begin to suspect that a man's
bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom. Men and women, and
children, too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be
certain that he really knows them; nor ever guess what they have been
from what he sees them to be now. Judge Pyncheon! Clifford! What a
complex riddle--a complexity of complexities--do they present! It
requires intuitive sympathy, like a young girl's, to solve it. A mere
observer, like myself (who never have any intuitions, and am, at best,
only subtile and acute), is pretty certain to go astray."
The artist now turned the conversation to themes less dark than that
which they had touched upon. Phoebe and he were young together; nor
had Holgrave, in his premature experience of life, wasted entirely that
beautiful spirit of youth, which, gushing forth from one small heart
and fancy, may diffuse itself over the universe, making it all as
bright as on the first day of creation. Man's own youth is the world's
youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth's
granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould
into whatever shape he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk
sagely about the world's old age, but never actually believed what he
said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the
world--that gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without
being venerable--as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into
all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest
promise of becoming. He had that sense, or inward prophecy,--which a
young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a
mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,--that we
are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this
very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be
accomplished in his own lifetime. It seemed to Holgrave,--as doubtless
it has seemed to the hopeful of every century since the epoch of Adam's
grandchildren,--that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown
and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be
thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to
begin anew.
As to the main point,--may we never live to doubt it!--as to the better
centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right. His error lay
in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is
destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new
suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in
applying his own little life-span as the measure of an interminable
achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything
to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or
against it. Yet it was well for him to think so. This enthusiasm,
infusing itself through the calmness of his character, and thus taking
an aspect of settled thought and wisdom, would serve to keep his youth
pure, and make his aspirations high. And when, with the years settling
down more weightily upon him, his early faith should be modified by
inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution
of his sentiments. He would still have faith in man's brightening
destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he should recognize
his helplessness in his own behalf; and the haughty faith, with which
he began life, would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its
close, in discerning that man's best directed effort accomplishes a
kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities.
Holgrave had read very little, and that little in passing through the
thoroughfare of life, where the mystic language of his books was
necessarily mixed up with the babble of the multitude, so that both one
and the other were apt to lose any sense that might have been properly
their own. He considered himself a thinker, and was certainly of a
thoughtful turn, but, with his own path to discover, had perhaps hardly
yet reached the point where an educated man begins to think. The true
value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward
strength, which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely like a
change of garments; in that enthusiasm, so quiet that he scarcely knew
of its existence, but which gave a warmth to everything that he laid
his hand on; in that personal ambition, hidden--from his own as well as
other eyes--among his more generous impulses, but in which lurked a
certain efficacy, that might solidify him from a theorist into the
champion of some practicable cause. Altogether in his culture and want
of culture,--in his crude, wild, and misty philosophy, and the
practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies; in his
magnanimous zeal for man's welfare, and his recklessness of whatever
the ages had established in man's behalf; in his faith, and in his
infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lacked,--the artist might
fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his
native land.
His career it would be difficult to prefigure. There appeared to be
qualities in Holgrave, such as, in a country where everything is free
to the hand that can grasp it, could hardly fail to put some of the
world's prizes within his reach. But these matters are delightfully
uncertain. At almost every step in life, we meet with young men of
just about Holgrave's age, for whom we anticipate wonderful things, but
of whom, even after much and careful inquiry, we never happen to hear
another word. The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh
gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false
brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves and other people. Like
certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely in their
first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very
sober aspect after washing-day.
But our business is with Holgrave as we find him on this particular
afternoon, and in the arbor of the Pyncheon garden. In that point of
view, it was a pleasant sight to behold this young man, with so much
faith in himself, and so fair an appearance of admirable powers,--so
little harmed, too, by the many tests that had tried his metal,--it was
pleasant to see him in his kindly intercourse with Phoebe. Her thought
had scarcely done him justice when it pronounced him cold; or, if so,
he had grown warmer now. Without such purpose on her part, and
unconsciously on his, she made the House of the Seven Gables like a
home to him, and the garden a familiar precinct. With the insight on
which he prided himself, he fancied that he could look through Phoebe,
and all around her, and could read her off like a page of a child's
story-book. But these transparent natures are often deceptive in their
depth; those pebbles at the bottom of the fountain are farther from us
than we think. Thus the artist, whatever he might judge of Phoebe's
capacity, was beguiled, by some silent charm of hers, to talk freely of
what he dreamed of doing in the world. He poured himself out as to
another self. Very possibly, he forgot Phoebe while he talked to her,
and was moved only by the inevitable tendency of thought, when rendered
sympathetic by enthusiasm and emotion, to flow into the first safe
reservoir which it finds. But, had you peeped at them through the
chinks of the garden-fence, the young man's earnestness and heightened
color might have led you to suppose that he was making love to the
young girl!
At length, something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for
Phoebe to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin
Hepzibah, and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old Pyncheon
House. Without directly answering her, he turned from the Future,
which had heretofore been the theme of his discourse, and began to
speak of the influences of the Past. One subject, indeed, is but the
reverberation of the other.
"Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?" cried he, keeping up the
earnest tone of his preceding conversation. "It lies upon the Present
like a giant's dead body In fact, the case is just as if a young giant
were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse
of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only
needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle
you to see what slaves we are to bygone times,--to Death, if we give
the matter the right word!"
"But I do not see it," observed Phoebe.
"For example, then," continued Holgrave: "a dead man, if he happens to
have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die
intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much
longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and
living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in
dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's
pathos! We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die
of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We
worship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds.
Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand
obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man's white,
immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we
must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence
on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world
of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to
interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's
houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!"
"And why not," said Phoebe, "so long as we can be comfortable in them?"
"But we shall live to see the day, I trust," went on the artist, "when
no man shall build his house for posterity. Why should he? He might
just as reasonably order a durable suit of clothes,--leather, or
guttapercha, or whatever else lasts longest,--so that his
great-grandchildren should have the benefit of them, and cut precisely
the same figure in the world that he himself does. If each generation
were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change,
comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform
which society is now suffering for. I doubt whether even our public
edifices--our capitols, state-houses, court-houses, city-hall, and
churches,--ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or
brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty
years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and
reform the institutions which they symbolize."
"How you hate everything old!" said Phoebe in dismay. "It makes me
dizzy to think of such a shifting world!"
"I certainly love nothing mouldy," answered Holgrave. "Now, this old
Pyncheon House! Is it a wholesome place to live in, with its black
shingles, and the green moss that shows how damp they are?--its dark,
low-studded rooms--its grime and sordidness, which are the
crystallization on its walls of the human breath, that has been drawn
and exhaled here in discontent and anguish? The house ought to be
purified with fire,--purified till only its ashes remain!"
"Then why do you live in it?" asked Phoebe, a little piqued.
"Oh, I am pursuing my studies here; not in books, however," replied
Holgrave. "The house, in my view, is expressive of that odious and
abominable Past, with all its bad influences, against which I have just
been declaiming. I dwell in it for a while, that I may know the better
how to hate it. By the bye, did you ever hear the story of Maule, the
wizard, and what happened between him and your immeasurably
great-grandfather?"
"Yes, indeed!" said Phoebe; "I heard it long ago, from my father, and
two or three times from my cousin Hepzibah, in the month that I have
been here. She seems to think that all the calamities of the Pyncheons
began from that quarrel with the wizard, as you call him. And you, Mr.
Holgrave look as if you thought so too! How singular that you should
believe what is so very absurd, when you reject many things that are a
great deal worthier of credit!"
"I do believe it," said the artist seriously; "not as a superstition,
however, but as proved by unquestionable facts, and as exemplifying a
theory. Now, see: under those seven gables, at which we now look
up,--and which old Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the house of his
descendants, in prosperity and happiness, down to an epoch far beyond
the present,--under that roof, through a portion of three centuries,
there has been perpetual remorse of conscience, a constantly defeated
hope, strife amongst kindred, various misery, a strange form of death,
dark suspicion, unspeakable disgrace,--all, or most of which calamity I
have the means of tracing to the old Puritan's inordinate desire to
plant and endow a family. To plant a family! This idea is at the
bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is,
that, once in every half-century, at longest, a family should be merged
into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its
ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in
hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean
pipes. In the family existence of these Pyncheons, for
instance,--forgive me Phoebe, but I cannot think of you as one of
them,--in their brief New England pedigree, there has been time enough
to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another."
"You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred," said Phoebe, debating
with herself whether she ought to take offence.
"I speak true thoughts to a true mind!" answered Holgrave, with a
vehemence which Phoebe had not before witnessed in him. "The truth is
as I say! Furthermore, the original perpetrator and father of this
mischief appears to have perpetuated himself, and still walks the
street,--at least, his very image, in mind and body,--with the fairest
prospect of transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched an
inheritance as he has received! Do you remember the daguerreotype, and
its resemblance to the old portrait?"
"How strangely in earnest you are!" exclaimed Phoebe, looking at him
with surprise and perplexity; half alarmed and partly inclined to
laugh. "You talk of the lunacy of the Pyncheons; is it contagious?"
"I understand you!" said the artist, coloring and laughing. "I believe
I am a little mad. This subject has taken hold of my mind with the
strangest tenacity of clutch since I have lodged in yonder old gable.
As one method of throwing it off, I have put an incident of the
Pyncheon family history, with which I happen to be acquainted, into the
form of a legend, and mean to publish it in a magazine."
"Do you write for the magazines?" inquired Phoebe.
"Is it possible you did not know it?" cried Holgrave. "Well, such is
literary fame! Yes. Miss Phoebe Pyncheon, among the multitude of my
marvellous gifts I have that of writing stories; and my name has
figured, I can assure you, on the covers of Graham and Godey, making as
respectable an appearance, for aught I could see, as any of the
canonized bead-roll with which it was associated. In the humorous
line, I am thought to have a very pretty way with me; and as for
pathos, I am as provocative of tears as an onion. But shall I read you
my story?"
"Yes, if it is not very long," said Phoebe,--and added
laughingly,--"nor very dull."
As this latter point was one which the daguerreotypist could not decide
for himself, he forthwith produced his roll of manuscript, and, while
the late sunbeams gilded the seven gables, began to read.
| Clifford usually gets tired long before sunset, so Phoebe is free to entertain herself in the evening. This is lucky because the House of the Seven Gables is not a cheerful place. The only young person she regularly sees is Mr. Holgrave. Even though they don't have much in common, they are still thrown into society together, so they have to get to know each other. Mr. Holgrave tells Phoebe something of his personal history. He has been supporting himself since he was a kid. Even though Mr. Holgrave is only 22, he still has experience as a teacher, a salesman, and the political editor of a newspaper. He has traveled throughout New England and the Midwest as a peddler and a dentist. He has worked on a ship that sailed to Europe and saw France, Italy, and Germany. He has also given public lectures on hypnotism. Now he takes photographs, but that doesn't seem to be a permanent career for him either. Phoebe continues to find Mr. Holgrave worrisome. She doesn't understand how he can be so stable a person while being completely unstable in his habits. Mr. Holgrave doesn't seem like a warm, friendly person. He spends his time studying people intellectually rather than with sympathy. One day he asks about Clifford. Phoebe says Clifford is happy but easily upset. She doesn't know what upsets him, though: she feels that it's Clifford's private business. Mr. Holgrave promises that he would have no hesitation about finding out everything about Clifford if he could. Mr. Holgrave doesn't understand the mystery between Judge Pyncheon and Clifford, but he lets the topic drop for now. Phoebe can't understand why Mr. Holgrave is so interested. Mr. Holgrave is an idealist, and he thinks it's time for all of the monuments of the past to be torn down in favor of new, modern ways of living. The narrator comments that Mr. Holgrave's ideals are good. His only mistake is in believing that this age will be the one to get rid of the old ways and start all over again. It won't happen, but Mr. Holgrave's ideals will help keep him young. It's tough to know what Mr. Holgrave's career will wind up being, but he's good company for Phoebe for now. Even though Mr. Holgrave thinks he understands Phoebe completely, he is still fascinated and charmed by her. He finds that she makes the House of the Seven Gables seem like a home to him. Phoebe asks how Mr. Holgrave came to lodge with Hepzibah. Mr. Holgrave goes off onto a whole rant about how we need to get rid of the Past. Why should we be slaves to bygone times? Mr. Holgrave wants people to stop passing down these gloomy, weighty homes to their children. It does more harm than good. He thinks the House of the Seven Gables should be "purified with fire, - purified till only its ashes remain!" . He claims he's living in the house so he can learn better how to hate what it symbolizes, the dead past. After all, the whole crime Colonel Pyncheon committed against Matthew Maule came about from his crazy desire "to plant and endow a family" . Mr. Holgrave thinks that families should be broken up at least once every 50 years. That way, people won't have time to grow crazy with pride about their families. Mr. Holgrave points to Phoebe's own family as an example. He claims that the committer of the first Pyncheon crime seems to have reproduced himself so that he is now walking the streets once more, with a good chance of passing on "as rich and as wretched an inheritance as he has received" . Phoebe thinks Mr. Holgrave is getting a bit crazy. Mr. Holgrave blushes. He admits that he is preparing to fictionalize the story of the Pyncheon family and put it in a magazine. Phoebe is surprised that Mr. Holgrave writes for magazines. Mr. Holgrave offers to read Phoebe his story. She agrees, as long as it's not too boring. | summary |
THERE was a message brought, one day, from the worshipful Gervayse
Pyncheon to young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, desiring his immediate
presence at the House of the Seven Gables.
"And what does your master want with me?" said the carpenter to Mr.
Pyncheon's black servant. "Does the house need any repair? Well it
may, by this time; and no blame to my father who built it, neither! I
was reading the old Colonel's tombstone, no longer ago than last
Sabbath; and, reckoning from that date, the house has stood
seven-and-thirty years. No wonder if there should be a job to do on
the roof."
"Don't know what massa wants," answered Scipio. "The house is a berry
good house, and old Colonel Pyncheon think so too, I reckon;--else why
the old man haunt it so, and frighten a poor nigga, As he does?"
"Well, well, friend Scipio; let your master know that I'm coming," said
the carpenter with a laugh. "For a fair, workmanlike job, he'll find
me his man. And so the house is haunted, is it? It will take a tighter
workman than I am to keep the spirits out of the Seven Gables. Even if
the Colonel would be quiet," he added, muttering to himself, "my old
grandfather, the wizard, will be pretty sure to stick to the Pyncheons
as long as their walls hold together."
"What's that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule?" asked Scipio.
"And what for do you look so black at me?"
"No matter, darky," said the carpenter. "Do you think nobody is to
look black but yourself? Go tell your master I'm coming; and if you
happen to see Mistress Alice, his daughter, give Matthew Maule's humble
respects to her. She has brought a fair face from Italy,--fair, and
gentle, and proud,--has that same Alice Pyncheon!"
"He talk of Mistress Alice!" cried Scipio, as he returned from his
errand. "The low carpenter-man! He no business so much as to look at
her a great way off!"
This young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, it must be observed, was a
person little understood, and not very generally liked, in the town
where he resided; not that anything could be alleged against his
integrity, or his skill and diligence in the handicraft which he
exercised. The aversion (as it might justly be called) with which many
persons regarded him was partly the result of his own character and
deportment, and partly an inheritance.
He was the grandson of a former Matthew Maule, one of the early
settlers of the town, and who had been a famous and terrible wizard in
his day. This old reprobate was one of the sufferers when Cotton
Mather, and his brother ministers, and the learned judges, and other
wise men, and Sir William Phipps, the sagacious governor, made such
laudable efforts to weaken the great enemy of souls, by sending a
multitude of his adherents up the rocky pathway of Gallows Hill. Since
those days, no doubt, it had grown to be suspected that, in consequence
of an unfortunate overdoing of a work praiseworthy in itself, the
proceedings against the witches had proved far less acceptable to the
Beneficent Father than to that very Arch Enemy whom they were intended
to distress and utterly overwhelm. It is not the less certain,
however, that awe and terror brooded over the memories of those who
died for this horrible crime of witchcraft. Their graves, in the
crevices of the rocks, were supposed to be incapable of retaining the
occupants who had been so hastily thrust into them. Old Matthew Maule,
especially, was known to have as little hesitation or difficulty in
rising out of his grave as an ordinary man in getting out of bed, and
was as often seen at midnight as living people at noonday. This
pestilent wizard (in whom his just punishment seemed to have wrought no
manner of amendment) had an inveterate habit of haunting a certain
mansion, styled the House of the Seven Gables, against the owner of
which he pretended to hold an unsettled claim for ground-rent. The
ghost, it appears,--with the pertinacity which was one of his
distinguishing characteristics while alive,--insisted that he was the
rightful proprietor of the site upon which the house stood. His terms
were, that either the aforesaid ground-rent, from the day when the
cellar began to be dug, should be paid down, or the mansion itself
given up; else he, the ghostly creditor, would have his finger in all
the affairs of the Pyncheons, and make everything go wrong with them,
though it should be a thousand years after his death. It was a wild
story, perhaps, but seemed not altogether so incredible to those who
could remember what an inflexibly obstinate old fellow this wizard
Maule had been.
Now, the wizard's grandson, the young Matthew Maule of our story, was
popularly supposed to have inherited some of his ancestor's
questionable traits. It is wonderful how many absurdities were
promulgated in reference to the young man. He was fabled, for example,
to have a strange power of getting into people's dreams, and regulating
matters there according to his own fancy, pretty much like the
stage-manager of a theatre. There was a great deal of talk among the
neighbors, particularly the petticoated ones, about what they called
the witchcraft of Maule's eye. Some said that he could look into
people's minds; others, that, by the marvellous power of this eye, he
could draw people into his own mind, or send them, if he pleased, to do
errands to his grandfather, in the spiritual world; others, again, that
it was what is termed an Evil Eye, and possessed the valuable faculty
of blighting corn, and drying children into mummies with the heartburn.
But, after all, what worked most to the young carpenter's disadvantage
was, first, the reserve and sternness of his natural disposition, and
next, the fact of his not being a church-communicant, and the suspicion
of his holding heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity.
After receiving Mr. Pyncheon's message, the carpenter merely tarried to
finish a small job, which he happened to have in hand, and then took
his way towards the House of the Seven Gables. This noted edifice,
though its style might be getting a little out of fashion, was still as
respectable a family residence as that of any gentleman in town. The
present owner, Gervayse Pyncheon, was said to have contracted a dislike
to the house, in consequence of a shock to his sensibility, in early
childhood, from the sudden death of his grandfather. In the very act
of running to climb Colonel Pyncheon's knee, the boy had discovered the
old Puritan to be a corpse. On arriving at manhood, Mr. Pyncheon had
visited England, where he married a lady of fortune, and had
subsequently spent many years, partly in the mother country, and partly
in various cities on the continent of Europe. During this period, the
family mansion had been consigned to the charge of a kinsman, who was
allowed to make it his home for the time being, in consideration of
keeping the premises in thorough repair. So faithfully had this
contract been fulfilled, that now, as the carpenter approached the
house, his practised eye could detect nothing to criticise in its
condition. The peaks of the seven gables rose up sharply; the shingled
roof looked thoroughly water-tight; and the glittering plaster-work
entirely covered the exterior walls, and sparkled in the October sun,
as if it had been new only a week ago.
The house had that pleasant aspect of life which is like the cheery
expression of comfortable activity in the human countenance. You could
see, at once, that there was the stir of a large family within it. A
huge load of oak-wood was passing through the gateway, towards the
outbuildings in the rear; the fat cook--or probably it might be the
housekeeper--stood at the side door, bargaining for some turkeys and
poultry which a countryman had brought for sale. Now and then a
maid-servant, neatly dressed, and now the shining sable face of a
slave, might be seen bustling across the windows, in the lower part of
the house. At an open window of a room in the second story, hanging
over some pots of beautiful and delicate flowers,--exotics, but which
had never known a more genial sunshine than that of the New England
autumn,--was the figure of a young lady, an exotic, like the flowers,
and beautiful and delicate as they. Her presence imparted an
indescribable grace and faint witchery to the whole edifice. In other
respects, it was a substantial, jolly-looking mansion, and seemed fit
to be the residence of a patriarch, who might establish his own
headquarters in the front gable and assign one of the remainder to each
of his six children, while the great chimney in the centre should
symbolize the old fellow's hospitable heart, which kept them all warm,
and made a great whole of the seven smaller ones.
There was a vertical sundial on the front gable; and as the carpenter
passed beneath it, he looked up and noted the hour.
"Three o'clock!" said he to himself. "My father told me that dial was
put up only an hour before the old Colonel's death. How truly it has
kept time these seven-and-thirty years past! The shadow creeps and
creeps, and is always looking over the shoulder of the sunshine!"
It might have befitted a craftsman, like Matthew Maule, on being sent
for to a gentleman's house, to go to the back door, where servants and
work-people were usually admitted; or at least to the side entrance,
where the better class of tradesmen made application. But the
carpenter had a great deal of pride and stiffness in his nature; and,
at this moment, moreover, his heart was bitter with the sense of
hereditary wrong, because he considered the great Pyncheon House to be
standing on soil which should have been his own. On this very site,
beside a spring of delicious water, his grandfather had felled the
pine-trees and built a cottage, in which children had been born to him;
and it was only from a dead man's stiffened fingers that Colonel
Pyncheon had wrested away the title-deeds. So young Maule went
straight to the principal entrance, beneath a portal of carved oak, and
gave such a peal of the iron knocker that you would have imagined the
stern old wizard himself to be standing at the threshold.
Black Scipio answered the summons in a prodigious, hurry; but showed
the whites of his eyes in amazement on beholding only the carpenter.
"Lord-a-mercy, what a great man he be, this carpenter fellow!" mumbled
Scipio, down in his throat. "Anybody think he beat on the door with
his biggest hammer!"
"Here I am!" said Maule sternly. "Show me the way to your master's
parlor."
As he stept into the house, a note of sweet and melancholy music
thrilled and vibrated along the passage-way, proceeding from one of the
rooms above stairs. It was the harpsichord which Alice Pyncheon had
brought with her from beyond the sea. The fair Alice bestowed most of
her maiden leisure between flowers and music, although the former were
apt to droop, and the melodies were often sad. She was of foreign
education, and could not take kindly to the New England modes of life,
in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed.
As Mr. Pyncheon had been impatiently awaiting Maule's arrival, black
Scipio, of course, lost no time in ushering the carpenter into his
master's presence. The room in which this gentleman sat was a parlor of
moderate size, looking out upon the garden of the house, and having its
windows partly shadowed by the foliage of fruit-trees. It was Mr.
Pyncheon's peculiar apartment, and was provided with furniture, in an
elegant and costly style, principally from Paris; the floor (which was
unusual at that day) being covered with a carpet, so skilfully and
richly wrought that it seemed to glow as with living flowers. In one
corner stood a marble woman, to whom her own beauty was the sole and
sufficient garment. Some pictures--that looked old, and had a mellow
tinge diffused through all their artful splendor--hung on the walls.
Near the fireplace was a large and very beautiful cabinet of ebony,
inlaid with ivory; a piece of antique furniture, which Mr. Pyncheon had
bought in Venice, and which he used as the treasure-place for medals,
ancient coins, and whatever small and valuable curiosities he had
picked up on his travels. Through all this variety of decoration,
however, the room showed its original characteristics; its low stud,
its cross-beam, its chimney-piece, with the old-fashioned Dutch tiles;
so that it was the emblem of a mind industriously stored with foreign
ideas, and elaborated into artificial refinement, but neither larger,
nor, in its proper self, more elegant than before.
There were two objects that appeared rather out of place in this very
handsomely furnished room. One was a large map, or surveyor's plan, of
a tract of land, which looked as if it had been drawn a good many years
ago, and was now dingy with smoke, and soiled, here and there, with the
touch of fingers. The other was a portrait of a stern old man, in a
Puritan garb, painted roughly, but with a bold effect, and a remarkably
strong expression of character.
At a small table, before a fire of English sea-coal, sat Mr. Pyncheon,
sipping coffee, which had grown to be a very favorite beverage with him
in France. He was a middle-aged and really handsome man, with a wig
flowing down upon his shoulders; his coat was of blue velvet, with lace
on the borders and at the button-holes; and the firelight glistened on
the spacious breadth of his waistcoat, which was flowered all over with
gold. On the entrance of Scipio, ushering in the carpenter, Mr.
Pyncheon turned partly round, but resumed his former position, and
proceeded deliberately to finish his cup of coffee, without immediate
notice of the guest whom he had summoned to his presence. It was not
that he intended any rudeness or improper neglect,--which, indeed, he
would have blushed to be guilty of,--but it never occurred to him that
a person in Maule's station had a claim on his courtesy, or would
trouble himself about it one way or the other.
The carpenter, however, stepped at once to the hearth, and turned
himself about, so as to look Mr. Pyncheon in the face.
"You sent for me," said he. "Be pleased to explain your business, that
I may go back to my own affairs."
"Ah! excuse me," said Mr. Pyncheon quietly. "I did not mean to tax
your time without a recompense. Your name, I think, is Maule,--Thomas
or Matthew Maule,--a son or grandson of the builder of this house?"
"Matthew Maule," replied the carpenter,--"son of him who built the
house,--grandson of the rightful proprietor of the soil."
"I know the dispute to which you allude," observed Mr. Pyncheon with
undisturbed equanimity. "I am well aware that my grandfather was
compelled to resort to a suit at law, in order to establish his claim
to the foundation-site of this edifice. We will not, if you please,
renew the discussion. The matter was settled at the time, and by the
competent authorities,--equitably, it is to be presumed,--and, at all
events, irrevocably. Yet, singularly enough, there is an incidental
reference to this very subject in what I am now about to say to you.
And this same inveterate grudge,--excuse me, I mean no offence,--this
irritability, which you have just shown, is not entirely aside from the
matter."
"If you can find anything for your purpose, Mr. Pyncheon," said the
carpenter, "in a man's natural resentment for the wrongs done to his
blood, you are welcome to it."
"I take you at your word, Goodman Maule," said the owner of the Seven
Gables, with a smile, "and will proceed to suggest a mode in which your
hereditary resentments--justifiable or otherwise--may have had a
bearing on my affairs. You have heard, I suppose, that the Pyncheon
family, ever since my grandfather's days, have been prosecuting a still
unsettled claim to a very large extent of territory at the Eastward?"
"Often," replied Maule,--and it is said that a smile came over his
face,--"very often,--from my father!"
"This claim," continued Mr. Pyncheon, after pausing a moment, as if to
consider what the carpenter's smile might mean, "appeared to be on the
very verge of a settlement and full allowance, at the period of my
grandfather's decease. It was well known, to those in his confidence,
that he anticipated neither difficulty nor delay. Now, Colonel
Pyncheon, I need hardly say, was a practical man, well acquainted with
public and private business, and not at all the person to cherish
ill-founded hopes, or to attempt the following out of an impracticable
scheme. It is obvious to conclude, therefore, that he had grounds, not
apparent to his heirs, for his confident anticipation of success in the
matter of this Eastern claim. In a word, I believe,--and my legal
advisers coincide in the belief, which, moreover, is authorized, to a
certain extent, by the family traditions,--that my grandfather was in
possession of some deed, or other document, essential to this claim,
but which has since disappeared."
"Very likely," said Matthew Maule,--and again, it is said, there was a
dark smile on his face,--"but what can a poor carpenter have to do with
the grand affairs of the Pyncheon family?"
"Perhaps nothing," returned Mr. Pyncheon, "possibly much!"
Here ensued a great many words between Matthew Maule and the proprietor
of the Seven Gables, on the subject which the latter had thus broached.
It seems (although Mr. Pyncheon had some hesitation in referring to
stories so exceedingly absurd in their aspect) that the popular belief
pointed to some mysterious connection and dependence, existing between
the family of the Maules and these vast unrealized possessions of the
Pyncheons. It was an ordinary saying that the old wizard, hanged
though he was, had obtained the best end of the bargain in his contest
with Colonel Pyncheon; inasmuch as he had got possession of the great
Eastern claim, in exchange for an acre or two of garden-ground. A very
aged woman, recently dead, had often used the metaphorical expression,
in her fireside talk, that miles and miles of the Pyncheon lands had
been shovelled into Maule's grave; which, by the bye, was but a very
shallow nook, between two rocks, near the summit of Gallows Hill.
Again, when the lawyers were making inquiry for the missing document,
it was a by-word that it would never be found, unless in the wizard's
skeleton hand. So much weight had the shrewd lawyers assigned to these
fables, that (but Mr. Pyncheon did not see fit to inform the carpenter
of the fact) they had secretly caused the wizard's grave to be
searched. Nothing was discovered, however, except that, unaccountably,
the right hand of the skeleton was gone.
Now, what was unquestionably important, a portion of these popular
rumors could be traced, though rather doubtfully and indistinctly, to
chance words and obscure hints of the executed wizard's son, and the
father of this present Matthew Maule. And here Mr. Pyncheon could
bring an item of his own personal evidence into play. Though but a
child at the time, he either remembered or fancied that Matthew's
father had had some job to perform on the day before, or possibly the
very morning of the Colonel's decease, in the private room where he and
the carpenter were at this moment talking. Certain papers belonging to
Colonel Pyncheon, as his grandson distinctly recollected, had been
spread out on the table.
Matthew Maule understood the insinuated suspicion.
"My father," he said,--but still there was that dark smile, making a
riddle of his countenance,--"my father was an honester man than the
bloody old Colonel! Not to get his rights back again would he have
carried off one of those papers!"
"I shall not bandy words with you," observed the foreign-bred Mr.
Pyncheon, with haughty composure. "Nor will it become me to resent any
rudeness towards either my grandfather or myself. A gentleman, before
seeking intercourse with a person of your station and habits, will
first consider whether the urgency of the end may compensate for the
disagreeableness of the means. It does so in the present instance."
He then renewed the conversation, and made great pecuniary offers to
the carpenter, in case the latter should give information leading to
the discovery of the lost document, and the consequent success of the
Eastern claim. For a long time Matthew Maule is said to have turned a
cold ear to these propositions. At last, however, with a strange kind
of laugh, he inquired whether Mr. Pyncheon would make over to him the
old wizard's homestead-ground, together with the House of the Seven
Gables, now standing on it, in requital of the documentary evidence so
urgently required.
The wild, chimney-corner legend (which, without copying all its
extravagances, my narrative essentially follows) here gives an account
of some very strange behavior on the part of Colonel Pyncheon's
portrait. This picture, it must be understood, was supposed to be so
intimately connected with the fate of the house, and so magically built
into its walls, that, if once it should be removed, that very instant
the whole edifice would come thundering down in a heap of dusty ruin.
All through the foregoing conversation between Mr. Pyncheon and the
carpenter, the portrait had been frowning, clenching its fist, and
giving many such proofs of excessive discomposure, but without
attracting the notice of either of the two colloquists. And finally,
at Matthew Maule's audacious suggestion of a transfer of the
seven-gabled structure, the ghostly portrait is averred to have lost
all patience, and to have shown itself on the point of descending
bodily from its frame. But such incredible incidents are merely to be
mentioned aside.
"Give up this house!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, in amazement at the
proposal. "Were I to do so, my grandfather would not rest quiet in his
grave!"
"He never has, if all stories are true," remarked the carpenter
composedly. "But that matter concerns his grandson more than it does
Matthew Maule. I have no other terms to propose."
Impossible as he at first thought it to comply with Maule's conditions,
still, on a second glance, Mr. Pyncheon was of opinion that they might
at least be made matter of discussion. He himself had no personal
attachment for the house, nor any pleasant associations connected with
his childish residence in it. On the contrary, after seven-and-thirty
years, the presence of his dead grandfather seemed still to pervade it,
as on that morning when the affrighted boy had beheld him, with so
ghastly an aspect, stiffening in his chair. His long abode in foreign
parts, moreover, and familiarity with many of the castles and ancestral
halls of England, and the marble palaces of Italy, had caused him to
look contemptuously at the House of the Seven Gables, whether in point
of splendor or convenience. It was a mansion exceedingly inadequate to
the style of living which it would be incumbent on Mr. Pyncheon to
support, after realizing his territorial rights. His steward might
deign to occupy it, but never, certainly, the great landed proprietor
himself. In the event of success, indeed, it was his purpose to return
to England; nor, to say the truth, would he recently have quitted that
more congenial home, had not his own fortune, as well as his deceased
wife's, begun to give symptoms of exhaustion. The Eastern claim once
fairly settled, and put upon the firm basis of actual possession, Mr.
Pyncheon's property--to be measured by miles, not acres--would be worth
an earldom, and would reasonably entitle him to solicit, or enable him
to purchase, that elevated dignity from the British monarch. Lord
Pyncheon!--or the Earl of Waldo!--how could such a magnate be expected
to contract his grandeur within the pitiful compass of seven shingled
gables?
In short, on an enlarged view of the business, the carpenter's terms
appeared so ridiculously easy that Mr. Pyncheon could scarcely forbear
laughing in his face. He was quite ashamed, after the foregoing
reflections, to propose any diminution of so moderate a recompense for
the immense service to be rendered.
"I consent to your proposition, Maule!" cried he. "Put me in possession
of the document essential to establish my rights, and the House of the
Seven Gables is your own!"
According to some versions of the story, a regular contract to the
above effect was drawn up by a lawyer, and signed and sealed in the
presence of witnesses. Others say that Matthew Maule was contented
with a private written agreement, in which Mr. Pyncheon pledged his
honor and integrity to the fulfillment of the terms concluded upon.
The gentleman then ordered wine, which he and the carpenter drank
together, in confirmation of their bargain. During the whole preceding
discussion and subsequent formalities, the old Puritan's portrait seems
to have persisted in its shadowy gestures of disapproval; but without
effect, except that, as Mr. Pyncheon set down the emptied glass, he
thought he beheld his grandfather frown.
"This sherry is too potent a wine for me; it has affected my brain
already," he observed, after a somewhat startled look at the picture.
"On returning to Europe, I shall confine myself to the more delicate
vintages of Italy and France, the best of which will not bear
transportation."
"My Lord Pyncheon may drink what wine he will, and wherever he
pleases," replied the carpenter, as if he had been privy to Mr.
Pyncheon's ambitious projects. "But first, sir, if you desire tidings
of this lost document, I must crave the favor of a little talk with
your fair daughter Alice."
"You are mad, Maule!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon haughtily; and now, at
last, there was anger mixed up with his pride. "What can my daughter
have to do with a business like this?"
Indeed, at this new demand on the carpenter's part, the proprietor of
the Seven Gables was even more thunder-struck than at the cool
proposition to surrender his house. There was, at least, an assignable
motive for the first stipulation; there appeared to be none whatever
for the last. Nevertheless, Matthew Maule sturdily insisted on the
young lady being summoned, and even gave her father to understand, in a
mysterious kind of explanation,--which made the matter considerably
darker than it looked before,--that the only chance of acquiring the
requisite knowledge was through the clear, crystal medium of a pure and
virgin intelligence, like that of the fair Alice. Not to encumber our
story with Mr. Pyncheon's scruples, whether of conscience, pride, or
fatherly affection, he at length ordered his daughter to be called. He
well knew that she was in her chamber, and engaged in no occupation
that could not readily be laid aside; for, as it happened, ever since
Alice's name had been spoken, both her father and the carpenter had
heard the sad and sweet music of her harpsichord, and the airier
melancholy of her accompanying voice.
So Alice Pyncheon was summoned, and appeared. A portrait of this young
lady, painted by a Venetian artist, and left by her father in England,
is said to have fallen into the hands of the present Duke of
Devonshire, and to be now preserved at Chatsworth; not on account of
any associations with the original, but for its value as a picture, and
the high character of beauty in the countenance. If ever there was a
lady born, and set apart from the world's vulgar mass by a certain
gentle and cold stateliness, it was this very Alice Pyncheon. Yet
there was the womanly mixture in her; the tenderness, or, at least, the
tender capabilities. For the sake of that redeeming quality, a man of
generous nature would have forgiven all her pride, and have been
content, almost, to lie down in her path, and let Alice set her slender
foot upon his heart. All that he would have required was simply the
acknowledgment that he was indeed a man, and a fellow-being, moulded of
the same elements as she.
As Alice came into the room, her eyes fell upon the carpenter, who was
standing near its centre, clad in green woollen jacket, a pair of loose
breeches, open at the knees, and with a long pocket for his rule, the
end of which protruded; it was as proper a mark of the artisan's
calling as Mr. Pyncheon's full-dress sword of that gentleman's
aristocratic pretensions. A glow of artistic approval brightened over
Alice Pyncheon's face; she was struck with admiration--which she made
no attempt to conceal--of the remarkable comeliness, strength, and
energy of Maule's figure. But that admiring glance (which most other
men, perhaps, would have cherished as a sweet recollection all through
life) the carpenter never forgave. It must have been the devil himself
that made Maule so subtile in his preception.
"Does the girl look at me as if I were a brute beast?" thought he,
setting his teeth. "She shall know whether I have a human spirit; and
the worse for her, if it prove stronger than her own!"
"My father, you sent for me," said Alice, in her sweet and harp-like
voice. "But, if you have business with this young man, pray let me go
again. You know I do not love this room, in spite of that Claude, with
which you try to bring back sunny recollections."
"Stay a moment, young lady, if you please!" said Matthew Maule. "My
business with your father is over. With yourself, it is now to begin!"
Alice looked towards her father, in surprise and inquiry.
"Yes, Alice," said Mr. Pyncheon, with some disturbance and confusion.
"This young man--his name is Matthew Maule--professes, so far as I can
understand him, to be able to discover, through your means, a certain
paper or parchment, which was missing long before your birth. The
importance of the document in question renders it advisable to neglect
no possible, even if improbable, method of regaining it. You will
therefore oblige me, my dear Alice, by answering this person's
inquiries, and complying with his lawful and reasonable requests, so
far as they may appear to have the aforesaid object in view. As I
shall remain in the room, you need apprehend no rude nor unbecoming
deportment, on the young man's part; and, at your slightest wish, of
course, the investigation, or whatever we may call it, shall
immediately be broken off."
"Mistress Alice Pyncheon," remarked Matthew Maule, with the utmost
deference, but yet a half-hidden sarcasm in his look and tone, "will no
doubt feel herself quite safe in her father's presence, and under his
all-sufficient protection."
"I certainly shall entertain no manner of apprehension, with my father
at hand," said Alice with maidenly dignity. "Neither do I conceive
that a lady, while true to herself, can have aught to fear from
whomsoever, or in any circumstances!"
Poor Alice! By what unhappy impulse did she thus put herself at once on
terms of defiance against a strength which she could not estimate?
"Then, Mistress Alice," said Matthew Maule, handing a
chair,--gracefully enough, for a craftsman, "will it please you only to
sit down, and do me the favor (though altogether beyond a poor
carpenter's deserts) to fix your eyes on mine!"
Alice complied, She was very proud. Setting aside all advantages of
rank, this fair girl deemed herself conscious of a power--combined of
beauty, high, unsullied purity, and the preservative force of
womanhood--that could make her sphere impenetrable, unless betrayed by
treachery within. She instinctively knew, it may be, that some
sinister or evil potency was now striving to pass her barriers; nor
would she decline the contest. So Alice put woman's might against
man's might; a match not often equal on the part of woman.
Her father meanwhile had turned away, and seemed absorbed in the
contemplation of a landscape by Claude, where a shadowy and
sun-streaked vista penetrated so remotely into an ancient wood, that it
would have been no wonder if his fancy had lost itself in the picture's
bewildering depths. But, in truth, the picture was no more to him at
that moment than the blank wall against which it hung. His mind was
haunted with the many and strange tales which he had heard, attributing
mysterious if not supernatural endowments to these Maules, as well the
grandson here present as his two immediate ancestors. Mr. Pyncheon's
long residence abroad, and intercourse with men of wit and
fashion,--courtiers, worldings, and free-thinkers,--had done much
towards obliterating the grim Puritan superstitions, which no man of
New England birth at that early period could entirely escape. But, on
the other hand, had not a whole community believed Maule's grandfather
to be a wizard? Had not the crime been proved? Had not the wizard died
for it? Had he not bequeathed a legacy of hatred against the Pyncheons
to this only grandson, who, as it appeared, was now about to exercise a
subtle influence over the daughter of his enemy's house? Might not
this influence be the same that was called witchcraft?
Turning half around, he caught a glimpse of Maule's figure in the
looking-glass. At some paces from Alice, with his arms uplifted in the
air, the carpenter made a gesture as if directing downward a slow,
ponderous, and invisible weight upon the maiden.
"Stay, Maule!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, stepping forward. "I forbid
your proceeding further!"
"Pray, my dear father, do not interrupt the young man," said Alice,
without changing her position. "His efforts, I assure you, will prove
very harmless."
Again Mr. Pyncheon turned his eyes towards the Claude. It was then his
daughter's will, in opposition to his own, that the experiment should
be fully tried. Henceforth, therefore, he did but consent, not urge
it. And was it not for her sake far more than for his own that he
desired its success? That lost parchment once restored, the beautiful
Alice Pyncheon, with the rich dowry which he could then bestow, might
wed an English duke or a German reigning-prince, instead of some New
England clergyman or lawyer! At the thought, the ambitious father
almost consented, in his heart, that, if the devil's power were needed
to the accomplishment of this great object, Maule might evoke him.
Alice's own purity would be her safeguard.
With his mind full of imaginary magnificence, Mr. Pyncheon heard a
half-uttered exclamation from his daughter. It was very faint and low;
so indistinct that there seemed but half a will to shape out the words,
and too undefined a purport to be intelligible. Yet it was a call for
help!--his conscience never doubted it;--and, little more than a
whisper to his ear, it was a dismal shriek, and long reechoed so, in
the region round his heart! But this time the father did not turn.
After a further interval, Maule spoke.
"Behold your daughter," said he.
Mr. Pyncheon came hastily forward. The carpenter was standing erect in
front of Alice's chair, and pointing his finger towards the maiden with
an expression of triumphant power, the limits of which could not be
defined, as, indeed, its scope stretched vaguely towards the unseen and
the infinite. Alice sat in an attitude of profound repose, with the
long brown lashes drooping over her eyes.
"There she is!" said the carpenter. "Speak to her!"
"Alice! My daughter!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon. "My own Alice!"
She did not stir.
"Louder!" said Maule, smiling.
"Alice! Awake!" cried her father. "It troubles me to see you thus!
Awake!"
He spoke loudly, with terror in his voice, and close to that delicate
ear which had always been so sensitive to every discord. But the sound
evidently reached her not. It is indescribable what a sense of remote,
dim, unattainable distance betwixt himself and Alice was impressed on
the father by this impossibility of reaching her with his voice.
"Best touch her!" said Matthew Maule "Shake the girl, and roughly, too!
My hands are hardened with too much use of axe, saw, and plane,--else I
might help you!"
Mr. Pyncheon took her hand, and pressed it with the earnestness of
startled emotion. He kissed her, with so great a heart-throb in the
kiss, that he thought she must needs feel it. Then, in a gust of anger
at her insensibility, he shook her maiden form with a violence which,
the next moment, it affrighted him to remember. He withdrew his
encircling arms, and Alice--whose figure, though flexible, had been
wholly impassive--relapsed into the same attitude as before these
attempts to arouse her. Maule having shifted his position, her face
was turned towards him slightly, but with what seemed to be a reference
of her very slumber to his guidance.
Then it was a strange sight to behold how the man of conventionalities
shook the powder out of his periwig; how the reserved and stately
gentleman forgot his dignity; how the gold-embroidered waistcoat
flickered and glistened in the firelight with the convulsion of rage,
terror, and sorrow in the human heart that was beating under it.
"Villain!" cried Mr. Pyncheon, shaking his clenched fist at Maule.
"You and the fiend together have robbed me of my daughter. Give her
back, spawn of the old wizard, or you shall climb Gallows Hill in your
grandfather's footsteps!"
"Softly, Mr. Pyncheon!" said the carpenter with scornful composure.
"Softly, an' it please your worship, else you will spoil those rich
lace-ruffles at your wrists! Is it my crime if you have sold your
daughter for the mere hope of getting a sheet of yellow parchment into
your clutch? There sits Mistress Alice quietly asleep. Now let Matthew
Maule try whether she be as proud as the carpenter found her awhile
since."
He spoke, and Alice responded, with a soft, subdued, inward
acquiescence, and a bending of her form towards him, like the flame of
a torch when it indicates a gentle draught of air. He beckoned with
his hand, and, rising from her chair,--blindly, but undoubtingly, as
tending to her sure and inevitable centre,--the proud Alice approached
him. He waved her back, and, retreating, Alice sank again into her
seat.
"She is mine!" said Matthew Maule. "Mine, by the right of the
strongest spirit!"
In the further progress of the legend, there is a long, grotesque, and
occasionally awe-striking account of the carpenter's incantations (if
so they are to be called), with a view of discovering the lost
document. It appears to have been his object to convert the mind of
Alice into a kind of telescopic medium, through which Mr. Pyncheon and
himself might obtain a glimpse into the spiritual world. He succeeded,
accordingly, in holding an imperfect sort of intercourse, at one
remove, with the departed personages in whose custody the so much
valued secret had been carried beyond the precincts of earth. During
her trance, Alice described three figures as being present to her
spiritualized perception. One was an aged, dignified, stern-looking
gentleman, clad as for a solemn festival in grave and costly attire,
but with a great blood-stain on his richly wrought band; the second, an
aged man, meanly dressed, with a dark and malign countenance, and a
broken halter about his neck; the third, a person not so advanced in
life as the former two, but beyond the middle age, wearing a coarse
woollen tunic and leather breeches, and with a carpenter's rule
sticking out of his side pocket. These three visionary characters
possessed a mutual knowledge of the missing document. One of them, in
truth,--it was he with the blood-stain on his band,--seemed, unless his
gestures were misunderstood, to hold the parchment in his immediate
keeping, but was prevented by his two partners in the mystery from
disburdening himself of the trust. Finally, when he showed a purpose
of shouting forth the secret loudly enough to be heard from his own
sphere into that of mortals, his companions struggled with him, and
pressed their hands over his mouth; and forthwith--whether that he were
choked by it, or that the secret itself was of a crimson hue--there was
a fresh flow of blood upon his band. Upon this, the two meanly dressed
figures mocked and jeered at the much-abashed old dignitary, and
pointed their fingers at the stain.
At this juncture, Maule turned to Mr. Pyncheon.
"It will never be allowed," said he. "The custody of this secret, that
would so enrich his heirs, makes part of your grandfather's
retribution. He must choke with it until it is no longer of any value.
And keep you the House of the Seven Gables! It is too dear bought an
inheritance, and too heavy with the curse upon it, to be shifted yet
awhile from the Colonel's posterity."
Mr. Pyncheon tried to speak, but--what with fear and passion--could
make only a gurgling murmur in his throat. The carpenter smiled.
"Aha, worshipful sir!--so you have old Maule's blood to drink!" said he
jeeringly.
"Fiend in man's shape! why dost thou keep dominion over my child?"
cried Mr. Pyncheon, when his choked utterance could make way. "Give me
back my daughter. Then go thy ways; and may we never meet again!"
"Your daughter!" said Matthew Maule. "Why, she is fairly mine!
Nevertheless, not to be too hard with fair Mistress Alice, I will leave
her in your keeping; but I do not warrant you that she shall never have
occasion to remember Maule, the carpenter."
He waved his hands with an upward motion; and, after a few repetitions
of similar gestures, the beautiful Alice Pyncheon awoke from her
strange trance. She awoke without the slightest recollection of her
visionary experience; but as one losing herself in a momentary reverie,
and returning to the consciousness of actual life, in almost as brief
an interval as the down-sinking flame of the hearth should quiver again
up the chimney. On recognizing Matthew Maule, she assumed an air of
somewhat cold but gentle dignity, the rather, as there was a certain
peculiar smile on the carpenter's visage that stirred the native pride
of the fair Alice. So ended, for that time, the quest for the lost
title-deed of the Pyncheon territory at the Eastward; nor, though often
subsequently renewed, has it ever yet befallen a Pyncheon to set his
eye upon that parchment.
But, alas for the beautiful, the gentle, yet too haughty Alice! A
power that she little dreamed of had laid its grasp upon her maiden
soul. A will, most unlike her own, constrained her to do its grotesque
and fantastic bidding. Her father as it proved, had martyred his poor
child to an inordinate desire for measuring his land by miles instead
of acres. And, therefore, while Alice Pyncheon lived, she was Maule's
slave, in a bondage more humiliating, a thousand-fold, than that which
binds its chain around the body. Seated by his humble fireside, Maule
had but to wave his hand; and, wherever the proud lady chanced to
be,--whether in her chamber, or entertaining her father's stately
guests, or worshipping at church,--whatever her place or occupation,
her spirit passed from beneath her own control, and bowed itself to
Maule. "Alice, laugh!"--the carpenter, beside his hearth, would say;
or perhaps intensely will it, without a spoken word. And, even were it
prayer-time, or at a funeral, Alice must break into wild laughter.
"Alice, be sad!"--and, at the instant, down would come her tears,
quenching all the mirth of those around her like sudden rain upon a
bonfire. "Alice, dance."--and dance she would, not in such court-like
measures as she had learned abroad, but some high-paced jig, or
hop-skip rigadoon, befitting the brisk lasses at a rustic merry-making.
It seemed to be Maule's impulse, not to ruin Alice, nor to visit her
with any black or gigantic mischief, which would have crowned her
sorrows with the grace of tragedy, but to wreak a low, ungenerous scorn
upon her. Thus all the dignity of life was lost. She felt herself too
much abased, and longed to change natures with some worm!
One evening, at a bridal party (but not her own; for, so lost from
self-control, she would have deemed it sin to marry), poor Alice was
beckoned forth by her unseen despot, and constrained, in her gossamer
white dress and satin slippers, to hasten along the street to the mean
dwelling of a laboring-man. There was laughter and good cheer within;
for Matthew Maule, that night, was to wed the laborer's daughter, and
had summoned proud Alice Pyncheon to wait upon his bride. And so she
did; and when the twain were one, Alice awoke out of her enchanted
sleep. Yet, no longer proud,--humbly, and with a smile all steeped in
sadness,--she kissed Maule's wife, and went her way. It was an
inclement night; the southeast wind drove the mingled snow and rain
into her thinly sheltered bosom; her satin slippers were wet through
and through, as she trod the muddy sidewalks. The next day a cold;
soon, a settled cough; anon, a hectic cheek, a wasted form, that sat
beside the harpsichord, and filled the house with music! Music in
which a strain of the heavenly choristers was echoed! Oh; joy! For
Alice had borne her last humiliation! Oh, greater joy! For Alice was
penitent of her one earthly sin, and proud no more!
The Pyncheons made a great funeral for Alice. The kith and kin were
there, and the whole respectability of the town besides. But, last in
the procession, came Matthew Maule, gnashing his teeth, as if he would
have bitten his own heart in twain,--the darkest and wofullest man that
ever walked behind a corpse! He meant to humble Alice, not to kill her;
but he had taken a woman's delicate soul into his rude gripe, to play
with--and she was dead!
| One day Matthew Maule II gets a message to come to the House of the Seven Gables. The servant who brings the message, Scipio, says the house is haunted by Colonel Pyncheon. Matthew Maule II adds that, if Colonel Pyncheon weren't haunting the place, his grandfather Matthew Maule certainly would be. Matthew Maule II sends his respects to Alice Pyncheon, the daughter of the house. Scipio thinks Maule shouldn't be thinking such thoughts about Alice. Maule is a carpenter and not widely liked in the town. The fact that his grandfather was executed for witchcraft doesn't look good to these god-fearing townspeople. Also, the villagers think that Maule has the ability to control other people with his mind. Everyone suspects that he is a wizard like his grandfather. Eventually Maule makes his way to the House of the Seven Gables. The current owner of the house is Mr. Gervayse Pyncheon, the grandson of the original Colonel Pyncheon. Apparently, he's the grandson who ran up to his grandfather and discovered him dead on the day of that housewarming party many years before. As a result, Gervayse Pyncheon hates the House of the Seven Gables. He traveled to Europe and married a wealthy woman there. While Pyncheon has been away, the rest of the family has been keeping up the house. The House of the Seven Gables looks jolly and well-filled - not as fashionable as it once was, but still very respectable. Even though he's a servant, Maule goes straight up to the front door. He doesn't care - he's filled with bitterness towards the Pyncheon family anyway. The servant, Scipio, is startled by the loudness of Maule's knock, but he lets him in. Maule hears a pleasant sound: it's young Alice Pyncheon playing her harpsichord Scipio ushers Maule into Gervayse Pyncheon's visiting room. The room has two interesting things in it: a large map of land that looks like "it had been drawn a good many years ago" , and , a portrait of a stern Puritan man. Maule demands that Pyncheon explain why he has sent for him. Pyncheon asks if Maule is aware of the Pyncheon family claim on this land in Maine. Apparently the story goes that Matthew Maule I somehow got hold of the deed before he was hanged. Gervayse Pyncheon's lawyers had Maule's grave searched, but they couldn't find the deed. They did find one weird detail: his right hand was missing. Pyncheon wants to know whether Matthew Maule's father Thomas Maule might have come away from the Colonel's study with this important piece of paper. Pyncheon promises Maule lots of money if he can produce the deed. Maule makes a counteroffer: if Pyncheon promises to abandon the House of the Seven Gables, he will help him. Pyncheon thinks it over. After all, he doesn't really like the house, and he has spent a lot of time abroad. So finally, Pyncheon agrees. Pyncheon promises that, if Maule can produce the land documents, he will give him the deed to the House of the Seven Gables. Maule also insists on speaking to Alice Pyncheon. Gervayse Pyncheon calls in his daughter. As soon as she looks at Maule, she is impressed by his handsome appearance. But Maule totally misinterprets her look: he thinks she thinks he's "a brute beast" . Maule decides to show her that he has the stronger spirit. He asks Alice to sit down and look into his eyes. Gervayse Pyncheon turns around to examine a landscape painting. Twice he turns around and thinks of stopping Maule from whatever strange ritual he's performing. But each time, he remembers how much money is in it for him if Maule produces that land deed. Finally Maule speaks: "Behold your daughter" . Alice seems to be in a deep sleep and Pyncheon can't wake her, no matter how hard he tries. Pyncheon demands that Maule give him back his daughter. Maule laughs and says she is his: he has the strongest spirit. Under hypnosis, Alice sees three men who know the secret location of the land document. The men she describes are Colonel Pyncheon, Matthew Maule I, and Thomas Maule. But the Maules won't let Colonel Pyncheon say what he knows. Matthew Maule II decides that his grandfather's curse on the Pyncheon family has to run its course. They can't leave the House of the Seven Gables yet. Pyncheon demands that Maule release Alice. Alice wakes up without any memory of what has happened to her. And so the secret deed is never found. After this hypnotic incident, Alice is never the same. Maule can make her laugh or cry in an instant, whenever he feels like it. Alice is so ashamed and embarrassed that she withdraws from society. The last humiliation is when Maule makes her come along to wait on his bride on their wedding night. When Alice comes to, she kisses the bride then goes out into the wild weather. She catches a terrible cold and slowly wastes away and dies. But frankly, she is glad to be free of Maule's humiliations. The Pyncheons hold a big funeral for Alice. Maule attends, and he looks furious. He meant to "humble" Alice, "not to kill her" . | summary |
HOLGRAVE, plunging into his tale with the energy and absorption natural
to a young author, had given a good deal of action to the parts capable
of being developed and exemplified in that manner. He now observed
that a certain remarkable drowsiness (wholly unlike that with which the
reader possibly feels himself affected) had been flung over the senses
of his auditress. It was the effect, unquestionably, of the mystic
gesticulations by which he had sought to bring bodily before Phoebe's
perception the figure of the mesmerizing carpenter. With the lids
drooping over her eyes,--now lifted for an instant, and drawn down
again as with leaden weights,--she leaned slightly towards him, and
seemed almost to regulate her breath by his. Holgrave gazed at her, as
he rolled up his manuscript, and recognized an incipient stage of that
curious psychological condition which, as he had himself told Phoebe,
he possessed more than an ordinary faculty of producing. A veil was
beginning to be muffled about her, in which she could behold only him,
and live only in his thoughts and emotions. His glance, as he fastened
it on the young girl, grew involuntarily more concentrated; in his
attitude there was the consciousness of power, investing his hardly
mature figure with a dignity that did not belong to its physical
manifestation. It was evident, that, with but one wave of his hand and
a corresponding effort of his will, he could complete his mastery over
Phoebe's yet free and virgin spirit: he could establish an influence
over this good, pure, and simple child, as dangerous, and perhaps as
disastrous, as that which the carpenter of his legend had acquired and
exercised over the ill-fated Alice.
To a disposition like Holgrave's, at once speculative and active, there
is no temptation so great as the opportunity of acquiring empire over
the human spirit; nor any idea more seductive to a young man than to
become the arbiter of a young girl's destiny. Let us,
therefore,--whatever his defects of nature and education, and in spite
of his scorn for creeds and institutions,--concede to the
daguerreotypist the rare and high quality of reverence for another's
individuality. Let us allow him integrity, also, forever after to be
confided in; since he forbade himself to twine that one link more which
might have rendered his spell over Phoebe indissoluble.
He made a slight gesture upward with his hand.
"You really mortify me, my dear Miss Phoebe!" he exclaimed, smiling
half-sarcastically at her. "My poor story, it is but too evident, will
never do for Godey or Graham! Only think of your falling asleep at what
I hoped the newspaper critics would pronounce a most brilliant,
powerful, imaginative, pathetic, and original winding up! Well, the
manuscript must serve to light lamps with;--if, indeed, being so imbued
with my gentle dulness, it is any longer capable of flame!"
"Me asleep! How can you say so?" answered Phoebe, as unconscious of the
crisis through which she had passed as an infant of the precipice to
the verge of which it has rolled. "No, no! I consider myself as having
been very attentive; and, though I don't remember the incidents quite
distinctly, yet I have an impression of a vast deal of trouble and
calamity,--so, no doubt, the story will prove exceedingly attractive."
By this time the sun had gone down, and was tinting the clouds towards
the zenith with those bright hues which are not seen there until some
time after sunset, and when the horizon has quite lost its richer
brilliancy. The moon, too, which had long been climbing overhead, and
unobtrusively melting its disk into the azure,--like an ambitious
demagogue, who hides his aspiring purpose by assuming the prevalent hue
of popular sentiment,--now began to shine out, broad and oval, in its
middle pathway. These silvery beams were already powerful enough to
change the character of the lingering daylight. They softened and
embellished the aspect of the old house; although the shadows fell
deeper into the angles of its many gables, and lay brooding under the
projecting story, and within the half-open door. With the lapse of
every moment, the garden grew more picturesque; the fruit-trees,
shrubbery, and flower-bushes had a dark obscurity among them. The
commonplace characteristics--which, at noontide, it seemed to have
taken a century of sordid life to accumulate--were now transfigured by
a charm of romance. A hundred mysterious years were whispering among
the leaves, whenever the slight sea-breeze found its way thither and
stirred them. Through the foliage that roofed the little summer-house
the moonlight flickered to and fro, and fell silvery white on the dark
floor, the table, and the circular bench, with a continual shift and
play, according as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs
admitted or shut out the glimmer.
So sweetly cool was the atmosphere, after all the feverish day, that
the summer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid
moonlight, with a dash of icy temper in them, out of a silver vase.
Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human
heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of
nature. The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence
fell. It made him feel--what he sometimes almost forgot, thrust so
early as he had been into the rude struggle of man with man--how
youthful he still was.
"It seems to me," he observed, "that I never watched the coming of so
beautiful an eve, and never felt anything so very much like happiness
as at this moment. After all, what a good world we live in! How good,
and beautiful! How young it is, too, with nothing really rotten or
age-worn in it! This old house, for example, which sometimes has
positively oppressed my breath with its smell of decaying timber! And
this garden, where the black mould always clings to my spade, as if I
were a sexton delving in a graveyard! Could I keep the feeling that now
possesses me, the garden would every day be virgin soil, with the
earth's first freshness in the flavor of its beans and squashes; and
the house!--it would be like a bower in Eden, blossoming with the
earliest roses that God ever made. Moonlight, and the sentiment in
man's heart responsive to it, are the greatest of renovators and
reformers. And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove
to be no better than moonshine!"
"I have been happier than I am now; at least, much gayer," said Phoebe
thoughtfully. "Yet I am sensible of a great charm in this brightening
moonlight; and I love to watch how the day, tired as it is, lags away
reluctantly, and hates to be called yesterday so soon. I never cared
much about moonlight before. What is there, I wonder, so beautiful in
it, to-night?"
"And you have never felt it before?" inquired the artist, looking
earnestly at the girl through the twilight.
"Never," answered Phoebe; "and life does not look the same, now that I
have felt it so. It seems as if I had looked at everything, hitherto,
in broad daylight, or else in the ruddy light of a cheerful fire,
glimmering and dancing through a room. Ah, poor me!" she added, with a
half-melancholy laugh. "I shall never be so merry as before I knew
Cousin Hepzibah and poor Cousin Clifford. I have grown a great deal
older, in this little time. Older, and, I hope, wiser, and,--not
exactly sadder,--but, certainly, with not half so much lightness in my
spirits! I have given them my sunshine, and have been glad to give it;
but, of course, I cannot both give and keep it. They are welcome,
notwithstanding!"
"You have lost nothing, Phoebe, worth keeping, nor which it was
possible to keep," said Holgrave after a pause. "Our first youth is of
no value; for we are never conscious of it until after it is gone. But
sometimes--always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly
unfortunate--there comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the
heart's joy at being in love; or, possibly, it may come to crown some
other grand festival in life, if any other such there be. This
bemoaning of one's self (as you do now) over the first, careless,
shallow gayety of youth departed, and this profound happiness at youth
regained,--so much deeper and richer than that we lost,--are essential
to the soul's development. In some cases, the two states come almost
simultaneously, and mingle the sadness and the rapture in one
mysterious emotion."
"I hardly think I understand you," said Phoebe.
"No wonder," replied Holgrave, smiling; "for I have told you a secret
which I hardly began to know before I found myself giving it utterance.
Remember it, however; and when the truth becomes clear to you, then
think of this moonlight scene!"
"It is entirely moonlight now, except only a little flush of faint
crimson, upward from the west, between those buildings," remarked
Phoebe. "I must go in. Cousin Hepzibah is not quick at figures, and
will give herself a headache over the day's accounts, unless I help
her."
But Holgrave detained her a little longer.
"Miss Hepzibah tells me," observed he, "that you return to the country
in a few days."
"Yes, but only for a little while," answered Phoebe; "for I look upon
this as my present home. I go to make a few arrangements, and to take
a more deliberate leave of my mother and friends. It is pleasant to
live where one is much desired and very useful; and I think I may have
the satisfaction of feeling myself so here."
"You surely may, and more than you imagine," said the artist.
"Whatever health, comfort, and natural life exists in the house is
embodied in your person. These blessings came along with you, and will
vanish when you leave the threshold. Miss Hepzibah, by secluding
herself from society, has lost all true relation with it, and is, in
fact, dead; although she galvanizes herself into a semblance of life,
and stands behind her counter, afflicting the world with a
greatly-to-be-deprecated scowl. Your poor cousin Clifford is another
dead and long-buried person, on whom the governor and council have
wrought a necromantic miracle. I should not wonder if he were to
crumble away, some morning, after you are gone, and nothing be seen of
him more, except a heap of dust. Miss Hepzibah, at any rate, will lose
what little flexibility she has. They both exist by you."
"I should be very sorry to think so," answered Phoebe gravely. "But it
is true that my small abilities were precisely what they needed; and I
have a real interest in their welfare,--an odd kind of motherly
sentiment,--which I wish you would not laugh at! And let me tell you
frankly, Mr. Holgrave, I am sometimes puzzled to know whether you wish
them well or ill."
"Undoubtedly," said the daguerreotypist, "I do feel an interest in this
antiquated, poverty-stricken old maiden lady, and this degraded and
shattered gentleman,--this abortive lover of the beautiful. A kindly
interest, too, helpless old children that they are! But you have no
conception what a different kind of heart mine is from your own. It is
not my impulse, as regards these two individuals, either to help or
hinder; but to look on, to analyze, to explain matters to myself, and
to comprehend the drama which, for almost two hundred years, has been
dragging its slow length over the ground where you and I now tread. If
permitted to witness the close, I doubt not to derive a moral
satisfaction from it, go matters how they may. There is a conviction
within me that the end draws nigh. But, though Providence sent you
hither to help, and sends me only as a privileged and meet spectator, I
pledge myself to lend these unfortunate beings whatever aid I can!"
"I wish you would speak more plainly," cried Phoebe, perplexed and
displeased; "and, above all, that you would feel more like a Christian
and a human being! How is it possible to see people in distress without
desiring, more than anything else, to help and comfort them? You talk
as if this old house were a theatre; and you seem to look at Hepzibah's
and Clifford's misfortunes, and those of generations before them, as a
tragedy, such as I have seen acted in the hall of a country hotel, only
the present one appears to be played exclusively for your amusement. I
do not like this. The play costs the performers too much, and the
audience is too cold-hearted."
"You are severe," said Holgrave, compelled to recognize a degree of
truth in the piquant sketch of his own mood.
"And then," continued Phoebe, "what can you mean by your conviction,
which you tell me of, that the end is drawing near? Do you know of any
new trouble hanging over my poor relatives? If so, tell me at once, and
I will not leave them!"
"Forgive me, Phoebe!" said the daguerreotypist, holding out his hand,
to which the girl was constrained to yield her own. "I am somewhat of
a mystic, it must be confessed. The tendency is in my blood, together
with the faculty of mesmerism, which might have brought me to Gallows
Hill, in the good old times of witchcraft. Believe me, if I were
really aware of any secret, the disclosure of which would benefit your
friends,--who are my own friends, likewise,--you should learn it before
we part. But I have no such knowledge."
"You hold something back!" said Phoebe.
"Nothing,--no secrets but my own," answered Holgrave. "I can perceive,
indeed, that Judge Pyncheon still keeps his eye on Clifford, in whose
ruin he had so large a share. His motives and intentions, however are
a mystery to me. He is a determined and relentless man, with the
genuine character of an inquisitor; and had he any object to gain by
putting Clifford to the rack, I verily believe that he would wrench his
joints from their sockets, in order to accomplish it. But, so wealthy
and eminent as he is,--so powerful in his own strength, and in the
support of society on all sides,--what can Judge Pyncheon have to hope
or fear from the imbecile, branded, half-torpid Clifford?"
"Yet," urged Phoebe, "you did speak as if misfortune were impending!"
"Oh, that was because I am morbid!" replied the artist. "My mind has a
twist aside, like almost everybody's mind, except your own. Moreover,
it is so strange to find myself an inmate of this old Pyncheon House,
and sitting in this old garden--(hark, how Maule's well is
murmuring!)--that, were it only for this one circumstance, I cannot
help fancying that Destiny is arranging its fifth act for a
catastrophe."
"There!" cried Phoebe with renewed vexation; for she was by nature as
hostile to mystery as the sunshine to a dark corner. "You puzzle me
more than ever!"
"Then let us part friends!" said Holgrave, pressing her hand. "Or, if
not friends, let us part before you entirely hate me. You, who love
everybody else in the world!"
"Good-by, then," said Phoebe frankly. "I do not mean to be angry a
great while, and should be sorry to have you think so. There has
Cousin Hepzibah been standing in the shadow of the doorway, this
quarter of an hour past! She thinks I stay too long in the damp garden.
So, good-night, and good-by."
On the second morning thereafter, Phoebe might have been seen, in her
straw bonnet, with a shawl on one arm and a little carpet-bag on the
other, bidding adieu to Hepzibah and Cousin Clifford. She was to take
a seat in the next train of cars, which would transport her to within
half a dozen miles of her country village.
The tears were in Phoebe's eyes; a smile, dewy with affectionate
regret, was glimmering around her pleasant mouth. She wondered how it
came to pass, that her life of a few weeks, here in this heavy-hearted
old mansion, had taken such hold of her, and so melted into her
associations, as now to seem a more important centre-point of
remembrance than all which had gone before. How had Hepzibah--grim,
silent, and irresponsive to her overflow of cordial sentiment--contrived
to win so much love? And Clifford,--in his abortive decay, with the
mystery of fearful crime upon him, and the close prison-atmosphere yet
lurking in his breath,--how had he transformed himself into the simplest
child, whom Phoebe felt bound to watch over, and be, as it were, the
providence of his unconsidered hours! Everything, at that instant of
farewell, stood out prominently to her view. Look where she would, lay
her hand on what she might, the object responded to her consciousness,
as if a moist human heart were in it.
She peeped from the window into the garden, and felt herself more
regretful at leaving this spot of black earth, vitiated with such an
age-long growth of weeds, than joyful at the idea of again scenting her
pine forests and fresh clover-fields. She called Chanticleer, his two
wives, and the venerable chicken, and threw them some crumbs of bread
from the breakfast-table. These being hastily gobbled up, the chicken
spread its wings, and alighted close by Phoebe on the window-sill,
where it looked gravely into her face and vented its emotions in a
croak. Phoebe bade it be a good old chicken during her absence, and
promised to bring it a little bag of buckwheat.
"Ah, Phoebe!" remarked Hepzibah, "you do not smile so naturally as when
you came to us! Then, the smile chose to shine out; now, you choose it
should. It is well that you are going back, for a little while, into
your native air. There has been too much weight on your spirits. The
house is too gloomy and lonesome; the shop is full of vexations; and as
for me, I have no faculty of making things look brighter than they are.
Dear Clifford has been your only comfort!"
"Come hither, Phoebe," suddenly cried her cousin Clifford, who had said
very little all the morning. "Close!--closer!--and look me in the
face!"
Phoebe put one of her small hands on each elbow of his chair, and
leaned her face towards him, so that he might peruse it as carefully as
he would. It is probable that the latent emotions of this parting hour
had revived, in some degree, his bedimmed and enfeebled faculties. At
any rate, Phoebe soon felt that, if not the profound insight of a seer,
yet a more than feminine delicacy of appreciation, was making her heart
the subject of its regard. A moment before, she had known nothing
which she would have sought to hide. Now, as if some secret were
hinted to her own consciousness through the medium of another's
perception, she was fain to let her eyelids droop beneath Clifford's
gaze. A blush, too,--the redder, because she strove hard to keep it
down,--ascended bigger and higher, in a tide of fitful progress, until
even her brow was all suffused with it.
"It is enough, Phoebe," said Clifford, with a melancholy smile. "When
I first saw you, you were the prettiest little maiden in the world; and
now you have deepened into beauty. Girlhood has passed into womanhood;
the bud is a bloom! Go, now--I feel lonelier than I did."
Phoebe took leave of the desolate couple, and passed through the shop,
twinkling her eyelids to shake off a dew-drop; for--considering how
brief her absence was to be, and therefore the folly of being cast down
about it--she would not so far acknowledge her tears as to dry them
with her handkerchief. On the doorstep, she met the little urchin
whose marvellous feats of gastronomy have been recorded in the earlier
pages of our narrative. She took from the window some specimen or
other of natural history,--her eyes being too dim with moisture to
inform her accurately whether it was a rabbit or a hippopotamus,--put
it into the child's hand as a parting gift, and went her way. Old
Uncle Venner was just coming out of his door, with a wood-horse and saw
on his shoulder; and, trudging along the street, he scrupled not to
keep company with Phoebe, so far as their paths lay together; nor, in
spite of his patched coat and rusty beaver, and the curious fashion of
his tow-cloth trousers, could she find it in her heart to outwalk him.
"We shall miss you, next Sabbath afternoon," observed the street
philosopher. "It is unaccountable how little while it takes some folks
to grow just as natural to a man as his own breath; and, begging your
pardon, Miss Phoebe (though there can be no offence in an old man's
saying it), that's just what you've grown to me! My years have been a
great many, and your life is but just beginning; and yet, you are
somehow as familiar to me as if I had found you at my mother's door,
and you had blossomed, like a running vine, all along my pathway since.
Come back soon, or I shall be gone to my farm; for I begin to find
these wood-sawing jobs a little too tough for my back-ache."
"Very soon, Uncle Venner," replied Phoebe.
"And let it be all the sooner, Phoebe, for the sake of those poor souls
yonder," continued her companion. "They can never do without you,
now,--never, Phoebe; never--no more than if one of God's angels had
been living with them, and making their dismal house pleasant and
comfortable! Don't it seem to you they'd be in a sad case, if, some
pleasant summer morning like this, the angel should spread his wings,
and fly to the place he came from? Well, just so they feel, now that
you're going home by the railroad! They can't bear it, Miss Phoebe; so
be sure to come back!"
"I am no angel, Uncle Venner," said Phoebe, smiling, as she offered him
her hand at the street-corner. "But, I suppose, people never feel so
much like angels as when they are doing what little good they may. So
I shall certainly come back!"
Thus parted the old man and the rosy girl; and Phoebe took the wings of
the morning, and was soon flitting almost as rapidly away as if endowed
with the aerial locomotion of the angels to whom Uncle Venner had so
graciously compared her.
| After Mr. Holgrave finishes reading his story aloud, he notices that Phoebe has become literally hypnotized as a result of his gestures. Mr. Holgrave has a sudden temptation: he could establish total power over Phoebe in this state. But he has too much respect for individual choice to do this to Phoebe, so he releases her from the hypnotic spell. Mr. Holgrave teases Phoebe for falling asleep. She protests that she was awake the whole time. She just can't...quite...remember what his story was about. The night falls and it's lovely. Mr. Holgrave has never felt so happy as he does at this moment. Phoebe admits that she's been more cheerful in the past, but she has a new appreciation for moonlight now. Mr. Holgrave says this feeling is proof that her soul is developing into something better and more mature. Phoebe realizes that she must go inside to help Hepzibah close up the shop. Mr. Holgrave has heard that Phoebe plans to go back to the country in a couple of days. Phoebe says it's true, but she's coming back soon. She enjoys living where she can be useful . Mr. Holgrave says she is desperately needed by Hepzibah and Clifford, who are both as good as dead without her. Phoebe wonders whether Mr. Holgrave cares what happens to Hepzibah and Clifford. Mr. Holgrave is interested in the two of them, but in an intellectual way. He is there primarily as "a privileged spectator" to this human drama. Phoebe demands to know whether Mr. Holgrave is aware of anything that threatens Hepzibah and Clifford. Mr. Holgrave apologizes and promises that he knows of nothing coming their way. He has secrets, yes, but they are his own. It's just that Mr. Holgrave has noticed that Judge Pyncheon seems unusually interested in Clifford. But why? Phoebe says goodbye and promises that she is not angry. Two days later Phoebe says farewell to Hepzibah and Clifford. She weeps as she thinks over how much her life has changed over the last several weeks. She feeds Chanticleer and the hens. Hepzibah remarks that it's good Phoebe is going away for a bit - she needs to regain her old, easy smile. Clifford tells Phoebe that she has changed from a child into a woman during her stay at the House. Phoebe goes on her way after handing Ned Higgins another animal-shaped cookie. Uncle Venner walks along the path with her awhile. He tells Phoebe to come back soon - she seems to belong here, and Clifford and Hepzibah won't be able to bear her absence. Phoebe promises to come back. | summary |
SEVERAL days passed over the Seven Gables, heavily and drearily enough.
In fact (not to attribute the whole gloom of sky and earth to the one
inauspicious circumstance of Phoebe's departure), an easterly storm had
set in, and indefatigably apply itself to the task of making the black
roof and walls of the old house look more cheerless than ever before.
Yet was the outside not half so cheerless as the interior. Poor
Clifford was cut off, at once, from all his scanty resources of
enjoyment. Phoebe was not there; nor did the sunshine fall upon the
floor. The garden, with its muddy walks, and the chill, dripping
foliage of its summer-house, was an image to be shuddered at. Nothing
flourished in the cold, moist, pitiless atmosphere, drifting with the
brackish scud of sea-breezes, except the moss along the joints of the
shingle-roof, and the great bunch of weeds, that had lately been
suffering from drought, in the angle between the two front gables.
As for Hepzibah, she seemed not merely possessed with the east wind,
but to be, in her very person, only another phase of this gray and
sullen spell of weather; the East-Wind itself, grim and disconsolate,
in a rusty black silk gown, and with a turban of cloud-wreaths on its
head. The custom of the shop fell off, because a story got abroad that
she soured her small beer and other damageable commodities, by scowling
on them. It is, perhaps, true that the public had something reasonably
to complain of in her deportment; but towards Clifford she was neither
ill-tempered nor unkind, nor felt less warmth of heart than always, had
it been possible to make it reach him. The inutility of her best
efforts, however, palsied the poor old gentlewoman. She could do
little else than sit silently in a corner of the room, when the wet
pear-tree branches, sweeping across the small windows, created a
noonday dusk, which Hepzibah unconsciously darkened with her woe-begone
aspect. It was no fault of Hepzibah's. Everything--even the old
chairs and tables, that had known what weather was for three or four
such lifetimes as her own--looked as damp and chill as if the present
were their worst experience. The picture of the Puritan Colonel
shivered on the wall. The house itself shivered, from every attic of
its seven gables down to the great kitchen fireplace, which served all
the better as an emblem of the mansion's heart, because, though built
for warmth, it was now so comfortless and empty.
Hepzibah attempted to enliven matters by a fire in the parlor. But the
storm demon kept watch above, and, whenever a flame was kindled, drove
the smoke back again, choking the chimney's sooty throat with its own
breath. Nevertheless, during four days of this miserable storm,
Clifford wrapt himself in an old cloak, and occupied his customary
chair. On the morning of the fifth, when summoned to breakfast, he
responded only by a broken-hearted murmur, expressive of a
determination not to leave his bed. His sister made no attempt to
change his purpose. In fact, entirely as she loved him, Hepzibah could
hardly have borne any longer the wretched duty--so impracticable by her
few and rigid faculties--of seeking pastime for a still sensitive, but
ruined mind, critical and fastidious, without force or volition. It
was at least something short of positive despair, that to-day she might
sit shivering alone, and not suffer continually a new grief, and
unreasonable pang of remorse, at every fitful sigh of her fellow
sufferer.
But Clifford, it seemed, though he did not make his appearance below
stairs, had, after all, bestirred himself in quest of amusement. In
the course of the forenoon, Hepzibah heard a note of music, which
(there being no other tuneful contrivance in the House of the Seven
Gables) she knew must proceed from Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord. She
was aware that Clifford, in his youth, had possessed a cultivated taste
for music, and a considerable degree of skill in its practice. It was
difficult, however, to conceive of his retaining an accomplishment to
which daily exercise is so essential, in the measure indicated by the
sweet, airy, and delicate, though most melancholy strain, that now
stole upon her ear. Nor was it less marvellous that the long-silent
instrument should be capable of so much melody. Hepzibah involuntarily
thought of the ghostly harmonies, prelusive of death in the family,
which were attributed to the legendary Alice. But it was, perhaps,
proof of the agency of other than spiritual fingers, that, after a few
touches, the chords seemed to snap asunder with their own vibrations,
and the music ceased.
But a harsher sound succeeded to the mysterious notes; nor was the
easterly day fated to pass without an event sufficient in itself to
poison, for Hepzibah and Clifford, the balmiest air that ever brought
the humming-birds along with it. The final echoes of Alice Pyncheon's
performance (or Clifford's, if his we must consider it) were driven
away by no less vulgar a dissonance than the ringing of the shop-bell.
A foot was heard scraping itself on the threshold, and thence somewhat
ponderously stepping on the floor. Hepzibah delayed a moment, while
muffling herself in a faded shawl, which had been her defensive armor
in a forty years' warfare against the east wind. A characteristic
sound, however,--neither a cough nor a hem, but a kind of rumbling and
reverberating spasm in somebody's capacious depth of chest;--impelled
her to hurry forward, with that aspect of fierce faint-heartedness so
common to women in cases of perilous emergency. Few of her sex, on
such occasions, have ever looked so terrible as our poor scowling
Hepzibah. But the visitor quietly closed the shop-door behind him,
stood up his umbrella against the counter, and turned a visage of
composed benignity, to meet the alarm and anger which his appearance
had excited.
Hepzibah's presentiment had not deceived her. It was no other than
Judge Pyncheon, who, after in vain trying the front door, had now
effected his entrance into the shop.
"How do you do, Cousin Hepzibah?--and how does this most inclement
weather affect our poor Clifford?" began the Judge; and wonderful it
seemed, indeed, that the easterly storm was not put to shame, or, at
any rate, a little mollified, by the genial benevolence of his smile.
"I could not rest without calling to ask, once more, whether I can in
any manner promote his comfort, or your own."
"You can do nothing," said Hepzibah, controlling her agitation as well
as she could. "I devote myself to Clifford. He has every comfort
which his situation admits of."
"But allow me to suggest, dear cousin," rejoined the Judge, "you
err,--in all affection and kindness, no doubt, and with the very best
intentions,--but you do err, nevertheless, in keeping your brother so
secluded. Why insulate him thus from all sympathy and kindness?
Clifford, alas! has had too much of solitude. Now let him try
society,--the society, that is to say, of kindred and old friends. Let
me, for instance, but see Clifford, and I will answer for the good
effect of the interview."
"You cannot see him," answered Hepzibah. "Clifford has kept his bed
since yesterday."
"What! How! Is he ill?" exclaimed Judge Pyncheon, starting with what
seemed to be angry alarm; for the very frown of the old Puritan
darkened through the room as he spoke. "Nay, then, I must and will see
him! What if he should die?"
"He is in no danger of death," said Hepzibah,--and added, with
bitterness that she could repress no longer, "none; unless he shall be
persecuted to death, now, by the same man who long ago attempted it!"
"Cousin Hepzibah," said the Judge, with an impressive earnestness of
manner, which grew even to tearful pathos as he proceeded, "is it
possible that you do not perceive how unjust, how unkind, how
unchristian, is this constant, this long-continued bitterness against
me, for a part which I was constrained by duty and conscience, by the
force of law, and at my own peril, to act? What did I do, in detriment
to Clifford, which it was possible to leave undone? How could you, his
sister,--if, for your never-ending sorrow, as it has been for mine, you
had known what I did,--have, shown greater tenderness? And do you
think, cousin, that it has cost me no pang?--that it has left no
anguish in my bosom, from that day to this, amidst all the prosperity
with which Heaven has blessed me?--or that I do not now rejoice, when
it is deemed consistent with the dues of public justice and the welfare
of society that this dear kinsman, this early friend, this nature so
delicately and beautifully constituted,--so unfortunate, let us
pronounce him, and forbear to say, so guilty,--that our own Clifford,
in fine, should be given back to life, and its possibilities of
enjoyment? Ah, you little know me, Cousin Hepzibah! You little know
this heart! It now throbs at the thought of meeting him! There lives
not the human being (except yourself,--and you not more than I) who has
shed so many tears for Clifford's calamity. You behold some of them
now. There is none who would so delight to promote his happiness! Try
me, Hepzibah!--try me, Cousin!--try the man whom you have treated as
your enemy and Clifford's!--try Jaffrey Pyncheon, and you shall find
him true, to the heart's core!"
"In the name of Heaven," cried Hepzibah, provoked only to intenser
indignation by this outgush of the inestimable tenderness of a stern
nature,--"in God's name, whom you insult, and whose power I could
almost question, since he hears you utter so many false words without
palsying your tongue,--give over, I beseech you, this loathsome
pretence of affection for your victim! You hate him! Say so, like a
man! You cherish, at this moment, some black purpose against him in
your heart! Speak it out, at once!--or, if you hope so to promote it
better, hide it till you can triumph in its success! But never speak
again of your love for my poor brother. I cannot bear it! It will
drive me beyond a woman's decency! It will drive me mad! Forbear! Not
another word! It will make me spurn you!"
For once, Hepzibah's wrath had given her courage. She had spoken.
But, after all, was this unconquerable distrust of Judge Pyncheon's
integrity, and this utter denial, apparently, of his claim to stand in
the ring of human sympathies,--were they founded in any just perception
of his character, or merely the offspring of a woman's unreasonable
prejudice, deduced from nothing?
The Judge, beyond all question, was a man of eminent respectability.
The church acknowledged it; the state acknowledged it. It was denied
by nobody. In all the very extensive sphere of those who knew him,
whether in his public or private capacities, there was not an
individual--except Hepzibah, and some lawless mystic, like the
daguerreotypist, and, possibly, a few political opponents--who would
have dreamed of seriously disputing his claim to a high and honorable
place in the world's regard. Nor (we must do him the further justice
to say) did Judge Pyncheon himself, probably, entertain many or very
frequent doubts, that his enviable reputation accorded with his
deserts. His conscience, therefore, usually considered the surest
witness to a man's integrity,--his conscience, unless it might be for
the little space of five minutes in the twenty-four hours, or, now and
then, some black day in the whole year's circle,--his conscience bore
an accordant testimony with the world's laudatory voice. And yet,
strong as this evidence may seem to be, we should hesitate to peril our
own conscience on the assertion, that the Judge and the consenting
world were right, and that poor Hepzibah with her solitary prejudice
was wrong. Hidden from mankind,--forgotten by himself, or buried so
deeply under a sculptured and ornamented pile of ostentatious deeds
that his daily life could take no note of it,--there may have lurked
some evil and unsightly thing. Nay, we could almost venture to say,
further, that a daily guilt might have been acted by him, continually
renewed, and reddening forth afresh, like the miraculous blood-stain of
a murder, without his necessarily and at every moment being aware of it.
Men of strong minds, great force of character, and a hard texture of
the sensibilities, are very capable of falling into mistakes of this
kind. They are ordinarily men to whom forms are of paramount
importance. Their field of action lies among the external phenomena of
life. They possess vast ability in grasping, and arranging, and
appropriating to themselves, the big, heavy, solid unrealities, such as
gold, landed estate, offices of trust and emolument, and public honors.
With these materials, and with deeds of goodly aspect, done in the
public eye, an individual of this class builds up, as it were, a tall
and stately edifice, which, in the view of other people, and ultimately
in his own view, is no other than the man's character, or the man
himself. Behold, therefore, a palace! Its splendid halls and suites of
spacious apartments are floored with a mosaic-work of costly marbles;
its windows, the whole height of each room, admit the sunshine through
the most transparent of plate-glass; its high cornices are gilded, and
its ceilings gorgeously painted; and a lofty dome--through which, from
the central pavement, you may gaze up to the sky, as with no
obstructing medium between--surmounts the whole. With what fairer and
nobler emblem could any man desire to shadow forth his character? Ah!
but in some low and obscure nook,--some narrow closet on the
ground-floor, shut, locked and bolted, and the key flung away,--or
beneath the marble pavement, in a stagnant water-puddle, with the
richest pattern of mosaic-work above,--may lie a corpse, half decayed,
and still decaying, and diffusing its death-scent all through the
palace! The inhabitant will not be conscious of it, for it has long
been his daily breath! Neither will the visitors, for they smell only
the rich odors which the master sedulously scatters through the palace,
and the incense which they bring, and delight to burn before him! Now
and then, perchance, comes in a seer, before whose sadly gifted eye the
whole structure melts into thin air, leaving only the hidden nook, the
bolted closet, with the cobwebs festooned over its forgotten door, or
the deadly hole under the pavement, and the decaying corpse within.
Here, then, we are to seek the true emblem of the man's character, and
of the deed that gives whatever reality it possesses to his life. And,
beneath the show of a marble palace, that pool of stagnant water, foul
with many impurities, and, perhaps, tinged with blood,--that secret
abomination, above which, possibly, he may say his prayers, without
remembering it,--is this man's miserable soul!
To apply this train of remark somewhat more closely to Judge Pyncheon.
We might say (without in the least imputing crime to a personage of his
eminent respectability) that there was enough of splendid rubbish in
his life to cover up and paralyze a more active and subtile conscience
than the Judge was ever troubled with. The purity of his judicial
character, while on the bench; the faithfulness of his public service
in subsequent capacities; his devotedness to his party, and the rigid
consistency with which he had adhered to its principles, or, at all
events, kept pace with its organized movements; his remarkable zeal as
president of a Bible society; his unimpeachable integrity as treasurer
of a widow's and orphan's fund; his benefits to horticulture, by
producing two much esteemed varieties of the pear and to agriculture,
through the agency of the famous Pyncheon bull; the cleanliness of his
moral deportment, for a great many years past; the severity with which
he had frowned upon, and finally cast off, an expensive and dissipated
son, delaying forgiveness until within the final quarter of an hour of
the young man's life; his prayers at morning and eventide, and graces
at meal-time; his efforts in furtherance of the temperance cause; his
confining himself, since the last attack of the gout, to five diurnal
glasses of old sherry wine; the snowy whiteness of his linen, the
polish of his boots, the handsomeness of his gold-headed cane, the
square and roomy fashion of his coat, and the fineness of its material,
and, in general, the studied propriety of his dress and equipment; the
scrupulousness with which he paid public notice, in the street, by a
bow, a lifting of the hat, a nod, or a motion of the hand, to all and
sundry of his acquaintances, rich or poor; the smile of broad
benevolence wherewith he made it a point to gladden the whole
world,--what room could possibly be found for darker traits in a
portrait made up of lineaments like these? This proper face was what he
beheld in the looking-glass. This admirably arranged life was what he
was conscious of in the progress of every day. Then might not he claim
to be its result and sum, and say to himself and the community, "Behold
Judge Pyncheon there"?
And allowing that, many, many years ago, in his early and reckless
youth, he had committed some one wrong act,--or that, even now, the
inevitable force of circumstances should occasionally make him do one
questionable deed among a thousand praiseworthy, or, at least,
blameless ones,--would you characterize the Judge by that one necessary
deed, and that half-forgotten act, and let it overshadow the fair
aspect of a lifetime? What is there so ponderous in evil, that a
thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil which
were heaped into the other scale! This scale and balance system is a
favorite one with people of Judge Pyncheon's brotherhood. A hard, cold
man, thus unfortunately situated, seldom or never looking inward, and
resolutely taking his idea of himself from what purports to be his
image as reflected in the mirror of public opinion, can scarcely arrive
at true self-knowledge, except through loss of property and reputation.
Sickness will not always help him do it; not always the death-hour!
But our affair now is with Judge Pyncheon as he stood confronting the
fierce outbreak of Hepzibah's wrath. Without premeditation, to her own
surprise, and indeed terror, she had given vent, for once, to the
inveteracy of her resentment, cherished against this kinsman for thirty
years.
Thus far the Judge's countenance had expressed mild forbearance,--grave
and almost gentle deprecation of his cousin's unbecoming
violence,--free and Christian-like forgiveness of the wrong inflicted
by her words. But when those words were irrevocably spoken, his look
assumed sternness, the sense of power, and immitigable resolve; and
this with so natural and imperceptible a change, that it seemed as if
the iron man had stood there from the first, and the meek man not at
all. The effect was as when the light, vapory clouds, with their soft
coloring, suddenly vanish from the stony brow of a precipitous
mountain, and leave there the frown which you at once feel to be
eternal. Hepzibah almost adopted the insane belief that it was her old
Puritan ancestor, and not the modern Judge, on whom she had just been
wreaking the bitterness of her heart. Never did a man show stronger
proof of the lineage attributed to him than Judge Pyncheon, at this
crisis, by his unmistakable resemblance to the picture in the inner
room.
"Cousin Hepzibah," said he very calmly, "it is time to have done with
this."
"With all my heart!" answered she. "Then, why do you persecute us any
longer? Leave poor Clifford and me in peace. Neither of us desires
anything better!"
"It is my purpose to see Clifford before I leave this house," continued
the Judge. "Do not act like a madwoman, Hepzibah! I am his only
friend, and an all-powerful one. Has it never occurred to you,--are
you so blind as not to have seen,--that, without not merely my consent,
but my efforts, my representations, the exertion of my whole influence,
political, official, personal, Clifford would never have been what you
call free? Did you think his release a triumph over me? Not so, my good
cousin; not so, by any means! The furthest possible from that! No; but
it was the accomplishment of a purpose long entertained on my part. I
set him free!"
"You!" answered Hepzibah. "I never will believe it! He owed his
dungeon to you; his freedom to God's providence!"
"I set him free!" reaffirmed Judge Pyncheon, with the calmest
composure. "And I came hither now to decide whether he shall retain
his freedom. It will depend upon himself. For this purpose, I must
see him."
"Never!--it would drive him mad!" exclaimed Hepzibah, but with an
irresoluteness sufficiently perceptible to the keen eye of the Judge;
for, without the slightest faith in his good intentions, she knew not
whether there was most to dread in yielding or resistance. "And why
should you wish to see this wretched, broken man, who retains hardly a
fraction of his intellect, and will hide even that from an eye which
has no love in it?"
"He shall see love enough in mine, if that be all!" said the Judge,
with well-grounded confidence in the benignity of his aspect. "But,
Cousin Hepzibah, you confess a great deal, and very much to the
purpose. Now, listen, and I will frankly explain my reasons for
insisting on this interview. At the death, thirty years since, of our
uncle Jaffrey, it was found,--I know not whether the circumstance ever
attracted much of your attention, among the sadder interests that
clustered round that event,--but it was found that his visible estate,
of every kind, fell far short of any estimate ever made of it. He was
supposed to be immensely rich. Nobody doubted that he stood among the
weightiest men of his day. It was one of his eccentricities,
however,--and not altogether a folly, neither,--to conceal the amount
of his property by making distant and foreign investments, perhaps
under other names than his own, and by various means, familiar enough
to capitalists, but unnecessary here to be specified. By Uncle
Jaffrey's last will and testament, as you are aware, his entire
property was bequeathed to me, with the single exception of a life
interest to yourself in this old family mansion, and the strip of
patrimonial estate remaining attached to it."
"And do you seek to deprive us of that?" asked Hepzibah, unable to
restrain her bitter contempt. "Is this your price for ceasing to
persecute poor Clifford?"
"Certainly not, my dear cousin!" answered the Judge, smiling
benevolently. "On the contrary, as you must do me the justice to own,
I have constantly expressed my readiness to double or treble your
resources, whenever you should make up your mind to accept any kindness
of that nature at the hands of your kinsman. No, no! But here lies
the gist of the matter. Of my uncle's unquestionably great estate, as
I have said, not the half--no, not one third, as I am fully
convinced--was apparent after his death. Now, I have the best possible
reasons for believing that your brother Clifford can give me a clew to
the recovery of the remainder."
"Clifford!--Clifford know of any hidden wealth? Clifford have it in his
power to make you rich?" cried the old gentlewoman, affected with a
sense of something like ridicule at the idea. "Impossible! You
deceive yourself! It is really a thing to laugh at!"
"It is as certain as that I stand here!" said Judge Pyncheon, striking
his gold-headed cane on the floor, and at the same time stamping his
foot, as if to express his conviction the more forcibly by the whole
emphasis of his substantial person. "Clifford told me so himself!"
"No, no!" exclaimed Hepzibah incredulously. "You are dreaming, Cousin
Jaffrey."
"I do not belong to the dreaming class of men," said the Judge quietly.
"Some months before my uncle's death, Clifford boasted to me of the
possession of the secret of incalculable wealth. His purpose was to
taunt me, and excite my curiosity. I know it well. But, from a pretty
distinct recollection of the particulars of our conversation, I am
thoroughly convinced that there was truth in what he said. Clifford,
at this moment, if he chooses,--and choose he must!--can inform me
where to find the schedule, the documents, the evidences, in whatever
shape they exist, of the vast amount of Uncle Jaffrey's missing
property. He has the secret. His boast was no idle word. It had a
directness, an emphasis, a particularity, that showed a backbone of
solid meaning within the mystery of his expression."
"But what could have been Clifford's object," asked Hepzibah, "in
concealing it so long?"
"It was one of the bad impulses of our fallen nature," replied the
Judge, turning up his eyes. "He looked upon me as his enemy. He
considered me as the cause of his overwhelming disgrace, his imminent
peril of death, his irretrievable ruin. There was no great
probability, therefore, of his volunteering information, out of his
dungeon, that should elevate me still higher on the ladder of
prosperity. But the moment has now come when he must give up his
secret."
"And what if he should refuse?" inquired Hepzibah. "Or,--as I
steadfastly believe,--what if he has no knowledge of this wealth?"
"My dear cousin," said Judge Pyncheon, with a quietude which he had the
power of making more formidable than any violence, "since your
brother's return, I have taken the precaution (a highly proper one in
the near kinsman and natural guardian of an individual so situated) to
have his deportment and habits constantly and carefully overlooked.
Your neighbors have been eye-witnesses to whatever has passed in the
garden. The butcher, the baker, the fish-monger, some of the customers
of your shop, and many a prying old woman, have told me several of the
secrets of your interior. A still larger circle--I myself, among the
rest--can testify to his extravagances at the arched window. Thousands
beheld him, a week or two ago, on the point of flinging himself thence
into the street. From all this testimony, I am led to
apprehend--reluctantly, and with deep grief--that Clifford's
misfortunes have so affected his intellect, never very strong, that he
cannot safely remain at large. The alternative, you must be
aware,--and its adoption will depend entirely on the decision which I
am now about to make,--the alternative is his confinement, probably for
the remainder of his life, in a public asylum for persons in his
unfortunate state of mind."
"You cannot mean it!" shrieked Hepzibah.
"Should my cousin Clifford," continued Judge Pyncheon, wholly
undisturbed, "from mere malice, and hatred of one whose interests ought
naturally to be dear to him,--a mode of passion that, as often as any
other, indicates mental disease,--should he refuse me the information
so important to myself, and which he assuredly possesses, I shall
consider it the one needed jot of evidence to satisfy my mind of his
insanity. And, once sure of the course pointed out by conscience, you
know me too well, Cousin Hepzibah, to entertain a doubt that I shall
pursue it."
"O Jaffrey,--Cousin Jaffrey," cried Hepzibah mournfully, not
passionately, "it is you that are diseased in mind, not Clifford! You
have forgotten that a woman was your mother!--that you have had
sisters, brothers, children of your own!--or that there ever was
affection between man and man, or pity from one man to another, in this
miserable world! Else, how could you have dreamed of this? You are not
young, Cousin Jaffrey!--no, nor middle-aged,--but already an old man!
The hair is white upon your head! How many years have you to live? Are
you not rich enough for that little time? Shall you be hungry,--shall
you lack clothes, or a roof to shelter you,--between this point and the
grave? No! but, with the half of what you now possess, you could revel
in costly food and wines, and build a house twice as splendid as you
now inhabit, and make a far greater show to the world,--and yet leave
riches to your only son, to make him bless the hour of your death!
Then, why should you do this cruel, cruel thing?--so mad a thing, that
I know not whether to call it wicked! Alas, Cousin Jaffrey, this hard
and grasping spirit has run in our blood these two hundred years. You
are but doing over again, in another shape, what your ancestor before
you did, and sending down to your posterity the curse inherited from
him!"
"Talk sense, Hepzibah, for Heaven's sake!" exclaimed the Judge, with
the impatience natural to a reasonable man, on hearing anything so
utterly absurd as the above, in a discussion about matters of business.
"I have told you my determination. I am not apt to change. Clifford
must give up his secret, or take the consequences. And let him decide
quickly; for I have several affairs to attend to this morning, and an
important dinner engagement with some political friends."
"Clifford has no secret!" answered Hepzibah. "And God will not let you
do the thing you meditate!"
"We shall see," said the unmoved Judge. "Meanwhile, choose whether you
will summon Clifford, and allow this business to be amicably settled by
an interview between two kinsmen, or drive me to harsher measures,
which I should be most happy to feel myself justified in avoiding. The
responsibility is altogether on your part."
"You are stronger than I," said Hepzibah, after a brief consideration;
"and you have no pity in your strength! Clifford is not now insane; but
the interview which you insist upon may go far to make him so.
Nevertheless, knowing you as I do, I believe it to be my best course to
allow you to judge for yourself as to the improbability of his
possessing any valuable secret. I will call Clifford. Be merciful in
your dealings with him!--be far more merciful than your heart bids you
be!--for God is looking at you, Jaffrey Pyncheon!"
The Judge followed his cousin from the shop, where the foregoing
conversation had passed, into the parlor, and flung himself heavily
into the great ancestral chair. Many a former Pyncheon had found
repose in its capacious arms: rosy children, after their sports; young
men, dreamy with love; grown men, weary with cares; old men, burdened
with winters,--they had mused, and slumbered, and departed to a yet
profounder sleep. It had been a long tradition, though a doubtful one,
that this was the very chair, seated in which the earliest of the
Judge's New England forefathers--he whose picture still hung upon the
wall--had given a dead man's silent and stern reception to the throng
of distinguished guests. From that hour of evil omen until the
present, it may be,--though we know not the secret of his heart,--but
it may be that no wearier and sadder man had ever sunk into the chair
than this same Judge Pyncheon, whom we have just beheld so immitigably
hard and resolute. Surely, it must have been at no slight cost that he
had thus fortified his soul with iron. Such calmness is a mightier
effort than the violence of weaker men. And there was yet a heavy task
for him to do. Was it a little matter--a trifle to be prepared for in
a single moment, and to be rested from in another moment,--that he must
now, after thirty years, encounter a kinsman risen from a living tomb,
and wrench a secret from him, or else consign him to a living tomb
again?
"Did you speak?" asked Hepzibah, looking in from the threshold of the
parlor; for she imagined that the Judge had uttered some sound which
she was anxious to interpret as a relenting impulse. "I thought you
called me back."
"No, no" gruffly answered Judge Pyncheon with a harsh frown, while his
brow grew almost a black purple, in the shadow of the room. "Why
should I call you back? Time flies! Bid Clifford come to me!"
The Judge had taken his watch from his vest pocket and now held it in
his hand, measuring the interval which was to ensue before the
appearance of Clifford.
| Clifford and Hepzibah start moping around the House of the Seven Gables. The weather is cold and stormy. Hepzibah is exhausted trying to keep up the house by herself. On the fifth day of this, Clifford refuses to get up in the morning. Frankly, Hepzibah is relieved to be alone for a bit. Clifford taps out a few notes on the harpsichord before the strings snap. Then they hear the sound of the shop bell. It's Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon. Judge Pyncheon asks why Hepzibah keeps Clifford so secluded - surely it would do Clifford good to see an old friend? Hepzibah replies that it's impossible: Clifford has been in bed for the past day. Judge Pyncheon seems really upset at the idea that Clifford might be dying. He insists on seeing Clifford as soon as possible to heal up the bitterness between them. Hepzibah tells him to cut the crap: she knows he has something terrible in mind for Clifford. Judge Pyncheon tells Hepzibah sternly to knock it off. He insists on seeing Clifford, and he won't leave the house without doing so. Judge Pyncheon claims that, without his efforts, Clifford would never have gotten out of prison at all. Hepzibah says Pyncheon is the one who sent Clifford there in the first place. Hepzibah doesn't understand what Judge Pyncheon wants from Clifford. The sight of him would probably drive Clifford insane. Judge Pyncheon finally gets down to business: when their Uncle Jaffrey Pyncheon died, the lawyers found that he had much less money than expected. Everyone thought he was one of the wealthiest men of his day. Judge Pyncheon is sure that Jaffrey hid some of his property. Judge Pyncheon also points out that all of Jaffrey's estate was left to Judge Pyncheon except for the House of the Seven Gables . Judge Pyncheon is certain that Clifford has the key to the rest of Uncle Jaffrey Pyncheon's estate. Hepzibah tells Judge Pyncheon he's nuts. Judge Pyncheon informs Hepzibah that, some months before Uncle Jaffrey Pyncheon's death, Clifford bragged to Judge Pyncheon that he knew a "secret of incalculable wealth" . Judge Pyncheon wants that secret. Judge Pyncheon thinks Clifford is hiding the secret out of personal spite for Judge Pyncheon. Hepzibah asks what will happen if Clifford doesn't tell the location of this supposed wealth. Judge Pyncheon promises he will have Clifford locked up in an asylum for the rest of his life. Hepzibah tells Judge Pyncheon that he's the one who is insane, not Clifford. Judge Pyncheon has all the money he could possibly need to live out the remainder of his days - why does he keep grasping after more? Judge Pyncheon demands that Clifford make his decision this afternoon. Hepzibah begs Judge Pyncheon to be kind to Clifford, because "God is looking at you, Jaffrey Pyncheon!" . Judge Pyncheon sits down in the parlor to wait for Clifford. Hepzibah thinks Judge Pyncheon has said something to call her back. But no, Judge Pyncheon demands that Hepzibah bring Clifford to him. | summary |
NEVER had the old house appeared so dismal to poor Hepzibah as when she
departed on that wretched errand. There was a strange aspect in it.
As she trode along the foot-worn passages, and opened one crazy door
after another, and ascended the creaking staircase, she gazed wistfully
and fearfully around. It would have been no marvel, to her excited
mind, if, behind or beside her, there had been the rustle of dead
people's garments, or pale visages awaiting her on the landing-place
above. Her nerves were set all ajar by the scene of passion and terror
through which she had just struggled. Her colloquy with Judge
Pyncheon, who so perfectly represented the person and attributes of the
founder of the family, had called back the dreary past. It weighed
upon her heart. Whatever she had heard, from legendary aunts and
grandmothers, concerning the good or evil fortunes of the
Pyncheons,--stories which had heretofore been kept warm in her
remembrance by the chimney-corner glow that was associated with
them,--now recurred to her, sombre, ghastly, cold, like most passages
of family history, when brooded over in melancholy mood. The whole
seemed little else but a series of calamity, reproducing itself in
successive generations, with one general hue, and varying in little,
save the outline. But Hepzibah now felt as if the Judge, and Clifford,
and herself,--they three together,--were on the point of adding another
incident to the annals of the house, with a bolder relief of wrong and
sorrow, which would cause it to stand out from all the rest. Thus it
is that the grief of the passing moment takes upon itself an
individuality, and a character of climax, which it is destined to lose
after a while, and to fade into the dark gray tissue common to the
grave or glad events of many years ago. It is but for a moment,
comparatively, that anything looks strange or startling,--a truth that
has the bitter and the sweet in it.
But Hepzibah could not rid herself of the sense of something
unprecedented at that instant passing and soon to be accomplished. Her
nerves were in a shake. Instinctively she paused before the arched
window, and looked out upon the street, in order to seize its permanent
objects with her mental grasp, and thus to steady herself from the reel
and vibration which affected her more immediate sphere. It brought her
up, as we may say, with a kind of shock, when she beheld everything
under the same appearance as the day before, and numberless preceding
days, except for the difference between sunshine and sullen storm. Her
eyes travelled along the street, from doorstep to doorstep, noting the
wet sidewalks, with here and there a puddle in hollows that had been
imperceptible until filled with water. She screwed her dim optics to
their acutest point, in the hope of making out, with greater
distinctness, a certain window, where she half saw, half guessed, that
a tailor's seamstress was sitting at her work. Hepzibah flung herself
upon that unknown woman's companionship, even thus far off. Then she
was attracted by a chaise rapidly passing, and watched its moist and
glistening top, and its splashing wheels, until it had turned the
corner, and refused to carry any further her idly trifling, because
appalled and overburdened, mind. When the vehicle had disappeared, she
allowed herself still another loitering moment; for the patched figure
of good Uncle Venner was now visible, coming slowly from the head of
the street downward, with a rheumatic limp, because the east wind had
got into his joints. Hepzibah wished that he would pass yet more
slowly, and befriend her shivering solitude a little longer. Anything
that would take her out of the grievous present, and interpose human
beings betwixt herself and what was nearest to her,--whatever would
defer for an instant the inevitable errand on which she was bound,--all
such impediments were welcome. Next to the lightest heart, the
heaviest is apt to be most playful.
Hepzibah had little hardihood for her own proper pain, and far less for
what she must inflict on Clifford. Of so slight a nature, and so
shattered by his previous calamities, it could not well be short of
utter ruin to bring him face to face with the hard, relentless man who
had been his evil destiny through life. Even had there been no bitter
recollections, nor any hostile interest now at stake between them, the
mere natural repugnance of the more sensitive system to the massive,
weighty, and unimpressible one, must, in itself, have been disastrous
to the former. It would be like flinging a porcelain vase, with
already a crack in it, against a granite column. Never before had
Hepzibah so adequately estimated the powerful character of her cousin
Jaffrey,--powerful by intellect, energy of will, the long habit of
acting among men, and, as she believed, by his unscrupulous pursuit of
selfish ends through evil means. It did but increase the difficulty
that Judge Pyncheon was under a delusion as to the secret which he
supposed Clifford to possess. Men of his strength of purpose and
customary sagacity, if they chance to adopt a mistaken opinion in
practical matters, so wedge it and fasten it among things known to be
true, that to wrench it out of their minds is hardly less difficult
than pulling up an oak. Thus, as the Judge required an impossibility
of Clifford, the latter, as he could not perform it, must needs perish.
For what, in the grasp of a man like this, was to become of Clifford's
soft poetic nature, that never should have had a task more stubborn
than to set a life of beautiful enjoyment to the flow and rhythm of
musical cadences! Indeed, what had become of it already? Broken!
Blighted! All but annihilated! Soon to be wholly so!
For a moment, the thought crossed Hepzibah's mind, whether Clifford
might not really have such knowledge of their deceased uncle's vanished
estate as the Judge imputed to him. She remembered some vague
intimations, on her brother's part, which--if the supposition were not
essentially preposterous--might have been so interpreted. There had
been schemes of travel and residence abroad, day-dreams of brilliant
life at home, and splendid castles in the air, which it would have
required boundless wealth to build and realize. Had this wealth been
in her power, how gladly would Hepzibah have bestowed it all upon her
iron-hearted kinsman, to buy for Clifford the freedom and seclusion of
the desolate old house! But she believed that her brother's schemes
were as destitute of actual substance and purpose as a child's pictures
of its future life, while sitting in a little chair by its mother's
knee. Clifford had none but shadowy gold at his command; and it was
not the stuff to satisfy Judge Pyncheon!
Was there no help in their extremity? It seemed strange that there
should be none, with a city round about her. It would be so easy to
throw up the window, and send forth a shriek, at the strange agony of
which everybody would come hastening to the rescue, well understanding
it to be the cry of a human soul, at some dreadful crisis! But how
wild, how almost laughable, the fatality,--and yet how continually it
comes to pass, thought Hepzibah, in this dull delirium of a
world,--that whosoever, and with however kindly a purpose, should come
to help, they would be sure to help the strongest side! Might and wrong
combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible
attraction. There would be Judge Pyncheon,--a person eminent in the
public view, of high station and great wealth, a philanthropist, a
member of Congress and of the church, and intimately associated with
whatever else bestows good name,--so imposing, in these advantageous
lights, that Hepzibah herself could hardly help shrinking from her own
conclusions as to his hollow integrity. The Judge, on one side! And
who, on the other? The guilty Clifford! Once a byword! Now, an
indistinctly remembered ignominy!
Nevertheless, in spite of this perception that the Judge would draw all
human aid to his own behalf, Hepzibah was so unaccustomed to act for
herself, that the least word of counsel would have swayed her to any
mode of action. Little Phoebe Pyncheon would at once have lighted up
the whole scene, if not by any available suggestion, yet simply by the
warm vivacity of her character. The idea of the artist occurred to
Hepzibah. Young and unknown, mere vagrant adventurer as he was, she had
been conscious of a force in Holgrave which might well adapt him to be
the champion of a crisis. With this thought in her mind, she unbolted a
door, cobwebbed and long disused, but which had served as a former
medium of communication between her own part of the house and the gable
where the wandering daguerreotypist had now established his temporary
home. He was not there. A book, face downward, on the table, a roll of
manuscript, a half-written sheet, a newspaper, some tools of his
present occupation, and several rejected daguerreotypes, conveyed an
impression as if he were close at hand. But, at this period of the day,
as Hepzibah might have anticipated, the artist was at his public rooms.
With an impulse of idle curiosity, that flickered among her heavy
thoughts, she looked at one of the daguerreotypes, and beheld Judge
Pyncheon frowning at her. Fate stared her in the face. She turned back
from her fruitless quest, with a heartsinking sense of disappointment.
In all her years of seclusion, she had never felt, as now, what it was
to be alone. It seemed as if the house stood in a desert, or, by some
spell, was made invisible to those who dwelt around, or passed beside
it; so that any mode of misfortune, miserable accident, or crime might
happen in it without the possibility of aid. In her grief and wounded
pride, Hepzibah had spent her life in divesting herself of friends; she
had wilfully cast off the support which God has ordained his creatures
to need from one another; and it was now her punishment, that Clifford
and herself would fall the easier victims to their kindred enemy.
Returning to the arched window, she lifted her eyes,--scowling, poor,
dim-sighted Hepzibah, in the face of Heaven!--and strove hard to send
up a prayer through the dense gray pavement of clouds. Those mists had
gathered, as if to symbolize a great, brooding mass of human trouble,
doubt, confusion, and chill indifference, between earth and the better
regions. Her faith was too weak; the prayer too heavy to be thus
uplifted. It fell back, a lump of lead, upon her heart. It smote her
with the wretched conviction that Providence intermeddled not in these
petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor had any balm for
these little agonies of a solitary soul; but shed its justice, and its
mercy, in a broad, sunlike sweep, over half the universe at once. Its
vastness made it nothing. But Hepzibah did not see that, just as there
comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of
God's care and pity for every separate need.
At last, finding no other pretext for deferring the torture that she
was to inflict on Clifford,--her reluctance to which was the true cause
of her loitering at the window, her search for the artist, and even her
abortive prayer,--dreading, also, to hear the stern voice of Judge
Pyncheon from below stairs, chiding her delay,--she crept slowly, a
pale, grief-stricken figure, a dismal shape of woman, with almost
torpid limbs, slowly to her brother's door, and knocked!
There was no reply.
And how should there have been? Her hand, tremulous with the shrinking
purpose which directed it, had smitten so feebly against the door that
the sound could hardly have gone inward. She knocked again. Still no
response! Nor was it to be wondered at. She had struck with the entire
force of her heart's vibration, communicating, by some subtile
magnetism, her own terror to the summons. Clifford would turn his face
to the pillow, and cover his head beneath the bedclothes, like a
startled child at midnight. She knocked a third time, three regular
strokes, gentle, but perfectly distinct, and with meaning in them; for,
modulate it with what cautious art we will, the hand cannot help
playing some tune of what we feel upon the senseless wood.
Clifford returned no answer.
"Clifford! Dear brother!" said Hepzibah. "Shall I come in?"
A silence.
Two or three times, and more, Hepzibah repeated his name, without
result; till, thinking her brother's sleep unwontedly profound, she
undid the door, and entering, found the chamber vacant. How could he
have come forth, and when, without her knowledge? Was it possible
that, in spite of the stormy day, and worn out with the irksomeness
within doors he had betaken himself to his customary haunt in the
garden, and was now shivering under the cheerless shelter of the
summer-house? She hastily threw up a window, thrust forth her turbaned
head and the half of her gaunt figure, and searched the whole garden
through, as completely as her dim vision would allow. She could see
the interior of the summer-house, and its circular seat, kept moist by
the droppings of the roof. It had no occupant. Clifford was not
thereabouts; unless, indeed, he had crept for concealment (as, for a
moment, Hepzibah fancied might be the case) into a great, wet mass of
tangled and broad-leaved shadow, where the squash-vines were clambering
tumultuously upon an old wooden framework, set casually aslant against
the fence. This could not be, however; he was not there; for, while
Hepzibah was looking, a strange grimalkin stole forth from the very
spot, and picked his way across the garden. Twice he paused to snuff
the air, and then anew directed his course towards the parlor window.
Whether it was only on account of the stealthy, prying manner common to
the race, or that this cat seemed to have more than ordinary mischief
in his thoughts, the old gentlewoman, in spite of her much perplexity,
felt an impulse to drive the animal away, and accordingly flung down a
window stick. The cat stared up at her, like a detected thief or
murderer, and, the next instant, took to flight. No other living
creature was visible in the garden. Chanticleer and his family had
either not left their roost, disheartened by the interminable rain, or
had done the next wisest thing, by seasonably returning to it.
Hepzibah closed the window.
But where was Clifford? Could it be that, aware of the presence of his
Evil Destiny, he had crept silently down the staircase, while the Judge
and Hepzibah stood talking in the shop, and had softly undone the
fastenings of the outer door, and made his escape into the street?
With that thought, she seemed to behold his gray, wrinkled, yet
childlike aspect, in the old-fashioned garments which he wore about the
house; a figure such as one sometimes imagines himself to be, with the
world's eye upon him, in a troubled dream. This figure of her wretched
brother would go wandering through the city, attracting all eyes, and
everybody's wonder and repugnance, like a ghost, the more to be
shuddered at because visible at noontide. To incur the ridicule of the
younger crowd, that knew him not,--the harsher scorn and indignation of
a few old men, who might recall his once familiar features! To be the
sport of boys, who, when old enough to run about the streets, have no
more reverence for what is beautiful and holy, nor pity for what is
sad,--no more sense of sacred misery, sanctifying the human shape in
which it embodies itself,--than if Satan were the father of them all!
Goaded by their taunts, their loud, shrill cries, and cruel
laughter,--insulted by the filth of the public ways, which they would
fling upon him,--or, as it might well be, distracted by the mere
strangeness of his situation, though nobody should afflict him with so
much as a thoughtless word,--what wonder if Clifford were to break into
some wild extravagance which was certain to be interpreted as lunacy?
Thus Judge Pyncheon's fiendish scheme would be ready accomplished to
his hands!
Then Hepzibah reflected that the town was almost completely
water-girdled. The wharves stretched out towards the centre of the
harbor, and, in this inclement weather, were deserted by the ordinary
throng of merchants, laborers, and sea-faring men; each wharf a
solitude, with the vessels moored stem and stern, along its misty
length. Should her brother's aimless footsteps stray thitherward, and
he but bend, one moment, over the deep, black tide, would he not
bethink himself that here was the sure refuge within his reach, and
that, with a single step, or the slightest overbalance of his body, he
might be forever beyond his kinsman's gripe? Oh, the temptation! To
make of his ponderous sorrow a security! To sink, with its leaden
weight upon him, and never rise again!
The horror of this last conception was too much for Hepzibah. Even
Jaffrey Pyncheon must help her now She hastened down the staircase,
shrieking as she went.
"Clifford is gone!" she cried. "I cannot find my brother. Help,
Jaffrey Pyncheon! Some harm will happen to him!"
She threw open the parlor-door. But, what with the shade of branches
across the windows, and the smoke-blackened ceiling, and the dark
oak-panelling of the walls, there was hardly so much daylight in the
room that Hepzibah's imperfect sight could accurately distinguish the
Judge's figure. She was certain, however, that she saw him sitting in
the ancestral arm-chair, near the centre of the floor, with his face
somewhat averted, and looking towards a window. So firm and quiet is
the nervous system of such men as Judge Pyncheon, that he had perhaps
stirred not more than once since her departure, but, in the hard
composure of his temperament, retained the position into which accident
had thrown him.
"I tell you, Jaffrey," cried Hepzibah impatiently, as she turned from
the parlor-door to search other rooms, "my brother is not in his
chamber! You must help me seek him!"
But Judge Pyncheon was not the man to let himself be startled from an
easy-chair with haste ill-befitting either the dignity of his character
or his broad personal basis, by the alarm of an hysteric woman. Yet,
considering his own interest in the matter, he might have bestirred
himself with a little more alacrity.
"Do you hear me, Jaffrey Pyncheon?" screamed Hepzibah, as she again
approached the parlor-door, after an ineffectual search elsewhere.
"Clifford is gone."
At this instant, on the threshold of the parlor, emerging from within,
appeared Clifford himself! His face was preternaturally pale; so deadly
white, indeed, that, through all the glimmering indistinctness of the
passageway, Hepzibah could discern his features, as if a light fell on
them alone. Their vivid and wild expression seemed likewise sufficient
to illuminate them; it was an expression of scorn and mockery,
coinciding with the emotions indicated by his gesture. As Clifford
stood on the threshold, partly turning back, he pointed his finger
within the parlor, and shook it slowly as though he would have
summoned, not Hepzibah alone, but the whole world, to gaze at some
object inconceivably ridiculous. This action, so ill-timed and
extravagant,--accompanied, too, with a look that showed more like joy
than any other kind of excitement,--compelled Hepzibah to dread that
her stern kinsman's ominous visit had driven her poor brother to
absolute insanity. Nor could she otherwise account for the Judge's
quiescent mood than by supposing him craftily on the watch, while
Clifford developed these symptoms of a distracted mind.
"Be quiet, Clifford!" whispered his sister, raising her hand to impress
caution. "Oh, for Heaven's sake, be quiet!"
"Let him be quiet! What can he do better?" answered Clifford, with a
still wilder gesture, pointing into the room which he had just quitted.
"As for us, Hepzibah, we can dance now!--we can sing, laugh, play, do
what we will! The weight is gone, Hepzibah! It is gone off this weary
old world, and we may be as light-hearted as little Phoebe herself."
And, in accordance with his words, he began to laugh, still pointing
his finger at the object, invisible to Hepzibah, within the parlor.
She was seized with a sudden intuition of some horrible thing. She
thrust herself past Clifford, and disappeared into the room; but almost
immediately returned, with a cry choking in her throat. Gazing at her
brother with an affrighted glance of inquiry, she beheld him all in a
tremor and a quake, from head to foot, while, amid these commoted
elements of passion or alarm, still flickered his gusty mirth.
"My God! what is to become of us?" gasped Hepzibah.
"Come!" said Clifford in a tone of brief decision, most unlike what was
usual with him. "We stay here too long! Let us leave the old house to
our cousin Jaffrey! He will take good care of it!"
Hepzibah now noticed that Clifford had on a cloak,--a garment of long
ago,--in which he had constantly muffled himself during these days of
easterly storm. He beckoned with his hand, and intimated, so far as
she could comprehend him, his purpose that they should go together from
the house. There are chaotic, blind, or drunken moments, in the lives
of persons who lack real force of character,--moments of test, in which
courage would most assert itself,--but where these individuals, if left
to themselves, stagger aimlessly along, or follow implicitly whatever
guidance may befall them, even if it be a child's. No matter how
preposterous or insane, a purpose is a Godsend to them. Hepzibah had
reached this point. Unaccustomed to action or responsibility,--full of
horror at what she had seen, and afraid to inquire, or almost to
imagine, how it had come to pass,--affrighted at the fatality which
seemed to pursue her brother,--stupefied by the dim, thick, stifling
atmosphere of dread which filled the house as with a death-smell, and
obliterated all definiteness of thought,--she yielded without a
question, and on the instant, to the will which Clifford expressed.
For herself, she was like a person in a dream, when the will always
sleeps. Clifford, ordinarily so destitute of this faculty, had found
it in the tension of the crisis.
"Why do you delay so?" cried he sharply. "Put on your cloak and hood,
or whatever it pleases you to wear! No matter what; you cannot look
beautiful nor brilliant, my poor Hepzibah! Take your purse, with money
in it, and come along!"
Hepzibah obeyed these instructions, as if nothing else were to be done
or thought of. She began to wonder, it is true, why she did not wake
up, and at what still more intolerable pitch of dizzy trouble her
spirit would struggle out of the maze, and make her conscious that
nothing of all this had actually happened. Of course it was not real;
no such black, easterly day as this had yet begun to be; Judge Pyncheon
had not talked with, her. Clifford had not laughed, pointed, beckoned
her away with him; but she had merely been afflicted--as lonely
sleepers often are--with a great deal of unreasonable misery, in a
morning dream!
"Now--now--I shall certainly awake!" thought Hepzibah, as she went to
and fro, making her little preparations. "I can bear it no longer I
must wake up now!"
But it came not, that awakening moment! It came not, even when, just
before they left the house, Clifford stole to the parlor-door, and made
a parting obeisance to the sole occupant of the room.
"What an absurd figure the old fellow cuts now!" whispered he to
Hepzibah. "Just when he fancied he had me completely under his thumb!
Come, come; make haste! or he will start up, like Giant Despair in
pursuit of Christian and Hopeful, and catch us yet!"
As they passed into the street, Clifford directed Hepzibah's attention
to something on one of the posts of the front door. It was merely the
initials of his own name, which, with somewhat of his characteristic
grace about the forms of the letters, he had cut there when a boy. The
brother and sister departed, and left Judge Pyncheon sitting in the old
home of his forefathers, all by himself; so heavy and lumpish that we
can liken him to nothing better than a defunct nightmare, which had
perished in the midst of its wickedness, and left its flabby corpse on
the breast of the tormented one, to be gotten rid of as it might!
| Hepzibah goes back inside the House of the Seven Gables. She has a feeling that something new, something unprecedented in the Pyncheon family history, is about to take place. Hepzibah is sure that Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon will destroy Clifford. She is also sure that Clifford has no access to the secret Judge Pyncheon believes he holds. She has nowhere to turn for help. Who would side with Clifford against well-respected Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon? She thinks of going to Mr. Holgrave, but he's not there. She looks out the arched window at the sky and sends up a prayer, but she doesn't feel any response. At last Hepzibah goes to knock on Clifford's door. No one answers. Hepzibah asks if she can come in. She finds Clifford's room empty. Hepzibah looks down into the garden to see if Clifford has gone out somehow. She sees "a strange grimalkin" - meaning an old house cat - walking across the garden. Hepzibah throws a stick at it to frighten it away. But still, Hepzibah cannot see Clifford. She can't imagine that he would have run away - he would be treated so badly by the public! Hepzibah suddenly wonders whether Clifford might have decided to end it all and throw himself into the sea. Hepzibah is so frightened by the thought that she runs to Judge Pyncheon. She begs Judge Pyncheon to help her. She finds him sitting in that chair in the parlor - the same chair, supposedly, where Colonel Pyncheon was found dead 150 years before. Judge Pyncheon doesn't move, even when Hepzibah screams, "Do you hear me, Jaffrey Pyncheon?" . Clifford walks into the parlor. He looks crazy. His face is filled with a wild expression of "scorn and mockery" . Clifford tells Hepzibah that they can dance now - they can do whatever they like. Hepzibah realizes that Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon is dead. Clifford suggests that they leave the House of the Seven Gables. After all, Judge Pyncheon "will take good care of it!" . Hepzibah is in such a panic that she agrees without question. She grabs her cloak and follows Clifford. She keeps thinking that she will awake from this dream, but she never does. And so Clifford and Hepzibah leave the House of the Seven Gables. Inside, Judge Pyncheon's body is sitting by himself "in the old home of his forefathers" . | summary |
SUMMER as it was, the east wind set poor Hepzibah's few remaining teeth
chattering in her head, as she and Clifford faced it, on their way up
Pyncheon Street, and towards the centre of the town. Not merely was it
the shiver which this pitiless blast brought to her frame (although her
feet and hands, especially, had never seemed so death-a-cold as now),
but there was a moral sensation, mingling itself with the physical
chill, and causing her to shake more in spirit than in body. The
world's broad, bleak atmosphere was all so comfortless! Such, indeed,
is the impression which it makes on every new adventurer, even if he
plunge into it while the warmest tide of life is bubbling through his
veins. What, then, must it have been to Hepzibah and Clifford,--so
time-stricken as they were, yet so like children in their
inexperience,--as they left the doorstep, and passed from beneath the
wide shelter of the Pyncheon Elm! They were wandering all abroad, on
precisely such a pilgrimage as a child often meditates, to the world's
end, with perhaps a sixpence and a biscuit in his pocket. In
Hepzibah's mind, there was the wretched consciousness of being adrift.
She had lost the faculty of self-guidance; but, in view of the
difficulties around her, felt it hardly worth an effort to regain it,
and was, moreover, incapable of making one.
As they proceeded on their strange expedition, she now and then cast a
look sidelong at Clifford, and could not but observe that he was
possessed and swayed by a powerful excitement. It was this, indeed,
that gave him the control which he had at once, and so irresistibly,
established over his movements. It not a little resembled the
exhilaration of wine. Or, it might more fancifully be compared to a
joyous piece of music, played with wild vivacity, but upon a disordered
instrument. As the cracked jarring note might always be heard, and as
it jarred loudest amidst the loftiest exultation of the melody, so was
there a continual quake through Clifford, causing him most to quiver
while he wore a triumphant smile, and seemed almost under a necessity
to skip in his gait.
They met few people abroad, even on passing from the retired
neighborhood of the House of the Seven Gables into what was ordinarily
the more thronged and busier portion of the town. Glistening
sidewalks, with little pools of rain, here and there, along their
unequal surface; umbrellas displayed ostentatiously in the
shop-windows, as if the life of trade had concentrated itself in that
one article; wet leaves of the horse-chestnut or elm-trees, torn off
untimely by the blast and scattered along the public way; an unsightly,
accumulation of mud in the middle of the street, which perversely grew
the more unclean for its long and laborious washing,--these were the
more definable points of a very sombre picture. In the way of movement
and human life, there was the hasty rattle of a cab or coach, its
driver protected by a waterproof cap over his head and shoulders; the
forlorn figure of an old man, who seemed to have crept out of some
subterranean sewer, and was stooping along the kennel, and poking the
wet rubbish with a stick, in quest of rusty nails; a merchant or two,
at the door of the post-office, together with an editor and a
miscellaneous politician, awaiting a dilatory mail; a few visages of
retired sea-captains at the window of an insurance office, looking out
vacantly at the vacant street, blaspheming at the weather, and fretting
at the dearth as well of public news as local gossip. What a
treasure-trove to these venerable quidnuncs, could they have guessed
the secret which Hepzibah and Clifford were carrying along with them!
But their two figures attracted hardly so much notice as that of a
young girl, who passed at the same instant, and happened to raise her
skirt a trifle too high above her ankles. Had it been a sunny and
cheerful day, they could hardly have gone through the streets without
making themselves obnoxious to remark. Now, probably, they were felt
to be in keeping with the dismal and bitter weather, and therefore did
not stand out in strong relief, as if the sun were shining on them, but
melted into the gray gloom and were forgotten as soon as gone.
Poor Hepzibah! Could she have understood this fact, it would have
brought her some little comfort; for, to all her other
troubles,--strange to say!--there was added the womanish and
old-maiden-like misery arising from a sense of unseemliness in her
attire. Thus, she was fain to shrink deeper into herself, as it were,
as if in the hope of making people suppose that here was only a cloak
and hood, threadbare and woefully faded, taking an airing in the midst
of the storm, without any wearer!
As they went on, the feeling of indistinctness and unreality kept dimly
hovering round about her, and so diffusing itself into her system that
one of her hands was hardly palpable to the touch of the other. Any
certainty would have been preferable to this. She whispered to
herself, again and again, "Am I awake?--Am I awake?" and sometimes
exposed her face to the chill spatter of the wind, for the sake of its
rude assurance that she was. Whether it was Clifford's purpose, or
only chance, had led them thither, they now found themselves passing
beneath the arched entrance of a large structure of gray stone.
Within, there was a spacious breadth, and an airy height from floor to
roof, now partially filled with smoke and steam, which eddied
voluminously upward and formed a mimic cloud-region over their heads.
A train of cars was just ready for a start; the locomotive was fretting
and fuming, like a steed impatient for a headlong rush; and the bell
rang out its hasty peal, so well expressing the brief summons which
life vouchsafes to us in its hurried career. Without question or
delay,--with the irresistible decision, if not rather to be called
recklessness, which had so strangely taken possession of him, and
through him of Hepzibah,--Clifford impelled her towards the cars, and
assisted her to enter. The signal was given; the engine puffed forth
its short, quick breaths; the train began its movement; and, along with
a hundred other passengers, these two unwonted travellers sped onward
like the wind.
At last, therefore, and after so long estrangement from everything that
the world acted or enjoyed, they had been drawn into the great current
of human life, and were swept away with it, as by the suction of fate
itself.
Still haunted with the idea that not one of the past incidents,
inclusive of Judge Pyncheon's visit, could be real, the recluse of the
Seven Gables murmured in her brother's ear,--
"Clifford! Clifford! Is not this a dream?"
"A dream, Hepzibah!" repeated he, almost laughing in her face. "On the
contrary, I have never been awake before!"
Meanwhile, looking from the window, they could see the world racing
past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the
next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it
had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of
meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the
broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its
age-long rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to
their own.
Within the car there was the usual interior life of the railroad,
offering little to the observation of other passengers, but full of
novelty for this pair of strangely enfranchised prisoners. It was
novelty enough, indeed, that there were fifty human beings in close
relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by
the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its
grasp. It seemed marvellous how all these people could remain so
quietly in their seats, while so much noisy strength was at work in
their behalf. Some, with tickets in their hats (long travellers these,
before whom lay a hundred miles of railroad), had plunged into the
English scenery and adventures of pamphlet novels, and were keeping
company with dukes and earls. Others, whose briefer span forbade their
devoting themselves to studies so abstruse, beguiled the little tedium
of the way with penny-papers. A party of girls, and one young man, on
opposite sides of the car, found huge amusement in a game of ball.
They tossed it to and fro, with peals of laughter that might be
measured by mile-lengths; for, faster than the nimble ball could fly,
the merry players fled unconsciously along, leaving the trail of their
mirth afar behind, and ending their game under another sky than had
witnessed its commencement. Boys, with apples, cakes, candy, and rolls
of variously tinctured lozenges,--merchandise that reminded Hepzibah of
her deserted shop,--appeared at each momentary stopping-place, doing up
their business in a hurry, or breaking it short off, lest the market
should ravish them away with it. New people continually entered. Old
acquaintances--for such they soon grew to be, in this rapid current of
affairs--continually departed. Here and there, amid the rumble and the
tumult, sat one asleep. Sleep; sport; business; graver or lighter
study; and the common and inevitable movement onward! It was life
itself!
Clifford's naturally poignant sympathies were all aroused. He caught
the color of what was passing about him, and threw it back more vividly
than he received it, but mixed, nevertheless, with a lurid and
portentous hue. Hepzibah, on the other hand, felt herself more apart
from human kind than even in the seclusion which she had just quitted.
"You are not happy, Hepzibah!" said Clifford apart, in a tone of
approach. "You are thinking of that dismal old house, and of Cousin
Jaffrey"--here came the quake through him,--"and of Cousin Jaffrey
sitting there, all by himself! Take my advice,--follow my example,--and
let such things slip aside. Here we are, in the world, Hepzibah!--in
the midst of life!--in the throng of our fellow beings! Let you and I
be happy! As happy as that youth and those pretty girls, at their game
of ball!"
"Happy--" thought Hepzibah, bitterly conscious, at the word, of her
dull and heavy heart, with the frozen pain in it,--"happy. He is mad
already; and, if I could once feel myself broad awake, I should go mad
too!"
If a fixed idea be madness, she was perhaps not remote from it. Fast
and far as they had rattled and clattered along the iron track, they
might just as well, as regarded Hepzibah's mental images, have been
passing up and down Pyncheon Street. With miles and miles of varied
scenery between, there was no scene for her save the seven old
gable-peaks, with their moss, and the tuft of weeds in one of the
angles, and the shop-window, and a customer shaking the door, and
compelling the little bell to jingle fiercely, but without disturbing
Judge Pyncheon! This one old house was everywhere! It transported its
great, lumbering bulk with more than railroad speed, and set itself
phlegmatically down on whatever spot she glanced at. The quality of
Hepzibah's mind was too unmalleable to take new impressions so readily
as Clifford's. He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable
kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots.
Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her
brother and herself was changed. At home, she was his guardian; here,
Clifford had become hers, and seemed to comprehend whatever belonged to
their new position with a singular rapidity of intelligence. He had
been startled into manhood and intellectual vigor; or, at least, into a
condition that resembled them, though it might be both diseased and
transitory.
The conductor now applied for their tickets; and Clifford, who had made
himself the purse-bearer, put a bank-note into his hand, as he had
observed others do.
"For the lady and yourself?" asked the conductor. "And how far?"
"As far as that will carry us," said Clifford. "It is no great matter.
We are riding for pleasure merely."
"You choose a strange day for it, sir!" remarked a gimlet-eyed old
gentleman on the other side of the car, looking at Clifford and his
companion, as if curious to make them out. "The best chance of
pleasure, in an easterly rain, I take it, is in a man's own house, with
a nice little fire in the chimney."
"I cannot precisely agree with you," said Clifford, courteously bowing
to the old gentleman, and at once taking up the clew of conversation
which the latter had proffered. "It had just occurred to me, on the
contrary, that this admirable invention of the railroad--with the vast
and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and
convenience--is destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and
fireside, and substitute something better."
"In the name of common-sense," asked the old gentleman rather testily,
"what can be better for a man than his own parlor and chimney-corner?"
"These things have not the merit which many good people attribute to
them," replied Clifford. "They may be said, in few and pithy words, to
have ill served a poor purpose. My impression is, that our wonderfully
increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to
bring us around again to the nomadic state. You are aware, my dear
sir,--you must have observed it in your own experience,--that all human
progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful
figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going
straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new
position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried
and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and
perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy
of the present and the future. To apply this truth to the topic now
under discussion. In the early epochs of our race, men dwelt in
temporary huts, of bowers of branches, as easily constructed as a
bird's-nest, and which they built,--if it should be called building,
when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made
with hands,--which Nature, we will say, assisted them to rear where
fruit abounded, where fish and game were plentiful, or, most
especially, where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier
shade than elsewhere, and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood,
and hill. This life possessed a charm which, ever since man quitted
it, has vanished from existence. And it typified something better than
itself. It had its drawbacks; such as hunger and thirst, inclement
weather, hot sunshine, and weary and foot-blistering marches over
barren and ugly tracts, that lay between the sites desirable for their
fertility and beauty. But in our ascending spiral, we escape all this.
These railroads--could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble
and the jar got rid of--are positively the greatest blessing that the
ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the
toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being
so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why,
therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily
be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life
in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as
easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,--in a better sense, wherever the
fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?"
Clifford's countenance glowed, as he divulged this theory; a youthful
character shone out from within, converting the wrinkles and pallid
duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask. The merry girls let
their ball drop upon the floor, and gazed at him. They said to
themselves, perhaps, that, before his hair was gray and the crow's-feet
tracked his temples, this now decaying man must have stamped the
impress of his features on many a woman's heart. But, alas! no woman's
eye had seen his face while it was beautiful.
"I should scarcely call it an improved state of things," observed
Clifford's new acquaintance, "to live everywhere and nowhere!"
"Would you not?" exclaimed Clifford, with singular energy. "It is as
clear to me as sunshine,--were there any in the sky,--that the greatest
possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and
improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with
mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men
painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home!
The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it. Morbid
influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about hearths, and
pollute the life of households. There is no such unwholesome
atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one's defunct
forefathers and relatives. I speak of what I know. There is a certain
house within my familiar recollection,--one of those peaked-gable
(there are seven of them), projecting-storied edifices, such as you
occasionally see in our older towns,--a rusty, crazy, creaky,
dry-rotted, dingy, dark, and miserable old dungeon, with an arched
window over the porch, and a little shop-door on one side, and a great,
melancholy elm before it! Now, sir, whenever my thoughts recur to this
seven-gabled mansion (the fact is so very curious that I must needs
mention it), immediately I have a vision or image of an elderly man, of
remarkably stern countenance, sitting in an oaken elbow-chair, dead,
stone-dead, with an ugly flow of blood upon his shirt-bosom! Dead, but
with open eyes! He taints the whole house, as I remember it. I could
never flourish there, nor be happy, nor do nor enjoy what God meant me
to do and enjoy."
His face darkened, and seemed to contract, and shrivel itself up, and
wither into age.
"Never, sir!" he repeated. "I could never draw cheerful breath there!"
"I should think not," said the old gentleman, eyeing Clifford
earnestly, and rather apprehensively. "I should conceive not, sir,
with that notion in your head!"
"Surely not," continued Clifford; "and it were a relief to me if that
house could be torn down, or burnt up, and so the earth be rid of it,
and grass be sown abundantly over its foundation. Not that I should
ever visit its site again! for, sir, the farther I get away from it,
the more does the joy, the lightsome freshness, the heart-leap, the
intellectual dance, the youth, in short,--yes, my youth, my youth!--the
more does it come back to me. No longer ago than this morning, I was
old. I remember looking in the glass, and wondering at my own gray
hair, and the wrinkles, many and deep, right across my brow, and the
furrows down my cheeks, and the prodigious trampling of crow's-feet
about my temples! It was too soon! I could not bear it! Age had no
right to come! I had not lived! But now do I look old? If so, my
aspect belies me strangely; for--a great weight being off my mind--I
feel in the very heyday of my youth, with the world and my best days
before me!"
"I trust you may find it so," said the old gentleman, who seemed rather
embarrassed, and desirous of avoiding the observation which Clifford's
wild talk drew on them both. "You have my best wishes for it."
"For Heaven's sake, dear Clifford, be quiet!" whispered his sister.
"They think you mad."
"Be quiet yourself, Hepzibah!" returned her brother. "No matter what
they think! I am not mad. For the first time in thirty years my
thoughts gush up and find words ready for them. I must talk, and I
will!"
He turned again towards the old gentleman, and renewed the conversation.
"Yes, my dear sir," said he, "it is my firm belief and hope that these
terms of roof and hearth-stone, which have so long been held to embody
something sacred, are soon to pass out of men's daily use, and be
forgotten. Just imagine, for a moment, how much of human evil will
crumble away, with this one change! What we call real estate--the solid
ground to build a house on--is the broad foundation on which nearly all
the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit almost any wrong,--he
will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and
which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages,--only to
build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in,
and for his posterity to be miserable in. He lays his own dead corpse
beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning
picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an evil
destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there. I
do not speak wildly. I have just such a house in my mind's eye!"
"Then, sir," said the old gentleman, getting anxious to drop the
subject, "you are not to blame for leaving it."
"Within the lifetime of the child already born," Clifford went on, "all
this will be done away. The world is growing too ethereal and
spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer. To me,
though, for a considerable period of time, I have lived chiefly in
retirement, and know less of such things than most men,--even to me,
the harbingers of a better era are unmistakable. Mesmerism, now! Will
that effect nothing, think you, towards purging away the grossness out
of human life?"
"All a humbug!" growled the old gentleman.
"These rapping spirits, that little Phoebe told us of, the other day,"
said Clifford,--"what are these but the messengers of the spiritual
world, knocking at the door of substance? And it shall be flung wide
open!"
"A humbug, again!" cried the old gentleman, growing more and more testy
at these glimpses of Clifford's metaphysics. "I should like to rap
with a good stick on the empty pates of the dolts who circulate such
nonsense!"
"Then there is electricity,--the demon, the angel, the mighty physical
power, the all-pervading intelligence!" exclaimed Clifford. "Is that a
humbug, too? Is it a fact--or have I dreamt it--that, by means of
electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating
thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round
globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall
we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the
substance which we deemed it!"
"If you mean the telegraph," said the old gentleman, glancing his eye
toward its wire, alongside the rail-track, "it is an excellent
thing,--that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics
don't get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly
as regards the detection of bank-robbers and murderers."
"I don't quite like it, in that point of view," replied Clifford. "A
bank-robber, and what you call a murderer, likewise, has his rights,
which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard in so
much the more liberal spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to
controvert their existence. An almost spiritual medium, like the
electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and
holy missions. Lovers, day by, day--hour by hour, if so often moved to
do it,--might send their heart-throbs from Maine to Florida, with some
such words as these 'I love you forever!'--'My heart runs over with
love!'--'I love you more than I can!' and, again, at the next message
'I have lived an hour longer, and love you twice as much!' Or, when a
good man has departed, his distant friend should be conscious of an
electric thrill, as from the world of happy spirits, telling him 'Your
dear friend is in bliss!' Or, to an absent husband, should come tidings
thus 'An immortal being, of whom you are the father, has this moment
come from God!' and immediately its little voice would seem to have
reached so far, and to be echoing in his heart. But for these poor
rogues, the bank-robbers,--who, after all, are about as honest as nine
people in ten, except that they disregard certain formalities, and
prefer to transact business at midnight rather than 'Change-hours,--and
for these murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the
motives of their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public
benefactors, if we consider only its result,--for unfortunate
individuals like these, I really cannot applaud the enlistment of an
immaterial and miraculous power in the universal world-hunt at their
heels!"
"You can't, hey?" cried the old gentleman, with a hard look.
"Positively, no!" answered Clifford. "It puts them too miserably at
disadvantage. For example, sir, in a dark, low, cross-beamed, panelled
room of an old house, let us suppose a dead man, sitting in an
arm-chair, with a blood-stain on his shirt-bosom,--and let us add to
our hypothesis another man, issuing from the house, which he feels to
be over-filled with the dead man's presence,--and let us lastly imagine
him fleeing, Heaven knows whither, at the speed of a hurricane, by
railroad! Now, sir, if the fugitive alight in some distant town, and
find all the people babbling about that self-same dead man, whom he has
fled so far to avoid the sight and thought of, will you not allow that
his natural rights have been infringed? He has been deprived of his
city of refuge, and, in my humble opinion, has suffered infinite wrong!"
"You are a strange man; Sir!" said the old gentleman, bringing his
gimlet-eye to a point on Clifford, as if determined to bore right into
him. "I can't see through you!"
"No, I'll be bound you can't!" cried Clifford, laughing. "And yet, my
dear sir, I am as transparent as the water of Maule's well! But come,
Hepzibah! We have flown far enough for once. Let us alight, as the
birds do, and perch ourselves on the nearest twig, and consult wither
we shall fly next!"
Just then, as it happened, the train reached a solitary way-station.
Taking advantage of the brief pause, Clifford left the car, and drew
Hepzibah along with him. A moment afterwards, the train--with all the
life of its interior, amid which Clifford had made himself so
conspicuous an object--was gliding away in the distance, and rapidly
lessening to a point which, in another moment, vanished. The world had
fled away from these two wanderers. They gazed drearily about them.
At a little distance stood a wooden church, black with age, and in a
dismal state of ruin and decay, with broken windows, a great rift
through the main body of the edifice, and a rafter dangling from the
top of the square tower. Farther off was a farm-house, in the old
style, as venerably black as the church, with a roof sloping downward
from the three-story peak, to within a man's height of the ground. It
seemed uninhabited. There were the relics of a wood-pile, indeed, near
the door, but with grass sprouting up among the chips and scattered
logs. The small rain-drops came down aslant; the wind was not
turbulent, but sullen, and full of chilly moisture.
Clifford shivered from head to foot. The wild effervescence of his
mood--which had so readily supplied thoughts, fantasies, and a strange
aptitude of words, and impelled him to talk from the mere necessity of
giving vent to this bubbling-up gush of ideas had entirely subsided. A
powerful excitement had given him energy and vivacity. Its operation
over, he forthwith began to sink.
"You must take the lead now, Hepzibah!" murmured he, with a torpid and
reluctant utterance. "Do with me as you will!" She knelt down upon the
platform where they were standing and lifted her clasped hands to the
sky. The dull, gray weight of clouds made it invisible; but it was no
hour for disbelief,--no juncture this to question that there was a sky
above, and an Almighty Father looking from it!
"O God!"--ejaculated poor, gaunt Hepzibah,--then paused a moment, to
consider what her prayer should be,--"O God,--our Father,--are we not
thy children? Have mercy on us!"
| Hepzibah and Clifford are as inexperienced as children as they step out of the yard of the House of the Seven Gables. Clifford looks almost drunk with excitement. Hardly anyone notices Clifford and Hepzibah passing by. Hepzibah continues to feel as though she is walking in a dream. Clifford pulls Hepzibah toward a line of railway cars. He feels as though he has never been awake before. Inside the train, the two elderly Pyncheons are surrounded by 50 completely unfamiliar people. Clifford feels full of life. Hepzibah is fretful. Clifford comments that Hepzibah is still thinking about Judge Pyncheon. But she shouldn't - she should join Clifford in the world and be happy! Hepzibah thinks Clifford has gone insane. The train conductor stops and asks how far Clifford and Hepzibah are going. Clifford says they're traveling for pleasure and want to go as far as they can. A fellow passenger speaks up. The narrator calls him "gimlet-eyed," which means sharp-eyed or piercing. He says Clifford and Hepzibah have chosen a bad day for their excursion. On a day as stormy as this one, it's better to stay home. Clifford says home isn't actually as great as people say it is. He thinks the whole trajectory of humankind has been moving toward the present and the future and away from the past. Homes represent the past, and trains represent the future. Soon we will just keep moving all the time like nomads. The gimlet-eyed man tells Clifford that it would be awful "to live everywhere and nowhere!" . Clifford thinks that would be the best thing that could happen to humanity. Clifford remembers "a certain house within familiar recollection" . This house is huge, melancholy, and dark. There is a dead man sitting in it who taints the whole house. Clifford has never been able to be happy there, thanks to the "dead" man "with open eyes." The gimlet-eyed man is starting to look rather afraid of Clifford. Clifford says it would be a relief to him if his whole house burned down. Clifford exclaims that this morning he was old, but now he feels young again! The gimlet-eyed man definitely looks embarrassed. Hepzibah tells Clifford to be quiet - everyone thinks he's insane. Clifford turns back to the gimlet-eyed man. Clifford tells the gimlet-eyed man that all of the worst sins committed by humankind are over property. The gimlet-eyed man tells Clifford he's sure he is right. Clifford suggests that hypnosis will help solve some of the world's troubles. He's also excited about "rapping spirits" - i.e., spirits who are supposed to speak up during seances. The gimlet-eyed man thinks this is all nonsense. The gimlet-eyed man does like the telegraph machine, though. Clifford approves of the telegraph machine when it carries messages of love across the country. But he doesn't think it should be used to catch bank robbers or murderers, since it puts them so much at a disadvantage. He gives an example: if a man is running away from a house where there is a corpse sitting up in a chair, would it be fair to have the news of that corpse waiting for him in the next town? The gimlet-eyed man is confused: he "can't see through " . The train stops at a small station and Clifford and Hepzibah quickly get off. All of Clifford's sudden energy is draining out of him. He tells Hepzibah to figure out what to do next. Hepzibah prays to God to help them. | summary |
JUDGE PYNCHEON, while his two relatives have fled away with such
ill-considered haste, still sits in the old parlor, keeping house, as
the familiar phrase is, in the absence of its ordinary occupants. To
him, and to the venerable House of the Seven Gables, does our story now
betake itself, like an owl, bewildered in the daylight, and hastening
back to his hollow tree.
The Judge has not shifted his position for a long while now. He has
not stirred hand or foot, nor withdrawn his eyes so much as a
hair's-breadth from their fixed gaze towards the corner of the room,
since the footsteps of Hepzibah and Clifford creaked along the passage,
and the outer door was closed cautiously behind their exit. He holds
his watch in his left hand, but clutched in such a manner that you
cannot see the dial-plate. How profound a fit of meditation! Or,
supposing him asleep, how infantile a quietude of conscience, and what
wholesome order in the gastric region, are betokened by slumber so
entirely undisturbed with starts, cramp, twitches, muttered dreamtalk,
trumpet-blasts through the nasal organ, or any slightest irregularity
of breath! You must hold your own breath, to satisfy yourself whether
he breathes at all. It is quite inaudible. You hear the ticking of
his watch; his breath you do not hear. A most refreshing slumber,
doubtless! And yet, the Judge cannot be asleep. His eyes are open! A
veteran politician, such as he, would never fall asleep with wide-open
eyes, lest some enemy or mischief-maker, taking him thus at unawares,
should peep through these windows into his consciousness, and make
strange discoveries among the reminiscences, projects, hopes,
apprehensions, weaknesses, and strong points, which he has heretofore
shared with nobody. A cautious man is proverbially said to sleep with
one eye open. That may be wisdom. But not with both; for this were
heedlessness! No, no! Judge Pyncheon cannot be asleep.
It is odd, however, that a gentleman so burdened with engagements,--and
noted, too, for punctuality,--should linger thus in an old lonely
mansion, which he has never seemed very fond of visiting. The oaken
chair, to be sure, may tempt him with its roominess. It is, indeed, a
spacious, and, allowing for the rude age that fashioned it, a
moderately easy seat, with capacity enough, at all events, and offering
no restraint to the Judge's breadth of beam. A bigger man might find
ample accommodation in it. His ancestor, now pictured upon the wall,
with all his English beef about him, used hardly to present a front
extending from elbow to elbow of this chair, or a base that would cover
its whole cushion. But there are better chairs than this,--mahogany,
black walnut, rosewood, spring-seated and damask-cushioned, with varied
slopes, and innumerable artifices to make them easy, and obviate the
irksomeness of too tame an ease,--a score of such might be at Judge
Pyncheon's service. Yes! in a score of drawing-rooms he would be more
than welcome. Mamma would advance to meet him, with outstretched hand;
the virgin daughter, elderly as he has now got to be,--an old widower,
as he smilingly describes himself,--would shake up the cushion for the
Judge, and do her pretty utmost to make him comfortable. For the Judge
is a prosperous man. He cherishes his schemes, moreover, like other
people, and reasonably brighter than most others; or did so, at least,
as he lay abed this morning, in an agreeable half-drowse, planning the
business of the day, and speculating on the probabilities of the next
fifteen years. With his firm health, and the little inroad that age
has made upon him, fifteen years or twenty--yes, or perhaps
five-and-twenty!--are no more than he may fairly call his own.
Five-and-twenty years for the enjoyment of his real estate in town and
country, his railroad, bank, and insurance shares, his United States
stock,--his wealth, in short, however invested, now in possession, or
soon to be acquired; together with the public honors that have fallen
upon him, and the weightier ones that are yet to fall! It is good! It
is excellent! It is enough!
Still lingering in the old chair! If the Judge has a little time to
throw away, why does not he visit the insurance office, as is his
frequent custom, and sit awhile in one of their leathern-cushioned
arm-chairs, listening to the gossip of the day, and dropping some
deeply designed chance-word, which will be certain to become the gossip
of to-morrow. And have not the bank directors a meeting at which it
was the Judge's purpose to be present, and his office to preside?
Indeed they have; and the hour is noted on a card, which is, or ought
to be, in Judge Pyncheon's right vest-pocket. Let him go thither, and
loll at ease upon his moneybags! He has lounged long enough in the old
chair!
This was to have been such a busy day. In the first place, the
interview with Clifford. Half an hour, by the Judge's reckoning, was
to suffice for that; it would probably be less, but--taking into
consideration that Hepzibah was first to be dealt with, and that these
women are apt to make many words where a few would do much better--it
might be safest to allow half an hour. Half an hour? Why, Judge, it is
already two hours, by your own undeviatingly accurate chronometer.
Glance your eye down at it and see! Ah; he will not give himself the
trouble either to bend his head, or elevate his hand, so as to bring
the faithful time-keeper within his range of vision! Time, all at once,
appears to have become a matter of no moment with the Judge!
And has he forgotten all the other items of his memoranda? Clifford's
affair arranged, he was to meet a State Street broker, who has
undertaken to procure a heavy percentage, and the best of paper, for a
few loose thousands which the Judge happens to have by him, uninvested.
The wrinkled note-shaver will have taken his railroad trip in vain.
Half an hour later, in the street next to this, there was to be an
auction of real estate, including a portion of the old Pyncheon
property, originally belonging to Maule's garden ground. It has been
alienated from the Pyncheons these four-score years; but the Judge had
kept it in his eye, and had set his heart on reannexing it to the small
demesne still left around the Seven Gables; and now, during this odd
fit of oblivion, the fatal hammer must have fallen, and transferred our
ancient patrimony to some alien possessor. Possibly, indeed, the sale
may have been postponed till fairer weather. If so, will the Judge
make it convenient to be present, and favor the auctioneer with his
bid, On the proximate occasion?
The next affair was to buy a horse for his own driving. The one
heretofore his favorite stumbled, this very morning, on the road to
town, and must be at once discarded. Judge Pyncheon's neck is too
precious to be risked on such a contingency as a stumbling steed.
Should all the above business be seasonably got through with, he might
attend the meeting of a charitable society; the very name of which,
however, in the multiplicity of his benevolence, is quite forgotten; so
that this engagement may pass unfulfilled, and no great harm done. And
if he have time, amid the press of more urgent matters, he must take
measures for the renewal of Mrs. Pyncheon's tombstone, which, the
sexton tells him, has fallen on its marble face, and is cracked quite
in twain. She was a praiseworthy woman enough, thinks the Judge, in
spite of her nervousness, and the tears that she was so oozy with, and
her foolish behavior about the coffee; and as she took her departure so
seasonably, he will not grudge the second tombstone. It is better, at
least, than if she had never needed any! The next item on his list was
to give orders for some fruit-trees, of a rare variety, to be
deliverable at his country-seat in the ensuing autumn. Yes, buy them,
by all means; and may the peaches be luscious in your mouth, Judge
Pyncheon! After this comes something more important. A committee of
his political party has besought him for a hundred or two of dollars,
in addition to his previous disbursements, towards carrying on the fall
campaign. The Judge is a patriot; the fate of the country is staked on
the November election; and besides, as will be shadowed forth in
another paragraph, he has no trifling stake of his own in the same
great game. He will do what the committee asks; nay, he will be
liberal beyond their expectations; they shall have a check for five
hundred dollars, and more anon, if it be needed. What next? A decayed
widow, whose husband was Judge Pyncheon's early friend, has laid her
case of destitution before him, in a very moving letter. She and her
fair daughter have scarcely bread to eat. He partly intends to call on
her to-day,--perhaps so--perhaps not,--accordingly as he may happen to
have leisure, and a small bank-note.
Another business, which, however, he puts no great weight on (it is
well, you know, to be heedful, but not over-anxious, as respects one's
personal health),--another business, then, was to consult his family
physician. About what, for Heaven's sake? Why, it is rather difficult
to describe the symptoms. A mere dimness of sight and dizziness of
brain, was it?--or disagreeable choking, or stifling, or gurgling, or
bubbling, in the region of the thorax, as the anatomists say?--or was
it a pretty severe throbbing and kicking of the heart, rather
creditable to him than otherwise, as showing that the organ had not
been left out of the Judge's physical contrivance? No matter what it
was. The doctor probably would smile at the statement of such trifles
to his professional ear; the Judge would smile in his turn; and meeting
one another's eyes, they would enjoy a hearty laugh together! But a fig
for medical advice. The Judge will never need it.
Pray, pray, Judge Pyncheon, look at your watch, Now! What--not a
glance! It is within ten minutes of the dinner hour! It surely cannot
have slipped your memory that the dinner of to-day is to be the most
important, in its consequences, of all the dinners you ever ate. Yes,
precisely the most important; although, in the course of your somewhat
eminent career, you have been placed high towards the head of the
table, at splendid banquets, and have poured out your festive eloquence
to ears yet echoing with Webster's mighty organ-tones. No public
dinner this, however. It is merely a gathering of some dozen or so of
friends from several districts of the State; men of distinguished
character and influence, assembling, almost casually, at the house of a
common friend, likewise distinguished, who will make them welcome to a
little better than his ordinary fare. Nothing in the way of French
cookery, but an excellent dinner, nevertheless. Real turtle, we
understand, and salmon, tautog, canvas-backs, pig, English mutton, good
roast beef, or dainties of that serious kind, fit for substantial
country gentlemen, as these honorable persons mostly are. The
delicacies of the season, in short, and flavored by a brand of old
Madeira which has been the pride of many seasons. It is the Juno
brand; a glorious wine, fragrant, and full of gentle might; a
bottled-up happiness, put by for use; a golden liquid, worth more than
liquid gold; so rare and admirable, that veteran wine-bibbers count it
among their epochs to have tasted it! It drives away the heart-ache,
and substitutes no head-ache! Could the Judge but quaff a glass, it
might enable him to shake off the unaccountable lethargy which (for the
ten intervening minutes, and five to boot, are already past) has made
him such a laggard at this momentous dinner. It would all but revive a
dead man! Would you like to sip it now, Judge Pyncheon?
Alas, this dinner. Have you really forgotten its true object? Then
let us whisper it, that you may start at once out of the oaken chair,
which really seems to be enchanted, like the one in Comus, or that in
which Moll Pitcher imprisoned your own grandfather. But ambition is a
talisman more powerful than witchcraft. Start up, then, and, hurrying
through the streets, burst in upon the company, that they may begin
before the fish is spoiled! They wait for you; and it is little for
your interest that they should wait. These gentlemen--need you be told
it?--have assembled, not without purpose, from every quarter of the
State. They are practised politicians, every man of them, and skilled
to adjust those preliminary measures which steal from the people,
without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers. The
popular voice, at the next gubernatorial election, though loud as
thunder, will be really but an echo of what these gentlemen shall
speak, under their breath, at your friend's festive board. They meet
to decide upon their candidate. This little knot of subtle schemers
will control the convention, and, through it, dictate to the party.
And what worthier candidate,--more wise and learned, more noted for
philanthropic liberality, truer to safe principles, tried oftener by
public trusts, more spotless in private character, with a larger stake
in the common welfare, and deeper grounded, by hereditary descent, in
the faith and practice of the Puritans,--what man can be presented for
the suffrage of the people, so eminently combining all these claims to
the chief-rulership as Judge Pyncheon here before us?
Make haste, then! Do your part! The meed for which you have toiled, and
fought, and climbed, and crept, is ready for your grasp! Be present at
this dinner!--drink a glass or two of that noble wine!--make your
pledges in as low a whisper as you will!--and you rise up from table
virtually governor of the glorious old State! Governor Pyncheon of
Massachusetts!
And is there no potent and exhilarating cordial in a certainty like
this? It has been the grand purpose of half your lifetime to obtain it.
Now, when there needs little more than to signify your acceptance, why
do you sit so lumpishly in your great-great-grandfather's oaken chair,
as if preferring it to the gubernatorial one? We have all heard of King
Log; but, in these jostling times, one of that royal kindred will
hardly win the race for an elective chief-magistracy.
Well; it is absolutely too late for dinner! Turtle, salmon, tautog,
woodcock, boiled turkey, South-Down mutton, pig, roast-beef, have
vanished, or exist only in fragments, with lukewarm potatoes, and
gravies crusted over with cold fat. The Judge, had he done nothing
else, would have achieved wonders with his knife and fork. It was he,
you know, of whom it used to be said, in reference to his ogre-like
appetite, that his Creator made him a great animal, but that the
dinner-hour made him a great beast. Persons of his large sensual
endowments must claim indulgence, at their feeding-time. But, for
once, the Judge is entirely too late for dinner! Too late, we fear,
even to join the party at their wine! The guests are warm and merry;
they have given up the Judge; and, concluding that the Free-Soilers
have him, they will fix upon another candidate. Were our friend now to
stalk in among them, with that wide-open stare, at once wild and
stolid, his ungenial presence would be apt to change their cheer.
Neither would it be seemly in Judge Pyncheon, generally so scrupulous
in his attire, to show himself at a dinner-table with that crimson
stain upon his shirt-bosom. By the bye, how came it there? It is an
ugly sight, at any rate; and the wisest way for the Judge is to button
his coat closely over his breast, and, taking his horse and chaise from
the livery stable, to make all speed to his own house. There, after a
glass of brandy and water, and a mutton-chop, a beefsteak, a broiled
fowl, or some such hasty little dinner and supper all in one, he had
better spend the evening by the fireside. He must toast his slippers a
long while, in order to get rid of the chilliness which the air of this
vile old house has sent curdling through his veins.
Up, therefore, Judge Pyncheon, up! You have lost a day. But to-morrow
will be here anon. Will you rise, betimes, and make the most of it?
To-morrow. To-morrow! To-morrow. We, that are alive, may rise betimes
to-morrow. As for him that has died to-day, his morrow will be the
resurrection morn.
Meanwhile the twilight is glooming upward out of the corners of the
room. The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper, and at first
become more definite; then, spreading wider, they lose their
distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion, as it were,
that creeps slowly over the various objects, and the one human figure
sitting in the midst of them. The gloom has not entered from without;
it has brooded here all day, and now, taking its own inevitable time,
will possess itself of everything. The Judge's face, indeed, rigid and
singularly white, refuses to melt into this universal solvent. Fainter
and fainter grows the light. It is as if another double-handful of
darkness had been scattered through the air. Now it is no longer gray,
but sable. There is still a faint appearance at the window; neither a
glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmer,--any phrase of light would express
something far brighter than this doubtful perception, or sense, rather,
that there is a window there. Has it yet vanished? No!--yes!--not
quite! And there is still the swarthy whiteness,--we shall venture to
marry these ill-agreeing words,--the swarthy whiteness of Judge
Pyncheon's face. The features are all gone: there is only the paleness
of them left. And how looks it now? There is no window! There is no
face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where
is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos,
may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and
murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!
Is there no other sound? One other, and a fearful one. It is the
ticking of the Judge's watch, which, ever since Hepzibah left the room
in search of Clifford, he has been holding in his hand. Be the cause
what it may, this little, quiet, never-ceasing throb of Time's pulse,
repeating its small strokes with such busy regularity, in Judge
Pyncheon's motionless hand, has an effect of terror, which we do not
find in any other accompaniment of the scene.
But, listen! That puff of the breeze was louder. It had a tone unlike
the dreary and sullen one which has bemoaned itself, and afflicted all
mankind with miserable sympathy, for five days past. The wind has
veered about! It now comes boisterously from the northwest, and, taking
hold of the aged framework of the Seven Gables, gives it a shake, like
a wrestler that would try strength with his antagonist. Another and
another sturdy tussle with the blast! The old house creaks again, and
makes a vociferous but somewhat unintelligible bellowing in its sooty
throat (the big flue, we mean, of its wide chimney), partly in
complaint at the rude wind, but rather, as befits their century and a
half of hostile intimacy, in tough defiance. A rumbling kind of a
bluster roars behind the fire-board. A door has slammed above stairs.
A window, perhaps, has been left open, or else is driven in by an
unruly gust. It is not to be conceived, before-hand, what wonderful
wind-instruments are these old timber mansions, and how haunted with
the strangest noises, which immediately begin to sing, and sigh, and
sob, and shriek,--and to smite with sledge-hammers, airy but ponderous,
in some distant chamber,--and to tread along the entries as with
stately footsteps, and rustle up and down the staircase, as with silks
miraculously stiff,--whenever the gale catches the house with a window
open, and gets fairly into it. Would that we were not an attendant
spirit here! It is too awful! This clamor of the wind through the
lonely house; the Judge's quietude, as he sits invisible; and that
pertinacious ticking of his watch!
As regards Judge Pyncheon's invisibility, however, that matter will
soon be remedied. The northwest wind has swept the sky clear. The
window is distinctly seen. Through its panes, moreover, we dimly catch
the sweep of the dark, clustering foliage outside, fluttering with a
constant irregularity of movement, and letting in a peep of starlight,
now here, now there. Oftener than any other object, these glimpses
illuminate the Judge's face. But here comes more effectual light.
Observe that silvery dance upon the upper branches of the pear-tree,
and now a little lower, and now on the whole mass of boughs, while,
through their shifting intricacies, the moonbeams fall aslant into the
room. They play over the Judge's figure and show that he has not
stirred throughout the hours of darkness. They follow the shadows, in
changeful sport, across his unchanging features. They gleam upon his
watch. His grasp conceals the dial-plate,--but we know that the
faithful hands have met; for one of the city clocks tells midnight.
A man of sturdy understanding, like Judge Pyncheon, cares no more for
twelve o'clock at night than for the corresponding hour of noon.
However just the parallel drawn, in some of the preceding pages,
between his Puritan ancestor and himself, it fails in this point. The
Pyncheon of two centuries ago, in common with most of his
contemporaries, professed his full belief in spiritual ministrations,
although reckoning them chiefly of a malignant character. The Pyncheon
of to-night, who sits in yonder arm-chair, believes in no such
nonsense. Such, at least, was his creed, some few hours since. His
hair will not bristle, therefore, at the stories which--in times when
chimney-corners had benches in them, where old people sat poking into
the ashes of the past, and raking out traditions like live coals--used
to be told about this very room of his ancestral house. In fact, these
tales are too absurd to bristle even childhood's hair. What sense,
meaning, or moral, for example, such as even ghost-stories should be
susceptible of, can be traced in the ridiculous legend, that, at
midnight, all the dead Pyncheons are bound to assemble in this parlor?
And, pray, for what? Why, to see whether the portrait of their ancestor
still keeps its place upon the wall, in compliance with his
testamentary directions! Is it worth while to come out of their graves
for that?
We are tempted to make a little sport with the idea. Ghost-stories are
hardly to be treated seriously any longer. The family-party of the
defunct Pyncheons, we presume, goes off in this wise.
First comes the ancestor himself, in his black cloak, steeple-hat, and
trunk-breeches, girt about the waist with a leathern belt, in which
hangs his steel-hilted sword; he has a long staff in his hand, such as
gentlemen in advanced life used to carry, as much for the dignity of
the thing as for the support to be derived from it. He looks up at the
portrait; a thing of no substance, gazing at its own painted image! All
is safe. The picture is still there. The purpose of his brain has
been kept sacred thus long after the man himself has sprouted up in
graveyard grass. See! he lifts his ineffectual hand, and tries the
frame. All safe! But is that a smile?--is it not, rather a frown of
deadly import, that darkens over the shadow of his features? The stout
Colonel is dissatisfied! So decided is his look of discontent as to
impart additional distinctness to his features; through which,
nevertheless, the moonlight passes, and flickers on the wall beyond.
Something has strangely vexed the ancestor! With a grim shake of the
head, he turns away. Here come other Pyncheons, the whole tribe, in
their half a dozen generations, jostling and elbowing one another, to
reach the picture. We behold aged men and grandames, a clergyman with
the Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien, and a red-coated
officer of the old French war; and there comes the shop-keeping
Pyncheon of a century ago, with the ruffles turned back from his
wrists; and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artist's
legend, with the beautiful and pensive Alice, who brings no pride out
of her virgin grave. All try the picture-frame. What do these ghostly
people seek? A mother lifts her child, that his little hands may touch
it! There is evidently a mystery about the picture, that perplexes
these poor Pyncheons when they ought to be at rest. In a corner,
meanwhile, stands the figure of an elderly man, in a leathern jerkin
and breeches, with a carpenter's rule sticking out of his side pocket;
he points his finger at the bearded Colonel and his descendants,
nodding, jeering, mocking, and finally bursting into obstreperous,
though inaudible laughter.
Indulging our fancy in this freak, we have partly lost the power of
restraint and guidance. We distinguish an unlooked-for figure in our
visionary scene. Among those ancestral people there is a young man,
dressed in the very fashion of to-day: he wears a dark frock-coat,
almost destitute of skirts, gray pantaloons, gaiter boots of patent
leather, and has a finely wrought gold chain across his breast, and a
little silver-headed whalebone stick in his hand. Were we to meet this
figure at noonday, we should greet him as young Jaffrey Pyncheon, the
Judge's only surviving child, who has been spending the last two years
in foreign travel. If still in life, how comes his shadow hither? If
dead, what a misfortune! The old Pyncheon property, together with the
great estate acquired by the young man's father, would devolve on whom?
On poor, foolish Clifford, gaunt Hepzibah, and rustic little Phoebe!
But another and a greater marvel greets us! Can we believe our eyes? A
stout, elderly gentleman has made his appearance; he has an aspect of
eminent respectability, wears a black coat and pantaloons, of roomy
width, and might be pronounced scrupulously neat in his attire, but for
a broad crimson stain across his snowy neckcloth and down his
shirt-bosom. Is it the Judge, or no? How can it be Judge Pyncheon? We
discern his figure, as plainly as the flickering moonbeams can show us
anything, still seated in the oaken chair! Be the apparition whose it
may, it advances to the picture, seems to seize the frame, tries to
peep behind it, and turns away, with a frown as black as the ancestral
one.
The fantastic scene just hinted at must by no means be considered as
forming an actual portion of our story. We were betrayed into this
brief extravagance by the quiver of the moonbeams; they dance
hand-in-hand with shadows, and are reflected in the looking-glass,
which, you are aware, is always a kind of window or doorway into the
spiritual world. We needed relief, moreover, from our too long and
exclusive contemplation of that figure in the chair. This wild wind,
too, has tossed our thoughts into strange confusion, but without
tearing them away from their one determined centre. Yonder leaden
Judge sits immovably upon our soul. Will he never stir again? We shall
go mad unless he stirs! You may the better estimate his quietude by the
fearlessness of a little mouse, which sits on its hind legs, in a
streak of moonlight, close by Judge Pyncheon's foot, and seems to
meditate a journey of exploration over this great black bulk. Ha! what
has startled the nimble little mouse? It is the visage of grimalkin,
outside of the window, where he appears to have posted himself for a
deliberate watch. This grimalkin has a very ugly look. Is it a cat
watching for a mouse, or the devil for a human soul? Would we could
scare him from the window!
Thank Heaven, the night is well-nigh past! The moonbeams have no longer
so silvery a gleam, nor contrast so strongly with the blackness of the
shadows among which they fall. They are paler now; the shadows look
gray, not black. The boisterous wind is hushed. What is the hour? Ah!
the watch has at last ceased to tick; for the Judge's forgetful fingers
neglected to wind it up, as usual, at ten o'clock, being half an hour
or so before his ordinary bedtime,--and it has run down, for the first
time in five years. But the great world-clock of Time still keeps its
beat. The dreary night--for, oh, how dreary seems its haunted waste,
behind us!--gives place to a fresh, transparent, cloudless morn.
Blessed, blessed radiance! The daybeam--even what little of it finds
its way into this always dusky parlor--seems part of the universal
benediction, annulling evil, and rendering all goodness possible, and
happiness attainable. Will Judge Pyncheon now rise up from his chair?
Will he go forth, and receive the early sunbeams on his brow? Will he
begin this new day,--which God has smiled upon, and blessed, and given
to mankind,--will he begin it with better purposes than the many that
have been spent amiss? Or are all the deep-laid schemes of yesterday as
stubborn in his heart, and as busy in his brain, as ever?
In this latter case, there is much to do. Will the Judge still insist
with Hepzibah on the interview with Clifford? Will he buy a safe,
elderly gentleman's horse? Will he persuade the purchaser of the old
Pyncheon property to relinquish the bargain in his favor? Will he see
his family physician, and obtain a medicine that shall preserve him, to
be an honor and blessing to his race, until the utmost term of
patriarchal longevity? Will Judge Pyncheon, above all, make due
apologies to that company of honorable friends, and satisfy them that
his absence from the festive board was unavoidable, and so fully
retrieve himself in their good opinion that he shall yet be Governor of
Massachusetts? And all these great purposes accomplished, will he walk
the streets again, with that dog-day smile of elaborate benevolence,
sultry enough to tempt flies to come and buzz in it? Or will he, after
the tomb-like seclusion of the past day and night, go forth a humbled
and repentant man, sorrowful, gentle, seeking no profit, shrinking from
worldly honor, hardly daring to love God, but bold to love his fellow
man, and to do him what good he may? Will he bear about with him,--no
odious grin of feigned benignity, insolent in its pretence, and
loathsome in its falsehood,--but the tender sadness of a contrite
heart, broken, at last, beneath its own weight of sin? For it is our
belief, whatever show of honor he may have piled upon it, that there
was heavy sin at the base of this man's being.
Rise up, Judge Pyncheon! The morning sunshine glimmers through the
foliage, and, beautiful and holy as it is, shuns not to kindle up your
face. Rise up, thou subtle, worldly, selfish, iron-hearted hypocrite,
and make thy choice whether still to be subtle, worldly, selfish,
iron-hearted, and hypocritical, or to tear these sins out of thy
nature, though they bring the lifeblood with them! The Avenger is upon
thee! Rise up, before it be too late!
What! Thou art not stirred by this last appeal? No, not a jot! And
there we see a fly,--one of your common house-flies, such as are always
buzzing on the window-pane,--which has smelt out Governor Pyncheon, and
alights, now on his forehead, now on his chin, and now, Heaven help us!
is creeping over the bridge of his nose, towards the would-be
chief-magistrate's wide-open eyes! Canst thou not brush the fly away?
Art thou too sluggish? Thou man, that hadst so many busy projects
yesterday! Art thou too weak, that wast so powerful? Not brush away a
fly? Nay, then, we give thee up!
And hark! the shop-bell rings. After hours like these latter ones,
through which we have borne our heavy tale, it is good to be made
sensible that there is a living world, and that even this old, lonely
mansion retains some manner of connection with it. We breathe more
freely, emerging from Judge Pyncheon's presence into the street before
the Seven Gables.
| Judge Pyncheon still sits in the parlor "keeping house" . He has not moved a muscle. The narrator comments that it's odd to see Judge Pyncheon sitting so still when he has so much business to do today. After finishing his business with Clifford, he was going to meet with his broker to invest more money. He was going to buy a portion of property that used to belong to the Maule family to complete the estate of the House of the Seven Gables. He was going to buy a horse and some new fruit trees. He was going to replace the tombstone on his wife's grave . He was going to visit the widow of an old business partner who has fallen on hard times. And he was going to visit the doctor. He didn't think his symptoms were that important: dizziness and a "disagreeable choking, or stifling" in the throat. He was going to attend a dinner later on, the purpose of which was to select him as a candidate for Governor of Massachusetts. But the dinner has now passed and the guests have given up on Judge Pyncheon. On his white shirt, there is a blood stain about his neck. The Judge's watch is still ticking in his hand, but nothing else is moving. A moonbeam gleams on the Judge's still face. Judge Pyncheon doesn't believe in ghosts. But even if he doesn't, the narrator wants to play with one: First comes Colonel Pyncheon himself, with a sword at his waist and a staff in his hand. He is frowning. Next come all the other Pyncheons, including "the shop-keeping Pyncheon" and Alice Pyncheon. They all stop to look at the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, and they all look dissatisfied. In a corner there is an elderly man pointing and laughing at all the Pyncheons. Among the hoard of dead Pyncheons there is one unexpected one: the son of Judge Pyncheon. With him dead, this makes Phoebe, Clifford, and Hepzibah Judge Pyncheon's only remaining heirs. And there is also the newest ghost: Judge Pyncheon himself. The narrator continues to point out the stillness of Judge Pyncheon. "Will he never stir again?" he asks. The only thing that does move is a black cat - the grimalkin - outside the window. The narrator asks if this grimalkin is "the devil for a human soul?" . The night has passed and Judge Pyncheon's watch has run down. Judge Pyncheon has another busy day ahead of him: will he move now? A fly lands on Judge Pyncheon but he doesn't brush it away. At last, the narrator gives up on him. The shop bell jangles and the narrator leaves Judge Pyncheon alone. | summary |
UNCLE VENNER, trundling a wheelbarrow, was the earliest person stirring
in the neighborhood the day after the storm.
Pyncheon Street, in front of the House of the Seven Gables, was a far
pleasanter scene than a by-lane, confined by shabby fences, and
bordered with wooden dwellings of the meaner class, could reasonably be
expected to present. Nature made sweet amends, that morning, for the
five unkindly days which had preceded it. It would have been enough to
live for, merely to look up at the wide benediction of the sky, or as
much of it as was visible between the houses, genial once more with
sunshine. Every object was agreeable, whether to be gazed at in the
breadth, or examined more minutely. Such, for example, were the
well-washed pebbles and gravel of the sidewalk; even the sky-reflecting
pools in the centre of the street; and the grass, now freshly verdant,
that crept along the base of the fences, on the other side of which, if
one peeped over, was seen the multifarious growth of gardens.
Vegetable productions, of whatever kind, seemed more than negatively
happy, in the juicy warmth and abundance of their life. The Pyncheon
Elm, throughout its great circumference, was all alive, and full of the
morning sun and a sweet-tempered little breeze, which lingered within
this verdant sphere, and set a thousand leafy tongues a-whispering all
at once. This aged tree appeared to have suffered nothing from the
gale. It had kept its boughs unshattered, and its full complement of
leaves; and the whole in perfect verdure, except a single branch, that,
by the earlier change with which the elm-tree sometimes prophesies the
autumn, had been transmuted to bright gold. It was like the golden
branch that gained Aeneas and the Sibyl admittance into Hades.
This one mystic branch hung down before the main entrance of the Seven
Gables, so nigh the ground that any passer-by might have stood on
tiptoe and plucked it off. Presented at the door, it would have been a
symbol of his right to enter, and be made acquainted with all the
secrets of the house. So little faith is due to external appearance,
that there was really an inviting aspect over the venerable edifice,
conveying an idea that its history must be a decorous and happy one,
and such as would be delightful for a fireside tale. Its windows
gleamed cheerfully in the slanting sunlight. The lines and tufts of
green moss, here and there, seemed pledges of familiarity and
sisterhood with Nature; as if this human dwelling-place, being of such
old date, had established its prescriptive title among primeval oaks
and whatever other objects, by virtue of their long continuance, have
acquired a gracious right to be. A person of imaginative temperament,
while passing by the house, would turn, once and again, and peruse it
well: its many peaks, consenting together in the clustered chimney;
the deep projection over its basement-story; the arched window,
imparting a look, if not of grandeur, yet of antique gentility, to the
broken portal over which it opened; the luxuriance of gigantic
burdocks, near the threshold; he would note all these characteristics,
and be conscious of something deeper than he saw. He would conceive
the mansion to have been the residence of the stubborn old Puritan,
Integrity, who, dying in some forgotten generation, had left a blessing
in all its rooms and chambers, the efficacy of which was to be seen in
the religion, honesty, moderate competence, or upright poverty and
solid happiness, of his descendants, to this day.
One object, above all others, would take root in the imaginative
observer's memory. It was the great tuft of flowers,--weeds, you would
have called them, only a week ago,--the tuft of crimson-spotted
flowers, in the angle between the two front gables. The old people used
to give them the name of Alice's Posies, in remembrance of fair Alice
Pyncheon, who was believed to have brought their seeds from Italy.
They were flaunting in rich beauty and full bloom to-day, and seemed,
as it were, a mystic expression that something within the house was
consummated.
It was but little after sunrise, when Uncle Venner made his appearance,
as aforesaid, impelling a wheelbarrow along the street. He was going
his matutinal rounds to collect cabbage-leaves, turnip-tops,
potato-skins, and the miscellaneous refuse of the dinner-pot, which the
thrifty housewives of the neighborhood were accustomed to put aside, as
fit only to feed a pig. Uncle Venner's pig was fed entirely, and kept
in prime order, on these eleemosynary contributions; insomuch that the
patched philosopher used to promise that, before retiring to his farm,
he would make a feast of the portly grunter, and invite all his
neighbors to partake of the joints and spare-ribs which they had helped
to fatten. Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon's housekeeping had so greatly
improved, since Clifford became a member of the family, that her share
of the banquet would have been no lean one; and Uncle Venner,
accordingly, was a good deal disappointed not to find the large earthen
pan, full of fragmentary eatables, that ordinarily awaited his coming
at the back doorstep of the Seven Gables.
"I never knew Miss Hepzibah so forgetful before," said the patriarch to
himself. "She must have had a dinner yesterday,--no question of that!
She always has one, nowadays. So where's the pot-liquor and
potato-skins, I ask? Shall I knock, and see if she's stirring yet? No,
no,--'t won't do! If little Phoebe was about the house, I should not
mind knocking; but Miss Hepzibah, likely as not, would scowl down at me
out of the window, and look cross, even if she felt pleasantly. So,
I'll come back at noon."
With these reflections, the old man was shutting the gate of the little
back-yard. Creaking on its hinges, however, like every other gate and
door about the premises, the sound reached the ears of the occupant of
the northern gable, one of the windows of which had a side-view towards
the gate.
"Good-morning, Uncle Venner!" said the daguerreotypist, leaning out of
the window. "Do you hear nobody stirring?"
"Not a soul," said the man of patches. "But that's no wonder. 'Tis
barely half an hour past sunrise, yet. But I'm really glad to see you,
Mr. Holgrave! There's a strange, lonesome look about this side of the
house; so that my heart misgave me, somehow or other, and I felt as if
there was nobody alive in it. The front of the house looks a good deal
cheerier; and Alice's Posies are blooming there beautifully; and if I
were a young man, Mr. Holgrave, my sweetheart should have one of those
flowers in her bosom, though I risked my neck climbing for it! Well,
and did the wind keep you awake last night?"
"It did, indeed!" answered the artist, smiling. "If I were a believer
in ghosts,--and I don't quite know whether I am or not,--I should have
concluded that all the old Pyncheons were running riot in the lower
rooms, especially in Miss Hepzibah's part of the house. But it is very
quiet now."
"Yes, Miss Hepzibah will be apt to over-sleep herself, after being
disturbed, all night, with the racket," said Uncle Venner. "But it
would be odd, now, wouldn't it, if the Judge had taken both his cousins
into the country along with him? I saw him go into the shop yesterday."
"At what hour?" inquired Holgrave.
"Oh, along in the forenoon," said the old man. "Well, well! I must go
my rounds, and so must my wheelbarrow. But I'll be back here at
dinner-time; for my pig likes a dinner as well as a breakfast. No
meal-time, and no sort of victuals, ever seems to come amiss to my pig.
Good morning to you! And, Mr. Holgrave, if I were a young man, like
you, I'd get one of Alice's Posies, and keep it in water till Phoebe
comes back."
"I have heard," said the daguerreotypist, as he drew in his head, "that
the water of Maule's well suits those flowers best."
Here the conversation ceased, and Uncle Venner went on his way. For
half an hour longer, nothing disturbed the repose of the Seven Gables;
nor was there any visitor, except a carrier-boy, who, as he passed the
front doorstep, threw down one of his newspapers; for Hepzibah, of
late, had regularly taken it in. After a while, there came a fat
woman, making prodigious speed, and stumbling as she ran up the steps
of the shop-door. Her face glowed with fire-heat, and, it being a
pretty warm morning, she bubbled and hissed, as it were, as if all
a-fry with chimney-warmth, and summer-warmth, and the warmth of her own
corpulent velocity. She tried the shop-door; it was fast. She tried
it again, with so angry a jar that the bell tinkled angrily back at her.
"The deuce take Old Maid Pyncheon!" muttered the irascible housewife.
"Think of her pretending to set up a cent-shop, and then lying abed
till noon! These are what she calls gentlefolk's airs, I suppose! But
I'll either start her ladyship, or break the door down!"
She shook it accordingly, and the bell, having a spiteful little temper
of its own, rang obstreperously, making its remonstrances heard,--not,
indeed, by the ears for which they were intended,--but by a good lady
on the opposite side of the street. She opened the window, and
addressed the impatient applicant.
"You'll find nobody there, Mrs. Gubbins."
"But I must and will find somebody here!" cried Mrs. Gubbins,
inflicting another outrage on the bell. "I want a half-pound of pork,
to fry some first-rate flounders for Mr. Gubbins's breakfast; and, lady
or not, Old Maid Pyncheon shall get up and serve me with it!"
"But do hear reason, Mrs. Gubbins!" responded the lady opposite. "She,
and her brother too, have both gone to their cousin's, Judge Pyncheon's
at his country-seat. There's not a soul in the house, but that young
daguerreotype-man that sleeps in the north gable. I saw old Hepzibah
and Clifford go away yesterday; and a queer couple of ducks they were,
paddling through the mud-puddles! They're gone, I'll assure you."
"And how do you know they're gone to the Judge's?" asked Mrs. Gubbins.
"He's a rich man; and there's been a quarrel between him and Hepzibah
this many a day, because he won't give her a living. That's the main
reason of her setting up a cent-shop."
"I know that well enough," said the neighbor. "But they're
gone,--that's one thing certain. And who but a blood relation, that
couldn't help himself, I ask you, would take in that awful-tempered old
maid, and that dreadful Clifford? That's it, you may be sure."
Mrs. Gubbins took her departure, still brimming over with hot wrath
against the absent Hepzibah. For another half-hour, or, perhaps,
considerably more, there was almost as much quiet on the outside of the
house as within. The elm, however, made a pleasant, cheerful, sunny
sigh, responsive to the breeze that was elsewhere imperceptible; a
swarm of insects buzzed merrily under its drooping shadow, and became
specks of light whenever they darted into the sunshine; a locust sang,
once or twice, in some inscrutable seclusion of the tree; and a
solitary little bird, with plumage of pale gold, came and hovered about
Alice's Posies.
At last our small acquaintance, Ned Higgins, trudged up the street, on
his way to school; and happening, for the first time in a fortnight, to
be the possessor of a cent, he could by no means get past the shop-door
of the Seven Gables. But it would not open. Again and again, however,
and half a dozen other agains, with the inexorable pertinacity of a
child intent upon some object important to itself, did he renew his
efforts for admittance. He had, doubtless, set his heart upon an
elephant; or, possibly, with Hamlet, he meant to eat a crocodile. In
response to his more violent attacks, the bell gave, now and then, a
moderate tinkle, but could not be stirred into clamor by any exertion
of the little fellow's childish and tiptoe strength. Holding by the
door-handle, he peeped through a crevice of the curtain, and saw that
the inner door, communicating with the passage towards the parlor, was
closed.
"Miss Pyncheon!" screamed the child, rapping on the window-pane, "I
want an elephant!"
There being no answer to several repetitions of the summons, Ned began
to grow impatient; and his little pot of passion quickly boiling over,
he picked up a stone, with a naughty purpose to fling it through the
window; at the same time blubbering and sputtering with wrath. A
man--one of two who happened to be passing by--caught the urchin's arm.
"What's the trouble, old gentleman?" he asked.
"I want old Hepzibah, or Phoebe, or any of them!" answered Ned,
sobbing. "They won't open the door; and I can't get my elephant!"
"Go to school, you little scamp!" said the man. "There's another
cent-shop round the corner. 'T is very strange, Dixey," added he to
his companion, "what's become of all these Pyncheon's! Smith, the
livery-stable keeper, tells me Judge Pyncheon put his horse up
yesterday, to stand till after dinner, and has not taken him away yet.
And one of the Judge's hired men has been in, this morning, to make
inquiry about him. He's a kind of person, they say, that seldom breaks
his habits, or stays out o' nights."
"Oh, he'll turn up safe enough!" said Dixey. "And as for Old Maid
Pyncheon, take my word for it, she has run in debt, and gone off from
her creditors. I foretold, you remember, the first morning she set up
shop, that her devilish scowl would frighten away customers. They
couldn't stand it!"
"I never thought she'd make it go," remarked his friend. "This
business of cent-shops is overdone among the women-folks. My wife
tried it, and lost five dollars on her outlay!"
"Poor business!" said Dixey, shaking his head. "Poor business!"
In the course of the morning, there were various other attempts to open
a communication with the supposed inhabitants of this silent and
impenetrable mansion. The man of root-beer came, in his neatly painted
wagon, with a couple of dozen full bottles, to be exchanged for empty
ones; the baker, with a lot of crackers which Hepzibah had ordered for
her retail custom; the butcher, with a nice titbit which he fancied she
would be eager to secure for Clifford. Had any observer of these
proceedings been aware of the fearful secret hidden within the house,
it would have affected him with a singular shape and modification of
horror, to see the current of human life making this small eddy
hereabouts,--whirling sticks, straws and all such trifles, round and
round, right over the black depth where a dead corpse lay unseen!
The butcher was so much in earnest with his sweetbread of lamb, or
whatever the dainty might be, that he tried every accessible door of
the Seven Gables, and at length came round again to the shop, where he
ordinarily found admittance.
"It's a nice article, and I know the old lady would jump at it," said
he to himself. "She can't be gone away! In fifteen years that I have
driven my cart through Pyncheon Street, I've never known her to be away
from home; though often enough, to be sure, a man might knock all day
without bringing her to the door. But that was when she'd only herself
to provide for."
Peeping through the same crevice of the curtain where, only a little
while before, the urchin of elephantine appetite had peeped, the
butcher beheld the inner door, not closed, as the child had seen it,
but ajar, and almost wide open. However it might have happened, it was
the fact. Through the passage-way there was a dark vista into the
lighter but still obscure interior of the parlor. It appeared to the
butcher that he could pretty clearly discern what seemed to be the
stalwart legs, clad in black pantaloons, of a man sitting in a large
oaken chair, the back of which concealed all the remainder of his
figure. This contemptuous tranquillity on the part of an occupant of
the house, in response to the butcher's indefatigable efforts to
attract notice, so piqued the man of flesh that he determined to
withdraw.
"So," thought he, "there sits Old Maid Pyncheon's bloody brother, while
I've been giving myself all this trouble! Why, if a hog hadn't more
manners, I'd stick him! I call it demeaning a man's business to trade
with such people; and from this time forth, if they want a sausage or
an ounce of liver, they shall run after the cart for it!"
He tossed the titbit angrily into his cart, and drove off in a pet.
Not a great while afterwards there was a sound of music turning the
corner and approaching down the street, with several intervals of
silence, and then a renewed and nearer outbreak of brisk melody. A mob
of children was seen moving onward, or stopping, in unison with the
sound, which appeared to proceed from the centre of the throng; so that
they were loosely bound together by slender strains of harmony, and
drawn along captive; with ever and anon an accession of some little
fellow in an apron and straw-hat, capering forth from door or gateway.
Arriving under the shadow of the Pyncheon Elm, it proved to be the
Italian boy, who, with his monkey and show of puppets, had once before
played his hurdy-gurdy beneath the arched window. The pleasant face of
Phoebe--and doubtless, too, the liberal recompense which she had flung
him--still dwelt in his remembrance. His expressive features kindled
up, as he recognized the spot where this trifling incident of his
erratic life had chanced. He entered the neglected yard (now wilder
than ever, with its growth of hog-weed and burdock), stationed himself
on the doorstep of the main entrance, and, opening his show-box, began
to play. Each individual of the automatic community forthwith set to
work, according to his or her proper vocation: the monkey, taking off
his Highland bonnet, bowed and scraped to the by-standers most
obsequiously, with ever an observant eye to pick up a stray cent; and
the young foreigner himself, as he turned the crank of his machine,
glanced upward to the arched window, expectant of a presence that would
make his music the livelier and sweeter. The throng of children stood
near; some on the sidewalk; some within the yard; two or three
establishing themselves on the very door-step; and one squatting on the
threshold. Meanwhile, the locust kept singing in the great old
Pyncheon Elm.
"I don't hear anybody in the house," said one of the children to
another. "The monkey won't pick up anything here."
"There is somebody at home," affirmed the urchin on the threshold. "I
heard a step!"
Still the young Italian's eye turned sidelong upward; and it really
seemed as if the touch of genuine, though slight and almost playful,
emotion communicated a juicier sweetness to the dry, mechanical process
of his minstrelsy. These wanderers are readily responsive to any
natural kindness--be it no more than a smile, or a word itself not
understood, but only a warmth in it--which befalls them on the roadside
of life. They remember these things, because they are the little
enchantments which, for the instant,--for the space that reflects a
landscape in a soap-bubble,--build up a home about them. Therefore,
the Italian boy would not be discouraged by the heavy silence with
which the old house seemed resolute to clog the vivacity of his
instrument. He persisted in his melodious appeals; he still looked
upward, trusting that his dark, alien countenance would soon be
brightened by Phoebe's sunny aspect. Neither could he be willing to
depart without again beholding Clifford, whose sensibility, like
Phoebe's smile, had talked a kind of heart's language to the foreigner.
He repeated all his music over and over again, until his auditors were
getting weary. So were the little wooden people in his show-box, and
the monkey most of all. There was no response, save the singing of the
locust.
"No children live in this house," said a schoolboy, at last. "Nobody
lives here but an old maid and an old man. You'll get nothing here!
Why don't you go along?"
"You fool, you, why do you tell him?" whispered a shrewd little Yankee,
caring nothing for the music, but a good deal for the cheap rate at
which it was had. "Let him play as he likes! If there's nobody to pay
him, that's his own lookout!"
Once more, however, the Italian ran over his round of melodies. To the
common observer--who could understand nothing of the case, except the
music and the sunshine on the hither side of the door--it might have
been amusing to watch the pertinacity of the street-performer. Will he
succeed at last? Will that stubborn door be suddenly flung open? Will a
group of joyous children, the young ones of the house, come dancing,
shouting, laughing, into the open air, and cluster round the show-box,
looking with eager merriment at the puppets, and tossing each a copper
for long-tailed Mammon, the monkey, to pick up?
But to us, who know the inner heart of the Seven Gables as well as its
exterior face, there is a ghastly effect in this repetition of light
popular tunes at its door-step. It would be an ugly business, indeed,
if Judge Pyncheon (who would not have cared a fig for Paganini's fiddle
in his most harmonious mood) should make his appearance at the door,
with a bloody shirt-bosom, and a grim frown on his swarthily white
visage, and motion the foreign vagabond away! Was ever before such a
grinding out of jigs and waltzes, where nobody was in the cue to dance?
Yes, very often. This contrast, or intermingling of tragedy with mirth,
happens daily, hourly, momently. The gloomy and desolate old house,
deserted of life, and with awful Death sitting sternly in its solitude,
was the emblem of many a human heart, which, nevertheless, is compelled
to hear the thrill and echo of the world's gayety around it.
Before the conclusion of the Italian's performance, a couple of men
happened to be passing, On their way to dinner. "I say, you young
French fellow!" called out one of them,--"come away from that doorstep,
and go somewhere else with your nonsense! The Pyncheon family live
there; and they are in great trouble, just about this time. They don't
feel musical to-day. It is reported all over town that Judge Pyncheon,
who owns the house, has been murdered; and the city marshal is going to
look into the matter. So be off with you, at once!"
As the Italian shouldered his hurdy-gurdy, he saw on the doorstep a
card, which had been covered, all the morning, by the newspaper that
the carrier had flung upon it, but was now shuffled into sight. He
picked it up, and perceiving something written in pencil, gave it to
the man to read. In fact, it was an engraved card of Judge Pyncheon's
with certain pencilled memoranda on the back, referring to various
businesses which it had been his purpose to transact during the
preceding day. It formed a prospective epitome of the day's history;
only that affairs had not turned out altogether in accordance with the
programme. The card must have been lost from the Judge's vest-pocket
in his preliminary attempt to gain access by the main entrance of the
house. Though well soaked with rain, it was still partially legible.
"Look here; Dixey!" cried the man. "This has something to do with
Judge Pyncheon. See!--here's his name printed on it; and here, I
suppose, is some of his handwriting."
"Let's go to the city marshal with it!" said Dixey. "It may give him
just the clew he wants. After all," whispered he in his companion's
ear, "it would be no wonder if the Judge has gone into that door and
never come out again! A certain cousin of his may have been at his old
tricks. And Old Maid Pyncheon having got herself in debt by the
cent-shop,--and the Judge's pocket-book being well filled,--and bad
blood amongst them already! Put all these things together and see what
they make!"
"Hush, hush!" whispered the other. "It seems like a sin to be the
first to speak of such a thing. But I think, with you, that we had
better go to the city marshal."
"Yes, yes!" said Dixey. "Well!--I always said there was something
devilish in that woman's scowl!"
The men wheeled about, accordingly, and retraced their steps up the
street. The Italian, also, made the best of his way off, with a
parting glance up at the arched window. As for the children, they took
to their heels, with one accord, and scampered as if some giant or ogre
were in pursuit, until, at a good distance from the house, they stopped
as suddenly and simultaneously as they had set out. Their susceptible
nerves took an indefinite alarm from what they had overheard. Looking
back at the grotesque peaks and shadowy angles of the old mansion, they
fancied a gloom diffused about it which no brightness of the sunshine
could dispel. An imaginary Hepzibah scowled and shook her finger at
them, from several windows at the same moment. An imaginary
Clifford--for (and it would have deeply wounded him to know it) he had
always been a horror to these small people--stood behind the unreal
Hepzibah, making awful gestures, in a faded dressing-gown. Children
are even more apt, if possible, than grown people, to catch the
contagion of a panic terror. For the rest of the day, the more timid
went whole streets about, for the sake of avoiding the Seven Gables;
while the bolder signalized their hardihood by challenging their
comrades to race past the mansion at full speed.
It could not have been more than half an hour after the disappearance
of the Italian boy, with his unseasonable melodies, when a cab drove
down the street. It stopped beneath the Pyncheon Elm; the cabman took
a trunk, a canvas bag, and a bandbox, from the top of his vehicle, and
deposited them on the doorstep of the old house; a straw bonnet, and
then the pretty figure of a young girl, came into view from the
interior of the cab. It was Phoebe! Though not altogether so blooming
as when she first tripped into our story,--for, in the few intervening
weeks, her experiences had made her graver, more womanly, and
deeper-eyed, in token of a heart that had begun to suspect its
depths,--still there was the quiet glow of natural sunshine over her.
Neither had she forfeited her proper gift of making things look real,
rather than fantastic, within her sphere. Yet we feel it to be a
questionable venture, even for Phoebe, at this juncture, to cross the
threshold of the Seven Gables. Is her healthful presence potent enough
to chase away the crowd of pale, hideous, and sinful phantoms, that
have gained admittance there since her departure? Or will she,
likewise, fade, sicken, sadden, and grow into deformity, and be only
another pallid phantom, to glide noiselessly up and down the stairs,
and affright children as she pauses at the window?
At least, we would gladly forewarn the unsuspecting girl that there is
nothing in human shape or substance to receive her, unless it be the
figure of Judge Pyncheon, who--wretched spectacle that he is, and
frightful in our remembrance, since our night-long vigil with
him!--still keeps his place in the oaken chair.
Phoebe first tried the shop-door. It did not yield to her hand; and
the white curtain, drawn across the window which formed the upper
section of the door, struck her quick perceptive faculty as something
unusual. Without making another effort to enter here, she betook
herself to the great portal, under the arched window. Finding it
fastened, she knocked. A reverberation came from the emptiness within.
She knocked again, and a third time; and, listening intently, fancied
that the floor creaked, as if Hepzibah were coming, with her ordinary
tiptoe movement, to admit her. But so dead a silence ensued upon this
imaginary sound, that she began to question whether she might not have
mistaken the house, familiar as she thought herself with its exterior.
Her notice was now attracted by a child's voice, at some distance. It
appeared to call her name. Looking in the direction whence it
proceeded, Phoebe saw little Ned Higgins, a good way down the street,
stamping, shaking his head violently, making deprecatory gestures with
both hands, and shouting to her at mouth-wide screech.
"No, no, Phoebe!" he screamed. "Don't you go in! There's something
wicked there! Don't--don't--don't go in!"
But, as the little personage could not be induced to approach near
enough to explain himself, Phoebe concluded that he had been
frightened, on some of his visits to the shop, by her cousin Hepzibah;
for the good lady's manifestations, in truth, ran about an equal chance
of scaring children out of their wits, or compelling them to unseemly
laughter. Still, she felt the more, for this incident, how
unaccountably silent and impenetrable the house had become. As her
next resort, Phoebe made her way into the garden, where on so warm and
bright a day as the present, she had little doubt of finding Clifford,
and perhaps Hepzibah also, idling away the noontide in the shadow of
the arbor. Immediately on her entering the garden gate, the family of
hens half ran, half flew to meet her; while a strange grimalkin, which
was prowling under the parlor window, took to his heels, clambered
hastily over the fence, and vanished. The arbor was vacant, and its
floor, table, and circular bench were still damp, and bestrewn with
twigs and the disarray of the past storm. The growth of the garden
seemed to have got quite out of bounds; the weeds had taken advantage
of Phoebe's absence, and the long-continued rain, to run rampant over
the flowers and kitchen-vegetables. Maule's well had overflowed its
stone border, and made a pool of formidable breadth in that corner of
the garden.
The impression of the whole scene was that of a spot where no human
foot had left its print for many preceding days,--probably not since
Phoebe's departure,--for she saw a side-comb of her own under the table
of the arbor, where it must have fallen on the last afternoon when she
and Clifford sat there.
The girl knew that her two relatives were capable of far greater
oddities than that of shutting themselves up in their old house, as
they appeared now to have done. Nevertheless, with indistinct
misgivings of something amiss, and apprehensions to which she could not
give shape, she approached the door that formed the customary
communication between the house and garden. It was secured within,
like the two which she had already tried. She knocked, however; and
immediately, as if the application had been expected, the door was
drawn open, by a considerable exertion of some unseen person's
strength, not wide, but far enough to afford her a sidelong entrance.
As Hepzibah, in order not to expose herself to inspection from without,
invariably opened a door in this manner, Phoebe necessarily concluded
that it was her cousin who now admitted her.
Without hesitation, therefore, she stepped across the threshold, and
had no sooner entered than the door closed behind her.
| Uncle Venner is the first person awake the morning after the storm. Everything looks clean and refreshed, even the House of the Seven Gables. The most eye-catching thing about the whole house is the full bloom of Alice's Posies, the flowers sown by Alice Pyncheon so many years before. Uncle Venner stops by the House of the Seven Gables for scraps to feed his pig. He's surprised that Hepzibah hasn't left him anything. Mr. Holgrave sees Uncle Venner at the gate. Uncle Venner explains that no one is up yet. He asks if the wind kept Mr. Holgrave up the night before. Mr. Holgrave replies, "If I were a believer in ghosts I should have concluded that all the old Pyncheons were running riot in the lower rooms" . But it's all very quiet now. Uncle Venner mentions that he saw Judge Pyncheon in the shop the day before. Uncle Venner suggests that Mr. Holgrave pick one of Alice's Posies and keep it in water until Phoebe comes back. Mr. Holgrave agrees that the water of Maule's well suits Alice's Posies the best. Uncle Venner goes on his way. The next visitor is an angry housewife, Mrs. Gubbins. She wants to buy half a pound of pork. A neighbor across the street tells her not to bother: nobody's home. Well, that's too bad, says the neighbor across the way - both Hepzibah and Clifford have gone off with Judge Pyncheon. Mrs. Gubbins thinks that's unlikely: everyone knows that Hepzibah and Judge Pyncheon have had a falling out, and that's why Hepzibah is so poor. The neighbor claims only a blood relative like Judge Pyncheon would bother to help out dreadful Hepzibah and Clifford. Mrs. Gubbins stalks off. Ned Higgins goes up the street on his way to school and stops to buy a cookie. He bangs on the door because he wants "an elephant!" . The little brat almost throws a stone through the window, but a passerby stops him in time. Ned sobs, "They won't open the door; and I can't get my elephant!" . The man sends Ned off to school. The man then turns to his friend Dixey and wonders what has happened to the Pyncheons. It's odd because Judge Pyncheon - who is a man of very regular habits - didn't come home the night before. Dixey thinks Judge Pyncheon will be fine. He speculates that Hepzibah has gotten into debt and run off. Several delivery people stop by throughout the morning but they get no answer at the door. The butcher peeps through the window and sees someone sitting down in the parlor. He thinks it's Clifford ignoring the doorbell and drives off in a snit. The man with the barrel-organ and the monkey stops to play outside of the house. A crowd of children collect. They argue over whether anyone is home. The man with the barrel-organ keeps playing, hoping to catch a glimpse of Phoebe or Clifford. The children finally get bored and tell him to go along. Two men passing by tell the barrel-organ player to be quiet. One of them says the Pyncheons will be wanting no music: "it is reported all over town that Judge Pyncheon, who owns the house, has been murdered So be off with you, at once!" The barrel-organ player finds a card on the doorstep. It belonged to Judge Pyncheon and has a bunch of appointments written on the back. Dixey decides they have to bring the card to the city marshal. Dixey thinks Clifford "may have been up at his old tricks" - in other words, that he and Hepzibah have killed Judge Pyncheon. The children run off in fright, but they start daring each other to run past the House of the Seven Gables. They think they can see Clifford and Hepzibah scowling at them from the windows. Half an hour later, a cab stops at the door. It's Phoebe! She's back! Ned Higgins screams at her not to go inside. Ned Higgins thinks there's "something wicked there!" . The doors are locked, so Phoebe goes around to the garden. She sees that the storm has made Maule's well overflow. Phoebe starts to feel slightly nervous. The side door swings open and Phoebe walks inside. The door swings shut behind her. | summary |
PHOEBE, coming so suddenly from the sunny daylight, was altogether
bedimmed in such density of shadow as lurked in most of the passages of
the old house. She was not at first aware by whom she had been
admitted. Before her eyes had adapted themselves to the obscurity, a
hand grasped her own with a firm but gentle and warm pressure, thus
imparting a welcome which caused her heart to leap and thrill with an
indefinable shiver of enjoyment. She felt herself drawn along, not
towards the parlor, but into a large and unoccupied apartment, which
had formerly been the grand reception-room of the Seven Gables. The
sunshine came freely into all the uncurtained windows of this room, and
fell upon the dusty floor; so that Phoebe now clearly saw--what,
indeed, had been no secret, after the encounter of a warm hand with
hers--that it was not Hepzibah nor Clifford, but Holgrave, to whom she
owed her reception. The subtile, intuitive communication, or, rather,
the vague and formless impression of something to be told, had made her
yield unresistingly to his impulse. Without taking away her hand, she
looked eagerly in his face, not quick to forebode evil, but unavoidably
conscious that the state of the family had changed since her departure,
and therefore anxious for an explanation.
The artist looked paler than ordinary; there was a thoughtful and
severe contraction of his forehead, tracing a deep, vertical line
between the eyebrows. His smile, however, was full of genuine warmth,
and had in it a joy, by far the most vivid expression that Phoebe had
ever witnessed, shining out of the New England reserve with which
Holgrave habitually masked whatever lay near his heart. It was the
look wherewith a man, brooding alone over some fearful object, in a
dreary forest or illimitable desert, would recognize the familiar
aspect of his dearest friend, bringing up all the peaceful ideas that
belong to home, and the gentle current of every-day affairs. And yet,
as he felt the necessity of responding to her look of inquiry, the
smile disappeared.
"I ought not to rejoice that you have come, Phoebe," said he. "We meet
at a strange moment!"
"What has happened!" she exclaimed. "Why is the house so deserted?
Where are Hepzibah and Clifford?"
"Gone! I cannot imagine where they are!" answered Holgrave. "We are
alone in the house!"
"Hepzibah and Clifford gone?" cried Phoebe. "It is not possible! And
why have you brought me into this room, instead of the parlor? Ah,
something terrible has happened! I must run and see!"
"No, no, Phoebe!" said Holgrave holding her back. "It is as I have
told you. They are gone, and I know not whither. A terrible event
has, indeed happened, but not to them, nor, as I undoubtingly believe,
through any agency of theirs. If I read your character rightly,
Phoebe," he continued, fixing his eyes on hers with stern anxiety,
intermixed with tenderness, "gentle as you are, and seeming to have
your sphere among common things, you yet possess remarkable strength.
You have wonderful poise, and a faculty which, when tested, will prove
itself capable of dealing with matters that fall far out of the
ordinary rule."
"Oh, no, I am very weak!" replied Phoebe, trembling. "But tell me what
has happened!"
"You are strong!" persisted Holgrave. "You must be both strong and
wise; for I am all astray, and need your counsel. It may be you can
suggest the one right thing to do!"
"Tell me!--tell me!" said Phoebe, all in a tremble. "It oppresses,--it
terrifies me,--this mystery! Anything else I can bear!"
The artist hesitated. Notwithstanding what he had just said, and most
sincerely, in regard to the self-balancing power with which Phoebe
impressed him, it still seemed almost wicked to bring the awful secret
of yesterday to her knowledge. It was like dragging a hideous shape of
death into the cleanly and cheerful space before a household fire,
where it would present all the uglier aspect, amid the decorousness of
everything about it. Yet it could not be concealed from her; she must
needs know it.
"Phoebe," said he, "do you remember this?" He put into her hand a
daguerreotype; the same that he had shown her at their first interview
in the garden, and which so strikingly brought out the hard and
relentless traits of the original.
"What has this to do with Hepzibah and Clifford?" asked Phoebe, with
impatient surprise that Holgrave should so trifle with her at such a
moment. "It is Judge Pyncheon! You have shown it to me before!"
"But here is the same face, taken within this half-hour" said the
artist, presenting her with another miniature. "I had just finished it
when I heard you at the door."
"This is death!" shuddered Phoebe, turning very pale. "Judge Pyncheon
dead!"
"Such as there represented," said Holgrave, "he sits in the next room.
The Judge is dead, and Clifford and Hepzibah have vanished! I know no
more. All beyond is conjecture. On returning to my solitary chamber,
last evening, I noticed no light, either in the parlor, or Hepzibah's
room, or Clifford's; no stir nor footstep about the house. This
morning, there was the same death-like quiet. From my window, I
overheard the testimony of a neighbor, that your relatives were seen
leaving the house in the midst of yesterday's storm. A rumor reached
me, too, of Judge Pyncheon being missed. A feeling which I cannot
describe--an indefinite sense of some catastrophe, or
consummation--impelled me to make my way into this part of the house,
where I discovered what you see. As a point of evidence that may be
useful to Clifford, and also as a memorial valuable to myself,--for,
Phoebe, there are hereditary reasons that connect me strangely with
that man's fate,--I used the means at my disposal to preserve this
pictorial record of Judge Pyncheon's death."
Even in her agitation, Phoebe could not help remarking the calmness of
Holgrave's demeanor. He appeared, it is true, to feel the whole
awfulness of the Judge's death, yet had received the fact into his mind
without any mixture of surprise, but as an event preordained, happening
inevitably, and so fitting itself into past occurrences that it could
almost have been prophesied.
"Why have you not thrown open the doors, and called in witnesses?"
inquired she with a painful shudder. "It is terrible to be here alone!"
"But Clifford!" suggested the artist. "Clifford and Hepzibah! We must
consider what is best to be done in their behalf. It is a wretched
fatality that they should have disappeared! Their flight will throw the
worst coloring over this event of which it is susceptible. Yet how
easy is the explanation, to those who know them! Bewildered and
terror-stricken by the similarity of this death to a former one, which
was attended with such disastrous consequences to Clifford, they have
had no idea but of removing themselves from the scene. How miserably
unfortunate! Had Hepzibah but shrieked aloud,--had Clifford flung wide
the door, and proclaimed Judge Pyncheon's death,--it would have been,
however awful in itself, an event fruitful of good consequences to
them. As I view it, it would have gone far towards obliterating the
black stain on Clifford's character."
"And how," asked Phoebe, "could any good come from what is so very
dreadful?"
"Because," said the artist, "if the matter can be fairly considered and
candidly interpreted, it must be evident that Judge Pyncheon could not
have come unfairly to his end. This mode of death had been an
idiosyncrasy with his family, for generations past; not often
occurring, indeed, but, when it does occur, usually attacking
individuals about the Judge's time of life, and generally in the
tension of some mental crisis, or, perhaps, in an access of wrath. Old
Maule's prophecy was probably founded on a knowledge of this physical
predisposition in the Pyncheon race. Now, there is a minute and almost
exact similarity in the appearances connected with the death that
occurred yesterday and those recorded of the death of Clifford's uncle
thirty years ago. It is true, there was a certain arrangement of
circumstances, unnecessary to be recounted, which made it possible nay,
as men look at these things, probable, or even certain--that old
Jaffrey Pyncheon came to a violent death, and by Clifford's hands."
"Whence came those circumstances?" exclaimed Phoebe. "He being
innocent, as we know him to be!"
"They were arranged," said Holgrave,--"at least such has long been my
conviction,--they were arranged after the uncle's death, and before it
was made public, by the man who sits in yonder parlor. His own death,
so like that former one, yet attended by none of those suspicious
circumstances, seems the stroke of God upon him, at once a punishment
for his wickedness, and making plain the innocence of Clifford. But
this flight,--it distorts everything! He may be in concealment, near at
hand. Could we but bring him back before the discovery of the Judge's
death, the evil might be rectified."
"We must not hide this thing a moment longer!" said Phoebe. "It is
dreadful to keep it so closely in our hearts. Clifford is innocent.
God will make it manifest! Let us throw open the doors, and call all
the neighborhood to see the truth!"
"You are right, Phoebe," rejoined Holgrave. "Doubtless you are right."
Yet the artist did not feel the horror, which was proper to Phoebe's
sweet and order-loving character, at thus finding herself at issue with
society, and brought in contact with an event that transcended ordinary
rules. Neither was he in haste, like her, to betake himself within the
precincts of common life. On the contrary, he gathered a wild
enjoyment,--as it were, a flower of strange beauty, growing in a
desolate spot, and blossoming in the wind,--such a flower of momentary
happiness he gathered from his present position. It separated Phoebe
and himself from the world, and bound them to each other, by their
exclusive knowledge of Judge Pyncheon's mysterious death, and the
counsel which they were forced to hold respecting it. The secret, so
long as it should continue such, kept them within the circle of a
spell, a solitude in the midst of men, a remoteness as entire as that
of an island in mid-ocean; once divulged, the ocean would flow betwixt
them, standing on its widely sundered shores. Meanwhile, all the
circumstances of their situation seemed to draw them together; they
were like two children who go hand in hand, pressing closely to one
another's side, through a shadow-haunted passage. The image of awful
Death, which filled the house, held them united by his stiffened grasp.
These influences hastened the development of emotions that might not
otherwise have flowered so. Possibly, indeed, it had been Holgrave's
purpose to let them die in their undeveloped germs. "Why do we delay
so?" asked Phoebe. "This secret takes away my breath! Let us throw
open the doors!"
"In all our lives there can never come another moment like this!" said
Holgrave. "Phoebe, is it all terror?--nothing but terror? Are you
conscious of no joy, as I am, that has made this the only point of life
worth living for?"
"It seems a sin," replied Phoebe, trembling, "to think of joy at such a
time!"
"Could you but know, Phoebe, how it was with me the hour before you
came!" exclaimed the artist. "A dark, cold, miserable hour! The
presence of yonder dead man threw a great black shadow over everything;
he made the universe, so far as my perception could reach, a scene of
guilt and of retribution more dreadful than the guilt. The sense of it
took away my youth. I never hoped to feel young again! The world
looked strange, wild, evil, hostile; my past life, so lonesome and
dreary; my future, a shapeless gloom, which I must mould into gloomy
shapes! But, Phoebe, you crossed the threshold; and hope, warmth, and
joy came in with you! The black moment became at once a blissful one.
It must not pass without the spoken word. I love you!"
"How can you love a simple girl like me?" asked Phoebe, compelled by
his earnestness to speak. "You have many, many thoughts, with which I
should try in vain to sympathize. And I,--I, too,--I have tendencies
with which you would sympathize as little. That is less matter. But I
have not scope enough to make you happy."
"You are my only possibility of happiness!" answered Holgrave. "I have
no faith in it, except as you bestow it on me!"
"And then--I am afraid!" continued Phoebe, shrinking towards Holgrave,
even while she told him so frankly the doubts with which he affected
her. "You will lead me out of my own quiet path. You will make me
strive to follow you where it is pathless. I cannot do so. It is not
my nature. I shall sink down and perish!"
"Ah, Phoebe!" exclaimed Holgrave, with almost a sigh, and a smile that
was burdened with thought.
"It will be far otherwise than as you forebode. The world owes all its
onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines
himself within ancient limits. I have a presentiment that, hereafter,
it will be my lot to set out trees, to make fences,--perhaps, even, in
due time, to build a house for another generation,--in a word, to
conform myself to laws and the peaceful practice of society. Your
poise will be more powerful than any oscillating tendency of mine."
"I would not have it so!" said Phoebe earnestly.
"Do you love me?" asked Holgrave. "If we love one another, the moment
has room for nothing more. Let us pause upon it, and be satisfied. Do
you love me, Phoebe?"
"You look into my heart," said she, letting her eyes drop. "You know I
love you!"
And it was in this hour, so full of doubt and awe, that the one miracle
was wrought, without which every human existence is a blank. The bliss
which makes all things true, beautiful, and holy shone around this
youth and maiden. They were conscious of nothing sad nor old. They
transfigured the earth, and made it Eden again, and themselves the two
first dwellers in it. The dead man, so close beside them, was
forgotten. At such a crisis, there is no death; for immortality is
revealed anew, and embraces everything in its hallowed atmosphere.
But how soon the heavy earth-dream settled down again!
"Hark!" whispered Phoebe. "Somebody is at the street door!"
"Now let us meet the world!" said Holgrave. "No doubt, the rumor of
Judge Pyncheon's visit to this house, and the flight of Hepzibah and
Clifford, is about to lead to the investigation of the premises. We
have no way but to meet it. Let us open the door at once."
But, to their surprise, before they could reach the street door,--even
before they quitted the room in which the foregoing interview had
passed,--they heard footsteps in the farther passage. The door,
therefore, which they supposed to be securely locked,--which Holgrave,
indeed, had seen to be so, and at which Phoebe had vainly tried to
enter,--must have been opened from without. The sound of footsteps was
not harsh, bold, decided, and intrusive, as the gait of strangers would
naturally be, making authoritative entrance into a dwelling where they
knew themselves unwelcome. It was feeble, as of persons either weak or
weary; there was the mingled murmur of two voices, familiar to both the
listeners.
"Can it be?" whispered Holgrave.
"It is they!" answered Phoebe. "Thank God!--thank God!"
And then, as if in sympathy with Phoebe's whispered ejaculation, they
heard Hepzibah's voice more distinctly.
"Thank God, my brother, we are at home!"
"Well!--Yes!--thank God!" responded Clifford. "A dreary home,
Hepzibah! But you have done well to bring me hither! Stay! That parlor
door is open. I cannot pass by it! Let me go and rest me in the arbor,
where I used,--oh, very long ago, it seems to me, after what has
befallen us,--where I used to be so happy with little Phoebe!"
But the house was not altogether so dreary as Clifford imagined it.
They had not made many steps,--in truth, they were lingering in the
entry, with the listlessness of an accomplished purpose, uncertain what
to do next,--when Phoebe ran to meet them. On beholding her, Hepzibah
burst into tears. With all her might, she had staggered onward beneath
the burden of grief and responsibility, until now that it was safe to
fling it down. Indeed, she had not energy to fling it down, but had
ceased to uphold it, and suffered it to press her to the earth.
Clifford appeared the stronger of the two.
"It is our own little Phoebe!--Ah! and Holgrave with, her" exclaimed
he, with a glance of keen and delicate insight, and a smile, beautiful,
kind, but melancholy. "I thought of you both, as we came down the
street, and beheld Alice's Posies in full bloom. And so the flower of
Eden has bloomed, likewise, in this old, darksome house to-day."
| At first Phoebe can't see in the sudden dark of the house. She feels a hand drawing her into the grand reception room. She sees that it's Mr. Holgrave who has brought her inside. He looks paler than usual, but his smile is full of a rare warmth. Phoebe asks what has happened to Hepzibah and Clifford. Mr. Holgrave the two of them are all alone in the house. He hesitates to tell Phoebe what has happened. First he shows her the old photograph of Judge Pyncheon. Then he shows her another photograph he took half an hour before of Judge Pyncheon's dead face. Mr. Holgrave explains that throughout the day he has been overhearing rumors from passersby about Judge Pyncheon and Clifford. So he went down into the main part of the house to investigate. That's when he found Judge Pyncheon's body. And that's when he decided to photograph it as a form of evidence in case it could help Clifford. Phoebe wonders why he hasn't brought in help from outside. Mr. Holgrave thinks that would look very bad for Clifford and Hepzibah, who seem to have fled the scene. Indeed, Mr. Holgrave thinks it would have been better for Clifford's reputation if they had just brought in help. After all, it's clear that Judge Pyncheon has not died from violence. It's just a hereditary ailment that seems to affect the Pyncheon family - "usually attacking individuals about the Judge's time of life, and generally in the tension of some mental crisis" . Mr. Holgrave suspects that Matthew Maule knew about this genetic problem, which is why he framed his curse the way he did. Mr. Holgrave believes that Clifford's uncle's death happened in exactly the same way 30 years earlier. But after Clifford's Uncle Jaffrey's death, someone appears to have arranged the scene to make it look like Clifford killed the man. The person who framed Clifford was, of course, Judge Pyncheon. If Clifford comes back to the House of the Seven Gables before Judge Pyncheon's body is found, then they could prove that Judge Pyncheon died of natural causes, and Uncle Jaffrey Pyncheon's death many years earlier was by the same means and thus also natural. Otherwise, it'll look like Clifford killed both Judge Pyncheon and his Uncle Jaffrey Pyncheon. Phoebe says, "Clifford is innocent. God will make it manifest!" . She insists that they have to tell the neighborhood what has happened right now. Mr. Holgrave agrees, but he stalls for a few moments. Mr. Holgrave is enjoying the fact that he and Phoebe are the only two people in the world who know this secret. He feels joy that the two of them are together in this dark business. Mr. Holgrave seizes the moment to tell Phoebe that he loves her! Phoebe is afraid that Mr. Holgrave will expect her to live too far outside of society for her comfort. Mr. Holgrave promises that in the future he is going to start settling down. Phoebe admits, "You look into my heart You know I love you!" . At this happy moment, Mr. Holgrave and Phoebe forget everything sad - even the dead guy in the next room. That is, until they both hear footsteps at the front door. It's Clifford and Hepzibah - they're back! As soon as Hepzibah sees Phoebe she bursts into tears. Clifford is delighted to see Phoebe and Mr. Holgrave, even back in this dark, dreary house. | summary |
THE sudden death of so prominent a member of the social world as the
Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a sensation (at least, in the
circles more immediately connected with the deceased) which had hardly
quite subsided in a fortnight.
It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which constitute a
person's biography, there is scarcely one--none, certainly, of anything
like a similar importance--to which the world so easily reconciles
itself as to his death. In most other cases and contingencies, the
individual is present among us, mixed up with the daily revolution of
affairs, and affording a definite point for observation. At his
decease, there is only a vacancy, and a momentary eddy,--very small, as
compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated object,--and a
bubble or two, ascending out of the black depth and bursting at the
surface. As regarded Judge Pyncheon, it seemed probable, at first
blush, that the mode of his final departure might give him a larger and
longer posthumous vogue than ordinarily attends the memory of a
distinguished man. But when it came to be understood, on the highest
professional authority, that the event was a natural, and--except for
some unimportant particulars, denoting a slight idiosyncrasy--by no
means an unusual form of death, the public, with its customary
alacrity, proceeded to forget that he had ever lived. In short, the
honorable Judge was beginning to be a stale subject before half the
country newspapers had found time to put their columns in mourning, and
publish his exceedingly eulogistic obituary.
Nevertheless, creeping darkly through the places which this excellent
person had haunted in his lifetime, there was a hidden stream of
private talk, such as it would have shocked all decency to speak loudly
at the street-corners. It is very singular, how the fact of a man's
death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether
for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and
acting among them. Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes
falsehood, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the
gold, and dishonors the baser metal. Could the departed, whoever he
may be, return in a week after his decease, he would almost invariably
find himself at a higher or lower point than he had formerly occupied,
on the scale of public appreciation. But the talk, or scandal, to
which we now allude, had reference to matters of no less old a date
than the supposed murder, thirty or forty years ago, of the late Judge
Pyncheon's uncle. The medical opinion with regard to his own recent
and regretted decease had almost entirely obviated the idea that a
murder was committed in the former case. Yet, as the record showed,
there were circumstances irrefragably indicating that some person had
gained access to old Jaffrey Pyncheon's private apartments, at or near
the moment of his death. His desk and private drawers, in a room
contiguous to his bedchamber, had been ransacked; money and valuable
articles were missing; there was a bloody hand-print on the old man's
linen; and, by a powerfully welded chain of deductive evidence, the
guilt of the robbery and apparent murder had been fixed on Clifford,
then residing with his uncle in the House of the Seven Gables.
Whencesoever originating, there now arose a theory that undertook so to
account for these circumstances as to exclude the idea of Clifford's
agency. Many persons affirmed that the history and elucidation of the
facts, long so mysterious, had been obtained by the daguerreotypist
from one of those mesmerical seers who, nowadays, so strangely perplex
the aspect of human affairs, and put everybody's natural vision to the
blush, by the marvels which they see with their eyes shut.
According to this version of the story, Judge Pyncheon, exemplary as we
have portrayed him in our narrative, was, in his youth, an apparently
irreclaimable scapegrace. The brutish, the animal instincts, as is
often the case, had been developed earlier than the intellectual
qualities, and the force of character, for which he was afterwards
remarkable. He had shown himself wild, dissipated, addicted to low
pleasures, little short of ruffianly in his propensities, and
recklessly expensive, with no other resources than the bounty of his
uncle. This course of conduct had alienated the old bachelor's
affection, once strongly fixed upon him. Now it is averred,--but
whether on authority available in a court of justice, we do not pretend
to have investigated,--that the young man was tempted by the devil, one
night, to search his uncle's private drawers, to which he had
unsuspected means of access. While thus criminally occupied, he was
startled by the opening of the chamber-door. There stood old Jaffrey
Pyncheon, in his nightclothes! The surprise of such a discovery, his
agitation, alarm, and horror, brought on the crisis of a disorder to
which the old bachelor had an hereditary liability; he seemed to choke
with blood, and fell upon the floor, striking his temple a heavy blow
against the corner of a table. What was to be done? The old man was
surely dead! Assistance would come too late! What a misfortune, indeed,
should it come too soon, since his reviving consciousness would bring
the recollection of the ignominious offence which he had beheld his
nephew in the very act of committing!
But he never did revive. With the cool hardihood that always pertained
to him, the young man continued his search of the drawers, and found a
will, of recent date, in favor of Clifford,--which he destroyed,--and
an older one, in his own favor, which he suffered to remain. But
before retiring, Jaffrey bethought himself of the evidence, in these
ransacked drawers, that some one had visited the chamber with sinister
purposes. Suspicion, unless averted, might fix upon the real offender.
In the very presence of the dead man, therefore, he laid a scheme that
should free himself at the expense of Clifford, his rival, for whose
character he had at once a contempt and a repugnance. It is not
probable, be it said, that he acted with any set purpose of involving
Clifford in a charge of murder. Knowing that his uncle did not die by
violence, it may not have occurred to him, in the hurry of the crisis,
that such an inference might be drawn. But, when the affair took this
darker aspect, Jaffrey's previous steps had already pledged him to
those which remained. So craftily had he arranged the circumstances,
that, at Clifford's trial, his cousin hardly found it necessary to
swear to anything false, but only to withhold the one decisive
explanation, by refraining to state what he had himself done and
witnessed.
Thus Jaffrey Pyncheon's inward criminality, as regarded Clifford, was,
indeed, black and damnable; while its mere outward show and positive
commission was the smallest that could possibly consist with so great a
sin. This is just the sort of guilt that a man of eminent
respectability finds it easiest to dispose of. It was suffered to fade
out of sight or be reckoned a venial matter, in the Honorable Judge
Pyncheon's long subsequent survey of his own life. He shuffled it
aside, among the forgotten and forgiven frailties of his youth, and
seldom thought of it again.
We leave the Judge to his repose. He could not be styled fortunate at
the hour of death. Unknowingly, he was a childless man, while striving
to add more wealth to his only child's inheritance. Hardly a week
after his decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of
the death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheon's son, just at the point of
embarkation for his native land. By this misfortune Clifford became
rich; so did Hepzibah; so did our little village maiden, and, through
her, that sworn foe of wealth and all manner of conservatism,--the wild
reformer,--Holgrave!
It was now far too late in Clifford's life for the good opinion of
society to be worth the trouble and anguish of a formal vindication.
What he needed was the love of a very few; not the admiration, or even
the respect, of the unknown many. The latter might probably have been
won for him, had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had
fallen deemed it advisable to expose Clifford to a miserable
resuscitation of past ideas, when the condition of whatever comfort he
might expect lay in the calm of forgetfulness. After such wrong as he
had suffered, there is no reparation. The pitiable mockery of it,
which the world might have been ready enough to offer, coming so long
after the agony had done its utmost work, would have been fit only to
provoke bitterer laughter than poor Clifford was ever capable of. It
is a truth (and it would be a very sad one but for the higher hopes
which it suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in
our mortal sphere, is ever really set right. Time, the continual
vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of
death, render it impossible. If, after long lapse of years, the right
seems to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in. The better
remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought
his irreparable ruin far behind him.
The shock of Judge Pyncheon's death had a permanently invigorating and
ultimately beneficial effect on Clifford. That strong and ponderous
man had been Clifford's nightmare. There was no free breath to be
drawn, within the sphere of so malevolent an influence. The first
effect of freedom, as we have witnessed in Clifford's aimless flight,
was a tremulous exhilaration. Subsiding from it, he did not sink into
his former intellectual apathy. He never, it is true, attained to
nearly the full measure of what might have been his faculties. But he
recovered enough of them partially to light up his character, to
display some outline of the marvellous grace that was abortive in it,
and to make him the object of no less deep, although less melancholy
interest than heretofore. He was evidently happy. Could we pause to
give another picture of his daily life, with all the appliances now at
command to gratify his instinct for the Beautiful, the garden scenes,
that seemed so sweet to him, would look mean and trivial in comparison.
Very soon after their change of fortune, Clifford, Hepzibah, and little
Phoebe, with the approval of the artist, concluded to remove from the
dismal old House of the Seven Gables, and take up their abode, for the
present, at the elegant country-seat of the late Judge Pyncheon.
Chanticleer and his family had already been transported thither, where
the two hens had forthwith begun an indefatigable process of
egg-laying, with an evident design, as a matter of duty and conscience,
to continue their illustrious breed under better auspices than for a
century past. On the day set for their departure, the principal
personages of our story, including good Uncle Venner, were assembled in
the parlor.
"The country-house is certainly a very fine one, so far as the plan
goes," observed Holgrave, as the party were discussing their future
arrangements. "But I wonder that the late Judge--being so opulent, and
with a reasonable prospect of transmitting his wealth to descendants of
his own--should not have felt the propriety of embodying so excellent a
piece of domestic architecture in stone, rather than in wood. Then,
every generation of the family might have altered the interior, to suit
its own taste and convenience; while the exterior, through the lapse of
years, might have been adding venerableness to its original beauty, and
thus giving that impression of permanence which I consider essential to
the happiness of any one moment."
"Why," cried Phoebe, gazing into the artist's face with infinite
amazement, "how wonderfully your ideas are changed! A house of stone,
indeed! It is but two or three weeks ago that you seemed to wish people
to live in something as fragile and temporary as a bird's-nest!"
"Ah, Phoebe, I told you how it would be!" said the artist, with a
half-melancholy laugh. "You find me a conservative already! Little
did I think ever to become one. It is especially unpardonable in this
dwelling of so much hereditary misfortune, and under the eye of yonder
portrait of a model conservative, who, in that very character, rendered
himself so long the evil destiny of his race."
"That picture!" said Clifford, seeming to shrink from its stern glance.
"Whenever I look at it, there is an old dreamy recollection haunting
me, but keeping just beyond the grasp of my mind. Wealth, it seems to
say!--boundless wealth!--unimaginable wealth! I could fancy that, when
I was a child, or a youth, that portrait had spoken, and told me a rich
secret, or had held forth its hand, with the written record of hidden
opulence. But those old matters are so dim with me, nowadays! What
could this dream have been?"
"Perhaps I can recall it," answered Holgrave. "See! There are a
hundred chances to one that no person, unacquainted with the secret,
would ever touch this spring."
"A secret spring!" cried Clifford. "Ah, I remember now! I did discover
it, one summer afternoon, when I was idling and dreaming about the
house, long, long ago. But the mystery escapes me."
The artist put his finger on the contrivance to which he had referred.
In former days, the effect would probably have been to cause the
picture to start forward. But, in so long a period of concealment, the
machinery had been eaten through with rust; so that at Holgrave's
pressure, the portrait, frame and all, tumbled suddenly from its
position, and lay face downward on the floor. A recess in the wall was
thus brought to light, in which lay an object so covered with a
century's dust that it could not immediately be recognized as a folded
sheet of parchment. Holgrave opened it, and displayed an ancient deed,
signed with the hieroglyphics of several Indian sagamores, and
conveying to Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs, forever, a vast extent of
territory at the Eastward.
"This is the very parchment, the attempt to recover which cost the
beautiful Alice Pyncheon her happiness and life," said the artist,
alluding to his legend. "It is what the Pyncheons sought in vain,
while it was valuable; and now that they find the treasure, it has long
been worthless."
"Poor Cousin Jaffrey! This is what deceived him," exclaimed Hepzibah.
"When they were young together, Clifford probably made a kind of
fairy-tale of this discovery. He was always dreaming hither and
thither about the house, and lighting up its dark corners with
beautiful stories. And poor Jaffrey, who took hold of everything as if
it were real, thought my brother had found out his uncle's wealth. He
died with this delusion in his mind!"
"But," said Phoebe, apart to Holgrave, "how came you to know the
secret?"
"My dearest Phoebe," said Holgrave, "how will it please you to assume
the name of Maule? As for the secret, it is the only inheritance that
has come down to me from my ancestors. You should have known sooner
(only that I was afraid of frightening you away) that, in this long
drama of wrong and retribution, I represent the old wizard, and am
probably as much a wizard as ever he was. The son of the executed
Matthew Maule, while building this house, took the opportunity to
construct that recess, and hide away the Indian deed, on which depended
the immense land-claim of the Pyncheons. Thus they bartered their
eastern territory for Maule's garden-ground."
"And now" said Uncle Venner "I suppose their whole claim is not worth
one man's share in my farm yonder!"
"Uncle Venner," cried Phoebe, taking the patched philosopher's hand,
"you must never talk any more about your farm! You shall never go
there, as long as you live! There is a cottage in our new garden,--the
prettiest little yellowish-brown cottage you ever saw; and the
sweetest-looking place, for it looks just as if it were made of
gingerbread,--and we are going to fit it up and furnish it, on purpose
for you. And you shall do nothing but what you choose, and shall be as
happy as the day is long, and shall keep Cousin Clifford in spirits
with the wisdom and pleasantness which is always dropping from your
lips!"
"Ah! my dear child," quoth good Uncle Venner, quite overcome, "if you
were to speak to a young man as you do to an old one, his chance of
keeping his heart another minute would not be worth one of the buttons
on my waistcoat! And--soul alive!--that great sigh, which you made me
heave, has burst off the very last of them! But, never mind! It was the
happiest sigh I ever did heave; and it seems as if I must have drawn in
a gulp of heavenly breath, to make it with. Well, well, Miss Phoebe!
They'll miss me in the gardens hereabouts, and round by the back doors;
and Pyncheon Street, I'm afraid, will hardly look the same without old
Uncle Venner, who remembers it with a mowing field on one side, and the
garden of the Seven Gables on the other. But either I must go to your
country-seat, or you must come to my farm,--that's one of two things
certain; and I leave you to choose which!"
"Oh, come with us, by all means, Uncle Venner!" said Clifford, who had
a remarkable enjoyment of the old man's mellow, quiet, and simple
spirit. "I want you always to be within five minutes, saunter of my
chair. You are the only philosopher I ever knew of whose wisdom has
not a drop of bitter essence at the bottom!"
"Dear me!" cried Uncle Venner, beginning partly to realize what manner
of man he was. "And yet folks used to set me down among the simple
ones, in my younger days! But I suppose I am like a Roxbury russet,--a
great deal the better, the longer I can be kept. Yes; and my words of
wisdom, that you and Phoebe tell me of, are like the golden dandelions,
which never grow in the hot months, but may be seen glistening among
the withered grass, and under the dry leaves, sometimes as late as
December. And you are welcome, friends, to my mess of dandelions, if
there were twice as many!"
A plain, but handsome, dark-green barouche had now drawn up in front of
the ruinous portal of the old mansion-house. The party came forth, and
(with the exception of good Uncle Venner, who was to follow in a few
days) proceeded to take their places. They were chatting and laughing
very pleasantly together; and--as proves to be often the case, at
moments when we ought to palpitate with sensibility--Clifford and
Hepzibah bade a final farewell to the abode of their forefathers, with
hardly more emotion than if they had made it their arrangement to
return thither at tea-time. Several children were drawn to the spot by
so unusual a spectacle as the barouche and pair of gray horses.
Recognizing little Ned Higgins among them, Hepzibah put her hand into
her pocket, and presented the urchin, her earliest and staunchest
customer, with silver enough to people the Domdaniel cavern of his
interior with as various a procession of quadrupeds as passed into the
ark.
Two men were passing, just as the barouche drove off.
"Well, Dixey," said one of them, "what do you think of this? My wife
kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay.
Old Maid Pyncheon has been in trade just about as long, and rides off
in her carriage with a couple of hundred thousand,--reckoning her
share, and Clifford's, and Phoebe's,--and some say twice as much! If
you choose to call it luck, it is all very well; but if we are to take
it as the will of Providence, why, I can't exactly fathom it!"
"Pretty good business!" quoth the sagacious Dixey,--"pretty good
business!"
Maule's well, all this time, though left in solitude, was throwing up a
succession of kaleidoscopic pictures, in which a gifted eye might have
seen foreshadowed the coming fortunes of Hepzibah and Clifford, and the
descendant of the legendary wizard, and the village maiden, over whom
he had thrown love's web of sorcery. The Pyncheon Elm, moreover, with
what foliage the September gale had spared to it, whispered
unintelligible prophecies. And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from
the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that
sweet Alice Pyncheon--after witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and
this present happiness, of her kindred mortals--had given one farewell
touch of a spirit's joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward
from the HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES!
| When it becomes public knowledge that Judge Pyncheon died a natural death, people start to think back to the death of Uncle Jaffrey Pyncheon 30 years before. They realize that he must also have died a natural death. But it is nonetheless true that someone got into Uncle Jaffrey Pyncheon's rooms after his death and searched through all of his papers. The evidence seemed to point to Clifford Pyncheon, who was living with Uncle Jaffrey Pyncheon at the time. Now that Judge Pyncheon has died, a new set of rumors crops up. Everyone remembers what a rough, pleasure-loving young man Judge Pyncheon had been. Apparently his bad behavior turned Uncle Jaffrey Pyncheon against his nephew. One night Uncle Jaffrey Pyncheon surprised his criminal nephew in the act of searching through his papers. This surprise may have been what caused Uncle Jaffrey Pyncheon to suffer his fatal stroke. Presented with the dead body of his uncle, young Jaffrey Pyncheon immediately thought about how he could turn this whole situation to his advantage. It was his testimony on the stand that got Clifford Pyncheon sent to jail for 30 years. Now that the Judge has died, there is the question of his fortune. The Judge's only son has died of cholera overseas, so the fortune is being divided evenly between Hepzibah, Clifford, and Phoebe. Everyone has also acknowledged Clifford's innocence. But it's way too late for Clifford to care. He's already lost his whole life to this case. After Judge Pyncheon's death, he does perk up a bit, though. Clifford, Hepzibah, Phoebe, and Mr. Holgrave all decide to leave the House of the Seven Gables. They are going to set up house at Judge Pyncheon's country home. The morning of their departure, they gather in the parlor with Uncle Venner. Clifford looks at the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon and half-remembers some secret he discovered years before. Mr. Holgrave shows him that there is a spring hidden in the portrait. The portrait falls to the floor. There is a hole in the wall behind the portrait. In the hole, there is an ancient deed signed by Native American leaders promising Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs a huge stretch of land to the east. Mr. Holgrave says this is the deed for which Alice Pyncheon sacrificed her life. Hepzibah realizes that this discovery must be what Clifford told Judge Pyncheon about many years ago. This must be what made Judge Pyncheon think Clifford knew the secret to Uncle Jaffrey Pyncheon's hidden wealth. Phoebe asks how Mr. Holgrave came to know of the secret spring. Apparently, Mr. Holgrave is a direct descendent of Matthew Maule! When Thomas Maule built the House of the Seven Gables, he put Colonel Pyncheon's deed into this special hole. Thus, without even knowing it, the Pyncheons exchanged their deed to Maine for Matthew Maule's land. Uncle Venner points out that now their claim isn't worth a thing. Phoebe invites Uncle Venner to come live in a cottage on their new property. He can help keep Clifford's spirits up. Uncle Venner happily agrees. As they leave, Hepzibah presents Ned Higgins with enough silver to buy as many gingerbread animals as he could possibly want. Dixey and his friend comment that this is all "pretty good business" . As the remaining Pyncheons drive away, the harpsichord sends up a few notes. "Sweet Alice Pyncheon" is showing her joy at this present happiness. | summary |
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.
| On one of the side streets of a New England town stands a seven-gabled house with an enormous elm tree before its door. It is the ancestral Pyncheon house, owned by a family with a long tradition. It was built on the site of the house of Matthew Maule. Envious of the fine location, Colonel Pyncheon had helped convict the house's owner of witchcraft and was instrumental in having him hanged. From the gallows, however, Matthew Maule cursed Colonel Pyncheon: "God will give him blood to drink!" Later, on the day that the Colonel opened his new seven-gabled mansion, a hundred sixty years ago, his guests found him dead in his study, his ruff and beard smeared red with blood. Generations of Pyncheons have come and gone, and the family has suffered many sorrows; a claim to an extensive tract of land in Maine remains unsubstantiated; a Pyncheon turned Tory during the Revolution, but he repented in time to save the house from confiscation; and a cousin of the present leading Pyncheon, Judge Jaffrey, has been convicted of murdering his uncle and has been sent to prison. The present inhabitant of the house, Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, has reopened its dusty little cent-shop. The descendants of Maule seem to have disappeared, although one, Matthew's son Thomas, superintended the building of the Pyncheon house, which has a brow-like second story, a murky, sour well, a weedy garden, mossy windows, and flowers in a high nook near the chimney. | summary |
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.
| The opening sentences of this novel are worth noting for their many details. In view of Hawthorne's habit of using only details that are most significant, certain images should be noted here. The novel involves the story of a house that was built by pride and possessed by death on the very day of the housewarming. Thus, the opening description stresses the darkness and angularity of the house and the "wide circumference" of the giant tree that is later said to "overshadow" it. As the house and its inhabitants have decayed, the elm tree has grown almost as though it were nourished by the decay of the Pyncheon family. The once proud prosperity of the Pyncheons has given way to poverty for most of the family and the original injustice of old Colonel Pyncheon has descended as retribution upon the present inhabitants. The elm has grown with each season, but the inhabitants of the house have become stunted. The same things have happened over and over again, but the Pyncheons do not see that retribution has been a continuing curse upon them because their vision is taken up with the more obvious reality of their great house and the social position of which it is a symbol. Consequently, this blindness to reality is presented in Hepzibah's near-sightedness. The house is a setting for the novel, it is a symbol, and it is also a character in the novel; in fact; it is the protagonist in a drama of good and evil. The street is its antagonist. The realization that the house is a "character" is found in a set of images which personify the House of the Seven Gables. The outward appearance of the house, we are told, reminds one of a human face. The interior, especially the great chimney in the center, is repeatedly presented in the novel in terms of heart imagery. There is a certain suggestion in the novel, though, that the humanity and dignity of the house are inseparable from its troubles; this suggestion is found in the contrasting images of light and dark. Although storm and sunshine have constituted the history of the house, the darkness of the ominous storm is prevalent, as "the venerable mansion . . . grew black in the east-wind." This darkness is early foreshadowed. Hawthorne describes how the terror and ugliness of Maule's crime "darkened" the freshly painted walls of the house until it became a gray, feudal castle. The projecting upper stories cast "shadowed frowns"; darkness, in fact, penetrates the house very soon indeed, especially in the character of Colonel Pyncheon, wearing in death "a frown on his dark and massive countenance." Here, from the very beginning of the novel, the dark frown of the house is compared to the dark frown of its many occupants. The Colonel's death is coupled with the mysterious disappearance of the Pyncheon deed and the vast eastern tract of lands and the subsequent obsession of his descendants with their claim to this vast territory in Maine. This becomes an absurd delusion of family importance, an obsession which sets the house and its inhabitants apart from "the street" -- that is, from the society outside the house. Through all the generations, the portrait of the Colonel has brooded over the house, its features seeming to mingle with the sunshine of the passing hour. From the beginning of the novel, we are told that nothing beautiful and "good" will ever grow around the House of the Seven Gables, even though many critics have seen "Alice's posies" as a symbol of renewal. The combination of the light-dark imagery and the growth / non-growth imagery is still seen long after the Colonel's death, when his successor tries to rehabilitate the family. The irony continues as the unlucky descendants of Matthew Maule, long immersed in obscurity and darkness, seem to have disappeared forever. But there is a tradition that "these plebian Maules" have exercised a strange ascendancy over their Pyncheon oppressors in the world of dreams. | analysis |
SUMMER as it was, the east wind set poor Hepzibah's few remaining teeth
chattering in her head, as she and Clifford faced it, on their way up
Pyncheon Street, and towards the centre of the town. Not merely was it
the shiver which this pitiless blast brought to her frame (although her
feet and hands, especially, had never seemed so death-a-cold as now),
but there was a moral sensation, mingling itself with the physical
chill, and causing her to shake more in spirit than in body. The
world's broad, bleak atmosphere was all so comfortless! Such, indeed,
is the impression which it makes on every new adventurer, even if he
plunge into it while the warmest tide of life is bubbling through his
veins. What, then, must it have been to Hepzibah and Clifford,--so
time-stricken as they were, yet so like children in their
inexperience,--as they left the doorstep, and passed from beneath the
wide shelter of the Pyncheon Elm! They were wandering all abroad, on
precisely such a pilgrimage as a child often meditates, to the world's
end, with perhaps a sixpence and a biscuit in his pocket. In
Hepzibah's mind, there was the wretched consciousness of being adrift.
She had lost the faculty of self-guidance; but, in view of the
difficulties around her, felt it hardly worth an effort to regain it,
and was, moreover, incapable of making one.
As they proceeded on their strange expedition, she now and then cast a
look sidelong at Clifford, and could not but observe that he was
possessed and swayed by a powerful excitement. It was this, indeed,
that gave him the control which he had at once, and so irresistibly,
established over his movements. It not a little resembled the
exhilaration of wine. Or, it might more fancifully be compared to a
joyous piece of music, played with wild vivacity, but upon a disordered
instrument. As the cracked jarring note might always be heard, and as
it jarred loudest amidst the loftiest exultation of the melody, so was
there a continual quake through Clifford, causing him most to quiver
while he wore a triumphant smile, and seemed almost under a necessity
to skip in his gait.
They met few people abroad, even on passing from the retired
neighborhood of the House of the Seven Gables into what was ordinarily
the more thronged and busier portion of the town. Glistening
sidewalks, with little pools of rain, here and there, along their
unequal surface; umbrellas displayed ostentatiously in the
shop-windows, as if the life of trade had concentrated itself in that
one article; wet leaves of the horse-chestnut or elm-trees, torn off
untimely by the blast and scattered along the public way; an unsightly,
accumulation of mud in the middle of the street, which perversely grew
the more unclean for its long and laborious washing,--these were the
more definable points of a very sombre picture. In the way of movement
and human life, there was the hasty rattle of a cab or coach, its
driver protected by a waterproof cap over his head and shoulders; the
forlorn figure of an old man, who seemed to have crept out of some
subterranean sewer, and was stooping along the kennel, and poking the
wet rubbish with a stick, in quest of rusty nails; a merchant or two,
at the door of the post-office, together with an editor and a
miscellaneous politician, awaiting a dilatory mail; a few visages of
retired sea-captains at the window of an insurance office, looking out
vacantly at the vacant street, blaspheming at the weather, and fretting
at the dearth as well of public news as local gossip. What a
treasure-trove to these venerable quidnuncs, could they have guessed
the secret which Hepzibah and Clifford were carrying along with them!
But their two figures attracted hardly so much notice as that of a
young girl, who passed at the same instant, and happened to raise her
skirt a trifle too high above her ankles. Had it been a sunny and
cheerful day, they could hardly have gone through the streets without
making themselves obnoxious to remark. Now, probably, they were felt
to be in keeping with the dismal and bitter weather, and therefore did
not stand out in strong relief, as if the sun were shining on them, but
melted into the gray gloom and were forgotten as soon as gone.
Poor Hepzibah! Could she have understood this fact, it would have
brought her some little comfort; for, to all her other
troubles,--strange to say!--there was added the womanish and
old-maiden-like misery arising from a sense of unseemliness in her
attire. Thus, she was fain to shrink deeper into herself, as it were,
as if in the hope of making people suppose that here was only a cloak
and hood, threadbare and woefully faded, taking an airing in the midst
of the storm, without any wearer!
As they went on, the feeling of indistinctness and unreality kept dimly
hovering round about her, and so diffusing itself into her system that
one of her hands was hardly palpable to the touch of the other. Any
certainty would have been preferable to this. She whispered to
herself, again and again, "Am I awake?--Am I awake?" and sometimes
exposed her face to the chill spatter of the wind, for the sake of its
rude assurance that she was. Whether it was Clifford's purpose, or
only chance, had led them thither, they now found themselves passing
beneath the arched entrance of a large structure of gray stone.
Within, there was a spacious breadth, and an airy height from floor to
roof, now partially filled with smoke and steam, which eddied
voluminously upward and formed a mimic cloud-region over their heads.
A train of cars was just ready for a start; the locomotive was fretting
and fuming, like a steed impatient for a headlong rush; and the bell
rang out its hasty peal, so well expressing the brief summons which
life vouchsafes to us in its hurried career. Without question or
delay,--with the irresistible decision, if not rather to be called
recklessness, which had so strangely taken possession of him, and
through him of Hepzibah,--Clifford impelled her towards the cars, and
assisted her to enter. The signal was given; the engine puffed forth
its short, quick breaths; the train began its movement; and, along with
a hundred other passengers, these two unwonted travellers sped onward
like the wind.
At last, therefore, and after so long estrangement from everything that
the world acted or enjoyed, they had been drawn into the great current
of human life, and were swept away with it, as by the suction of fate
itself.
Still haunted with the idea that not one of the past incidents,
inclusive of Judge Pyncheon's visit, could be real, the recluse of the
Seven Gables murmured in her brother's ear,--
"Clifford! Clifford! Is not this a dream?"
"A dream, Hepzibah!" repeated he, almost laughing in her face. "On the
contrary, I have never been awake before!"
Meanwhile, looking from the window, they could see the world racing
past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the
next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it
had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of
meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the
broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its
age-long rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to
their own.
Within the car there was the usual interior life of the railroad,
offering little to the observation of other passengers, but full of
novelty for this pair of strangely enfranchised prisoners. It was
novelty enough, indeed, that there were fifty human beings in close
relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by
the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its
grasp. It seemed marvellous how all these people could remain so
quietly in their seats, while so much noisy strength was at work in
their behalf. Some, with tickets in their hats (long travellers these,
before whom lay a hundred miles of railroad), had plunged into the
English scenery and adventures of pamphlet novels, and were keeping
company with dukes and earls. Others, whose briefer span forbade their
devoting themselves to studies so abstruse, beguiled the little tedium
of the way with penny-papers. A party of girls, and one young man, on
opposite sides of the car, found huge amusement in a game of ball.
They tossed it to and fro, with peals of laughter that might be
measured by mile-lengths; for, faster than the nimble ball could fly,
the merry players fled unconsciously along, leaving the trail of their
mirth afar behind, and ending their game under another sky than had
witnessed its commencement. Boys, with apples, cakes, candy, and rolls
of variously tinctured lozenges,--merchandise that reminded Hepzibah of
her deserted shop,--appeared at each momentary stopping-place, doing up
their business in a hurry, or breaking it short off, lest the market
should ravish them away with it. New people continually entered. Old
acquaintances--for such they soon grew to be, in this rapid current of
affairs--continually departed. Here and there, amid the rumble and the
tumult, sat one asleep. Sleep; sport; business; graver or lighter
study; and the common and inevitable movement onward! It was life
itself!
Clifford's naturally poignant sympathies were all aroused. He caught
the color of what was passing about him, and threw it back more vividly
than he received it, but mixed, nevertheless, with a lurid and
portentous hue. Hepzibah, on the other hand, felt herself more apart
from human kind than even in the seclusion which she had just quitted.
"You are not happy, Hepzibah!" said Clifford apart, in a tone of
approach. "You are thinking of that dismal old house, and of Cousin
Jaffrey"--here came the quake through him,--"and of Cousin Jaffrey
sitting there, all by himself! Take my advice,--follow my example,--and
let such things slip aside. Here we are, in the world, Hepzibah!--in
the midst of life!--in the throng of our fellow beings! Let you and I
be happy! As happy as that youth and those pretty girls, at their game
of ball!"
"Happy--" thought Hepzibah, bitterly conscious, at the word, of her
dull and heavy heart, with the frozen pain in it,--"happy. He is mad
already; and, if I could once feel myself broad awake, I should go mad
too!"
If a fixed idea be madness, she was perhaps not remote from it. Fast
and far as they had rattled and clattered along the iron track, they
might just as well, as regarded Hepzibah's mental images, have been
passing up and down Pyncheon Street. With miles and miles of varied
scenery between, there was no scene for her save the seven old
gable-peaks, with their moss, and the tuft of weeds in one of the
angles, and the shop-window, and a customer shaking the door, and
compelling the little bell to jingle fiercely, but without disturbing
Judge Pyncheon! This one old house was everywhere! It transported its
great, lumbering bulk with more than railroad speed, and set itself
phlegmatically down on whatever spot she glanced at. The quality of
Hepzibah's mind was too unmalleable to take new impressions so readily
as Clifford's. He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable
kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots.
Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her
brother and herself was changed. At home, she was his guardian; here,
Clifford had become hers, and seemed to comprehend whatever belonged to
their new position with a singular rapidity of intelligence. He had
been startled into manhood and intellectual vigor; or, at least, into a
condition that resembled them, though it might be both diseased and
transitory.
The conductor now applied for their tickets; and Clifford, who had made
himself the purse-bearer, put a bank-note into his hand, as he had
observed others do.
"For the lady and yourself?" asked the conductor. "And how far?"
"As far as that will carry us," said Clifford. "It is no great matter.
We are riding for pleasure merely."
"You choose a strange day for it, sir!" remarked a gimlet-eyed old
gentleman on the other side of the car, looking at Clifford and his
companion, as if curious to make them out. "The best chance of
pleasure, in an easterly rain, I take it, is in a man's own house, with
a nice little fire in the chimney."
"I cannot precisely agree with you," said Clifford, courteously bowing
to the old gentleman, and at once taking up the clew of conversation
which the latter had proffered. "It had just occurred to me, on the
contrary, that this admirable invention of the railroad--with the vast
and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and
convenience--is destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and
fireside, and substitute something better."
"In the name of common-sense," asked the old gentleman rather testily,
"what can be better for a man than his own parlor and chimney-corner?"
"These things have not the merit which many good people attribute to
them," replied Clifford. "They may be said, in few and pithy words, to
have ill served a poor purpose. My impression is, that our wonderfully
increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to
bring us around again to the nomadic state. You are aware, my dear
sir,--you must have observed it in your own experience,--that all human
progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful
figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going
straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new
position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried
and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and
perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy
of the present and the future. To apply this truth to the topic now
under discussion. In the early epochs of our race, men dwelt in
temporary huts, of bowers of branches, as easily constructed as a
bird's-nest, and which they built,--if it should be called building,
when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made
with hands,--which Nature, we will say, assisted them to rear where
fruit abounded, where fish and game were plentiful, or, most
especially, where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier
shade than elsewhere, and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood,
and hill. This life possessed a charm which, ever since man quitted
it, has vanished from existence. And it typified something better than
itself. It had its drawbacks; such as hunger and thirst, inclement
weather, hot sunshine, and weary and foot-blistering marches over
barren and ugly tracts, that lay between the sites desirable for their
fertility and beauty. But in our ascending spiral, we escape all this.
These railroads--could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble
and the jar got rid of--are positively the greatest blessing that the
ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the
toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being
so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why,
therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily
be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life
in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as
easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,--in a better sense, wherever the
fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?"
Clifford's countenance glowed, as he divulged this theory; a youthful
character shone out from within, converting the wrinkles and pallid
duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask. The merry girls let
their ball drop upon the floor, and gazed at him. They said to
themselves, perhaps, that, before his hair was gray and the crow's-feet
tracked his temples, this now decaying man must have stamped the
impress of his features on many a woman's heart. But, alas! no woman's
eye had seen his face while it was beautiful.
"I should scarcely call it an improved state of things," observed
Clifford's new acquaintance, "to live everywhere and nowhere!"
"Would you not?" exclaimed Clifford, with singular energy. "It is as
clear to me as sunshine,--were there any in the sky,--that the greatest
possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and
improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with
mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men
painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home!
The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it. Morbid
influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about hearths, and
pollute the life of households. There is no such unwholesome
atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one's defunct
forefathers and relatives. I speak of what I know. There is a certain
house within my familiar recollection,--one of those peaked-gable
(there are seven of them), projecting-storied edifices, such as you
occasionally see in our older towns,--a rusty, crazy, creaky,
dry-rotted, dingy, dark, and miserable old dungeon, with an arched
window over the porch, and a little shop-door on one side, and a great,
melancholy elm before it! Now, sir, whenever my thoughts recur to this
seven-gabled mansion (the fact is so very curious that I must needs
mention it), immediately I have a vision or image of an elderly man, of
remarkably stern countenance, sitting in an oaken elbow-chair, dead,
stone-dead, with an ugly flow of blood upon his shirt-bosom! Dead, but
with open eyes! He taints the whole house, as I remember it. I could
never flourish there, nor be happy, nor do nor enjoy what God meant me
to do and enjoy."
His face darkened, and seemed to contract, and shrivel itself up, and
wither into age.
"Never, sir!" he repeated. "I could never draw cheerful breath there!"
"I should think not," said the old gentleman, eyeing Clifford
earnestly, and rather apprehensively. "I should conceive not, sir,
with that notion in your head!"
"Surely not," continued Clifford; "and it were a relief to me if that
house could be torn down, or burnt up, and so the earth be rid of it,
and grass be sown abundantly over its foundation. Not that I should
ever visit its site again! for, sir, the farther I get away from it,
the more does the joy, the lightsome freshness, the heart-leap, the
intellectual dance, the youth, in short,--yes, my youth, my youth!--the
more does it come back to me. No longer ago than this morning, I was
old. I remember looking in the glass, and wondering at my own gray
hair, and the wrinkles, many and deep, right across my brow, and the
furrows down my cheeks, and the prodigious trampling of crow's-feet
about my temples! It was too soon! I could not bear it! Age had no
right to come! I had not lived! But now do I look old? If so, my
aspect belies me strangely; for--a great weight being off my mind--I
feel in the very heyday of my youth, with the world and my best days
before me!"
"I trust you may find it so," said the old gentleman, who seemed rather
embarrassed, and desirous of avoiding the observation which Clifford's
wild talk drew on them both. "You have my best wishes for it."
"For Heaven's sake, dear Clifford, be quiet!" whispered his sister.
"They think you mad."
"Be quiet yourself, Hepzibah!" returned her brother. "No matter what
they think! I am not mad. For the first time in thirty years my
thoughts gush up and find words ready for them. I must talk, and I
will!"
He turned again towards the old gentleman, and renewed the conversation.
"Yes, my dear sir," said he, "it is my firm belief and hope that these
terms of roof and hearth-stone, which have so long been held to embody
something sacred, are soon to pass out of men's daily use, and be
forgotten. Just imagine, for a moment, how much of human evil will
crumble away, with this one change! What we call real estate--the solid
ground to build a house on--is the broad foundation on which nearly all
the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit almost any wrong,--he
will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and
which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages,--only to
build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in,
and for his posterity to be miserable in. He lays his own dead corpse
beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning
picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an evil
destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there. I
do not speak wildly. I have just such a house in my mind's eye!"
"Then, sir," said the old gentleman, getting anxious to drop the
subject, "you are not to blame for leaving it."
"Within the lifetime of the child already born," Clifford went on, "all
this will be done away. The world is growing too ethereal and
spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer. To me,
though, for a considerable period of time, I have lived chiefly in
retirement, and know less of such things than most men,--even to me,
the harbingers of a better era are unmistakable. Mesmerism, now! Will
that effect nothing, think you, towards purging away the grossness out
of human life?"
"All a humbug!" growled the old gentleman.
"These rapping spirits, that little Phoebe told us of, the other day,"
said Clifford,--"what are these but the messengers of the spiritual
world, knocking at the door of substance? And it shall be flung wide
open!"
"A humbug, again!" cried the old gentleman, growing more and more testy
at these glimpses of Clifford's metaphysics. "I should like to rap
with a good stick on the empty pates of the dolts who circulate such
nonsense!"
"Then there is electricity,--the demon, the angel, the mighty physical
power, the all-pervading intelligence!" exclaimed Clifford. "Is that a
humbug, too? Is it a fact--or have I dreamt it--that, by means of
electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating
thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round
globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall
we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the
substance which we deemed it!"
"If you mean the telegraph," said the old gentleman, glancing his eye
toward its wire, alongside the rail-track, "it is an excellent
thing,--that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics
don't get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly
as regards the detection of bank-robbers and murderers."
"I don't quite like it, in that point of view," replied Clifford. "A
bank-robber, and what you call a murderer, likewise, has his rights,
which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard in so
much the more liberal spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to
controvert their existence. An almost spiritual medium, like the
electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and
holy missions. Lovers, day by, day--hour by hour, if so often moved to
do it,--might send their heart-throbs from Maine to Florida, with some
such words as these 'I love you forever!'--'My heart runs over with
love!'--'I love you more than I can!' and, again, at the next message
'I have lived an hour longer, and love you twice as much!' Or, when a
good man has departed, his distant friend should be conscious of an
electric thrill, as from the world of happy spirits, telling him 'Your
dear friend is in bliss!' Or, to an absent husband, should come tidings
thus 'An immortal being, of whom you are the father, has this moment
come from God!' and immediately its little voice would seem to have
reached so far, and to be echoing in his heart. But for these poor
rogues, the bank-robbers,--who, after all, are about as honest as nine
people in ten, except that they disregard certain formalities, and
prefer to transact business at midnight rather than 'Change-hours,--and
for these murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the
motives of their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public
benefactors, if we consider only its result,--for unfortunate
individuals like these, I really cannot applaud the enlistment of an
immaterial and miraculous power in the universal world-hunt at their
heels!"
"You can't, hey?" cried the old gentleman, with a hard look.
"Positively, no!" answered Clifford. "It puts them too miserably at
disadvantage. For example, sir, in a dark, low, cross-beamed, panelled
room of an old house, let us suppose a dead man, sitting in an
arm-chair, with a blood-stain on his shirt-bosom,--and let us add to
our hypothesis another man, issuing from the house, which he feels to
be over-filled with the dead man's presence,--and let us lastly imagine
him fleeing, Heaven knows whither, at the speed of a hurricane, by
railroad! Now, sir, if the fugitive alight in some distant town, and
find all the people babbling about that self-same dead man, whom he has
fled so far to avoid the sight and thought of, will you not allow that
his natural rights have been infringed? He has been deprived of his
city of refuge, and, in my humble opinion, has suffered infinite wrong!"
"You are a strange man; Sir!" said the old gentleman, bringing his
gimlet-eye to a point on Clifford, as if determined to bore right into
him. "I can't see through you!"
"No, I'll be bound you can't!" cried Clifford, laughing. "And yet, my
dear sir, I am as transparent as the water of Maule's well! But come,
Hepzibah! We have flown far enough for once. Let us alight, as the
birds do, and perch ourselves on the nearest twig, and consult wither
we shall fly next!"
Just then, as it happened, the train reached a solitary way-station.
Taking advantage of the brief pause, Clifford left the car, and drew
Hepzibah along with him. A moment afterwards, the train--with all the
life of its interior, amid which Clifford had made himself so
conspicuous an object--was gliding away in the distance, and rapidly
lessening to a point which, in another moment, vanished. The world had
fled away from these two wanderers. They gazed drearily about them.
At a little distance stood a wooden church, black with age, and in a
dismal state of ruin and decay, with broken windows, a great rift
through the main body of the edifice, and a rafter dangling from the
top of the square tower. Farther off was a farm-house, in the old
style, as venerably black as the church, with a roof sloping downward
from the three-story peak, to within a man's height of the ground. It
seemed uninhabited. There were the relics of a wood-pile, indeed, near
the door, but with grass sprouting up among the chips and scattered
logs. The small rain-drops came down aslant; the wind was not
turbulent, but sullen, and full of chilly moisture.
Clifford shivered from head to foot. The wild effervescence of his
mood--which had so readily supplied thoughts, fantasies, and a strange
aptitude of words, and impelled him to talk from the mere necessity of
giving vent to this bubbling-up gush of ideas had entirely subsided. A
powerful excitement had given him energy and vivacity. Its operation
over, he forthwith began to sink.
"You must take the lead now, Hepzibah!" murmured he, with a torpid and
reluctant utterance. "Do with me as you will!" She knelt down upon the
platform where they were standing and lifted her clasped hands to the
sky. The dull, gray weight of clouds made it invisible; but it was no
hour for disbelief,--no juncture this to question that there was a sky
above, and an Almighty Father looking from it!
"O God!"--ejaculated poor, gaunt Hepzibah,--then paused a moment, to
consider what her prayer should be,--"O God,--our Father,--are we not
thy children? Have mercy on us!"
| Hepzibah and Clifford dash out through the summer rain and soon find themselves at a railroad station; they board a train and Clifford seems to be almost bubbling; Hepzibah, however, views the passengers about them as though they were figures in a dream. Clifford then strikes up a wild conversation with a gimlet-eyed old man across the aisle and speaks of the railroads' role in creating a new order of nomads; then he declares a need to tear down all houses -- particularly those with blood-stained corpses in them -- and goes on to rave further about the value of mesmerism, spiritualism, electricity, and the telegraph -- except when it is used to apprehend bank robbers and murderers. Repeatedly, Clifford describes a seven-gabled house "presided over" by a corpse. Suddenly Clifford wants off the train, and he and his prayerful sister alight at a way-station under gloomy clouds. | summary |
SUMMER as it was, the east wind set poor Hepzibah's few remaining teeth
chattering in her head, as she and Clifford faced it, on their way up
Pyncheon Street, and towards the centre of the town. Not merely was it
the shiver which this pitiless blast brought to her frame (although her
feet and hands, especially, had never seemed so death-a-cold as now),
but there was a moral sensation, mingling itself with the physical
chill, and causing her to shake more in spirit than in body. The
world's broad, bleak atmosphere was all so comfortless! Such, indeed,
is the impression which it makes on every new adventurer, even if he
plunge into it while the warmest tide of life is bubbling through his
veins. What, then, must it have been to Hepzibah and Clifford,--so
time-stricken as they were, yet so like children in their
inexperience,--as they left the doorstep, and passed from beneath the
wide shelter of the Pyncheon Elm! They were wandering all abroad, on
precisely such a pilgrimage as a child often meditates, to the world's
end, with perhaps a sixpence and a biscuit in his pocket. In
Hepzibah's mind, there was the wretched consciousness of being adrift.
She had lost the faculty of self-guidance; but, in view of the
difficulties around her, felt it hardly worth an effort to regain it,
and was, moreover, incapable of making one.
As they proceeded on their strange expedition, she now and then cast a
look sidelong at Clifford, and could not but observe that he was
possessed and swayed by a powerful excitement. It was this, indeed,
that gave him the control which he had at once, and so irresistibly,
established over his movements. It not a little resembled the
exhilaration of wine. Or, it might more fancifully be compared to a
joyous piece of music, played with wild vivacity, but upon a disordered
instrument. As the cracked jarring note might always be heard, and as
it jarred loudest amidst the loftiest exultation of the melody, so was
there a continual quake through Clifford, causing him most to quiver
while he wore a triumphant smile, and seemed almost under a necessity
to skip in his gait.
They met few people abroad, even on passing from the retired
neighborhood of the House of the Seven Gables into what was ordinarily
the more thronged and busier portion of the town. Glistening
sidewalks, with little pools of rain, here and there, along their
unequal surface; umbrellas displayed ostentatiously in the
shop-windows, as if the life of trade had concentrated itself in that
one article; wet leaves of the horse-chestnut or elm-trees, torn off
untimely by the blast and scattered along the public way; an unsightly,
accumulation of mud in the middle of the street, which perversely grew
the more unclean for its long and laborious washing,--these were the
more definable points of a very sombre picture. In the way of movement
and human life, there was the hasty rattle of a cab or coach, its
driver protected by a waterproof cap over his head and shoulders; the
forlorn figure of an old man, who seemed to have crept out of some
subterranean sewer, and was stooping along the kennel, and poking the
wet rubbish with a stick, in quest of rusty nails; a merchant or two,
at the door of the post-office, together with an editor and a
miscellaneous politician, awaiting a dilatory mail; a few visages of
retired sea-captains at the window of an insurance office, looking out
vacantly at the vacant street, blaspheming at the weather, and fretting
at the dearth as well of public news as local gossip. What a
treasure-trove to these venerable quidnuncs, could they have guessed
the secret which Hepzibah and Clifford were carrying along with them!
But their two figures attracted hardly so much notice as that of a
young girl, who passed at the same instant, and happened to raise her
skirt a trifle too high above her ankles. Had it been a sunny and
cheerful day, they could hardly have gone through the streets without
making themselves obnoxious to remark. Now, probably, they were felt
to be in keeping with the dismal and bitter weather, and therefore did
not stand out in strong relief, as if the sun were shining on them, but
melted into the gray gloom and were forgotten as soon as gone.
Poor Hepzibah! Could she have understood this fact, it would have
brought her some little comfort; for, to all her other
troubles,--strange to say!--there was added the womanish and
old-maiden-like misery arising from a sense of unseemliness in her
attire. Thus, she was fain to shrink deeper into herself, as it were,
as if in the hope of making people suppose that here was only a cloak
and hood, threadbare and woefully faded, taking an airing in the midst
of the storm, without any wearer!
As they went on, the feeling of indistinctness and unreality kept dimly
hovering round about her, and so diffusing itself into her system that
one of her hands was hardly palpable to the touch of the other. Any
certainty would have been preferable to this. She whispered to
herself, again and again, "Am I awake?--Am I awake?" and sometimes
exposed her face to the chill spatter of the wind, for the sake of its
rude assurance that she was. Whether it was Clifford's purpose, or
only chance, had led them thither, they now found themselves passing
beneath the arched entrance of a large structure of gray stone.
Within, there was a spacious breadth, and an airy height from floor to
roof, now partially filled with smoke and steam, which eddied
voluminously upward and formed a mimic cloud-region over their heads.
A train of cars was just ready for a start; the locomotive was fretting
and fuming, like a steed impatient for a headlong rush; and the bell
rang out its hasty peal, so well expressing the brief summons which
life vouchsafes to us in its hurried career. Without question or
delay,--with the irresistible decision, if not rather to be called
recklessness, which had so strangely taken possession of him, and
through him of Hepzibah,--Clifford impelled her towards the cars, and
assisted her to enter. The signal was given; the engine puffed forth
its short, quick breaths; the train began its movement; and, along with
a hundred other passengers, these two unwonted travellers sped onward
like the wind.
At last, therefore, and after so long estrangement from everything that
the world acted or enjoyed, they had been drawn into the great current
of human life, and were swept away with it, as by the suction of fate
itself.
Still haunted with the idea that not one of the past incidents,
inclusive of Judge Pyncheon's visit, could be real, the recluse of the
Seven Gables murmured in her brother's ear,--
"Clifford! Clifford! Is not this a dream?"
"A dream, Hepzibah!" repeated he, almost laughing in her face. "On the
contrary, I have never been awake before!"
Meanwhile, looking from the window, they could see the world racing
past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the
next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it
had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of
meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the
broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its
age-long rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to
their own.
Within the car there was the usual interior life of the railroad,
offering little to the observation of other passengers, but full of
novelty for this pair of strangely enfranchised prisoners. It was
novelty enough, indeed, that there were fifty human beings in close
relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by
the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its
grasp. It seemed marvellous how all these people could remain so
quietly in their seats, while so much noisy strength was at work in
their behalf. Some, with tickets in their hats (long travellers these,
before whom lay a hundred miles of railroad), had plunged into the
English scenery and adventures of pamphlet novels, and were keeping
company with dukes and earls. Others, whose briefer span forbade their
devoting themselves to studies so abstruse, beguiled the little tedium
of the way with penny-papers. A party of girls, and one young man, on
opposite sides of the car, found huge amusement in a game of ball.
They tossed it to and fro, with peals of laughter that might be
measured by mile-lengths; for, faster than the nimble ball could fly,
the merry players fled unconsciously along, leaving the trail of their
mirth afar behind, and ending their game under another sky than had
witnessed its commencement. Boys, with apples, cakes, candy, and rolls
of variously tinctured lozenges,--merchandise that reminded Hepzibah of
her deserted shop,--appeared at each momentary stopping-place, doing up
their business in a hurry, or breaking it short off, lest the market
should ravish them away with it. New people continually entered. Old
acquaintances--for such they soon grew to be, in this rapid current of
affairs--continually departed. Here and there, amid the rumble and the
tumult, sat one asleep. Sleep; sport; business; graver or lighter
study; and the common and inevitable movement onward! It was life
itself!
Clifford's naturally poignant sympathies were all aroused. He caught
the color of what was passing about him, and threw it back more vividly
than he received it, but mixed, nevertheless, with a lurid and
portentous hue. Hepzibah, on the other hand, felt herself more apart
from human kind than even in the seclusion which she had just quitted.
"You are not happy, Hepzibah!" said Clifford apart, in a tone of
approach. "You are thinking of that dismal old house, and of Cousin
Jaffrey"--here came the quake through him,--"and of Cousin Jaffrey
sitting there, all by himself! Take my advice,--follow my example,--and
let such things slip aside. Here we are, in the world, Hepzibah!--in
the midst of life!--in the throng of our fellow beings! Let you and I
be happy! As happy as that youth and those pretty girls, at their game
of ball!"
"Happy--" thought Hepzibah, bitterly conscious, at the word, of her
dull and heavy heart, with the frozen pain in it,--"happy. He is mad
already; and, if I could once feel myself broad awake, I should go mad
too!"
If a fixed idea be madness, she was perhaps not remote from it. Fast
and far as they had rattled and clattered along the iron track, they
might just as well, as regarded Hepzibah's mental images, have been
passing up and down Pyncheon Street. With miles and miles of varied
scenery between, there was no scene for her save the seven old
gable-peaks, with their moss, and the tuft of weeds in one of the
angles, and the shop-window, and a customer shaking the door, and
compelling the little bell to jingle fiercely, but without disturbing
Judge Pyncheon! This one old house was everywhere! It transported its
great, lumbering bulk with more than railroad speed, and set itself
phlegmatically down on whatever spot she glanced at. The quality of
Hepzibah's mind was too unmalleable to take new impressions so readily
as Clifford's. He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable
kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots.
Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her
brother and herself was changed. At home, she was his guardian; here,
Clifford had become hers, and seemed to comprehend whatever belonged to
their new position with a singular rapidity of intelligence. He had
been startled into manhood and intellectual vigor; or, at least, into a
condition that resembled them, though it might be both diseased and
transitory.
The conductor now applied for their tickets; and Clifford, who had made
himself the purse-bearer, put a bank-note into his hand, as he had
observed others do.
"For the lady and yourself?" asked the conductor. "And how far?"
"As far as that will carry us," said Clifford. "It is no great matter.
We are riding for pleasure merely."
"You choose a strange day for it, sir!" remarked a gimlet-eyed old
gentleman on the other side of the car, looking at Clifford and his
companion, as if curious to make them out. "The best chance of
pleasure, in an easterly rain, I take it, is in a man's own house, with
a nice little fire in the chimney."
"I cannot precisely agree with you," said Clifford, courteously bowing
to the old gentleman, and at once taking up the clew of conversation
which the latter had proffered. "It had just occurred to me, on the
contrary, that this admirable invention of the railroad--with the vast
and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and
convenience--is destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and
fireside, and substitute something better."
"In the name of common-sense," asked the old gentleman rather testily,
"what can be better for a man than his own parlor and chimney-corner?"
"These things have not the merit which many good people attribute to
them," replied Clifford. "They may be said, in few and pithy words, to
have ill served a poor purpose. My impression is, that our wonderfully
increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to
bring us around again to the nomadic state. You are aware, my dear
sir,--you must have observed it in your own experience,--that all human
progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful
figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going
straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new
position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried
and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and
perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy
of the present and the future. To apply this truth to the topic now
under discussion. In the early epochs of our race, men dwelt in
temporary huts, of bowers of branches, as easily constructed as a
bird's-nest, and which they built,--if it should be called building,
when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made
with hands,--which Nature, we will say, assisted them to rear where
fruit abounded, where fish and game were plentiful, or, most
especially, where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier
shade than elsewhere, and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood,
and hill. This life possessed a charm which, ever since man quitted
it, has vanished from existence. And it typified something better than
itself. It had its drawbacks; such as hunger and thirst, inclement
weather, hot sunshine, and weary and foot-blistering marches over
barren and ugly tracts, that lay between the sites desirable for their
fertility and beauty. But in our ascending spiral, we escape all this.
These railroads--could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble
and the jar got rid of--are positively the greatest blessing that the
ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the
toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being
so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why,
therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily
be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life
in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as
easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,--in a better sense, wherever the
fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?"
Clifford's countenance glowed, as he divulged this theory; a youthful
character shone out from within, converting the wrinkles and pallid
duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask. The merry girls let
their ball drop upon the floor, and gazed at him. They said to
themselves, perhaps, that, before his hair was gray and the crow's-feet
tracked his temples, this now decaying man must have stamped the
impress of his features on many a woman's heart. But, alas! no woman's
eye had seen his face while it was beautiful.
"I should scarcely call it an improved state of things," observed
Clifford's new acquaintance, "to live everywhere and nowhere!"
"Would you not?" exclaimed Clifford, with singular energy. "It is as
clear to me as sunshine,--were there any in the sky,--that the greatest
possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and
improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with
mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men
painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home!
The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it. Morbid
influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about hearths, and
pollute the life of households. There is no such unwholesome
atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one's defunct
forefathers and relatives. I speak of what I know. There is a certain
house within my familiar recollection,--one of those peaked-gable
(there are seven of them), projecting-storied edifices, such as you
occasionally see in our older towns,--a rusty, crazy, creaky,
dry-rotted, dingy, dark, and miserable old dungeon, with an arched
window over the porch, and a little shop-door on one side, and a great,
melancholy elm before it! Now, sir, whenever my thoughts recur to this
seven-gabled mansion (the fact is so very curious that I must needs
mention it), immediately I have a vision or image of an elderly man, of
remarkably stern countenance, sitting in an oaken elbow-chair, dead,
stone-dead, with an ugly flow of blood upon his shirt-bosom! Dead, but
with open eyes! He taints the whole house, as I remember it. I could
never flourish there, nor be happy, nor do nor enjoy what God meant me
to do and enjoy."
His face darkened, and seemed to contract, and shrivel itself up, and
wither into age.
"Never, sir!" he repeated. "I could never draw cheerful breath there!"
"I should think not," said the old gentleman, eyeing Clifford
earnestly, and rather apprehensively. "I should conceive not, sir,
with that notion in your head!"
"Surely not," continued Clifford; "and it were a relief to me if that
house could be torn down, or burnt up, and so the earth be rid of it,
and grass be sown abundantly over its foundation. Not that I should
ever visit its site again! for, sir, the farther I get away from it,
the more does the joy, the lightsome freshness, the heart-leap, the
intellectual dance, the youth, in short,--yes, my youth, my youth!--the
more does it come back to me. No longer ago than this morning, I was
old. I remember looking in the glass, and wondering at my own gray
hair, and the wrinkles, many and deep, right across my brow, and the
furrows down my cheeks, and the prodigious trampling of crow's-feet
about my temples! It was too soon! I could not bear it! Age had no
right to come! I had not lived! But now do I look old? If so, my
aspect belies me strangely; for--a great weight being off my mind--I
feel in the very heyday of my youth, with the world and my best days
before me!"
"I trust you may find it so," said the old gentleman, who seemed rather
embarrassed, and desirous of avoiding the observation which Clifford's
wild talk drew on them both. "You have my best wishes for it."
"For Heaven's sake, dear Clifford, be quiet!" whispered his sister.
"They think you mad."
"Be quiet yourself, Hepzibah!" returned her brother. "No matter what
they think! I am not mad. For the first time in thirty years my
thoughts gush up and find words ready for them. I must talk, and I
will!"
He turned again towards the old gentleman, and renewed the conversation.
"Yes, my dear sir," said he, "it is my firm belief and hope that these
terms of roof and hearth-stone, which have so long been held to embody
something sacred, are soon to pass out of men's daily use, and be
forgotten. Just imagine, for a moment, how much of human evil will
crumble away, with this one change! What we call real estate--the solid
ground to build a house on--is the broad foundation on which nearly all
the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit almost any wrong,--he
will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and
which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages,--only to
build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in,
and for his posterity to be miserable in. He lays his own dead corpse
beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning
picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an evil
destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there. I
do not speak wildly. I have just such a house in my mind's eye!"
"Then, sir," said the old gentleman, getting anxious to drop the
subject, "you are not to blame for leaving it."
"Within the lifetime of the child already born," Clifford went on, "all
this will be done away. The world is growing too ethereal and
spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer. To me,
though, for a considerable period of time, I have lived chiefly in
retirement, and know less of such things than most men,--even to me,
the harbingers of a better era are unmistakable. Mesmerism, now! Will
that effect nothing, think you, towards purging away the grossness out
of human life?"
"All a humbug!" growled the old gentleman.
"These rapping spirits, that little Phoebe told us of, the other day,"
said Clifford,--"what are these but the messengers of the spiritual
world, knocking at the door of substance? And it shall be flung wide
open!"
"A humbug, again!" cried the old gentleman, growing more and more testy
at these glimpses of Clifford's metaphysics. "I should like to rap
with a good stick on the empty pates of the dolts who circulate such
nonsense!"
"Then there is electricity,--the demon, the angel, the mighty physical
power, the all-pervading intelligence!" exclaimed Clifford. "Is that a
humbug, too? Is it a fact--or have I dreamt it--that, by means of
electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating
thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round
globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall
we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the
substance which we deemed it!"
"If you mean the telegraph," said the old gentleman, glancing his eye
toward its wire, alongside the rail-track, "it is an excellent
thing,--that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics
don't get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly
as regards the detection of bank-robbers and murderers."
"I don't quite like it, in that point of view," replied Clifford. "A
bank-robber, and what you call a murderer, likewise, has his rights,
which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard in so
much the more liberal spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to
controvert their existence. An almost spiritual medium, like the
electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and
holy missions. Lovers, day by, day--hour by hour, if so often moved to
do it,--might send their heart-throbs from Maine to Florida, with some
such words as these 'I love you forever!'--'My heart runs over with
love!'--'I love you more than I can!' and, again, at the next message
'I have lived an hour longer, and love you twice as much!' Or, when a
good man has departed, his distant friend should be conscious of an
electric thrill, as from the world of happy spirits, telling him 'Your
dear friend is in bliss!' Or, to an absent husband, should come tidings
thus 'An immortal being, of whom you are the father, has this moment
come from God!' and immediately its little voice would seem to have
reached so far, and to be echoing in his heart. But for these poor
rogues, the bank-robbers,--who, after all, are about as honest as nine
people in ten, except that they disregard certain formalities, and
prefer to transact business at midnight rather than 'Change-hours,--and
for these murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the
motives of their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public
benefactors, if we consider only its result,--for unfortunate
individuals like these, I really cannot applaud the enlistment of an
immaterial and miraculous power in the universal world-hunt at their
heels!"
"You can't, hey?" cried the old gentleman, with a hard look.
"Positively, no!" answered Clifford. "It puts them too miserably at
disadvantage. For example, sir, in a dark, low, cross-beamed, panelled
room of an old house, let us suppose a dead man, sitting in an
arm-chair, with a blood-stain on his shirt-bosom,--and let us add to
our hypothesis another man, issuing from the house, which he feels to
be over-filled with the dead man's presence,--and let us lastly imagine
him fleeing, Heaven knows whither, at the speed of a hurricane, by
railroad! Now, sir, if the fugitive alight in some distant town, and
find all the people babbling about that self-same dead man, whom he has
fled so far to avoid the sight and thought of, will you not allow that
his natural rights have been infringed? He has been deprived of his
city of refuge, and, in my humble opinion, has suffered infinite wrong!"
"You are a strange man; Sir!" said the old gentleman, bringing his
gimlet-eye to a point on Clifford, as if determined to bore right into
him. "I can't see through you!"
"No, I'll be bound you can't!" cried Clifford, laughing. "And yet, my
dear sir, I am as transparent as the water of Maule's well! But come,
Hepzibah! We have flown far enough for once. Let us alight, as the
birds do, and perch ourselves on the nearest twig, and consult wither
we shall fly next!"
Just then, as it happened, the train reached a solitary way-station.
Taking advantage of the brief pause, Clifford left the car, and drew
Hepzibah along with him. A moment afterwards, the train--with all the
life of its interior, amid which Clifford had made himself so
conspicuous an object--was gliding away in the distance, and rapidly
lessening to a point which, in another moment, vanished. The world had
fled away from these two wanderers. They gazed drearily about them.
At a little distance stood a wooden church, black with age, and in a
dismal state of ruin and decay, with broken windows, a great rift
through the main body of the edifice, and a rafter dangling from the
top of the square tower. Farther off was a farm-house, in the old
style, as venerably black as the church, with a roof sloping downward
from the three-story peak, to within a man's height of the ground. It
seemed uninhabited. There were the relics of a wood-pile, indeed, near
the door, but with grass sprouting up among the chips and scattered
logs. The small rain-drops came down aslant; the wind was not
turbulent, but sullen, and full of chilly moisture.
Clifford shivered from head to foot. The wild effervescence of his
mood--which had so readily supplied thoughts, fantasies, and a strange
aptitude of words, and impelled him to talk from the mere necessity of
giving vent to this bubbling-up gush of ideas had entirely subsided. A
powerful excitement had given him energy and vivacity. Its operation
over, he forthwith began to sink.
"You must take the lead now, Hepzibah!" murmured he, with a torpid and
reluctant utterance. "Do with me as you will!" She knelt down upon the
platform where they were standing and lifted her clasped hands to the
sky. The dull, gray weight of clouds made it invisible; but it was no
hour for disbelief,--no juncture this to question that there was a sky
above, and an Almighty Father looking from it!
"O God!"--ejaculated poor, gaunt Hepzibah,--then paused a moment, to
consider what her prayer should be,--"O God,--our Father,--are we not
thy children? Have mercy on us!"
| When Clifford and Hepzibah flee the house in Chapter 17, they merge with their dark surroundings. "Had it been a sunny and cheerful day," Hawthorne notes, they would have been noticed. As it is, however, they seem to be in keeping with the dismal and bitter weather; they "melt into the gray gloom." Correspondingly, Hepzibah's feeling of indistinctness and unreality keeps dimly hovering about her. When she boards the train with Clifford, the motion adds to this sense of the unreal: the "spires of meetinghouses" seem "set adrift from their foundation"; the "broad-based hills" glide away. Everything seems "unfixed." For the moment, Clifford is highly exhilarated. As he converses, his countenance glows. A "youthful character" seems to shine out from within him, "converting the wrinkles and pallid duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask." Yet the House of the Seven Gables and the figure of the dead Judge Pyncheon run obsessively through all he says. Wildly theorizing, he says that it is "as clear as sunshine" that houses should be abolished: "The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it." He speaks repeatedly of "a certain house . . . a rusty, crazy, creaky, dry-rotted, damp-rotted, dingy, dark, and miserable dungeon." This, of course, is the Pyncheon's dark and deadly House of the Seven Gables. At the thought, Clifford's face darkens and seems to contract, shrivel itself up, and wither into age. Yet his conversation keeps coming back to the house, and he repeats key phrases: "a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion . . . a dark, low, cross-beamed, paneled room of an old house" in which a dead man sits in an armchair, "with a blood-stain on his shirt-bosom." Finally, he sees a "wooden church, black with age," and he realizes that no real flight from the old Pyncheon house is ever, really, attainable. Clifford and Hepzibah cannot redeem themselves. This chapter, describing Clifford's and Hepzibah's temporary but invigorating escape from the house, is one of the high points of the novel. For a moment, however, Jaffrey's death seems to lift the whole burden of the past, for Clifford excitedly throws off his old damask dressing-gown, dons a cloak, and triumphantly guides Hepzibah out of the house and into the street. Almost instinctively, he guides her to a train, which is one of Hawthorne's symbolic representations of the contemporary scene. As the train gathers speed and the landscape with its emblems of the past melts away in the gloom of the stormy afternoon, Clifford immediately concocts a marvelous conversational hodgepodge of ideas. In an ironic parallel with Holgrave, he hysterically denounces the evils that accumulate around roof and hearthstone, and he urges their destruction by fire. With a kind of Emersonian optimism, Clifford describes an ever-ascending spiral of progress in which material crudities are gradually spiritualized. "These railroads," he says, "are positively the greatest blessing that the ages have wrought for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel!" He then cites the current fad phenomena of mesmerism and spiritualism, and his excitement grows to an even more feverish pitch when he exalts the vitalizing power of electricity. Electricity, he says, is an angel, a mighty physical power, an "all-pervading intelligence!" These speculations are climaxed by Clifford's praise of the telegraph, which, he, like Thoreau, considers to be "an almost spiritual medium." Hepzibah is understandably bewildered by all this, and as the two confused wanderers prepare to alight from the train, Hawthorne reveals one of the ironies attendant upon Clifford's praise of civilization. The stranger to whom Clifford has been speaking says, "I can't see through you!" pointing up the fact that Clifford's excursion into the world has given him a transparency inconsistent with his former shadowy status in the house. Clifford's mood -- as the flight itself -- is only temporary, and at the lonely train station Clifford's tremulous exhilaration dribbles away, and he turns once again to Hepzibah for guidance. Their trip, their attempted escape from the house, has been a total failure. | analysis |
JUDGE PYNCHEON, while his two relatives have fled away with such
ill-considered haste, still sits in the old parlor, keeping house, as
the familiar phrase is, in the absence of its ordinary occupants. To
him, and to the venerable House of the Seven Gables, does our story now
betake itself, like an owl, bewildered in the daylight, and hastening
back to his hollow tree.
The Judge has not shifted his position for a long while now. He has
not stirred hand or foot, nor withdrawn his eyes so much as a
hair's-breadth from their fixed gaze towards the corner of the room,
since the footsteps of Hepzibah and Clifford creaked along the passage,
and the outer door was closed cautiously behind their exit. He holds
his watch in his left hand, but clutched in such a manner that you
cannot see the dial-plate. How profound a fit of meditation! Or,
supposing him asleep, how infantile a quietude of conscience, and what
wholesome order in the gastric region, are betokened by slumber so
entirely undisturbed with starts, cramp, twitches, muttered dreamtalk,
trumpet-blasts through the nasal organ, or any slightest irregularity
of breath! You must hold your own breath, to satisfy yourself whether
he breathes at all. It is quite inaudible. You hear the ticking of
his watch; his breath you do not hear. A most refreshing slumber,
doubtless! And yet, the Judge cannot be asleep. His eyes are open! A
veteran politician, such as he, would never fall asleep with wide-open
eyes, lest some enemy or mischief-maker, taking him thus at unawares,
should peep through these windows into his consciousness, and make
strange discoveries among the reminiscences, projects, hopes,
apprehensions, weaknesses, and strong points, which he has heretofore
shared with nobody. A cautious man is proverbially said to sleep with
one eye open. That may be wisdom. But not with both; for this were
heedlessness! No, no! Judge Pyncheon cannot be asleep.
It is odd, however, that a gentleman so burdened with engagements,--and
noted, too, for punctuality,--should linger thus in an old lonely
mansion, which he has never seemed very fond of visiting. The oaken
chair, to be sure, may tempt him with its roominess. It is, indeed, a
spacious, and, allowing for the rude age that fashioned it, a
moderately easy seat, with capacity enough, at all events, and offering
no restraint to the Judge's breadth of beam. A bigger man might find
ample accommodation in it. His ancestor, now pictured upon the wall,
with all his English beef about him, used hardly to present a front
extending from elbow to elbow of this chair, or a base that would cover
its whole cushion. But there are better chairs than this,--mahogany,
black walnut, rosewood, spring-seated and damask-cushioned, with varied
slopes, and innumerable artifices to make them easy, and obviate the
irksomeness of too tame an ease,--a score of such might be at Judge
Pyncheon's service. Yes! in a score of drawing-rooms he would be more
than welcome. Mamma would advance to meet him, with outstretched hand;
the virgin daughter, elderly as he has now got to be,--an old widower,
as he smilingly describes himself,--would shake up the cushion for the
Judge, and do her pretty utmost to make him comfortable. For the Judge
is a prosperous man. He cherishes his schemes, moreover, like other
people, and reasonably brighter than most others; or did so, at least,
as he lay abed this morning, in an agreeable half-drowse, planning the
business of the day, and speculating on the probabilities of the next
fifteen years. With his firm health, and the little inroad that age
has made upon him, fifteen years or twenty--yes, or perhaps
five-and-twenty!--are no more than he may fairly call his own.
Five-and-twenty years for the enjoyment of his real estate in town and
country, his railroad, bank, and insurance shares, his United States
stock,--his wealth, in short, however invested, now in possession, or
soon to be acquired; together with the public honors that have fallen
upon him, and the weightier ones that are yet to fall! It is good! It
is excellent! It is enough!
Still lingering in the old chair! If the Judge has a little time to
throw away, why does not he visit the insurance office, as is his
frequent custom, and sit awhile in one of their leathern-cushioned
arm-chairs, listening to the gossip of the day, and dropping some
deeply designed chance-word, which will be certain to become the gossip
of to-morrow. And have not the bank directors a meeting at which it
was the Judge's purpose to be present, and his office to preside?
Indeed they have; and the hour is noted on a card, which is, or ought
to be, in Judge Pyncheon's right vest-pocket. Let him go thither, and
loll at ease upon his moneybags! He has lounged long enough in the old
chair!
This was to have been such a busy day. In the first place, the
interview with Clifford. Half an hour, by the Judge's reckoning, was
to suffice for that; it would probably be less, but--taking into
consideration that Hepzibah was first to be dealt with, and that these
women are apt to make many words where a few would do much better--it
might be safest to allow half an hour. Half an hour? Why, Judge, it is
already two hours, by your own undeviatingly accurate chronometer.
Glance your eye down at it and see! Ah; he will not give himself the
trouble either to bend his head, or elevate his hand, so as to bring
the faithful time-keeper within his range of vision! Time, all at once,
appears to have become a matter of no moment with the Judge!
And has he forgotten all the other items of his memoranda? Clifford's
affair arranged, he was to meet a State Street broker, who has
undertaken to procure a heavy percentage, and the best of paper, for a
few loose thousands which the Judge happens to have by him, uninvested.
The wrinkled note-shaver will have taken his railroad trip in vain.
Half an hour later, in the street next to this, there was to be an
auction of real estate, including a portion of the old Pyncheon
property, originally belonging to Maule's garden ground. It has been
alienated from the Pyncheons these four-score years; but the Judge had
kept it in his eye, and had set his heart on reannexing it to the small
demesne still left around the Seven Gables; and now, during this odd
fit of oblivion, the fatal hammer must have fallen, and transferred our
ancient patrimony to some alien possessor. Possibly, indeed, the sale
may have been postponed till fairer weather. If so, will the Judge
make it convenient to be present, and favor the auctioneer with his
bid, On the proximate occasion?
The next affair was to buy a horse for his own driving. The one
heretofore his favorite stumbled, this very morning, on the road to
town, and must be at once discarded. Judge Pyncheon's neck is too
precious to be risked on such a contingency as a stumbling steed.
Should all the above business be seasonably got through with, he might
attend the meeting of a charitable society; the very name of which,
however, in the multiplicity of his benevolence, is quite forgotten; so
that this engagement may pass unfulfilled, and no great harm done. And
if he have time, amid the press of more urgent matters, he must take
measures for the renewal of Mrs. Pyncheon's tombstone, which, the
sexton tells him, has fallen on its marble face, and is cracked quite
in twain. She was a praiseworthy woman enough, thinks the Judge, in
spite of her nervousness, and the tears that she was so oozy with, and
her foolish behavior about the coffee; and as she took her departure so
seasonably, he will not grudge the second tombstone. It is better, at
least, than if she had never needed any! The next item on his list was
to give orders for some fruit-trees, of a rare variety, to be
deliverable at his country-seat in the ensuing autumn. Yes, buy them,
by all means; and may the peaches be luscious in your mouth, Judge
Pyncheon! After this comes something more important. A committee of
his political party has besought him for a hundred or two of dollars,
in addition to his previous disbursements, towards carrying on the fall
campaign. The Judge is a patriot; the fate of the country is staked on
the November election; and besides, as will be shadowed forth in
another paragraph, he has no trifling stake of his own in the same
great game. He will do what the committee asks; nay, he will be
liberal beyond their expectations; they shall have a check for five
hundred dollars, and more anon, if it be needed. What next? A decayed
widow, whose husband was Judge Pyncheon's early friend, has laid her
case of destitution before him, in a very moving letter. She and her
fair daughter have scarcely bread to eat. He partly intends to call on
her to-day,--perhaps so--perhaps not,--accordingly as he may happen to
have leisure, and a small bank-note.
Another business, which, however, he puts no great weight on (it is
well, you know, to be heedful, but not over-anxious, as respects one's
personal health),--another business, then, was to consult his family
physician. About what, for Heaven's sake? Why, it is rather difficult
to describe the symptoms. A mere dimness of sight and dizziness of
brain, was it?--or disagreeable choking, or stifling, or gurgling, or
bubbling, in the region of the thorax, as the anatomists say?--or was
it a pretty severe throbbing and kicking of the heart, rather
creditable to him than otherwise, as showing that the organ had not
been left out of the Judge's physical contrivance? No matter what it
was. The doctor probably would smile at the statement of such trifles
to his professional ear; the Judge would smile in his turn; and meeting
one another's eyes, they would enjoy a hearty laugh together! But a fig
for medical advice. The Judge will never need it.
Pray, pray, Judge Pyncheon, look at your watch, Now! What--not a
glance! It is within ten minutes of the dinner hour! It surely cannot
have slipped your memory that the dinner of to-day is to be the most
important, in its consequences, of all the dinners you ever ate. Yes,
precisely the most important; although, in the course of your somewhat
eminent career, you have been placed high towards the head of the
table, at splendid banquets, and have poured out your festive eloquence
to ears yet echoing with Webster's mighty organ-tones. No public
dinner this, however. It is merely a gathering of some dozen or so of
friends from several districts of the State; men of distinguished
character and influence, assembling, almost casually, at the house of a
common friend, likewise distinguished, who will make them welcome to a
little better than his ordinary fare. Nothing in the way of French
cookery, but an excellent dinner, nevertheless. Real turtle, we
understand, and salmon, tautog, canvas-backs, pig, English mutton, good
roast beef, or dainties of that serious kind, fit for substantial
country gentlemen, as these honorable persons mostly are. The
delicacies of the season, in short, and flavored by a brand of old
Madeira which has been the pride of many seasons. It is the Juno
brand; a glorious wine, fragrant, and full of gentle might; a
bottled-up happiness, put by for use; a golden liquid, worth more than
liquid gold; so rare and admirable, that veteran wine-bibbers count it
among their epochs to have tasted it! It drives away the heart-ache,
and substitutes no head-ache! Could the Judge but quaff a glass, it
might enable him to shake off the unaccountable lethargy which (for the
ten intervening minutes, and five to boot, are already past) has made
him such a laggard at this momentous dinner. It would all but revive a
dead man! Would you like to sip it now, Judge Pyncheon?
Alas, this dinner. Have you really forgotten its true object? Then
let us whisper it, that you may start at once out of the oaken chair,
which really seems to be enchanted, like the one in Comus, or that in
which Moll Pitcher imprisoned your own grandfather. But ambition is a
talisman more powerful than witchcraft. Start up, then, and, hurrying
through the streets, burst in upon the company, that they may begin
before the fish is spoiled! They wait for you; and it is little for
your interest that they should wait. These gentlemen--need you be told
it?--have assembled, not without purpose, from every quarter of the
State. They are practised politicians, every man of them, and skilled
to adjust those preliminary measures which steal from the people,
without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers. The
popular voice, at the next gubernatorial election, though loud as
thunder, will be really but an echo of what these gentlemen shall
speak, under their breath, at your friend's festive board. They meet
to decide upon their candidate. This little knot of subtle schemers
will control the convention, and, through it, dictate to the party.
And what worthier candidate,--more wise and learned, more noted for
philanthropic liberality, truer to safe principles, tried oftener by
public trusts, more spotless in private character, with a larger stake
in the common welfare, and deeper grounded, by hereditary descent, in
the faith and practice of the Puritans,--what man can be presented for
the suffrage of the people, so eminently combining all these claims to
the chief-rulership as Judge Pyncheon here before us?
Make haste, then! Do your part! The meed for which you have toiled, and
fought, and climbed, and crept, is ready for your grasp! Be present at
this dinner!--drink a glass or two of that noble wine!--make your
pledges in as low a whisper as you will!--and you rise up from table
virtually governor of the glorious old State! Governor Pyncheon of
Massachusetts!
And is there no potent and exhilarating cordial in a certainty like
this? It has been the grand purpose of half your lifetime to obtain it.
Now, when there needs little more than to signify your acceptance, why
do you sit so lumpishly in your great-great-grandfather's oaken chair,
as if preferring it to the gubernatorial one? We have all heard of King
Log; but, in these jostling times, one of that royal kindred will
hardly win the race for an elective chief-magistracy.
Well; it is absolutely too late for dinner! Turtle, salmon, tautog,
woodcock, boiled turkey, South-Down mutton, pig, roast-beef, have
vanished, or exist only in fragments, with lukewarm potatoes, and
gravies crusted over with cold fat. The Judge, had he done nothing
else, would have achieved wonders with his knife and fork. It was he,
you know, of whom it used to be said, in reference to his ogre-like
appetite, that his Creator made him a great animal, but that the
dinner-hour made him a great beast. Persons of his large sensual
endowments must claim indulgence, at their feeding-time. But, for
once, the Judge is entirely too late for dinner! Too late, we fear,
even to join the party at their wine! The guests are warm and merry;
they have given up the Judge; and, concluding that the Free-Soilers
have him, they will fix upon another candidate. Were our friend now to
stalk in among them, with that wide-open stare, at once wild and
stolid, his ungenial presence would be apt to change their cheer.
Neither would it be seemly in Judge Pyncheon, generally so scrupulous
in his attire, to show himself at a dinner-table with that crimson
stain upon his shirt-bosom. By the bye, how came it there? It is an
ugly sight, at any rate; and the wisest way for the Judge is to button
his coat closely over his breast, and, taking his horse and chaise from
the livery stable, to make all speed to his own house. There, after a
glass of brandy and water, and a mutton-chop, a beefsteak, a broiled
fowl, or some such hasty little dinner and supper all in one, he had
better spend the evening by the fireside. He must toast his slippers a
long while, in order to get rid of the chilliness which the air of this
vile old house has sent curdling through his veins.
Up, therefore, Judge Pyncheon, up! You have lost a day. But to-morrow
will be here anon. Will you rise, betimes, and make the most of it?
To-morrow. To-morrow! To-morrow. We, that are alive, may rise betimes
to-morrow. As for him that has died to-day, his morrow will be the
resurrection morn.
Meanwhile the twilight is glooming upward out of the corners of the
room. The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper, and at first
become more definite; then, spreading wider, they lose their
distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion, as it were,
that creeps slowly over the various objects, and the one human figure
sitting in the midst of them. The gloom has not entered from without;
it has brooded here all day, and now, taking its own inevitable time,
will possess itself of everything. The Judge's face, indeed, rigid and
singularly white, refuses to melt into this universal solvent. Fainter
and fainter grows the light. It is as if another double-handful of
darkness had been scattered through the air. Now it is no longer gray,
but sable. There is still a faint appearance at the window; neither a
glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmer,--any phrase of light would express
something far brighter than this doubtful perception, or sense, rather,
that there is a window there. Has it yet vanished? No!--yes!--not
quite! And there is still the swarthy whiteness,--we shall venture to
marry these ill-agreeing words,--the swarthy whiteness of Judge
Pyncheon's face. The features are all gone: there is only the paleness
of them left. And how looks it now? There is no window! There is no
face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where
is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos,
may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and
murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!
Is there no other sound? One other, and a fearful one. It is the
ticking of the Judge's watch, which, ever since Hepzibah left the room
in search of Clifford, he has been holding in his hand. Be the cause
what it may, this little, quiet, never-ceasing throb of Time's pulse,
repeating its small strokes with such busy regularity, in Judge
Pyncheon's motionless hand, has an effect of terror, which we do not
find in any other accompaniment of the scene.
But, listen! That puff of the breeze was louder. It had a tone unlike
the dreary and sullen one which has bemoaned itself, and afflicted all
mankind with miserable sympathy, for five days past. The wind has
veered about! It now comes boisterously from the northwest, and, taking
hold of the aged framework of the Seven Gables, gives it a shake, like
a wrestler that would try strength with his antagonist. Another and
another sturdy tussle with the blast! The old house creaks again, and
makes a vociferous but somewhat unintelligible bellowing in its sooty
throat (the big flue, we mean, of its wide chimney), partly in
complaint at the rude wind, but rather, as befits their century and a
half of hostile intimacy, in tough defiance. A rumbling kind of a
bluster roars behind the fire-board. A door has slammed above stairs.
A window, perhaps, has been left open, or else is driven in by an
unruly gust. It is not to be conceived, before-hand, what wonderful
wind-instruments are these old timber mansions, and how haunted with
the strangest noises, which immediately begin to sing, and sigh, and
sob, and shriek,--and to smite with sledge-hammers, airy but ponderous,
in some distant chamber,--and to tread along the entries as with
stately footsteps, and rustle up and down the staircase, as with silks
miraculously stiff,--whenever the gale catches the house with a window
open, and gets fairly into it. Would that we were not an attendant
spirit here! It is too awful! This clamor of the wind through the
lonely house; the Judge's quietude, as he sits invisible; and that
pertinacious ticking of his watch!
As regards Judge Pyncheon's invisibility, however, that matter will
soon be remedied. The northwest wind has swept the sky clear. The
window is distinctly seen. Through its panes, moreover, we dimly catch
the sweep of the dark, clustering foliage outside, fluttering with a
constant irregularity of movement, and letting in a peep of starlight,
now here, now there. Oftener than any other object, these glimpses
illuminate the Judge's face. But here comes more effectual light.
Observe that silvery dance upon the upper branches of the pear-tree,
and now a little lower, and now on the whole mass of boughs, while,
through their shifting intricacies, the moonbeams fall aslant into the
room. They play over the Judge's figure and show that he has not
stirred throughout the hours of darkness. They follow the shadows, in
changeful sport, across his unchanging features. They gleam upon his
watch. His grasp conceals the dial-plate,--but we know that the
faithful hands have met; for one of the city clocks tells midnight.
A man of sturdy understanding, like Judge Pyncheon, cares no more for
twelve o'clock at night than for the corresponding hour of noon.
However just the parallel drawn, in some of the preceding pages,
between his Puritan ancestor and himself, it fails in this point. The
Pyncheon of two centuries ago, in common with most of his
contemporaries, professed his full belief in spiritual ministrations,
although reckoning them chiefly of a malignant character. The Pyncheon
of to-night, who sits in yonder arm-chair, believes in no such
nonsense. Such, at least, was his creed, some few hours since. His
hair will not bristle, therefore, at the stories which--in times when
chimney-corners had benches in them, where old people sat poking into
the ashes of the past, and raking out traditions like live coals--used
to be told about this very room of his ancestral house. In fact, these
tales are too absurd to bristle even childhood's hair. What sense,
meaning, or moral, for example, such as even ghost-stories should be
susceptible of, can be traced in the ridiculous legend, that, at
midnight, all the dead Pyncheons are bound to assemble in this parlor?
And, pray, for what? Why, to see whether the portrait of their ancestor
still keeps its place upon the wall, in compliance with his
testamentary directions! Is it worth while to come out of their graves
for that?
We are tempted to make a little sport with the idea. Ghost-stories are
hardly to be treated seriously any longer. The family-party of the
defunct Pyncheons, we presume, goes off in this wise.
First comes the ancestor himself, in his black cloak, steeple-hat, and
trunk-breeches, girt about the waist with a leathern belt, in which
hangs his steel-hilted sword; he has a long staff in his hand, such as
gentlemen in advanced life used to carry, as much for the dignity of
the thing as for the support to be derived from it. He looks up at the
portrait; a thing of no substance, gazing at its own painted image! All
is safe. The picture is still there. The purpose of his brain has
been kept sacred thus long after the man himself has sprouted up in
graveyard grass. See! he lifts his ineffectual hand, and tries the
frame. All safe! But is that a smile?--is it not, rather a frown of
deadly import, that darkens over the shadow of his features? The stout
Colonel is dissatisfied! So decided is his look of discontent as to
impart additional distinctness to his features; through which,
nevertheless, the moonlight passes, and flickers on the wall beyond.
Something has strangely vexed the ancestor! With a grim shake of the
head, he turns away. Here come other Pyncheons, the whole tribe, in
their half a dozen generations, jostling and elbowing one another, to
reach the picture. We behold aged men and grandames, a clergyman with
the Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien, and a red-coated
officer of the old French war; and there comes the shop-keeping
Pyncheon of a century ago, with the ruffles turned back from his
wrists; and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artist's
legend, with the beautiful and pensive Alice, who brings no pride out
of her virgin grave. All try the picture-frame. What do these ghostly
people seek? A mother lifts her child, that his little hands may touch
it! There is evidently a mystery about the picture, that perplexes
these poor Pyncheons when they ought to be at rest. In a corner,
meanwhile, stands the figure of an elderly man, in a leathern jerkin
and breeches, with a carpenter's rule sticking out of his side pocket;
he points his finger at the bearded Colonel and his descendants,
nodding, jeering, mocking, and finally bursting into obstreperous,
though inaudible laughter.
Indulging our fancy in this freak, we have partly lost the power of
restraint and guidance. We distinguish an unlooked-for figure in our
visionary scene. Among those ancestral people there is a young man,
dressed in the very fashion of to-day: he wears a dark frock-coat,
almost destitute of skirts, gray pantaloons, gaiter boots of patent
leather, and has a finely wrought gold chain across his breast, and a
little silver-headed whalebone stick in his hand. Were we to meet this
figure at noonday, we should greet him as young Jaffrey Pyncheon, the
Judge's only surviving child, who has been spending the last two years
in foreign travel. If still in life, how comes his shadow hither? If
dead, what a misfortune! The old Pyncheon property, together with the
great estate acquired by the young man's father, would devolve on whom?
On poor, foolish Clifford, gaunt Hepzibah, and rustic little Phoebe!
But another and a greater marvel greets us! Can we believe our eyes? A
stout, elderly gentleman has made his appearance; he has an aspect of
eminent respectability, wears a black coat and pantaloons, of roomy
width, and might be pronounced scrupulously neat in his attire, but for
a broad crimson stain across his snowy neckcloth and down his
shirt-bosom. Is it the Judge, or no? How can it be Judge Pyncheon? We
discern his figure, as plainly as the flickering moonbeams can show us
anything, still seated in the oaken chair! Be the apparition whose it
may, it advances to the picture, seems to seize the frame, tries to
peep behind it, and turns away, with a frown as black as the ancestral
one.
The fantastic scene just hinted at must by no means be considered as
forming an actual portion of our story. We were betrayed into this
brief extravagance by the quiver of the moonbeams; they dance
hand-in-hand with shadows, and are reflected in the looking-glass,
which, you are aware, is always a kind of window or doorway into the
spiritual world. We needed relief, moreover, from our too long and
exclusive contemplation of that figure in the chair. This wild wind,
too, has tossed our thoughts into strange confusion, but without
tearing them away from their one determined centre. Yonder leaden
Judge sits immovably upon our soul. Will he never stir again? We shall
go mad unless he stirs! You may the better estimate his quietude by the
fearlessness of a little mouse, which sits on its hind legs, in a
streak of moonlight, close by Judge Pyncheon's foot, and seems to
meditate a journey of exploration over this great black bulk. Ha! what
has startled the nimble little mouse? It is the visage of grimalkin,
outside of the window, where he appears to have posted himself for a
deliberate watch. This grimalkin has a very ugly look. Is it a cat
watching for a mouse, or the devil for a human soul? Would we could
scare him from the window!
Thank Heaven, the night is well-nigh past! The moonbeams have no longer
so silvery a gleam, nor contrast so strongly with the blackness of the
shadows among which they fall. They are paler now; the shadows look
gray, not black. The boisterous wind is hushed. What is the hour? Ah!
the watch has at last ceased to tick; for the Judge's forgetful fingers
neglected to wind it up, as usual, at ten o'clock, being half an hour
or so before his ordinary bedtime,--and it has run down, for the first
time in five years. But the great world-clock of Time still keeps its
beat. The dreary night--for, oh, how dreary seems its haunted waste,
behind us!--gives place to a fresh, transparent, cloudless morn.
Blessed, blessed radiance! The daybeam--even what little of it finds
its way into this always dusky parlor--seems part of the universal
benediction, annulling evil, and rendering all goodness possible, and
happiness attainable. Will Judge Pyncheon now rise up from his chair?
Will he go forth, and receive the early sunbeams on his brow? Will he
begin this new day,--which God has smiled upon, and blessed, and given
to mankind,--will he begin it with better purposes than the many that
have been spent amiss? Or are all the deep-laid schemes of yesterday as
stubborn in his heart, and as busy in his brain, as ever?
In this latter case, there is much to do. Will the Judge still insist
with Hepzibah on the interview with Clifford? Will he buy a safe,
elderly gentleman's horse? Will he persuade the purchaser of the old
Pyncheon property to relinquish the bargain in his favor? Will he see
his family physician, and obtain a medicine that shall preserve him, to
be an honor and blessing to his race, until the utmost term of
patriarchal longevity? Will Judge Pyncheon, above all, make due
apologies to that company of honorable friends, and satisfy them that
his absence from the festive board was unavoidable, and so fully
retrieve himself in their good opinion that he shall yet be Governor of
Massachusetts? And all these great purposes accomplished, will he walk
the streets again, with that dog-day smile of elaborate benevolence,
sultry enough to tempt flies to come and buzz in it? Or will he, after
the tomb-like seclusion of the past day and night, go forth a humbled
and repentant man, sorrowful, gentle, seeking no profit, shrinking from
worldly honor, hardly daring to love God, but bold to love his fellow
man, and to do him what good he may? Will he bear about with him,--no
odious grin of feigned benignity, insolent in its pretence, and
loathsome in its falsehood,--but the tender sadness of a contrite
heart, broken, at last, beneath its own weight of sin? For it is our
belief, whatever show of honor he may have piled upon it, that there
was heavy sin at the base of this man's being.
Rise up, Judge Pyncheon! The morning sunshine glimmers through the
foliage, and, beautiful and holy as it is, shuns not to kindle up your
face. Rise up, thou subtle, worldly, selfish, iron-hearted hypocrite,
and make thy choice whether still to be subtle, worldly, selfish,
iron-hearted, and hypocritical, or to tear these sins out of thy
nature, though they bring the lifeblood with them! The Avenger is upon
thee! Rise up, before it be too late!
What! Thou art not stirred by this last appeal? No, not a jot! And
there we see a fly,--one of your common house-flies, such as are always
buzzing on the window-pane,--which has smelt out Governor Pyncheon, and
alights, now on his forehead, now on his chin, and now, Heaven help us!
is creeping over the bridge of his nose, towards the would-be
chief-magistrate's wide-open eyes! Canst thou not brush the fly away?
Art thou too sluggish? Thou man, that hadst so many busy projects
yesterday! Art thou too weak, that wast so powerful? Not brush away a
fly? Nay, then, we give thee up!
And hark! the shop-bell rings. After hours like these latter ones,
through which we have borne our heavy tale, it is good to be made
sensible that there is a living world, and that even this old, lonely
mansion retains some manner of connection with it. We breathe more
freely, emerging from Judge Pyncheon's presence into the street before
the Seven Gables.
| Meanwhile, back in the old Pyncheon house, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon remains seated in the foreboding house, heedless of time. This is odd, because he is burdened with engagements -- he should see Clifford, and then he should see his broker, attend an auction to add a parcel of land to the Pyncheon holdings, buy a house, check on his wife's fallen tombstone, give generously to his political party and a trifle to a needy widow, and consult with his doctor about his throbbing heart. He also has a private political dinner to attend, with all manner of luxurious foods and wines. Will he be nominated for governor? This is indeed a keen matter, for there is blood on the Judge's shirt front. Darkness falls and covers the Judge's figure, and, meanwhile, the Judge's watch continues to tick on. The wind rises. One might easily imagine at this point that the seated figure might well be viewing a procession of Pyncheon ghosts -- including those of the Judge himself and his son. The moon rises, and a mouse approaches the seated figure. Is that a cat outside or the devil watching for a soul? By dawn, the Judge's watch has stopped ticking. A fly crawls toward the open, lifeless, staring eyes of the Judge. | summary |
JUDGE PYNCHEON, while his two relatives have fled away with such
ill-considered haste, still sits in the old parlor, keeping house, as
the familiar phrase is, in the absence of its ordinary occupants. To
him, and to the venerable House of the Seven Gables, does our story now
betake itself, like an owl, bewildered in the daylight, and hastening
back to his hollow tree.
The Judge has not shifted his position for a long while now. He has
not stirred hand or foot, nor withdrawn his eyes so much as a
hair's-breadth from their fixed gaze towards the corner of the room,
since the footsteps of Hepzibah and Clifford creaked along the passage,
and the outer door was closed cautiously behind their exit. He holds
his watch in his left hand, but clutched in such a manner that you
cannot see the dial-plate. How profound a fit of meditation! Or,
supposing him asleep, how infantile a quietude of conscience, and what
wholesome order in the gastric region, are betokened by slumber so
entirely undisturbed with starts, cramp, twitches, muttered dreamtalk,
trumpet-blasts through the nasal organ, or any slightest irregularity
of breath! You must hold your own breath, to satisfy yourself whether
he breathes at all. It is quite inaudible. You hear the ticking of
his watch; his breath you do not hear. A most refreshing slumber,
doubtless! And yet, the Judge cannot be asleep. His eyes are open! A
veteran politician, such as he, would never fall asleep with wide-open
eyes, lest some enemy or mischief-maker, taking him thus at unawares,
should peep through these windows into his consciousness, and make
strange discoveries among the reminiscences, projects, hopes,
apprehensions, weaknesses, and strong points, which he has heretofore
shared with nobody. A cautious man is proverbially said to sleep with
one eye open. That may be wisdom. But not with both; for this were
heedlessness! No, no! Judge Pyncheon cannot be asleep.
It is odd, however, that a gentleman so burdened with engagements,--and
noted, too, for punctuality,--should linger thus in an old lonely
mansion, which he has never seemed very fond of visiting. The oaken
chair, to be sure, may tempt him with its roominess. It is, indeed, a
spacious, and, allowing for the rude age that fashioned it, a
moderately easy seat, with capacity enough, at all events, and offering
no restraint to the Judge's breadth of beam. A bigger man might find
ample accommodation in it. His ancestor, now pictured upon the wall,
with all his English beef about him, used hardly to present a front
extending from elbow to elbow of this chair, or a base that would cover
its whole cushion. But there are better chairs than this,--mahogany,
black walnut, rosewood, spring-seated and damask-cushioned, with varied
slopes, and innumerable artifices to make them easy, and obviate the
irksomeness of too tame an ease,--a score of such might be at Judge
Pyncheon's service. Yes! in a score of drawing-rooms he would be more
than welcome. Mamma would advance to meet him, with outstretched hand;
the virgin daughter, elderly as he has now got to be,--an old widower,
as he smilingly describes himself,--would shake up the cushion for the
Judge, and do her pretty utmost to make him comfortable. For the Judge
is a prosperous man. He cherishes his schemes, moreover, like other
people, and reasonably brighter than most others; or did so, at least,
as he lay abed this morning, in an agreeable half-drowse, planning the
business of the day, and speculating on the probabilities of the next
fifteen years. With his firm health, and the little inroad that age
has made upon him, fifteen years or twenty--yes, or perhaps
five-and-twenty!--are no more than he may fairly call his own.
Five-and-twenty years for the enjoyment of his real estate in town and
country, his railroad, bank, and insurance shares, his United States
stock,--his wealth, in short, however invested, now in possession, or
soon to be acquired; together with the public honors that have fallen
upon him, and the weightier ones that are yet to fall! It is good! It
is excellent! It is enough!
Still lingering in the old chair! If the Judge has a little time to
throw away, why does not he visit the insurance office, as is his
frequent custom, and sit awhile in one of their leathern-cushioned
arm-chairs, listening to the gossip of the day, and dropping some
deeply designed chance-word, which will be certain to become the gossip
of to-morrow. And have not the bank directors a meeting at which it
was the Judge's purpose to be present, and his office to preside?
Indeed they have; and the hour is noted on a card, which is, or ought
to be, in Judge Pyncheon's right vest-pocket. Let him go thither, and
loll at ease upon his moneybags! He has lounged long enough in the old
chair!
This was to have been such a busy day. In the first place, the
interview with Clifford. Half an hour, by the Judge's reckoning, was
to suffice for that; it would probably be less, but--taking into
consideration that Hepzibah was first to be dealt with, and that these
women are apt to make many words where a few would do much better--it
might be safest to allow half an hour. Half an hour? Why, Judge, it is
already two hours, by your own undeviatingly accurate chronometer.
Glance your eye down at it and see! Ah; he will not give himself the
trouble either to bend his head, or elevate his hand, so as to bring
the faithful time-keeper within his range of vision! Time, all at once,
appears to have become a matter of no moment with the Judge!
And has he forgotten all the other items of his memoranda? Clifford's
affair arranged, he was to meet a State Street broker, who has
undertaken to procure a heavy percentage, and the best of paper, for a
few loose thousands which the Judge happens to have by him, uninvested.
The wrinkled note-shaver will have taken his railroad trip in vain.
Half an hour later, in the street next to this, there was to be an
auction of real estate, including a portion of the old Pyncheon
property, originally belonging to Maule's garden ground. It has been
alienated from the Pyncheons these four-score years; but the Judge had
kept it in his eye, and had set his heart on reannexing it to the small
demesne still left around the Seven Gables; and now, during this odd
fit of oblivion, the fatal hammer must have fallen, and transferred our
ancient patrimony to some alien possessor. Possibly, indeed, the sale
may have been postponed till fairer weather. If so, will the Judge
make it convenient to be present, and favor the auctioneer with his
bid, On the proximate occasion?
The next affair was to buy a horse for his own driving. The one
heretofore his favorite stumbled, this very morning, on the road to
town, and must be at once discarded. Judge Pyncheon's neck is too
precious to be risked on such a contingency as a stumbling steed.
Should all the above business be seasonably got through with, he might
attend the meeting of a charitable society; the very name of which,
however, in the multiplicity of his benevolence, is quite forgotten; so
that this engagement may pass unfulfilled, and no great harm done. And
if he have time, amid the press of more urgent matters, he must take
measures for the renewal of Mrs. Pyncheon's tombstone, which, the
sexton tells him, has fallen on its marble face, and is cracked quite
in twain. She was a praiseworthy woman enough, thinks the Judge, in
spite of her nervousness, and the tears that she was so oozy with, and
her foolish behavior about the coffee; and as she took her departure so
seasonably, he will not grudge the second tombstone. It is better, at
least, than if she had never needed any! The next item on his list was
to give orders for some fruit-trees, of a rare variety, to be
deliverable at his country-seat in the ensuing autumn. Yes, buy them,
by all means; and may the peaches be luscious in your mouth, Judge
Pyncheon! After this comes something more important. A committee of
his political party has besought him for a hundred or two of dollars,
in addition to his previous disbursements, towards carrying on the fall
campaign. The Judge is a patriot; the fate of the country is staked on
the November election; and besides, as will be shadowed forth in
another paragraph, he has no trifling stake of his own in the same
great game. He will do what the committee asks; nay, he will be
liberal beyond their expectations; they shall have a check for five
hundred dollars, and more anon, if it be needed. What next? A decayed
widow, whose husband was Judge Pyncheon's early friend, has laid her
case of destitution before him, in a very moving letter. She and her
fair daughter have scarcely bread to eat. He partly intends to call on
her to-day,--perhaps so--perhaps not,--accordingly as he may happen to
have leisure, and a small bank-note.
Another business, which, however, he puts no great weight on (it is
well, you know, to be heedful, but not over-anxious, as respects one's
personal health),--another business, then, was to consult his family
physician. About what, for Heaven's sake? Why, it is rather difficult
to describe the symptoms. A mere dimness of sight and dizziness of
brain, was it?--or disagreeable choking, or stifling, or gurgling, or
bubbling, in the region of the thorax, as the anatomists say?--or was
it a pretty severe throbbing and kicking of the heart, rather
creditable to him than otherwise, as showing that the organ had not
been left out of the Judge's physical contrivance? No matter what it
was. The doctor probably would smile at the statement of such trifles
to his professional ear; the Judge would smile in his turn; and meeting
one another's eyes, they would enjoy a hearty laugh together! But a fig
for medical advice. The Judge will never need it.
Pray, pray, Judge Pyncheon, look at your watch, Now! What--not a
glance! It is within ten minutes of the dinner hour! It surely cannot
have slipped your memory that the dinner of to-day is to be the most
important, in its consequences, of all the dinners you ever ate. Yes,
precisely the most important; although, in the course of your somewhat
eminent career, you have been placed high towards the head of the
table, at splendid banquets, and have poured out your festive eloquence
to ears yet echoing with Webster's mighty organ-tones. No public
dinner this, however. It is merely a gathering of some dozen or so of
friends from several districts of the State; men of distinguished
character and influence, assembling, almost casually, at the house of a
common friend, likewise distinguished, who will make them welcome to a
little better than his ordinary fare. Nothing in the way of French
cookery, but an excellent dinner, nevertheless. Real turtle, we
understand, and salmon, tautog, canvas-backs, pig, English mutton, good
roast beef, or dainties of that serious kind, fit for substantial
country gentlemen, as these honorable persons mostly are. The
delicacies of the season, in short, and flavored by a brand of old
Madeira which has been the pride of many seasons. It is the Juno
brand; a glorious wine, fragrant, and full of gentle might; a
bottled-up happiness, put by for use; a golden liquid, worth more than
liquid gold; so rare and admirable, that veteran wine-bibbers count it
among their epochs to have tasted it! It drives away the heart-ache,
and substitutes no head-ache! Could the Judge but quaff a glass, it
might enable him to shake off the unaccountable lethargy which (for the
ten intervening minutes, and five to boot, are already past) has made
him such a laggard at this momentous dinner. It would all but revive a
dead man! Would you like to sip it now, Judge Pyncheon?
Alas, this dinner. Have you really forgotten its true object? Then
let us whisper it, that you may start at once out of the oaken chair,
which really seems to be enchanted, like the one in Comus, or that in
which Moll Pitcher imprisoned your own grandfather. But ambition is a
talisman more powerful than witchcraft. Start up, then, and, hurrying
through the streets, burst in upon the company, that they may begin
before the fish is spoiled! They wait for you; and it is little for
your interest that they should wait. These gentlemen--need you be told
it?--have assembled, not without purpose, from every quarter of the
State. They are practised politicians, every man of them, and skilled
to adjust those preliminary measures which steal from the people,
without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers. The
popular voice, at the next gubernatorial election, though loud as
thunder, will be really but an echo of what these gentlemen shall
speak, under their breath, at your friend's festive board. They meet
to decide upon their candidate. This little knot of subtle schemers
will control the convention, and, through it, dictate to the party.
And what worthier candidate,--more wise and learned, more noted for
philanthropic liberality, truer to safe principles, tried oftener by
public trusts, more spotless in private character, with a larger stake
in the common welfare, and deeper grounded, by hereditary descent, in
the faith and practice of the Puritans,--what man can be presented for
the suffrage of the people, so eminently combining all these claims to
the chief-rulership as Judge Pyncheon here before us?
Make haste, then! Do your part! The meed for which you have toiled, and
fought, and climbed, and crept, is ready for your grasp! Be present at
this dinner!--drink a glass or two of that noble wine!--make your
pledges in as low a whisper as you will!--and you rise up from table
virtually governor of the glorious old State! Governor Pyncheon of
Massachusetts!
And is there no potent and exhilarating cordial in a certainty like
this? It has been the grand purpose of half your lifetime to obtain it.
Now, when there needs little more than to signify your acceptance, why
do you sit so lumpishly in your great-great-grandfather's oaken chair,
as if preferring it to the gubernatorial one? We have all heard of King
Log; but, in these jostling times, one of that royal kindred will
hardly win the race for an elective chief-magistracy.
Well; it is absolutely too late for dinner! Turtle, salmon, tautog,
woodcock, boiled turkey, South-Down mutton, pig, roast-beef, have
vanished, or exist only in fragments, with lukewarm potatoes, and
gravies crusted over with cold fat. The Judge, had he done nothing
else, would have achieved wonders with his knife and fork. It was he,
you know, of whom it used to be said, in reference to his ogre-like
appetite, that his Creator made him a great animal, but that the
dinner-hour made him a great beast. Persons of his large sensual
endowments must claim indulgence, at their feeding-time. But, for
once, the Judge is entirely too late for dinner! Too late, we fear,
even to join the party at their wine! The guests are warm and merry;
they have given up the Judge; and, concluding that the Free-Soilers
have him, they will fix upon another candidate. Were our friend now to
stalk in among them, with that wide-open stare, at once wild and
stolid, his ungenial presence would be apt to change their cheer.
Neither would it be seemly in Judge Pyncheon, generally so scrupulous
in his attire, to show himself at a dinner-table with that crimson
stain upon his shirt-bosom. By the bye, how came it there? It is an
ugly sight, at any rate; and the wisest way for the Judge is to button
his coat closely over his breast, and, taking his horse and chaise from
the livery stable, to make all speed to his own house. There, after a
glass of brandy and water, and a mutton-chop, a beefsteak, a broiled
fowl, or some such hasty little dinner and supper all in one, he had
better spend the evening by the fireside. He must toast his slippers a
long while, in order to get rid of the chilliness which the air of this
vile old house has sent curdling through his veins.
Up, therefore, Judge Pyncheon, up! You have lost a day. But to-morrow
will be here anon. Will you rise, betimes, and make the most of it?
To-morrow. To-morrow! To-morrow. We, that are alive, may rise betimes
to-morrow. As for him that has died to-day, his morrow will be the
resurrection morn.
Meanwhile the twilight is glooming upward out of the corners of the
room. The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper, and at first
become more definite; then, spreading wider, they lose their
distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion, as it were,
that creeps slowly over the various objects, and the one human figure
sitting in the midst of them. The gloom has not entered from without;
it has brooded here all day, and now, taking its own inevitable time,
will possess itself of everything. The Judge's face, indeed, rigid and
singularly white, refuses to melt into this universal solvent. Fainter
and fainter grows the light. It is as if another double-handful of
darkness had been scattered through the air. Now it is no longer gray,
but sable. There is still a faint appearance at the window; neither a
glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmer,--any phrase of light would express
something far brighter than this doubtful perception, or sense, rather,
that there is a window there. Has it yet vanished? No!--yes!--not
quite! And there is still the swarthy whiteness,--we shall venture to
marry these ill-agreeing words,--the swarthy whiteness of Judge
Pyncheon's face. The features are all gone: there is only the paleness
of them left. And how looks it now? There is no window! There is no
face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where
is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos,
may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and
murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!
Is there no other sound? One other, and a fearful one. It is the
ticking of the Judge's watch, which, ever since Hepzibah left the room
in search of Clifford, he has been holding in his hand. Be the cause
what it may, this little, quiet, never-ceasing throb of Time's pulse,
repeating its small strokes with such busy regularity, in Judge
Pyncheon's motionless hand, has an effect of terror, which we do not
find in any other accompaniment of the scene.
But, listen! That puff of the breeze was louder. It had a tone unlike
the dreary and sullen one which has bemoaned itself, and afflicted all
mankind with miserable sympathy, for five days past. The wind has
veered about! It now comes boisterously from the northwest, and, taking
hold of the aged framework of the Seven Gables, gives it a shake, like
a wrestler that would try strength with his antagonist. Another and
another sturdy tussle with the blast! The old house creaks again, and
makes a vociferous but somewhat unintelligible bellowing in its sooty
throat (the big flue, we mean, of its wide chimney), partly in
complaint at the rude wind, but rather, as befits their century and a
half of hostile intimacy, in tough defiance. A rumbling kind of a
bluster roars behind the fire-board. A door has slammed above stairs.
A window, perhaps, has been left open, or else is driven in by an
unruly gust. It is not to be conceived, before-hand, what wonderful
wind-instruments are these old timber mansions, and how haunted with
the strangest noises, which immediately begin to sing, and sigh, and
sob, and shriek,--and to smite with sledge-hammers, airy but ponderous,
in some distant chamber,--and to tread along the entries as with
stately footsteps, and rustle up and down the staircase, as with silks
miraculously stiff,--whenever the gale catches the house with a window
open, and gets fairly into it. Would that we were not an attendant
spirit here! It is too awful! This clamor of the wind through the
lonely house; the Judge's quietude, as he sits invisible; and that
pertinacious ticking of his watch!
As regards Judge Pyncheon's invisibility, however, that matter will
soon be remedied. The northwest wind has swept the sky clear. The
window is distinctly seen. Through its panes, moreover, we dimly catch
the sweep of the dark, clustering foliage outside, fluttering with a
constant irregularity of movement, and letting in a peep of starlight,
now here, now there. Oftener than any other object, these glimpses
illuminate the Judge's face. But here comes more effectual light.
Observe that silvery dance upon the upper branches of the pear-tree,
and now a little lower, and now on the whole mass of boughs, while,
through their shifting intricacies, the moonbeams fall aslant into the
room. They play over the Judge's figure and show that he has not
stirred throughout the hours of darkness. They follow the shadows, in
changeful sport, across his unchanging features. They gleam upon his
watch. His grasp conceals the dial-plate,--but we know that the
faithful hands have met; for one of the city clocks tells midnight.
A man of sturdy understanding, like Judge Pyncheon, cares no more for
twelve o'clock at night than for the corresponding hour of noon.
However just the parallel drawn, in some of the preceding pages,
between his Puritan ancestor and himself, it fails in this point. The
Pyncheon of two centuries ago, in common with most of his
contemporaries, professed his full belief in spiritual ministrations,
although reckoning them chiefly of a malignant character. The Pyncheon
of to-night, who sits in yonder arm-chair, believes in no such
nonsense. Such, at least, was his creed, some few hours since. His
hair will not bristle, therefore, at the stories which--in times when
chimney-corners had benches in them, where old people sat poking into
the ashes of the past, and raking out traditions like live coals--used
to be told about this very room of his ancestral house. In fact, these
tales are too absurd to bristle even childhood's hair. What sense,
meaning, or moral, for example, such as even ghost-stories should be
susceptible of, can be traced in the ridiculous legend, that, at
midnight, all the dead Pyncheons are bound to assemble in this parlor?
And, pray, for what? Why, to see whether the portrait of their ancestor
still keeps its place upon the wall, in compliance with his
testamentary directions! Is it worth while to come out of their graves
for that?
We are tempted to make a little sport with the idea. Ghost-stories are
hardly to be treated seriously any longer. The family-party of the
defunct Pyncheons, we presume, goes off in this wise.
First comes the ancestor himself, in his black cloak, steeple-hat, and
trunk-breeches, girt about the waist with a leathern belt, in which
hangs his steel-hilted sword; he has a long staff in his hand, such as
gentlemen in advanced life used to carry, as much for the dignity of
the thing as for the support to be derived from it. He looks up at the
portrait; a thing of no substance, gazing at its own painted image! All
is safe. The picture is still there. The purpose of his brain has
been kept sacred thus long after the man himself has sprouted up in
graveyard grass. See! he lifts his ineffectual hand, and tries the
frame. All safe! But is that a smile?--is it not, rather a frown of
deadly import, that darkens over the shadow of his features? The stout
Colonel is dissatisfied! So decided is his look of discontent as to
impart additional distinctness to his features; through which,
nevertheless, the moonlight passes, and flickers on the wall beyond.
Something has strangely vexed the ancestor! With a grim shake of the
head, he turns away. Here come other Pyncheons, the whole tribe, in
their half a dozen generations, jostling and elbowing one another, to
reach the picture. We behold aged men and grandames, a clergyman with
the Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien, and a red-coated
officer of the old French war; and there comes the shop-keeping
Pyncheon of a century ago, with the ruffles turned back from his
wrists; and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artist's
legend, with the beautiful and pensive Alice, who brings no pride out
of her virgin grave. All try the picture-frame. What do these ghostly
people seek? A mother lifts her child, that his little hands may touch
it! There is evidently a mystery about the picture, that perplexes
these poor Pyncheons when they ought to be at rest. In a corner,
meanwhile, stands the figure of an elderly man, in a leathern jerkin
and breeches, with a carpenter's rule sticking out of his side pocket;
he points his finger at the bearded Colonel and his descendants,
nodding, jeering, mocking, and finally bursting into obstreperous,
though inaudible laughter.
Indulging our fancy in this freak, we have partly lost the power of
restraint and guidance. We distinguish an unlooked-for figure in our
visionary scene. Among those ancestral people there is a young man,
dressed in the very fashion of to-day: he wears a dark frock-coat,
almost destitute of skirts, gray pantaloons, gaiter boots of patent
leather, and has a finely wrought gold chain across his breast, and a
little silver-headed whalebone stick in his hand. Were we to meet this
figure at noonday, we should greet him as young Jaffrey Pyncheon, the
Judge's only surviving child, who has been spending the last two years
in foreign travel. If still in life, how comes his shadow hither? If
dead, what a misfortune! The old Pyncheon property, together with the
great estate acquired by the young man's father, would devolve on whom?
On poor, foolish Clifford, gaunt Hepzibah, and rustic little Phoebe!
But another and a greater marvel greets us! Can we believe our eyes? A
stout, elderly gentleman has made his appearance; he has an aspect of
eminent respectability, wears a black coat and pantaloons, of roomy
width, and might be pronounced scrupulously neat in his attire, but for
a broad crimson stain across his snowy neckcloth and down his
shirt-bosom. Is it the Judge, or no? How can it be Judge Pyncheon? We
discern his figure, as plainly as the flickering moonbeams can show us
anything, still seated in the oaken chair! Be the apparition whose it
may, it advances to the picture, seems to seize the frame, tries to
peep behind it, and turns away, with a frown as black as the ancestral
one.
The fantastic scene just hinted at must by no means be considered as
forming an actual portion of our story. We were betrayed into this
brief extravagance by the quiver of the moonbeams; they dance
hand-in-hand with shadows, and are reflected in the looking-glass,
which, you are aware, is always a kind of window or doorway into the
spiritual world. We needed relief, moreover, from our too long and
exclusive contemplation of that figure in the chair. This wild wind,
too, has tossed our thoughts into strange confusion, but without
tearing them away from their one determined centre. Yonder leaden
Judge sits immovably upon our soul. Will he never stir again? We shall
go mad unless he stirs! You may the better estimate his quietude by the
fearlessness of a little mouse, which sits on its hind legs, in a
streak of moonlight, close by Judge Pyncheon's foot, and seems to
meditate a journey of exploration over this great black bulk. Ha! what
has startled the nimble little mouse? It is the visage of grimalkin,
outside of the window, where he appears to have posted himself for a
deliberate watch. This grimalkin has a very ugly look. Is it a cat
watching for a mouse, or the devil for a human soul? Would we could
scare him from the window!
Thank Heaven, the night is well-nigh past! The moonbeams have no longer
so silvery a gleam, nor contrast so strongly with the blackness of the
shadows among which they fall. They are paler now; the shadows look
gray, not black. The boisterous wind is hushed. What is the hour? Ah!
the watch has at last ceased to tick; for the Judge's forgetful fingers
neglected to wind it up, as usual, at ten o'clock, being half an hour
or so before his ordinary bedtime,--and it has run down, for the first
time in five years. But the great world-clock of Time still keeps its
beat. The dreary night--for, oh, how dreary seems its haunted waste,
behind us!--gives place to a fresh, transparent, cloudless morn.
Blessed, blessed radiance! The daybeam--even what little of it finds
its way into this always dusky parlor--seems part of the universal
benediction, annulling evil, and rendering all goodness possible, and
happiness attainable. Will Judge Pyncheon now rise up from his chair?
Will he go forth, and receive the early sunbeams on his brow? Will he
begin this new day,--which God has smiled upon, and blessed, and given
to mankind,--will he begin it with better purposes than the many that
have been spent amiss? Or are all the deep-laid schemes of yesterday as
stubborn in his heart, and as busy in his brain, as ever?
In this latter case, there is much to do. Will the Judge still insist
with Hepzibah on the interview with Clifford? Will he buy a safe,
elderly gentleman's horse? Will he persuade the purchaser of the old
Pyncheon property to relinquish the bargain in his favor? Will he see
his family physician, and obtain a medicine that shall preserve him, to
be an honor and blessing to his race, until the utmost term of
patriarchal longevity? Will Judge Pyncheon, above all, make due
apologies to that company of honorable friends, and satisfy them that
his absence from the festive board was unavoidable, and so fully
retrieve himself in their good opinion that he shall yet be Governor of
Massachusetts? And all these great purposes accomplished, will he walk
the streets again, with that dog-day smile of elaborate benevolence,
sultry enough to tempt flies to come and buzz in it? Or will he, after
the tomb-like seclusion of the past day and night, go forth a humbled
and repentant man, sorrowful, gentle, seeking no profit, shrinking from
worldly honor, hardly daring to love God, but bold to love his fellow
man, and to do him what good he may? Will he bear about with him,--no
odious grin of feigned benignity, insolent in its pretence, and
loathsome in its falsehood,--but the tender sadness of a contrite
heart, broken, at last, beneath its own weight of sin? For it is our
belief, whatever show of honor he may have piled upon it, that there
was heavy sin at the base of this man's being.
Rise up, Judge Pyncheon! The morning sunshine glimmers through the
foliage, and, beautiful and holy as it is, shuns not to kindle up your
face. Rise up, thou subtle, worldly, selfish, iron-hearted hypocrite,
and make thy choice whether still to be subtle, worldly, selfish,
iron-hearted, and hypocritical, or to tear these sins out of thy
nature, though they bring the lifeblood with them! The Avenger is upon
thee! Rise up, before it be too late!
What! Thou art not stirred by this last appeal? No, not a jot! And
there we see a fly,--one of your common house-flies, such as are always
buzzing on the window-pane,--which has smelt out Governor Pyncheon, and
alights, now on his forehead, now on his chin, and now, Heaven help us!
is creeping over the bridge of his nose, towards the would-be
chief-magistrate's wide-open eyes! Canst thou not brush the fly away?
Art thou too sluggish? Thou man, that hadst so many busy projects
yesterday! Art thou too weak, that wast so powerful? Not brush away a
fly? Nay, then, we give thee up!
And hark! the shop-bell rings. After hours like these latter ones,
through which we have borne our heavy tale, it is good to be made
sensible that there is a living world, and that even this old, lonely
mansion retains some manner of connection with it. We breathe more
freely, emerging from Judge Pyncheon's presence into the street before
the Seven Gables.
| In Chapter 18, the story moves "like an owl, bewildered in the daylight" to the house where the dead Judge is. This chapter is an ironic meditation on time and the eternity into which the dead man has entered. Time passes, minute by minute, and with it the Judge's carefully organized commitments, including the political dinner which would have made him the next governor of Massachusetts. Figuratively, however, the influence of the Judge still seems to brood over the chamber. Hawthorne notes the shadows of the tall furniture becoming deeper, losing their distinctiveness of outline in the "dark, gray tide of oblivion." The gloom, he says, has brooded here all day, and now, "will possess itself of everything." But the Judge's white face, curiously, does not become dark; instead, it turns into a kind of swarthy whiteness. The features all seem to be gone; there is only the paleness left. While the two fugitives are embarked on their wild flight through the streets and aboard the train, and as Clifford is temporarily assuming the outside world's veneer, the corpse of Judge Pyncheon is gradually fading into the shadows of the house. Throughout his life he has clutched at the solid "realities" of the past -- real estate, in particular -- while shrugging off the intangible heredity that contains his ultimate doom. On the surface, his motives are clear. Through his political influence, the Judge has had Clifford released from prison for one reason only: Clifford will either divulge the whereabouts of the map and the deed "to the large tracts of land to the east" -- or else Jaffrey will have him declared insane. Yet, the matter is not all that simple: From the beginning, when Hepzibah first opened her shop, and the Judge scrutinized the old house from "the opposite side" of the street, one felt that his efforts to get inside the house unconsciously stemmed from something even deeper than greed. Hawthorne makes us feel that the Judge believed that he could "exorcise" the black evil which infested the ancestral home; he seemed to feel the need to wrench out and analyze the secret of the dark old house's interior -- its heart of darkness. Although that obsession is never made absolutely explicit, Hepzibah hints at it when she tells Jaffrey that he is "diseased in mind." The macabre chapter in which the narrator gloats almost to excess over the Judge's death may repel some modern readers, but the passages are critical and necessary because they climax the subtle interaction between the sense of space and time that permeates this book. In addition, one of the novel's key ironies lies here. Judge Jaffrey was a devotee of the mechanical system in which time is measured spatially; such a view of time assumes that our experience takes place at distinct, short instants. But the little card that falls out of Jaffrey's pocket on the doorstep forms "a prospective epitome of the day's history"; furthermore, his unerringly accurate watch measures the distance between his various engagements. One might say, indeed, that, in death, the Judge's watch replaces his pulse. In the darkening inner parlor of the house, both the Judge's watch and his pulse run down; the Judge is overwhelmed by real time, and despite the Judge's death, "the great world-clock of Time still keeps its beat." Hawthorne compresses the outcome in one sarcastic pun: "Time, all at once, appears to have become a matter of no moment with the Judge!" But the rhetoric of this chapter is not just a showpiece; it functions as part of the irony. The old Pyncheon house is a custodian: It holds the documents, books, and poetry from the past. In the Judge's material fashion, he tried to effect a synthesis between himself and his past -- and the attempt killed him. | analysis |
THE sudden death of so prominent a member of the social world as the
Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a sensation (at least, in the
circles more immediately connected with the deceased) which had hardly
quite subsided in a fortnight.
It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which constitute a
person's biography, there is scarcely one--none, certainly, of anything
like a similar importance--to which the world so easily reconciles
itself as to his death. In most other cases and contingencies, the
individual is present among us, mixed up with the daily revolution of
affairs, and affording a definite point for observation. At his
decease, there is only a vacancy, and a momentary eddy,--very small, as
compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated object,--and a
bubble or two, ascending out of the black depth and bursting at the
surface. As regarded Judge Pyncheon, it seemed probable, at first
blush, that the mode of his final departure might give him a larger and
longer posthumous vogue than ordinarily attends the memory of a
distinguished man. But when it came to be understood, on the highest
professional authority, that the event was a natural, and--except for
some unimportant particulars, denoting a slight idiosyncrasy--by no
means an unusual form of death, the public, with its customary
alacrity, proceeded to forget that he had ever lived. In short, the
honorable Judge was beginning to be a stale subject before half the
country newspapers had found time to put their columns in mourning, and
publish his exceedingly eulogistic obituary.
Nevertheless, creeping darkly through the places which this excellent
person had haunted in his lifetime, there was a hidden stream of
private talk, such as it would have shocked all decency to speak loudly
at the street-corners. It is very singular, how the fact of a man's
death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether
for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and
acting among them. Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes
falsehood, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the
gold, and dishonors the baser metal. Could the departed, whoever he
may be, return in a week after his decease, he would almost invariably
find himself at a higher or lower point than he had formerly occupied,
on the scale of public appreciation. But the talk, or scandal, to
which we now allude, had reference to matters of no less old a date
than the supposed murder, thirty or forty years ago, of the late Judge
Pyncheon's uncle. The medical opinion with regard to his own recent
and regretted decease had almost entirely obviated the idea that a
murder was committed in the former case. Yet, as the record showed,
there were circumstances irrefragably indicating that some person had
gained access to old Jaffrey Pyncheon's private apartments, at or near
the moment of his death. His desk and private drawers, in a room
contiguous to his bedchamber, had been ransacked; money and valuable
articles were missing; there was a bloody hand-print on the old man's
linen; and, by a powerfully welded chain of deductive evidence, the
guilt of the robbery and apparent murder had been fixed on Clifford,
then residing with his uncle in the House of the Seven Gables.
Whencesoever originating, there now arose a theory that undertook so to
account for these circumstances as to exclude the idea of Clifford's
agency. Many persons affirmed that the history and elucidation of the
facts, long so mysterious, had been obtained by the daguerreotypist
from one of those mesmerical seers who, nowadays, so strangely perplex
the aspect of human affairs, and put everybody's natural vision to the
blush, by the marvels which they see with their eyes shut.
According to this version of the story, Judge Pyncheon, exemplary as we
have portrayed him in our narrative, was, in his youth, an apparently
irreclaimable scapegrace. The brutish, the animal instincts, as is
often the case, had been developed earlier than the intellectual
qualities, and the force of character, for which he was afterwards
remarkable. He had shown himself wild, dissipated, addicted to low
pleasures, little short of ruffianly in his propensities, and
recklessly expensive, with no other resources than the bounty of his
uncle. This course of conduct had alienated the old bachelor's
affection, once strongly fixed upon him. Now it is averred,--but
whether on authority available in a court of justice, we do not pretend
to have investigated,--that the young man was tempted by the devil, one
night, to search his uncle's private drawers, to which he had
unsuspected means of access. While thus criminally occupied, he was
startled by the opening of the chamber-door. There stood old Jaffrey
Pyncheon, in his nightclothes! The surprise of such a discovery, his
agitation, alarm, and horror, brought on the crisis of a disorder to
which the old bachelor had an hereditary liability; he seemed to choke
with blood, and fell upon the floor, striking his temple a heavy blow
against the corner of a table. What was to be done? The old man was
surely dead! Assistance would come too late! What a misfortune, indeed,
should it come too soon, since his reviving consciousness would bring
the recollection of the ignominious offence which he had beheld his
nephew in the very act of committing!
But he never did revive. With the cool hardihood that always pertained
to him, the young man continued his search of the drawers, and found a
will, of recent date, in favor of Clifford,--which he destroyed,--and
an older one, in his own favor, which he suffered to remain. But
before retiring, Jaffrey bethought himself of the evidence, in these
ransacked drawers, that some one had visited the chamber with sinister
purposes. Suspicion, unless averted, might fix upon the real offender.
In the very presence of the dead man, therefore, he laid a scheme that
should free himself at the expense of Clifford, his rival, for whose
character he had at once a contempt and a repugnance. It is not
probable, be it said, that he acted with any set purpose of involving
Clifford in a charge of murder. Knowing that his uncle did not die by
violence, it may not have occurred to him, in the hurry of the crisis,
that such an inference might be drawn. But, when the affair took this
darker aspect, Jaffrey's previous steps had already pledged him to
those which remained. So craftily had he arranged the circumstances,
that, at Clifford's trial, his cousin hardly found it necessary to
swear to anything false, but only to withhold the one decisive
explanation, by refraining to state what he had himself done and
witnessed.
Thus Jaffrey Pyncheon's inward criminality, as regarded Clifford, was,
indeed, black and damnable; while its mere outward show and positive
commission was the smallest that could possibly consist with so great a
sin. This is just the sort of guilt that a man of eminent
respectability finds it easiest to dispose of. It was suffered to fade
out of sight or be reckoned a venial matter, in the Honorable Judge
Pyncheon's long subsequent survey of his own life. He shuffled it
aside, among the forgotten and forgiven frailties of his youth, and
seldom thought of it again.
We leave the Judge to his repose. He could not be styled fortunate at
the hour of death. Unknowingly, he was a childless man, while striving
to add more wealth to his only child's inheritance. Hardly a week
after his decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of
the death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheon's son, just at the point of
embarkation for his native land. By this misfortune Clifford became
rich; so did Hepzibah; so did our little village maiden, and, through
her, that sworn foe of wealth and all manner of conservatism,--the wild
reformer,--Holgrave!
It was now far too late in Clifford's life for the good opinion of
society to be worth the trouble and anguish of a formal vindication.
What he needed was the love of a very few; not the admiration, or even
the respect, of the unknown many. The latter might probably have been
won for him, had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had
fallen deemed it advisable to expose Clifford to a miserable
resuscitation of past ideas, when the condition of whatever comfort he
might expect lay in the calm of forgetfulness. After such wrong as he
had suffered, there is no reparation. The pitiable mockery of it,
which the world might have been ready enough to offer, coming so long
after the agony had done its utmost work, would have been fit only to
provoke bitterer laughter than poor Clifford was ever capable of. It
is a truth (and it would be a very sad one but for the higher hopes
which it suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in
our mortal sphere, is ever really set right. Time, the continual
vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of
death, render it impossible. If, after long lapse of years, the right
seems to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in. The better
remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought
his irreparable ruin far behind him.
The shock of Judge Pyncheon's death had a permanently invigorating and
ultimately beneficial effect on Clifford. That strong and ponderous
man had been Clifford's nightmare. There was no free breath to be
drawn, within the sphere of so malevolent an influence. The first
effect of freedom, as we have witnessed in Clifford's aimless flight,
was a tremulous exhilaration. Subsiding from it, he did not sink into
his former intellectual apathy. He never, it is true, attained to
nearly the full measure of what might have been his faculties. But he
recovered enough of them partially to light up his character, to
display some outline of the marvellous grace that was abortive in it,
and to make him the object of no less deep, although less melancholy
interest than heretofore. He was evidently happy. Could we pause to
give another picture of his daily life, with all the appliances now at
command to gratify his instinct for the Beautiful, the garden scenes,
that seemed so sweet to him, would look mean and trivial in comparison.
Very soon after their change of fortune, Clifford, Hepzibah, and little
Phoebe, with the approval of the artist, concluded to remove from the
dismal old House of the Seven Gables, and take up their abode, for the
present, at the elegant country-seat of the late Judge Pyncheon.
Chanticleer and his family had already been transported thither, where
the two hens had forthwith begun an indefatigable process of
egg-laying, with an evident design, as a matter of duty and conscience,
to continue their illustrious breed under better auspices than for a
century past. On the day set for their departure, the principal
personages of our story, including good Uncle Venner, were assembled in
the parlor.
"The country-house is certainly a very fine one, so far as the plan
goes," observed Holgrave, as the party were discussing their future
arrangements. "But I wonder that the late Judge--being so opulent, and
with a reasonable prospect of transmitting his wealth to descendants of
his own--should not have felt the propriety of embodying so excellent a
piece of domestic architecture in stone, rather than in wood. Then,
every generation of the family might have altered the interior, to suit
its own taste and convenience; while the exterior, through the lapse of
years, might have been adding venerableness to its original beauty, and
thus giving that impression of permanence which I consider essential to
the happiness of any one moment."
"Why," cried Phoebe, gazing into the artist's face with infinite
amazement, "how wonderfully your ideas are changed! A house of stone,
indeed! It is but two or three weeks ago that you seemed to wish people
to live in something as fragile and temporary as a bird's-nest!"
"Ah, Phoebe, I told you how it would be!" said the artist, with a
half-melancholy laugh. "You find me a conservative already! Little
did I think ever to become one. It is especially unpardonable in this
dwelling of so much hereditary misfortune, and under the eye of yonder
portrait of a model conservative, who, in that very character, rendered
himself so long the evil destiny of his race."
"That picture!" said Clifford, seeming to shrink from its stern glance.
"Whenever I look at it, there is an old dreamy recollection haunting
me, but keeping just beyond the grasp of my mind. Wealth, it seems to
say!--boundless wealth!--unimaginable wealth! I could fancy that, when
I was a child, or a youth, that portrait had spoken, and told me a rich
secret, or had held forth its hand, with the written record of hidden
opulence. But those old matters are so dim with me, nowadays! What
could this dream have been?"
"Perhaps I can recall it," answered Holgrave. "See! There are a
hundred chances to one that no person, unacquainted with the secret,
would ever touch this spring."
"A secret spring!" cried Clifford. "Ah, I remember now! I did discover
it, one summer afternoon, when I was idling and dreaming about the
house, long, long ago. But the mystery escapes me."
The artist put his finger on the contrivance to which he had referred.
In former days, the effect would probably have been to cause the
picture to start forward. But, in so long a period of concealment, the
machinery had been eaten through with rust; so that at Holgrave's
pressure, the portrait, frame and all, tumbled suddenly from its
position, and lay face downward on the floor. A recess in the wall was
thus brought to light, in which lay an object so covered with a
century's dust that it could not immediately be recognized as a folded
sheet of parchment. Holgrave opened it, and displayed an ancient deed,
signed with the hieroglyphics of several Indian sagamores, and
conveying to Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs, forever, a vast extent of
territory at the Eastward.
"This is the very parchment, the attempt to recover which cost the
beautiful Alice Pyncheon her happiness and life," said the artist,
alluding to his legend. "It is what the Pyncheons sought in vain,
while it was valuable; and now that they find the treasure, it has long
been worthless."
"Poor Cousin Jaffrey! This is what deceived him," exclaimed Hepzibah.
"When they were young together, Clifford probably made a kind of
fairy-tale of this discovery. He was always dreaming hither and
thither about the house, and lighting up its dark corners with
beautiful stories. And poor Jaffrey, who took hold of everything as if
it were real, thought my brother had found out his uncle's wealth. He
died with this delusion in his mind!"
"But," said Phoebe, apart to Holgrave, "how came you to know the
secret?"
"My dearest Phoebe," said Holgrave, "how will it please you to assume
the name of Maule? As for the secret, it is the only inheritance that
has come down to me from my ancestors. You should have known sooner
(only that I was afraid of frightening you away) that, in this long
drama of wrong and retribution, I represent the old wizard, and am
probably as much a wizard as ever he was. The son of the executed
Matthew Maule, while building this house, took the opportunity to
construct that recess, and hide away the Indian deed, on which depended
the immense land-claim of the Pyncheons. Thus they bartered their
eastern territory for Maule's garden-ground."
"And now" said Uncle Venner "I suppose their whole claim is not worth
one man's share in my farm yonder!"
"Uncle Venner," cried Phoebe, taking the patched philosopher's hand,
"you must never talk any more about your farm! You shall never go
there, as long as you live! There is a cottage in our new garden,--the
prettiest little yellowish-brown cottage you ever saw; and the
sweetest-looking place, for it looks just as if it were made of
gingerbread,--and we are going to fit it up and furnish it, on purpose
for you. And you shall do nothing but what you choose, and shall be as
happy as the day is long, and shall keep Cousin Clifford in spirits
with the wisdom and pleasantness which is always dropping from your
lips!"
"Ah! my dear child," quoth good Uncle Venner, quite overcome, "if you
were to speak to a young man as you do to an old one, his chance of
keeping his heart another minute would not be worth one of the buttons
on my waistcoat! And--soul alive!--that great sigh, which you made me
heave, has burst off the very last of them! But, never mind! It was the
happiest sigh I ever did heave; and it seems as if I must have drawn in
a gulp of heavenly breath, to make it with. Well, well, Miss Phoebe!
They'll miss me in the gardens hereabouts, and round by the back doors;
and Pyncheon Street, I'm afraid, will hardly look the same without old
Uncle Venner, who remembers it with a mowing field on one side, and the
garden of the Seven Gables on the other. But either I must go to your
country-seat, or you must come to my farm,--that's one of two things
certain; and I leave you to choose which!"
"Oh, come with us, by all means, Uncle Venner!" said Clifford, who had
a remarkable enjoyment of the old man's mellow, quiet, and simple
spirit. "I want you always to be within five minutes, saunter of my
chair. You are the only philosopher I ever knew of whose wisdom has
not a drop of bitter essence at the bottom!"
"Dear me!" cried Uncle Venner, beginning partly to realize what manner
of man he was. "And yet folks used to set me down among the simple
ones, in my younger days! But I suppose I am like a Roxbury russet,--a
great deal the better, the longer I can be kept. Yes; and my words of
wisdom, that you and Phoebe tell me of, are like the golden dandelions,
which never grow in the hot months, but may be seen glistening among
the withered grass, and under the dry leaves, sometimes as late as
December. And you are welcome, friends, to my mess of dandelions, if
there were twice as many!"
A plain, but handsome, dark-green barouche had now drawn up in front of
the ruinous portal of the old mansion-house. The party came forth, and
(with the exception of good Uncle Venner, who was to follow in a few
days) proceeded to take their places. They were chatting and laughing
very pleasantly together; and--as proves to be often the case, at
moments when we ought to palpitate with sensibility--Clifford and
Hepzibah bade a final farewell to the abode of their forefathers, with
hardly more emotion than if they had made it their arrangement to
return thither at tea-time. Several children were drawn to the spot by
so unusual a spectacle as the barouche and pair of gray horses.
Recognizing little Ned Higgins among them, Hepzibah put her hand into
her pocket, and presented the urchin, her earliest and staunchest
customer, with silver enough to people the Domdaniel cavern of his
interior with as various a procession of quadrupeds as passed into the
ark.
Two men were passing, just as the barouche drove off.
"Well, Dixey," said one of them, "what do you think of this? My wife
kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay.
Old Maid Pyncheon has been in trade just about as long, and rides off
in her carriage with a couple of hundred thousand,--reckoning her
share, and Clifford's, and Phoebe's,--and some say twice as much! If
you choose to call it luck, it is all very well; but if we are to take
it as the will of Providence, why, I can't exactly fathom it!"
"Pretty good business!" quoth the sagacious Dixey,--"pretty good
business!"
Maule's well, all this time, though left in solitude, was throwing up a
succession of kaleidoscopic pictures, in which a gifted eye might have
seen foreshadowed the coming fortunes of Hepzibah and Clifford, and the
descendant of the legendary wizard, and the village maiden, over whom
he had thrown love's web of sorcery. The Pyncheon Elm, moreover, with
what foliage the September gale had spared to it, whispered
unintelligible prophecies. And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from
the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that
sweet Alice Pyncheon--after witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and
this present happiness, of her kindred mortals--had given one farewell
touch of a spirit's joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward
from the HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES!
| Before Holgrave can throw open the doors of the house and admit the warm sunlight, Hepzibah and Clifford enter and embrace Phoebe, now happily returned to them. After what is soon termed a "natural death," Judge Pyncheon is quickly forgotten. A theory is advanced that as a youth he was surprised by his uncle while ransacking his uncle's desk. The old man had a seizure and died, and his would-be robber found two wills, one favoring the Judge and another will of a later date favoring Clifford. Destroying the latter, the Judge planted evidence pointing the finger of suspicion at Clifford, who was, accordingly, imprisoned for murder. The son of the Judge has now predeceased him; so Clifford and Hepzibah inherit his wealth and country estate, to which they decide to move. Clifford is easier in his mind and happier now, but he is still not well. No great mistake can ever be really set right, Hawthorne seems to say. Holgrave finally tells Phoebe that he is a Maule, and laughingly he expresses the non-reformer's sorrow that their country estate is made of wood rather than of permanent stone. He finds a spring -- which Clifford now vaguely remembers -- in the ancestral portrait and reveals that behind it lies the now useless deed to the Indian lands. When they all decide in September to move into the country, they take Uncle Venner with them. The old man fancies that he hears the shade of Alice Pyncheon playing sweet music. | summary |
THE sudden death of so prominent a member of the social world as the
Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a sensation (at least, in the
circles more immediately connected with the deceased) which had hardly
quite subsided in a fortnight.
It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which constitute a
person's biography, there is scarcely one--none, certainly, of anything
like a similar importance--to which the world so easily reconciles
itself as to his death. In most other cases and contingencies, the
individual is present among us, mixed up with the daily revolution of
affairs, and affording a definite point for observation. At his
decease, there is only a vacancy, and a momentary eddy,--very small, as
compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated object,--and a
bubble or two, ascending out of the black depth and bursting at the
surface. As regarded Judge Pyncheon, it seemed probable, at first
blush, that the mode of his final departure might give him a larger and
longer posthumous vogue than ordinarily attends the memory of a
distinguished man. But when it came to be understood, on the highest
professional authority, that the event was a natural, and--except for
some unimportant particulars, denoting a slight idiosyncrasy--by no
means an unusual form of death, the public, with its customary
alacrity, proceeded to forget that he had ever lived. In short, the
honorable Judge was beginning to be a stale subject before half the
country newspapers had found time to put their columns in mourning, and
publish his exceedingly eulogistic obituary.
Nevertheless, creeping darkly through the places which this excellent
person had haunted in his lifetime, there was a hidden stream of
private talk, such as it would have shocked all decency to speak loudly
at the street-corners. It is very singular, how the fact of a man's
death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether
for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and
acting among them. Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes
falsehood, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the
gold, and dishonors the baser metal. Could the departed, whoever he
may be, return in a week after his decease, he would almost invariably
find himself at a higher or lower point than he had formerly occupied,
on the scale of public appreciation. But the talk, or scandal, to
which we now allude, had reference to matters of no less old a date
than the supposed murder, thirty or forty years ago, of the late Judge
Pyncheon's uncle. The medical opinion with regard to his own recent
and regretted decease had almost entirely obviated the idea that a
murder was committed in the former case. Yet, as the record showed,
there were circumstances irrefragably indicating that some person had
gained access to old Jaffrey Pyncheon's private apartments, at or near
the moment of his death. His desk and private drawers, in a room
contiguous to his bedchamber, had been ransacked; money and valuable
articles were missing; there was a bloody hand-print on the old man's
linen; and, by a powerfully welded chain of deductive evidence, the
guilt of the robbery and apparent murder had been fixed on Clifford,
then residing with his uncle in the House of the Seven Gables.
Whencesoever originating, there now arose a theory that undertook so to
account for these circumstances as to exclude the idea of Clifford's
agency. Many persons affirmed that the history and elucidation of the
facts, long so mysterious, had been obtained by the daguerreotypist
from one of those mesmerical seers who, nowadays, so strangely perplex
the aspect of human affairs, and put everybody's natural vision to the
blush, by the marvels which they see with their eyes shut.
According to this version of the story, Judge Pyncheon, exemplary as we
have portrayed him in our narrative, was, in his youth, an apparently
irreclaimable scapegrace. The brutish, the animal instincts, as is
often the case, had been developed earlier than the intellectual
qualities, and the force of character, for which he was afterwards
remarkable. He had shown himself wild, dissipated, addicted to low
pleasures, little short of ruffianly in his propensities, and
recklessly expensive, with no other resources than the bounty of his
uncle. This course of conduct had alienated the old bachelor's
affection, once strongly fixed upon him. Now it is averred,--but
whether on authority available in a court of justice, we do not pretend
to have investigated,--that the young man was tempted by the devil, one
night, to search his uncle's private drawers, to which he had
unsuspected means of access. While thus criminally occupied, he was
startled by the opening of the chamber-door. There stood old Jaffrey
Pyncheon, in his nightclothes! The surprise of such a discovery, his
agitation, alarm, and horror, brought on the crisis of a disorder to
which the old bachelor had an hereditary liability; he seemed to choke
with blood, and fell upon the floor, striking his temple a heavy blow
against the corner of a table. What was to be done? The old man was
surely dead! Assistance would come too late! What a misfortune, indeed,
should it come too soon, since his reviving consciousness would bring
the recollection of the ignominious offence which he had beheld his
nephew in the very act of committing!
But he never did revive. With the cool hardihood that always pertained
to him, the young man continued his search of the drawers, and found a
will, of recent date, in favor of Clifford,--which he destroyed,--and
an older one, in his own favor, which he suffered to remain. But
before retiring, Jaffrey bethought himself of the evidence, in these
ransacked drawers, that some one had visited the chamber with sinister
purposes. Suspicion, unless averted, might fix upon the real offender.
In the very presence of the dead man, therefore, he laid a scheme that
should free himself at the expense of Clifford, his rival, for whose
character he had at once a contempt and a repugnance. It is not
probable, be it said, that he acted with any set purpose of involving
Clifford in a charge of murder. Knowing that his uncle did not die by
violence, it may not have occurred to him, in the hurry of the crisis,
that such an inference might be drawn. But, when the affair took this
darker aspect, Jaffrey's previous steps had already pledged him to
those which remained. So craftily had he arranged the circumstances,
that, at Clifford's trial, his cousin hardly found it necessary to
swear to anything false, but only to withhold the one decisive
explanation, by refraining to state what he had himself done and
witnessed.
Thus Jaffrey Pyncheon's inward criminality, as regarded Clifford, was,
indeed, black and damnable; while its mere outward show and positive
commission was the smallest that could possibly consist with so great a
sin. This is just the sort of guilt that a man of eminent
respectability finds it easiest to dispose of. It was suffered to fade
out of sight or be reckoned a venial matter, in the Honorable Judge
Pyncheon's long subsequent survey of his own life. He shuffled it
aside, among the forgotten and forgiven frailties of his youth, and
seldom thought of it again.
We leave the Judge to his repose. He could not be styled fortunate at
the hour of death. Unknowingly, he was a childless man, while striving
to add more wealth to his only child's inheritance. Hardly a week
after his decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of
the death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheon's son, just at the point of
embarkation for his native land. By this misfortune Clifford became
rich; so did Hepzibah; so did our little village maiden, and, through
her, that sworn foe of wealth and all manner of conservatism,--the wild
reformer,--Holgrave!
It was now far too late in Clifford's life for the good opinion of
society to be worth the trouble and anguish of a formal vindication.
What he needed was the love of a very few; not the admiration, or even
the respect, of the unknown many. The latter might probably have been
won for him, had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had
fallen deemed it advisable to expose Clifford to a miserable
resuscitation of past ideas, when the condition of whatever comfort he
might expect lay in the calm of forgetfulness. After such wrong as he
had suffered, there is no reparation. The pitiable mockery of it,
which the world might have been ready enough to offer, coming so long
after the agony had done its utmost work, would have been fit only to
provoke bitterer laughter than poor Clifford was ever capable of. It
is a truth (and it would be a very sad one but for the higher hopes
which it suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in
our mortal sphere, is ever really set right. Time, the continual
vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of
death, render it impossible. If, after long lapse of years, the right
seems to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in. The better
remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought
his irreparable ruin far behind him.
The shock of Judge Pyncheon's death had a permanently invigorating and
ultimately beneficial effect on Clifford. That strong and ponderous
man had been Clifford's nightmare. There was no free breath to be
drawn, within the sphere of so malevolent an influence. The first
effect of freedom, as we have witnessed in Clifford's aimless flight,
was a tremulous exhilaration. Subsiding from it, he did not sink into
his former intellectual apathy. He never, it is true, attained to
nearly the full measure of what might have been his faculties. But he
recovered enough of them partially to light up his character, to
display some outline of the marvellous grace that was abortive in it,
and to make him the object of no less deep, although less melancholy
interest than heretofore. He was evidently happy. Could we pause to
give another picture of his daily life, with all the appliances now at
command to gratify his instinct for the Beautiful, the garden scenes,
that seemed so sweet to him, would look mean and trivial in comparison.
Very soon after their change of fortune, Clifford, Hepzibah, and little
Phoebe, with the approval of the artist, concluded to remove from the
dismal old House of the Seven Gables, and take up their abode, for the
present, at the elegant country-seat of the late Judge Pyncheon.
Chanticleer and his family had already been transported thither, where
the two hens had forthwith begun an indefatigable process of
egg-laying, with an evident design, as a matter of duty and conscience,
to continue their illustrious breed under better auspices than for a
century past. On the day set for their departure, the principal
personages of our story, including good Uncle Venner, were assembled in
the parlor.
"The country-house is certainly a very fine one, so far as the plan
goes," observed Holgrave, as the party were discussing their future
arrangements. "But I wonder that the late Judge--being so opulent, and
with a reasonable prospect of transmitting his wealth to descendants of
his own--should not have felt the propriety of embodying so excellent a
piece of domestic architecture in stone, rather than in wood. Then,
every generation of the family might have altered the interior, to suit
its own taste and convenience; while the exterior, through the lapse of
years, might have been adding venerableness to its original beauty, and
thus giving that impression of permanence which I consider essential to
the happiness of any one moment."
"Why," cried Phoebe, gazing into the artist's face with infinite
amazement, "how wonderfully your ideas are changed! A house of stone,
indeed! It is but two or three weeks ago that you seemed to wish people
to live in something as fragile and temporary as a bird's-nest!"
"Ah, Phoebe, I told you how it would be!" said the artist, with a
half-melancholy laugh. "You find me a conservative already! Little
did I think ever to become one. It is especially unpardonable in this
dwelling of so much hereditary misfortune, and under the eye of yonder
portrait of a model conservative, who, in that very character, rendered
himself so long the evil destiny of his race."
"That picture!" said Clifford, seeming to shrink from its stern glance.
"Whenever I look at it, there is an old dreamy recollection haunting
me, but keeping just beyond the grasp of my mind. Wealth, it seems to
say!--boundless wealth!--unimaginable wealth! I could fancy that, when
I was a child, or a youth, that portrait had spoken, and told me a rich
secret, or had held forth its hand, with the written record of hidden
opulence. But those old matters are so dim with me, nowadays! What
could this dream have been?"
"Perhaps I can recall it," answered Holgrave. "See! There are a
hundred chances to one that no person, unacquainted with the secret,
would ever touch this spring."
"A secret spring!" cried Clifford. "Ah, I remember now! I did discover
it, one summer afternoon, when I was idling and dreaming about the
house, long, long ago. But the mystery escapes me."
The artist put his finger on the contrivance to which he had referred.
In former days, the effect would probably have been to cause the
picture to start forward. But, in so long a period of concealment, the
machinery had been eaten through with rust; so that at Holgrave's
pressure, the portrait, frame and all, tumbled suddenly from its
position, and lay face downward on the floor. A recess in the wall was
thus brought to light, in which lay an object so covered with a
century's dust that it could not immediately be recognized as a folded
sheet of parchment. Holgrave opened it, and displayed an ancient deed,
signed with the hieroglyphics of several Indian sagamores, and
conveying to Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs, forever, a vast extent of
territory at the Eastward.
"This is the very parchment, the attempt to recover which cost the
beautiful Alice Pyncheon her happiness and life," said the artist,
alluding to his legend. "It is what the Pyncheons sought in vain,
while it was valuable; and now that they find the treasure, it has long
been worthless."
"Poor Cousin Jaffrey! This is what deceived him," exclaimed Hepzibah.
"When they were young together, Clifford probably made a kind of
fairy-tale of this discovery. He was always dreaming hither and
thither about the house, and lighting up its dark corners with
beautiful stories. And poor Jaffrey, who took hold of everything as if
it were real, thought my brother had found out his uncle's wealth. He
died with this delusion in his mind!"
"But," said Phoebe, apart to Holgrave, "how came you to know the
secret?"
"My dearest Phoebe," said Holgrave, "how will it please you to assume
the name of Maule? As for the secret, it is the only inheritance that
has come down to me from my ancestors. You should have known sooner
(only that I was afraid of frightening you away) that, in this long
drama of wrong and retribution, I represent the old wizard, and am
probably as much a wizard as ever he was. The son of the executed
Matthew Maule, while building this house, took the opportunity to
construct that recess, and hide away the Indian deed, on which depended
the immense land-claim of the Pyncheons. Thus they bartered their
eastern territory for Maule's garden-ground."
"And now" said Uncle Venner "I suppose their whole claim is not worth
one man's share in my farm yonder!"
"Uncle Venner," cried Phoebe, taking the patched philosopher's hand,
"you must never talk any more about your farm! You shall never go
there, as long as you live! There is a cottage in our new garden,--the
prettiest little yellowish-brown cottage you ever saw; and the
sweetest-looking place, for it looks just as if it were made of
gingerbread,--and we are going to fit it up and furnish it, on purpose
for you. And you shall do nothing but what you choose, and shall be as
happy as the day is long, and shall keep Cousin Clifford in spirits
with the wisdom and pleasantness which is always dropping from your
lips!"
"Ah! my dear child," quoth good Uncle Venner, quite overcome, "if you
were to speak to a young man as you do to an old one, his chance of
keeping his heart another minute would not be worth one of the buttons
on my waistcoat! And--soul alive!--that great sigh, which you made me
heave, has burst off the very last of them! But, never mind! It was the
happiest sigh I ever did heave; and it seems as if I must have drawn in
a gulp of heavenly breath, to make it with. Well, well, Miss Phoebe!
They'll miss me in the gardens hereabouts, and round by the back doors;
and Pyncheon Street, I'm afraid, will hardly look the same without old
Uncle Venner, who remembers it with a mowing field on one side, and the
garden of the Seven Gables on the other. But either I must go to your
country-seat, or you must come to my farm,--that's one of two things
certain; and I leave you to choose which!"
"Oh, come with us, by all means, Uncle Venner!" said Clifford, who had
a remarkable enjoyment of the old man's mellow, quiet, and simple
spirit. "I want you always to be within five minutes, saunter of my
chair. You are the only philosopher I ever knew of whose wisdom has
not a drop of bitter essence at the bottom!"
"Dear me!" cried Uncle Venner, beginning partly to realize what manner
of man he was. "And yet folks used to set me down among the simple
ones, in my younger days! But I suppose I am like a Roxbury russet,--a
great deal the better, the longer I can be kept. Yes; and my words of
wisdom, that you and Phoebe tell me of, are like the golden dandelions,
which never grow in the hot months, but may be seen glistening among
the withered grass, and under the dry leaves, sometimes as late as
December. And you are welcome, friends, to my mess of dandelions, if
there were twice as many!"
A plain, but handsome, dark-green barouche had now drawn up in front of
the ruinous portal of the old mansion-house. The party came forth, and
(with the exception of good Uncle Venner, who was to follow in a few
days) proceeded to take their places. They were chatting and laughing
very pleasantly together; and--as proves to be often the case, at
moments when we ought to palpitate with sensibility--Clifford and
Hepzibah bade a final farewell to the abode of their forefathers, with
hardly more emotion than if they had made it their arrangement to
return thither at tea-time. Several children were drawn to the spot by
so unusual a spectacle as the barouche and pair of gray horses.
Recognizing little Ned Higgins among them, Hepzibah put her hand into
her pocket, and presented the urchin, her earliest and staunchest
customer, with silver enough to people the Domdaniel cavern of his
interior with as various a procession of quadrupeds as passed into the
ark.
Two men were passing, just as the barouche drove off.
"Well, Dixey," said one of them, "what do you think of this? My wife
kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay.
Old Maid Pyncheon has been in trade just about as long, and rides off
in her carriage with a couple of hundred thousand,--reckoning her
share, and Clifford's, and Phoebe's,--and some say twice as much! If
you choose to call it luck, it is all very well; but if we are to take
it as the will of Providence, why, I can't exactly fathom it!"
"Pretty good business!" quoth the sagacious Dixey,--"pretty good
business!"
Maule's well, all this time, though left in solitude, was throwing up a
succession of kaleidoscopic pictures, in which a gifted eye might have
seen foreshadowed the coming fortunes of Hepzibah and Clifford, and the
descendant of the legendary wizard, and the village maiden, over whom
he had thrown love's web of sorcery. The Pyncheon Elm, moreover, with
what foliage the September gale had spared to it, whispered
unintelligible prophecies. And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from
the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that
sweet Alice Pyncheon--after witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and
this present happiness, of her kindred mortals--had given one farewell
touch of a spirit's joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward
from the HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES!
| The day after the storm, when Phoebe returns from her visit to the country, she walks around to the back of the house, tries to get in, and finally decides to enter the garden. Here, both explicitly and implicitly, Hawthorne is drawing a parallel between his story and the biblical story of the fall in Genesis -- but this is not the "fortunate fall" of some of Hawthorne's other works. Phoebe finds the Pyncheon garden in complete disarray from the effects of the storm. Weeds have taken over where there once were flowers and vegetables; in fact, the whole place looks deserted, littered, and dismal. Sin and death seem to have taken root. Some literary circles have maintained that Hawthorne is developing "the story of the fall of man" in this story of the house of Pyncheons. Hawthorne draws not only upon the Bible in this novel, but also upon classical myth in order to develop his theme. For example, Phoebe's name means "shining" in Greek; it refers to emanating light, the sun in particular. Phoebus Apollo was the god of the sun, and Phoebe is one of the names of Apollo's twin sister, his feminine counterpart. But before we assign only positive connotations to the name, we should also remember that Phoebe was one of the names of Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt and protectress of the young; she was also goddess of childbirth and women. Hawthorne's irony is at work again here. One of the reasons, as we stated above, for the decline of the family has been its lack of childbirths, of progeny; and, as has been pointed out, Phoebe, like her namesake, is a virgin. Although she is soon to marry and become part of "a new Eden," the mother of the new Eden might also be the mother of a new "fall," for when they all leave the old "garden," it is in September -- not in spring, when we generally think of regeneration's taking place; furthermore, there has been nothing in Phoebe's character to suggest that she is stronger than the original Eve; in fact, she almost "falls" to Holgrave's mesmerism early in the story. Even more suggestive of Hawthorne's combining classical myth and biblical allusion is his reference to a "golden bough." When Uncle Venner, the morning after the storm, approaches the Pyncheon house where the dead Judge sits as yet undiscovered in the ancestral armchair, old Uncle Venner notes that although the elm seems not to have been damaged by the storm, "a single branch . . . had been transmuted to bright gold." Then, making his classical allusion explicit, Hawthorne writes: "It was like the golden branch that gained Aeneas and the Sybil admittance into Hades." This one magestic branch hangs down before the main entrance of the seven gables so that any passerby might have stood on tiptoe, plucked it off, presented it at the door, and be admitted and, as a result, be aware of all the dark secrets of the house. When both Aeneas and the Sybil gained admittance to the underworld by the power of the golden talismanic branch, Aeneas learned both the secrets of the dead and the prophecies concerning the living. Reference to the myth functions, therefore, on several levels. First, it is still a general secret that the Judge is dead inside the house; anyone entering would learn that secret. But the branch is not just a sort of "key" to the house; it is a "mystic" branch, capable of unlocking secrets more mysterious than merely the Judge's physical presence within. Reference to it transforms the house into an underworld, a realm where death is all-powerful and sits on the throne. Also, this single branch is only a small part of the tree. The rest of the tree is "in perfect verdure," a symbol of life, not of death. Because of its great circumference, the tree has come to symbolize nature and nature's resurrection; now, it overshadows the house, where there has been, since the beginning, only death, not resurrection. Now, "all was alive and full of the morning sun and a sweetly tempered little breeze." The "leafy tongues" of the tree's leaves are whispering the secrets of the living, just as the single, symbolic branch gives the secrets of the dead. The tree is full of life and light because it has finally succeeded in completely overshadowing the house and its occupants, both past and present. At the end of the novel, in the concluding sentences, Hawthorne makes this aspect of his allusion more explicit by telling us that the elm "whispered unintelligible prophecies." These "unintelligible prophecies" are like the secrets held by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis, and here we are once more reminded that Phoebe and Holgrave, Clifford and Hepzibah are moving out of the House of the Seven Gables -- out of Eden after the Fall, and into the new Eden, into a house built and established by the wealth of the Judge. Thus, it seems more than a little likely that the new Pyncheon Eden will fare much better than the old one. In a cryptic way, The House of the Seven Gables has dealt extensively with both moral and psychological affairs. Its "necromancies" allow us to see the entire historical, social, and symbolic framework of the romance in relationship to guilt. From the opening pages of the novel, the focal symbol of the house is symbolized by "a human countenance," and the resulting struggle for possession follows familiar Hawthornian lines. The falsely accused "wizard" Matthew Maule has not been simply executed by his enemy, Colonel Pyncheon; he has been incorporated into the subsequent life of the house, like an ever-present conscience. The new structure will not insure happiness. It will, Hawthorne tells us, "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." The Pyncheon estate, therefore, embodies a striving by almost all of its inhabitants to avoid responsibility for guilt. Such attempted avoidance of guilt is the genesis of all the ironic justice in The House of the Seven Gables. Every tyrant is at the mercy of his victim; or, as Hawthorne puts it in his American Notebooks, "All slavery is reciprocal." This maxim is first applied to the original Colonel Pyncheon, who dies while inaugurating the house he built on the executed Matthew Maule's property. It is clear that the Colonel's strange and unexplained sudden death is due to nothing other than his festering guilt toward Maule. The pattern is repeated for Gervayse Pyncheon in the story told by Holgrave; thus, Pyncheon's greed makes him tacitly cooperate when the second Matthew Maule, supposedly in exchange for a valuable document, takes mesmeric control over Pyncheon's daughter and subsequently causes her death. Jaffrey Pyncheon is similarly enslaved by the oppressed Clifford, who, some claim, "causes" the Judge's death simply by freeing himself from Jaffrey's corrupt authoritarianism. Perfect justice is, of course, not accomplished. If the authoritarian Pyncheon characters suffer from a secret, sick malaise and eventually come to grief, they all, nevertheless, have a certain public dignity for compensation; revenge, then, is incomplete. The meek victims, by contrast, are in continual misery until Holgrave arrives, but even he retains his internalized sense of persecution. Hepzibah and Clifford, who are presented as figures of infantile innocence, escape Jaffrey's dictatorial presence, but even they are pathetic in trying to enjoy their freedom after Jaffrey's death. "For," Hawthorne says, "what other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!" These sentences indicate Hawthorne's emphasis on the wasting away of the Pyncheon energies from generation to generation. Many critics have said that the conclusion to The House of the Seven Gables is a reconciliation of the past and the present into a "sunny" ending. But if that were positively and unquestionably so, we would have to admit that the story would end as no more than flimsy farce. It is more likely, given Hawthorne's dispensations, that the book ends with the heavy irony which has imbued it throughout. Good old Uncle Venner, it turns out, is not going to the poorhouse; instead, he will end his days in a little gingerbread cottage at the country estate. Chanticleer and his hens have already moved there and have already begun an indefatigable orgy of crowing and egg-laying. Holgrave, having completely surrendered to Phoebe, is contemplating a variety of do-it-yourself projects, including the construction of a cut-stone house in suburbia. Hepzibah, now worth approximately a couple hundred thousand dollars, is prodigal in her gifts. Maule's well, formerly noted for its profound depths, is now "vomiting up" a volume of kaleidoscopic pictures. The conclusion is perhaps best summed up in a vision of Alice Pyncheon floating to heaven as she plays sweetly on her harpsichord. In concentrating our attention upon this ironic correlation of events following a final stormy afternoon, Hawthorne has emphasized the book's theme -- that is, the interpretation of the past and present, the Pyncheon family still cut off from the street and still living on "tainted" money -- thus perpetuating the eternal fall of the inhabitants of the House of the Seven Gables. | analysis |
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.
| The Old Pyncheon Family In the mid-1600s, the farmer Matthew Maule builds a small house next to a lovely, clear spring in what will become a small, well-to-do Massachusetts town. A local landowner named Colonel Pyncheon, who wants the land for himself, accuses Maule of witchcraft at a time of mass hysteria against witches. Maule is convicted and hanged, but, before he dies, he warns that God will give Pyncheon blood to drink. Undaunted by this curse, Colonel Pyncheon builds a house with seven gables, vertical triangular points on a house that run from the roof's center to its edge. Maule's own son helps design and build the house, and on the day of its opening, a great feast is held. When Colonel Pyncheon fails to greet his distinguished guests, they charge into one of his rooms, only to find him sitting dead at his desk. Blood coats his beard and his shirt. There is no evidence of foul play, but no one knows how he died, and rumors of strangulation persist. It is whispered that a mysterious figure was seen fleeing the scene. The narrator goes to great lengths to discount these rumors. Future generations of the Pyncheon family continue to occupy the house over the next century and a half, but they are never able to claim one of the dead Colonel's final acquisitions, a gigantic tract of land in Maine. Generations of the family are raised thinking the land is rightfully theirs, and they make unsuccessful attempts to obtain it. The area where the Pyncheon house was built falls out of fashion. Thirty years before the novel is set, a wealthy Pyncheon is murdered by one of his nephews, another Pyncheon. The killer is convicted and jailed for life, but the dead man's other nephew, an intelligent man who becomes known as Judge Pyncheon, is successful and builds a large house just outside of town. The sister of the jailed Pyncheon continues to live alone in the house of the seven gables. The Maules, on the other hand, have not had such a clear descent through history. Many of them have no knowledge of Matthew Maule or his curse on Colonel Pyncheon, and some are not even aware that they are of Maule descent. Nevertheless, many still retain the Maules' characteristic alienating reserve, and some are believed by townspeople to have inherited mysterious powers from their forefather. The chapter ends with a few descriptions. Outside the house of the seven gables stands a gigantic elm planted over eighty years ago by one of the earliest Pyncheons. In a nook between two of the gables grows a cluster of flowers known as Alice's Posies, named after an old legend that told of Alice Pyncheon flinging up flower seeds for fun; the resulting flowers were said to thrive in the dust and dirt collected on the roof. The house also contains a door on the front gable, leading to a little shop where a Pyncheon family member who found himself in dire financial straits once took to being a merchant | summary |
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.
| The Little Shop-Window Hepzibah Pyncheon, the old maid who inhabits the house of the seven gables, awakens. A woman with a good heart but a permanent scowl brought on by nearsightedness, Hepzibah spends quite a bit of time on her appearance, pausing every now and then to sigh over the portrait of a beautiful young man, who we are assured is not her lover. As the sun begins to rise, Hepzibah grows increasingly agitated. She heads downstairs, where we discover that her own financial difficulties have led her to reopen the little shop with the door cut into the front gable. The shop-tending offends her dignity as a member of the aristocratic Pyncheon family line, but it is the only option she has: she is too blind to sew and not educated enough to teach. She has filled the little shop with many goods, such as gingerbread men, children's toys, and foodstuffs, but she is timid, and she knocks things over as she sets up. Hepzibah delays opening the shop as long as she can, but as the day goes on she can put it off no longer. She opens the store window and quickly runs into the living room of the house, crying. | summary |
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.
| Chapter 1 provides us with a lurid history of the Pyncheon family rich in symbolic passages. The most explicit of these symbols is Maule's Well, the cheerful spring whose waters turn brackish after Maule's death and the arrival of the Pyncheons, a very literal illustration of the land's deep corruption. It is indicative that the Maule rather than the Pyncheon well should be the one spouting dirty water, as Maule's curse will prove to be tied to the ill-gotten land rather than to the Pyncheon family itself. Pyncheons who leave the house appear to be the least affected by the curse; some are not affected at all. The murder of old Jaffrey Pyncheon by his nephew is also irrevocably tied to the house of seven gables: after the crime, Judge Pyncheon moves away and soon becomes happy, prosperous, and successful, although his return to the house in later chapters will signify his downfall | analysis |
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.
| The First Customer The shop's first visitor is actually the Pyncheon house's only lodger, Holgrave, a young man of twenty-two who makes daguerreotypes, an early kind of photograph. Holgrave gently chides Hepzibah for being so worried about losing her dignity, saying that now she will become a "woman" rather a "lady. Hepzibah's decision to begin working, Holgrave continues, means she is "lending strength. to the united struggle of mankind. This is success. Hepzibah resists this interpretation, but Holgrave claims that in their modern world the title of "lady" is more of a restriction than a privilege. Holgrave asks for some biscuits, which makes him Hepzibah's first customer, but as he is her lodger she gives them to him freely. Hepzibah then overhears a conversation between two workers. They are surprised to see her shop open and discuss her business prospects quite openly in front of her. One points out that better shops can be found on every street corner, while the other adds that his own wife actually lost money by trying to start a shop. As they walk off, Hepzibah frets over their assertions that she will probably fail. Hepzibah is even more concerned, however, with the casual way that the workmen discuss her painful fall from dignity. She finds their frank conversation about the mechanics of her fall mortifying, and she is especially offended by the way that what is so important to her is of only passing interest to the two workmen. The shop bell rings again, and in walks a small boy, who asks for a gingerbread man. Hepzibah, who appears to have a low opinion of her own goods, thinks its wrong to take a child's pocket money for a piece of stale baking, so she gives him the cookie for free. Five minutes later, however, the small boy returns for another cookie. This time Hepzibah, having overcome her disdain for pocket change, takes his money. Now that her day has begun to pick up, Hepzibah begins to feel better about opening up her shop. Throughout the day, she experience brief uplifting moments, and things begin to look better. Several more customers come through, and most of them are quite grouchy. Unable to keep up her good spirits, Hepzibah begins to worry again that the shop will ruin her. When a wealthy woman walks by, Hepzibah wonders bitterly what use such people serve, then instantly feels guilty about her bitter sentiments | summary |
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 Phoebe?" questioned she within herself. "It must be little
Phoebe; for it can be nobody else,--and there is a look of her father
about her, too! But what does she want here? And how like a country
cousin, to come down upon a poor body in this way, without so much as a
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."
Phoebe, it must be understood, was that one little offshoot of the
Pyncheon race to whom we have already referred, as a native of a rural
part of New England, where the old fashions and feelings of
relationship are still partially kept up. In her own circle, it was
regarded as by no means improper for kinsfolk to visit one another
without invitation, or preliminary and ceremonious warning. Yet, in
consideration of Miss Hepzibah's recluse way of life, a letter had
actually been written and despatched, conveying information of Phoebe'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!"
| A Day Behind the Counter As the day wears on, an elderly gentleman walks by the house. With his cane and fine clothes, he is clearly someone of importance. The man peers into the newly reopened shop window and frowns briefly. When he sees Hepzibah, the man smiles, nods at her, and moves on. She recognizes the man as Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, a wealthy cousin who has built a house for himself just outside of town. Hepzibah is visited by "Uncle Venner," an elderly man who is known around the neighborhood as something of a character. Uncle Venner is pleased to see that Hepzibah is working, and he stops to offer her advice on shop-keeping. He assures her that the days of minding a store will probably only be temporary and that "omething still better will turn up for you. The statement inspires Hepzibah to dream up many fantasies of sudden, untold wealth. Venner also asks whether an unnamed "he" will return soon, and adds that everyone in the village has been speaking of "him. After Venner leaves, the rest of the day does not go particularly smoothly for Hepzibah. She has trouble concentrating on helping her customers and getting the specific items they want. Just as she closes her shop, an omnibus arrives and stops in front of the house. A girl hops out and knocks on the door, and Hepzibah realizes that it is Phoebe, a young Pyncheon family "offshoot" who has come to visit, unaware that her letter, sent in advance, never arrived at the house of the seven gables. Hepzibah decides to let her in, but tells her that she can only stay one night because she might disturb Clifford. | summary |
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 Phoebe?" questioned she within herself. "It must be little
Phoebe; for it can be nobody else,--and there is a look of her father
about her, too! But what does she want here? And how like a country
cousin, to come down upon a poor body in this way, without so much as a
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."
Phoebe, it must be understood, was that one little offshoot of the
Pyncheon race to whom we have already referred, as a native of a rural
part of New England, where the old fashions and feelings of
relationship are still partially kept up. In her own circle, it was
regarded as by no means improper for kinsfolk to visit one another
without invitation, or preliminary and ceremonious warning. Yet, in
consideration of Miss Hepzibah's recluse way of life, a letter had
actually been written and despatched, conveying information of Phoebe'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!"
| Between Holgrave, the workmen, and the wealthy lady, Chapter 3 features a varied sampling of New England society. We learn a great deal about the society's class and social structure from the way Hepzibah interacts with her fellow villagers. The young Holgrave, a daguerreotypist by profession, is something of an early bohemian, defined entirely by his personality rather than by his money. Holgrave represents a new kind of socially mobile New Englander, one who can interact comfortably with the snobbish Hepzibah but certainly does not meet the criteria necessary to be considered a gentleman. The workmen, however, have little connection to Hepzibah's world. Where her house is somber and grave, the banter between the workers is Hawthorne's equivalent of comic relief. They openly discuss their financial success and their wives, whereas Hepzibah seems to see both money and romantic relationships as taboo topics. In spite of herself, however, Hepzibah begins to see life through the eyes of her profession, as evidenced by her scorn for the wealthy lady. That Hepzibah wonders aloud what such people contribute to the world indicates that she no longer sees herself as being in the same social category as the wealthy woman. In her descent from haughty aristocrat to embittered shopwoman, Hepzibah becomes a powerful symbol of the importance of money in determining New England social status. Both Uncle Venner and Judge Pyncheon are introduced to us in this chapter, and the way they are first presented provides clues about the roles they will play in the novel. Uncle Venner is immediately recognizable as a colorful neighborhood character. He is so uncontroversial a character that he even helps the author along: after offering Hepzibah sound advice, Uncle Venner alludes to the fact that a certain "he" is expected home, allowing Hawthorne to alert us that something is in the works without breaking the pattern of his narrative. Judge Pyncheon is a mysterious figure, and Hawthorne's approach underscores the fact that the Judge's appearance may well be deceiving. Hepzibah's dour response to the man's good-natured smile signals that his outward kindness may mask something less pleasant. Hepzibah's final observation connecting the Judge to the deceased Colonel Pyncheon adds an ominous note to this initial depiction of the Judge | analysis |
PHOEBE PYNCHEON slept, on the night of her arrival, in a chamber that
looked down on the garden of the old house. It fronted towards the
east, so that at a very seasonable hour a glow of crimson light came
flooding through the window, and bathed the dingy ceiling and
paper-hangings in its own hue. There were curtains to Phoebe'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, Phoebe quietly awoke, and, for a
moment, did not recognize where she was, nor how those heavy curtains
chanced to be festooned around her. Nothing, indeed, was absolutely
plain to her, except that it was now early morning, and that, whatever
might happen next, it was proper, first of all, to get up and say her
prayers. She was the more inclined to devotion from the grim aspect of
the chamber and its furniture, especially the tall, stiff chairs; one
of which stood close by her bedside, and looked as if some
old-fashioned personage had been sitting there all night, and had
vanished only just in season to escape discovery.
When Phoebe was quite dressed, she peeped out of the window, and saw a
rosebush in the garden. Being a very tall one, and of luxuriant
growth, it had been propped up against the side of the house, and was
literally covered with a rare and very beautiful species of white rose.
A large portion of them, as the girl afterwards discovered, had blight
or mildew at their hearts; but, viewed at a fair distance, the whole
rosebush looked as if it had been brought from Eden that very summer,
together with the mould in which it grew. The truth was, nevertheless,
that it had been planted by Alice Pyncheon,--she was Phoebe'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 Phoebe'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 Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive
patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement. It is a kind of natural
magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden
capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of
comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a
period, may happen to be their home. A wild hut of underbrush, tossed
together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the
home aspect by one 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, Phoebe's waste, cheerless, and dusky chamber, which had
been untenanted so long--except by spiders, and mice, and rats, and
ghosts--that it was all overgrown with the desolation which watches to
obliterate every trace of man's happier hours. What was precisely
Phoebe's process we find it impossible to say. She appeared to have no
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, Phoebe emerged from her
chamber, with a purpose to descend again into the garden. Besides the
rosebush, she had observed several other species of flowers growing
there in a wilderness of neglect, and obstructing one 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 Phoebe was a harpsichord.
It looked more like a coffin than anything else; and, indeed,--not
having been played upon, or opened, for years,--there must have been a
vast deal of dead music in it, stifled for want of air. Human finger
was hardly known to have touched its chords since the days of Alice
Pyncheon, who had learned the sweet accomplishment of melody in Europe.
Hepzibah bade her young guest sit down, and, herself taking a chair
near by, looked as earnestly at Phoebe's trim little figure as if she
expected to see right into its springs and motive secrets.
"Cousin Phoebe," 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 Phoebe to establish herself in another home. Nor did she
misinterpret Phoebe'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, Phoebe replied as frankly,
and more cheerfully.
"Dear cousin, I cannot tell how it will be," said she. "But I really
think we may suit one another much better than you suppose."
"You are a nice girl,--I see it plainly," continued Hepzibah; "and it
is not any question as to that point which makes me hesitate. But,
Phoebe, this house of mine is but a melancholy place for a young person
to be in. It lets in the wind and rain, and the snow, too, in the
garret and upper chambers, in 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, Phoebe), whose temper, I am
afraid, is none of the best, and whose spirits are as bad as can be! I
cannot make your life pleasant, Cousin Phoebe, neither can I so much as
give you bread to eat."
"You will find me a cheerful little body" answered Phoebe, smiling, and
yet with a kind of gentle dignity, "and I mean to earn my bread. You
know I have not been brought up a Pyncheon. A girl learns many things
in a New England village."
"Ah! Phoebe," said Hepzibah, sighing, "your knowledge would do but
little for you here! And then it is a wretched thought that you should
fling away your young days in a place like this. Those cheeks would
not be so rosy after a month or two. Look at my face!" and, indeed,
the contrast was very striking,--"you see how pale I am! It is my idea
that the dust and continual decay of these old houses are unwholesome
for the lungs."
"There is the garden,--the flowers to be taken care of," observed
Phoebe. "I should keep myself healthy with exercise in the open air."
"And, after all, child," exclaimed Hepzibah, suddenly rising, as if to
dismiss the subject, "it is not for me to say who shall be a guest or
inhabitant of the old Pyncheon House. Its master is coming."
"Do you mean Judge Pyncheon?" asked Phoebe in surprise.
"Judge Pyncheon!" answered her cousin angrily. "He will hardly cross
the threshold while I live! No, no! But, Phoebe, you shall see the face
of him I speak of."
She went in quest of the miniature already described, and returned with
it in her hand. Giving it to Phoebe, she watched her features
narrowly, and with a certain jealousy as to the mode in which the girl
would show herself affected by the picture.
"How do you like the face?" asked Hepzibah.
"It is handsome!--it is very beautiful!" said Phoebe admiringly. "It
is as sweet a face as a 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 Phoebe. "And yet I seem to have heard
the name of Clifford Pyncheon. Yes!--from my father or my mother; but
has he not been a long while dead?"
"Well, well, child, perhaps he has!" said Hepzibah with a sad, hollow
laugh; "but, in old houses like this, you know, dead people are very
apt to come back again! We shall see. And, Cousin Phoebe, since, after
all that I have said, your courage does not fail you, we will not part
so soon. You are welcome, my child, for the present, to such a home as
your kinswoman can offer you."
With this measured, but not exactly cold assurance of a hospitable
purpose, Hepzibah kissed her cheek.
They now went below stairs, where Phoebe--not so much assuming the
office as attracting it to herself, by the magnetism of innate
fitness--took the most active part in preparing breakfast. The
mistress of the house, meanwhile, as is usual with persons of her stiff
and unmalleable cast, stood mostly aside; willing to lend her aid, yet
conscious that her natural inaptitude would be likely to impede the
business in hand. Phoebe and the fire that boiled the teakettle were
equally bright, cheerful, and efficient, in their respective offices.
Hepzibah gazed forth from her habitual sluggishness, the necessary
result of long solitude, as from another sphere. She could not help
being interested, however, and even amused, at the readiness with which
her new inmate adapted herself to the circumstances, and brought the
house, moreover, and all its rusty old appliances, into a suitableness
for her purposes. Whatever she did, too, was done without conscious
effort, and with frequent outbreaks of song, which were exceedingly
pleasant to the ear. This natural tunefulness made Phoebe seem like a
bird in a shadowy tree; or conveyed the idea that the stream of life
warbled through her heart as a brook sometimes warbles through a
pleasant little dell. It betokened the cheeriness of an active
temperament, finding joy in its activity, and, therefore, rendering it
beautiful; it was a New England trait,--the stern old stuff of
Puritanism with a gold thread in the web.
Hepzibah brought out some old silver spoons with the family crest upon
them, and a china 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 Phoebe. "She was a Davenport, of a good
family. They were almost the first teacups ever seen in the colony;
and if one of them were to be broken, my heart would break with it.
But it is nonsense to speak so about a brittle teacup, when I remember
what my heart has gone through without breaking."
The cups--not having been used, perhaps, since Hepzibah's youth--had
contracted no small burden of dust, which Phoebe washed away with so
much care and delicacy as to satisfy even the proprietor of this
invaluable china.
"What a nice little housewife you are!" exclaimed the latter, smiling,
and at the same time frowning so prodigiously that the smile was
sunshine under a 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 Phoebe, 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 Phoebe, 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 Phoebe. "And I have had a table at a fancy fair, and made better
sales than anybody. These things are not to be learnt; they depend
upon a knack that comes, I suppose," added she, smiling, "with 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 Phoebe, and peeped from the passageway
into the shop, to note how she would manage her undertaking. It was a
case of some intricacy. A very ancient woman, in a white short gown
and a green petticoat, with a string of gold beads about her neck, and
what looked like a nightcap on her head, had brought a quantity of yarn
to barter for the commodities of the shop. She was probably the very
last person in town who still kept the 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 Phoebe,
mingling in one twisted thread of talk; and still better to contrast
their figures,--so light and bloomy,--so decrepit and dusky,--with only
the counter betwixt them, in one sense, but more than threescore years,
in another. As for the bargain, it was wrinkled slyness and craft
pitted against native truth and sagacity.
"Was not that well done?" asked Phoebe, laughing, when the customer was
gone.
"Nicely done, indeed, child!" answered Hepzibah. "I could not have
gone through with it nearly so well. As you say, it must be a knack
that belongs to you on the 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 Phoebe'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! Phoebe is no Pyncheon. She takes everything from
her mother!"
As to Phoebe'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 Phoebe as the
example of feminine grace and availability combined, in a state of
society, if there were any such, where ladies did not exist. There it
should be woman's office to move in the midst of practical affairs, and
to gild them all, the very homeliest,--were it even the scouring of
pots and kettles,--with an atmosphere of loveliness and joy.
Such was the sphere of Phoebe. To find the born and educated lady, on
the other hand, we need look no farther than Hepzibah, our forlorn old
maid, in her rustling and rusty silks, with her deeply cherished and
ridiculous consciousness of long descent, her shadowy claims to
princely territory, and, in the way of accomplishment, her
recollections, it may be, of having formerly thrummed on a harpsichord,
and walked a minuet, and worked an antique 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
Phoebe passed to and fro in the interior. Otherwise, it is impossible
to explain how the people of the neighborhood so soon became aware of
the 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. Phoebe laughed, as she
summed up her aggregate of sales upon the slate; while Hepzibah, first
drawing on a pair of silk gloves, reckoned over the sordid accumulation
of copper coin, not without silver intermixed, that had jingled into
the till.
"We must renew our stock, Cousin Hepzibah!" cried the little
saleswoman. "The gingerbread figures are all gone, and so are those
Dutch wooden milkmaids, and most of our other playthings. There has
been constant inquiry for cheap raisins, and a great cry for whistles,
and trumpets, and 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, Phoebe is a nice girl!" said Hepzibah, with a scowl of austere
approbation. "But, Uncle Venner, you have known the family a great
many years. Can you tell me whether there ever was a Pyncheon whom she
takes after?"
"I 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 Phoebe 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 Phoebe'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 Phoebe.
The two relatives--the young maid and the old one--found time before
nightfall, in the intervals of trade, to make rapid advances towards
affection and confidence. A recluse, like Hepzibah, usually displays
remarkable frankness, and at least temporary affability, on being
absolutely cornered, and brought to the point of personal intercourse;
like the angel whom Jacob wrestled with, she is ready to bless you when
once overcome.
The old gentlewoman took a dreary and proud satisfaction in leading
Phoebe from room to room of the house, and recounting the traditions
with which, as we may say, the walls were lugubriously frescoed. She
showed the indentations made by the 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 Phoebe step into one
of the tall chairs, and inspect the ancient map of the Pyncheon
territory at the eastward. In a tract of land on which she laid her
finger, there existed a silver mine, the locality of which was
precisely pointed out in some memoranda of Colonel Pyncheon himself,
but only to be made known when the family claim should be recognized by
government. Thus it was for the interest of all New England that the
Pyncheons should have justice done them. She told, too, how that there
was undoubtedly an immense treasure of English guineas hidden somewhere
about the house, or in the cellar, or possibly in the garden.
"If you should happen to find it, Phoebe," said Hepzibah, glancing
aside at her with a grim yet kindly smile, "we will tie up the
shop-bell for good and all!"
"Yes, dear cousin," answered Phoebe; "but, in the mean time, I hear
somebody ringing it!"
When the customer was gone, Hepzibah talked rather vaguely, and at
great length, about a certain Alice Pyncheon, who had been exceedingly
beautiful and accomplished in her lifetime, a hundred years ago. The
fragrance of her rich and delightful character still lingered about the
place where she had lived, as a dried 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 Phoebe.
"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 Phoebe, "if the young man is so dangerous, why
do you let him stay? If he does nothing worse, he may set the house on
fire!"
"Why, sometimes," answered Hepzibah, "I have seriously made it a
question, whether I ought not to send him away. But, with all his
oddities, he is a quiet kind of a person, and has such a way of taking
hold of 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 Phoebe, a part
of whose essence it was to keep within the limits of law.
"Oh!" said Hepzibah carelessly,--for, formal as she was, still, in her
life's experience, she had gnashed her teeth against human law,--"I
suppose he has a law of his own!"
| May and November Phoebe awakens in the Pyncheon house. She has already brightened the dingy home with her presence, and she immediately begins redecorating her room, making it more comfortable and easier to live in. Hepzibah tells her that she cannot stay, because the master of the house will be returning soon. When Phoebe naively asks if she means Judge Pyncheon, Hepzibah is incensed and angrily declares that the Judge will never cross her threshold. The master of the house, she tells Phoebe, is Clifford, Hepzibah's brother and Phoebe's cousin. She shows Phoebe a picture, and Phoebe remarks that he has a beautiful face. Phoebe is undaunted, however, by Hepzibah's instruction that she leave. Buoyed by her cheery nature and excellent domestic skills, she quickly persuades Hepzibah to let her remain at the house for at least a few weeks. She then makes breakfast for Hepzibah. Phoebe shows herself to be particularly well suited to running the shop. By the end of the day she has sold most of the stock and is making plans to improve the store. Hepzibah is thrilled with Phoebe's cheerfulness and her skills, and mourns the fact that Phoebe's humble background prevents her from being a lady. The novel notes that while Phoebe is, in fact, from a humble background, her grace and charm transcend such silly social distinctions. Hepzibah asks Uncle Venner if he has ever seen a Pyncheon like Phoebe before, and he replies that he has never had the good luck of seeing anybody so angelic before. As business slows down, Hepzibah gives Phoebe a tour of the house, showing her where Colonel Pyncheon died and claiming that if Phoebe could only find the treasure Hepzibah is convinced is buried in the vicinity, they would all be wealthy. Hepzibah also shows Phoebe a harpsichord played by Phoebe's great-great-grand-aunt, a woman named Alice Pyncheon, whose ghost is believed to still haunt the house. Hepzibah makes sure to tell Phoebe about their lodger, Holgrave, who she says is something of a revolutionary with strange acquaintances. She adds, however, that Holgrave is charming. When Phoebe asks how Hepzibah can permit such a lawless figure to live in her house, her cousin replies that the young man seems to live by his own laws | summary |
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. Phoebe saw, however, that their
growth must have been checked by a degree of careful labor, bestowed
daily and systematically on the garden. The white double rosebush had
evidently been propped up anew against the house since the commencement
of the season; and a 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.
Phoebe wondered whose care and toil it could have been that had planted
these vegetables, and kept the soil so clean and orderly. Not surely
her cousin 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,
Phoebe found an unexpected charm in this little nook of grass, and
foliage, and aristocratic flowers, and plebeian vegetables. The eye of
Heaven seemed to look down into it pleasantly, and with a peculiar
smile, as if glad to perceive that nature, elsewhere overwhelmed, and
driven out of the dusty town, had here been able to retain a
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 Phoebe--to the
poignant distress of her conscience, but inevitably--was led to fancy a
general resemblance betwixt these forlorn bipeds and her respectable
relative.
The girl ran into the house to get some crumbs of bread, cold potatoes,
and other such scraps as were suitable to the accommodating appetite of
fowls. Returning, she gave a peculiar call, which they seemed to
recognize. The chicken crept through the pales of the coop and ran,
with some show of liveliness, to her feet; while Chanticleer and the
ladies of his household regarded her with queer, sidelong glances, and
then croaked one to another, as if communicating their sage opinions of
her character. So wise, as well as antique, was their aspect, as to
give color to the idea, not merely that they were the descendants of a
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 Phoebe; "here are some nice crumbs
for you!"
The chicken, hereupon, though almost as venerable in appearance as its
mother--possessing, indeed, the whole antiquity of its progenitors in
miniature,--mustered vivacity enough to flutter upward and alight on
Phoebe's shoulder.
"That little fowl pays you a high compliment!" said a voice behind
Phoebe.
Turning quickly, she was surprised at sight of a young man, who had
found access into the garden by a door opening out of another gable
than that whence she had emerged. He held a hoe in his hand, and,
while Phoebe was gone in quest of the crumbs, had begun to busy himself
with drawing up fresh earth about the roots of the tomatoes.
"The chicken really treats you like an old acquaintance," continued he
in a quiet way, while a smile made his face pleasanter than Phoebe at
first fancied it. "Those venerable personages in the coop, too, seem
very affably disposed. You are lucky to be in their good graces so
soon! They have known me much longer, but never honor me with any
familiarity, though hardly a day passes without my bringing them food.
Miss Hepzibah, I suppose, will interweave the fact with her other
traditions, and set it down that the fowls know you to be a Pyncheon!"
"The secret is," said Phoebe, smiling, "that I have learned how to talk
with hens and chickens."
"Ah, but these hens," answered the young man,--"these hens of
aristocratic lineage would scorn to understand the vulgar language of a
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 Phoebe Pyncheon," said the girl, with a manner of some
reserve; for she was aware that her new acquaintance could be no other
than the daguerreotypist, of whose lawless propensities the old maid
had given her a disagreeable idea. "I did not know that my cousin
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 Phoebe 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 Phoebe, "I should
like to try whether the daguerreotype can bring out disagreeable traits
on a perfectly amiable face. But there certainly is truth in what you
have said. Most of my likenesses do look unamiable; but the very
sufficient reason, I fancy, is, because the originals are so. There is
a wonderful insight in 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. Phoebe
merely glanced at it, and gave it back.
"I know the face," she replied; "for its stern eye has been following
me about all day. It is my Puritan ancestor, who hangs yonder in the
parlor. To be sure, you have found some way of copying the portrait
without its black velvet cap and gray beard, and have given him a
modern coat and satin cravat, instead of his cloak and band. I 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 Phoebe, turning away
her eyes. "It is certainly very like the old portrait. But my cousin
Hepzibah has another picture,--a miniature. If the original is still
in the world, I think he might defy the sun to make him look stern and
hard."
"You have seen that picture, then!" exclaimed the artist, with an
expression of much interest. "I never did, but have a great curiosity
to do so. And you judge favorably of the face?"
"There never was a sweeter one," said Phoebe. "It is almost too soft
and gentle for a man's."
"Is there nothing wild in the eye?" continued Holgrave, so earnestly
that it embarrassed Phoebe, as did also the quiet freedom with which he
presumed on their so recent acquaintance. "Is there nothing dark or
sinister anywhere? Could you not conceive the original to have been
guilty of a great crime?"
"It is nonsense," said Phoebe a little impatiently, "for us to talk
about a picture which you have never seen. You mistake it for some
other. A crime, indeed! Since you are a friend of my cousin
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."
Phoebe was on the point of retreating, but turned back, with some
hesitation; for she did not exactly comprehend his manner, although, on
better observation, its feature seemed rather to be lack of ceremony
than any approach to offensive rudeness. There was an odd kind of
authority, too, in what he now proceeded to say, rather as if the
garden were his own than a place to which he was admitted merely by
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, Phoebe
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 Phoebe Pyncheon!
Any bright day, if you will put one of those rosebuds in your hair, and
come to my rooms in Central Street, I will seize the purest ray of
sunshine, and make a picture of the flower and its wearer." He retired
towards his own solitary gable, but turned his head, on reaching the
door, and called to Phoebe, with a tone which certainly had laughter in
it, yet which seemed to be more than half in earnest.
"Be careful not to drink at Maule's well!" said he. "Neither drink nor
bathe your face in it!"
"Maule's well!" answered Phoebe. "Is that it with the rim of mossy
stones? I have no thought of drinking there,--but why not?"
"Oh," rejoined the daguerreotypist, "because, like an old lady's cup of
tea, it is water bewitched!"
He vanished; and Phoebe, lingering a moment, saw a glimmering light,
and then the steady beam of a lamp, in a chamber of the gable. On
returning into 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, Phoebe fancied that her
cousin spoke to her.
"In a moment, cousin!" answered the girl. "These matches just glimmer,
and go out."
But, instead of a response from Hepzibah, she seemed to hear the murmur
of an unknown voice. It was strangely indistinct, however, and less
like articulate words than an unshaped sound, such as would be the
utterance of feeling and sympathy, rather than of the intellect. So
vague was it, that its impression or echo in Phoebe'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 Phoebe, "did you speak to me just now?"
"No, child!" replied Hepzibah.
Fewer words than before, but with the same mysterious music in them!
Mellow, melancholy, yet not mournful, the tone seemed to gush up out of
the deep well of 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 Phoebe. The girl sat silently
for a moment. But soon, her senses being very acute, she became
conscious of an irregular respiration in an obscure corner of the room.
Her physical organization, moreover, being at once delicate and
healthy, gave her a perception, operating with almost the effect of a
spiritual medium, that somebody was near at hand.
"My dear cousin," asked she, overcoming an indefinable reluctance, "is
there not some one in the room with us?"
"Phoebe, my dear little girl," said Hepzibah, after a 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 Phoebe, and pressed her to her heart, which beat
against the girl's bosom with a strong, high, and tumultuous swell.
How came there to be so much love in this desolate old heart, that it
could afford to well over thus abundantly?
"Goodnight, cousin," said Phoebe, 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, Phoebe
heard that strange, vague murmur, which might be likened to an
indistinct shadow of human utterance.
| Maule's Well Phoebe heads out into the garden to see if she can help rejuvenate the plants. She finds a garden in an advanced state of decay, with an old summerhouse slowly crumbling in the center of it. She discovers a rooster, two hens, and a chick, and she starts to feed and take care of them. The chickens, we are told, are descendants of an old, noble race of birds once bred by the Pyncheons. When the family first began breeding them, the chickens were said to be the size of turkeys. The chickens have gotten smaller over time, but even though their line is increasingly feeble and diminished, it continues. As Phoebe feeds the chickens, she is surprised by Holgrave, who, unbeknownst to her, had been tending to another part of the garden. Holgrave shows some surprise at the way the chickens flock to and acknowledge Phoebe. He tells her that he feeds the birds constantly, but they have always ignored him. Holgrave says the chickens must like Phoebe because they recognize that she is part of the Pyncheon family. As a result of Hepzibah's warnings, Phoebe is initially cautious around Holgrave, but he is a compelling figure, and she is soon drawn in. Phoebe thinks very little of daguerreotypes and says that all of their figures seem overly stern, but Holgrave responds that his portraits reveal more than a painted picture does. Holgrave says that his daguerreotypes, rather than being simple pictures, can reveal the true nature of the individual depicted. He shows her a picture of a man that he says shows the stern, unforgiving character lurking beneath the subject's smiling exterior. Phoebe thinks the portrait is that of old Colonel Pyncheon. Holgrave asks Phoebe to tend to the chickens and the flowers on his behalf, and she agrees. When Phoebe returns inside, she finds Hepzibah sitting, rather mysteriously, all by herself. Phoebe sits down with her and is troubled by the nagging feeling that there is another presence in the room. She thinks she hears Hepzibah speaking to someone and fancies she hears a low murmuring in reply, whispered phrases that sound almost like human speech. | summary |
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. Phoebe saw, however, that their
growth must have been checked by a degree of careful labor, bestowed
daily and systematically on the garden. The white double rosebush had
evidently been propped up anew against the house since the commencement
of the season; and a 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.
Phoebe wondered whose care and toil it could have been that had planted
these vegetables, and kept the soil so clean and orderly. Not surely
her cousin 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,
Phoebe found an unexpected charm in this little nook of grass, and
foliage, and aristocratic flowers, and plebeian vegetables. The eye of
Heaven seemed to look down into it pleasantly, and with a peculiar
smile, as if glad to perceive that nature, elsewhere overwhelmed, and
driven out of the dusty town, had here been able to retain a
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 Phoebe--to the
poignant distress of her conscience, but inevitably--was led to fancy a
general resemblance betwixt these forlorn bipeds and her respectable
relative.
The girl ran into the house to get some crumbs of bread, cold potatoes,
and other such scraps as were suitable to the accommodating appetite of
fowls. Returning, she gave a peculiar call, which they seemed to
recognize. The chicken crept through the pales of the coop and ran,
with some show of liveliness, to her feet; while Chanticleer and the
ladies of his household regarded her with queer, sidelong glances, and
then croaked one to another, as if communicating their sage opinions of
her character. So wise, as well as antique, was their aspect, as to
give color to the idea, not merely that they were the descendants of a
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 Phoebe; "here are some nice crumbs
for you!"
The chicken, hereupon, though almost as venerable in appearance as its
mother--possessing, indeed, the whole antiquity of its progenitors in
miniature,--mustered vivacity enough to flutter upward and alight on
Phoebe's shoulder.
"That little fowl pays you a high compliment!" said a voice behind
Phoebe.
Turning quickly, she was surprised at sight of a young man, who had
found access into the garden by a door opening out of another gable
than that whence she had emerged. He held a hoe in his hand, and,
while Phoebe was gone in quest of the crumbs, had begun to busy himself
with drawing up fresh earth about the roots of the tomatoes.
"The chicken really treats you like an old acquaintance," continued he
in a quiet way, while a smile made his face pleasanter than Phoebe at
first fancied it. "Those venerable personages in the coop, too, seem
very affably disposed. You are lucky to be in their good graces so
soon! They have known me much longer, but never honor me with any
familiarity, though hardly a day passes without my bringing them food.
Miss Hepzibah, I suppose, will interweave the fact with her other
traditions, and set it down that the fowls know you to be a Pyncheon!"
"The secret is," said Phoebe, smiling, "that I have learned how to talk
with hens and chickens."
"Ah, but these hens," answered the young man,--"these hens of
aristocratic lineage would scorn to understand the vulgar language of a
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 Phoebe Pyncheon," said the girl, with a manner of some
reserve; for she was aware that her new acquaintance could be no other
than the daguerreotypist, of whose lawless propensities the old maid
had given her a disagreeable idea. "I did not know that my cousin
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 Phoebe 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 Phoebe, "I should
like to try whether the daguerreotype can bring out disagreeable traits
on a perfectly amiable face. But there certainly is truth in what you
have said. Most of my likenesses do look unamiable; but the very
sufficient reason, I fancy, is, because the originals are so. There is
a wonderful insight in 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. Phoebe
merely glanced at it, and gave it back.
"I know the face," she replied; "for its stern eye has been following
me about all day. It is my Puritan ancestor, who hangs yonder in the
parlor. To be sure, you have found some way of copying the portrait
without its black velvet cap and gray beard, and have given him a
modern coat and satin cravat, instead of his cloak and band. I 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 Phoebe, turning away
her eyes. "It is certainly very like the old portrait. But my cousin
Hepzibah has another picture,--a miniature. If the original is still
in the world, I think he might defy the sun to make him look stern and
hard."
"You have seen that picture, then!" exclaimed the artist, with an
expression of much interest. "I never did, but have a great curiosity
to do so. And you judge favorably of the face?"
"There never was a sweeter one," said Phoebe. "It is almost too soft
and gentle for a man's."
"Is there nothing wild in the eye?" continued Holgrave, so earnestly
that it embarrassed Phoebe, as did also the quiet freedom with which he
presumed on their so recent acquaintance. "Is there nothing dark or
sinister anywhere? Could you not conceive the original to have been
guilty of a great crime?"
"It is nonsense," said Phoebe a little impatiently, "for us to talk
about a picture which you have never seen. You mistake it for some
other. A crime, indeed! Since you are a friend of my cousin
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."
Phoebe was on the point of retreating, but turned back, with some
hesitation; for she did not exactly comprehend his manner, although, on
better observation, its feature seemed rather to be lack of ceremony
than any approach to offensive rudeness. There was an odd kind of
authority, too, in what he now proceeded to say, rather as if the
garden were his own than a place to which he was admitted merely by
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, Phoebe
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 Phoebe Pyncheon!
Any bright day, if you will put one of those rosebuds in your hair, and
come to my rooms in Central Street, I will seize the purest ray of
sunshine, and make a picture of the flower and its wearer." He retired
towards his own solitary gable, but turned his head, on reaching the
door, and called to Phoebe, with a tone which certainly had laughter in
it, yet which seemed to be more than half in earnest.
"Be careful not to drink at Maule's well!" said he. "Neither drink nor
bathe your face in it!"
"Maule's well!" answered Phoebe. "Is that it with the rim of mossy
stones? I have no thought of drinking there,--but why not?"
"Oh," rejoined the daguerreotypist, "because, like an old lady's cup of
tea, it is water bewitched!"
He vanished; and Phoebe, lingering a moment, saw a glimmering light,
and then the steady beam of a lamp, in a chamber of the gable. On
returning into 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, Phoebe fancied that her
cousin spoke to her.
"In a moment, cousin!" answered the girl. "These matches just glimmer,
and go out."
But, instead of a response from Hepzibah, she seemed to hear the murmur
of an unknown voice. It was strangely indistinct, however, and less
like articulate words than an unshaped sound, such as would be the
utterance of feeling and sympathy, rather than of the intellect. So
vague was it, that its impression or echo in Phoebe'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 Phoebe, "did you speak to me just now?"
"No, child!" replied Hepzibah.
Fewer words than before, but with the same mysterious music in them!
Mellow, melancholy, yet not mournful, the tone seemed to gush up out of
the deep well of 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 Phoebe. The girl sat silently
for a moment. But soon, her senses being very acute, she became
conscious of an irregular respiration in an obscure corner of the room.
Her physical organization, moreover, being at once delicate and
healthy, gave her a perception, operating with almost the effect of a
spiritual medium, that somebody was near at hand.
"My dear cousin," asked she, overcoming an indefinable reluctance, "is
there not some one in the room with us?"
"Phoebe, my dear little girl," said Hepzibah, after a 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 Phoebe, and pressed her to her heart, which beat
against the girl's bosom with a strong, high, and tumultuous swell.
How came there to be so much love in this desolate old heart, that it
could afford to well over thus abundantly?
"Goodnight, cousin," said Phoebe, 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, Phoebe
heard that strange, vague murmur, which might be likened to an
indistinct shadow of human utterance.
| Phoebe brings a breath of fresh air into the stuffy Pyncheon house, and the optimistic, bright, even pastoral vocabulary that surrounds every description of Phoebe seems to reflect her stalwart country values. Phoebe's first action upon waking up is to make her room as cheery and airy as possible--to begin reshaping the house. She breathes new life into the shop as well, and her beauty, youth, and inherent cheerfulness transform a failing Pyncheon experiment into a commercial success; the store is almost unrecognizable under her command. By and large, Hepzibah seems to be swayed by Phoebe's upbeat demeanor, but it is interesting to note that the she still harbors an old attachment to bloodline. She worries aloud to Uncle Venner that Phoebe is unlike any Pyncheon she has ever seen. Phoebe is, in fact, a Pyncheon, but she is not of the aristocratic strain, and though her modest country background brings a badly needed change to the house, she is allowed to begin making those changes only because of her family name. The ramifications of the close-minded, accursed Pyncheon way of life are artfully illustrated by the description of the chickens, who are obvious symbols for the Pyncheon family. Like the Pyncheons, the chickens were once a large, hardy breed, but like the family that breeds them, they have suffered with time, shrinking in size. By their very nature, too, the chickens, whose clucking and fighting is more evocative of petty gossip than of serious discussion, seem like a rather unflattering metaphor for a ruined family. Nonetheless, the chickens also exhibit a rather admirable dignity, as their lineage has endured in the face of poor health and seeming neglect. As the narrator tells us, "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. Not only do the chickens share the Pyncheons' declining fortunes, but they are inextricably linked to the fate of the family's house as well. There are inherent contradictions in Holgrave's character, too, and his conversation with Phoebe in the garden reveals that he is a polarizing figure, one who, for better or worse, disrupts the world around him. Holgrave's politics are said to be wild and dangerous, but it is telling that Hepzibah, who seems to have such an austere conception of society, lets him live in her house; even her usual convictions seem to be overturned by this magnetic figure. In the garden, Phoebe's hardy country goodness falls prey to Holgrave's charm, making this figure, a man she would normally avoid, become increasingly compelling. Yet the real testament to how contradictory a figure Holgrave is comes when he shows Phoebe one of his daguerreotypes. The man in the daguerreotype, who strongly resembles Colonel Pyncheon, should be one of great pomp and respectability. Although he wears a smile, there is nothing amicable about this particular daguerreotype. Granted, the photograph's subject, who in later chapters will prove to be Judge Pyncheon, supplies his own contradictions and hidden meanings, but it is noteworthy that these mysteries are first revealed by Holgrave | analysis |
WHEN Phoebe 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 Phoebe whether old Speckle, as she called one of the hens, had laid
an egg the preceding day. Phoebe ran to see, but returned without the
expected treasure in her hand. At that instant, however, the blast of
a 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 Phoebe to roast some coffee,--which she
casually observed was the real Mocha, and so long kept that each of the
small berries ought to be worth its weight in gold,--the maiden lady
heaped fuel into the vast receptacle of the ancient fireplace in such
quantity as soon to drive the lingering dusk out of the kitchen. The
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 Phoebe, the only spectator, except the rats and ghosts
aforesaid, had not been better employed than in shedding them), to see
her rake out a bed of fresh and glowing coals, and proceed to broil the
mackerel. Her usually pale cheeks were all ablaze with heat and hurry.
She watched the fish with as much tender care and minuteness of
attention as if,--we know not how to express it otherwise,--as if her
own heart were on the gridiron, and her immortal happiness were
involved in its being done precisely to a turn!
Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged
and 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. Phoebe'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 Phoebe
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 have scorned to take his place. But the Puritan's face
scowled down out of the picture, as if nothing on the table pleased his
appetite.
By way of contributing what grace she could, Phoebe gathered some roses
and a few other flowers, possessing either scent or beauty, and
arranged them in a glass pitcher, which, having long ago lost its
handle, was so much the fitter for a flower-vase. The early
sunshine--as fresh as that which peeped into Eve's bower while she and
Adam sat at breakfast there--came twinkling through the branches of the
pear-tree, and fell quite across the table. All was now ready. There
were chairs and plates for three. A chair and plate for Hepzibah,--the
same for Phoebe,--but what other guest did her cousin look for?
Throughout this preparation there had been a constant tremor in
Hepzibah's frame; an agitation so powerful that Phoebe could see the
quivering of her gaunt shadow, as thrown by the firelight on the
kitchen wall, or by the sunshine on the parlor floor. Its
manifestations were so various, and agreed so little with one another,
that the girl knew not what to make of it. Sometimes it seemed an
ecstasy of delight and happiness. At such moments, Hepzibah would
fling out her arms, and infold Phoebe in them, and kiss her cheek as
tenderly as ever her mother had; she appeared to do so by an inevitable
impulse, and as if her bosom were oppressed with tenderness, of which
she must needs pour out a little, in order to gain breathing-room. The
next moment, without any visible cause for the change, her unwonted joy
shrank back, appalled, as it were, and clothed itself in mourning; or
it ran and hid itself, so to speak, in the dungeon of her heart, where
it had long lain chained, while a cold, spectral sorrow took the place
of the imprisoned joy, that was afraid to be enfranchised,--a sorrow as
black as that was bright. She often broke into a little, nervous,
hysteric laugh, more touching than any tears could be; and forthwith,
as if to try which was the most touching, a gush of tears would follow;
or perhaps the laughter and tears came both at once, and surrounded our
poor Hepzibah, in a moral sense, with a kind of pale, dim rainbow.
Towards Phoebe, as we have said, she was affectionate,--far tenderer
than ever before, in their brief acquaintance, except for that one kiss
on the preceding night,--yet with a continually recurring pettishness
and irritability. She would speak sharply to her; then, throwing aside
all the starched reserve of her ordinary manner, ask pardon, and the
next instant renew the just-forgiven injury.
At last, when their mutual labor was all finished, she took Phoebe's
hand in her own trembling one.
"Bear with me, my dear child," she cried; "for truly my heart is full
to the brim! Bear with me; for I love you, Phoebe, though I speak so
roughly. Think nothing of it, dearest child! By and by, I shall be
kind, and only kind!"
"My dearest cousin, cannot you tell me what has happened?" asked
Phoebe, with a sunny and tearful sympathy. "What is it that moves you
so?"
"Hush! hush! He is coming!" whispered Hepzibah, hastily wiping her
eyes. "Let him see you first, Phoebe; for you are young and rosy, and
cannot help letting a smile break out whether or no. He always liked
bright faces! And mine is old now, and the tears are hardly dry on it.
He never could abide tears. There; draw the curtain a little, so that
the shadow may fall across his side of the table! But let there be a
good deal of sunshine, too; for he never was fond of gloom, as some
people are. He has had but little sunshine in his life,--poor
Clifford,--and, oh, what a black shadow. Poor, poor Clifford!"
Thus murmuring in an undertone, as if speaking rather to her own heart
than to Phoebe, the old gentlewoman stepped on tiptoe about the room,
making such arrangements as suggested themselves at the crisis.
Meanwhile there was a step in the passage-way, above stairs. Phoebe
recognized it as the same which had passed upward, as through her
dream, in the night-time. The approaching guest, whoever it might be,
appeared to pause at the head of the staircase; he paused twice or
thrice in the descent; he paused again at the foot. Each time, the
delay seemed to be without purpose, but rather from a forgetfulness of
the purpose which had set him in motion, or as if the person's feet
came involuntarily to a stand-still because the motive-power was too
feeble to sustain his progress. Finally, he made a long pause at the
threshold of the parlor. He took hold of the knob of the door; then
loosened his grasp without opening it. Hepzibah, her hands
convulsively clasped, stood gazing at the entrance.
"Dear Cousin Hepzibah, pray don't look so!" said Phoebe, trembling; for
her cousin's emotion, and this mysteriously reluctant step, made her
feel as if a ghost were coming into the room. "You really frighten me!
Is something awful going to happen?"
"Hush!" whispered Hepzibah. "Be cheerful! whatever may happen, be
nothing but cheerful!"
The final pause at the threshold proved so long, that Hepzibah, unable
to endure the suspense, rushed forward, threw open the door, and led in
the stranger by the hand. At the first glance, Phoebe saw an elderly
personage, in an old-fashioned dressing-gown of faded damask, and
wearing his gray or almost white hair of an unusual length. It quite
overshadowed his forehead, except when he thrust it back, and stared
vaguely about the room. After a very brief inspection of his face, it
was easy to conceive that his footstep must necessarily be such an one
as that which, slowly and with as indefinite an aim as a child's first
journey across a floor, had just brought him hitherward. Yet there
were no tokens that his physical strength might not have sufficed for a
free and determined gait. It was the spirit of the man that could not
walk. The expression of his countenance--while, notwithstanding it had
the light of reason in it--seemed to waver, and glimmer, and nearly to
die away, and feebly to recover itself again. It was like a flame
which we see twinkling among half-extinguished embers; we gaze at it
more intently than if it were a positive blaze, gushing vividly
upward,--more intently, but with a certain impatience, as if it ought
either to kindle itself into satisfactory splendor, or be at once
extinguished.
For an instant after entering the room, the guest stood still,
retaining Hepzibah's hand instinctively, as a child does that of the
grown person who guides it. He saw Phoebe, however, and caught an
illumination from her youthful and pleasant aspect, which, indeed,
threw a cheerfulness about the parlor, like the circle of reflected
brilliancy around the glass vase of flowers that was standing in the
sunshine. He made a salutation, or, to speak nearer the truth, an
ill-defined, abortive attempt at curtsy. Imperfect as it was, however,
it conveyed an idea, or, at least, gave a hint, of indescribable grace,
such as no practised art of external manners could have attained. It
was too slight to seize upon at the instant; yet, as recollected
afterwards, seemed to transfigure the whole man.
"Dear Clifford," said Hepzibah, in the tone with which one soothes a
wayward infant, "this is our cousin Phoebe,--little Phoebe
Pyncheon,--Arthur's only child, you know. She has come from the
country to stay with us awhile; for our old house has grown to be very
lonely now."
"Phoebe--Phoebe Pyncheon?--Phoebe?" repeated the guest, with a strange,
sluggish, ill-defined utterance. "Arthur's child! Ah, I forget! No
matter. She is very welcome!"
"Come, dear Clifford, take this chair," said Hepzibah, leading him to
his place. "Pray, Phoebe, lower the curtain a very little more. Now
let us begin breakfast."
The guest seated himself in the place assigned him, and looked
strangely around. He was evidently trying to grapple with the present
scene, and bring it home to his mind with a more satisfactory
distinctness. He desired to be certain, at least, that he was here, in
the low-studded, cross-beamed, oaken-panelled parlor, and not in some
other spot, which had stereotyped itself into his senses. But the
effort was too great to be sustained with more than a fragmentary
success. Continually, as we may express it, he faded away out of his
place; or, in other words, his mind and consciousness took their
departure, leaving his wasted, gray, and melancholy figure--a
substantial emptiness, a material ghost--to occupy his seat at table.
Again, after a blank moment, there would be a flickering taper-gleam in
his eyeballs. It betokened that his spiritual part had returned, and
was doing its best to kindle the heart's household fire, and light up
intellectual lamps in the dark and ruinous mansion, where it was doomed
to be a forlorn inhabitant.
At one of these moments of less torpid, yet still imperfect animation,
Phoebe became convinced of what she had at first rejected as too
extravagant and startling an idea. She saw that the person before her
must have been the original of the beautiful miniature in her cousin
Hepzibah's possession. Indeed, with a feminine eye for costume, she
had at once identified the damask dressing-gown, which enveloped him,
as the same in figure, material, and fashion, with that so elaborately
represented in the picture. This old, faded garment, with all its
pristine brilliancy extinct, seemed, in some indescribable way, to
translate the wearer's untold misfortune, and make it perceptible to
the beholder's eye. It was the better to be discerned, by this
exterior type, how worn and old were the soul's more immediate
garments; that form and countenance, the beauty and grace of which had
almost transcended the skill of the most exquisite of artists. It
could the more adequately be known that the soul of the man must have
suffered some miserable wrong, from its earthly experience. There he
seemed to sit, with a dim veil of decay and ruin betwixt him and the
world, but through which, at flitting intervals, might be caught the
same expression, so refined, so softly imaginative, which
Malbone--venturing a happy touch, with suspended breath--had imparted
to the miniature! There had been something so innately characteristic
in this look, that all the dusky years, and the burden of unfit
calamity which had fallen upon him, did not suffice utterly to destroy
it.
Hepzibah had now poured out a cup of deliciously fragrant coffee, and
presented it to her guest. As his eyes met hers, he seemed bewildered
and disquieted.
"Is this you, Hepzibah?" he murmured sadly; then, more apart, and
perhaps unconscious that he was overheard, "How changed! how changed!
And is she angry with me? Why does she bend her brow so?"
Poor Hepzibah! It was that wretched scowl which time and her
near-sightedness, and the fret of inward discomfort, had rendered so
habitual that any vehemence of mood invariably evoked it. But at the
indistinct murmur of his words her whole face grew tender, and even
lovely, with sorrowful affection; the harshness of her features
disappeared, as it were, behind the warm and misty glow.
"Angry!" she repeated; "angry with you, Clifford!"
Her tone, as she uttered the exclamation, had a plaintive and really
exquisite melody thrilling through it, yet without subduing a certain
something which an obtuse auditor might still have mistaken for
asperity. It was as if some transcendent musician should draw a
soul-thrilling sweetness out of a cracked instrument, which makes its
physical imperfection heard in the midst of ethereal harmony,--so deep
was the sensibility that found an organ in Hepzibah's voice!
"There is nothing but love here, Clifford," she added,--"nothing but
love! You are at home!"
The guest responded to her tone by a smile, which did not half light up
his face. Feeble as it was, however, and gone in a moment, it had a
charm of wonderful beauty. It was followed by a coarser expression; or
one that had the effect of coarseness on the fine mould and outline of
his countenance, because there was nothing intellectual to temper it.
It was a look of appetite. He ate food with what might almost be
termed voracity; and seemed to forget himself, Hepzibah, the young
girl, and everything else around him, in the sensual enjoyment which
the bountifully spread table afforded. In his natural system, though
high-wrought and delicately refined, a sensibility to the delights of
the palate was probably inherent. It would have been kept in check,
however, and even converted into an accomplishment, and one of the
thousand modes of intellectual culture, had his more ethereal
characteristics retained their vigor. But as it existed now, the
effect was painful and made Phoebe droop her eyes.
In a little while the guest became sensible of the fragrance of the yet
untasted coffee. He quaffed it eagerly. The subtle essence acted on
him like a charmed draught, and caused the opaque substance of his
animal being to grow transparent, or, at least, translucent; so that a
spiritual gleam was transmitted through it, with a clearer lustre than
hitherto.
"More, more!" he cried, with nervous haste in his utterance, as if
anxious to retain his grasp of what sought to escape him. "This is
what I need! Give me more!"
Under this delicate and powerful influence he sat more erect, and
looked out from his eyes with a glance that took note of what it rested
on. It was not so much that his expression grew more intellectual;
this, though it had its share, was not the most peculiar effect.
Neither was what we call the moral nature so forcibly awakened as to
present itself in remarkable prominence. But a certain fine temper of
being was now not brought out in full relief, but changeably and
imperfectly betrayed, of which it was the function to deal with all
beautiful and enjoyable things. In a character where it should exist
as the chief attribute, it would bestow on its possessor an exquisite
taste, and an enviable susceptibility of happiness. Beauty would be
his life; his aspirations would all tend toward it; and, allowing his
frame and physical organs to be in consonance, his own developments
would likewise be beautiful. Such a man should have nothing to do with
sorrow; nothing with strife; nothing with the martyrdom which, in an
infinite variety of shapes, awaits those who have the heart, and will,
and conscience, to fight a battle with the world. To these heroic
tempers, such martyrdom is the richest meed in the world's gift. To
the individual before us, it could only be a grief, intense in due
proportion with the severity of the infliction. He had no right to be
a martyr; and, beholding him so fit to be happy and so feeble for all
other purposes, a generous, strong, and noble spirit would, methinks,
have been ready to sacrifice what little enjoyment it might have
planned for itself,--it would have flung down the hopes, so paltry in
its regard,--if thereby the wintry blasts of our rude sphere might come
tempered to such a man.
Not to speak it harshly or scornfully, it seemed Clifford's nature to
be a Sybarite. It was perceptible, even there, in the dark old parlor,
in the inevitable polarity with which his eyes were attracted towards
the quivering play of sunbeams through the shadowy foliage. It was
seen in his appreciating notice of the vase of flowers, the scent of
which he inhaled with a zest almost peculiar to a physical organization
so refined that spiritual ingredients are moulded in with it. It was
betrayed in the unconscious smile with which he regarded Phoebe, whose
fresh and maidenly figure was both sunshine and flowers,--their
essence, in a prettier and more agreeable mode of manifestation. Not
less evident was this love and necessity for the Beautiful, in the
instinctive caution with which, even so soon, his eyes turned away from
his hostess, and wandered to any quarter rather than come back. It was
Hepzibah's misfortune,--not Clifford's fault. How could he,--so yellow
as she was, so wrinkled, so sad of mien, with that odd uncouthness of a
turban on her head, and that most perverse of scowls contorting her
brow,--how could he love to gaze at her? But, did he owe her no
affection for so much as she had silently given? He owed her nothing.
A nature like Clifford's can contract no debts of that kind. It is--we
say it without censure, nor in diminution of the claim which it
indefeasibly possesses on beings of another mould--it is always selfish
in its essence; and we must give it leave to be so, and heap up our
heroic and disinterested love upon it so much the more, without a
recompense. Poor Hepzibah knew this truth, or, at least, acted on the
instinct of it. So long estranged from what was lovely as Clifford had
been, she rejoiced--rejoiced, though with a present sigh, and a secret
purpose to shed tears in her own chamber that he had brighter objects
now before his eyes than her aged and uncomely features. They never
possessed a charm; and if they had, the canker of her grief for him
would long since have destroyed it.
The guest leaned back in his chair. Mingled in his countenance with a
dreamy delight, there was a troubled look of effort and unrest. He was
seeking to make himself more fully sensible of the scene around him;
or, perhaps, dreading it to be a dream, or a play of imagination, was
vexing the fair moment with a struggle for some added brilliancy and
more durable illusion.
"How pleasant!--How delightful!" he murmured, but not as if addressing
any one. "Will it last? How balmy the atmosphere through that open
window! An open window! How beautiful that play of sunshine! Those
flowers, how very fragrant! That young girl's face, how cheerful, how
blooming!--a flower with the dew on it, and sunbeams in the dew-drops!
Ah! this must be all a dream! A dream! A dream! But it has quite
hidden the four stone walls!"
Then his face darkened, as if the shadow of a cavern or a dungeon had
come over it; there was no more light in its expression than might have
come through the iron grates of a prison-window--still lessening, too,
as if he were sinking farther into the depths. Phoebe (being of that
quickness and activity of temperament that she seldom long refrained
from taking a part, and generally a good one, in what was going
forward) now felt herself moved to address the stranger.
"Here is a new kind of rose, which I found this morning in the garden,"
said she, choosing a small crimson one from among the flowers in the
vase. "There will be but five or six on the bush this season. This is
the most perfect of them all; not a speck of blight or mildew in it.
And how sweet it is!--sweet like no other rose! One can never forget
that scent!"
"Ah!--let me see!--let me hold it!" cried the guest, eagerly seizing
the flower, which, by the spell peculiar to remembered odors, brought
innumerable associations along with the fragrance that it exhaled.
"Thank you! This has done me good. I remember how I used to prize this
flower,--long ago, I suppose, very long ago!--or was it only yesterday?
It makes me feel young again! Am I young? Either this remembrance is
singularly distinct, or this consciousness strangely dim! But how kind
of the fair young girl! Thank you! Thank you!"
The favorable excitement derived from this little crimson rose afforded
Clifford the brightest moment which he enjoyed at the breakfast-table.
It might have lasted longer, but that his eyes happened, soon
afterwards, to rest on the face of the old Puritan, who, out of his
dingy frame and lustreless canvas, was looking down on the scene like a
ghost, and a most ill-tempered and ungenial one. The guest made an
impatient gesture of the hand, and addressed Hepzibah with what might
easily be recognized as the licensed irritability of a petted member of
the family.
"Hepzibah!--Hepzibah!" cried he with no little force and distinctness,
"why do you keep that odious picture on the wall? Yes, yes!--that is
precisely your taste! I have told you, a thousand times, that it was
the evil genius of the house!--my evil genius particularly! Take it
down, at once!"
"Dear Clifford," said Hepzibah sadly, "you know it cannot be!"
"Then, at all events," continued he, still speaking with some energy,
"pray cover it with a crimson curtain, broad enough to hang in folds,
and with a golden border and tassels. I cannot bear it! It must not
stare me in the face!"
"Yes, dear Clifford, the picture shall be covered," said Hepzibah
soothingly. "There is a crimson curtain in a trunk above stairs,--a
little faded and moth-eaten, I'm afraid,--but Phoebe and I will do
wonders with it."
"This very day, remember" said he; and then added, in a low,
self-communing voice, "Why should we live in this dismal house at all?
Why not go to the South of France?--to Italy?--Paris, Naples, Venice,
Rome? Hepzibah will say we have not the means. A droll idea that!"
He smiled to himself, and threw a glance of fine sarcastic meaning
towards Hepzibah.
But the several moods of feeling, faintly as they were marked, through
which he had passed, occurring in so brief an interval of time, had
evidently wearied the stranger. He was probably accustomed to a sad
monotony of life, not so much flowing in a stream, however sluggish, as
stagnating in a pool around his feet. A slumberous veil diffused
itself over his countenance, and had an effect, morally speaking, on
its naturally delicate and elegant outline, like that which a brooding
mist, with no sunshine in it, throws over the features of a landscape.
He appeared to become grosser,--almost cloddish. If aught of interest
or beauty--even ruined beauty--had heretofore been visible in this man,
the beholder might now begin to doubt it, and to accuse his own
imagination of deluding him with whatever grace had flickered over that
visage, and whatever exquisite lustre had gleamed in those filmy eyes.
Before he had quite sunken away, however, the sharp and peevish tinkle
of the shop-bell made itself audible. Striking most disagreeably on
Clifford's auditory organs and the characteristic sensibility of his
nerves, it caused him to start upright out of his chair.
"Good heavens, Hepzibah! what horrible disturbance have we now in the
house?" cried he, wreaking his resentful impatience--as a matter of
course, and a custom of old--on the one person in the world that loved
him. "I have never heard such a hateful clamor! Why do you permit it?
In the name of all dissonance, what can it be?"
It was very remarkable into what prominent relief--even as if a dim
picture should leap suddenly from its canvas--Clifford's character was
thrown by this apparently trifling annoyance. The secret was, that an
individual of his temper can always be pricked more acutely through his
sense of the beautiful and harmonious than through his heart. It is
even possible--for similar cases have often happened--that if Clifford,
in his foregoing life, had enjoyed the means of cultivating his taste
to its utmost perfectibility, that subtile attribute might, before this
period, have completely eaten out or filed away his affections. Shall
we venture to pronounce, therefore, that his long and black calamity
may not have had a redeeming drop of mercy at the bottom?
"Dear Clifford, I wish I could keep the sound from your ears," said
Hepzibah, patiently, but reddening with a painful suffusion of shame.
"It is very disagreeable even to me. But, do you know, Clifford, I
have something to tell you? This ugly noise,--pray run, Phoebe, and see
who is there!--this naughty little tinkle is nothing but our shop-bell!"
"Shop-bell!" repeated Clifford, with a bewildered stare.
"Yes, our shop-bell," said Hepzibah, a certain natural dignity, mingled
with deep emotion, now asserting itself in her manner. "For you must
know, dearest Clifford, that we are very poor. And there was no other
resource, but either to accept assistance from a hand that I would push
aside (and so would you!) were it to offer bread when we were dying for
it,--no help, save from him, or else to earn our subsistence with my
own hands! Alone, I might have been content to starve. But you were to
be given back to me! Do you think, then, dear Clifford," added she,
with a wretched smile, "that I have brought an irretrievable disgrace
on the old house, by opening a little shop in the front gable? Our
great-great-grandfather did the same, when there was far less need! Are
you ashamed of me?"
"Shame! Disgrace! Do you speak these words to me, Hepzibah?" said
Clifford,--not angrily, however; for when a man's spirit has been
thoroughly crushed, he may be peevish at small offences, but never
resentful of great ones. So he spoke with only a grieved emotion. "It
was not kind to say so, Hepzibah! What shame can befall me now?"
And then the unnerved man--he that had been born for enjoyment, but had
met a doom so very wretched--burst into a woman's passion of tears. It
was but of brief continuance, however; soon leaving him in a quiescent,
and, to judge by his countenance, not an uncomfortable state. From
this mood, too, he partially rallied for an instant, and looked at
Hepzibah with a smile, the keen, half-derisory purport of which was a
puzzle to her.
"Are we so very poor, Hepzibah?" said he.
Finally, his chair being deep and softly cushioned, Clifford fell
asleep. Hearing the more regular rise and fall of his breath (which,
however, even then, instead of being strong and full, had a feeble kind
of tremor, corresponding with the lack of vigor in his
character),--hearing these tokens of settled slumber, Hepzibah seized
the opportunity to peruse his face more attentively than she had yet
dared to do. Her heart melted away in tears; her profoundest spirit
sent forth a moaning voice, low, gentle, but inexpressibly sad. In
this depth of grief and pity she felt that there was no irreverence in
gazing at his altered, aged, faded, ruined face. But no sooner was she
a little relieved than her conscience smote her for gazing curiously at
him, now that he was so changed; and, turning hastily away, Hepzibah
let down the curtain over the sunny window, and left Clifford to
slumber there.
| The Guest Phoebe awakes to find Hepzibah downstairs, deeply immersed in a cookbook. Hepzibah decides to buy a mackerel from a fishmonger walking along the street and immediately begins cooking it. Phoebe, surprised by Hepzibah's sudden energy, helps to cook the large breakfast. Throughout the cooking, Hepzibah is on an emotional roller-coaster, hugging Phoebe joyfully one minute and bursting into tears the next. Phoebe is surprised to see three places set for the meal, and when they hear the sounds of their long-awaited guest, Hepzibah begs her to be cheerful no matter what. Finally, with Hepzibah's assistance, in walks their guest, Hepzibah's long-absent brother, Clifford. He wanders about in confusion, addresses his sister in the third person, and though he is quite taken with Phoebe, he can barely place her in the family. Phoebe eventually recognizes him as the man whose miniature portrait Hepzibah keeps in her drawer. Clifford eats his food ravenously, but he cannot look his sister in the face and keeps casting his eyes around so that he does not have to look at the ugliness of Hepzibah's scowl. After breakfast, Clifford begins to look around the room. It becomes apparent that, for all his frailty, he is at heart a sybarite--a person who devotes his life to the sensual pleasures of sight, sound, and touch. Clifford takes particular pleasure in the old house and the pleasant sight of young Phoebe. When he spots the old portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, however, Clifford recoils in horror and asks that it be removed. Hepzibah replies that, as Clifford well knows, she can do no such thing, but she agrees to cover it with a cloth instead. The sudden ring of the shop bell greatly troubles Clifford. Hepzibah explains to him that times have changed and that they are now so poor that she has been forced to take up shop-keeping. She frets that by doing so she has brought shame on the family, but Clifford replies that he cannot be shamed further and is not bothered by Hepzibah's occupation. He weeps, however, over the ruins of his life. Eventually, he falls asleep in his chair, while Hepzibah looks at his face and sheds silent tears | summary |
PHOEBE, on entering the shop, beheld there the already familiar face of
the little devourer--if we can reckon his mighty deeds aright--of Jim
Crow, the elephant, the camel, the dromedaries, and the locomotive.
Having expended his private fortune, on the two preceding days, in the
purchase of the above unheard-of luxuries, the young gentleman's
present errand was on the part of his mother, in quest of three eggs
and half a pound of raisins. These articles Phoebe accordingly
supplied, and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a
slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a
whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of
Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of
fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him. This remarkable
urchin, in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, both in
respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because
he, as well as Time, after ingulfing thus much of creation, looked
almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made.
After partly closing the door, the child turned back, and mumbled
something to Phoebe, which, as the whale was but half disposed of, she
could not perfectly understand.
"What did you say, my little fellow?" asked she.
"Mother wants to know" repeated Ned Higgins more distinctly, "how Old
Maid Pyncheon's brother does? Folks say he has got home."
"My cousin Hepzibah's brother?" exclaimed Phoebe, surprised at this
sudden explanation of the relationship between Hepzibah and her guest.
"Her brother! And where can he have been?"
The little boy only put his thumb to his broad snub-nose, with that
look of shrewdness which a child, spending much of his time in the
street, so soon learns to throw over his features, however
unintelligent in themselves. Then as Phoebe continued to gaze at him,
without answering his mother's message, he took his departure.
As the child went down the steps, a gentleman ascended them, and made
his entrance into the shop. It was the portly, and, had it possessed
the advantage of a little more height, would have been the stately
figure of a man considerably in the decline of life, dressed in a black
suit of some thin stuff, resembling broadcloth as closely as possible.
A gold-headed cane, of rare Oriental wood, added materially to the high
respectability of his aspect, as did also a neckcloth of the utmost
snowy purity, and the conscientious polish of his boots. His dark,
square countenance, with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows, was
naturally impressive, and would, perhaps, have been rather stern, had
not the gentleman considerately taken upon himself to mitigate the
harsh effect by a look of exceeding good-humor and benevolence. Owing,
however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about
the lower region of his face, the look was, perhaps, unctuous rather
than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshly effulgence, not
altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be. A
susceptible observer, at any rate, might have regarded it as affording
very little evidence of the general benignity of soul whereof it
purported to be the outward reflection. And if the observer chanced to
be ill-natured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably
suspect that the smile on the gentleman's face was a good deal akin to
the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his
boot-black, respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and
preserve them.
As the stranger entered the little shop, where the projection of the
second story and the thick foliage of the elm-tree, as well as the
commodities at the window, created a sort of gray medium, his smile
grew as intense as if he had set his heart on counteracting the whole
gloom of the atmosphere (besides any moral gloom pertaining to Hepzibah
and her inmates) by the unassisted light of his countenance. On
perceiving a young rose-bud of a girl, instead of the gaunt presence of
the old maid, a look of surprise was manifest. He at first knit his
brows; then smiled with more unctuous benignity than ever.
"Ah, I see how it is!" said he in a deep voice,--a voice which, had it
come from the throat of an uncultivated man, would have been gruff,
but, by dint of careful training, was now sufficiently agreeable,--"I
was not aware that Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon had commenced business under
such favorable auspices. You are her assistant, I suppose?"
"I certainly am," answered Phoebe, and added, with a little air of
lady-like assumption (for, civil as the gentleman was, he evidently
took her to be a young person serving for wages), "I am a cousin of
Miss Hepzibah, on a visit to her."
"Her cousin?--and from the country? Pray pardon me, then," said the
gentleman, bowing and smiling, as Phoebe never had been bowed to nor
smiled on before; "in that case, we must be better acquainted; for,
unless I am sadly mistaken, you are my own little kinswoman likewise!
Let me see,--Mary?--Dolly?--Phoebe?--yes, Phoebe is the name! Is it
possible that you are Phoebe Pyncheon, only child of my dear cousin and
classmate, Arthur? Ah, I see your father now, about your mouth! Yes,
yes! we must be better acquainted! I am your kinsman, my dear. Surely
you must have heard of Judge Pyncheon?"
As Phoebe curtsied in reply, the Judge bent forward, with the
pardonable and even praiseworthy purpose--considering the nearness of
blood and the difference of age--of bestowing on his young relative a
kiss of acknowledged kindred and natural affection. Unfortunately
(without design, or only with such instinctive design as gives no
account of itself to the intellect) Phoebe, just at the critical
moment, drew back; so that her highly respectable kinsman, with his
body bent over the counter and his lips protruded, was betrayed into
the rather absurd predicament of kissing the empty air. It was a
modern parallel to the case of Ixion embracing a cloud, and was so much
the more ridiculous as the Judge prided himself on eschewing all airy
matter, and never mistaking a shadow for a substance. The truth
was,--and it is Phoebe's only excuse,--that, although Judge Pyncheon's
glowing benignity might not be absolutely unpleasant to the feminine
beholder, with the width of a street, or even an ordinary-sized room,
interposed between, yet it became quite too intense, when this dark,
full-fed physiognomy (so roughly bearded, too, that no razor could ever
make it smooth) sought to bring itself into actual contact with the
object of its regards. The man, the sex, somehow or other, was
entirely too prominent in the Judge's demonstrations of that sort.
Phoebe's eyes sank, and, without knowing why, she felt herself blushing
deeply under his look. Yet she had been kissed before, and without
any particular squeamishness, by perhaps half a dozen different
cousins, younger as well as older than this dark-browned,
grisly-bearded, white-neck-clothed, and unctuously-benevolent Judge!
Then, why not by him?
On raising her eyes, Phoebe was startled by the change in Judge
Pyncheon's face. It was quite as striking, allowing for the difference
of scale, as that betwixt a landscape under a broad sunshine and just
before a thunder-storm; not that it had the passionate intensity of the
latter aspect, but was cold, hard, immitigable, like a day-long
brooding cloud.
"Dear me! what is to be done now?" thought the country-girl to herself.
"He looks as if there were nothing softer in him than a rock, nor
milder than the east wind! I meant no harm! Since he is really my
cousin, I would have let him kiss me, if I could!"
Then, all at once, it struck Phoebe that this very Judge Pyncheon was
the original of the miniature which the daguerreotypist had shown her
in the garden, and that the hard, stern, relentless look, now on his
face, was the same that the sun had so inflexibly persisted in bringing
out. Was it, therefore, no momentary mood, but, however skilfully
concealed, the settled temper of his life? And not merely so, but was
it hereditary in him, and transmitted down, as a precious heirloom,
from that bearded ancestor, in whose picture both the expression and,
to a singular degree, the features of the modern Judge were shown as by
a kind of prophecy? A deeper philosopher than Phoebe might have found
something very terrible in this idea. It implied that the weaknesses
and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral
diseases which lead to crime are handed down from one generation to
another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been
able to establish in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to
entail upon posterity.
But, as it happened, scarcely had Phoebe's eyes rested again on the
Judge's countenance than all its ugly sternness vanished; and she found
herself quite overpowered by the sultry, dog-day heat, as it were, of
benevolence, which this excellent man diffused out of his great heart
into the surrounding atmosphere,--very much like a serpent, which, as a
preliminary to fascination, is said to fill the air with his peculiar
odor.
"I like that, Cousin Phoebe!" cried he, with an emphatic nod of
approbation. "I like it much, my little cousin! You are a good child,
and know how to take care of yourself. A young girl--especially if she
be a very pretty one--can never be too chary of her lips."
"Indeed, sir," said Phoebe, trying to laugh the matter off, "I did not
mean to be unkind."
Nevertheless, whether or no it were entirely owing to the inauspicious
commencement of their acquaintance, she still acted under a certain
reserve, which was by no means customary to her frank and genial
nature. The fantasy would not quit her, that the original Puritan, of
whom she had heard so many sombre traditions,--the progenitor of the
whole race of New England Pyncheons, the founder of the House of the
Seven Gables, and who had died so strangely in it,--had now stept into
the shop. In these days of off-hand equipment, the matter was easily
enough arranged. On his arrival from the other world, he had merely
found it necessary to spend a quarter of an hour at a barber's, who had
trimmed down the Puritan's full beard into a pair of grizzled whiskers,
then, patronizing a ready-made clothing establishment, he had exchanged
his velvet doublet and sable cloak, with the richly worked band under
his chin, for a white collar and cravat, coat, vest, and pantaloons;
and lastly, putting aside his steel-hilted broadsword to take up a
gold-headed cane, the Colonel Pyncheon of two centuries ago steps
forward as the Judge of the passing moment!
Of course, Phoebe was far too sensible a girl to entertain this idea in
any other way than as matter for a smile. Possibly, also, could the
two personages have stood together before her eye, many points of
difference would have been perceptible, and perhaps only a general
resemblance. The long lapse of intervening years, in a climate so
unlike that which had fostered the ancestral Englishman, must
inevitably have wrought important changes in the physical system of his
descendant. The Judge's volume of muscle could hardly be the same as
the Colonel's; there was undoubtedly less beef in him. Though looked
upon as a weighty man among his contemporaries in respect of animal
substance, and as favored with a remarkable degree of fundamental
development, well adapting him for the judicial bench, we conceive that
the modern Judge Pyncheon, if weighed in the same balance with his
ancestor, would have required at least an old-fashioned fifty-six to
keep the scale in equilibrio. Then the Judge's face had lost the ruddy
English hue that showed its warmth through all the duskiness of the
Colonel's weather-beaten cheek, and had taken a sallow shade, the
established complexion of his countrymen. If we mistake not, moreover,
a certain quality of nervousness had become more or less manifest, even
in so solid a specimen of Puritan descent as the gentleman now under
discussion. As one of its effects, it bestowed on his countenance a
quicker mobility than the old Englishman's had possessed, and keener
vivacity, but at the expense of a sturdier something, on which these
acute endowments seemed to act like dissolving acids. This process,
for aught we know, may belong to the great system of human progress,
which, with every ascending footstep, as it diminishes the necessity
for animal force, may be destined gradually to spiritualize us, by
refining away our grosser attributes of body. If so, Judge Pyncheon
could endure a century or two more of such refinement as well as most
other men.
The similarity, intellectual and moral, between the Judge and his
ancestor appears to have been at least as strong as the resemblance of
mien and feature would afford reason to anticipate. In old Colonel
Pyncheon's funeral discourse the clergyman absolutely canonized his
deceased parishioner, and opening, as it were, a vista through the roof
of the church, and thence through the firmament above, showed him
seated, harp in hand, among the crowned choristers of the spiritual
world. On his tombstone, too, the record is highly eulogistic; nor
does history, so far as he holds a place upon its page, assail the
consistency and uprightness of his character. So also, as regards the
Judge Pyncheon of to-day, neither clergyman, nor legal critic, nor
inscriber of tombstones, nor historian of general or local politics,
would venture a word against this eminent person's sincerity as a
Christian, or respectability as a man, or integrity as a judge, or
courage and faithfulness as the often-tried representative of his
political party. But, besides these cold, formal, and empty words of
the chisel that inscribes, the voice that speaks, and the pen that
writes, for the public eye and for distant time,--and which inevitably
lose much of their truth and freedom by the fatal consciousness of so
doing,--there were traditions about the ancestor, and private diurnal
gossip about the Judge, remarkably accordant in their testimony. It is
often instructive to take the woman's, the private and domestic, view
of a public man; nor can anything be more curious than the vast
discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving and the
pencil-sketches that pass from hand to hand behind the original's back.
For example: tradition affirmed that the Puritan had been greedy of
wealth; the Judge, too, with all the show of liberal expenditure, was
said to be as close-fisted as if his gripe were of iron. The ancestor
had clothed himself in a grim assumption of kindliness, a rough
heartiness of word and manner, which most people took to be the genuine
warmth of nature, making its way through the thick and inflexible hide
of a manly character. His descendant, in compliance with the
requirements of a nicer age, had etherealized this rude benevolence
into that broad benignity of smile wherewith he shone like a noonday
sun along the streets, or glowed like a household fire in the
drawing-rooms of his private acquaintance. The Puritan--if not belied
by some singular stories, murmured, even at this day, under the
narrator's breath--had fallen into certain transgressions to which men
of his great animal development, whatever their faith or principles,
must continue liable, until they put off impurity, along with the gross
earthly substance that involves it. We must not stain our page with
any contemporary scandal, to a similar purport, that may have been
whispered against the Judge. The Puritan, again, an autocrat in his
own household, had worn out three wives, and, merely by the remorseless
weight and hardness of his character in the conjugal relation, had sent
them, one after another, broken-hearted, to their graves. Here the
parallel, in some sort, fails. The Judge had wedded but a single wife,
and lost her in the third or fourth year of their marriage. There was
a fable, however,--for such we choose to consider it, though, not
impossibly, typical of Judge Pyncheon's marital deportment,--that the
lady got her death-blow in the honeymoon, and never smiled again,
because her husband compelled her to serve him with coffee every
morning at his bedside, in token of fealty to her liege-lord and master.
But it is too fruitful a subject, this of hereditary resemblances,--the
frequent recurrence of which, in a direct line, is truly unaccountable,
when we consider how large an accumulation of ancestry lies behind
every man at the distance of one or two centuries. We shall only add,
therefore, that the Puritan--so, at least, says chimney-corner
tradition, which often preserves traits of character with marvellous
fidelity--was bold, imperious, relentless, crafty; laying his purposes
deep, and following them out with an inveteracy of pursuit that knew
neither rest nor conscience; trampling on the weak, and, when essential
to his ends, doing his utmost to beat down the strong. Whether the
Judge in any degree resembled him, the further progress of our
narrative may show.
Scarcely any of the items in the above-drawn parallel occurred to
Phoebe, whose country birth and residence, in truth, had left her
pitifully ignorant of most of the family traditions, which lingered,
like cobwebs and incrustations of smoke, about the rooms and
chimney-corners of the House of the Seven Gables. Yet there was a
circumstance, very trifling in itself, which impressed her with an odd
degree of horror. She had heard of the anathema flung by Maule, the
executed wizard, against Colonel Pyncheon and his posterity,--that God
would give them blood to drink,--and likewise of the popular notion,
that this miraculous blood might now and then be heard gurgling in
their throats. The latter scandal--as became a person of sense, and,
more especially, a member of the Pyncheon family--Phoebe had set down
for the absurdity which it unquestionably was. But ancient
superstitions, after being steeped in human hearts and embodied in
human breath, and passing from lip to ear in manifold repetition,
through a series of generations, become imbued with an effect of homely
truth. The smoke of the domestic hearth has scented them through and
through. By long transmission among household facts, they grow to look
like them, and have such a familiar way of making themselves at home
that their influence is usually greater than we suspect. Thus it
happened, that when Phoebe heard a certain noise in Judge Pyncheon's
throat,--rather habitual with him, not altogether voluntary, yet
indicative of nothing, unless it were a slight bronchial complaint, or,
as some people hinted, an apoplectic symptom,--when the girl heard this
queer and awkward ingurgitation (which the writer never did hear, and
therefore cannot describe), she very foolishly started, and clasped her
hands.
Of course, it was exceedingly ridiculous in Phoebe to be discomposed by
such a trifle, and still more unpardonable to show her discomposure to
the individual most concerned in it. But the incident chimed in so
oddly with her previous fancies about the Colonel and the Judge, that,
for the moment, it seemed quite to mingle their identity.
"What is the matter with you, young woman?" said Judge Pyncheon, giving
her one of his harsh looks. "Are you afraid of anything?"
"Oh, nothing, sir--nothing in the world!" answered Phoebe, with a
little laugh of vexation at herself. "But perhaps you wish to speak
with my cousin Hepzibah. Shall I call her?"
"Stay a moment, if you please," said the Judge, again beaming sunshine
out of his face. "You seem to be a little nervous this morning. The
town air, Cousin Phoebe, does not agree with your good, wholesome
country habits. Or has anything happened to disturb you?--anything
remarkable in Cousin Hepzibah's family?-- An arrival, eh? I thought
so! No wonder you are out of sorts, my little cousin. To be an inmate
with such a guest may well startle an innocent young girl!"
"You quite puzzle me, sir," replied Phoebe, gazing inquiringly at the
Judge. "There is no frightful guest in the house, but only a poor,
gentle, childlike man, whom I believe to be Cousin Hepzibah's brother.
I am afraid (but you, sir, will know better than I) that he is not
quite in his sound senses; but so mild and quiet he seems to be, that a
mother might trust her baby with him; and I think he would play with
the baby as if he were only a few years older than itself. He startle
me!--Oh, no indeed!"
"I rejoice to hear so favorable and so ingenuous an account of my
cousin Clifford," said the benevolent Judge. "Many years ago, when we
were boys and young men together, I had a great affection for him, and
still feel a tender interest in all his concerns. You say, Cousin
Phoebe, he appears to be weak minded. Heaven grant him at least enough
of intellect to repent of his past sins!"
"Nobody, I fancy," observed Phoebe, "can have fewer to repent of."
"And is it possible, my dear," rejoined the Judge, with a commiserating
look, "that you have never heard of Clifford Pyncheon?--that you know
nothing of his history? Well, it is all right; and your mother has
shown a very proper regard for the good name of the family with which
she connected herself. Believe the best you can of this unfortunate
person, and hope the best! It is a rule which Christians should always
follow, in their judgments of one another; and especially is it right
and wise among near relatives, whose characters have necessarily a
degree of mutual dependence. But is Clifford in the parlor? I will
just step in and see."
"Perhaps, sir, I had better call my cousin Hepzibah," said Phoebe;
hardly knowing, however, whether she ought to obstruct the entrance of
so affectionate a kinsman into the private regions of the house. "Her
brother seemed to be just falling asleep after breakfast; and I am sure
she would not like him to be disturbed. Pray, sir, let me give her
notice!"
But the Judge showed a singular determination to enter unannounced; and
as Phoebe, with the vivacity of a person whose movements unconsciously
answer to her thoughts, had stepped towards the door, he used little or
no ceremony in putting her aside.
"No, no, Miss Phoebe!" said Judge Pyncheon in a voice as deep as a
thunder-growl, and with a frown as black as the cloud whence it issues.
"Stay you here! I know the house, and know my cousin Hepzibah, and know
her brother Clifford likewise.--nor need my little country cousin put
herself to the trouble of announcing me!"--in these latter words, by
the bye, there were symptoms of a change from his sudden harshness into
his previous benignity of manner. "I am at home here, Phoebe, you must
recollect, and you are the stranger. I will just step in, therefore,
and see for myself how Clifford is, and assure him and Hepzibah of my
kindly feelings and best wishes. It is right, at this juncture, that
they should both hear from my own lips how much I desire to serve them.
Ha! here is Hepzibah herself!"
Such was the case. The vibrations of the Judge's voice had reached the
old gentlewoman in the parlor, where she sat, with face averted,
waiting on her brother's slumber. She now issued forth, as would
appear, to defend the entrance, looking, we must needs say, amazingly
like the dragon which, in fairy tales, is wont to be the guardian over
an enchanted beauty. The habitual scowl of her brow was undeniably too
fierce, at this moment, to pass itself off on the innocent score of
near-sightedness; and it was bent on Judge Pyncheon in a way that
seemed to confound, if not alarm him, so inadequately had he estimated
the moral force of a deeply grounded antipathy. She made a repelling
gesture with her hand, and stood a perfect picture of prohibition, at
full length, in the dark frame of the doorway. But we must betray
Hepzibah's secret, and confess that the native timorousness of her
character even now developed itself in a quick tremor, which, to her
own perception, set each of her joints at variance with its fellows.
Possibly, the Judge was aware how little true hardihood lay behind
Hepzibah's formidable front. At any rate, being a gentleman of steady
nerves, he soon recovered himself, and failed not to approach his
cousin with outstretched hand; adopting the sensible precaution,
however, to cover his advance with a smile, so broad and sultry, that,
had it been only half as warm as it looked, a trellis of grapes might
at once have turned purple under its summer-like exposure. It may have
been his purpose, indeed, to melt poor Hepzibah on the spot, as if she
were a figure of yellow wax.
"Hepzibah, my beloved cousin, I am rejoiced!" exclaimed the Judge most
emphatically. "Now, at length, you have something to live for. Yes,
and all of us, let me say, your friends and kindred, have more to live
for than we had yesterday. I have lost no time in hastening to offer
any assistance in my power towards making Clifford comfortable. He
belongs to us all. I know how much he requires,--how much he used to
require,--with his delicate taste, and his love of the beautiful.
Anything in my house,--pictures, books, wine, luxuries of the
table,--he may command them all! It would afford me most heartfelt
gratification to see him! Shall I step in, this moment?"
"No," replied Hepzibah, her voice quivering too painfully to allow of
many words. "He cannot see visitors!"
"A visitor, my dear cousin!--do you call me so?" cried the Judge, whose
sensibility, it seems, was hurt by the coldness of the phrase. "Nay,
then, let me be Clifford's host, and your own likewise. Come at once
to my house. The country air, and all the conveniences,--I may say
luxuries,--that I have gathered about me, will do wonders for him. And
you and I, dear Hepzibah, will consult together, and watch together,
and labor together, to make our dear Clifford happy. Come! why should
we make more words about what is both a duty and a pleasure on my part?
Come to me at once!"
On hearing these so hospitable offers, and such generous recognition of
the claims of kindred, Phoebe felt very much in the mood of running up
to Judge Pyncheon, and giving him, of her own accord, the kiss from
which she had so recently shrunk away. It was quite otherwise with
Hepzibah; the Judge's smile seemed to operate on her acerbity of heart
like sunshine upon vinegar, making it ten times sourer than ever.
"Clifford," said she,--still too agitated to utter more than an abrupt
sentence,--"Clifford has a home here!"
"May Heaven forgive you, Hepzibah," said Judge Pyncheon,--reverently
lifting his eyes towards that high court of equity to which he
appealed,--"if you suffer any ancient prejudice or animosity to weigh
with you in this matter. I stand here with an open heart, willing and
anxious to receive yourself and Clifford into it. Do not refuse my
good offices,--my earnest propositions for your welfare! They are such,
in all respects, as it behooves your nearest kinsman to make. It will
be a heavy responsibility, cousin, if you confine your brother to this
dismal house and stifled air, when the delightful freedom of my
country-seat is at his command."
"It would never suit Clifford," said Hepzibah, as briefly as before.
"Woman!" broke forth the Judge, giving way to his resentment, "what is
the meaning of all this? Have you other resources? Nay, I suspected as
much! Take care, Hepzibah, take care! Clifford is on the brink of as
black a ruin as ever befell him yet! But why do I talk with you, woman
as you are? Make way!--I must see Clifford!"
Hepzibah spread out her gaunt figure across the door, and seemed really
to increase in bulk; looking the more terrible, also, because there was
so much terror and agitation in her heart. But Judge Pyncheon's
evident purpose of forcing a passage was interrupted by a voice from
the inner room; a weak, tremulous, wailing voice, indicating helpless
alarm, with no more energy for self-defence than belongs to a
frightened infant.
"Hepzibah, Hepzibah!" cried the voice; "go down on your knees to him!
Kiss his feet! Entreat him not to come in! Oh, let him have mercy on
me! Mercy! mercy!"
For the instant, it appeared doubtful whether it were not the Judge's
resolute purpose to set Hepzibah aside, and step across the threshold
into the parlor, whence issued that broken and miserable murmur of
entreaty. It was not pity that restrained him, for, at the first sound
of the enfeebled voice, a red fire kindled in his eyes, and he made a
quick pace forward, with something inexpressibly fierce and grim
darkening forth, as it were, out of the whole man. To know Judge
Pyncheon was to see him at that moment. After such a revelation, let
him smile with what sultriness he would, he could much sooner turn
grapes purple, or pumpkins yellow, than melt the iron-branded
impression out of the beholder's memory. And it rendered his aspect
not the less, but more frightful, that it seemed not to express wrath
or hatred, but a certain hot fellness of purpose, which annihilated
everything but itself.
Yet, after all, are we not slandering an excellent and amiable man?
Look at the Judge now! He is apparently conscious of having erred, in
too energetically pressing his deeds of loving-kindness on persons
unable to appreciate them. He will await their better mood, and hold
himself as ready to assist them then as at this moment. As he draws
back from the door, an all-comprehensive benignity blazes from his
visage, indicating that he gathers Hepzibah, little Phoebe, and the
invisible Clifford, all three, together with the whole world besides,
into his immense heart, and gives them a warm bath in its flood of
affection.
"You do me great wrong, dear Cousin Hepzibah!" said he, first kindly
offering her his hand, and then drawing on his glove preparatory to
departure. "Very great wrong! But I forgive it, and will study to make
you think better of me. Of course, our poor Clifford being in so
unhappy a state of mind, I cannot think of urging an interview at
present. But I shall watch over his welfare as if he were my own
beloved brother; nor do I at all despair, my dear cousin, of
constraining both him and you to acknowledge your injustice. When that
shall happen, I desire no other revenge than your acceptance of the
best offices in my power to do you."
With a bow to Hepzibah, and a degree of paternal benevolence in his
parting nod to Phoebe, the Judge left the shop, and went smiling along
the street. As is customary with the rich, when they aim at the honors
of a republic, he apologized, as it were, to the people, for his
wealth, prosperity, and elevated station, by a free and hearty manner
towards those who knew him; putting off the more of his dignity in due
proportion with the humbleness of the man whom he saluted, and thereby
proving a haughty consciousness of his advantages as irrefragably as if
he had marched forth preceded by a troop of lackeys to clear the way.
On this particular forenoon, so excessive was the warmth of Judge
Pyncheon's kindly aspect, that (such, at least, was the rumor about
town) an extra passage of the water-carts was found essential, in order
to lay the dust occasioned by so much extra sunshine!
No sooner had he disappeared than Hepzibah grew deadly white, and,
staggering towards Phoebe, let her head fall on the young girl's
shoulder.
"O Phoebe!" murmured she, "that man has been the horror of my life!
Shall I never, never have the courage,--will my voice never cease from
trembling long enough to let me tell him what he is?"
"Is he so very wicked?" asked Phoebe. "Yet his offers were surely
kind!"
"Do not speak of them,--he has a heart of iron!" rejoined Hepzibah.
"Go, now, and talk to Clifford! Amuse and keep him quiet! It would
disturb him wretchedly to see me so agitated as I am. There, go, dear
child, and I will try to look after the shop."
Phoebe went accordingly, but perplexed herself, meanwhile, with queries
as to the purport of the scene which she had just witnessed, and also
whether judges, clergymen, and other characters of that eminent stamp
and respectability, could really, in any single instance, be otherwise
than just and upright men. A doubt of this nature has a most
disturbing influence, and, if shown to be a fact, comes with fearful
and startling effect on minds of the trim, orderly, and limit-loving
class, in which we find our little country-girl. Dispositions more
boldly speculative may derive a stern enjoyment from the discovery,
since there must be evil in the world, that a high man is as likely to
grasp his share of it as a low one. A wider scope of view, and a
deeper insight, may see rank, dignity, and station, all proved
illusory, so far as regards their claim to human reverence, and yet not
feel as if the universe were thereby tumbled headlong into chaos. But
Phoebe, in order to keep the universe in its old place, was fain to
smother, in some degree, her own intuitions as to Judge Pyncheon's
character. And as for her cousin's testimony in disparagement of it,
she concluded that Hepzibah's judgment was embittered by one of those
family feuds which render hatred the more deadly by the dead and
corrupted love that they intermingle with its native poison.
| The Pyncheon of To-day The shop bell that so startled Clifford turns out to have announced the arrival of a new customer. This new arrival is the small boy who bought gingerbread from Hepzibah before. As the boy leaves the shop, in walks a portly man with a very noble bearing and a wide and endearing smile. This is no ordinary smile, for it seems to draw in anyone who sees it. Phoebe meets him, and the stranger at first mistakes her for a new assistant hired by Hepzibah. Once the stranger finds out who Phoebe is, however, he introduces himself as her cousin, Judge Pyncheon. As a way of greeting Phoebe, the Judge leans forward to kiss her, but Phoebe instinctively pulls back in spite of herself. This revulsion briefly annoys the Judge, and a shadow seems to pass over his face. His bright smile is suddenly replaced by a great frown, and in this frown Phoebe thinks she sees the Judge's true nature, albeit only for a moment. Phoebe also realizes that this Judge Pyncheon is the same man as the smiling but unforgiving figure portrayed in the daguerreotype that Holgrave showed her. Phoebe recalls Holgrave's claim that daguerreotypes, when developed in the sunlight, reveal truths about people that portraits do not. Phoebe is amazed at how similar Judge Pyncheon is to the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon: the Judge seems to be simply an updated version of the old Pyncheon patriarch. The narrator interjects at this point, remarking on the many similarities between these two personages, including a certain greediness and an ability to hide a rather ruthless nature beneath a friendly exterior. The narrator also notes that, in most respects, Judge Pyncheon is a weaker, less potent version of his ancestor. In addition to the physical similarities, Phoebe notices a more sinister connection to the past when the Judge makes a small noise in his throat, gurgling slightly as he does so. The noise makes Phoebe suddenly recall Matthew Maule's curse on Colonel Pyncheon--"God will give him blood to drink"--and the whispered rumors that the blood can supposedly be heard to gurgle in the throats of Pyncheons. Judge Pyncheon asks to speak to Hepzibah and guesses that Clifford has arrived. He suggests that Phoebe may be scared of Clifford, something she is surprised to hear and against which she protests. Judge Pyncheon cryptically implies to her, however, that Clifford has done something terrible, but that it is best she think well of him and so remain ignorant of what he has done. The Judge says he wants to have a word with Clifford. As the Judge moves past Phoebe toward the kitchen, Hepzibah appears and resolutely blocks his way. In an effort to soften her, Judge Pyncheon makes a kindly offer to support Hepzibah and Clifford financially, but Hepzibah refuses, her eyes glowing with bitterness and maybe even hatred. From the kitchen, Clifford, who is now awake, begs Hepzibah to make the Judge go away, but his entreaties are more pitiable than strong. When the Judge hears the sound of Clifford's voice, however, the narrator tells us that "a red fire kindled in eyes; and he made a quick pace forward, with something inexpressibly fierce and grim, darkening forth, as it were, out of the whole man. Hepzibah stands strong, however, and manages to prevent the Judge from entering the house. The Judge quickly calms himself and returns to his usual congeniality, adding that he hopes to visit the house later, when Clifford and Hepzibah are in a better mood. He leaves beaming his great false smile. Hepzibah collapses after the encounter and asks Phoebe to entertain Clifford for the morning. Phoebe goes to speak with the old man, deciding that there must be some old feud between Judge Pyncheon and his cousins. | summary |
PHOEBE, on entering the shop, beheld there the already familiar face of
the little devourer--if we can reckon his mighty deeds aright--of Jim
Crow, the elephant, the camel, the dromedaries, and the locomotive.
Having expended his private fortune, on the two preceding days, in the
purchase of the above unheard-of luxuries, the young gentleman's
present errand was on the part of his mother, in quest of three eggs
and half a pound of raisins. These articles Phoebe accordingly
supplied, and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a
slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a
whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of
Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of
fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him. This remarkable
urchin, in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, both in
respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because
he, as well as Time, after ingulfing thus much of creation, looked
almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made.
After partly closing the door, the child turned back, and mumbled
something to Phoebe, which, as the whale was but half disposed of, she
could not perfectly understand.
"What did you say, my little fellow?" asked she.
"Mother wants to know" repeated Ned Higgins more distinctly, "how Old
Maid Pyncheon's brother does? Folks say he has got home."
"My cousin Hepzibah's brother?" exclaimed Phoebe, surprised at this
sudden explanation of the relationship between Hepzibah and her guest.
"Her brother! And where can he have been?"
The little boy only put his thumb to his broad snub-nose, with that
look of shrewdness which a child, spending much of his time in the
street, so soon learns to throw over his features, however
unintelligent in themselves. Then as Phoebe continued to gaze at him,
without answering his mother's message, he took his departure.
As the child went down the steps, a gentleman ascended them, and made
his entrance into the shop. It was the portly, and, had it possessed
the advantage of a little more height, would have been the stately
figure of a man considerably in the decline of life, dressed in a black
suit of some thin stuff, resembling broadcloth as closely as possible.
A gold-headed cane, of rare Oriental wood, added materially to the high
respectability of his aspect, as did also a neckcloth of the utmost
snowy purity, and the conscientious polish of his boots. His dark,
square countenance, with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows, was
naturally impressive, and would, perhaps, have been rather stern, had
not the gentleman considerately taken upon himself to mitigate the
harsh effect by a look of exceeding good-humor and benevolence. Owing,
however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about
the lower region of his face, the look was, perhaps, unctuous rather
than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshly effulgence, not
altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be. A
susceptible observer, at any rate, might have regarded it as affording
very little evidence of the general benignity of soul whereof it
purported to be the outward reflection. And if the observer chanced to
be ill-natured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably
suspect that the smile on the gentleman's face was a good deal akin to
the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his
boot-black, respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and
preserve them.
As the stranger entered the little shop, where the projection of the
second story and the thick foliage of the elm-tree, as well as the
commodities at the window, created a sort of gray medium, his smile
grew as intense as if he had set his heart on counteracting the whole
gloom of the atmosphere (besides any moral gloom pertaining to Hepzibah
and her inmates) by the unassisted light of his countenance. On
perceiving a young rose-bud of a girl, instead of the gaunt presence of
the old maid, a look of surprise was manifest. He at first knit his
brows; then smiled with more unctuous benignity than ever.
"Ah, I see how it is!" said he in a deep voice,--a voice which, had it
come from the throat of an uncultivated man, would have been gruff,
but, by dint of careful training, was now sufficiently agreeable,--"I
was not aware that Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon had commenced business under
such favorable auspices. You are her assistant, I suppose?"
"I certainly am," answered Phoebe, and added, with a little air of
lady-like assumption (for, civil as the gentleman was, he evidently
took her to be a young person serving for wages), "I am a cousin of
Miss Hepzibah, on a visit to her."
"Her cousin?--and from the country? Pray pardon me, then," said the
gentleman, bowing and smiling, as Phoebe never had been bowed to nor
smiled on before; "in that case, we must be better acquainted; for,
unless I am sadly mistaken, you are my own little kinswoman likewise!
Let me see,--Mary?--Dolly?--Phoebe?--yes, Phoebe is the name! Is it
possible that you are Phoebe Pyncheon, only child of my dear cousin and
classmate, Arthur? Ah, I see your father now, about your mouth! Yes,
yes! we must be better acquainted! I am your kinsman, my dear. Surely
you must have heard of Judge Pyncheon?"
As Phoebe curtsied in reply, the Judge bent forward, with the
pardonable and even praiseworthy purpose--considering the nearness of
blood and the difference of age--of bestowing on his young relative a
kiss of acknowledged kindred and natural affection. Unfortunately
(without design, or only with such instinctive design as gives no
account of itself to the intellect) Phoebe, just at the critical
moment, drew back; so that her highly respectable kinsman, with his
body bent over the counter and his lips protruded, was betrayed into
the rather absurd predicament of kissing the empty air. It was a
modern parallel to the case of Ixion embracing a cloud, and was so much
the more ridiculous as the Judge prided himself on eschewing all airy
matter, and never mistaking a shadow for a substance. The truth
was,--and it is Phoebe's only excuse,--that, although Judge Pyncheon's
glowing benignity might not be absolutely unpleasant to the feminine
beholder, with the width of a street, or even an ordinary-sized room,
interposed between, yet it became quite too intense, when this dark,
full-fed physiognomy (so roughly bearded, too, that no razor could ever
make it smooth) sought to bring itself into actual contact with the
object of its regards. The man, the sex, somehow or other, was
entirely too prominent in the Judge's demonstrations of that sort.
Phoebe's eyes sank, and, without knowing why, she felt herself blushing
deeply under his look. Yet she had been kissed before, and without
any particular squeamishness, by perhaps half a dozen different
cousins, younger as well as older than this dark-browned,
grisly-bearded, white-neck-clothed, and unctuously-benevolent Judge!
Then, why not by him?
On raising her eyes, Phoebe was startled by the change in Judge
Pyncheon's face. It was quite as striking, allowing for the difference
of scale, as that betwixt a landscape under a broad sunshine and just
before a thunder-storm; not that it had the passionate intensity of the
latter aspect, but was cold, hard, immitigable, like a day-long
brooding cloud.
"Dear me! what is to be done now?" thought the country-girl to herself.
"He looks as if there were nothing softer in him than a rock, nor
milder than the east wind! I meant no harm! Since he is really my
cousin, I would have let him kiss me, if I could!"
Then, all at once, it struck Phoebe that this very Judge Pyncheon was
the original of the miniature which the daguerreotypist had shown her
in the garden, and that the hard, stern, relentless look, now on his
face, was the same that the sun had so inflexibly persisted in bringing
out. Was it, therefore, no momentary mood, but, however skilfully
concealed, the settled temper of his life? And not merely so, but was
it hereditary in him, and transmitted down, as a precious heirloom,
from that bearded ancestor, in whose picture both the expression and,
to a singular degree, the features of the modern Judge were shown as by
a kind of prophecy? A deeper philosopher than Phoebe might have found
something very terrible in this idea. It implied that the weaknesses
and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral
diseases which lead to crime are handed down from one generation to
another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been
able to establish in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to
entail upon posterity.
But, as it happened, scarcely had Phoebe's eyes rested again on the
Judge's countenance than all its ugly sternness vanished; and she found
herself quite overpowered by the sultry, dog-day heat, as it were, of
benevolence, which this excellent man diffused out of his great heart
into the surrounding atmosphere,--very much like a serpent, which, as a
preliminary to fascination, is said to fill the air with his peculiar
odor.
"I like that, Cousin Phoebe!" cried he, with an emphatic nod of
approbation. "I like it much, my little cousin! You are a good child,
and know how to take care of yourself. A young girl--especially if she
be a very pretty one--can never be too chary of her lips."
"Indeed, sir," said Phoebe, trying to laugh the matter off, "I did not
mean to be unkind."
Nevertheless, whether or no it were entirely owing to the inauspicious
commencement of their acquaintance, she still acted under a certain
reserve, which was by no means customary to her frank and genial
nature. The fantasy would not quit her, that the original Puritan, of
whom she had heard so many sombre traditions,--the progenitor of the
whole race of New England Pyncheons, the founder of the House of the
Seven Gables, and who had died so strangely in it,--had now stept into
the shop. In these days of off-hand equipment, the matter was easily
enough arranged. On his arrival from the other world, he had merely
found it necessary to spend a quarter of an hour at a barber's, who had
trimmed down the Puritan's full beard into a pair of grizzled whiskers,
then, patronizing a ready-made clothing establishment, he had exchanged
his velvet doublet and sable cloak, with the richly worked band under
his chin, for a white collar and cravat, coat, vest, and pantaloons;
and lastly, putting aside his steel-hilted broadsword to take up a
gold-headed cane, the Colonel Pyncheon of two centuries ago steps
forward as the Judge of the passing moment!
Of course, Phoebe was far too sensible a girl to entertain this idea in
any other way than as matter for a smile. Possibly, also, could the
two personages have stood together before her eye, many points of
difference would have been perceptible, and perhaps only a general
resemblance. The long lapse of intervening years, in a climate so
unlike that which had fostered the ancestral Englishman, must
inevitably have wrought important changes in the physical system of his
descendant. The Judge's volume of muscle could hardly be the same as
the Colonel's; there was undoubtedly less beef in him. Though looked
upon as a weighty man among his contemporaries in respect of animal
substance, and as favored with a remarkable degree of fundamental
development, well adapting him for the judicial bench, we conceive that
the modern Judge Pyncheon, if weighed in the same balance with his
ancestor, would have required at least an old-fashioned fifty-six to
keep the scale in equilibrio. Then the Judge's face had lost the ruddy
English hue that showed its warmth through all the duskiness of the
Colonel's weather-beaten cheek, and had taken a sallow shade, the
established complexion of his countrymen. If we mistake not, moreover,
a certain quality of nervousness had become more or less manifest, even
in so solid a specimen of Puritan descent as the gentleman now under
discussion. As one of its effects, it bestowed on his countenance a
quicker mobility than the old Englishman's had possessed, and keener
vivacity, but at the expense of a sturdier something, on which these
acute endowments seemed to act like dissolving acids. This process,
for aught we know, may belong to the great system of human progress,
which, with every ascending footstep, as it diminishes the necessity
for animal force, may be destined gradually to spiritualize us, by
refining away our grosser attributes of body. If so, Judge Pyncheon
could endure a century or two more of such refinement as well as most
other men.
The similarity, intellectual and moral, between the Judge and his
ancestor appears to have been at least as strong as the resemblance of
mien and feature would afford reason to anticipate. In old Colonel
Pyncheon's funeral discourse the clergyman absolutely canonized his
deceased parishioner, and opening, as it were, a vista through the roof
of the church, and thence through the firmament above, showed him
seated, harp in hand, among the crowned choristers of the spiritual
world. On his tombstone, too, the record is highly eulogistic; nor
does history, so far as he holds a place upon its page, assail the
consistency and uprightness of his character. So also, as regards the
Judge Pyncheon of to-day, neither clergyman, nor legal critic, nor
inscriber of tombstones, nor historian of general or local politics,
would venture a word against this eminent person's sincerity as a
Christian, or respectability as a man, or integrity as a judge, or
courage and faithfulness as the often-tried representative of his
political party. But, besides these cold, formal, and empty words of
the chisel that inscribes, the voice that speaks, and the pen that
writes, for the public eye and for distant time,--and which inevitably
lose much of their truth and freedom by the fatal consciousness of so
doing,--there were traditions about the ancestor, and private diurnal
gossip about the Judge, remarkably accordant in their testimony. It is
often instructive to take the woman's, the private and domestic, view
of a public man; nor can anything be more curious than the vast
discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving and the
pencil-sketches that pass from hand to hand behind the original's back.
For example: tradition affirmed that the Puritan had been greedy of
wealth; the Judge, too, with all the show of liberal expenditure, was
said to be as close-fisted as if his gripe were of iron. The ancestor
had clothed himself in a grim assumption of kindliness, a rough
heartiness of word and manner, which most people took to be the genuine
warmth of nature, making its way through the thick and inflexible hide
of a manly character. His descendant, in compliance with the
requirements of a nicer age, had etherealized this rude benevolence
into that broad benignity of smile wherewith he shone like a noonday
sun along the streets, or glowed like a household fire in the
drawing-rooms of his private acquaintance. The Puritan--if not belied
by some singular stories, murmured, even at this day, under the
narrator's breath--had fallen into certain transgressions to which men
of his great animal development, whatever their faith or principles,
must continue liable, until they put off impurity, along with the gross
earthly substance that involves it. We must not stain our page with
any contemporary scandal, to a similar purport, that may have been
whispered against the Judge. The Puritan, again, an autocrat in his
own household, had worn out three wives, and, merely by the remorseless
weight and hardness of his character in the conjugal relation, had sent
them, one after another, broken-hearted, to their graves. Here the
parallel, in some sort, fails. The Judge had wedded but a single wife,
and lost her in the third or fourth year of their marriage. There was
a fable, however,--for such we choose to consider it, though, not
impossibly, typical of Judge Pyncheon's marital deportment,--that the
lady got her death-blow in the honeymoon, and never smiled again,
because her husband compelled her to serve him with coffee every
morning at his bedside, in token of fealty to her liege-lord and master.
But it is too fruitful a subject, this of hereditary resemblances,--the
frequent recurrence of which, in a direct line, is truly unaccountable,
when we consider how large an accumulation of ancestry lies behind
every man at the distance of one or two centuries. We shall only add,
therefore, that the Puritan--so, at least, says chimney-corner
tradition, which often preserves traits of character with marvellous
fidelity--was bold, imperious, relentless, crafty; laying his purposes
deep, and following them out with an inveteracy of pursuit that knew
neither rest nor conscience; trampling on the weak, and, when essential
to his ends, doing his utmost to beat down the strong. Whether the
Judge in any degree resembled him, the further progress of our
narrative may show.
Scarcely any of the items in the above-drawn parallel occurred to
Phoebe, whose country birth and residence, in truth, had left her
pitifully ignorant of most of the family traditions, which lingered,
like cobwebs and incrustations of smoke, about the rooms and
chimney-corners of the House of the Seven Gables. Yet there was a
circumstance, very trifling in itself, which impressed her with an odd
degree of horror. She had heard of the anathema flung by Maule, the
executed wizard, against Colonel Pyncheon and his posterity,--that God
would give them blood to drink,--and likewise of the popular notion,
that this miraculous blood might now and then be heard gurgling in
their throats. The latter scandal--as became a person of sense, and,
more especially, a member of the Pyncheon family--Phoebe had set down
for the absurdity which it unquestionably was. But ancient
superstitions, after being steeped in human hearts and embodied in
human breath, and passing from lip to ear in manifold repetition,
through a series of generations, become imbued with an effect of homely
truth. The smoke of the domestic hearth has scented them through and
through. By long transmission among household facts, they grow to look
like them, and have such a familiar way of making themselves at home
that their influence is usually greater than we suspect. Thus it
happened, that when Phoebe heard a certain noise in Judge Pyncheon's
throat,--rather habitual with him, not altogether voluntary, yet
indicative of nothing, unless it were a slight bronchial complaint, or,
as some people hinted, an apoplectic symptom,--when the girl heard this
queer and awkward ingurgitation (which the writer never did hear, and
therefore cannot describe), she very foolishly started, and clasped her
hands.
Of course, it was exceedingly ridiculous in Phoebe to be discomposed by
such a trifle, and still more unpardonable to show her discomposure to
the individual most concerned in it. But the incident chimed in so
oddly with her previous fancies about the Colonel and the Judge, that,
for the moment, it seemed quite to mingle their identity.
"What is the matter with you, young woman?" said Judge Pyncheon, giving
her one of his harsh looks. "Are you afraid of anything?"
"Oh, nothing, sir--nothing in the world!" answered Phoebe, with a
little laugh of vexation at herself. "But perhaps you wish to speak
with my cousin Hepzibah. Shall I call her?"
"Stay a moment, if you please," said the Judge, again beaming sunshine
out of his face. "You seem to be a little nervous this morning. The
town air, Cousin Phoebe, does not agree with your good, wholesome
country habits. Or has anything happened to disturb you?--anything
remarkable in Cousin Hepzibah's family?-- An arrival, eh? I thought
so! No wonder you are out of sorts, my little cousin. To be an inmate
with such a guest may well startle an innocent young girl!"
"You quite puzzle me, sir," replied Phoebe, gazing inquiringly at the
Judge. "There is no frightful guest in the house, but only a poor,
gentle, childlike man, whom I believe to be Cousin Hepzibah's brother.
I am afraid (but you, sir, will know better than I) that he is not
quite in his sound senses; but so mild and quiet he seems to be, that a
mother might trust her baby with him; and I think he would play with
the baby as if he were only a few years older than itself. He startle
me!--Oh, no indeed!"
"I rejoice to hear so favorable and so ingenuous an account of my
cousin Clifford," said the benevolent Judge. "Many years ago, when we
were boys and young men together, I had a great affection for him, and
still feel a tender interest in all his concerns. You say, Cousin
Phoebe, he appears to be weak minded. Heaven grant him at least enough
of intellect to repent of his past sins!"
"Nobody, I fancy," observed Phoebe, "can have fewer to repent of."
"And is it possible, my dear," rejoined the Judge, with a commiserating
look, "that you have never heard of Clifford Pyncheon?--that you know
nothing of his history? Well, it is all right; and your mother has
shown a very proper regard for the good name of the family with which
she connected herself. Believe the best you can of this unfortunate
person, and hope the best! It is a rule which Christians should always
follow, in their judgments of one another; and especially is it right
and wise among near relatives, whose characters have necessarily a
degree of mutual dependence. But is Clifford in the parlor? I will
just step in and see."
"Perhaps, sir, I had better call my cousin Hepzibah," said Phoebe;
hardly knowing, however, whether she ought to obstruct the entrance of
so affectionate a kinsman into the private regions of the house. "Her
brother seemed to be just falling asleep after breakfast; and I am sure
she would not like him to be disturbed. Pray, sir, let me give her
notice!"
But the Judge showed a singular determination to enter unannounced; and
as Phoebe, with the vivacity of a person whose movements unconsciously
answer to her thoughts, had stepped towards the door, he used little or
no ceremony in putting her aside.
"No, no, Miss Phoebe!" said Judge Pyncheon in a voice as deep as a
thunder-growl, and with a frown as black as the cloud whence it issues.
"Stay you here! I know the house, and know my cousin Hepzibah, and know
her brother Clifford likewise.--nor need my little country cousin put
herself to the trouble of announcing me!"--in these latter words, by
the bye, there were symptoms of a change from his sudden harshness into
his previous benignity of manner. "I am at home here, Phoebe, you must
recollect, and you are the stranger. I will just step in, therefore,
and see for myself how Clifford is, and assure him and Hepzibah of my
kindly feelings and best wishes. It is right, at this juncture, that
they should both hear from my own lips how much I desire to serve them.
Ha! here is Hepzibah herself!"
Such was the case. The vibrations of the Judge's voice had reached the
old gentlewoman in the parlor, where she sat, with face averted,
waiting on her brother's slumber. She now issued forth, as would
appear, to defend the entrance, looking, we must needs say, amazingly
like the dragon which, in fairy tales, is wont to be the guardian over
an enchanted beauty. The habitual scowl of her brow was undeniably too
fierce, at this moment, to pass itself off on the innocent score of
near-sightedness; and it was bent on Judge Pyncheon in a way that
seemed to confound, if not alarm him, so inadequately had he estimated
the moral force of a deeply grounded antipathy. She made a repelling
gesture with her hand, and stood a perfect picture of prohibition, at
full length, in the dark frame of the doorway. But we must betray
Hepzibah's secret, and confess that the native timorousness of her
character even now developed itself in a quick tremor, which, to her
own perception, set each of her joints at variance with its fellows.
Possibly, the Judge was aware how little true hardihood lay behind
Hepzibah's formidable front. At any rate, being a gentleman of steady
nerves, he soon recovered himself, and failed not to approach his
cousin with outstretched hand; adopting the sensible precaution,
however, to cover his advance with a smile, so broad and sultry, that,
had it been only half as warm as it looked, a trellis of grapes might
at once have turned purple under its summer-like exposure. It may have
been his purpose, indeed, to melt poor Hepzibah on the spot, as if she
were a figure of yellow wax.
"Hepzibah, my beloved cousin, I am rejoiced!" exclaimed the Judge most
emphatically. "Now, at length, you have something to live for. Yes,
and all of us, let me say, your friends and kindred, have more to live
for than we had yesterday. I have lost no time in hastening to offer
any assistance in my power towards making Clifford comfortable. He
belongs to us all. I know how much he requires,--how much he used to
require,--with his delicate taste, and his love of the beautiful.
Anything in my house,--pictures, books, wine, luxuries of the
table,--he may command them all! It would afford me most heartfelt
gratification to see him! Shall I step in, this moment?"
"No," replied Hepzibah, her voice quivering too painfully to allow of
many words. "He cannot see visitors!"
"A visitor, my dear cousin!--do you call me so?" cried the Judge, whose
sensibility, it seems, was hurt by the coldness of the phrase. "Nay,
then, let me be Clifford's host, and your own likewise. Come at once
to my house. The country air, and all the conveniences,--I may say
luxuries,--that I have gathered about me, will do wonders for him. And
you and I, dear Hepzibah, will consult together, and watch together,
and labor together, to make our dear Clifford happy. Come! why should
we make more words about what is both a duty and a pleasure on my part?
Come to me at once!"
On hearing these so hospitable offers, and such generous recognition of
the claims of kindred, Phoebe felt very much in the mood of running up
to Judge Pyncheon, and giving him, of her own accord, the kiss from
which she had so recently shrunk away. It was quite otherwise with
Hepzibah; the Judge's smile seemed to operate on her acerbity of heart
like sunshine upon vinegar, making it ten times sourer than ever.
"Clifford," said she,--still too agitated to utter more than an abrupt
sentence,--"Clifford has a home here!"
"May Heaven forgive you, Hepzibah," said Judge Pyncheon,--reverently
lifting his eyes towards that high court of equity to which he
appealed,--"if you suffer any ancient prejudice or animosity to weigh
with you in this matter. I stand here with an open heart, willing and
anxious to receive yourself and Clifford into it. Do not refuse my
good offices,--my earnest propositions for your welfare! They are such,
in all respects, as it behooves your nearest kinsman to make. It will
be a heavy responsibility, cousin, if you confine your brother to this
dismal house and stifled air, when the delightful freedom of my
country-seat is at his command."
"It would never suit Clifford," said Hepzibah, as briefly as before.
"Woman!" broke forth the Judge, giving way to his resentment, "what is
the meaning of all this? Have you other resources? Nay, I suspected as
much! Take care, Hepzibah, take care! Clifford is on the brink of as
black a ruin as ever befell him yet! But why do I talk with you, woman
as you are? Make way!--I must see Clifford!"
Hepzibah spread out her gaunt figure across the door, and seemed really
to increase in bulk; looking the more terrible, also, because there was
so much terror and agitation in her heart. But Judge Pyncheon's
evident purpose of forcing a passage was interrupted by a voice from
the inner room; a weak, tremulous, wailing voice, indicating helpless
alarm, with no more energy for self-defence than belongs to a
frightened infant.
"Hepzibah, Hepzibah!" cried the voice; "go down on your knees to him!
Kiss his feet! Entreat him not to come in! Oh, let him have mercy on
me! Mercy! mercy!"
For the instant, it appeared doubtful whether it were not the Judge's
resolute purpose to set Hepzibah aside, and step across the threshold
into the parlor, whence issued that broken and miserable murmur of
entreaty. It was not pity that restrained him, for, at the first sound
of the enfeebled voice, a red fire kindled in his eyes, and he made a
quick pace forward, with something inexpressibly fierce and grim
darkening forth, as it were, out of the whole man. To know Judge
Pyncheon was to see him at that moment. After such a revelation, let
him smile with what sultriness he would, he could much sooner turn
grapes purple, or pumpkins yellow, than melt the iron-branded
impression out of the beholder's memory. And it rendered his aspect
not the less, but more frightful, that it seemed not to express wrath
or hatred, but a certain hot fellness of purpose, which annihilated
everything but itself.
Yet, after all, are we not slandering an excellent and amiable man?
Look at the Judge now! He is apparently conscious of having erred, in
too energetically pressing his deeds of loving-kindness on persons
unable to appreciate them. He will await their better mood, and hold
himself as ready to assist them then as at this moment. As he draws
back from the door, an all-comprehensive benignity blazes from his
visage, indicating that he gathers Hepzibah, little Phoebe, and the
invisible Clifford, all three, together with the whole world besides,
into his immense heart, and gives them a warm bath in its flood of
affection.
"You do me great wrong, dear Cousin Hepzibah!" said he, first kindly
offering her his hand, and then drawing on his glove preparatory to
departure. "Very great wrong! But I forgive it, and will study to make
you think better of me. Of course, our poor Clifford being in so
unhappy a state of mind, I cannot think of urging an interview at
present. But I shall watch over his welfare as if he were my own
beloved brother; nor do I at all despair, my dear cousin, of
constraining both him and you to acknowledge your injustice. When that
shall happen, I desire no other revenge than your acceptance of the
best offices in my power to do you."
With a bow to Hepzibah, and a degree of paternal benevolence in his
parting nod to Phoebe, the Judge left the shop, and went smiling along
the street. As is customary with the rich, when they aim at the honors
of a republic, he apologized, as it were, to the people, for his
wealth, prosperity, and elevated station, by a free and hearty manner
towards those who knew him; putting off the more of his dignity in due
proportion with the humbleness of the man whom he saluted, and thereby
proving a haughty consciousness of his advantages as irrefragably as if
he had marched forth preceded by a troop of lackeys to clear the way.
On this particular forenoon, so excessive was the warmth of Judge
Pyncheon's kindly aspect, that (such, at least, was the rumor about
town) an extra passage of the water-carts was found essential, in order
to lay the dust occasioned by so much extra sunshine!
No sooner had he disappeared than Hepzibah grew deadly white, and,
staggering towards Phoebe, let her head fall on the young girl's
shoulder.
"O Phoebe!" murmured she, "that man has been the horror of my life!
Shall I never, never have the courage,--will my voice never cease from
trembling long enough to let me tell him what he is?"
"Is he so very wicked?" asked Phoebe. "Yet his offers were surely
kind!"
"Do not speak of them,--he has a heart of iron!" rejoined Hepzibah.
"Go, now, and talk to Clifford! Amuse and keep him quiet! It would
disturb him wretchedly to see me so agitated as I am. There, go, dear
child, and I will try to look after the shop."
Phoebe went accordingly, but perplexed herself, meanwhile, with queries
as to the purport of the scene which she had just witnessed, and also
whether judges, clergymen, and other characters of that eminent stamp
and respectability, could really, in any single instance, be otherwise
than just and upright men. A doubt of this nature has a most
disturbing influence, and, if shown to be a fact, comes with fearful
and startling effect on minds of the trim, orderly, and limit-loving
class, in which we find our little country-girl. Dispositions more
boldly speculative may derive a stern enjoyment from the discovery,
since there must be evil in the world, that a high man is as likely to
grasp his share of it as a low one. A wider scope of view, and a
deeper insight, may see rank, dignity, and station, all proved
illusory, so far as regards their claim to human reverence, and yet not
feel as if the universe were thereby tumbled headlong into chaos. But
Phoebe, in order to keep the universe in its old place, was fain to
smother, in some degree, her own intuitions as to Judge Pyncheon's
character. And as for her cousin's testimony in disparagement of it,
she concluded that Hepzibah's judgment was embittered by one of those
family feuds which render hatred the more deadly by the dead and
corrupted love that they intermingle with its native poison.
| Clifford is a figure shrouded by suspense, and in Chapter 7 Hawthorne uses the setting of the table to draw out the suspense until the very final moment. From the moment that Phoebe enters the kitchen, it becomes clear to her that something unusual is afoot. As the action unfolds, every detail emphasizes how Hepzibah's behavior has changed. She is immersed in a cookbook when we first find her, a sure indication that she is trying something new. The fish seller makes his appearance, and Hepzibah rushes to get his attention, a sharp contrast to the earlier self who appears incapable of making even the simplest decisions. And there is the noteworthy addition of a third place to the table. The house that was, when we first saw it, so definitively the domain of one woman has tripled its number of places almost overnight. When Clifford finally appears, however, he cuts something of an anticlimactic figure. He is almost delirious, a doddering old man, incapable of even looking directly at his sister. He shrinks with alarm at the smallest things. This homecoming is more tragic than the one Hepzibah's frantic preparations lead us to expect, and it is made all the more pitiable by the fact that our expectations, like Hepzibah's, have been raised in Clifford's absence. The loss of the past is a recurrent theme in The House of the Seven Gables, but nowhere is it more poignantly expressed than in the comparisons between what Clifford once was and what he has become. When Phoebe was shown his picture in past chapters, she exclaimed that he was a handsome man, but we see no evidence of that here. Hepzibah's preparations also seem far too great for such a man. But most telling of all is the description of Clifford as a man who takes great pleasure in luxury and sensual pleasure. His eyes consume the beautiful with a hunger as ravenous as the hunger he brings to the dinner table, and it seems as if he is taking in all such luxury for the first time in years--which we will discover in later chapters to be the case. There is a sadness, too, in the way that he cannot look directly at his sister, even when she is standing next to him. For these reasons, although the Judge darkly hints to Phoebe that there is reason to be afraid, it is hard to attribute any menace to Clifford's appearance. His feebleness has already given him an air of innocence. Judge Pyncheon here loses any remaining respectability he had in our eyes, though Hawthorne's decision to have the Judge remain smiling does allow us to see how thoroughly he has disguised himself. That Phoebe, who is so unquestionably good, is instinctively reluctant to endure a kiss from the Judge tells us something is wrong that is not apparent on his face or person. He suffers another comparison with Colonel Pyncheon, but this one is even more unflattering--not only does he have his ancestor's cruelty, but he isn't even endowed with the Colonel's strength. And the image of him with red fire raging naturally invites comparison to the red fires of Hell and makes him seem almost devilish. Nonetheless, even though the Judge's true nature is revealed to Phoebe and to us in this scene, he is able to regain his composure; the fact that his smile returns so effortlessly shows us how false this disguise is. It adds, too, to our perception of the Judge's evil. Once a character's true nature is unveiled, it is usually expected to stay that way; to see it cloaked again makes it seem all the more devious | analysis |
TRULY was there something high, generous, and noble in the native
composition of our poor old Hepzibah! Or else,--and it was quite as
probably the case,--she had been enriched by poverty, developed by
sorrow, elevated by the strong and solitary affection of her life, and
thus endowed with heroism, which never could have characterized her in
what are called happier circumstances. Through dreary years Hepzibah
had looked forward--for the most part despairingly, never with any
confidence of hope, but always with the feeling that it was her
brightest possibility--to the very position in which she now found
herself. In her own behalf, she had asked nothing of Providence but
the opportunity of devoting herself to this brother, whom she had so
loved,--so admired for what he was, or might have been,--and to whom
she had kept her faith, alone of all the world, wholly, unfalteringly,
at every instant, and throughout life. And here, in his late decline,
the lost one had come back out of his long and strange misfortune, and
was thrown on her sympathy, as it seemed, not merely for the bread of
his physical existence, but for everything that should keep him morally
alive. She had responded to the call. She had come forward,--our
poor, gaunt Hepzibah, in her rusty silks, with her rigid joints, and
the sad perversity of her scowl,--ready to do her utmost; and with
affection enough, if that were all, to do a hundred times as much!
There could be few more tearful sights,--and Heaven forgive us if a
smile insist on mingling with our conception of it!--few sights with
truer pathos in them, than Hepzibah presented on that first afternoon.
How patiently did she endeavor to wrap Clifford up in her great, warm
love, and make it all the world to him, so that he should retain no
torturing sense of the coldness and dreariness without! Her little
efforts to amuse him! How pitiful, yet magnanimous, they were!
Remembering his early love of poetry and fiction, she unlocked a
bookcase, and took down several books that had been excellent reading
in their day. There was a volume of Pope, with the Rape of the Lock in
it, and another of the Tatler, and an odd one of Dryden's Miscellanies,
all with tarnished gilding on their covers, and thoughts of tarnished
brilliancy inside. They had no success with Clifford. These, and all
such writers of society, whose new works glow like the rich texture of
a just-woven carpet, must be content to relinquish their charm, for
every reader, after an age or two, and could hardly be supposed to
retain any portion of it for a mind that had utterly lost its estimate
of modes and manners. Hepzibah then took up Rasselas, and began to
read of the Happy Valley, with a vague idea that some secret of a
contented life had there been elaborated, which might at least serve
Clifford and herself for this one day. But the Happy Valley had a
cloud over it. Hepzibah troubled her auditor, moreover, by innumerable
sins of emphasis, which he seemed to detect, without any reference to
the meaning; nor, in fact, did he appear to take much note of the sense
of what she read, but evidently felt the tedium of the lecture, without
harvesting its profit. His sister's voice, too, naturally harsh, had,
in the course of her sorrowful lifetime, contracted a kind of croak,
which, when it once gets into the human throat, is as ineradicable as
sin. In both sexes, occasionally, this lifelong croak, accompanying
each word of joy or sorrow, is one of the symptoms of a settled
melancholy; and wherever it occurs, the whole history of misfortune is
conveyed in its slightest accent. The effect is as if the voice had
been dyed black; or,--if we must use a more moderate simile,--this
miserable croak, running through all the variations of the voice, is
like a black silken thread, on which the crystal beads of speech are
strung, and whence they take their hue. Such voices have put on
mourning for dead hopes; and they ought to die and be buried along with
them!
Discerning that Clifford was not gladdened by her efforts, Hepzibah
searched about the house for the means of more exhilarating pastime.
At one time, her eyes chanced to rest on Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord.
It was a moment of great peril; for,--despite the traditionary awe that
had gathered over this instrument of music, and the dirges which
spiritual fingers were said to play on it,--the devoted sister had
solemn thoughts of thrumming on its chords for Clifford's benefit, and
accompanying the performance with her voice. Poor Clifford! Poor
Hepzibah! Poor harpsichord! All three would have been miserable
together. By some good agency,--possibly, by the unrecognized
interposition of the long-buried Alice herself,--the threatening
calamity was averted.
But the worst of all--the hardest stroke of fate for Hepzibah to
endure, and perhaps for Clifford, too was his invincible distaste for
her appearance. Her features, never the most agreeable, and now harsh
with age and grief, and resentment against the world for his sake; her
dress, and especially her turban; the queer and quaint manners, which
had unconsciously grown upon her in solitude,--such being the poor
gentlewoman's outward characteristics, it is no great marvel, although
the mournfullest of pities, that the instinctive lover of the Beautiful
was fain to turn away his eyes. There was no help for it. It would be
the latest impulse to die within him. In his last extremity, the
expiring breath stealing faintly through Clifford's lips, he would
doubtless press Hepzibah's hand, in fervent recognition of all her
lavished love, and close his eyes,--but not so much to die, as to be
constrained to look no longer on her face! Poor Hepzibah! She took
counsel with herself what might be done, and thought of putting ribbons
on her turban; but, by the instant rush of several guardian angels, was
withheld from an experiment that could hardly have proved less than
fatal to the beloved object of her anxiety.
To be brief, besides Hepzibah's disadvantages of person, there was an
uncouthness pervading all her deeds; a clumsy something, that could but
ill adapt itself for use, and not at all for ornament. She was a grief
to Clifford, and she knew it. In this extremity, the antiquated virgin
turned to Phoebe. No grovelling jealousy was in her heart. Had it
pleased Heaven to crown the heroic fidelity of her life by making her
personally the medium of Clifford's happiness, it would have rewarded
her for all the past, by a joy with no bright tints, indeed, but deep
and true, and worth a thousand gayer ecstasies. This could not be.
She therefore turned to Phoebe, and resigned the task into the young
girl's hands. The latter took it up cheerfully, as she did everything,
but with no sense of a mission to perform, and succeeding all the
better for that same simplicity.
By the involuntary effect of a genial temperament, Phoebe soon grew to
be absolutely essential to the daily comfort, if not the daily life, of
her two forlorn companions. The grime and sordidness of the House of
the Seven Gables seemed to have vanished since her appearance there;
the gnawing tooth of the dry-rot was stayed among the old timbers of
its skeleton frame; the dust had ceased to settle down so densely, from
the antique ceilings, upon the floors and furniture of the rooms
below,--or, at any rate, there was a little housewife, as light-footed
as the breeze that sweeps a garden walk, gliding hither and thither to
brush it all away. The shadows of gloomy events that haunted the else
lonely and desolate apartments; the heavy, breathless scent which death
had left in more than one of the bedchambers, ever since his visits of
long ago,--these were less powerful than the purifying influence
scattered throughout the atmosphere of the household by the presence of
one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly wholesome heart. There was no
morbidness in Phoebe; if there had been, the old Pyncheon House was the
very locality to ripen it into incurable disease. But now her spirit
resembled, in its potency, a minute quantity of ottar of rose in one of
Hepzibah's huge, iron-bound trunks, diffusing its fragrance through the
various articles of linen and wrought-lace, kerchiefs, caps, stockings,
folded dresses, gloves, and whatever else was treasured there. As
every article in the great trunk was the sweeter for the rose-scent, so
did all the thoughts and emotions of Hepzibah and Clifford, sombre as
they might seem, acquire a subtle attribute of happiness from Phoebe's
intermixture with them. Her activity of body, intellect, and heart
impelled her continually to perform the ordinary little toils that
offered themselves around her, and to think the thought proper for the
moment, and to sympathize,--now with the twittering gayety of the
robins in the pear-tree, and now to such a depth as she could with
Hepzibah's dark anxiety, or the vague moan of her brother. This facile
adaptation was at once the symptom of perfect health and its best
preservative.
A nature like Phoebe's has invariably its due influence, but is seldom
regarded with due honor. Its spiritual force, however, may be
partially estimated by the fact of her having found a place for
herself, amid circumstances so stern as those which surrounded the
mistress of the house; and also by the effect which she produced on a
character of so much more mass than her own. For the gaunt, bony
frame and limbs of Hepzibah, as compared with the tiny lightsomeness of
Phoebe's figure, were perhaps in some fit proportion with the moral
weight and substance, respectively, of the woman and the girl.
To the guest,--to Hepzibah's brother,--or Cousin Clifford, as Phoebe
now began to call him,--she was especially necessary. Not that he could
ever be said to converse with her, or often manifest, in any other very
definite mode, his sense of a charm in her society. But if she were a
long while absent he became pettish and nervously restless, pacing the
room to and fro with the uncertainty that characterized all his
movements; or else would sit broodingly in his great chair, resting his
head on his hands, and evincing life only by an electric sparkle of
ill-humor, whenever Hepzibah endeavored to arouse him. Phoebe's
presence, and the contiguity of her fresh life to his blighted one, was
usually all that he required. Indeed, such was the native gush and play
of her spirit, that she was seldom perfectly quiet and undemonstrative,
any more than a fountain ever ceases to dimple and warble with its
flow. She possessed the gift of song, and that, too, so naturally, that
you would as little think of inquiring whence she had caught it, or
what master had taught her, as of asking the same questions about a
bird, in whose small strain of music we recognize the voice of the
Creator as distinctly as in the loudest accents of his thunder. So long
as Phoebe sang, she might stray at her own will about the house.
Clifford was content, whether the sweet, airy homeliness of her tones
came down from the upper chambers, or along the passageway from the
shop, or was sprinkled through the foliage of the pear-tree, inward
from the garden, with the twinkling sunbeams. He would sit quietly,
with a gentle pleasure gleaming over his face, brighter now, and now a
little dimmer, as the song happened to float near him, or was more
remotely heard. It pleased him best, however, when she sat on a low
footstool at his knee.
It is perhaps remarkable, considering her temperament, that Phoebe
oftener chose a strain of pathos than of gayety. But the young and
happy are not ill pleased to temper their life with a transparent
shadow. The deepest pathos of Phoebe's voice and song, moreover, came
sifted through the golden texture of a cheery spirit, and was somehow
so interfused with the quality thence acquired, that one's heart felt
all the lighter for having wept at it. Broad mirth, in the sacred
presence of dark misfortune, would have jarred harshly and irreverently
with the solemn symphony that rolled its undertone through Hepzibah's
and her brother's life. Therefore, it was well that Phoebe so often
chose sad themes, and not amiss that they ceased to be so sad while she
was singing them.
Becoming habituated to her companionship, Clifford readily showed how
capable of imbibing pleasant tints and gleams of cheerful light from
all quarters his nature must originally have been. He grew youthful
while she sat by him. A beauty,--not precisely real, even in its
utmost manifestation, and which a painter would have watched long to
seize and fix upon his canvas, and, after all, in vain,--beauty,
nevertheless, that was not a mere dream, would sometimes play upon and
illuminate his face. It did more than to illuminate; it transfigured
him with an expression that could only be interpreted as the glow of an
exquisite and happy spirit. That gray hair, and those furrows,--with
their record of infinite sorrow so deeply written across his brow, and
so compressed, as with a futile effort to crowd in all the tale, that
the whole inscription was made illegible,--these, for the moment,
vanished. An eye at once tender and acute might have beheld in the man
some shadow of what he was meant to be. Anon, as age came stealing,
like a sad twilight, back over his figure, you would have felt tempted
to hold an argument with Destiny, and affirm, that either this being
should not have been made mortal, or mortal existence should have been
tempered to his qualities. There seemed no necessity for his having
drawn breath at all; the world never wanted him; but, as he had
breathed, it ought always to have been the balmiest of summer air. The
same perplexity will invariably haunt us with regard to natures that
tend to feed exclusively upon the Beautiful, let their earthly fate be
as lenient as it may.
Phoebe, it is probable, had but a very imperfect comprehension of the
character over which she had thrown so beneficent a spell. Nor was it
necessary. The fire upon the hearth can gladden a whole semicircle of
faces round about it, but need not know the individuality of one among
them all. Indeed, there was something too fine and delicate in
Clifford's traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose sphere lay
so much in the Actual as Phoebe's did. For Clifford, however, the
reality, and simplicity, and thorough homeliness of the girl's nature
were as powerful a charm as any that she possessed. Beauty, it is
true, and beauty almost perfect in its own style, was indispensable.
Had Phoebe been coarse in feature, shaped clumsily, of a harsh voice,
and uncouthly mannered, she might have been rich with all good gifts,
beneath this unfortunate exterior, and still, so long as she wore the
guise of woman, she would have shocked Clifford, and depressed him by
her lack of beauty. But nothing more beautiful--nothing prettier, at
least--was ever made than Phoebe. And, therefore, to this man,--whose
whole poor and impalpable enjoyment of existence heretofore, and until
both his heart and fancy died within him, had been a dream,--whose
images of women had more and more lost their warmth and substance, and
been frozen, like the pictures of secluded artists, into the chillest
ideality,--to him, this little figure of the cheeriest household life
was just what he required to bring him back into the breathing world.
Persons who have wandered, or been expelled, out of the common track of
things, even were it for a better system, desire nothing so much as to
be led back. They shiver in their loneliness, be it on a mountain-top
or in a dungeon. Now, Phoebe's presence made a home about her,--that
very sphere which the outcast, the prisoner, the potentate,--the wretch
beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above
it,--instinctively pines after,--a home! She was real! Holding her
hand, you felt something; a tender something; a substance, and a warm
one: and so long as you should feel its grasp, soft as it was, you
might be certain that your place was good in the whole sympathetic
chain of human nature. The world was no longer a delusion.
By looking a little further in this direction, we might suggest an
explanation of an often-suggested mystery. Why are poets so apt to
choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for
qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman
as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because,
probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human
intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.
There was something very beautiful in the relation that grew up between
this pair, so closely and constantly linked together, yet with such a
waste of gloomy and mysterious years from his birthday to hers. On
Clifford's part it was the feeling of a man naturally endowed with the
liveliest sensibility to feminine influence, but who had never quaffed
the cup of passionate love, and knew that it was now too late. He knew
it, with the instinctive delicacy that had survived his intellectual
decay. Thus, his sentiment for Phoebe, without being paternal, was not
less chaste than if she had been his daughter. He was a man, it is
true, and recognized her as a woman. She was his only representative
of womankind. He took unfailing note of every charm that appertained
to her sex, and saw the ripeness of her lips, and the virginal
development of her bosom. All her little womanly ways, budding out of
her like blossoms on a young fruit-tree, had their effect on him, and
sometimes caused his very heart to tingle with the keenest thrills of
pleasure. At such moments,--for the effect was seldom more than
momentary,--the half-torpid man would be full of harmonious life, just
as a long-silent harp is full of sound, when the musician's fingers
sweep across it. But, after all, it seemed rather a perception, or a
sympathy, than a sentiment belonging to himself as an individual. He
read Phoebe as he would a sweet and simple story; he listened to her as
if she were a verse of household poetry, which God, in requital of his
bleak and dismal lot, had permitted some angel, that most pitied him,
to warble through the house. She was not an actual fact for him, but
the interpretation of all that he lacked on earth brought warmly home
to his conception; so that this mere symbol, or life-like picture, had
almost the comfort of reality.
But we strive in vain to put the idea into words. No adequate
expression of the beauty and profound pathos with which it impresses us
is attainable. This being, made only for happiness, and heretofore so
miserably failing to be happy,--his tendencies so hideously thwarted,
that, some unknown time ago, the delicate springs of his character,
never morally or intellectually strong, had given way, and he was now
imbecile,--this poor, forlorn voyager from the Islands of the Blest, in
a frail bark, on a tempestuous sea, had been flung, by the last
mountain-wave of his shipwreck, into a quiet harbor. There, as he lay
more than half lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly
rose-bud had come to his nostrils, and, as odors will, had summoned up
reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid
which he should have had his home. With his native susceptibility of
happy influences, he inhales the slight, ethereal rapture into his
soul, and expires!
And how did Phoebe regard Clifford? The girl's was not one of those
natures which are most attracted by what is strange and exceptional in
human character. The path which would best have suited her was the
well-worn track of ordinary life; the companions in whom she would most
have delighted were such as one encounters at every turn. The mystery
which enveloped Clifford, so far as it affected her at all, was an
annoyance, rather than the piquant charm which many women might have
found in it. Still, her native kindliness was brought strongly into
play, not by what was darkly picturesque in his situation, nor so much,
even, by the finer graces of his character, as by the simple appeal of
a heart so forlorn as his to one so full of genuine sympathy as hers.
She gave him an affectionate regard, because he needed so much love,
and seemed to have received so little. With a ready tact, the result
of ever-active and wholesome sensibility, she discerned what was good
for him, and did it. Whatever was morbid in his mind and experience
she ignored; and thereby kept their intercourse healthy, by the
incautious, but, as it were, heaven-directed freedom of her whole
conduct. The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more
darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease,
mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them;
they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in
infinite repetition. But Phoebe afforded her poor patient a supply of
purer air. She impregnated it, too, not with a wild-flower scent,--for
wildness was no trait of hers,--but with the perfume of garden-roses,
pinks, and other blossoms of much sweetness, which nature and man have
consented together in making grow from summer to summer, and from
century to century. Such a flower was Phoebe in her relation with
Clifford, and such the delight that he inhaled from her.
Yet, it must be said, her petals sometimes drooped a little, in
consequence of the heavy atmosphere about her. She grew more
thoughtful than heretofore. Looking aside at Clifford's face, and
seeing the dim, unsatisfactory elegance and the intellect almost
quenched, she would try to inquire what had been his life. Was he
always thus? Had this veil been over him from his birth?--this veil,
under which far more of his spirit was hidden than revealed, and
through which he so imperfectly discerned the actual world,--or was its
gray texture woven of some dark calamity? Phoebe loved no riddles, and
would have been glad to escape the perplexity of this one.
Nevertheless, there was so far a good result of her meditations on
Clifford's character, that, when her involuntary conjectures, together
with the tendency of every strange circumstance to tell its own story,
had gradually taught her the fact, it had no terrible effect upon her.
Let the world have done him what vast wrong it might, she knew Cousin
Clifford too well--or fancied so--ever to shudder at the touch of his
thin, delicate fingers.
Within a few days after the appearance of this remarkable inmate, the
routine of life had established itself with a good deal of uniformity
in the old house of our narrative. In the morning, very shortly after
breakfast, it was Clifford's custom to fall asleep in his chair; nor,
unless accidentally disturbed, would he emerge from a dense cloud of
slumber or the thinner mists that flitted to and fro, until well
towards noonday. These hours of drowsihead were the season of the old
gentlewoman's attendance on her brother, while Phoebe took charge of
the shop; an arrangement which the public speedily understood, and
evinced their decided preference of the younger shopwoman by the
multiplicity of their calls during her administration of affairs.
Dinner over, Hepzibah took her knitting-work,--a long stocking of gray
yarn, for her brother's winter wear,--and with a sigh, and a scowl of
affectionate farewell to Clifford, and a gesture enjoining watchfulness
on Phoebe, went to take her seat behind the counter. It was now the
young girl's turn to be the nurse,--the guardian, the playmate,--or
whatever is the fitter phrase,--of the gray-haired man.
| Clifford and Phoebe Hepzibah comes to realize that she cannot be a comforting presence to Clifford. Her voice croaks when she reads to him; he finds the books she chooses uninteresting; and he cannot even bear to look at her withered, scowling face. So Phoebe becomes the sole source of happiness for the two miserable elders. Miraculously, Phoebe is not brought down by the pathos and misery that envelop the house, and she even begins to brighten it up. Phoebe's is not a mindless happiness, however, and she begins to acquire a womanly wisdom. She sings as she works, and the sound always makes Clifford happy, or at least less unhappy. He becomes "youthful" when he is near her. His fascination is not lecherous, however, as it has more to do with his enjoyment of watching her youth and vigor develop than it does with Phoebe's appearance. She, in turn, is not one of those people who is fascinated by misery. In fact, she finds the mystery surrounding Clifford frustrating, and the time she spends with him is motivated by pity rather than morbid fascination. In the shop, too, Phoebe continues to be an asset, and most customers prefer her to Hepzibah | summary |
CLIFFORD, except for Phoebe's More active instigation would ordinarily
have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of
being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair
till eventide. But the girl seldom failed to propose a removal to the
garden, where Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist had made such
repairs on the roof of the ruinous arbor, or summer-house, that it was
now a sufficient shelter from sunshine and casual showers. The
hop-vine, too, had begun to grow luxuriantly over the sides of the
little edifice, and made an interior of verdant seclusion, with
innumerable peeps and glimpses into the wider solitude of the garden.
Here, sometimes, in this green play-place of flickering light, Phoebe
read to Clifford. Her acquaintance, the artist, who appeared to have a
literary turn, had supplied her with works of fiction, in pamphlet
form,--and a few volumes of poetry, in altogether a different style and
taste from those which Hepzibah selected for his amusement. Small
thanks were due to the books, however, if the girl's readings were in
any degree more successful than her elderly cousin's. Phoebe's voice
had always a pretty music in it, and could either enliven Clifford by
its sparkle and gayety of tone, or soothe him by a continued flow of
pebbly and brook-like cadences. But the fictions--in which the
country-girl, unused to works of that nature, often became deeply
absorbed--interested her strange auditor very little, or not at all.
Pictures of life, scenes of passion or sentiment, wit, humor, and
pathos, were all thrown away, or worse than thrown away, on Clifford;
either because he lacked an experience by which to test their truth, or
because his own griefs were a touch-stone of reality that few feigned
emotions could withstand. When Phoebe broke into a peal of merry
laughter at what she read, he would now and then laugh for sympathy,
but oftener respond with a troubled, questioning look. If a tear--a
maiden's sunshiny tear over imaginary woe--dropped upon some melancholy
page, Clifford either took it as a token of actual calamity, or else
grew peevish, and angrily motioned her to close the volume. And wisely
too! Is not the world sad enough, in genuine earnest, without making a
pastime of mock sorrows?
With poetry it was rather better. He delighted in the swell and
subsidence of the rhythm, and the happily recurring rhyme. Nor was
Clifford incapable of feeling the sentiment of poetry,--not, perhaps,
where it was highest or deepest, but where it was most flitting and
ethereal. It was impossible to foretell in what exquisite verse the
awakening spell might lurk; but, on raising her eyes from the page to
Clifford's face, Phoebe would be made aware, by the light breaking
through it, that a more delicate intelligence than her own had caught a
lambent flame from what she read. One glow of this kind, however, was
often the precursor of gloom for many hours afterward; because, when
the glow left him, he seemed conscious of a missing sense and power,
and groped about for them, as if a blind man should go seeking his lost
eyesight.
It pleased him more, and was better for his inward welfare, that Phoebe
should talk, and make passing occurrences vivid to his mind by her
accompanying description and remarks. The life of the garden offered
topics enough for such discourse as suited Clifford best. He never
failed to inquire what flowers had bloomed since yesterday. His
feeling for flowers was very exquisite, and seemed not so much a taste
as an emotion; he was fond of sitting with one in his hand, intently
observing it, and looking from its petals into Phoebe's face, as if the
garden flower were the sister of the household maiden. Not merely was
there a delight in the flower's perfume, or pleasure in its beautiful
form, and the delicacy or brightness of its hue; but Clifford's
enjoyment was accompanied with a perception of life, character, and
individuality, that made him love these blossoms of the garden, as if
they were endowed with sentiment and intelligence. This affection and
sympathy for flowers is almost exclusively a woman's trait. Men, if
endowed with it by nature, soon lose, forget, and learn to despise it,
in their contact with coarser things than flowers. Clifford, too, had
long forgotten it; but found it again now, as he slowly revived from
the chill torpor of his life.
It is wonderful how many pleasant incidents continually came to pass in
that secluded garden-spot when once Phoebe had set herself to look for
them. She had seen or heard a bee there, on the first day of her
acquaintance with the place. And often,--almost continually,
indeed,--since then, the bees kept coming thither, Heaven knows why, or
by what pertinacious desire, for far-fetched sweets, when, no doubt,
there were broad clover-fields, and all kinds of garden growth, much
nearer home than this. Thither the bees came, however, and plunged
into the squash-blossoms, as if there were no other squash-vines within
a long day's flight, or as if the soil of Hepzibah's garden gave its
productions just the very quality which these laborious little wizards
wanted, in order to impart the Hymettus odor to their whole hive of New
England honey. When Clifford heard their sunny, buzzing murmur, in the
heart of the great yellow blossoms, he looked about him with a joyful
sense of warmth, and blue sky, and green grass, and of God's free air
in the whole height from earth to heaven. After all, there need be no
question why the bees came to that one green nook in the dusty town.
God sent them thither to gladden our poor Clifford. They brought the
rich summer with them, in requital of a little honey.
When the bean-vines began to flower on the poles, there was one
particular variety which bore a vivid scarlet blossom. The
daguerreotypist had found these beans in a garret, over one of the
seven gables, treasured up in an old chest of drawers by some
horticultural Pyncheon of days gone by, who doubtless meant to sow them
the next summer, but was himself first sown in Death's garden-ground.
By way of testing whether there were still a living germ in such
ancient seeds, Holgrave had planted some of them; and the result of his
experiment was a splendid row of bean-vines, clambering, early, to the
full height of the poles, and arraying them, from top to bottom, in a
spiral profusion of red blossoms. And, ever since the unfolding of the
first bud, a multitude of humming-birds had been attracted thither. At
times, it seemed as if for every one of the hundred blossoms there was
one of these tiniest fowls of the air,--a thumb's bigness of burnished
plumage, hovering and vibrating about the bean-poles. It was with
indescribable interest, and even more than childish delight, that
Clifford watched the humming-birds. He used to thrust his head softly
out of the arbor to see them the better; all the while, too, motioning
Phoebe to be quiet, and snatching glimpses of the smile upon her face,
so as to heap his enjoyment up the higher with her sympathy. He had
not merely grown young;--he was a child again.
Hepzibah, whenever she happened to witness one of these fits of
miniature enthusiasm, would shake her head, with a strange mingling of
the mother and sister, and of pleasure and sadness, in her aspect. She
said that it had always been thus with Clifford when the humming-birds
came,--always, from his babyhood,--and that his delight in them had
been one of the earliest tokens by which he showed his love for
beautiful things. And it was a wonderful coincidence, the good lady
thought, that the artist should have planted these scarlet-flowering
beans--which the humming-birds sought far and wide, and which had not
grown in the Pyncheon garden before for forty years--on the very summer
of Clifford's return.
Then would the tears stand in poor Hepzibah's eyes, or overflow them
with a too abundant gush, so that she was fain to betake herself into
some corner, lest Clifford should espy her agitation. Indeed, all the
enjoyments of this period were provocative of tears. Coming so late as
it did, it was a kind of Indian summer, with a mist in its balmiest
sunshine, and decay and death in its gaudiest delight. The more
Clifford seemed to taste the happiness of a child, the sadder was the
difference to be recognized. With a mysterious and terrible Past,
which had annihilated his memory, and a blank Future before him, he had
only this visionary and impalpable Now, which, if you once look closely
at it, is nothing. He himself, as was perceptible by many symptoms,
lay darkly behind his pleasure, and knew it to be a baby-play, which he
was to toy and trifle with, instead of thoroughly believing. Clifford
saw, it may be, in the mirror of his deeper consciousness, that he was
an example and representative of that great class of people whom an
inexplicable Providence is continually putting at cross-purposes with
the world: breaking what seems its own promise in their nature;
withholding their proper food, and setting poison before them for a
banquet; and thus--when it might so easily, as one would think, have
been adjusted otherwise--making their existence a strangeness, a
solitude, and torment. All his life long, he had been learning how to
be wretched, as one learns a foreign tongue; and now, with the lesson
thoroughly by heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little
airy happiness. Frequently there was a dim shadow of doubt in his
eyes. "Take my hand, Phoebe," he would say, "and pinch it hard with
your little fingers! Give me a rose, that I may press its thorns, and
prove myself awake by the sharp touch of pain!" Evidently, he desired
this prick of a trifling anguish, in order to assure himself, by that
quality which he best knew to be real, that the garden, and the seven
weather-beaten gables, and Hepzibah's scowl, and Phoebe's smile, were
real likewise. Without this signet in his flesh, he could have
attributed no more substance to them than to the empty confusion of
imaginary scenes with which he had fed his spirit, until even that poor
sustenance was exhausted.
The author needs great faith in his reader's sympathy; else he must
hesitate to give details so minute, and incidents apparently so
trifling, as are essential to make up the idea of this garden-life. It
was the Eden of a thunder-smitten Adam, who had fled for refuge thither
out of the same dreary and perilous wilderness into which the original
Adam was expelled.
One of the available means of amusement, of which Phoebe made the most
in Clifford's behalf, was that feathered society, the hens, a breed of
whom, as we have already said, was an immemorial heirloom in the
Pyncheon family. In compliance with a whim of Clifford, as it troubled
him to see them in confinement, they had been set at liberty, and now
roamed at will about the garden; doing some little mischief, but
hindered from escape by buildings on three sides, and the difficult
peaks of a wooden fence on the other. They spent much of their
abundant leisure on the margin of Maule's well, which was haunted by a
kind of snail, evidently a titbit to their palates; and the brackish
water itself, however nauseous to the rest of the world, was so greatly
esteemed by these fowls, that they might be seen tasting, turning up
their heads, and smacking their bills, with precisely the air of
wine-bibbers round a probationary cask. Their generally quiet, yet
often brisk, and constantly diversified talk, one to another, or
sometimes in soliloquy,--as they scratched worms out of the rich, black
soil, or pecked at such plants as suited their taste,--had such a
domestic tone, that it was almost a wonder why you could not establish
a regular interchange of ideas about household matters, human and
gallinaceous. All hens are well worth studying for the piquancy and
rich variety of their manners; but by no possibility can there have
been other fowls of such odd appearance and deportment as these
ancestral ones. They probably embodied the traditionary peculiarities
of their whole line of progenitors, derived through an unbroken
succession of eggs; or else this individual Chanticleer and his two
wives had grown to be humorists, and a little crack-brained withal, on
account of their solitary way of life, and out of sympathy for
Hepzibah, their lady-patroness.
Queer, indeed, they looked! Chanticleer himself, though stalking on two
stilt-like legs, with the dignity of interminable descent in all his
gestures, was hardly bigger than an ordinary partridge; his two wives
were about the size of quails; and as for the one chicken, it looked
small enough to be still in the egg, and, at the same time,
sufficiently old, withered, wizened, and experienced, to have been
founder of the antiquated race. Instead of being the youngest of the
family, it rather seemed to have aggregated into itself the ages, not
only of these living specimens of the breed, but of all its forefathers
and foremothers, whose united excellences and oddities were squeezed
into its little body. Its mother evidently regarded it as the one
chicken of the world, and as necessary, in fact, to the world's
continuance, or, at any rate, to the equilibrium of the present system
of affairs, whether in church or state. No lesser sense of the infant
fowl's importance could have justified, even in a mother's eyes, the
perseverance with which she watched over its safety, ruffling her small
person to twice its proper size, and flying in everybody's face that so
much as looked towards her hopeful progeny. No lower estimate could
have vindicated the indefatigable zeal with which she scratched, and
her unscrupulousness in digging up the choicest flower or vegetable,
for the sake of the fat earthworm at its root. Her nervous cluck, when
the chicken happened to be hidden in the long grass or under the
squash-leaves; her gentle croak of satisfaction, while sure of it
beneath her wing; her note of ill-concealed fear and obstreperous
defiance, when she saw her arch-enemy, a neighbor's cat, on the top of
the high fence,--one or other of these sounds was to be heard at almost
every moment of the day. By degrees, the observer came to feel nearly
as much interest in this chicken of illustrious race as the mother-hen
did.
Phoebe, after getting well acquainted with the old hen, was sometimes
permitted to take the chicken in her hand, which was quite capable of
grasping its cubic inch or two of body. While she curiously examined
its hereditary marks,--the peculiar speckle of its plumage, the funny
tuft on its head, and a knob on each of its legs,--the little biped, as
she insisted, kept giving her a sagacious wink. The daguerreotypist
once whispered her that these marks betokened the oddities of the
Pyncheon family, and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life
of the old house, embodying its interpretation, likewise, although an
unintelligible one, as such clews generally are. It was a feathered
riddle; a mystery hatched out of an egg, and just as mysterious as if
the egg had been addle!
The second of Chanticleer's two wives, ever since Phoebe's arrival, had
been in a state of heavy despondency, caused, as it afterwards
appeared, by her inability to lay an egg. One day, however, by her
self-important gait, the sideways turn of her head, and the cock of her
eye, as she pried into one and another nook of the garden,--croaking to
herself, all the while, with inexpressible complacency,--it was made
evident that this identical hen, much as mankind undervalued her,
carried something about her person the worth of which was not to be
estimated either in gold or precious stones. Shortly after, there was
a prodigious cackling and gratulation of Chanticleer and all his
family, including the wizened chicken, who appeared to understand the
matter quite as well as did his sire, his mother, or his aunt. That
afternoon Phoebe found a diminutive egg,--not in the regular nest, it
was far too precious to be trusted there,--but cunningly hidden under
the currant-bushes, on some dry stalks of last year's grass. Hepzibah,
on learning the fact, took possession of the egg and appropriated it to
Clifford's breakfast, on account of a certain delicacy of flavor, for
which, as she affirmed, these eggs had always been famous. Thus
unscrupulously did the old gentlewoman sacrifice the continuance,
perhaps, of an ancient feathered race, with no better end than to
supply her brother with a dainty that hardly filled the bowl of a
tea-spoon! It must have been in reference to this outrage that
Chanticleer, the next day, accompanied by the bereaved mother of the
egg, took his post in front of Phoebe and Clifford, and delivered
himself of a harangue that might have proved as long as his own
pedigree, but for a fit of merriment on Phoebe's part. Hereupon, the
offended fowl stalked away on his long stilts, and utterly withdrew his
notice from Phoebe and the rest of human nature, until she made her
peace with an offering of spice-cake, which, next to snails, was the
delicacy most in favor with his aristocratic taste.
We linger too long, no doubt, beside this paltry rivulet of life that
flowed through the garden of the Pyncheon House. But we deem it
pardonable to record these mean incidents and poor delights, because
they proved so greatly to Clifford's benefit. They had the earth-smell
in them, and contributed to give him health and substance. Some of his
occupations wrought less desirably upon him. He had a singular
propensity, for example, to hang over Maule's well, and look at the
constantly shifting phantasmagoria of figures produced by the agitation
of the water over the mosaic-work of colored pebbles at the bottom. He
said that faces looked upward to him there,--beautiful faces, arrayed
in bewitching smiles,--each momentary face so fair and rosy, and every
smile so sunny, that he felt wronged at its departure, until the same
flitting witchcraft made a new one. But sometimes he would suddenly
cry out, "The dark face gazes at me!" and be miserable the whole day
afterwards. Phoebe, when she hung over the fountain by Clifford's
side, could see nothing of all this,--neither the beauty nor the
ugliness,--but only the colored pebbles, looking as if the gush of the
waters shook and disarranged them. And the dark face, that so troubled
Clifford, was no more than the shadow thrown from a branch of one of
the damson-trees, and breaking the inner light of Maule's well. The
truth was, however, that his fancy--reviving faster than his will and
judgment, and always stronger than they--created shapes of loveliness
that were symbolic of his native character, and now and then a stern
and dreadful shape that typified his fate.
On Sundays, after Phoebe had been at church,--for the girl had a
church-going conscience, and would hardly have been at ease had she
missed either prayer, singing, sermon, or benediction,--after
church-time, therefore, there was, ordinarily, a sober little festival
in the garden. In addition to Clifford, Hepzibah, and Phoebe, two
guests made up the company. One was the artist Holgrave, who, in spite
of his consociation with reformers, and his other queer and
questionable traits, continued to hold an elevated place in Hepzibah's
regard. The other, we are almost ashamed to say, was the venerable
Uncle Venner, in a clean shirt, and a broadcloth coat, more respectable
than his ordinary wear, inasmuch as it was neatly patched on each
elbow, and might be called an entire garment, except for a slight
inequality in the length of its skirts. Clifford, on several
occasions, had seemed to enjoy the old man's intercourse, for the sake
of his mellow, cheerful vein, which was like the sweet flavor of a
frost-bitten apple, such as one picks up under the tree in December. A
man at the very lowest point of the social scale was easier and more
agreeable for the fallen gentleman to encounter than a person at any of
the intermediate degrees; and, moreover, as Clifford's young manhood
had been lost, he was fond of feeling himself comparatively youthful,
now, in apposition with the patriarchal age of Uncle Venner. In fact,
it was sometimes observable that Clifford half wilfully hid from
himself the consciousness of being stricken in years, and cherished
visions of an earthly future still before him; visions, however, too
indistinctly drawn to be followed by disappointment--though, doubtless,
by depression--when any casual incident or recollection made him
sensible of the withered leaf.
So this oddly composed little social party used to assemble under the
ruinous arbor. Hepzibah--stately as ever at heart, and yielding not an
inch of her old gentility, but resting upon it so much the more, as
justifying a princess-like condescension--exhibited a not ungraceful
hospitality. She talked kindly to the vagrant artist, and took sage
counsel--lady as she was--with the wood-sawyer, the messenger of
everybody's petty errands, the patched philosopher. And Uncle Venner,
who had studied the world at street-corners, and other posts equally
well adapted for just observation, was as ready to give out his wisdom
as a town-pump to give water.
"Miss Hepzibah, ma'am," said he once, after they had all been cheerful
together, "I really enjoy these quiet little meetings of a Sabbath
afternoon. They are very much like what I expect to have after I
retire to my farm!"
"Uncle Venner" observed Clifford in a drowsy, inward tone, "is always
talking about his farm. But I have a better scheme for him, by and by.
We shall see!"
"Ah, Mr. Clifford Pyncheon!" said the man of patches, "you may scheme
for me as much as you please; but I'm not going to give up this one
scheme of my own, even if I never bring it really to pass. It does
seem to me that men make a wonderful mistake in trying to heap up
property upon property. If I had done so, I should feel as if
Providence was not bound to take care of me; and, at all events, the
city wouldn't be! I'm one of those people who think that infinity is
big enough for us all--and eternity long enough."
"Why, so they are, Uncle Venner," remarked Phoebe after a pause; for
she had been trying to fathom the profundity and appositeness of this
concluding apothegm. "But for this short life of ours, one would like
a house and a moderate garden-spot of one's own."
"It appears to me," said the daguerreotypist, smiling, "that Uncle
Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom; only
they have not quite so much distinctness in his mind as in that of the
systematizing Frenchman."
"Come, Phoebe," said Hepzibah, "it is time to bring the currants."
And then, while the yellow richness of the declining sunshine still
fell into the open space of the garden, Phoebe brought out a loaf of
bread and a china bowl of currants, freshly gathered from the bushes,
and crushed with sugar. These, with water,--but not from the fountain
of ill omen, close at hand,--constituted all the entertainment.
Meanwhile, Holgrave took some pains to establish an intercourse with
Clifford, actuated, it might seem, entirely by an impulse of
kindliness, in order that the present hour might be cheerfuller than
most which the poor recluse had spent, or was destined yet to spend.
Nevertheless, in the artist's deep, thoughtful, all-observant eyes,
there was, now and then, an expression, not sinister, but questionable;
as if he had some other interest in the scene than a stranger, a
youthful and unconnected adventurer, might be supposed to have. With
great mobility of outward mood, however, he applied himself to the task
of enlivening the party; and with so much success, that even dark-hued
Hepzibah threw off one tint of melancholy, and made what shift she
could with the remaining portion. Phoebe said to herself,--"How
pleasant he can be!" As for Uncle Venner, as a mark of friendship and
approbation, he readily consented to afford the young man his
countenance in the way of his profession,--not metaphorically, be it
understood, but literally, by allowing a daguerreotype of his face, so
familiar to the town, to be exhibited at the entrance of Holgrave's
studio.
Clifford, as the company partook of their little banquet, grew to be
the gayest of them all. Either it was one of those up-quivering
flashes of the spirit, to which minds in an abnormal state are liable,
or else the artist had subtly touched some chord that made musical
vibration. Indeed, what with the pleasant summer evening, and the
sympathy of this little circle of not unkindly souls, it was perhaps
natural that a character so susceptible as Clifford's should become
animated, and show itself readily responsive to what was said around
him. But he gave out his own thoughts, likewise, with an airy and
fanciful glow; so that they glistened, as it were, through the arbor,
and made their escape among the interstices of the foliage. He had
been as cheerful, no doubt, while alone with Phoebe, but never with
such tokens of acute, although partial intelligence.
But, as the sunlight left the peaks of the Seven Gables, so did the
excitement fade out of Clifford's eyes. He gazed vaguely and
mournfully about him, as if he missed something precious, and missed it
the more drearily for not knowing precisely what it was.
"I want my happiness!" at last he murmured hoarsely and indistinctly,
hardly shaping out the words. "Many, many years have I waited for it!
It is late! It is late! I want my happiness!"
Alas, poor Clifford! You are old, and worn with troubles that ought
never to have befallen you. You are partly crazy and partly imbecile;
a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is,--though some in less degree,
or less perceptibly, than their fellows. Fate has no happiness in
store for you; unless your quiet home in the old family residence with
the faithful Hepzibah, and your long summer afternoons with Phoebe, and
these Sabbath festivals with Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist,
deserve to be called happiness! Why not? If not the thing itself, it
is marvellously like it, and the more so for that ethereal and
intangible quality which causes it all to vanish at too close an
introspection. Take it, therefore, while you may. Murmur
not,--question not,--but make the most of it!
| The Pyncheon-Garden One of the few sources of amusement for Clifford is the garden, which, under Phoebe and Holgrave's tender care, has slowly been coming back to life. Phoebe often takes Clifford out into the garden, where she reads aloud to him. These little excursions with Phoebe always please Clifford, particularly when she reads poetry. In a magnanimous gesture, he decrees that the old chickens be allowed to roam free throughout the garden. They often can be found clustered close to Maule's Well. Earlier in the summer, Holgrave discovered some bean-vine seeds hidden away in a chest of drawers in a garret over one of the seven gables, stored away by a long-deceased Pyncheon ancestor. To see how long such seeds last, Clifford planted them, and now they have shot up as healthy bean vines laden with bright red blossoms, always swarmed by hummingbirds, to Clifford's great delight. The sight of Clifford admiring the hummingbirds and puttering about his garden with an innocence that is almost childlike warms Hepzibah's heart. At the same time, however, the sight of such happiness, and the thought that both she and Clifford have seen so many years wasted, give Hepzibah a slight twinge of sadness. Hepzibah has begun arranging Sunday-afternoon lunches with Phoebe, Clifford, Holgrave, and Uncle Venner. Clifford, whose social interactions are typically muted, is surprisingly animated at these lunches. He enjoys speaking with Uncle Venner, whose greatly advanced age makes Clifford feel almost young. Holgrave also makes friendly overtures toward Clifford, but the narrator notes the "questionable" expression that occasionally appears in the artist's eye. On one such occasion, Uncle Venner mentions that he dreams of eventually retiring to the workhouse, which he refers to as the "farm," and Clifford insinuates that he has bigger, more ambitious plans for Uncle Venner. Uncle Venner, however, politely refuses to be party to any such strategies, saying that he feels no burning desire to heap up property, since it seems to take away from what God has provided him with. As the sun begins to set, Clifford's high spirits decline. He mutters to himself, "I want my happiness. Many, many years have I waited for it. It is late. The narrator expresses pity for Clifford, for his past troubles and his half-imbecility, and says that Fate holds no happiness for Clifford unless he can find it in his time with Phoebe and luncheons like the one he has just consumed. The narrator advises Clifford to accept this as happiness: "Murmur not--question not--but make the most of it. | summary |
CLIFFORD, except for Phoebe's More active instigation would ordinarily
have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of
being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair
till eventide. But the girl seldom failed to propose a removal to the
garden, where Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist had made such
repairs on the roof of the ruinous arbor, or summer-house, that it was
now a sufficient shelter from sunshine and casual showers. The
hop-vine, too, had begun to grow luxuriantly over the sides of the
little edifice, and made an interior of verdant seclusion, with
innumerable peeps and glimpses into the wider solitude of the garden.
Here, sometimes, in this green play-place of flickering light, Phoebe
read to Clifford. Her acquaintance, the artist, who appeared to have a
literary turn, had supplied her with works of fiction, in pamphlet
form,--and a few volumes of poetry, in altogether a different style and
taste from those which Hepzibah selected for his amusement. Small
thanks were due to the books, however, if the girl's readings were in
any degree more successful than her elderly cousin's. Phoebe's voice
had always a pretty music in it, and could either enliven Clifford by
its sparkle and gayety of tone, or soothe him by a continued flow of
pebbly and brook-like cadences. But the fictions--in which the
country-girl, unused to works of that nature, often became deeply
absorbed--interested her strange auditor very little, or not at all.
Pictures of life, scenes of passion or sentiment, wit, humor, and
pathos, were all thrown away, or worse than thrown away, on Clifford;
either because he lacked an experience by which to test their truth, or
because his own griefs were a touch-stone of reality that few feigned
emotions could withstand. When Phoebe broke into a peal of merry
laughter at what she read, he would now and then laugh for sympathy,
but oftener respond with a troubled, questioning look. If a tear--a
maiden's sunshiny tear over imaginary woe--dropped upon some melancholy
page, Clifford either took it as a token of actual calamity, or else
grew peevish, and angrily motioned her to close the volume. And wisely
too! Is not the world sad enough, in genuine earnest, without making a
pastime of mock sorrows?
With poetry it was rather better. He delighted in the swell and
subsidence of the rhythm, and the happily recurring rhyme. Nor was
Clifford incapable of feeling the sentiment of poetry,--not, perhaps,
where it was highest or deepest, but where it was most flitting and
ethereal. It was impossible to foretell in what exquisite verse the
awakening spell might lurk; but, on raising her eyes from the page to
Clifford's face, Phoebe would be made aware, by the light breaking
through it, that a more delicate intelligence than her own had caught a
lambent flame from what she read. One glow of this kind, however, was
often the precursor of gloom for many hours afterward; because, when
the glow left him, he seemed conscious of a missing sense and power,
and groped about for them, as if a blind man should go seeking his lost
eyesight.
It pleased him more, and was better for his inward welfare, that Phoebe
should talk, and make passing occurrences vivid to his mind by her
accompanying description and remarks. The life of the garden offered
topics enough for such discourse as suited Clifford best. He never
failed to inquire what flowers had bloomed since yesterday. His
feeling for flowers was very exquisite, and seemed not so much a taste
as an emotion; he was fond of sitting with one in his hand, intently
observing it, and looking from its petals into Phoebe's face, as if the
garden flower were the sister of the household maiden. Not merely was
there a delight in the flower's perfume, or pleasure in its beautiful
form, and the delicacy or brightness of its hue; but Clifford's
enjoyment was accompanied with a perception of life, character, and
individuality, that made him love these blossoms of the garden, as if
they were endowed with sentiment and intelligence. This affection and
sympathy for flowers is almost exclusively a woman's trait. Men, if
endowed with it by nature, soon lose, forget, and learn to despise it,
in their contact with coarser things than flowers. Clifford, too, had
long forgotten it; but found it again now, as he slowly revived from
the chill torpor of his life.
It is wonderful how many pleasant incidents continually came to pass in
that secluded garden-spot when once Phoebe had set herself to look for
them. She had seen or heard a bee there, on the first day of her
acquaintance with the place. And often,--almost continually,
indeed,--since then, the bees kept coming thither, Heaven knows why, or
by what pertinacious desire, for far-fetched sweets, when, no doubt,
there were broad clover-fields, and all kinds of garden growth, much
nearer home than this. Thither the bees came, however, and plunged
into the squash-blossoms, as if there were no other squash-vines within
a long day's flight, or as if the soil of Hepzibah's garden gave its
productions just the very quality which these laborious little wizards
wanted, in order to impart the Hymettus odor to their whole hive of New
England honey. When Clifford heard their sunny, buzzing murmur, in the
heart of the great yellow blossoms, he looked about him with a joyful
sense of warmth, and blue sky, and green grass, and of God's free air
in the whole height from earth to heaven. After all, there need be no
question why the bees came to that one green nook in the dusty town.
God sent them thither to gladden our poor Clifford. They brought the
rich summer with them, in requital of a little honey.
When the bean-vines began to flower on the poles, there was one
particular variety which bore a vivid scarlet blossom. The
daguerreotypist had found these beans in a garret, over one of the
seven gables, treasured up in an old chest of drawers by some
horticultural Pyncheon of days gone by, who doubtless meant to sow them
the next summer, but was himself first sown in Death's garden-ground.
By way of testing whether there were still a living germ in such
ancient seeds, Holgrave had planted some of them; and the result of his
experiment was a splendid row of bean-vines, clambering, early, to the
full height of the poles, and arraying them, from top to bottom, in a
spiral profusion of red blossoms. And, ever since the unfolding of the
first bud, a multitude of humming-birds had been attracted thither. At
times, it seemed as if for every one of the hundred blossoms there was
one of these tiniest fowls of the air,--a thumb's bigness of burnished
plumage, hovering and vibrating about the bean-poles. It was with
indescribable interest, and even more than childish delight, that
Clifford watched the humming-birds. He used to thrust his head softly
out of the arbor to see them the better; all the while, too, motioning
Phoebe to be quiet, and snatching glimpses of the smile upon her face,
so as to heap his enjoyment up the higher with her sympathy. He had
not merely grown young;--he was a child again.
Hepzibah, whenever she happened to witness one of these fits of
miniature enthusiasm, would shake her head, with a strange mingling of
the mother and sister, and of pleasure and sadness, in her aspect. She
said that it had always been thus with Clifford when the humming-birds
came,--always, from his babyhood,--and that his delight in them had
been one of the earliest tokens by which he showed his love for
beautiful things. And it was a wonderful coincidence, the good lady
thought, that the artist should have planted these scarlet-flowering
beans--which the humming-birds sought far and wide, and which had not
grown in the Pyncheon garden before for forty years--on the very summer
of Clifford's return.
Then would the tears stand in poor Hepzibah's eyes, or overflow them
with a too abundant gush, so that she was fain to betake herself into
some corner, lest Clifford should espy her agitation. Indeed, all the
enjoyments of this period were provocative of tears. Coming so late as
it did, it was a kind of Indian summer, with a mist in its balmiest
sunshine, and decay and death in its gaudiest delight. The more
Clifford seemed to taste the happiness of a child, the sadder was the
difference to be recognized. With a mysterious and terrible Past,
which had annihilated his memory, and a blank Future before him, he had
only this visionary and impalpable Now, which, if you once look closely
at it, is nothing. He himself, as was perceptible by many symptoms,
lay darkly behind his pleasure, and knew it to be a baby-play, which he
was to toy and trifle with, instead of thoroughly believing. Clifford
saw, it may be, in the mirror of his deeper consciousness, that he was
an example and representative of that great class of people whom an
inexplicable Providence is continually putting at cross-purposes with
the world: breaking what seems its own promise in their nature;
withholding their proper food, and setting poison before them for a
banquet; and thus--when it might so easily, as one would think, have
been adjusted otherwise--making their existence a strangeness, a
solitude, and torment. All his life long, he had been learning how to
be wretched, as one learns a foreign tongue; and now, with the lesson
thoroughly by heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little
airy happiness. Frequently there was a dim shadow of doubt in his
eyes. "Take my hand, Phoebe," he would say, "and pinch it hard with
your little fingers! Give me a rose, that I may press its thorns, and
prove myself awake by the sharp touch of pain!" Evidently, he desired
this prick of a trifling anguish, in order to assure himself, by that
quality which he best knew to be real, that the garden, and the seven
weather-beaten gables, and Hepzibah's scowl, and Phoebe's smile, were
real likewise. Without this signet in his flesh, he could have
attributed no more substance to them than to the empty confusion of
imaginary scenes with which he had fed his spirit, until even that poor
sustenance was exhausted.
The author needs great faith in his reader's sympathy; else he must
hesitate to give details so minute, and incidents apparently so
trifling, as are essential to make up the idea of this garden-life. It
was the Eden of a thunder-smitten Adam, who had fled for refuge thither
out of the same dreary and perilous wilderness into which the original
Adam was expelled.
One of the available means of amusement, of which Phoebe made the most
in Clifford's behalf, was that feathered society, the hens, a breed of
whom, as we have already said, was an immemorial heirloom in the
Pyncheon family. In compliance with a whim of Clifford, as it troubled
him to see them in confinement, they had been set at liberty, and now
roamed at will about the garden; doing some little mischief, but
hindered from escape by buildings on three sides, and the difficult
peaks of a wooden fence on the other. They spent much of their
abundant leisure on the margin of Maule's well, which was haunted by a
kind of snail, evidently a titbit to their palates; and the brackish
water itself, however nauseous to the rest of the world, was so greatly
esteemed by these fowls, that they might be seen tasting, turning up
their heads, and smacking their bills, with precisely the air of
wine-bibbers round a probationary cask. Their generally quiet, yet
often brisk, and constantly diversified talk, one to another, or
sometimes in soliloquy,--as they scratched worms out of the rich, black
soil, or pecked at such plants as suited their taste,--had such a
domestic tone, that it was almost a wonder why you could not establish
a regular interchange of ideas about household matters, human and
gallinaceous. All hens are well worth studying for the piquancy and
rich variety of their manners; but by no possibility can there have
been other fowls of such odd appearance and deportment as these
ancestral ones. They probably embodied the traditionary peculiarities
of their whole line of progenitors, derived through an unbroken
succession of eggs; or else this individual Chanticleer and his two
wives had grown to be humorists, and a little crack-brained withal, on
account of their solitary way of life, and out of sympathy for
Hepzibah, their lady-patroness.
Queer, indeed, they looked! Chanticleer himself, though stalking on two
stilt-like legs, with the dignity of interminable descent in all his
gestures, was hardly bigger than an ordinary partridge; his two wives
were about the size of quails; and as for the one chicken, it looked
small enough to be still in the egg, and, at the same time,
sufficiently old, withered, wizened, and experienced, to have been
founder of the antiquated race. Instead of being the youngest of the
family, it rather seemed to have aggregated into itself the ages, not
only of these living specimens of the breed, but of all its forefathers
and foremothers, whose united excellences and oddities were squeezed
into its little body. Its mother evidently regarded it as the one
chicken of the world, and as necessary, in fact, to the world's
continuance, or, at any rate, to the equilibrium of the present system
of affairs, whether in church or state. No lesser sense of the infant
fowl's importance could have justified, even in a mother's eyes, the
perseverance with which she watched over its safety, ruffling her small
person to twice its proper size, and flying in everybody's face that so
much as looked towards her hopeful progeny. No lower estimate could
have vindicated the indefatigable zeal with which she scratched, and
her unscrupulousness in digging up the choicest flower or vegetable,
for the sake of the fat earthworm at its root. Her nervous cluck, when
the chicken happened to be hidden in the long grass or under the
squash-leaves; her gentle croak of satisfaction, while sure of it
beneath her wing; her note of ill-concealed fear and obstreperous
defiance, when she saw her arch-enemy, a neighbor's cat, on the top of
the high fence,--one or other of these sounds was to be heard at almost
every moment of the day. By degrees, the observer came to feel nearly
as much interest in this chicken of illustrious race as the mother-hen
did.
Phoebe, after getting well acquainted with the old hen, was sometimes
permitted to take the chicken in her hand, which was quite capable of
grasping its cubic inch or two of body. While she curiously examined
its hereditary marks,--the peculiar speckle of its plumage, the funny
tuft on its head, and a knob on each of its legs,--the little biped, as
she insisted, kept giving her a sagacious wink. The daguerreotypist
once whispered her that these marks betokened the oddities of the
Pyncheon family, and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life
of the old house, embodying its interpretation, likewise, although an
unintelligible one, as such clews generally are. It was a feathered
riddle; a mystery hatched out of an egg, and just as mysterious as if
the egg had been addle!
The second of Chanticleer's two wives, ever since Phoebe's arrival, had
been in a state of heavy despondency, caused, as it afterwards
appeared, by her inability to lay an egg. One day, however, by her
self-important gait, the sideways turn of her head, and the cock of her
eye, as she pried into one and another nook of the garden,--croaking to
herself, all the while, with inexpressible complacency,--it was made
evident that this identical hen, much as mankind undervalued her,
carried something about her person the worth of which was not to be
estimated either in gold or precious stones. Shortly after, there was
a prodigious cackling and gratulation of Chanticleer and all his
family, including the wizened chicken, who appeared to understand the
matter quite as well as did his sire, his mother, or his aunt. That
afternoon Phoebe found a diminutive egg,--not in the regular nest, it
was far too precious to be trusted there,--but cunningly hidden under
the currant-bushes, on some dry stalks of last year's grass. Hepzibah,
on learning the fact, took possession of the egg and appropriated it to
Clifford's breakfast, on account of a certain delicacy of flavor, for
which, as she affirmed, these eggs had always been famous. Thus
unscrupulously did the old gentlewoman sacrifice the continuance,
perhaps, of an ancient feathered race, with no better end than to
supply her brother with a dainty that hardly filled the bowl of a
tea-spoon! It must have been in reference to this outrage that
Chanticleer, the next day, accompanied by the bereaved mother of the
egg, took his post in front of Phoebe and Clifford, and delivered
himself of a harangue that might have proved as long as his own
pedigree, but for a fit of merriment on Phoebe's part. Hereupon, the
offended fowl stalked away on his long stilts, and utterly withdrew his
notice from Phoebe and the rest of human nature, until she made her
peace with an offering of spice-cake, which, next to snails, was the
delicacy most in favor with his aristocratic taste.
We linger too long, no doubt, beside this paltry rivulet of life that
flowed through the garden of the Pyncheon House. But we deem it
pardonable to record these mean incidents and poor delights, because
they proved so greatly to Clifford's benefit. They had the earth-smell
in them, and contributed to give him health and substance. Some of his
occupations wrought less desirably upon him. He had a singular
propensity, for example, to hang over Maule's well, and look at the
constantly shifting phantasmagoria of figures produced by the agitation
of the water over the mosaic-work of colored pebbles at the bottom. He
said that faces looked upward to him there,--beautiful faces, arrayed
in bewitching smiles,--each momentary face so fair and rosy, and every
smile so sunny, that he felt wronged at its departure, until the same
flitting witchcraft made a new one. But sometimes he would suddenly
cry out, "The dark face gazes at me!" and be miserable the whole day
afterwards. Phoebe, when she hung over the fountain by Clifford's
side, could see nothing of all this,--neither the beauty nor the
ugliness,--but only the colored pebbles, looking as if the gush of the
waters shook and disarranged them. And the dark face, that so troubled
Clifford, was no more than the shadow thrown from a branch of one of
the damson-trees, and breaking the inner light of Maule's well. The
truth was, however, that his fancy--reviving faster than his will and
judgment, and always stronger than they--created shapes of loveliness
that were symbolic of his native character, and now and then a stern
and dreadful shape that typified his fate.
On Sundays, after Phoebe had been at church,--for the girl had a
church-going conscience, and would hardly have been at ease had she
missed either prayer, singing, sermon, or benediction,--after
church-time, therefore, there was, ordinarily, a sober little festival
in the garden. In addition to Clifford, Hepzibah, and Phoebe, two
guests made up the company. One was the artist Holgrave, who, in spite
of his consociation with reformers, and his other queer and
questionable traits, continued to hold an elevated place in Hepzibah's
regard. The other, we are almost ashamed to say, was the venerable
Uncle Venner, in a clean shirt, and a broadcloth coat, more respectable
than his ordinary wear, inasmuch as it was neatly patched on each
elbow, and might be called an entire garment, except for a slight
inequality in the length of its skirts. Clifford, on several
occasions, had seemed to enjoy the old man's intercourse, for the sake
of his mellow, cheerful vein, which was like the sweet flavor of a
frost-bitten apple, such as one picks up under the tree in December. A
man at the very lowest point of the social scale was easier and more
agreeable for the fallen gentleman to encounter than a person at any of
the intermediate degrees; and, moreover, as Clifford's young manhood
had been lost, he was fond of feeling himself comparatively youthful,
now, in apposition with the patriarchal age of Uncle Venner. In fact,
it was sometimes observable that Clifford half wilfully hid from
himself the consciousness of being stricken in years, and cherished
visions of an earthly future still before him; visions, however, too
indistinctly drawn to be followed by disappointment--though, doubtless,
by depression--when any casual incident or recollection made him
sensible of the withered leaf.
So this oddly composed little social party used to assemble under the
ruinous arbor. Hepzibah--stately as ever at heart, and yielding not an
inch of her old gentility, but resting upon it so much the more, as
justifying a princess-like condescension--exhibited a not ungraceful
hospitality. She talked kindly to the vagrant artist, and took sage
counsel--lady as she was--with the wood-sawyer, the messenger of
everybody's petty errands, the patched philosopher. And Uncle Venner,
who had studied the world at street-corners, and other posts equally
well adapted for just observation, was as ready to give out his wisdom
as a town-pump to give water.
"Miss Hepzibah, ma'am," said he once, after they had all been cheerful
together, "I really enjoy these quiet little meetings of a Sabbath
afternoon. They are very much like what I expect to have after I
retire to my farm!"
"Uncle Venner" observed Clifford in a drowsy, inward tone, "is always
talking about his farm. But I have a better scheme for him, by and by.
We shall see!"
"Ah, Mr. Clifford Pyncheon!" said the man of patches, "you may scheme
for me as much as you please; but I'm not going to give up this one
scheme of my own, even if I never bring it really to pass. It does
seem to me that men make a wonderful mistake in trying to heap up
property upon property. If I had done so, I should feel as if
Providence was not bound to take care of me; and, at all events, the
city wouldn't be! I'm one of those people who think that infinity is
big enough for us all--and eternity long enough."
"Why, so they are, Uncle Venner," remarked Phoebe after a pause; for
she had been trying to fathom the profundity and appositeness of this
concluding apothegm. "But for this short life of ours, one would like
a house and a moderate garden-spot of one's own."
"It appears to me," said the daguerreotypist, smiling, "that Uncle
Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom; only
they have not quite so much distinctness in his mind as in that of the
systematizing Frenchman."
"Come, Phoebe," said Hepzibah, "it is time to bring the currants."
And then, while the yellow richness of the declining sunshine still
fell into the open space of the garden, Phoebe brought out a loaf of
bread and a china bowl of currants, freshly gathered from the bushes,
and crushed with sugar. These, with water,--but not from the fountain
of ill omen, close at hand,--constituted all the entertainment.
Meanwhile, Holgrave took some pains to establish an intercourse with
Clifford, actuated, it might seem, entirely by an impulse of
kindliness, in order that the present hour might be cheerfuller than
most which the poor recluse had spent, or was destined yet to spend.
Nevertheless, in the artist's deep, thoughtful, all-observant eyes,
there was, now and then, an expression, not sinister, but questionable;
as if he had some other interest in the scene than a stranger, a
youthful and unconnected adventurer, might be supposed to have. With
great mobility of outward mood, however, he applied himself to the task
of enlivening the party; and with so much success, that even dark-hued
Hepzibah threw off one tint of melancholy, and made what shift she
could with the remaining portion. Phoebe said to herself,--"How
pleasant he can be!" As for Uncle Venner, as a mark of friendship and
approbation, he readily consented to afford the young man his
countenance in the way of his profession,--not metaphorically, be it
understood, but literally, by allowing a daguerreotype of his face, so
familiar to the town, to be exhibited at the entrance of Holgrave's
studio.
Clifford, as the company partook of their little banquet, grew to be
the gayest of them all. Either it was one of those up-quivering
flashes of the spirit, to which minds in an abnormal state are liable,
or else the artist had subtly touched some chord that made musical
vibration. Indeed, what with the pleasant summer evening, and the
sympathy of this little circle of not unkindly souls, it was perhaps
natural that a character so susceptible as Clifford's should become
animated, and show itself readily responsive to what was said around
him. But he gave out his own thoughts, likewise, with an airy and
fanciful glow; so that they glistened, as it were, through the arbor,
and made their escape among the interstices of the foliage. He had
been as cheerful, no doubt, while alone with Phoebe, but never with
such tokens of acute, although partial intelligence.
But, as the sunlight left the peaks of the Seven Gables, so did the
excitement fade out of Clifford's eyes. He gazed vaguely and
mournfully about him, as if he missed something precious, and missed it
the more drearily for not knowing precisely what it was.
"I want my happiness!" at last he murmured hoarsely and indistinctly,
hardly shaping out the words. "Many, many years have I waited for it!
It is late! It is late! I want my happiness!"
Alas, poor Clifford! You are old, and worn with troubles that ought
never to have befallen you. You are partly crazy and partly imbecile;
a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is,--though some in less degree,
or less perceptibly, than their fellows. Fate has no happiness in
store for you; unless your quiet home in the old family residence with
the faithful Hepzibah, and your long summer afternoons with Phoebe, and
these Sabbath festivals with Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist,
deserve to be called happiness! Why not? If not the thing itself, it
is marvellously like it, and the more so for that ethereal and
intangible quality which causes it all to vanish at too close an
introspection. Take it, therefore, while you may. Murmur
not,--question not,--but make the most of it!
| The tableau of relative domestic tranquility that is painted in these chapters is given weight by the fact that we see Phoebe not only surviving but actually growing in her new environment. Until now, the house has been depicted as unfriendly territory at best, but it now takes on an air of fertility and nourishment. Phoebe, we are told, is noticeably developing into a woman, a strange claim when one considers that she has been at the house for only a matter of weeks, but one that is stressed nonetheless. Her emotional maturity is remarkable: she sings sad songs, but without any tragedy or self-pity, and she is more annoyed than fascinated with the pathos that surrounds Clifford. Granted, Phoebe arrived at the Pyncheon house with an air of natural vigor and determination, but in Chapter 9 these assets blossom into something more grounded and serious. While this makes Phoebe all the more admirable, it also casts a shadow of doubt on the melancholy that dyes the novel's every page. Phoebe's annoyance with Clifford's martyrdom may indicate that not everything in The House of the Seven Gables is as predestined as its owners have come to believe. Clifford is also allowed to grow, and as he emerges from his half-imbecilic state, he blossoms in a manner that is clearly linked to the garden he so adores. The bean vines are an obvious indicator of this growth, and they also come to stand for the more general revitalization of the house of the seven gables. Planted from seeds discovered buried in the musty belongings of an old Pyncheon ancestor, they indicate that something good can come out of the corruption of the past; the fact that they grow in the face of all expectations that they would fail--Holgrave plants them more as an experiment than as a serious attempt at agriculture--inserts some hope into what has so far been a predominantly bleak narrative. While the bean vines thrive, Clifford's own rejuvenation and spiritual rebirth are far from complete. It should be noted that as he extracts himself from his insanity, he also begins to exhibit some less likable Pyncheon traits. His disdain for his sister's face is cruel but may be justifiable given his penchant for all things beautiful, yet his plans for Uncle Venner's future seem strangely greedy, as do his grumblings that he now wants his happiness. Because Clifford has suffered through much, a somewhat vengeful spirit seems understandable, but some of his comments bear an eerie similarity to avaricious remarks we might have expected to hear from Colonel Pyncheon | analysis |
FROM the inertness, or what we may term the vegetative character, of
his ordinary mood, Clifford would perhaps have been content to spend
one day after another, interminably,--or, at least, throughout the
summer-time,--in just the kind of life described in the preceding
pages. Fancying, however, that it might be for his benefit
occasionally to diversify the scene, Phoebe sometimes suggested that he
should look out upon the life of the street. For this purpose, they
used to mount the staircase together, to the second story of the house,
where, at the termination of a wide entry, there was an arched window,
of uncommonly large dimensions, shaded by a pair of curtains. It
opened above the porch, where there had formerly been a balcony, the
balustrade of which had long since gone to decay, and been removed. At
this arched window, throwing it open, but keeping himself in
comparative obscurity by means of the curtain, Clifford had an
opportunity of witnessing such a portion of the great world's movement
as might be supposed to roll through one of the retired streets of a
not very populous city. But he and Phoebe made a sight as well worth
seeing as any that the city could exhibit. The pale, gray, childish,
aged, melancholy, yet often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicately
intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson
of the curtain,--watching the monotony of every-day occurrences with a
kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and, at every petty
throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of the
bright young girl!
If once he were fairly seated at the window, even Pyncheon Street would
hardly be so dull and lonely but that, somewhere or other along its
extent, Clifford might discover matter to occupy his eye, and
titillate, if not engross, his observation. Things familiar to the
youngest child that had begun its outlook at existence seemed strange
to him. A cab; an omnibus, with its populous interior, dropping here
and there a passenger, and picking up another, and thus typifying that
vast rolling vehicle, the world, the end of whose journey is everywhere
and nowhere; these objects he followed eagerly with his eyes, but
forgot them before the dust raised by the horses and wheels had settled
along their track. As regarded novelties (among which cabs and
omnibuses were to be reckoned), his mind appeared to have lost its
proper gripe and retentiveness. Twice or thrice, for example, during
the sunny hours of the day, a water-cart went along by the Pyncheon
House, leaving a broad wake of moistened earth, instead of the white
dust that had risen at a lady's lightest footfall; it was like a summer
shower, which the city authorities had caught and tamed, and compelled
it into the commonest routine of their convenience. With the
water-cart Clifford could never grow familiar; it always affected him
with just the same surprise as at first. His mind took an apparently
sharp impression from it, but lost the recollection of this
perambulatory shower, before its next reappearance, as completely as
did the street itself, along which the heat so quickly strewed white
dust again. It was the same with the railroad. Clifford could hear
the obstreperous howl of the steam-devil, and, by leaning a little way
from the arched window, could catch a glimpse of the trains of cars,
flashing a brief transit across the extremity of the street. The idea
of terrible energy thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence,
and seemed to affect him as disagreeably, and with almost as much
surprise, the hundredth time as the first.
Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of
the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the
swiftness of the passing moment. It can merely be a suspended
animation; for, were the power actually to perish, there would be
little use of immortality. We are less than ghosts, for the time
being, whenever this calamity befalls us.
Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives. All the
antique fashions of the street were dear to him; even such as were
characterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed his
fastidious senses. He loved the old rumbling and jolting carts, the
former track of which he still found in his long-buried remembrance, as
the observer of to-day finds the wheel-tracks of ancient vehicles in
Herculaneum. The butcher's cart, with its snowy canopy, was an
acceptable object; so was the fish-cart, heralded by its horn; so,
likewise, was the countryman's cart of vegetables, plodding from door
to door, with long pauses of the patient horse, while his owner drove a
trade in turnips, carrots, summer-squashes, string-beans, green peas,
and new potatoes, with half the housewives of the neighborhood. The
baker's cart, with the harsh music of its bells, had a pleasant effect
on Clifford, because, as few things else did, it jingled the very
dissonance of yore. One afternoon a scissor-grinder chanced to set his
wheel a-going under the Pyncheon Elm, and just in front of the arched
window. Children came running with their mothers' scissors, or the
carving-knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an
edge (except, indeed, poor Clifford's wits), that the grinder might
apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new.
Round went the busily revolving machinery, kept in motion by the
scissor-grinder's foot, and wore away the hard steel against the hard
stone, whence issued an intense and spiteful prolongation of a hiss as
fierce as those emitted by Satan and his compeers in Pandemonium,
though squeezed into smaller compass. It was an ugly, little, venomous
serpent of a noise, as ever did petty violence to human ears. But
Clifford listened with rapturous delight. The sound, however
disagreeable, had very brisk life in it, and, together with the circle
of curious children watching the revolutions of the wheel, appeared to
give him a more vivid sense of active, bustling, and sunshiny existence
than he had attained in almost any other way. Nevertheless, its charm
lay chiefly in the past; for the scissor-grinder's wheel had hissed in
his childish ears.
He sometimes made doleful complaint that there were no stage-coaches
nowadays. And he asked in an injured tone what had become of all those
old square-topped chaises, with wings sticking out on either side, that
used to be drawn by a plough-horse, and driven by a farmer's wife and
daughter, peddling whortle-berries and blackberries about the town.
Their disappearance made him doubt, he said, whether the berries had
not left off growing in the broad pastures and along the shady country
lanes.
But anything that appealed to the sense of beauty, in however humble a
way, did not require to be recommended by these old associations. This
was observable when one of those Italian boys (who are rather a modern
feature of our streets) came along with his barrel-organ, and stopped
under the wide and cool shadows of the elm. With his quick
professional eye he took note of the two faces watching him from the
arched window, and, opening his instrument, began to scatter its
melodies abroad. He had a monkey on his shoulder, dressed in a
Highland plaid; and, to complete the sum of splendid attractions
wherewith he presented himself to the public, there was a company of
little figures, whose sphere and habitation was in the mahogany case of
his organ, and whose principle of life was the music which the Italian
made it his business to grind out. In all their variety of
occupation,--the cobbler, the blacksmith, the soldier, the lady with
her fan, the toper with his bottle, the milk-maid sitting by her
cow--this fortunate little society might truly be said to enjoy a
harmonious existence, and to make life literally a dance. The Italian
turned a crank; and, behold! every one of these small individuals
started into the most curious vivacity. The cobbler wrought upon a
shoe; the blacksmith hammered his iron, the soldier waved his
glittering blade; the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan; the jolly
toper swigged lustily at his bottle; a scholar opened his book with
eager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to and fro along the
page; the milkmaid energetically drained her cow; and a miser counted
gold into his strong-box,--all at the same turning of a crank. Yes;
and, moved by the self-same impulse, a lover saluted his mistress on
her lips! Possibly some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to
signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our
business or amusement,--however serious, however trifling,--all dance
to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring
nothing finally to pass. For the most remarkable aspect of the affair
was, that, at the cessation of the music, everybody was petrified at
once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor. Neither was
the cobbler's shoe finished, nor the blacksmith's iron shaped out; nor
was there a drop less of brandy in the toper's bottle, nor a drop more
of milk in the milkmaid's pail, nor one additional coin in the miser's
strong-box, nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book. All were
precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so
ridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to
become wise. Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier
for the maiden's granted kiss! But, rather than swallow this last too
acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show.
The monkey, meanwhile, with a thick tail curling out into preposterous
prolixity from beneath his tartans, took his station at the Italian's
feet. He turned a wrinkled and abominable little visage to every
passer-by, and to the circle of children that soon gathered round, and
to Hepzibah's shop-door, and upward to the arched window, whence Phoebe
and Clifford were looking down. Every moment, also, he took off his
Highland bonnet, and performed a bow and scrape. Sometimes, moreover,
he made personal application to individuals, holding out his small
black palm, and otherwise plainly signifying his excessive desire for
whatever filthy lucre might happen to be in anybody's pocket. The mean
and low, yet strangely man-like expression of his wilted countenance;
the prying and crafty glance, that showed him ready to gripe at every
miserable advantage; his enormous tail (too enormous to be decently
concealed under his gabardine), and the deviltry of nature which it
betokened,--take this monkey just as he was, in short, and you could
desire no better image of the Mammon of copper coin, symbolizing the
grossest form of the love of money. Neither was there any possibility
of satisfying the covetous little devil. Phoebe threw down a whole
handful of cents, which he picked up with joyless eagerness, handed
them over to the Italian for safekeeping, and immediately recommenced a
series of pantomimic petitions for more.
Doubtless, more than one New-Englander--or, let him be of what country
he might, it is as likely to be the case--passed by, and threw a look
at the monkey, and went on, without imagining how nearly his own moral
condition was here exemplified. Clifford, however, was a being of
another order. He had taken childish delight in the music, and smiled,
too, at the figures which it set in motion. But, after looking awhile
at the long-tailed imp, he was so shocked by his horrible ugliness,
spiritual as well as physical, that he actually began to shed tears; a
weakness which men of merely delicate endowments, and destitute of the
fiercer, deeper, and more tragic power of laughter, can hardly avoid,
when the worst and meanest aspect of life happens to be presented to
them.
Pyncheon Street was sometimes enlivened by spectacles of more imposing
pretensions than the above, and which brought the multitude along with
them. With a shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact with
the world, a powerful impulse still seized on Clifford, whenever the
rush and roar of the human tide grew strongly audible to him. This was
made evident, one day, when a political procession, with hundreds of
flaunting banners, and drums, fifes, clarions, and cymbals,
reverberating between the rows of buildings, marched all through town,
and trailed its length of trampling footsteps, and most infrequent
uproar, past the ordinarily quiet House of the Seven Gables. As a mere
object of sight, nothing is more deficient in picturesque features than
a procession seen in its passage through narrow streets. The spectator
feels it to be fool's play, when he can distinguish the tedious
commonplace of each man's visage, with the perspiration and weary
self-importance on it, and the very cut of his pantaloons, and the
stiffness or laxity of his shirt-collar, and the dust on the back of
his black coat. In order to become majestic, it should be viewed from
some vantage point, as it rolls its slow and long array through the
centre of a wide plain, or the stateliest public square of a city; for
then, by its remoteness, it melts all the petty personalities, of which
it is made up, into one broad mass of existence,--one great life,--one
collected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animating
it. But, on the other hand, if an impressible person, standing alone
over the brink of one of these processions, should behold it, not in
its atoms, but in its aggregate,--as a mighty river of life, massive in
its tide, and black with mystery, and, out of its depths, calling to
the kindred depth within him,--then the contiguity would add to the
effect. It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained
from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies.
So it proved with Clifford. He shuddered; he grew pale; he threw an
appealing look at Hepzibah and Phoebe, who were with him at the window.
They comprehended nothing of his emotions, and supposed him merely
disturbed by the unaccustomed tumult. At last, with tremulous limbs,
he started up, set his foot on the window-sill, and in an instant more
would have been in the unguarded balcony. As it was, the whole
procession might have seen him, a wild, haggard figure, his gray locks
floating in the wind that waved their banners; a lonely being,
estranged from his race, but now feeling himself man again, by virtue
of the irrepressible instinct that possessed him. Had Clifford
attained the balcony, he would probably have leaped into the street;
but whether impelled by the species of terror that sometimes urges its
victim over the very precipice which he shrinks from, or by a natural
magnetism, tending towards the great centre of humanity, it were not
easy to decide. Both impulses might have wrought on him at once.
But his companions, affrighted by his gesture,--which was that of a man
hurried away in spite of himself,--seized Clifford's garment and held
him back. Hepzibah shrieked. Phoebe, to whom all extravagance was a
horror, burst into sobs and tears.
"Clifford, Clifford! are you crazy?" cried his sister.
"I hardly know, Hepzibah," said Clifford, drawing a long breath. "Fear
nothing,--it is over now,--but had I taken that plunge, and survived
it, methinks it would have made me another man!"
Possibly, in some sense, Clifford may have been right. He needed a
shock; or perhaps he required to take a deep, deep plunge into the
ocean of human life, and to sink down and be covered by its
profoundness, and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to the
world and to himself. Perhaps again, he required nothing less than the
great final remedy--death!
A similar yearning to renew the broken links of brotherhood with his
kind sometimes showed itself in a milder form; and once it was made
beautiful by the religion that lay even deeper than itself. In the
incident now to be sketched, there was a touching recognition, on
Clifford's part, of God's care and love towards him,--towards this
poor, forsaken man, who, if any mortal could, might have been pardoned
for regarding himself as thrown aside, forgotten, and left to be the
sport of some fiend, whose playfulness was an ecstasy of mischief.
It was the Sabbath morning; one of those bright, calm Sabbaths, with
its own hallowed atmosphere, when Heaven seems to diffuse itself over
the earth's face in a solemn smile, no less sweet than solemn. On such
a Sabbath morn, were we pure enough to be its medium, we should be
conscious of the earth's natural worship ascending through our frames,
on whatever spot of ground we stood. The church-bells, with various
tones, but all in harmony, were calling out and responding to one
another,--"It is the Sabbath!--The Sabbath!--Yea; the Sabbath!"--and
over the whole city the bells scattered the blessed sounds, now slowly,
now with livelier joy, now one bell alone, now all the bells together,
crying earnestly,--"It is the Sabbath!"--and flinging their accents
afar off, to melt into the air and pervade it with the holy word. The
air with God's sweetest and tenderest sunshine in it, was meet for
mankind to breathe into their hearts, and send it forth again as the
utterance of prayer.
Clifford sat at the window with Hepzibah, watching the neighbors as
they stepped into the street. All of them, however unspiritual on
other days, were transfigured by the Sabbath influence; so that their
very garments--whether it were an old man's decent coat well brushed
for the thousandth time, or a little boy's first sack and trousers
finished yesterday by his mother's needle--had somewhat of the quality
of ascension-robes. Forth, likewise, from the portal of the old house
stepped Phoebe, putting up her small green sunshade, and throwing
upward a glance and smile of parting kindness to the faces at the
arched window. In her aspect there was a familiar gladness, and a
holiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as
ever. She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of
one's mother-tongue. Fresh was Phoebe, moreover, and airy and sweet in
her apparel; as if nothing that she wore--neither her gown, nor her
small straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowy
stockings--had ever been put on before; or, if worn, were all the
fresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the
rosebuds.
The girl waved her hand to Hepzibah and Clifford, and went up the
street; a religion in herself, warm, simple, true, with a substance
that could walk on earth, and a spirit that was capable of heaven.
"Hepzibah," asked Clifford, after watching Phoebe to the corner, "do
you never go to church?"
"No, Clifford!" she replied,--"not these many, many years!"
"Were I to be there," he rejoined, "it seems to me that I could pray
once more, when so many human souls were praying all around me!"
She looked into Clifford's face, and beheld there a soft natural
effusion; for his heart gushed out, as it were, and ran over at his
eyes, in delightful reverence for God, and kindly affection for his
human brethren. The emotion communicated itself to Hepzibah. She
yearned to take him by the hand, and go and kneel down, they two
together,--both so long separate from the world, and, as she now
recognized, scarcely friends with Him above,--to kneel down among the
people, and be reconciled to God and man at once.
"Dear brother," said she earnestly, "let us go! We belong nowhere. We
have not a foot of space in any church to kneel upon; but let us go to
some place of worship, even if we stand in the broad aisle. Poor and
forsaken as we are, some pew-door will be opened to us!"
So Hepzibah and her brother made themselves, ready--as ready as they
could in the best of their old-fashioned garments, which had hung on
pegs, or been laid away in trunks, so long that the dampness and mouldy
smell of the past was on them,--made themselves ready, in their faded
bettermost, to go to church. They descended the staircase
together,--gaunt, sallow Hepzibah, and pale, emaciated, age-stricken
Clifford! They pulled open the front door, and stepped across the
threshold, and felt, both of them, as if they were standing in the
presence of the whole world, and with mankind's great and terrible eye
on them alone. The eye of their Father seemed to be withdrawn, and
gave them no encouragement. The warm sunny air of the street made them
shiver. Their hearts quaked within them at the idea of taking one
step farther.
"It cannot be, Hepzibah!--it is too late," said Clifford with deep
sadness. "We are ghosts! We have no right among human beings,--no
right anywhere but in this old house, which has a curse on it, and
which, therefore, we are doomed to haunt! And, besides," he continued,
with a fastidious sensibility, inalienably characteristic of the man,
"it would not be fit nor beautiful to go! It is an ugly thought that I
should be frightful to my fellow-beings, and that children would cling
to their mothers' gowns at sight of me!"
They shrank back into the dusky passage-way, and closed the door. But,
going up the staircase again, they found the whole interior of the
house tenfold more dismal, and the air closer and heavier, for the
glimpse and breath of freedom which they had just snatched. They could
not flee; their jailer had but left the door ajar in mockery, and stood
behind it to watch them stealing out. At the threshold, they felt his
pitiless gripe upon them. For, what other dungeon is so dark as one's
own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
But it would be no fair picture of Clifford's state of mind were we to
represent him as continually or prevailingly wretched. On the
contrary, there was no other man in the city, we are bold to affirm, of
so much as half his years, who enjoyed so many lightsome and griefless
moments as himself. He had no burden of care upon him; there were none
of those questions and contingencies with the future to be settled
which wear away all other lives, and render them not worth having by
the very process of providing for their support. In this respect he
was a child,--a child for the whole term of his existence, be it long
or short. Indeed, his life seemed to be standing still at a period
little in advance of childhood, and to cluster all his reminiscences
about that epoch; just as, after the torpor of a heavy blow, the
sufferer's reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerably
behind the accident that stupefied him. He sometimes told Phoebe and
Hepzibah his dreams, in which he invariably played the part of a child,
or a very young man. So vivid were they, in his relation of them, that
he once held a dispute with his sister as to the particular figure or
print of a chintz morning-dress which he had seen their mother wear, in
the dream of the preceding night. Hepzibah, piquing herself on a
woman's accuracy in such matters, held it to be slightly different from
what Clifford described; but, producing the very gown from an old
trunk, it proved to be identical with his remembrance of it. Had
Clifford, every time that he emerged out of dreams so lifelike,
undergone the torture of transformation from a boy into an old and
broken man, the daily recurrence of the shock would have been too much
to bear. It would have caused an acute agony to thrill from the
morning twilight, all the day through, until bedtime; and even then
would have mingled a dull, inscrutable pain and pallid hue of
misfortune with the visionary bloom and adolescence of his slumber.
But the nightly moonshine interwove itself with the morning mist, and
enveloped him as in a robe, which he hugged about his person, and
seldom let realities pierce through; he was not often quite awake, but
slept open-eyed, and perhaps fancied himself most dreaming then.
Thus, lingering always so near his childhood, he had sympathies with
children, and kept his heart the fresher thereby, like a reservoir into
which rivulets were pouring not far from the fountain-head. Though
prevented, by a subtile sense of propriety, from desiring to associate
with them, he loved few things better than to look out of the arched
window and see a little girl driving her hoop along the sidewalk, or
schoolboys at a game of ball. Their voices, also, were very pleasant
to him, heard at a distance, all swarming and intermingling together as
flies do in a sunny room.
Clifford would, doubtless, have been glad to share their sports. One
afternoon he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow
soap-bubbles; an amusement, as Hepzibah told Phoebe apart, that had
been a favorite one with her brother when they were both children.
Behold him, therefore, at the arched window, with an earthen pipe in
his mouth! Behold him, with his gray hair, and a wan, unreal smile over
his countenance, where still hovered a beautiful grace, which his worst
enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal, since it had
survived so long! Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad from the
window into the street! Little impalpable worlds were those
soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as
imagination, on the nothing of their surface. It was curious to see
how the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they came
floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them.
Some stopped to gaze, and perhaps, carried a pleasant recollection of
the bubbles onward as far as the street-corner; some looked angrily
upward, as if poor Clifford wronged them by setting an image of beauty
afloat so near their dusty pathway. A great many put out their fingers
or their walking-sticks to touch, withal; and were perversely
gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth and
sky scene, vanished as if it had never been.
At length, just as an elderly gentleman of very dignified presence
happened to be passing, a large bubble sailed majestically down, and
burst right against his nose! He looked up,--at first with a stern,
keen glance, which penetrated at once into the obscurity behind the
arched window,--then with a smile which might be conceived as diffusing
a dog-day sultriness for the space of several yards about him.
"Aha, Cousin Clifford!" cried Judge Pyncheon. "What! Still blowing
soap-bubbles!"
The tone seemed as if meant to be kind and soothing, but yet had a
bitterness of sarcasm in it. As for Clifford, an absolute palsy of
fear came over him. Apart from any definite cause of dread which his
past experience might have given him, he felt that native and original
horror of the excellent Judge which is proper to a weak, delicate, and
apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength. Strength
is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.
There is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle
of his own connections.
| The Arched Window Hoping to lighten Clifford's mood, Phoebe often takes him to the window of the front gable, which looks out onto the street. Clifford is surprised by many of the new innovations that have come about while he was gone, although he has trouble making sense of the endless stream passing by: water carts, omnibuses, the sound of a passing train. He is happier when he sees things he remembers, such as rickety old-style carts, and laments the lack of stagecoaches. One day an organ-grinder, who works with a monkey and a moving diorama, begins playing in front of the Pyncheon house. The diorama has many figures, including a young man who repeatedly kisses a woman, a miser who counts his money, and a drunk who continually takes swigs of liquor. The narrator notes the futility of the figures' efforts, since once the music stops, they cease to move, and they are no closer to finishing their activity than before. The organ-grinder's monkey, an ugly little thing, -constantly holds out his hairy palm for change and is never -satisfied. The narrator thinks this greedy, ugly monkey is an amusing caricature of many New Englanders' souls, but Clifford is the only one to recognize the horror of the monkey, and he recoils from it. Another day, a procession passes through the streets. The sight of so many people crowded into the same place at once greatly affects Clifford, who suddenly steps onto the windowsill and seems about to jump off. Phoebe and Hepzibah pull him back down, but the narrator suggests that the leap may not have been so bad and that it might have awakened Clifford from his thick, endless stupor. On Sunday, the entire town turns out for church, as does Phoebe. Watching them all go, Clifford suggests to Hepzibah that perhaps they too could go to church. They dress and walk out the door, but then immediately stop. They cannot make themselves go farther. Clifford laments that he and Hepzibah have become ghosts and are tied to the Pyncheon house forever. Another afternoon, Clifford amuses himself by blowing bubbles out the window, only to have one land on Judge Pyncheon, who looks up to the window and makes a slightly sarcastic comment to Clifford before moving on. It's a brief exchange, but it leaves Clifford paralyzed by fear | summary |
IT must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so
active as Phoebe could be wholly confined within the precincts of the
old Pyncheon House. Clifford's demands upon her time were usually
satisfied, in those long days, considerably earlier than sunset. Quiet
as his daily existence seemed, it nevertheless drained all the
resources by which he lived. It was not physical exercise that
overwearied him,--for except that he sometimes wrought a little with a
hoe, or paced the garden-walk, or, in rainy weather, traversed a large
unoccupied room,--it was his tendency to remain only too quiescent, as
regarded any toil of the limbs and muscles. But, either there was a
smouldering fire within him that consumed his vital energy, or the
monotony that would have dragged itself with benumbing effect over a
mind differently situated was no monotony to Clifford. Possibly, he
was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly
assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights,
sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more
practised with the world. As all is activity and vicissitude to the
new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had
undergone a kind of new creation, after its long-suspended life.
Be the cause what it might, Clifford commonly retired to rest,
thoroughly exhausted, while the sunbeams were still melting through his
window-curtains, or were thrown with late lustre on the chamber wall.
And while he thus slept early, as other children do, and dreamed of
childhood, Phoebe was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder
of the day and evening.
This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so
little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe. The old
house, as we have already said, had both the dry-rot and the damp-rot
in its walls; it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere than that.
Hepzibah, though she had her valuable and redeeming traits, had grown
to be a kind of lunatic by imprisoning herself so long in one place,
with no other company than a single series of ideas, and but one
affection, and one bitter sense of wrong. Clifford, the reader may
perhaps imagine, was too inert to operate morally on his
fellow-creatures, however intimate and exclusive their relations with
him. But the sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtile
and universal than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes
of organized life, and vibrates from one to another. A flower, for
instance, as Phoebe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in
Clifford's hand, or Hepzibah's, than in her own; and by the same law,
converting her whole daily life into a flower fragrance for these two
sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much
sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast. Unless she had
now and then indulged her brisk impulses, and breathed rural air in a
suburban walk, or ocean breezes along the shore,--had occasionally
obeyed the impulse of Nature, in New England girls, by attending a
metaphysical or philosophical lecture, or viewing a seven-mile
panorama, or listening to a concert,--had gone shopping about the city,
ransacking entire depots of splendid merchandise, and bringing home a
ribbon,--had employed, likewise, a little time to read the Bible in her
chamber, and had stolen a little more to think of her mother and her
native place--unless for such moral medicines as the above, we should
soon have beheld our poor Phoebe grow thin and put on a bleached,
unwholesome aspect, and assume strange, shy ways, prophetic of
old-maidenhood and a cheerless future.
Even as it was, a change grew visible; a change partly to be regretted,
although whatever charm it infringed upon was repaired by another,
perhaps more precious. She was not so constantly gay, but had her
moods of thought, which Clifford, on the whole, liked better than her
former phase of unmingled cheerfulness; because now she understood him
better and more delicately, and sometimes even interpreted him to
himself. Her eyes looked larger, and darker, and deeper; so deep, at
some silent moments, that they seemed like Artesian wells, down, down,
into the infinite. She was less girlish than when we first beheld her
alighting from the omnibus; less girlish, but more a woman.
The only youthful mind with which Phoebe had an opportunity of frequent
intercourse was that of the daguerreotypist. Inevitably, by the
pressure of the seclusion about them, they had been brought into habits
of some familiarity. Had they met under different circumstances,
neither of these young persons would have been likely to bestow much
thought upon the other, unless, indeed, their extreme dissimilarity
should have proved a principle of mutual attraction. Both, it is true,
were characters proper to New England life, and possessing a common
ground, therefore, in their more external developments; but as unlike,
in their respective interiors, as if their native climes had been at
world-wide distance. During the early part of their acquaintance,
Phoebe had held back rather more than was customary with her frank and
simple manners from Holgrave's not very marked advances. Nor was she
yet satisfied that she knew him well, although they almost daily met
and talked together, in a kind, friendly, and what seemed to be a
familiar way.
The artist, in a desultory manner, had imparted to Phoebe something of
his history. Young as he was, and had his career terminated at the
point already attained, there had been enough of incident to fill, very
creditably, an autobiographic volume. A romance on the plan of Gil
Blas, adapted to American society and manners, would cease to be a
romance. The experience of many individuals among us, who think it
hardly worth the telling, would equal the vicissitudes of the
Spaniard's earlier life; while their ultimate success, or the point
whither they tend, may be incomparably higher than any that a novelist
would imagine for his hero. Holgrave, as he told Phoebe somewhat
proudly, could not boast of his origin, unless as being exceedingly
humble, nor of his education, except that it had been the scantiest
possible, and obtained by a few winter-months' attendance at a district
school. Left early to his own guidance, he had begun to be
self-dependent while yet a boy; and it was a condition aptly suited to
his natural force of will. Though now but twenty-two years old
(lacking some months, which are years in such a life), he had already
been, first, a country schoolmaster; next, a salesman in a country
store; and, either at the same time or afterwards, the political editor
of a country newspaper. He had subsequently travelled New England and
the Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut
manufactory of cologne-water and other essences. In an episodical way
he had studied and practised dentistry, and with very flattering
success, especially in many of the factory-towns along our inland
streams. As a supernumerary official, of some kind or other, aboard a
packet-ship, he had visited Europe, and found means, before his return,
to see Italy, and part of France and Germany. At a later period he had
spent some months in a community of Fourierists. Still more recently
he had been a public lecturer on Mesmerism, for which science (as he
assured Phoebe, and, indeed, satisfactorily proved, by putting
Chanticleer, who happened to be scratching near by, to sleep) he had
very remarkable endowments.
His present phase, as a daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in
his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the
preceding ones. It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an
adventurer, who had his bread to earn. It would be thrown aside as
carelessly, whenever he should choose to earn his bread by some other
equally digressive means. But what was most remarkable, and, perhaps,
showed a more than common poise in the young man, was the fact that,
amid all these personal vicissitudes, he had never lost his identity.
Homeless as he had been,--continually changing his whereabout, and,
therefore, responsible neither to public opinion nor to
individuals,--putting off one exterior, and snatching up another, to be
soon shifted for a third,--he had never violated the innermost man, but
had carried his conscience along with him. It was impossible to know
Holgrave without recognizing this to be the fact. Hepzibah had seen
it. Phoebe soon saw it likewise, and gave him the sort of confidence
which such a certainty inspires. She was startled, however, and
sometimes repelled,--not by any doubt of his integrity to whatever law
he acknowledged, but by a sense that his law differed from her own. He
made her uneasy, and seemed to unsettle everything around her, by his
lack of reverence for what was fixed, unless, at a moment's warning, it
could establish its right to hold its ground.
Then, moreover, she scarcely thought him affectionate in his nature.
He was too calm and cool an observer. Phoebe felt his eye, often; his
heart, seldom or never. He took a certain kind of interest in Hepzibah
and her brother, and Phoebe herself. He studied them attentively, and
allowed no slightest circumstance of their individualities to escape
him. He was ready to do them whatever good he might; but, after all,
he never exactly made common cause with them, nor gave any reliable
evidence that he loved them better in proportion as he knew them more.
In his relations with them, he seemed to be in quest of mental food,
not heart-sustenance. Phoebe could not conceive what interested him so
much in her friends and herself, intellectually, since he cared nothing
for them, or, comparatively, so little, as objects of human affection.
Always, in his interviews with Phoebe, the artist made especial inquiry
as to the welfare of Clifford, whom, except at the Sunday festival, he
seldom saw.
"Does he still seem happy?" he asked one day.
"As happy as a child," answered Phoebe; "but--like a child, too--very
easily disturbed."
"How disturbed?" inquired Holgrave. "By things without, or by thoughts
within?"
"I cannot see his thoughts! How should I?" replied Phoebe with simple
piquancy. "Very often his humor changes without any reason that can be
guessed at, just as a cloud comes over the sun. Latterly, since I have
begun to know him better, I feel it to be not quite right to look
closely into his moods. He has had such a great sorrow, that his heart
is made all solemn and sacred by it. When he is cheerful,--when the
sun shines into his mind,--then I venture to peep in, just as far as
the light reaches, but no further. It is holy ground where the shadow
falls!"
"How prettily you express this sentiment!" said the artist. "I can
understand the feeling, without possessing it. Had I your
opportunities, no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to
the full depth of my plummet-line!"
"How strange that you should wish it!" remarked Phoebe involuntarily.
"What is Cousin Clifford to you?"
"Oh, nothing,--of course, nothing!" answered Holgrave with a smile.
"Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible world! The more I look
at it, the more it puzzles me, and I begin to suspect that a man's
bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom. Men and women, and
children, too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be
certain that he really knows them; nor ever guess what they have been
from what he sees them to be now. Judge Pyncheon! Clifford! What a
complex riddle--a complexity of complexities--do they present! It
requires intuitive sympathy, like a young girl's, to solve it. A mere
observer, like myself (who never have any intuitions, and am, at best,
only subtile and acute), is pretty certain to go astray."
The artist now turned the conversation to themes less dark than that
which they had touched upon. Phoebe and he were young together; nor
had Holgrave, in his premature experience of life, wasted entirely that
beautiful spirit of youth, which, gushing forth from one small heart
and fancy, may diffuse itself over the universe, making it all as
bright as on the first day of creation. Man's own youth is the world's
youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth's
granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould
into whatever shape he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk
sagely about the world's old age, but never actually believed what he
said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the
world--that gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without
being venerable--as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into
all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest
promise of becoming. He had that sense, or inward prophecy,--which a
young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a
mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,--that we
are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this
very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be
accomplished in his own lifetime. It seemed to Holgrave,--as doubtless
it has seemed to the hopeful of every century since the epoch of Adam's
grandchildren,--that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown
and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be
thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to
begin anew.
As to the main point,--may we never live to doubt it!--as to the better
centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right. His error lay
in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is
destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new
suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in
applying his own little life-span as the measure of an interminable
achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything
to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or
against it. Yet it was well for him to think so. This enthusiasm,
infusing itself through the calmness of his character, and thus taking
an aspect of settled thought and wisdom, would serve to keep his youth
pure, and make his aspirations high. And when, with the years settling
down more weightily upon him, his early faith should be modified by
inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution
of his sentiments. He would still have faith in man's brightening
destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he should recognize
his helplessness in his own behalf; and the haughty faith, with which
he began life, would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its
close, in discerning that man's best directed effort accomplishes a
kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities.
Holgrave had read very little, and that little in passing through the
thoroughfare of life, where the mystic language of his books was
necessarily mixed up with the babble of the multitude, so that both one
and the other were apt to lose any sense that might have been properly
their own. He considered himself a thinker, and was certainly of a
thoughtful turn, but, with his own path to discover, had perhaps hardly
yet reached the point where an educated man begins to think. The true
value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward
strength, which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely like a
change of garments; in that enthusiasm, so quiet that he scarcely knew
of its existence, but which gave a warmth to everything that he laid
his hand on; in that personal ambition, hidden--from his own as well as
other eyes--among his more generous impulses, but in which lurked a
certain efficacy, that might solidify him from a theorist into the
champion of some practicable cause. Altogether in his culture and want
of culture,--in his crude, wild, and misty philosophy, and the
practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies; in his
magnanimous zeal for man's welfare, and his recklessness of whatever
the ages had established in man's behalf; in his faith, and in his
infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lacked,--the artist might
fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his
native land.
His career it would be difficult to prefigure. There appeared to be
qualities in Holgrave, such as, in a country where everything is free
to the hand that can grasp it, could hardly fail to put some of the
world's prizes within his reach. But these matters are delightfully
uncertain. At almost every step in life, we meet with young men of
just about Holgrave's age, for whom we anticipate wonderful things, but
of whom, even after much and careful inquiry, we never happen to hear
another word. The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh
gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false
brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves and other people. Like
certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely in their
first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very
sober aspect after washing-day.
But our business is with Holgrave as we find him on this particular
afternoon, and in the arbor of the Pyncheon garden. In that point of
view, it was a pleasant sight to behold this young man, with so much
faith in himself, and so fair an appearance of admirable powers,--so
little harmed, too, by the many tests that had tried his metal,--it was
pleasant to see him in his kindly intercourse with Phoebe. Her thought
had scarcely done him justice when it pronounced him cold; or, if so,
he had grown warmer now. Without such purpose on her part, and
unconsciously on his, she made the House of the Seven Gables like a
home to him, and the garden a familiar precinct. With the insight on
which he prided himself, he fancied that he could look through Phoebe,
and all around her, and could read her off like a page of a child's
story-book. But these transparent natures are often deceptive in their
depth; those pebbles at the bottom of the fountain are farther from us
than we think. Thus the artist, whatever he might judge of Phoebe's
capacity, was beguiled, by some silent charm of hers, to talk freely of
what he dreamed of doing in the world. He poured himself out as to
another self. Very possibly, he forgot Phoebe while he talked to her,
and was moved only by the inevitable tendency of thought, when rendered
sympathetic by enthusiasm and emotion, to flow into the first safe
reservoir which it finds. But, had you peeped at them through the
chinks of the garden-fence, the young man's earnestness and heightened
color might have led you to suppose that he was making love to the
young girl!
At length, something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for
Phoebe to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin
Hepzibah, and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old Pyncheon
House. Without directly answering her, he turned from the Future,
which had heretofore been the theme of his discourse, and began to
speak of the influences of the Past. One subject, indeed, is but the
reverberation of the other.
"Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?" cried he, keeping up the
earnest tone of his preceding conversation. "It lies upon the Present
like a giant's dead body In fact, the case is just as if a young giant
were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse
of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only
needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle
you to see what slaves we are to bygone times,--to Death, if we give
the matter the right word!"
"But I do not see it," observed Phoebe.
"For example, then," continued Holgrave: "a dead man, if he happens to
have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die
intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much
longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and
living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in
dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's
pathos! We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die
of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We
worship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds.
Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand
obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man's white,
immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we
must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence
on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world
of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to
interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's
houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!"
"And why not," said Phoebe, "so long as we can be comfortable in them?"
"But we shall live to see the day, I trust," went on the artist, "when
no man shall build his house for posterity. Why should he? He might
just as reasonably order a durable suit of clothes,--leather, or
guttapercha, or whatever else lasts longest,--so that his
great-grandchildren should have the benefit of them, and cut precisely
the same figure in the world that he himself does. If each generation
were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change,
comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform
which society is now suffering for. I doubt whether even our public
edifices--our capitols, state-houses, court-houses, city-hall, and
churches,--ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or
brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty
years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and
reform the institutions which they symbolize."
"How you hate everything old!" said Phoebe in dismay. "It makes me
dizzy to think of such a shifting world!"
"I certainly love nothing mouldy," answered Holgrave. "Now, this old
Pyncheon House! Is it a wholesome place to live in, with its black
shingles, and the green moss that shows how damp they are?--its dark,
low-studded rooms--its grime and sordidness, which are the
crystallization on its walls of the human breath, that has been drawn
and exhaled here in discontent and anguish? The house ought to be
purified with fire,--purified till only its ashes remain!"
"Then why do you live in it?" asked Phoebe, a little piqued.
"Oh, I am pursuing my studies here; not in books, however," replied
Holgrave. "The house, in my view, is expressive of that odious and
abominable Past, with all its bad influences, against which I have just
been declaiming. I dwell in it for a while, that I may know the better
how to hate it. By the bye, did you ever hear the story of Maule, the
wizard, and what happened between him and your immeasurably
great-grandfather?"
"Yes, indeed!" said Phoebe; "I heard it long ago, from my father, and
two or three times from my cousin Hepzibah, in the month that I have
been here. She seems to think that all the calamities of the Pyncheons
began from that quarrel with the wizard, as you call him. And you, Mr.
Holgrave look as if you thought so too! How singular that you should
believe what is so very absurd, when you reject many things that are a
great deal worthier of credit!"
"I do believe it," said the artist seriously; "not as a superstition,
however, but as proved by unquestionable facts, and as exemplifying a
theory. Now, see: under those seven gables, at which we now look
up,--and which old Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the house of his
descendants, in prosperity and happiness, down to an epoch far beyond
the present,--under that roof, through a portion of three centuries,
there has been perpetual remorse of conscience, a constantly defeated
hope, strife amongst kindred, various misery, a strange form of death,
dark suspicion, unspeakable disgrace,--all, or most of which calamity I
have the means of tracing to the old Puritan's inordinate desire to
plant and endow a family. To plant a family! This idea is at the
bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is,
that, once in every half-century, at longest, a family should be merged
into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its
ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in
hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean
pipes. In the family existence of these Pyncheons, for
instance,--forgive me Phoebe, but I cannot think of you as one of
them,--in their brief New England pedigree, there has been time enough
to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another."
"You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred," said Phoebe, debating
with herself whether she ought to take offence.
"I speak true thoughts to a true mind!" answered Holgrave, with a
vehemence which Phoebe had not before witnessed in him. "The truth is
as I say! Furthermore, the original perpetrator and father of this
mischief appears to have perpetuated himself, and still walks the
street,--at least, his very image, in mind and body,--with the fairest
prospect of transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched an
inheritance as he has received! Do you remember the daguerreotype, and
its resemblance to the old portrait?"
"How strangely in earnest you are!" exclaimed Phoebe, looking at him
with surprise and perplexity; half alarmed and partly inclined to
laugh. "You talk of the lunacy of the Pyncheons; is it contagious?"
"I understand you!" said the artist, coloring and laughing. "I believe
I am a little mad. This subject has taken hold of my mind with the
strangest tenacity of clutch since I have lodged in yonder old gable.
As one method of throwing it off, I have put an incident of the
Pyncheon family history, with which I happen to be acquainted, into the
form of a legend, and mean to publish it in a magazine."
"Do you write for the magazines?" inquired Phoebe.
"Is it possible you did not know it?" cried Holgrave. "Well, such is
literary fame! Yes. Miss Phoebe Pyncheon, among the multitude of my
marvellous gifts I have that of writing stories; and my name has
figured, I can assure you, on the covers of Graham and Godey, making as
respectable an appearance, for aught I could see, as any of the
canonized bead-roll with which it was associated. In the humorous
line, I am thought to have a very pretty way with me; and as for
pathos, I am as provocative of tears as an onion. But shall I read you
my story?"
"Yes, if it is not very long," said Phoebe,--and added
laughingly,--"nor very dull."
As this latter point was one which the daguerreotypist could not decide
for himself, he forthwith produced his roll of manuscript, and, while
the late sunbeams gilded the seven gables, began to read.
| The Daguerreotypist Phoebe has now been at the Pyncheon house for a month. Since she is young and hungry for company of her own age, she becomes friends with Holgrave, the daguerreotypist. Their conversations are especially important to Phoebe, who craves a break from the dour company of Clifford and Hepzibah. Phoebe discovers that Holgrave, at the age of twenty-two, has already lived a diverse life, having worked a dozen jobs and visited not only the Midwestern states but also parts of Europe. He is an excitable young man who has been impressed with the ideas of revolutionaries. He makes a long speech to Phoebe about how everything in their world--their books, their laws, their houses--is based on the works of dead men, and he thinks each generation should tear down the institutions of the past and put up new ones in their place. These ideas unnerve Phoebe, but she listens nonetheless. The narrator notes that Holgrave's "earnestness and heightened color" which are increasingly evident as he speaks, might lead one to imagined that he is in love with Phoebe, although she has never been able to discern anything of the sort in his heart. Holgrave makes many inquiries about Clifford, as he is very curious about both the man's welfare and his past. Phoebe does not share Holgrave's inquisitiveness and is consequently unable to give him any of the information he seeks. We are told that Holgrave is not a particularly well-read young man, and that while he considers himself a thinker, he still has much to learn, including how to really think about things. Nonetheless, he possesses a natural courage and resolve that are made all the more admirable by the fact that they have survived many trials. Holgrave is wrongly convinced that he can read Phoebe like an open book, and he fails to recognize that such personalities often conceal deep thoughts and emotions. Holgrave then expresses to Phoebe his belief in a Pyncheon curse, at least as much as it has caused something of a Pyncheon "lunacy. Phoebe rejects the notion, asking whether such lunacy might be catching. Holgrave tells her that it is no superstition, and that he has written an in-depth story about the ancient Maule curse for a magazine. Holgrave asks Phoebe if she would like to hear it, and when she assents, he reads it to her. | summary |
IT must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so
active as Phoebe could be wholly confined within the precincts of the
old Pyncheon House. Clifford's demands upon her time were usually
satisfied, in those long days, considerably earlier than sunset. Quiet
as his daily existence seemed, it nevertheless drained all the
resources by which he lived. It was not physical exercise that
overwearied him,--for except that he sometimes wrought a little with a
hoe, or paced the garden-walk, or, in rainy weather, traversed a large
unoccupied room,--it was his tendency to remain only too quiescent, as
regarded any toil of the limbs and muscles. But, either there was a
smouldering fire within him that consumed his vital energy, or the
monotony that would have dragged itself with benumbing effect over a
mind differently situated was no monotony to Clifford. Possibly, he
was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly
assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights,
sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more
practised with the world. As all is activity and vicissitude to the
new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had
undergone a kind of new creation, after its long-suspended life.
Be the cause what it might, Clifford commonly retired to rest,
thoroughly exhausted, while the sunbeams were still melting through his
window-curtains, or were thrown with late lustre on the chamber wall.
And while he thus slept early, as other children do, and dreamed of
childhood, Phoebe was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder
of the day and evening.
This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so
little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe. The old
house, as we have already said, had both the dry-rot and the damp-rot
in its walls; it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere than that.
Hepzibah, though she had her valuable and redeeming traits, had grown
to be a kind of lunatic by imprisoning herself so long in one place,
with no other company than a single series of ideas, and but one
affection, and one bitter sense of wrong. Clifford, the reader may
perhaps imagine, was too inert to operate morally on his
fellow-creatures, however intimate and exclusive their relations with
him. But the sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtile
and universal than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes
of organized life, and vibrates from one to another. A flower, for
instance, as Phoebe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in
Clifford's hand, or Hepzibah's, than in her own; and by the same law,
converting her whole daily life into a flower fragrance for these two
sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much
sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast. Unless she had
now and then indulged her brisk impulses, and breathed rural air in a
suburban walk, or ocean breezes along the shore,--had occasionally
obeyed the impulse of Nature, in New England girls, by attending a
metaphysical or philosophical lecture, or viewing a seven-mile
panorama, or listening to a concert,--had gone shopping about the city,
ransacking entire depots of splendid merchandise, and bringing home a
ribbon,--had employed, likewise, a little time to read the Bible in her
chamber, and had stolen a little more to think of her mother and her
native place--unless for such moral medicines as the above, we should
soon have beheld our poor Phoebe grow thin and put on a bleached,
unwholesome aspect, and assume strange, shy ways, prophetic of
old-maidenhood and a cheerless future.
Even as it was, a change grew visible; a change partly to be regretted,
although whatever charm it infringed upon was repaired by another,
perhaps more precious. She was not so constantly gay, but had her
moods of thought, which Clifford, on the whole, liked better than her
former phase of unmingled cheerfulness; because now she understood him
better and more delicately, and sometimes even interpreted him to
himself. Her eyes looked larger, and darker, and deeper; so deep, at
some silent moments, that they seemed like Artesian wells, down, down,
into the infinite. She was less girlish than when we first beheld her
alighting from the omnibus; less girlish, but more a woman.
The only youthful mind with which Phoebe had an opportunity of frequent
intercourse was that of the daguerreotypist. Inevitably, by the
pressure of the seclusion about them, they had been brought into habits
of some familiarity. Had they met under different circumstances,
neither of these young persons would have been likely to bestow much
thought upon the other, unless, indeed, their extreme dissimilarity
should have proved a principle of mutual attraction. Both, it is true,
were characters proper to New England life, and possessing a common
ground, therefore, in their more external developments; but as unlike,
in their respective interiors, as if their native climes had been at
world-wide distance. During the early part of their acquaintance,
Phoebe had held back rather more than was customary with her frank and
simple manners from Holgrave's not very marked advances. Nor was she
yet satisfied that she knew him well, although they almost daily met
and talked together, in a kind, friendly, and what seemed to be a
familiar way.
The artist, in a desultory manner, had imparted to Phoebe something of
his history. Young as he was, and had his career terminated at the
point already attained, there had been enough of incident to fill, very
creditably, an autobiographic volume. A romance on the plan of Gil
Blas, adapted to American society and manners, would cease to be a
romance. The experience of many individuals among us, who think it
hardly worth the telling, would equal the vicissitudes of the
Spaniard's earlier life; while their ultimate success, or the point
whither they tend, may be incomparably higher than any that a novelist
would imagine for his hero. Holgrave, as he told Phoebe somewhat
proudly, could not boast of his origin, unless as being exceedingly
humble, nor of his education, except that it had been the scantiest
possible, and obtained by a few winter-months' attendance at a district
school. Left early to his own guidance, he had begun to be
self-dependent while yet a boy; and it was a condition aptly suited to
his natural force of will. Though now but twenty-two years old
(lacking some months, which are years in such a life), he had already
been, first, a country schoolmaster; next, a salesman in a country
store; and, either at the same time or afterwards, the political editor
of a country newspaper. He had subsequently travelled New England and
the Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut
manufactory of cologne-water and other essences. In an episodical way
he had studied and practised dentistry, and with very flattering
success, especially in many of the factory-towns along our inland
streams. As a supernumerary official, of some kind or other, aboard a
packet-ship, he had visited Europe, and found means, before his return,
to see Italy, and part of France and Germany. At a later period he had
spent some months in a community of Fourierists. Still more recently
he had been a public lecturer on Mesmerism, for which science (as he
assured Phoebe, and, indeed, satisfactorily proved, by putting
Chanticleer, who happened to be scratching near by, to sleep) he had
very remarkable endowments.
His present phase, as a daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in
his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the
preceding ones. It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an
adventurer, who had his bread to earn. It would be thrown aside as
carelessly, whenever he should choose to earn his bread by some other
equally digressive means. But what was most remarkable, and, perhaps,
showed a more than common poise in the young man, was the fact that,
amid all these personal vicissitudes, he had never lost his identity.
Homeless as he had been,--continually changing his whereabout, and,
therefore, responsible neither to public opinion nor to
individuals,--putting off one exterior, and snatching up another, to be
soon shifted for a third,--he had never violated the innermost man, but
had carried his conscience along with him. It was impossible to know
Holgrave without recognizing this to be the fact. Hepzibah had seen
it. Phoebe soon saw it likewise, and gave him the sort of confidence
which such a certainty inspires. She was startled, however, and
sometimes repelled,--not by any doubt of his integrity to whatever law
he acknowledged, but by a sense that his law differed from her own. He
made her uneasy, and seemed to unsettle everything around her, by his
lack of reverence for what was fixed, unless, at a moment's warning, it
could establish its right to hold its ground.
Then, moreover, she scarcely thought him affectionate in his nature.
He was too calm and cool an observer. Phoebe felt his eye, often; his
heart, seldom or never. He took a certain kind of interest in Hepzibah
and her brother, and Phoebe herself. He studied them attentively, and
allowed no slightest circumstance of their individualities to escape
him. He was ready to do them whatever good he might; but, after all,
he never exactly made common cause with them, nor gave any reliable
evidence that he loved them better in proportion as he knew them more.
In his relations with them, he seemed to be in quest of mental food,
not heart-sustenance. Phoebe could not conceive what interested him so
much in her friends and herself, intellectually, since he cared nothing
for them, or, comparatively, so little, as objects of human affection.
Always, in his interviews with Phoebe, the artist made especial inquiry
as to the welfare of Clifford, whom, except at the Sunday festival, he
seldom saw.
"Does he still seem happy?" he asked one day.
"As happy as a child," answered Phoebe; "but--like a child, too--very
easily disturbed."
"How disturbed?" inquired Holgrave. "By things without, or by thoughts
within?"
"I cannot see his thoughts! How should I?" replied Phoebe with simple
piquancy. "Very often his humor changes without any reason that can be
guessed at, just as a cloud comes over the sun. Latterly, since I have
begun to know him better, I feel it to be not quite right to look
closely into his moods. He has had such a great sorrow, that his heart
is made all solemn and sacred by it. When he is cheerful,--when the
sun shines into his mind,--then I venture to peep in, just as far as
the light reaches, but no further. It is holy ground where the shadow
falls!"
"How prettily you express this sentiment!" said the artist. "I can
understand the feeling, without possessing it. Had I your
opportunities, no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to
the full depth of my plummet-line!"
"How strange that you should wish it!" remarked Phoebe involuntarily.
"What is Cousin Clifford to you?"
"Oh, nothing,--of course, nothing!" answered Holgrave with a smile.
"Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible world! The more I look
at it, the more it puzzles me, and I begin to suspect that a man's
bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom. Men and women, and
children, too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be
certain that he really knows them; nor ever guess what they have been
from what he sees them to be now. Judge Pyncheon! Clifford! What a
complex riddle--a complexity of complexities--do they present! It
requires intuitive sympathy, like a young girl's, to solve it. A mere
observer, like myself (who never have any intuitions, and am, at best,
only subtile and acute), is pretty certain to go astray."
The artist now turned the conversation to themes less dark than that
which they had touched upon. Phoebe and he were young together; nor
had Holgrave, in his premature experience of life, wasted entirely that
beautiful spirit of youth, which, gushing forth from one small heart
and fancy, may diffuse itself over the universe, making it all as
bright as on the first day of creation. Man's own youth is the world's
youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth's
granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould
into whatever shape he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk
sagely about the world's old age, but never actually believed what he
said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the
world--that gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without
being venerable--as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into
all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest
promise of becoming. He had that sense, or inward prophecy,--which a
young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a
mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,--that we
are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this
very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be
accomplished in his own lifetime. It seemed to Holgrave,--as doubtless
it has seemed to the hopeful of every century since the epoch of Adam's
grandchildren,--that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown
and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be
thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to
begin anew.
As to the main point,--may we never live to doubt it!--as to the better
centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right. His error lay
in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is
destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new
suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in
applying his own little life-span as the measure of an interminable
achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything
to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or
against it. Yet it was well for him to think so. This enthusiasm,
infusing itself through the calmness of his character, and thus taking
an aspect of settled thought and wisdom, would serve to keep his youth
pure, and make his aspirations high. And when, with the years settling
down more weightily upon him, his early faith should be modified by
inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution
of his sentiments. He would still have faith in man's brightening
destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he should recognize
his helplessness in his own behalf; and the haughty faith, with which
he began life, would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its
close, in discerning that man's best directed effort accomplishes a
kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities.
Holgrave had read very little, and that little in passing through the
thoroughfare of life, where the mystic language of his books was
necessarily mixed up with the babble of the multitude, so that both one
and the other were apt to lose any sense that might have been properly
their own. He considered himself a thinker, and was certainly of a
thoughtful turn, but, with his own path to discover, had perhaps hardly
yet reached the point where an educated man begins to think. The true
value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward
strength, which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely like a
change of garments; in that enthusiasm, so quiet that he scarcely knew
of its existence, but which gave a warmth to everything that he laid
his hand on; in that personal ambition, hidden--from his own as well as
other eyes--among his more generous impulses, but in which lurked a
certain efficacy, that might solidify him from a theorist into the
champion of some practicable cause. Altogether in his culture and want
of culture,--in his crude, wild, and misty philosophy, and the
practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies; in his
magnanimous zeal for man's welfare, and his recklessness of whatever
the ages had established in man's behalf; in his faith, and in his
infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lacked,--the artist might
fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his
native land.
His career it would be difficult to prefigure. There appeared to be
qualities in Holgrave, such as, in a country where everything is free
to the hand that can grasp it, could hardly fail to put some of the
world's prizes within his reach. But these matters are delightfully
uncertain. At almost every step in life, we meet with young men of
just about Holgrave's age, for whom we anticipate wonderful things, but
of whom, even after much and careful inquiry, we never happen to hear
another word. The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh
gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false
brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves and other people. Like
certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely in their
first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very
sober aspect after washing-day.
But our business is with Holgrave as we find him on this particular
afternoon, and in the arbor of the Pyncheon garden. In that point of
view, it was a pleasant sight to behold this young man, with so much
faith in himself, and so fair an appearance of admirable powers,--so
little harmed, too, by the many tests that had tried his metal,--it was
pleasant to see him in his kindly intercourse with Phoebe. Her thought
had scarcely done him justice when it pronounced him cold; or, if so,
he had grown warmer now. Without such purpose on her part, and
unconsciously on his, she made the House of the Seven Gables like a
home to him, and the garden a familiar precinct. With the insight on
which he prided himself, he fancied that he could look through Phoebe,
and all around her, and could read her off like a page of a child's
story-book. But these transparent natures are often deceptive in their
depth; those pebbles at the bottom of the fountain are farther from us
than we think. Thus the artist, whatever he might judge of Phoebe's
capacity, was beguiled, by some silent charm of hers, to talk freely of
what he dreamed of doing in the world. He poured himself out as to
another self. Very possibly, he forgot Phoebe while he talked to her,
and was moved only by the inevitable tendency of thought, when rendered
sympathetic by enthusiasm and emotion, to flow into the first safe
reservoir which it finds. But, had you peeped at them through the
chinks of the garden-fence, the young man's earnestness and heightened
color might have led you to suppose that he was making love to the
young girl!
At length, something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for
Phoebe to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin
Hepzibah, and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old Pyncheon
House. Without directly answering her, he turned from the Future,
which had heretofore been the theme of his discourse, and began to
speak of the influences of the Past. One subject, indeed, is but the
reverberation of the other.
"Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?" cried he, keeping up the
earnest tone of his preceding conversation. "It lies upon the Present
like a giant's dead body In fact, the case is just as if a young giant
were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse
of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only
needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle
you to see what slaves we are to bygone times,--to Death, if we give
the matter the right word!"
"But I do not see it," observed Phoebe.
"For example, then," continued Holgrave: "a dead man, if he happens to
have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die
intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much
longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and
living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in
dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's
pathos! We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die
of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We
worship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds.
Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand
obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man's white,
immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we
must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence
on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world
of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to
interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's
houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!"
"And why not," said Phoebe, "so long as we can be comfortable in them?"
"But we shall live to see the day, I trust," went on the artist, "when
no man shall build his house for posterity. Why should he? He might
just as reasonably order a durable suit of clothes,--leather, or
guttapercha, or whatever else lasts longest,--so that his
great-grandchildren should have the benefit of them, and cut precisely
the same figure in the world that he himself does. If each generation
were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change,
comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform
which society is now suffering for. I doubt whether even our public
edifices--our capitols, state-houses, court-houses, city-hall, and
churches,--ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or
brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty
years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and
reform the institutions which they symbolize."
"How you hate everything old!" said Phoebe in dismay. "It makes me
dizzy to think of such a shifting world!"
"I certainly love nothing mouldy," answered Holgrave. "Now, this old
Pyncheon House! Is it a wholesome place to live in, with its black
shingles, and the green moss that shows how damp they are?--its dark,
low-studded rooms--its grime and sordidness, which are the
crystallization on its walls of the human breath, that has been drawn
and exhaled here in discontent and anguish? The house ought to be
purified with fire,--purified till only its ashes remain!"
"Then why do you live in it?" asked Phoebe, a little piqued.
"Oh, I am pursuing my studies here; not in books, however," replied
Holgrave. "The house, in my view, is expressive of that odious and
abominable Past, with all its bad influences, against which I have just
been declaiming. I dwell in it for a while, that I may know the better
how to hate it. By the bye, did you ever hear the story of Maule, the
wizard, and what happened between him and your immeasurably
great-grandfather?"
"Yes, indeed!" said Phoebe; "I heard it long ago, from my father, and
two or three times from my cousin Hepzibah, in the month that I have
been here. She seems to think that all the calamities of the Pyncheons
began from that quarrel with the wizard, as you call him. And you, Mr.
Holgrave look as if you thought so too! How singular that you should
believe what is so very absurd, when you reject many things that are a
great deal worthier of credit!"
"I do believe it," said the artist seriously; "not as a superstition,
however, but as proved by unquestionable facts, and as exemplifying a
theory. Now, see: under those seven gables, at which we now look
up,--and which old Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the house of his
descendants, in prosperity and happiness, down to an epoch far beyond
the present,--under that roof, through a portion of three centuries,
there has been perpetual remorse of conscience, a constantly defeated
hope, strife amongst kindred, various misery, a strange form of death,
dark suspicion, unspeakable disgrace,--all, or most of which calamity I
have the means of tracing to the old Puritan's inordinate desire to
plant and endow a family. To plant a family! This idea is at the
bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is,
that, once in every half-century, at longest, a family should be merged
into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its
ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in
hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean
pipes. In the family existence of these Pyncheons, for
instance,--forgive me Phoebe, but I cannot think of you as one of
them,--in their brief New England pedigree, there has been time enough
to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another."
"You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred," said Phoebe, debating
with herself whether she ought to take offence.
"I speak true thoughts to a true mind!" answered Holgrave, with a
vehemence which Phoebe had not before witnessed in him. "The truth is
as I say! Furthermore, the original perpetrator and father of this
mischief appears to have perpetuated himself, and still walks the
street,--at least, his very image, in mind and body,--with the fairest
prospect of transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched an
inheritance as he has received! Do you remember the daguerreotype, and
its resemblance to the old portrait?"
"How strangely in earnest you are!" exclaimed Phoebe, looking at him
with surprise and perplexity; half alarmed and partly inclined to
laugh. "You talk of the lunacy of the Pyncheons; is it contagious?"
"I understand you!" said the artist, coloring and laughing. "I believe
I am a little mad. This subject has taken hold of my mind with the
strangest tenacity of clutch since I have lodged in yonder old gable.
As one method of throwing it off, I have put an incident of the
Pyncheon family history, with which I happen to be acquainted, into the
form of a legend, and mean to publish it in a magazine."
"Do you write for the magazines?" inquired Phoebe.
"Is it possible you did not know it?" cried Holgrave. "Well, such is
literary fame! Yes. Miss Phoebe Pyncheon, among the multitude of my
marvellous gifts I have that of writing stories; and my name has
figured, I can assure you, on the covers of Graham and Godey, making as
respectable an appearance, for aught I could see, as any of the
canonized bead-roll with which it was associated. In the humorous
line, I am thought to have a very pretty way with me; and as for
pathos, I am as provocative of tears as an onion. But shall I read you
my story?"
"Yes, if it is not very long," said Phoebe,--and added
laughingly,--"nor very dull."
As this latter point was one which the daguerreotypist could not decide
for himself, he forthwith produced his roll of manuscript, and, while
the late sunbeams gilded the seven gables, began to read.
| While the organ-grinder himself is not a particularly gripping figure, he nonetheless offers up a number of symbols that allow Hawthorne to comment on the world around him. The first of these is the moving diorama, whose figures indulge in a fruitless, endless pantomime of activity in which goals remain unreached--particularly the lover, who is no happier for all the kisses he has obtained from his girl. Hawthorne's narrator remarks of the scene: "Possibly, some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to signify. that we mortals, whatever our business or amusement--however serious, however trifling--all dance to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring nothing finally to pass. It's a rare but telling moment in the narrative in which Hawthorne steps outside his authorial stance to admit that he is using this part of his story to impart his own "merry and bitter" opinions, revealing to his readers that his novel may have more than a simple storytelling agenda. The organ-grinder's monkey offers an even more grotesque commentary, personifying the stingy individuals that Hawthorne must have seen in the society around him. The monkey becomes associated with the demon of avarice when it is described as "the Mammon of copper-coin, symbolizing the grossest form of the love of money. The monkey is not the sole source of avarice, however, for the narrator notes that as New Englanders walk by and drop their money in the monkey's hairy palm, they fail to see how well their "own moral condition was here exemplified," meaning that the monkey is the spitting image of the humans from whom he collects his coins. Again, Hawthorne seems to be eager that we not miss the point, for not only does he take great pains to ensure we understand the ideas he is trying to express, but he states outright that the monkey is "symbolizing" something, in case we try to read such an obvious image too literally. Rather than letting us stroll happily by the monkey, as all the characters in the story except Clifford do, the author lets us in on his intentions and takes great pains to make sure we understand. Holgrave's diatribe in Chapter 12 allows Hawthorne to give voice to contemporary philosophy that transforms the house of the seven gables into a metaphor for society. When Holgrave touts some of the Transcendentalist ideas to which Hawthorne himself was exposed, he stresses the importance of renewal, arguing that society is based on the views of "Dead Men"--a rather chilling way of arguing that New England culture is based on stale ideas. Holgrave's argument that what is important is to rebuild with each succeeding generation is of unmistakable relevance to the Pyncheons, still haunted by a curse generations old. Holgrave's statement could even suggest that Matthew Maule's curse has become a handy excuse for the misery of the Pyncheon family. Until now, for the most part, Hepzibah and Clifford have seemed to be helpless prisoners of an ancient evil, but Holgrave's politics assign them a degree of agency, and it becomes somewhat harder to sympathize with their sufferings when we realize that their problems could disappear once they left the Pyncheon homestead. Of course, The House of the Seven Gables is a romance, and in previous pages, including the incident where Hepzibah and Clifford are unable to go to church, Hawthorne has presented circumstances as being beyond their control. Holgrave nevertheless offers a very different perspective, and for a brief moment the story of the house seems to stand for our own inability to deal with the problems around us and our unwillingness to even try | analysis |
THERE was a message brought, one day, from the worshipful Gervayse
Pyncheon to young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, desiring his immediate
presence at the House of the Seven Gables.
"And what does your master want with me?" said the carpenter to Mr.
Pyncheon's black servant. "Does the house need any repair? Well it
may, by this time; and no blame to my father who built it, neither! I
was reading the old Colonel's tombstone, no longer ago than last
Sabbath; and, reckoning from that date, the house has stood
seven-and-thirty years. No wonder if there should be a job to do on
the roof."
"Don't know what massa wants," answered Scipio. "The house is a berry
good house, and old Colonel Pyncheon think so too, I reckon;--else why
the old man haunt it so, and frighten a poor nigga, As he does?"
"Well, well, friend Scipio; let your master know that I'm coming," said
the carpenter with a laugh. "For a fair, workmanlike job, he'll find
me his man. And so the house is haunted, is it? It will take a tighter
workman than I am to keep the spirits out of the Seven Gables. Even if
the Colonel would be quiet," he added, muttering to himself, "my old
grandfather, the wizard, will be pretty sure to stick to the Pyncheons
as long as their walls hold together."
"What's that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule?" asked Scipio.
"And what for do you look so black at me?"
"No matter, darky," said the carpenter. "Do you think nobody is to
look black but yourself? Go tell your master I'm coming; and if you
happen to see Mistress Alice, his daughter, give Matthew Maule's humble
respects to her. She has brought a fair face from Italy,--fair, and
gentle, and proud,--has that same Alice Pyncheon!"
"He talk of Mistress Alice!" cried Scipio, as he returned from his
errand. "The low carpenter-man! He no business so much as to look at
her a great way off!"
This young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, it must be observed, was a
person little understood, and not very generally liked, in the town
where he resided; not that anything could be alleged against his
integrity, or his skill and diligence in the handicraft which he
exercised. The aversion (as it might justly be called) with which many
persons regarded him was partly the result of his own character and
deportment, and partly an inheritance.
He was the grandson of a former Matthew Maule, one of the early
settlers of the town, and who had been a famous and terrible wizard in
his day. This old reprobate was one of the sufferers when Cotton
Mather, and his brother ministers, and the learned judges, and other
wise men, and Sir William Phipps, the sagacious governor, made such
laudable efforts to weaken the great enemy of souls, by sending a
multitude of his adherents up the rocky pathway of Gallows Hill. Since
those days, no doubt, it had grown to be suspected that, in consequence
of an unfortunate overdoing of a work praiseworthy in itself, the
proceedings against the witches had proved far less acceptable to the
Beneficent Father than to that very Arch Enemy whom they were intended
to distress and utterly overwhelm. It is not the less certain,
however, that awe and terror brooded over the memories of those who
died for this horrible crime of witchcraft. Their graves, in the
crevices of the rocks, were supposed to be incapable of retaining the
occupants who had been so hastily thrust into them. Old Matthew Maule,
especially, was known to have as little hesitation or difficulty in
rising out of his grave as an ordinary man in getting out of bed, and
was as often seen at midnight as living people at noonday. This
pestilent wizard (in whom his just punishment seemed to have wrought no
manner of amendment) had an inveterate habit of haunting a certain
mansion, styled the House of the Seven Gables, against the owner of
which he pretended to hold an unsettled claim for ground-rent. The
ghost, it appears,--with the pertinacity which was one of his
distinguishing characteristics while alive,--insisted that he was the
rightful proprietor of the site upon which the house stood. His terms
were, that either the aforesaid ground-rent, from the day when the
cellar began to be dug, should be paid down, or the mansion itself
given up; else he, the ghostly creditor, would have his finger in all
the affairs of the Pyncheons, and make everything go wrong with them,
though it should be a thousand years after his death. It was a wild
story, perhaps, but seemed not altogether so incredible to those who
could remember what an inflexibly obstinate old fellow this wizard
Maule had been.
Now, the wizard's grandson, the young Matthew Maule of our story, was
popularly supposed to have inherited some of his ancestor's
questionable traits. It is wonderful how many absurdities were
promulgated in reference to the young man. He was fabled, for example,
to have a strange power of getting into people's dreams, and regulating
matters there according to his own fancy, pretty much like the
stage-manager of a theatre. There was a great deal of talk among the
neighbors, particularly the petticoated ones, about what they called
the witchcraft of Maule's eye. Some said that he could look into
people's minds; others, that, by the marvellous power of this eye, he
could draw people into his own mind, or send them, if he pleased, to do
errands to his grandfather, in the spiritual world; others, again, that
it was what is termed an Evil Eye, and possessed the valuable faculty
of blighting corn, and drying children into mummies with the heartburn.
But, after all, what worked most to the young carpenter's disadvantage
was, first, the reserve and sternness of his natural disposition, and
next, the fact of his not being a church-communicant, and the suspicion
of his holding heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity.
After receiving Mr. Pyncheon's message, the carpenter merely tarried to
finish a small job, which he happened to have in hand, and then took
his way towards the House of the Seven Gables. This noted edifice,
though its style might be getting a little out of fashion, was still as
respectable a family residence as that of any gentleman in town. The
present owner, Gervayse Pyncheon, was said to have contracted a dislike
to the house, in consequence of a shock to his sensibility, in early
childhood, from the sudden death of his grandfather. In the very act
of running to climb Colonel Pyncheon's knee, the boy had discovered the
old Puritan to be a corpse. On arriving at manhood, Mr. Pyncheon had
visited England, where he married a lady of fortune, and had
subsequently spent many years, partly in the mother country, and partly
in various cities on the continent of Europe. During this period, the
family mansion had been consigned to the charge of a kinsman, who was
allowed to make it his home for the time being, in consideration of
keeping the premises in thorough repair. So faithfully had this
contract been fulfilled, that now, as the carpenter approached the
house, his practised eye could detect nothing to criticise in its
condition. The peaks of the seven gables rose up sharply; the shingled
roof looked thoroughly water-tight; and the glittering plaster-work
entirely covered the exterior walls, and sparkled in the October sun,
as if it had been new only a week ago.
The house had that pleasant aspect of life which is like the cheery
expression of comfortable activity in the human countenance. You could
see, at once, that there was the stir of a large family within it. A
huge load of oak-wood was passing through the gateway, towards the
outbuildings in the rear; the fat cook--or probably it might be the
housekeeper--stood at the side door, bargaining for some turkeys and
poultry which a countryman had brought for sale. Now and then a
maid-servant, neatly dressed, and now the shining sable face of a
slave, might be seen bustling across the windows, in the lower part of
the house. At an open window of a room in the second story, hanging
over some pots of beautiful and delicate flowers,--exotics, but which
had never known a more genial sunshine than that of the New England
autumn,--was the figure of a young lady, an exotic, like the flowers,
and beautiful and delicate as they. Her presence imparted an
indescribable grace and faint witchery to the whole edifice. In other
respects, it was a substantial, jolly-looking mansion, and seemed fit
to be the residence of a patriarch, who might establish his own
headquarters in the front gable and assign one of the remainder to each
of his six children, while the great chimney in the centre should
symbolize the old fellow's hospitable heart, which kept them all warm,
and made a great whole of the seven smaller ones.
There was a vertical sundial on the front gable; and as the carpenter
passed beneath it, he looked up and noted the hour.
"Three o'clock!" said he to himself. "My father told me that dial was
put up only an hour before the old Colonel's death. How truly it has
kept time these seven-and-thirty years past! The shadow creeps and
creeps, and is always looking over the shoulder of the sunshine!"
It might have befitted a craftsman, like Matthew Maule, on being sent
for to a gentleman's house, to go to the back door, where servants and
work-people were usually admitted; or at least to the side entrance,
where the better class of tradesmen made application. But the
carpenter had a great deal of pride and stiffness in his nature; and,
at this moment, moreover, his heart was bitter with the sense of
hereditary wrong, because he considered the great Pyncheon House to be
standing on soil which should have been his own. On this very site,
beside a spring of delicious water, his grandfather had felled the
pine-trees and built a cottage, in which children had been born to him;
and it was only from a dead man's stiffened fingers that Colonel
Pyncheon had wrested away the title-deeds. So young Maule went
straight to the principal entrance, beneath a portal of carved oak, and
gave such a peal of the iron knocker that you would have imagined the
stern old wizard himself to be standing at the threshold.
Black Scipio answered the summons in a prodigious, hurry; but showed
the whites of his eyes in amazement on beholding only the carpenter.
"Lord-a-mercy, what a great man he be, this carpenter fellow!" mumbled
Scipio, down in his throat. "Anybody think he beat on the door with
his biggest hammer!"
"Here I am!" said Maule sternly. "Show me the way to your master's
parlor."
As he stept into the house, a note of sweet and melancholy music
thrilled and vibrated along the passage-way, proceeding from one of the
rooms above stairs. It was the harpsichord which Alice Pyncheon had
brought with her from beyond the sea. The fair Alice bestowed most of
her maiden leisure between flowers and music, although the former were
apt to droop, and the melodies were often sad. She was of foreign
education, and could not take kindly to the New England modes of life,
in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed.
As Mr. Pyncheon had been impatiently awaiting Maule's arrival, black
Scipio, of course, lost no time in ushering the carpenter into his
master's presence. The room in which this gentleman sat was a parlor of
moderate size, looking out upon the garden of the house, and having its
windows partly shadowed by the foliage of fruit-trees. It was Mr.
Pyncheon's peculiar apartment, and was provided with furniture, in an
elegant and costly style, principally from Paris; the floor (which was
unusual at that day) being covered with a carpet, so skilfully and
richly wrought that it seemed to glow as with living flowers. In one
corner stood a marble woman, to whom her own beauty was the sole and
sufficient garment. Some pictures--that looked old, and had a mellow
tinge diffused through all their artful splendor--hung on the walls.
Near the fireplace was a large and very beautiful cabinet of ebony,
inlaid with ivory; a piece of antique furniture, which Mr. Pyncheon had
bought in Venice, and which he used as the treasure-place for medals,
ancient coins, and whatever small and valuable curiosities he had
picked up on his travels. Through all this variety of decoration,
however, the room showed its original characteristics; its low stud,
its cross-beam, its chimney-piece, with the old-fashioned Dutch tiles;
so that it was the emblem of a mind industriously stored with foreign
ideas, and elaborated into artificial refinement, but neither larger,
nor, in its proper self, more elegant than before.
There were two objects that appeared rather out of place in this very
handsomely furnished room. One was a large map, or surveyor's plan, of
a tract of land, which looked as if it had been drawn a good many years
ago, and was now dingy with smoke, and soiled, here and there, with the
touch of fingers. The other was a portrait of a stern old man, in a
Puritan garb, painted roughly, but with a bold effect, and a remarkably
strong expression of character.
At a small table, before a fire of English sea-coal, sat Mr. Pyncheon,
sipping coffee, which had grown to be a very favorite beverage with him
in France. He was a middle-aged and really handsome man, with a wig
flowing down upon his shoulders; his coat was of blue velvet, with lace
on the borders and at the button-holes; and the firelight glistened on
the spacious breadth of his waistcoat, which was flowered all over with
gold. On the entrance of Scipio, ushering in the carpenter, Mr.
Pyncheon turned partly round, but resumed his former position, and
proceeded deliberately to finish his cup of coffee, without immediate
notice of the guest whom he had summoned to his presence. It was not
that he intended any rudeness or improper neglect,--which, indeed, he
would have blushed to be guilty of,--but it never occurred to him that
a person in Maule's station had a claim on his courtesy, or would
trouble himself about it one way or the other.
The carpenter, however, stepped at once to the hearth, and turned
himself about, so as to look Mr. Pyncheon in the face.
"You sent for me," said he. "Be pleased to explain your business, that
I may go back to my own affairs."
"Ah! excuse me," said Mr. Pyncheon quietly. "I did not mean to tax
your time without a recompense. Your name, I think, is Maule,--Thomas
or Matthew Maule,--a son or grandson of the builder of this house?"
"Matthew Maule," replied the carpenter,--"son of him who built the
house,--grandson of the rightful proprietor of the soil."
"I know the dispute to which you allude," observed Mr. Pyncheon with
undisturbed equanimity. "I am well aware that my grandfather was
compelled to resort to a suit at law, in order to establish his claim
to the foundation-site of this edifice. We will not, if you please,
renew the discussion. The matter was settled at the time, and by the
competent authorities,--equitably, it is to be presumed,--and, at all
events, irrevocably. Yet, singularly enough, there is an incidental
reference to this very subject in what I am now about to say to you.
And this same inveterate grudge,--excuse me, I mean no offence,--this
irritability, which you have just shown, is not entirely aside from the
matter."
"If you can find anything for your purpose, Mr. Pyncheon," said the
carpenter, "in a man's natural resentment for the wrongs done to his
blood, you are welcome to it."
"I take you at your word, Goodman Maule," said the owner of the Seven
Gables, with a smile, "and will proceed to suggest a mode in which your
hereditary resentments--justifiable or otherwise--may have had a
bearing on my affairs. You have heard, I suppose, that the Pyncheon
family, ever since my grandfather's days, have been prosecuting a still
unsettled claim to a very large extent of territory at the Eastward?"
"Often," replied Maule,--and it is said that a smile came over his
face,--"very often,--from my father!"
"This claim," continued Mr. Pyncheon, after pausing a moment, as if to
consider what the carpenter's smile might mean, "appeared to be on the
very verge of a settlement and full allowance, at the period of my
grandfather's decease. It was well known, to those in his confidence,
that he anticipated neither difficulty nor delay. Now, Colonel
Pyncheon, I need hardly say, was a practical man, well acquainted with
public and private business, and not at all the person to cherish
ill-founded hopes, or to attempt the following out of an impracticable
scheme. It is obvious to conclude, therefore, that he had grounds, not
apparent to his heirs, for his confident anticipation of success in the
matter of this Eastern claim. In a word, I believe,--and my legal
advisers coincide in the belief, which, moreover, is authorized, to a
certain extent, by the family traditions,--that my grandfather was in
possession of some deed, or other document, essential to this claim,
but which has since disappeared."
"Very likely," said Matthew Maule,--and again, it is said, there was a
dark smile on his face,--"but what can a poor carpenter have to do with
the grand affairs of the Pyncheon family?"
"Perhaps nothing," returned Mr. Pyncheon, "possibly much!"
Here ensued a great many words between Matthew Maule and the proprietor
of the Seven Gables, on the subject which the latter had thus broached.
It seems (although Mr. Pyncheon had some hesitation in referring to
stories so exceedingly absurd in their aspect) that the popular belief
pointed to some mysterious connection and dependence, existing between
the family of the Maules and these vast unrealized possessions of the
Pyncheons. It was an ordinary saying that the old wizard, hanged
though he was, had obtained the best end of the bargain in his contest
with Colonel Pyncheon; inasmuch as he had got possession of the great
Eastern claim, in exchange for an acre or two of garden-ground. A very
aged woman, recently dead, had often used the metaphorical expression,
in her fireside talk, that miles and miles of the Pyncheon lands had
been shovelled into Maule's grave; which, by the bye, was but a very
shallow nook, between two rocks, near the summit of Gallows Hill.
Again, when the lawyers were making inquiry for the missing document,
it was a by-word that it would never be found, unless in the wizard's
skeleton hand. So much weight had the shrewd lawyers assigned to these
fables, that (but Mr. Pyncheon did not see fit to inform the carpenter
of the fact) they had secretly caused the wizard's grave to be
searched. Nothing was discovered, however, except that, unaccountably,
the right hand of the skeleton was gone.
Now, what was unquestionably important, a portion of these popular
rumors could be traced, though rather doubtfully and indistinctly, to
chance words and obscure hints of the executed wizard's son, and the
father of this present Matthew Maule. And here Mr. Pyncheon could
bring an item of his own personal evidence into play. Though but a
child at the time, he either remembered or fancied that Matthew's
father had had some job to perform on the day before, or possibly the
very morning of the Colonel's decease, in the private room where he and
the carpenter were at this moment talking. Certain papers belonging to
Colonel Pyncheon, as his grandson distinctly recollected, had been
spread out on the table.
Matthew Maule understood the insinuated suspicion.
"My father," he said,--but still there was that dark smile, making a
riddle of his countenance,--"my father was an honester man than the
bloody old Colonel! Not to get his rights back again would he have
carried off one of those papers!"
"I shall not bandy words with you," observed the foreign-bred Mr.
Pyncheon, with haughty composure. "Nor will it become me to resent any
rudeness towards either my grandfather or myself. A gentleman, before
seeking intercourse with a person of your station and habits, will
first consider whether the urgency of the end may compensate for the
disagreeableness of the means. It does so in the present instance."
He then renewed the conversation, and made great pecuniary offers to
the carpenter, in case the latter should give information leading to
the discovery of the lost document, and the consequent success of the
Eastern claim. For a long time Matthew Maule is said to have turned a
cold ear to these propositions. At last, however, with a strange kind
of laugh, he inquired whether Mr. Pyncheon would make over to him the
old wizard's homestead-ground, together with the House of the Seven
Gables, now standing on it, in requital of the documentary evidence so
urgently required.
The wild, chimney-corner legend (which, without copying all its
extravagances, my narrative essentially follows) here gives an account
of some very strange behavior on the part of Colonel Pyncheon's
portrait. This picture, it must be understood, was supposed to be so
intimately connected with the fate of the house, and so magically built
into its walls, that, if once it should be removed, that very instant
the whole edifice would come thundering down in a heap of dusty ruin.
All through the foregoing conversation between Mr. Pyncheon and the
carpenter, the portrait had been frowning, clenching its fist, and
giving many such proofs of excessive discomposure, but without
attracting the notice of either of the two colloquists. And finally,
at Matthew Maule's audacious suggestion of a transfer of the
seven-gabled structure, the ghostly portrait is averred to have lost
all patience, and to have shown itself on the point of descending
bodily from its frame. But such incredible incidents are merely to be
mentioned aside.
"Give up this house!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, in amazement at the
proposal. "Were I to do so, my grandfather would not rest quiet in his
grave!"
"He never has, if all stories are true," remarked the carpenter
composedly. "But that matter concerns his grandson more than it does
Matthew Maule. I have no other terms to propose."
Impossible as he at first thought it to comply with Maule's conditions,
still, on a second glance, Mr. Pyncheon was of opinion that they might
at least be made matter of discussion. He himself had no personal
attachment for the house, nor any pleasant associations connected with
his childish residence in it. On the contrary, after seven-and-thirty
years, the presence of his dead grandfather seemed still to pervade it,
as on that morning when the affrighted boy had beheld him, with so
ghastly an aspect, stiffening in his chair. His long abode in foreign
parts, moreover, and familiarity with many of the castles and ancestral
halls of England, and the marble palaces of Italy, had caused him to
look contemptuously at the House of the Seven Gables, whether in point
of splendor or convenience. It was a mansion exceedingly inadequate to
the style of living which it would be incumbent on Mr. Pyncheon to
support, after realizing his territorial rights. His steward might
deign to occupy it, but never, certainly, the great landed proprietor
himself. In the event of success, indeed, it was his purpose to return
to England; nor, to say the truth, would he recently have quitted that
more congenial home, had not his own fortune, as well as his deceased
wife's, begun to give symptoms of exhaustion. The Eastern claim once
fairly settled, and put upon the firm basis of actual possession, Mr.
Pyncheon's property--to be measured by miles, not acres--would be worth
an earldom, and would reasonably entitle him to solicit, or enable him
to purchase, that elevated dignity from the British monarch. Lord
Pyncheon!--or the Earl of Waldo!--how could such a magnate be expected
to contract his grandeur within the pitiful compass of seven shingled
gables?
In short, on an enlarged view of the business, the carpenter's terms
appeared so ridiculously easy that Mr. Pyncheon could scarcely forbear
laughing in his face. He was quite ashamed, after the foregoing
reflections, to propose any diminution of so moderate a recompense for
the immense service to be rendered.
"I consent to your proposition, Maule!" cried he. "Put me in possession
of the document essential to establish my rights, and the House of the
Seven Gables is your own!"
According to some versions of the story, a regular contract to the
above effect was drawn up by a lawyer, and signed and sealed in the
presence of witnesses. Others say that Matthew Maule was contented
with a private written agreement, in which Mr. Pyncheon pledged his
honor and integrity to the fulfillment of the terms concluded upon.
The gentleman then ordered wine, which he and the carpenter drank
together, in confirmation of their bargain. During the whole preceding
discussion and subsequent formalities, the old Puritan's portrait seems
to have persisted in its shadowy gestures of disapproval; but without
effect, except that, as Mr. Pyncheon set down the emptied glass, he
thought he beheld his grandfather frown.
"This sherry is too potent a wine for me; it has affected my brain
already," he observed, after a somewhat startled look at the picture.
"On returning to Europe, I shall confine myself to the more delicate
vintages of Italy and France, the best of which will not bear
transportation."
"My Lord Pyncheon may drink what wine he will, and wherever he
pleases," replied the carpenter, as if he had been privy to Mr.
Pyncheon's ambitious projects. "But first, sir, if you desire tidings
of this lost document, I must crave the favor of a little talk with
your fair daughter Alice."
"You are mad, Maule!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon haughtily; and now, at
last, there was anger mixed up with his pride. "What can my daughter
have to do with a business like this?"
Indeed, at this new demand on the carpenter's part, the proprietor of
the Seven Gables was even more thunder-struck than at the cool
proposition to surrender his house. There was, at least, an assignable
motive for the first stipulation; there appeared to be none whatever
for the last. Nevertheless, Matthew Maule sturdily insisted on the
young lady being summoned, and even gave her father to understand, in a
mysterious kind of explanation,--which made the matter considerably
darker than it looked before,--that the only chance of acquiring the
requisite knowledge was through the clear, crystal medium of a pure and
virgin intelligence, like that of the fair Alice. Not to encumber our
story with Mr. Pyncheon's scruples, whether of conscience, pride, or
fatherly affection, he at length ordered his daughter to be called. He
well knew that she was in her chamber, and engaged in no occupation
that could not readily be laid aside; for, as it happened, ever since
Alice's name had been spoken, both her father and the carpenter had
heard the sad and sweet music of her harpsichord, and the airier
melancholy of her accompanying voice.
So Alice Pyncheon was summoned, and appeared. A portrait of this young
lady, painted by a Venetian artist, and left by her father in England,
is said to have fallen into the hands of the present Duke of
Devonshire, and to be now preserved at Chatsworth; not on account of
any associations with the original, but for its value as a picture, and
the high character of beauty in the countenance. If ever there was a
lady born, and set apart from the world's vulgar mass by a certain
gentle and cold stateliness, it was this very Alice Pyncheon. Yet
there was the womanly mixture in her; the tenderness, or, at least, the
tender capabilities. For the sake of that redeeming quality, a man of
generous nature would have forgiven all her pride, and have been
content, almost, to lie down in her path, and let Alice set her slender
foot upon his heart. All that he would have required was simply the
acknowledgment that he was indeed a man, and a fellow-being, moulded of
the same elements as she.
As Alice came into the room, her eyes fell upon the carpenter, who was
standing near its centre, clad in green woollen jacket, a pair of loose
breeches, open at the knees, and with a long pocket for his rule, the
end of which protruded; it was as proper a mark of the artisan's
calling as Mr. Pyncheon's full-dress sword of that gentleman's
aristocratic pretensions. A glow of artistic approval brightened over
Alice Pyncheon's face; she was struck with admiration--which she made
no attempt to conceal--of the remarkable comeliness, strength, and
energy of Maule's figure. But that admiring glance (which most other
men, perhaps, would have cherished as a sweet recollection all through
life) the carpenter never forgave. It must have been the devil himself
that made Maule so subtile in his preception.
"Does the girl look at me as if I were a brute beast?" thought he,
setting his teeth. "She shall know whether I have a human spirit; and
the worse for her, if it prove stronger than her own!"
"My father, you sent for me," said Alice, in her sweet and harp-like
voice. "But, if you have business with this young man, pray let me go
again. You know I do not love this room, in spite of that Claude, with
which you try to bring back sunny recollections."
"Stay a moment, young lady, if you please!" said Matthew Maule. "My
business with your father is over. With yourself, it is now to begin!"
Alice looked towards her father, in surprise and inquiry.
"Yes, Alice," said Mr. Pyncheon, with some disturbance and confusion.
"This young man--his name is Matthew Maule--professes, so far as I can
understand him, to be able to discover, through your means, a certain
paper or parchment, which was missing long before your birth. The
importance of the document in question renders it advisable to neglect
no possible, even if improbable, method of regaining it. You will
therefore oblige me, my dear Alice, by answering this person's
inquiries, and complying with his lawful and reasonable requests, so
far as they may appear to have the aforesaid object in view. As I
shall remain in the room, you need apprehend no rude nor unbecoming
deportment, on the young man's part; and, at your slightest wish, of
course, the investigation, or whatever we may call it, shall
immediately be broken off."
"Mistress Alice Pyncheon," remarked Matthew Maule, with the utmost
deference, but yet a half-hidden sarcasm in his look and tone, "will no
doubt feel herself quite safe in her father's presence, and under his
all-sufficient protection."
"I certainly shall entertain no manner of apprehension, with my father
at hand," said Alice with maidenly dignity. "Neither do I conceive
that a lady, while true to herself, can have aught to fear from
whomsoever, or in any circumstances!"
Poor Alice! By what unhappy impulse did she thus put herself at once on
terms of defiance against a strength which she could not estimate?
"Then, Mistress Alice," said Matthew Maule, handing a
chair,--gracefully enough, for a craftsman, "will it please you only to
sit down, and do me the favor (though altogether beyond a poor
carpenter's deserts) to fix your eyes on mine!"
Alice complied, She was very proud. Setting aside all advantages of
rank, this fair girl deemed herself conscious of a power--combined of
beauty, high, unsullied purity, and the preservative force of
womanhood--that could make her sphere impenetrable, unless betrayed by
treachery within. She instinctively knew, it may be, that some
sinister or evil potency was now striving to pass her barriers; nor
would she decline the contest. So Alice put woman's might against
man's might; a match not often equal on the part of woman.
Her father meanwhile had turned away, and seemed absorbed in the
contemplation of a landscape by Claude, where a shadowy and
sun-streaked vista penetrated so remotely into an ancient wood, that it
would have been no wonder if his fancy had lost itself in the picture's
bewildering depths. But, in truth, the picture was no more to him at
that moment than the blank wall against which it hung. His mind was
haunted with the many and strange tales which he had heard, attributing
mysterious if not supernatural endowments to these Maules, as well the
grandson here present as his two immediate ancestors. Mr. Pyncheon's
long residence abroad, and intercourse with men of wit and
fashion,--courtiers, worldings, and free-thinkers,--had done much
towards obliterating the grim Puritan superstitions, which no man of
New England birth at that early period could entirely escape. But, on
the other hand, had not a whole community believed Maule's grandfather
to be a wizard? Had not the crime been proved? Had not the wizard died
for it? Had he not bequeathed a legacy of hatred against the Pyncheons
to this only grandson, who, as it appeared, was now about to exercise a
subtle influence over the daughter of his enemy's house? Might not
this influence be the same that was called witchcraft?
Turning half around, he caught a glimpse of Maule's figure in the
looking-glass. At some paces from Alice, with his arms uplifted in the
air, the carpenter made a gesture as if directing downward a slow,
ponderous, and invisible weight upon the maiden.
"Stay, Maule!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, stepping forward. "I forbid
your proceeding further!"
"Pray, my dear father, do not interrupt the young man," said Alice,
without changing her position. "His efforts, I assure you, will prove
very harmless."
Again Mr. Pyncheon turned his eyes towards the Claude. It was then his
daughter's will, in opposition to his own, that the experiment should
be fully tried. Henceforth, therefore, he did but consent, not urge
it. And was it not for her sake far more than for his own that he
desired its success? That lost parchment once restored, the beautiful
Alice Pyncheon, with the rich dowry which he could then bestow, might
wed an English duke or a German reigning-prince, instead of some New
England clergyman or lawyer! At the thought, the ambitious father
almost consented, in his heart, that, if the devil's power were needed
to the accomplishment of this great object, Maule might evoke him.
Alice's own purity would be her safeguard.
With his mind full of imaginary magnificence, Mr. Pyncheon heard a
half-uttered exclamation from his daughter. It was very faint and low;
so indistinct that there seemed but half a will to shape out the words,
and too undefined a purport to be intelligible. Yet it was a call for
help!--his conscience never doubted it;--and, little more than a
whisper to his ear, it was a dismal shriek, and long reechoed so, in
the region round his heart! But this time the father did not turn.
After a further interval, Maule spoke.
"Behold your daughter," said he.
Mr. Pyncheon came hastily forward. The carpenter was standing erect in
front of Alice's chair, and pointing his finger towards the maiden with
an expression of triumphant power, the limits of which could not be
defined, as, indeed, its scope stretched vaguely towards the unseen and
the infinite. Alice sat in an attitude of profound repose, with the
long brown lashes drooping over her eyes.
"There she is!" said the carpenter. "Speak to her!"
"Alice! My daughter!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon. "My own Alice!"
She did not stir.
"Louder!" said Maule, smiling.
"Alice! Awake!" cried her father. "It troubles me to see you thus!
Awake!"
He spoke loudly, with terror in his voice, and close to that delicate
ear which had always been so sensitive to every discord. But the sound
evidently reached her not. It is indescribable what a sense of remote,
dim, unattainable distance betwixt himself and Alice was impressed on
the father by this impossibility of reaching her with his voice.
"Best touch her!" said Matthew Maule "Shake the girl, and roughly, too!
My hands are hardened with too much use of axe, saw, and plane,--else I
might help you!"
Mr. Pyncheon took her hand, and pressed it with the earnestness of
startled emotion. He kissed her, with so great a heart-throb in the
kiss, that he thought she must needs feel it. Then, in a gust of anger
at her insensibility, he shook her maiden form with a violence which,
the next moment, it affrighted him to remember. He withdrew his
encircling arms, and Alice--whose figure, though flexible, had been
wholly impassive--relapsed into the same attitude as before these
attempts to arouse her. Maule having shifted his position, her face
was turned towards him slightly, but with what seemed to be a reference
of her very slumber to his guidance.
Then it was a strange sight to behold how the man of conventionalities
shook the powder out of his periwig; how the reserved and stately
gentleman forgot his dignity; how the gold-embroidered waistcoat
flickered and glistened in the firelight with the convulsion of rage,
terror, and sorrow in the human heart that was beating under it.
"Villain!" cried Mr. Pyncheon, shaking his clenched fist at Maule.
"You and the fiend together have robbed me of my daughter. Give her
back, spawn of the old wizard, or you shall climb Gallows Hill in your
grandfather's footsteps!"
"Softly, Mr. Pyncheon!" said the carpenter with scornful composure.
"Softly, an' it please your worship, else you will spoil those rich
lace-ruffles at your wrists! Is it my crime if you have sold your
daughter for the mere hope of getting a sheet of yellow parchment into
your clutch? There sits Mistress Alice quietly asleep. Now let Matthew
Maule try whether she be as proud as the carpenter found her awhile
since."
He spoke, and Alice responded, with a soft, subdued, inward
acquiescence, and a bending of her form towards him, like the flame of
a torch when it indicates a gentle draught of air. He beckoned with
his hand, and, rising from her chair,--blindly, but undoubtingly, as
tending to her sure and inevitable centre,--the proud Alice approached
him. He waved her back, and, retreating, Alice sank again into her
seat.
"She is mine!" said Matthew Maule. "Mine, by the right of the
strongest spirit!"
In the further progress of the legend, there is a long, grotesque, and
occasionally awe-striking account of the carpenter's incantations (if
so they are to be called), with a view of discovering the lost
document. It appears to have been his object to convert the mind of
Alice into a kind of telescopic medium, through which Mr. Pyncheon and
himself might obtain a glimpse into the spiritual world. He succeeded,
accordingly, in holding an imperfect sort of intercourse, at one
remove, with the departed personages in whose custody the so much
valued secret had been carried beyond the precincts of earth. During
her trance, Alice described three figures as being present to her
spiritualized perception. One was an aged, dignified, stern-looking
gentleman, clad as for a solemn festival in grave and costly attire,
but with a great blood-stain on his richly wrought band; the second, an
aged man, meanly dressed, with a dark and malign countenance, and a
broken halter about his neck; the third, a person not so advanced in
life as the former two, but beyond the middle age, wearing a coarse
woollen tunic and leather breeches, and with a carpenter's rule
sticking out of his side pocket. These three visionary characters
possessed a mutual knowledge of the missing document. One of them, in
truth,--it was he with the blood-stain on his band,--seemed, unless his
gestures were misunderstood, to hold the parchment in his immediate
keeping, but was prevented by his two partners in the mystery from
disburdening himself of the trust. Finally, when he showed a purpose
of shouting forth the secret loudly enough to be heard from his own
sphere into that of mortals, his companions struggled with him, and
pressed their hands over his mouth; and forthwith--whether that he were
choked by it, or that the secret itself was of a crimson hue--there was
a fresh flow of blood upon his band. Upon this, the two meanly dressed
figures mocked and jeered at the much-abashed old dignitary, and
pointed their fingers at the stain.
At this juncture, Maule turned to Mr. Pyncheon.
"It will never be allowed," said he. "The custody of this secret, that
would so enrich his heirs, makes part of your grandfather's
retribution. He must choke with it until it is no longer of any value.
And keep you the House of the Seven Gables! It is too dear bought an
inheritance, and too heavy with the curse upon it, to be shifted yet
awhile from the Colonel's posterity."
Mr. Pyncheon tried to speak, but--what with fear and passion--could
make only a gurgling murmur in his throat. The carpenter smiled.
"Aha, worshipful sir!--so you have old Maule's blood to drink!" said he
jeeringly.
"Fiend in man's shape! why dost thou keep dominion over my child?"
cried Mr. Pyncheon, when his choked utterance could make way. "Give me
back my daughter. Then go thy ways; and may we never meet again!"
"Your daughter!" said Matthew Maule. "Why, she is fairly mine!
Nevertheless, not to be too hard with fair Mistress Alice, I will leave
her in your keeping; but I do not warrant you that she shall never have
occasion to remember Maule, the carpenter."
He waved his hands with an upward motion; and, after a few repetitions
of similar gestures, the beautiful Alice Pyncheon awoke from her
strange trance. She awoke without the slightest recollection of her
visionary experience; but as one losing herself in a momentary reverie,
and returning to the consciousness of actual life, in almost as brief
an interval as the down-sinking flame of the hearth should quiver again
up the chimney. On recognizing Matthew Maule, she assumed an air of
somewhat cold but gentle dignity, the rather, as there was a certain
peculiar smile on the carpenter's visage that stirred the native pride
of the fair Alice. So ended, for that time, the quest for the lost
title-deed of the Pyncheon territory at the Eastward; nor, though often
subsequently renewed, has it ever yet befallen a Pyncheon to set his
eye upon that parchment.
But, alas for the beautiful, the gentle, yet too haughty Alice! A
power that she little dreamed of had laid its grasp upon her maiden
soul. A will, most unlike her own, constrained her to do its grotesque
and fantastic bidding. Her father as it proved, had martyred his poor
child to an inordinate desire for measuring his land by miles instead
of acres. And, therefore, while Alice Pyncheon lived, she was Maule's
slave, in a bondage more humiliating, a thousand-fold, than that which
binds its chain around the body. Seated by his humble fireside, Maule
had but to wave his hand; and, wherever the proud lady chanced to
be,--whether in her chamber, or entertaining her father's stately
guests, or worshipping at church,--whatever her place or occupation,
her spirit passed from beneath her own control, and bowed itself to
Maule. "Alice, laugh!"--the carpenter, beside his hearth, would say;
or perhaps intensely will it, without a spoken word. And, even were it
prayer-time, or at a funeral, Alice must break into wild laughter.
"Alice, be sad!"--and, at the instant, down would come her tears,
quenching all the mirth of those around her like sudden rain upon a
bonfire. "Alice, dance."--and dance she would, not in such court-like
measures as she had learned abroad, but some high-paced jig, or
hop-skip rigadoon, befitting the brisk lasses at a rustic merry-making.
It seemed to be Maule's impulse, not to ruin Alice, nor to visit her
with any black or gigantic mischief, which would have crowned her
sorrows with the grace of tragedy, but to wreak a low, ungenerous scorn
upon her. Thus all the dignity of life was lost. She felt herself too
much abased, and longed to change natures with some worm!
One evening, at a bridal party (but not her own; for, so lost from
self-control, she would have deemed it sin to marry), poor Alice was
beckoned forth by her unseen despot, and constrained, in her gossamer
white dress and satin slippers, to hasten along the street to the mean
dwelling of a laboring-man. There was laughter and good cheer within;
for Matthew Maule, that night, was to wed the laborer's daughter, and
had summoned proud Alice Pyncheon to wait upon his bride. And so she
did; and when the twain were one, Alice awoke out of her enchanted
sleep. Yet, no longer proud,--humbly, and with a smile all steeped in
sadness,--she kissed Maule's wife, and went her way. It was an
inclement night; the southeast wind drove the mingled snow and rain
into her thinly sheltered bosom; her satin slippers were wet through
and through, as she trod the muddy sidewalks. The next day a cold;
soon, a settled cough; anon, a hectic cheek, a wasted form, that sat
beside the harpsichord, and filled the house with music! Music in
which a strain of the heavenly choristers was echoed! Oh; joy! For
Alice had borne her last humiliation! Oh, greater joy! For Alice was
penitent of her one earthly sin, and proud no more!
The Pyncheons made a great funeral for Alice. The kith and kin were
there, and the whole respectability of the town besides. But, last in
the procession, came Matthew Maule, gnashing his teeth, as if he would
have bitten his own heart in twain,--the darkest and wofullest man that
ever walked behind a corpse! He meant to humble Alice, not to kill her;
but he had taken a woman's delicate soul into his rude gripe, to play
with--and she was dead!
| Alice Pyncheon This chapter is the text of Holgrave's story about the Pyncheon curse, which he reads aloud to Phoebe. Gervayse Pyncheon, the grandson of Colonel Pyncheon, summons a carpenter named Matthew Maule, the grandson of the same Matthew Maule who placed the curse on the Pyncheon family. The younger Maule, a bitter and unpopular carpenter, knows the family legend well and has a deep hatred for the Pyncheons. Maule believes that the house of the seven gables is rightfully his and that the curse will never end until the house has been returned to the Maule family. Although he is only a laborer, Maule defiantly barges into the house through the front door and demands to know what Pyncheon wants. Pyncheon, now a middle-aged man, has not lived in the house for very long. He spent his younger years in Europe, where he got married and traveled the continent. Now that Gervayse has returned to New England, however, he is interested in the large area of land in Maine that Colonel Pyncheon was in the process of acquiring when he died. Gervayse believes that the Maule family may know where the missing deeds to the land are, since the current Matthew Maule's father, the first Maule's son, was working on the Pyncheon house when these deeds disappeared. The Pyncheons have searched thoroughly for the missing document, even digging up the grave of the first Matthew Maule to look for it, but have been unable to find it. The younger Maule turns a deaf ear to Gervayse's offers of money if he can produce the desired documentation, but he eventually agrees to help Gervayse in exchange for the house of the seven gables. After some deliberation, Gervayse decides that the exchange is worth it, and they have a celebratory drink. Before giving the information, Maule asks to see Gervayse's young daughter, Alice Pyncheon. Gervayse reluctantly agrees. When Alice enters, she admires the strength and artistry evident in the younger Maule, but he mistakes her glance for haughtiness. He makes her sit down and hypnotizes her. Gervayse has a premonition that Maule is doing something terrible, but Alice waves her father off, and this dismissal, combined with his greed, keep Gervayse from protesting. Maule uses Alice as a medium to contact the spirits of Colonel Pyncheon, the older Matthew Maule, and his own father. In Alice's vision, the two Maule spirits physically restrain the ghost of the Colonel from divulging the document's location, and he is so choked with his own secret that he begins to cough up blood. The younger Maule declares that the secret will not be revealed until the deed no longer has value. He tells Pyncheon to keep the house of the seven gables and glories in the fact that he now has control over Alice. Over the next few years, Maule uses his power to toy with Alice. Regardless of where she is, she is at his beck and call. He can make her happy or sad at the most inopportune times, or have her dance a vulgar jig anytime he pleases. Alice suffers greatly from this indignity, and she refuses to marry while her life is not her own. One night, she is summoned by Maule from a bridal party to a laborer's home, and trudges through the dark and snow wearing only a light evening gown. She arrives at the home, where Maule is marrying the laborer's daughter, and he uses his powers to force Alice to wait upon and serve his new bride. Alice wakes up from her trance once the ceremony is over and humbly kisses the new bride before heading back home. Inappropriately clad for the cold weather, however, Alice catches pneumonia and dies. The last marcher in the elaborate funeral procession is Matthew Maule, who is broken with guilt by the way his petty antics, which were only meant to humble, have cost the innocent girl her life | summary |
HOLGRAVE, plunging into his tale with the energy and absorption natural
to a young author, had given a good deal of action to the parts capable
of being developed and exemplified in that manner. He now observed
that a certain remarkable drowsiness (wholly unlike that with which the
reader possibly feels himself affected) had been flung over the senses
of his auditress. It was the effect, unquestionably, of the mystic
gesticulations by which he had sought to bring bodily before Phoebe's
perception the figure of the mesmerizing carpenter. With the lids
drooping over her eyes,--now lifted for an instant, and drawn down
again as with leaden weights,--she leaned slightly towards him, and
seemed almost to regulate her breath by his. Holgrave gazed at her, as
he rolled up his manuscript, and recognized an incipient stage of that
curious psychological condition which, as he had himself told Phoebe,
he possessed more than an ordinary faculty of producing. A veil was
beginning to be muffled about her, in which she could behold only him,
and live only in his thoughts and emotions. His glance, as he fastened
it on the young girl, grew involuntarily more concentrated; in his
attitude there was the consciousness of power, investing his hardly
mature figure with a dignity that did not belong to its physical
manifestation. It was evident, that, with but one wave of his hand and
a corresponding effort of his will, he could complete his mastery over
Phoebe's yet free and virgin spirit: he could establish an influence
over this good, pure, and simple child, as dangerous, and perhaps as
disastrous, as that which the carpenter of his legend had acquired and
exercised over the ill-fated Alice.
To a disposition like Holgrave's, at once speculative and active, there
is no temptation so great as the opportunity of acquiring empire over
the human spirit; nor any idea more seductive to a young man than to
become the arbiter of a young girl's destiny. Let us,
therefore,--whatever his defects of nature and education, and in spite
of his scorn for creeds and institutions,--concede to the
daguerreotypist the rare and high quality of reverence for another's
individuality. Let us allow him integrity, also, forever after to be
confided in; since he forbade himself to twine that one link more which
might have rendered his spell over Phoebe indissoluble.
He made a slight gesture upward with his hand.
"You really mortify me, my dear Miss Phoebe!" he exclaimed, smiling
half-sarcastically at her. "My poor story, it is but too evident, will
never do for Godey or Graham! Only think of your falling asleep at what
I hoped the newspaper critics would pronounce a most brilliant,
powerful, imaginative, pathetic, and original winding up! Well, the
manuscript must serve to light lamps with;--if, indeed, being so imbued
with my gentle dulness, it is any longer capable of flame!"
"Me asleep! How can you say so?" answered Phoebe, as unconscious of the
crisis through which she had passed as an infant of the precipice to
the verge of which it has rolled. "No, no! I consider myself as having
been very attentive; and, though I don't remember the incidents quite
distinctly, yet I have an impression of a vast deal of trouble and
calamity,--so, no doubt, the story will prove exceedingly attractive."
By this time the sun had gone down, and was tinting the clouds towards
the zenith with those bright hues which are not seen there until some
time after sunset, and when the horizon has quite lost its richer
brilliancy. The moon, too, which had long been climbing overhead, and
unobtrusively melting its disk into the azure,--like an ambitious
demagogue, who hides his aspiring purpose by assuming the prevalent hue
of popular sentiment,--now began to shine out, broad and oval, in its
middle pathway. These silvery beams were already powerful enough to
change the character of the lingering daylight. They softened and
embellished the aspect of the old house; although the shadows fell
deeper into the angles of its many gables, and lay brooding under the
projecting story, and within the half-open door. With the lapse of
every moment, the garden grew more picturesque; the fruit-trees,
shrubbery, and flower-bushes had a dark obscurity among them. The
commonplace characteristics--which, at noontide, it seemed to have
taken a century of sordid life to accumulate--were now transfigured by
a charm of romance. A hundred mysterious years were whispering among
the leaves, whenever the slight sea-breeze found its way thither and
stirred them. Through the foliage that roofed the little summer-house
the moonlight flickered to and fro, and fell silvery white on the dark
floor, the table, and the circular bench, with a continual shift and
play, according as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs
admitted or shut out the glimmer.
So sweetly cool was the atmosphere, after all the feverish day, that
the summer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid
moonlight, with a dash of icy temper in them, out of a silver vase.
Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human
heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of
nature. The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence
fell. It made him feel--what he sometimes almost forgot, thrust so
early as he had been into the rude struggle of man with man--how
youthful he still was.
"It seems to me," he observed, "that I never watched the coming of so
beautiful an eve, and never felt anything so very much like happiness
as at this moment. After all, what a good world we live in! How good,
and beautiful! How young it is, too, with nothing really rotten or
age-worn in it! This old house, for example, which sometimes has
positively oppressed my breath with its smell of decaying timber! And
this garden, where the black mould always clings to my spade, as if I
were a sexton delving in a graveyard! Could I keep the feeling that now
possesses me, the garden would every day be virgin soil, with the
earth's first freshness in the flavor of its beans and squashes; and
the house!--it would be like a bower in Eden, blossoming with the
earliest roses that God ever made. Moonlight, and the sentiment in
man's heart responsive to it, are the greatest of renovators and
reformers. And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove
to be no better than moonshine!"
"I have been happier than I am now; at least, much gayer," said Phoebe
thoughtfully. "Yet I am sensible of a great charm in this brightening
moonlight; and I love to watch how the day, tired as it is, lags away
reluctantly, and hates to be called yesterday so soon. I never cared
much about moonlight before. What is there, I wonder, so beautiful in
it, to-night?"
"And you have never felt it before?" inquired the artist, looking
earnestly at the girl through the twilight.
"Never," answered Phoebe; "and life does not look the same, now that I
have felt it so. It seems as if I had looked at everything, hitherto,
in broad daylight, or else in the ruddy light of a cheerful fire,
glimmering and dancing through a room. Ah, poor me!" she added, with a
half-melancholy laugh. "I shall never be so merry as before I knew
Cousin Hepzibah and poor Cousin Clifford. I have grown a great deal
older, in this little time. Older, and, I hope, wiser, and,--not
exactly sadder,--but, certainly, with not half so much lightness in my
spirits! I have given them my sunshine, and have been glad to give it;
but, of course, I cannot both give and keep it. They are welcome,
notwithstanding!"
"You have lost nothing, Phoebe, worth keeping, nor which it was
possible to keep," said Holgrave after a pause. "Our first youth is of
no value; for we are never conscious of it until after it is gone. But
sometimes--always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly
unfortunate--there comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the
heart's joy at being in love; or, possibly, it may come to crown some
other grand festival in life, if any other such there be. This
bemoaning of one's self (as you do now) over the first, careless,
shallow gayety of youth departed, and this profound happiness at youth
regained,--so much deeper and richer than that we lost,--are essential
to the soul's development. In some cases, the two states come almost
simultaneously, and mingle the sadness and the rapture in one
mysterious emotion."
"I hardly think I understand you," said Phoebe.
"No wonder," replied Holgrave, smiling; "for I have told you a secret
which I hardly began to know before I found myself giving it utterance.
Remember it, however; and when the truth becomes clear to you, then
think of this moonlight scene!"
"It is entirely moonlight now, except only a little flush of faint
crimson, upward from the west, between those buildings," remarked
Phoebe. "I must go in. Cousin Hepzibah is not quick at figures, and
will give herself a headache over the day's accounts, unless I help
her."
But Holgrave detained her a little longer.
"Miss Hepzibah tells me," observed he, "that you return to the country
in a few days."
"Yes, but only for a little while," answered Phoebe; "for I look upon
this as my present home. I go to make a few arrangements, and to take
a more deliberate leave of my mother and friends. It is pleasant to
live where one is much desired and very useful; and I think I may have
the satisfaction of feeling myself so here."
"You surely may, and more than you imagine," said the artist.
"Whatever health, comfort, and natural life exists in the house is
embodied in your person. These blessings came along with you, and will
vanish when you leave the threshold. Miss Hepzibah, by secluding
herself from society, has lost all true relation with it, and is, in
fact, dead; although she galvanizes herself into a semblance of life,
and stands behind her counter, afflicting the world with a
greatly-to-be-deprecated scowl. Your poor cousin Clifford is another
dead and long-buried person, on whom the governor and council have
wrought a necromantic miracle. I should not wonder if he were to
crumble away, some morning, after you are gone, and nothing be seen of
him more, except a heap of dust. Miss Hepzibah, at any rate, will lose
what little flexibility she has. They both exist by you."
"I should be very sorry to think so," answered Phoebe gravely. "But it
is true that my small abilities were precisely what they needed; and I
have a real interest in their welfare,--an odd kind of motherly
sentiment,--which I wish you would not laugh at! And let me tell you
frankly, Mr. Holgrave, I am sometimes puzzled to know whether you wish
them well or ill."
"Undoubtedly," said the daguerreotypist, "I do feel an interest in this
antiquated, poverty-stricken old maiden lady, and this degraded and
shattered gentleman,--this abortive lover of the beautiful. A kindly
interest, too, helpless old children that they are! But you have no
conception what a different kind of heart mine is from your own. It is
not my impulse, as regards these two individuals, either to help or
hinder; but to look on, to analyze, to explain matters to myself, and
to comprehend the drama which, for almost two hundred years, has been
dragging its slow length over the ground where you and I now tread. If
permitted to witness the close, I doubt not to derive a moral
satisfaction from it, go matters how they may. There is a conviction
within me that the end draws nigh. But, though Providence sent you
hither to help, and sends me only as a privileged and meet spectator, I
pledge myself to lend these unfortunate beings whatever aid I can!"
"I wish you would speak more plainly," cried Phoebe, perplexed and
displeased; "and, above all, that you would feel more like a Christian
and a human being! How is it possible to see people in distress without
desiring, more than anything else, to help and comfort them? You talk
as if this old house were a theatre; and you seem to look at Hepzibah's
and Clifford's misfortunes, and those of generations before them, as a
tragedy, such as I have seen acted in the hall of a country hotel, only
the present one appears to be played exclusively for your amusement. I
do not like this. The play costs the performers too much, and the
audience is too cold-hearted."
"You are severe," said Holgrave, compelled to recognize a degree of
truth in the piquant sketch of his own mood.
"And then," continued Phoebe, "what can you mean by your conviction,
which you tell me of, that the end is drawing near? Do you know of any
new trouble hanging over my poor relatives? If so, tell me at once, and
I will not leave them!"
"Forgive me, Phoebe!" said the daguerreotypist, holding out his hand,
to which the girl was constrained to yield her own. "I am somewhat of
a mystic, it must be confessed. The tendency is in my blood, together
with the faculty of mesmerism, which might have brought me to Gallows
Hill, in the good old times of witchcraft. Believe me, if I were
really aware of any secret, the disclosure of which would benefit your
friends,--who are my own friends, likewise,--you should learn it before
we part. But I have no such knowledge."
"You hold something back!" said Phoebe.
"Nothing,--no secrets but my own," answered Holgrave. "I can perceive,
indeed, that Judge Pyncheon still keeps his eye on Clifford, in whose
ruin he had so large a share. His motives and intentions, however are
a mystery to me. He is a determined and relentless man, with the
genuine character of an inquisitor; and had he any object to gain by
putting Clifford to the rack, I verily believe that he would wrench his
joints from their sockets, in order to accomplish it. But, so wealthy
and eminent as he is,--so powerful in his own strength, and in the
support of society on all sides,--what can Judge Pyncheon have to hope
or fear from the imbecile, branded, half-torpid Clifford?"
"Yet," urged Phoebe, "you did speak as if misfortune were impending!"
"Oh, that was because I am morbid!" replied the artist. "My mind has a
twist aside, like almost everybody's mind, except your own. Moreover,
it is so strange to find myself an inmate of this old Pyncheon House,
and sitting in this old garden--(hark, how Maule's well is
murmuring!)--that, were it only for this one circumstance, I cannot
help fancying that Destiny is arranging its fifth act for a
catastrophe."
"There!" cried Phoebe with renewed vexation; for she was by nature as
hostile to mystery as the sunshine to a dark corner. "You puzzle me
more than ever!"
"Then let us part friends!" said Holgrave, pressing her hand. "Or, if
not friends, let us part before you entirely hate me. You, who love
everybody else in the world!"
"Good-by, then," said Phoebe frankly. "I do not mean to be angry a
great while, and should be sorry to have you think so. There has
Cousin Hepzibah been standing in the shadow of the doorway, this
quarter of an hour past! She thinks I stay too long in the damp garden.
So, good-night, and good-by."
On the second morning thereafter, Phoebe might have been seen, in her
straw bonnet, with a shawl on one arm and a little carpet-bag on the
other, bidding adieu to Hepzibah and Cousin Clifford. She was to take
a seat in the next train of cars, which would transport her to within
half a dozen miles of her country village.
The tears were in Phoebe's eyes; a smile, dewy with affectionate
regret, was glimmering around her pleasant mouth. She wondered how it
came to pass, that her life of a few weeks, here in this heavy-hearted
old mansion, had taken such hold of her, and so melted into her
associations, as now to seem a more important centre-point of
remembrance than all which had gone before. How had Hepzibah--grim,
silent, and irresponsive to her overflow of cordial sentiment--contrived
to win so much love? And Clifford,--in his abortive decay, with the
mystery of fearful crime upon him, and the close prison-atmosphere yet
lurking in his breath,--how had he transformed himself into the simplest
child, whom Phoebe felt bound to watch over, and be, as it were, the
providence of his unconsidered hours! Everything, at that instant of
farewell, stood out prominently to her view. Look where she would, lay
her hand on what she might, the object responded to her consciousness,
as if a moist human heart were in it.
She peeped from the window into the garden, and felt herself more
regretful at leaving this spot of black earth, vitiated with such an
age-long growth of weeds, than joyful at the idea of again scenting her
pine forests and fresh clover-fields. She called Chanticleer, his two
wives, and the venerable chicken, and threw them some crumbs of bread
from the breakfast-table. These being hastily gobbled up, the chicken
spread its wings, and alighted close by Phoebe on the window-sill,
where it looked gravely into her face and vented its emotions in a
croak. Phoebe bade it be a good old chicken during her absence, and
promised to bring it a little bag of buckwheat.
"Ah, Phoebe!" remarked Hepzibah, "you do not smile so naturally as when
you came to us! Then, the smile chose to shine out; now, you choose it
should. It is well that you are going back, for a little while, into
your native air. There has been too much weight on your spirits. The
house is too gloomy and lonesome; the shop is full of vexations; and as
for me, I have no faculty of making things look brighter than they are.
Dear Clifford has been your only comfort!"
"Come hither, Phoebe," suddenly cried her cousin Clifford, who had said
very little all the morning. "Close!--closer!--and look me in the
face!"
Phoebe put one of her small hands on each elbow of his chair, and
leaned her face towards him, so that he might peruse it as carefully as
he would. It is probable that the latent emotions of this parting hour
had revived, in some degree, his bedimmed and enfeebled faculties. At
any rate, Phoebe soon felt that, if not the profound insight of a seer,
yet a more than feminine delicacy of appreciation, was making her heart
the subject of its regard. A moment before, she had known nothing
which she would have sought to hide. Now, as if some secret were
hinted to her own consciousness through the medium of another's
perception, she was fain to let her eyelids droop beneath Clifford's
gaze. A blush, too,--the redder, because she strove hard to keep it
down,--ascended bigger and higher, in a tide of fitful progress, until
even her brow was all suffused with it.
"It is enough, Phoebe," said Clifford, with a melancholy smile. "When
I first saw you, you were the prettiest little maiden in the world; and
now you have deepened into beauty. Girlhood has passed into womanhood;
the bud is a bloom! Go, now--I feel lonelier than I did."
Phoebe took leave of the desolate couple, and passed through the shop,
twinkling her eyelids to shake off a dew-drop; for--considering how
brief her absence was to be, and therefore the folly of being cast down
about it--she would not so far acknowledge her tears as to dry them
with her handkerchief. On the doorstep, she met the little urchin
whose marvellous feats of gastronomy have been recorded in the earlier
pages of our narrative. She took from the window some specimen or
other of natural history,--her eyes being too dim with moisture to
inform her accurately whether it was a rabbit or a hippopotamus,--put
it into the child's hand as a parting gift, and went her way. Old
Uncle Venner was just coming out of his door, with a wood-horse and saw
on his shoulder; and, trudging along the street, he scrupled not to
keep company with Phoebe, so far as their paths lay together; nor, in
spite of his patched coat and rusty beaver, and the curious fashion of
his tow-cloth trousers, could she find it in her heart to outwalk him.
"We shall miss you, next Sabbath afternoon," observed the street
philosopher. "It is unaccountable how little while it takes some folks
to grow just as natural to a man as his own breath; and, begging your
pardon, Miss Phoebe (though there can be no offence in an old man's
saying it), that's just what you've grown to me! My years have been a
great many, and your life is but just beginning; and yet, you are
somehow as familiar to me as if I had found you at my mother's door,
and you had blossomed, like a running vine, all along my pathway since.
Come back soon, or I shall be gone to my farm; for I begin to find
these wood-sawing jobs a little too tough for my back-ache."
"Very soon, Uncle Venner," replied Phoebe.
"And let it be all the sooner, Phoebe, for the sake of those poor souls
yonder," continued her companion. "They can never do without you,
now,--never, Phoebe; never--no more than if one of God's angels had
been living with them, and making their dismal house pleasant and
comfortable! Don't it seem to you they'd be in a sad case, if, some
pleasant summer morning like this, the angel should spread his wings,
and fly to the place he came from? Well, just so they feel, now that
you're going home by the railroad! They can't bear it, Miss Phoebe; so
be sure to come back!"
"I am no angel, Uncle Venner," said Phoebe, smiling, as she offered him
her hand at the street-corner. "But, I suppose, people never feel so
much like angels as when they are doing what little good they may. So
I shall certainly come back!"
Thus parted the old man and the rosy girl; and Phoebe took the wings of
the morning, and was soon flitting almost as rapidly away as if endowed
with the aerial locomotion of the angels to whom Uncle Venner had so
graciously compared her.
| Phoebe's Good Bye Holgrave finishes his story and realizes that his graphic description of Maule's hypnotic techniques have succeeded in mesmerizing Phoebe. For a moment, Holgrave is close to having the same tight grasp on Phoebe as Maule had on Alice, and we are told that for young men of Holgrave's temperament, there is no greater temptation than this power. The narrator tells us, however, that Holgrave's integrity and respect for individuality win out and prevent him from taking advantage of his captive audience member. Holgrave wakes Phoebe up. The sun begins to go down, and the young couple is struck by the romantic beauty of the moonlight. Phoebe mentions that she must soon return to her country home for a short time but that she will be back. She expresses some sadness at the fact that she has become less cheery than she used to be, though she also feels that she is wiser, too. Holgrave says this should be cause for celebration, not sadness. Phoebe is now entering the second phase of her youth, Holgrave says, in which she will be able to appreciate her life much more than before. They then discuss Hepzibah and Clifford, whom Holgrave says are already dead and cannot be brought back. Phoebe is surprised at Holgrave's pessimism and a little offended by his lack of sensitivity. Holgrave asks her forgiveness and explains that he senses trouble. Judge Pyncheon is a cruel man, he suggests, capable of doing horrible things, but his secrets remain a mystery to Holgrave. Holgrave and Phoebe part as friends. When Phoebe prepares to depart, Hepzibah sadly observes that she has lost her smile because "there has been too much weight on spirits" at the house of the seven gables. Clifford has a good look at her face and notices she is now a woman, beautiful rather than pretty, and no longer a girl. As Phoebe leaves, she runs into Uncle Venner, who again refers to her as an angel and tells her to be sure to come back. He tells her, too, that her presence in the house has greatly brightened the lives of her cousins. Phoebe replies that while she is certainly no angel, she has done what little good she can. | summary |
HOLGRAVE, plunging into his tale with the energy and absorption natural
to a young author, had given a good deal of action to the parts capable
of being developed and exemplified in that manner. He now observed
that a certain remarkable drowsiness (wholly unlike that with which the
reader possibly feels himself affected) had been flung over the senses
of his auditress. It was the effect, unquestionably, of the mystic
gesticulations by which he had sought to bring bodily before Phoebe's
perception the figure of the mesmerizing carpenter. With the lids
drooping over her eyes,--now lifted for an instant, and drawn down
again as with leaden weights,--she leaned slightly towards him, and
seemed almost to regulate her breath by his. Holgrave gazed at her, as
he rolled up his manuscript, and recognized an incipient stage of that
curious psychological condition which, as he had himself told Phoebe,
he possessed more than an ordinary faculty of producing. A veil was
beginning to be muffled about her, in which she could behold only him,
and live only in his thoughts and emotions. His glance, as he fastened
it on the young girl, grew involuntarily more concentrated; in his
attitude there was the consciousness of power, investing his hardly
mature figure with a dignity that did not belong to its physical
manifestation. It was evident, that, with but one wave of his hand and
a corresponding effort of his will, he could complete his mastery over
Phoebe's yet free and virgin spirit: he could establish an influence
over this good, pure, and simple child, as dangerous, and perhaps as
disastrous, as that which the carpenter of his legend had acquired and
exercised over the ill-fated Alice.
To a disposition like Holgrave's, at once speculative and active, there
is no temptation so great as the opportunity of acquiring empire over
the human spirit; nor any idea more seductive to a young man than to
become the arbiter of a young girl's destiny. Let us,
therefore,--whatever his defects of nature and education, and in spite
of his scorn for creeds and institutions,--concede to the
daguerreotypist the rare and high quality of reverence for another's
individuality. Let us allow him integrity, also, forever after to be
confided in; since he forbade himself to twine that one link more which
might have rendered his spell over Phoebe indissoluble.
He made a slight gesture upward with his hand.
"You really mortify me, my dear Miss Phoebe!" he exclaimed, smiling
half-sarcastically at her. "My poor story, it is but too evident, will
never do for Godey or Graham! Only think of your falling asleep at what
I hoped the newspaper critics would pronounce a most brilliant,
powerful, imaginative, pathetic, and original winding up! Well, the
manuscript must serve to light lamps with;--if, indeed, being so imbued
with my gentle dulness, it is any longer capable of flame!"
"Me asleep! How can you say so?" answered Phoebe, as unconscious of the
crisis through which she had passed as an infant of the precipice to
the verge of which it has rolled. "No, no! I consider myself as having
been very attentive; and, though I don't remember the incidents quite
distinctly, yet I have an impression of a vast deal of trouble and
calamity,--so, no doubt, the story will prove exceedingly attractive."
By this time the sun had gone down, and was tinting the clouds towards
the zenith with those bright hues which are not seen there until some
time after sunset, and when the horizon has quite lost its richer
brilliancy. The moon, too, which had long been climbing overhead, and
unobtrusively melting its disk into the azure,--like an ambitious
demagogue, who hides his aspiring purpose by assuming the prevalent hue
of popular sentiment,--now began to shine out, broad and oval, in its
middle pathway. These silvery beams were already powerful enough to
change the character of the lingering daylight. They softened and
embellished the aspect of the old house; although the shadows fell
deeper into the angles of its many gables, and lay brooding under the
projecting story, and within the half-open door. With the lapse of
every moment, the garden grew more picturesque; the fruit-trees,
shrubbery, and flower-bushes had a dark obscurity among them. The
commonplace characteristics--which, at noontide, it seemed to have
taken a century of sordid life to accumulate--were now transfigured by
a charm of romance. A hundred mysterious years were whispering among
the leaves, whenever the slight sea-breeze found its way thither and
stirred them. Through the foliage that roofed the little summer-house
the moonlight flickered to and fro, and fell silvery white on the dark
floor, the table, and the circular bench, with a continual shift and
play, according as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs
admitted or shut out the glimmer.
So sweetly cool was the atmosphere, after all the feverish day, that
the summer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid
moonlight, with a dash of icy temper in them, out of a silver vase.
Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human
heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of
nature. The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence
fell. It made him feel--what he sometimes almost forgot, thrust so
early as he had been into the rude struggle of man with man--how
youthful he still was.
"It seems to me," he observed, "that I never watched the coming of so
beautiful an eve, and never felt anything so very much like happiness
as at this moment. After all, what a good world we live in! How good,
and beautiful! How young it is, too, with nothing really rotten or
age-worn in it! This old house, for example, which sometimes has
positively oppressed my breath with its smell of decaying timber! And
this garden, where the black mould always clings to my spade, as if I
were a sexton delving in a graveyard! Could I keep the feeling that now
possesses me, the garden would every day be virgin soil, with the
earth's first freshness in the flavor of its beans and squashes; and
the house!--it would be like a bower in Eden, blossoming with the
earliest roses that God ever made. Moonlight, and the sentiment in
man's heart responsive to it, are the greatest of renovators and
reformers. And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove
to be no better than moonshine!"
"I have been happier than I am now; at least, much gayer," said Phoebe
thoughtfully. "Yet I am sensible of a great charm in this brightening
moonlight; and I love to watch how the day, tired as it is, lags away
reluctantly, and hates to be called yesterday so soon. I never cared
much about moonlight before. What is there, I wonder, so beautiful in
it, to-night?"
"And you have never felt it before?" inquired the artist, looking
earnestly at the girl through the twilight.
"Never," answered Phoebe; "and life does not look the same, now that I
have felt it so. It seems as if I had looked at everything, hitherto,
in broad daylight, or else in the ruddy light of a cheerful fire,
glimmering and dancing through a room. Ah, poor me!" she added, with a
half-melancholy laugh. "I shall never be so merry as before I knew
Cousin Hepzibah and poor Cousin Clifford. I have grown a great deal
older, in this little time. Older, and, I hope, wiser, and,--not
exactly sadder,--but, certainly, with not half so much lightness in my
spirits! I have given them my sunshine, and have been glad to give it;
but, of course, I cannot both give and keep it. They are welcome,
notwithstanding!"
"You have lost nothing, Phoebe, worth keeping, nor which it was
possible to keep," said Holgrave after a pause. "Our first youth is of
no value; for we are never conscious of it until after it is gone. But
sometimes--always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly
unfortunate--there comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the
heart's joy at being in love; or, possibly, it may come to crown some
other grand festival in life, if any other such there be. This
bemoaning of one's self (as you do now) over the first, careless,
shallow gayety of youth departed, and this profound happiness at youth
regained,--so much deeper and richer than that we lost,--are essential
to the soul's development. In some cases, the two states come almost
simultaneously, and mingle the sadness and the rapture in one
mysterious emotion."
"I hardly think I understand you," said Phoebe.
"No wonder," replied Holgrave, smiling; "for I have told you a secret
which I hardly began to know before I found myself giving it utterance.
Remember it, however; and when the truth becomes clear to you, then
think of this moonlight scene!"
"It is entirely moonlight now, except only a little flush of faint
crimson, upward from the west, between those buildings," remarked
Phoebe. "I must go in. Cousin Hepzibah is not quick at figures, and
will give herself a headache over the day's accounts, unless I help
her."
But Holgrave detained her a little longer.
"Miss Hepzibah tells me," observed he, "that you return to the country
in a few days."
"Yes, but only for a little while," answered Phoebe; "for I look upon
this as my present home. I go to make a few arrangements, and to take
a more deliberate leave of my mother and friends. It is pleasant to
live where one is much desired and very useful; and I think I may have
the satisfaction of feeling myself so here."
"You surely may, and more than you imagine," said the artist.
"Whatever health, comfort, and natural life exists in the house is
embodied in your person. These blessings came along with you, and will
vanish when you leave the threshold. Miss Hepzibah, by secluding
herself from society, has lost all true relation with it, and is, in
fact, dead; although she galvanizes herself into a semblance of life,
and stands behind her counter, afflicting the world with a
greatly-to-be-deprecated scowl. Your poor cousin Clifford is another
dead and long-buried person, on whom the governor and council have
wrought a necromantic miracle. I should not wonder if he were to
crumble away, some morning, after you are gone, and nothing be seen of
him more, except a heap of dust. Miss Hepzibah, at any rate, will lose
what little flexibility she has. They both exist by you."
"I should be very sorry to think so," answered Phoebe gravely. "But it
is true that my small abilities were precisely what they needed; and I
have a real interest in their welfare,--an odd kind of motherly
sentiment,--which I wish you would not laugh at! And let me tell you
frankly, Mr. Holgrave, I am sometimes puzzled to know whether you wish
them well or ill."
"Undoubtedly," said the daguerreotypist, "I do feel an interest in this
antiquated, poverty-stricken old maiden lady, and this degraded and
shattered gentleman,--this abortive lover of the beautiful. A kindly
interest, too, helpless old children that they are! But you have no
conception what a different kind of heart mine is from your own. It is
not my impulse, as regards these two individuals, either to help or
hinder; but to look on, to analyze, to explain matters to myself, and
to comprehend the drama which, for almost two hundred years, has been
dragging its slow length over the ground where you and I now tread. If
permitted to witness the close, I doubt not to derive a moral
satisfaction from it, go matters how they may. There is a conviction
within me that the end draws nigh. But, though Providence sent you
hither to help, and sends me only as a privileged and meet spectator, I
pledge myself to lend these unfortunate beings whatever aid I can!"
"I wish you would speak more plainly," cried Phoebe, perplexed and
displeased; "and, above all, that you would feel more like a Christian
and a human being! How is it possible to see people in distress without
desiring, more than anything else, to help and comfort them? You talk
as if this old house were a theatre; and you seem to look at Hepzibah's
and Clifford's misfortunes, and those of generations before them, as a
tragedy, such as I have seen acted in the hall of a country hotel, only
the present one appears to be played exclusively for your amusement. I
do not like this. The play costs the performers too much, and the
audience is too cold-hearted."
"You are severe," said Holgrave, compelled to recognize a degree of
truth in the piquant sketch of his own mood.
"And then," continued Phoebe, "what can you mean by your conviction,
which you tell me of, that the end is drawing near? Do you know of any
new trouble hanging over my poor relatives? If so, tell me at once, and
I will not leave them!"
"Forgive me, Phoebe!" said the daguerreotypist, holding out his hand,
to which the girl was constrained to yield her own. "I am somewhat of
a mystic, it must be confessed. The tendency is in my blood, together
with the faculty of mesmerism, which might have brought me to Gallows
Hill, in the good old times of witchcraft. Believe me, if I were
really aware of any secret, the disclosure of which would benefit your
friends,--who are my own friends, likewise,--you should learn it before
we part. But I have no such knowledge."
"You hold something back!" said Phoebe.
"Nothing,--no secrets but my own," answered Holgrave. "I can perceive,
indeed, that Judge Pyncheon still keeps his eye on Clifford, in whose
ruin he had so large a share. His motives and intentions, however are
a mystery to me. He is a determined and relentless man, with the
genuine character of an inquisitor; and had he any object to gain by
putting Clifford to the rack, I verily believe that he would wrench his
joints from their sockets, in order to accomplish it. But, so wealthy
and eminent as he is,--so powerful in his own strength, and in the
support of society on all sides,--what can Judge Pyncheon have to hope
or fear from the imbecile, branded, half-torpid Clifford?"
"Yet," urged Phoebe, "you did speak as if misfortune were impending!"
"Oh, that was because I am morbid!" replied the artist. "My mind has a
twist aside, like almost everybody's mind, except your own. Moreover,
it is so strange to find myself an inmate of this old Pyncheon House,
and sitting in this old garden--(hark, how Maule's well is
murmuring!)--that, were it only for this one circumstance, I cannot
help fancying that Destiny is arranging its fifth act for a
catastrophe."
"There!" cried Phoebe with renewed vexation; for she was by nature as
hostile to mystery as the sunshine to a dark corner. "You puzzle me
more than ever!"
"Then let us part friends!" said Holgrave, pressing her hand. "Or, if
not friends, let us part before you entirely hate me. You, who love
everybody else in the world!"
"Good-by, then," said Phoebe frankly. "I do not mean to be angry a
great while, and should be sorry to have you think so. There has
Cousin Hepzibah been standing in the shadow of the doorway, this
quarter of an hour past! She thinks I stay too long in the damp garden.
So, good-night, and good-by."
On the second morning thereafter, Phoebe might have been seen, in her
straw bonnet, with a shawl on one arm and a little carpet-bag on the
other, bidding adieu to Hepzibah and Cousin Clifford. She was to take
a seat in the next train of cars, which would transport her to within
half a dozen miles of her country village.
The tears were in Phoebe's eyes; a smile, dewy with affectionate
regret, was glimmering around her pleasant mouth. She wondered how it
came to pass, that her life of a few weeks, here in this heavy-hearted
old mansion, had taken such hold of her, and so melted into her
associations, as now to seem a more important centre-point of
remembrance than all which had gone before. How had Hepzibah--grim,
silent, and irresponsive to her overflow of cordial sentiment--contrived
to win so much love? And Clifford,--in his abortive decay, with the
mystery of fearful crime upon him, and the close prison-atmosphere yet
lurking in his breath,--how had he transformed himself into the simplest
child, whom Phoebe felt bound to watch over, and be, as it were, the
providence of his unconsidered hours! Everything, at that instant of
farewell, stood out prominently to her view. Look where she would, lay
her hand on what she might, the object responded to her consciousness,
as if a moist human heart were in it.
She peeped from the window into the garden, and felt herself more
regretful at leaving this spot of black earth, vitiated with such an
age-long growth of weeds, than joyful at the idea of again scenting her
pine forests and fresh clover-fields. She called Chanticleer, his two
wives, and the venerable chicken, and threw them some crumbs of bread
from the breakfast-table. These being hastily gobbled up, the chicken
spread its wings, and alighted close by Phoebe on the window-sill,
where it looked gravely into her face and vented its emotions in a
croak. Phoebe bade it be a good old chicken during her absence, and
promised to bring it a little bag of buckwheat.
"Ah, Phoebe!" remarked Hepzibah, "you do not smile so naturally as when
you came to us! Then, the smile chose to shine out; now, you choose it
should. It is well that you are going back, for a little while, into
your native air. There has been too much weight on your spirits. The
house is too gloomy and lonesome; the shop is full of vexations; and as
for me, I have no faculty of making things look brighter than they are.
Dear Clifford has been your only comfort!"
"Come hither, Phoebe," suddenly cried her cousin Clifford, who had said
very little all the morning. "Close!--closer!--and look me in the
face!"
Phoebe put one of her small hands on each elbow of his chair, and
leaned her face towards him, so that he might peruse it as carefully as
he would. It is probable that the latent emotions of this parting hour
had revived, in some degree, his bedimmed and enfeebled faculties. At
any rate, Phoebe soon felt that, if not the profound insight of a seer,
yet a more than feminine delicacy of appreciation, was making her heart
the subject of its regard. A moment before, she had known nothing
which she would have sought to hide. Now, as if some secret were
hinted to her own consciousness through the medium of another's
perception, she was fain to let her eyelids droop beneath Clifford's
gaze. A blush, too,--the redder, because she strove hard to keep it
down,--ascended bigger and higher, in a tide of fitful progress, until
even her brow was all suffused with it.
"It is enough, Phoebe," said Clifford, with a melancholy smile. "When
I first saw you, you were the prettiest little maiden in the world; and
now you have deepened into beauty. Girlhood has passed into womanhood;
the bud is a bloom! Go, now--I feel lonelier than I did."
Phoebe took leave of the desolate couple, and passed through the shop,
twinkling her eyelids to shake off a dew-drop; for--considering how
brief her absence was to be, and therefore the folly of being cast down
about it--she would not so far acknowledge her tears as to dry them
with her handkerchief. On the doorstep, she met the little urchin
whose marvellous feats of gastronomy have been recorded in the earlier
pages of our narrative. She took from the window some specimen or
other of natural history,--her eyes being too dim with moisture to
inform her accurately whether it was a rabbit or a hippopotamus,--put
it into the child's hand as a parting gift, and went her way. Old
Uncle Venner was just coming out of his door, with a wood-horse and saw
on his shoulder; and, trudging along the street, he scrupled not to
keep company with Phoebe, so far as their paths lay together; nor, in
spite of his patched coat and rusty beaver, and the curious fashion of
his tow-cloth trousers, could she find it in her heart to outwalk him.
"We shall miss you, next Sabbath afternoon," observed the street
philosopher. "It is unaccountable how little while it takes some folks
to grow just as natural to a man as his own breath; and, begging your
pardon, Miss Phoebe (though there can be no offence in an old man's
saying it), that's just what you've grown to me! My years have been a
great many, and your life is but just beginning; and yet, you are
somehow as familiar to me as if I had found you at my mother's door,
and you had blossomed, like a running vine, all along my pathway since.
Come back soon, or I shall be gone to my farm; for I begin to find
these wood-sawing jobs a little too tough for my back-ache."
"Very soon, Uncle Venner," replied Phoebe.
"And let it be all the sooner, Phoebe, for the sake of those poor souls
yonder," continued her companion. "They can never do without you,
now,--never, Phoebe; never--no more than if one of God's angels had
been living with them, and making their dismal house pleasant and
comfortable! Don't it seem to you they'd be in a sad case, if, some
pleasant summer morning like this, the angel should spread his wings,
and fly to the place he came from? Well, just so they feel, now that
you're going home by the railroad! They can't bear it, Miss Phoebe; so
be sure to come back!"
"I am no angel, Uncle Venner," said Phoebe, smiling, as she offered him
her hand at the street-corner. "But, I suppose, people never feel so
much like angels as when they are doing what little good they may. So
I shall certainly come back!"
Thus parted the old man and the rosy girl; and Phoebe took the wings of
the morning, and was soon flitting almost as rapidly away as if endowed
with the aerial locomotion of the angels to whom Uncle Venner had so
graciously compared her.
| The tale of Matthew Maule the younger and Alice Pyncheon is particularly difficult to analyze because even its accuracy is suspect. Throughout the chapter, the exact nature of events is thrown into question--whether the younger Maule and Gervayse sealed their deal with a handshake or with lawyers, what exactly was said in their meeting, and so on. Even the protagonists themselves speak in insinuations and rely on rumors. This story functions as the romantic centerpiece of the novel, combining near-wizardry, spirits, and the tragic death of a young innocent. The chapter may be said to encapsulate the whole of The House of the Seven Gables in exaggerated form, as it is a tale of relative realism laced with a strong dose of the fantastic. Holgrave, who has written this story, becomes representative of the author, and we, in turn, are cast as the captive, hypnotized audience. This representation of storytelling is not particularly cheerful or even tongue-in-cheek. Instead, storytelling is represented as a sort of dark art, capable of giving its practitioners enormous power--a strange commentary for Hawthorne to offer on his own craft of fiction. The story also introduces a number of close parallels between Holgrave and the Maule family that have been largely dormant until now. Like Holgrave, the younger Matthew Maule is an artist, and though he is a tradesman by profession, Alice is primarily struck by the artistry evident in Maule's craft. Even more obviously, Holgrave shows the same hypnotic capabilities as the younger Maule, and he ends his story in much the same state as his protagonist does when his spell is over, elated that his subject is now under his spell. Although Maule clearly does not have Gervayse's best intentions in mind when he casts his spell, he is pleasantly surprised by the power he has over Alice, and his ultimate grief over her death suggests he is not fully aware of the extent of his power. Holgrave's intentions appear to be purer, but he too is not entirely aware of his abilities. Though he is tempted by the fact that Phoebe has fallen under his spell, it does not appear to be his goal in telling the story. It is important that Holgrave does not follow through on his newfound power--his connection to the Maules remains murky, but he seems to be exercising the willpower necessary to break family patterns | analysis |
SEVERAL days passed over the Seven Gables, heavily and drearily enough.
In fact (not to attribute the whole gloom of sky and earth to the one
inauspicious circumstance of Phoebe's departure), an easterly storm had
set in, and indefatigably apply itself to the task of making the black
roof and walls of the old house look more cheerless than ever before.
Yet was the outside not half so cheerless as the interior. Poor
Clifford was cut off, at once, from all his scanty resources of
enjoyment. Phoebe was not there; nor did the sunshine fall upon the
floor. The garden, with its muddy walks, and the chill, dripping
foliage of its summer-house, was an image to be shuddered at. Nothing
flourished in the cold, moist, pitiless atmosphere, drifting with the
brackish scud of sea-breezes, except the moss along the joints of the
shingle-roof, and the great bunch of weeds, that had lately been
suffering from drought, in the angle between the two front gables.
As for Hepzibah, she seemed not merely possessed with the east wind,
but to be, in her very person, only another phase of this gray and
sullen spell of weather; the East-Wind itself, grim and disconsolate,
in a rusty black silk gown, and with a turban of cloud-wreaths on its
head. The custom of the shop fell off, because a story got abroad that
she soured her small beer and other damageable commodities, by scowling
on them. It is, perhaps, true that the public had something reasonably
to complain of in her deportment; but towards Clifford she was neither
ill-tempered nor unkind, nor felt less warmth of heart than always, had
it been possible to make it reach him. The inutility of her best
efforts, however, palsied the poor old gentlewoman. She could do
little else than sit silently in a corner of the room, when the wet
pear-tree branches, sweeping across the small windows, created a
noonday dusk, which Hepzibah unconsciously darkened with her woe-begone
aspect. It was no fault of Hepzibah's. Everything--even the old
chairs and tables, that had known what weather was for three or four
such lifetimes as her own--looked as damp and chill as if the present
were their worst experience. The picture of the Puritan Colonel
shivered on the wall. The house itself shivered, from every attic of
its seven gables down to the great kitchen fireplace, which served all
the better as an emblem of the mansion's heart, because, though built
for warmth, it was now so comfortless and empty.
Hepzibah attempted to enliven matters by a fire in the parlor. But the
storm demon kept watch above, and, whenever a flame was kindled, drove
the smoke back again, choking the chimney's sooty throat with its own
breath. Nevertheless, during four days of this miserable storm,
Clifford wrapt himself in an old cloak, and occupied his customary
chair. On the morning of the fifth, when summoned to breakfast, he
responded only by a broken-hearted murmur, expressive of a
determination not to leave his bed. His sister made no attempt to
change his purpose. In fact, entirely as she loved him, Hepzibah could
hardly have borne any longer the wretched duty--so impracticable by her
few and rigid faculties--of seeking pastime for a still sensitive, but
ruined mind, critical and fastidious, without force or volition. It
was at least something short of positive despair, that to-day she might
sit shivering alone, and not suffer continually a new grief, and
unreasonable pang of remorse, at every fitful sigh of her fellow
sufferer.
But Clifford, it seemed, though he did not make his appearance below
stairs, had, after all, bestirred himself in quest of amusement. In
the course of the forenoon, Hepzibah heard a note of music, which
(there being no other tuneful contrivance in the House of the Seven
Gables) she knew must proceed from Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord. She
was aware that Clifford, in his youth, had possessed a cultivated taste
for music, and a considerable degree of skill in its practice. It was
difficult, however, to conceive of his retaining an accomplishment to
which daily exercise is so essential, in the measure indicated by the
sweet, airy, and delicate, though most melancholy strain, that now
stole upon her ear. Nor was it less marvellous that the long-silent
instrument should be capable of so much melody. Hepzibah involuntarily
thought of the ghostly harmonies, prelusive of death in the family,
which were attributed to the legendary Alice. But it was, perhaps,
proof of the agency of other than spiritual fingers, that, after a few
touches, the chords seemed to snap asunder with their own vibrations,
and the music ceased.
But a harsher sound succeeded to the mysterious notes; nor was the
easterly day fated to pass without an event sufficient in itself to
poison, for Hepzibah and Clifford, the balmiest air that ever brought
the humming-birds along with it. The final echoes of Alice Pyncheon's
performance (or Clifford's, if his we must consider it) were driven
away by no less vulgar a dissonance than the ringing of the shop-bell.
A foot was heard scraping itself on the threshold, and thence somewhat
ponderously stepping on the floor. Hepzibah delayed a moment, while
muffling herself in a faded shawl, which had been her defensive armor
in a forty years' warfare against the east wind. A characteristic
sound, however,--neither a cough nor a hem, but a kind of rumbling and
reverberating spasm in somebody's capacious depth of chest;--impelled
her to hurry forward, with that aspect of fierce faint-heartedness so
common to women in cases of perilous emergency. Few of her sex, on
such occasions, have ever looked so terrible as our poor scowling
Hepzibah. But the visitor quietly closed the shop-door behind him,
stood up his umbrella against the counter, and turned a visage of
composed benignity, to meet the alarm and anger which his appearance
had excited.
Hepzibah's presentiment had not deceived her. It was no other than
Judge Pyncheon, who, after in vain trying the front door, had now
effected his entrance into the shop.
"How do you do, Cousin Hepzibah?--and how does this most inclement
weather affect our poor Clifford?" began the Judge; and wonderful it
seemed, indeed, that the easterly storm was not put to shame, or, at
any rate, a little mollified, by the genial benevolence of his smile.
"I could not rest without calling to ask, once more, whether I can in
any manner promote his comfort, or your own."
"You can do nothing," said Hepzibah, controlling her agitation as well
as she could. "I devote myself to Clifford. He has every comfort
which his situation admits of."
"But allow me to suggest, dear cousin," rejoined the Judge, "you
err,--in all affection and kindness, no doubt, and with the very best
intentions,--but you do err, nevertheless, in keeping your brother so
secluded. Why insulate him thus from all sympathy and kindness?
Clifford, alas! has had too much of solitude. Now let him try
society,--the society, that is to say, of kindred and old friends. Let
me, for instance, but see Clifford, and I will answer for the good
effect of the interview."
"You cannot see him," answered Hepzibah. "Clifford has kept his bed
since yesterday."
"What! How! Is he ill?" exclaimed Judge Pyncheon, starting with what
seemed to be angry alarm; for the very frown of the old Puritan
darkened through the room as he spoke. "Nay, then, I must and will see
him! What if he should die?"
"He is in no danger of death," said Hepzibah,--and added, with
bitterness that she could repress no longer, "none; unless he shall be
persecuted to death, now, by the same man who long ago attempted it!"
"Cousin Hepzibah," said the Judge, with an impressive earnestness of
manner, which grew even to tearful pathos as he proceeded, "is it
possible that you do not perceive how unjust, how unkind, how
unchristian, is this constant, this long-continued bitterness against
me, for a part which I was constrained by duty and conscience, by the
force of law, and at my own peril, to act? What did I do, in detriment
to Clifford, which it was possible to leave undone? How could you, his
sister,--if, for your never-ending sorrow, as it has been for mine, you
had known what I did,--have, shown greater tenderness? And do you
think, cousin, that it has cost me no pang?--that it has left no
anguish in my bosom, from that day to this, amidst all the prosperity
with which Heaven has blessed me?--or that I do not now rejoice, when
it is deemed consistent with the dues of public justice and the welfare
of society that this dear kinsman, this early friend, this nature so
delicately and beautifully constituted,--so unfortunate, let us
pronounce him, and forbear to say, so guilty,--that our own Clifford,
in fine, should be given back to life, and its possibilities of
enjoyment? Ah, you little know me, Cousin Hepzibah! You little know
this heart! It now throbs at the thought of meeting him! There lives
not the human being (except yourself,--and you not more than I) who has
shed so many tears for Clifford's calamity. You behold some of them
now. There is none who would so delight to promote his happiness! Try
me, Hepzibah!--try me, Cousin!--try the man whom you have treated as
your enemy and Clifford's!--try Jaffrey Pyncheon, and you shall find
him true, to the heart's core!"
"In the name of Heaven," cried Hepzibah, provoked only to intenser
indignation by this outgush of the inestimable tenderness of a stern
nature,--"in God's name, whom you insult, and whose power I could
almost question, since he hears you utter so many false words without
palsying your tongue,--give over, I beseech you, this loathsome
pretence of affection for your victim! You hate him! Say so, like a
man! You cherish, at this moment, some black purpose against him in
your heart! Speak it out, at once!--or, if you hope so to promote it
better, hide it till you can triumph in its success! But never speak
again of your love for my poor brother. I cannot bear it! It will
drive me beyond a woman's decency! It will drive me mad! Forbear! Not
another word! It will make me spurn you!"
For once, Hepzibah's wrath had given her courage. She had spoken.
But, after all, was this unconquerable distrust of Judge Pyncheon's
integrity, and this utter denial, apparently, of his claim to stand in
the ring of human sympathies,--were they founded in any just perception
of his character, or merely the offspring of a woman's unreasonable
prejudice, deduced from nothing?
The Judge, beyond all question, was a man of eminent respectability.
The church acknowledged it; the state acknowledged it. It was denied
by nobody. In all the very extensive sphere of those who knew him,
whether in his public or private capacities, there was not an
individual--except Hepzibah, and some lawless mystic, like the
daguerreotypist, and, possibly, a few political opponents--who would
have dreamed of seriously disputing his claim to a high and honorable
place in the world's regard. Nor (we must do him the further justice
to say) did Judge Pyncheon himself, probably, entertain many or very
frequent doubts, that his enviable reputation accorded with his
deserts. His conscience, therefore, usually considered the surest
witness to a man's integrity,--his conscience, unless it might be for
the little space of five minutes in the twenty-four hours, or, now and
then, some black day in the whole year's circle,--his conscience bore
an accordant testimony with the world's laudatory voice. And yet,
strong as this evidence may seem to be, we should hesitate to peril our
own conscience on the assertion, that the Judge and the consenting
world were right, and that poor Hepzibah with her solitary prejudice
was wrong. Hidden from mankind,--forgotten by himself, or buried so
deeply under a sculptured and ornamented pile of ostentatious deeds
that his daily life could take no note of it,--there may have lurked
some evil and unsightly thing. Nay, we could almost venture to say,
further, that a daily guilt might have been acted by him, continually
renewed, and reddening forth afresh, like the miraculous blood-stain of
a murder, without his necessarily and at every moment being aware of it.
Men of strong minds, great force of character, and a hard texture of
the sensibilities, are very capable of falling into mistakes of this
kind. They are ordinarily men to whom forms are of paramount
importance. Their field of action lies among the external phenomena of
life. They possess vast ability in grasping, and arranging, and
appropriating to themselves, the big, heavy, solid unrealities, such as
gold, landed estate, offices of trust and emolument, and public honors.
With these materials, and with deeds of goodly aspect, done in the
public eye, an individual of this class builds up, as it were, a tall
and stately edifice, which, in the view of other people, and ultimately
in his own view, is no other than the man's character, or the man
himself. Behold, therefore, a palace! Its splendid halls and suites of
spacious apartments are floored with a mosaic-work of costly marbles;
its windows, the whole height of each room, admit the sunshine through
the most transparent of plate-glass; its high cornices are gilded, and
its ceilings gorgeously painted; and a lofty dome--through which, from
the central pavement, you may gaze up to the sky, as with no
obstructing medium between--surmounts the whole. With what fairer and
nobler emblem could any man desire to shadow forth his character? Ah!
but in some low and obscure nook,--some narrow closet on the
ground-floor, shut, locked and bolted, and the key flung away,--or
beneath the marble pavement, in a stagnant water-puddle, with the
richest pattern of mosaic-work above,--may lie a corpse, half decayed,
and still decaying, and diffusing its death-scent all through the
palace! The inhabitant will not be conscious of it, for it has long
been his daily breath! Neither will the visitors, for they smell only
the rich odors which the master sedulously scatters through the palace,
and the incense which they bring, and delight to burn before him! Now
and then, perchance, comes in a seer, before whose sadly gifted eye the
whole structure melts into thin air, leaving only the hidden nook, the
bolted closet, with the cobwebs festooned over its forgotten door, or
the deadly hole under the pavement, and the decaying corpse within.
Here, then, we are to seek the true emblem of the man's character, and
of the deed that gives whatever reality it possesses to his life. And,
beneath the show of a marble palace, that pool of stagnant water, foul
with many impurities, and, perhaps, tinged with blood,--that secret
abomination, above which, possibly, he may say his prayers, without
remembering it,--is this man's miserable soul!
To apply this train of remark somewhat more closely to Judge Pyncheon.
We might say (without in the least imputing crime to a personage of his
eminent respectability) that there was enough of splendid rubbish in
his life to cover up and paralyze a more active and subtile conscience
than the Judge was ever troubled with. The purity of his judicial
character, while on the bench; the faithfulness of his public service
in subsequent capacities; his devotedness to his party, and the rigid
consistency with which he had adhered to its principles, or, at all
events, kept pace with its organized movements; his remarkable zeal as
president of a Bible society; his unimpeachable integrity as treasurer
of a widow's and orphan's fund; his benefits to horticulture, by
producing two much esteemed varieties of the pear and to agriculture,
through the agency of the famous Pyncheon bull; the cleanliness of his
moral deportment, for a great many years past; the severity with which
he had frowned upon, and finally cast off, an expensive and dissipated
son, delaying forgiveness until within the final quarter of an hour of
the young man's life; his prayers at morning and eventide, and graces
at meal-time; his efforts in furtherance of the temperance cause; his
confining himself, since the last attack of the gout, to five diurnal
glasses of old sherry wine; the snowy whiteness of his linen, the
polish of his boots, the handsomeness of his gold-headed cane, the
square and roomy fashion of his coat, and the fineness of its material,
and, in general, the studied propriety of his dress and equipment; the
scrupulousness with which he paid public notice, in the street, by a
bow, a lifting of the hat, a nod, or a motion of the hand, to all and
sundry of his acquaintances, rich or poor; the smile of broad
benevolence wherewith he made it a point to gladden the whole
world,--what room could possibly be found for darker traits in a
portrait made up of lineaments like these? This proper face was what he
beheld in the looking-glass. This admirably arranged life was what he
was conscious of in the progress of every day. Then might not he claim
to be its result and sum, and say to himself and the community, "Behold
Judge Pyncheon there"?
And allowing that, many, many years ago, in his early and reckless
youth, he had committed some one wrong act,--or that, even now, the
inevitable force of circumstances should occasionally make him do one
questionable deed among a thousand praiseworthy, or, at least,
blameless ones,--would you characterize the Judge by that one necessary
deed, and that half-forgotten act, and let it overshadow the fair
aspect of a lifetime? What is there so ponderous in evil, that a
thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil which
were heaped into the other scale! This scale and balance system is a
favorite one with people of Judge Pyncheon's brotherhood. A hard, cold
man, thus unfortunately situated, seldom or never looking inward, and
resolutely taking his idea of himself from what purports to be his
image as reflected in the mirror of public opinion, can scarcely arrive
at true self-knowledge, except through loss of property and reputation.
Sickness will not always help him do it; not always the death-hour!
But our affair now is with Judge Pyncheon as he stood confronting the
fierce outbreak of Hepzibah's wrath. Without premeditation, to her own
surprise, and indeed terror, she had given vent, for once, to the
inveteracy of her resentment, cherished against this kinsman for thirty
years.
Thus far the Judge's countenance had expressed mild forbearance,--grave
and almost gentle deprecation of his cousin's unbecoming
violence,--free and Christian-like forgiveness of the wrong inflicted
by her words. But when those words were irrevocably spoken, his look
assumed sternness, the sense of power, and immitigable resolve; and
this with so natural and imperceptible a change, that it seemed as if
the iron man had stood there from the first, and the meek man not at
all. The effect was as when the light, vapory clouds, with their soft
coloring, suddenly vanish from the stony brow of a precipitous
mountain, and leave there the frown which you at once feel to be
eternal. Hepzibah almost adopted the insane belief that it was her old
Puritan ancestor, and not the modern Judge, on whom she had just been
wreaking the bitterness of her heart. Never did a man show stronger
proof of the lineage attributed to him than Judge Pyncheon, at this
crisis, by his unmistakable resemblance to the picture in the inner
room.
"Cousin Hepzibah," said he very calmly, "it is time to have done with
this."
"With all my heart!" answered she. "Then, why do you persecute us any
longer? Leave poor Clifford and me in peace. Neither of us desires
anything better!"
"It is my purpose to see Clifford before I leave this house," continued
the Judge. "Do not act like a madwoman, Hepzibah! I am his only
friend, and an all-powerful one. Has it never occurred to you,--are
you so blind as not to have seen,--that, without not merely my consent,
but my efforts, my representations, the exertion of my whole influence,
political, official, personal, Clifford would never have been what you
call free? Did you think his release a triumph over me? Not so, my good
cousin; not so, by any means! The furthest possible from that! No; but
it was the accomplishment of a purpose long entertained on my part. I
set him free!"
"You!" answered Hepzibah. "I never will believe it! He owed his
dungeon to you; his freedom to God's providence!"
"I set him free!" reaffirmed Judge Pyncheon, with the calmest
composure. "And I came hither now to decide whether he shall retain
his freedom. It will depend upon himself. For this purpose, I must
see him."
"Never!--it would drive him mad!" exclaimed Hepzibah, but with an
irresoluteness sufficiently perceptible to the keen eye of the Judge;
for, without the slightest faith in his good intentions, she knew not
whether there was most to dread in yielding or resistance. "And why
should you wish to see this wretched, broken man, who retains hardly a
fraction of his intellect, and will hide even that from an eye which
has no love in it?"
"He shall see love enough in mine, if that be all!" said the Judge,
with well-grounded confidence in the benignity of his aspect. "But,
Cousin Hepzibah, you confess a great deal, and very much to the
purpose. Now, listen, and I will frankly explain my reasons for
insisting on this interview. At the death, thirty years since, of our
uncle Jaffrey, it was found,--I know not whether the circumstance ever
attracted much of your attention, among the sadder interests that
clustered round that event,--but it was found that his visible estate,
of every kind, fell far short of any estimate ever made of it. He was
supposed to be immensely rich. Nobody doubted that he stood among the
weightiest men of his day. It was one of his eccentricities,
however,--and not altogether a folly, neither,--to conceal the amount
of his property by making distant and foreign investments, perhaps
under other names than his own, and by various means, familiar enough
to capitalists, but unnecessary here to be specified. By Uncle
Jaffrey's last will and testament, as you are aware, his entire
property was bequeathed to me, with the single exception of a life
interest to yourself in this old family mansion, and the strip of
patrimonial estate remaining attached to it."
"And do you seek to deprive us of that?" asked Hepzibah, unable to
restrain her bitter contempt. "Is this your price for ceasing to
persecute poor Clifford?"
"Certainly not, my dear cousin!" answered the Judge, smiling
benevolently. "On the contrary, as you must do me the justice to own,
I have constantly expressed my readiness to double or treble your
resources, whenever you should make up your mind to accept any kindness
of that nature at the hands of your kinsman. No, no! But here lies
the gist of the matter. Of my uncle's unquestionably great estate, as
I have said, not the half--no, not one third, as I am fully
convinced--was apparent after his death. Now, I have the best possible
reasons for believing that your brother Clifford can give me a clew to
the recovery of the remainder."
"Clifford!--Clifford know of any hidden wealth? Clifford have it in his
power to make you rich?" cried the old gentlewoman, affected with a
sense of something like ridicule at the idea. "Impossible! You
deceive yourself! It is really a thing to laugh at!"
"It is as certain as that I stand here!" said Judge Pyncheon, striking
his gold-headed cane on the floor, and at the same time stamping his
foot, as if to express his conviction the more forcibly by the whole
emphasis of his substantial person. "Clifford told me so himself!"
"No, no!" exclaimed Hepzibah incredulously. "You are dreaming, Cousin
Jaffrey."
"I do not belong to the dreaming class of men," said the Judge quietly.
"Some months before my uncle's death, Clifford boasted to me of the
possession of the secret of incalculable wealth. His purpose was to
taunt me, and excite my curiosity. I know it well. But, from a pretty
distinct recollection of the particulars of our conversation, I am
thoroughly convinced that there was truth in what he said. Clifford,
at this moment, if he chooses,--and choose he must!--can inform me
where to find the schedule, the documents, the evidences, in whatever
shape they exist, of the vast amount of Uncle Jaffrey's missing
property. He has the secret. His boast was no idle word. It had a
directness, an emphasis, a particularity, that showed a backbone of
solid meaning within the mystery of his expression."
"But what could have been Clifford's object," asked Hepzibah, "in
concealing it so long?"
"It was one of the bad impulses of our fallen nature," replied the
Judge, turning up his eyes. "He looked upon me as his enemy. He
considered me as the cause of his overwhelming disgrace, his imminent
peril of death, his irretrievable ruin. There was no great
probability, therefore, of his volunteering information, out of his
dungeon, that should elevate me still higher on the ladder of
prosperity. But the moment has now come when he must give up his
secret."
"And what if he should refuse?" inquired Hepzibah. "Or,--as I
steadfastly believe,--what if he has no knowledge of this wealth?"
"My dear cousin," said Judge Pyncheon, with a quietude which he had the
power of making more formidable than any violence, "since your
brother's return, I have taken the precaution (a highly proper one in
the near kinsman and natural guardian of an individual so situated) to
have his deportment and habits constantly and carefully overlooked.
Your neighbors have been eye-witnesses to whatever has passed in the
garden. The butcher, the baker, the fish-monger, some of the customers
of your shop, and many a prying old woman, have told me several of the
secrets of your interior. A still larger circle--I myself, among the
rest--can testify to his extravagances at the arched window. Thousands
beheld him, a week or two ago, on the point of flinging himself thence
into the street. From all this testimony, I am led to
apprehend--reluctantly, and with deep grief--that Clifford's
misfortunes have so affected his intellect, never very strong, that he
cannot safely remain at large. The alternative, you must be
aware,--and its adoption will depend entirely on the decision which I
am now about to make,--the alternative is his confinement, probably for
the remainder of his life, in a public asylum for persons in his
unfortunate state of mind."
"You cannot mean it!" shrieked Hepzibah.
"Should my cousin Clifford," continued Judge Pyncheon, wholly
undisturbed, "from mere malice, and hatred of one whose interests ought
naturally to be dear to him,--a mode of passion that, as often as any
other, indicates mental disease,--should he refuse me the information
so important to myself, and which he assuredly possesses, I shall
consider it the one needed jot of evidence to satisfy my mind of his
insanity. And, once sure of the course pointed out by conscience, you
know me too well, Cousin Hepzibah, to entertain a doubt that I shall
pursue it."
"O Jaffrey,--Cousin Jaffrey," cried Hepzibah mournfully, not
passionately, "it is you that are diseased in mind, not Clifford! You
have forgotten that a woman was your mother!--that you have had
sisters, brothers, children of your own!--or that there ever was
affection between man and man, or pity from one man to another, in this
miserable world! Else, how could you have dreamed of this? You are not
young, Cousin Jaffrey!--no, nor middle-aged,--but already an old man!
The hair is white upon your head! How many years have you to live? Are
you not rich enough for that little time? Shall you be hungry,--shall
you lack clothes, or a roof to shelter you,--between this point and the
grave? No! but, with the half of what you now possess, you could revel
in costly food and wines, and build a house twice as splendid as you
now inhabit, and make a far greater show to the world,--and yet leave
riches to your only son, to make him bless the hour of your death!
Then, why should you do this cruel, cruel thing?--so mad a thing, that
I know not whether to call it wicked! Alas, Cousin Jaffrey, this hard
and grasping spirit has run in our blood these two hundred years. You
are but doing over again, in another shape, what your ancestor before
you did, and sending down to your posterity the curse inherited from
him!"
"Talk sense, Hepzibah, for Heaven's sake!" exclaimed the Judge, with
the impatience natural to a reasonable man, on hearing anything so
utterly absurd as the above, in a discussion about matters of business.
"I have told you my determination. I am not apt to change. Clifford
must give up his secret, or take the consequences. And let him decide
quickly; for I have several affairs to attend to this morning, and an
important dinner engagement with some political friends."
"Clifford has no secret!" answered Hepzibah. "And God will not let you
do the thing you meditate!"
"We shall see," said the unmoved Judge. "Meanwhile, choose whether you
will summon Clifford, and allow this business to be amicably settled by
an interview between two kinsmen, or drive me to harsher measures,
which I should be most happy to feel myself justified in avoiding. The
responsibility is altogether on your part."
"You are stronger than I," said Hepzibah, after a brief consideration;
"and you have no pity in your strength! Clifford is not now insane; but
the interview which you insist upon may go far to make him so.
Nevertheless, knowing you as I do, I believe it to be my best course to
allow you to judge for yourself as to the improbability of his
possessing any valuable secret. I will call Clifford. Be merciful in
your dealings with him!--be far more merciful than your heart bids you
be!--for God is looking at you, Jaffrey Pyncheon!"
The Judge followed his cousin from the shop, where the foregoing
conversation had passed, into the parlor, and flung himself heavily
into the great ancestral chair. Many a former Pyncheon had found
repose in its capacious arms: rosy children, after their sports; young
men, dreamy with love; grown men, weary with cares; old men, burdened
with winters,--they had mused, and slumbered, and departed to a yet
profounder sleep. It had been a long tradition, though a doubtful one,
that this was the very chair, seated in which the earliest of the
Judge's New England forefathers--he whose picture still hung upon the
wall--had given a dead man's silent and stern reception to the throng
of distinguished guests. From that hour of evil omen until the
present, it may be,--though we know not the secret of his heart,--but
it may be that no wearier and sadder man had ever sunk into the chair
than this same Judge Pyncheon, whom we have just beheld so immitigably
hard and resolute. Surely, it must have been at no slight cost that he
had thus fortified his soul with iron. Such calmness is a mightier
effort than the violence of weaker men. And there was yet a heavy task
for him to do. Was it a little matter--a trifle to be prepared for in
a single moment, and to be rested from in another moment,--that he must
now, after thirty years, encounter a kinsman risen from a living tomb,
and wrench a secret from him, or else consign him to a living tomb
again?
"Did you speak?" asked Hepzibah, looking in from the threshold of the
parlor; for she imagined that the Judge had uttered some sound which
she was anxious to interpret as a relenting impulse. "I thought you
called me back."
"No, no" gruffly answered Judge Pyncheon with a harsh frown, while his
brow grew almost a black purple, in the shadow of the room. "Why
should I call you back? Time flies! Bid Clifford come to me!"
The Judge had taken his watch from his vest pocket and now held it in
his hand, measuring the interval which was to ensue before the
appearance of Clifford.
| The Scowl and Smile The house of the seven gables becomes a dreary place after Phoebe leaves; it is made even more so by the arrival of a storm that lingers for several days. Clifford becomes more and more dour, eventually refusing to get out of bed. Hepzibah feels helpless and does not know how to help her brother. That same day, the shop bell rings. Judge Pyncheon has come to pay his two cousins another visit. Hepzibah responds to the Judge as before, with an anger that borders on hatred, and demands to know why the Judge continues to bother them. The Judge at first appeals to her emotional side, delivering a long and tearful speech about his own love for her and for Clifford, and informs Hepzibah that he only desires to help his cousins out of the sheer goodness of his heart. We are told that Judge is widely regarded as a wise and kindly man, and that he himself is so enamored of his station in life that he has come to believe he has no stains on his conscience. His one or two harsh deeds, the Judge thinks, are a necessary evil, balanced out by his various pious activities--among them his work with a Bible group and his leadership of a temperance movement dedicated to encouraging sobriety. Hepzibah is not fooled by the Judge's kind words and continues to refuse to summon Clifford. The Judge then becomes angry. The narrator embarks on a lengthy and descriptive exploration of the theory that the Judge nurses a terrible secret. The narrator suggests that despite the Judge's wholesome and pleasant exterior, he may well have been corrupted by an awful, buried truth, which has come to infect every part of him, like a corpse rotting in the nook of a giant, beautiful palace. The irate Judge tells Hepzibah that he absolutely must speak with Clifford, because, shortly before Clifford was taken away and incarcerated, he had told the Judge about documentation that revealed the whereabouts of a good portion of their Uncle Jaffrey's legacy. The Judge desperately wants this piece of evidence, and he will stop at nothing to get it. Hepzibah refuses to believe that her brother could really have such knowledge, but the Judge continues to insist that she fetch Clifford so the Judge can talk to him. Finally, the Judge threatens to have Clifford locked up in an asylum if he does not divulge the secret. Hepzibah believes that a conversation with the Judge will destroy Clifford, but this threat means she no longer has a choice. She walks upstairs to retrieve Clifford, while the Judge waits below | summary |
NEVER had the old house appeared so dismal to poor Hepzibah as when she
departed on that wretched errand. There was a strange aspect in it.
As she trode along the foot-worn passages, and opened one crazy door
after another, and ascended the creaking staircase, she gazed wistfully
and fearfully around. It would have been no marvel, to her excited
mind, if, behind or beside her, there had been the rustle of dead
people's garments, or pale visages awaiting her on the landing-place
above. Her nerves were set all ajar by the scene of passion and terror
through which she had just struggled. Her colloquy with Judge
Pyncheon, who so perfectly represented the person and attributes of the
founder of the family, had called back the dreary past. It weighed
upon her heart. Whatever she had heard, from legendary aunts and
grandmothers, concerning the good or evil fortunes of the
Pyncheons,--stories which had heretofore been kept warm in her
remembrance by the chimney-corner glow that was associated with
them,--now recurred to her, sombre, ghastly, cold, like most passages
of family history, when brooded over in melancholy mood. The whole
seemed little else but a series of calamity, reproducing itself in
successive generations, with one general hue, and varying in little,
save the outline. But Hepzibah now felt as if the Judge, and Clifford,
and herself,--they three together,--were on the point of adding another
incident to the annals of the house, with a bolder relief of wrong and
sorrow, which would cause it to stand out from all the rest. Thus it
is that the grief of the passing moment takes upon itself an
individuality, and a character of climax, which it is destined to lose
after a while, and to fade into the dark gray tissue common to the
grave or glad events of many years ago. It is but for a moment,
comparatively, that anything looks strange or startling,--a truth that
has the bitter and the sweet in it.
But Hepzibah could not rid herself of the sense of something
unprecedented at that instant passing and soon to be accomplished. Her
nerves were in a shake. Instinctively she paused before the arched
window, and looked out upon the street, in order to seize its permanent
objects with her mental grasp, and thus to steady herself from the reel
and vibration which affected her more immediate sphere. It brought her
up, as we may say, with a kind of shock, when she beheld everything
under the same appearance as the day before, and numberless preceding
days, except for the difference between sunshine and sullen storm. Her
eyes travelled along the street, from doorstep to doorstep, noting the
wet sidewalks, with here and there a puddle in hollows that had been
imperceptible until filled with water. She screwed her dim optics to
their acutest point, in the hope of making out, with greater
distinctness, a certain window, where she half saw, half guessed, that
a tailor's seamstress was sitting at her work. Hepzibah flung herself
upon that unknown woman's companionship, even thus far off. Then she
was attracted by a chaise rapidly passing, and watched its moist and
glistening top, and its splashing wheels, until it had turned the
corner, and refused to carry any further her idly trifling, because
appalled and overburdened, mind. When the vehicle had disappeared, she
allowed herself still another loitering moment; for the patched figure
of good Uncle Venner was now visible, coming slowly from the head of
the street downward, with a rheumatic limp, because the east wind had
got into his joints. Hepzibah wished that he would pass yet more
slowly, and befriend her shivering solitude a little longer. Anything
that would take her out of the grievous present, and interpose human
beings betwixt herself and what was nearest to her,--whatever would
defer for an instant the inevitable errand on which she was bound,--all
such impediments were welcome. Next to the lightest heart, the
heaviest is apt to be most playful.
Hepzibah had little hardihood for her own proper pain, and far less for
what she must inflict on Clifford. Of so slight a nature, and so
shattered by his previous calamities, it could not well be short of
utter ruin to bring him face to face with the hard, relentless man who
had been his evil destiny through life. Even had there been no bitter
recollections, nor any hostile interest now at stake between them, the
mere natural repugnance of the more sensitive system to the massive,
weighty, and unimpressible one, must, in itself, have been disastrous
to the former. It would be like flinging a porcelain vase, with
already a crack in it, against a granite column. Never before had
Hepzibah so adequately estimated the powerful character of her cousin
Jaffrey,--powerful by intellect, energy of will, the long habit of
acting among men, and, as she believed, by his unscrupulous pursuit of
selfish ends through evil means. It did but increase the difficulty
that Judge Pyncheon was under a delusion as to the secret which he
supposed Clifford to possess. Men of his strength of purpose and
customary sagacity, if they chance to adopt a mistaken opinion in
practical matters, so wedge it and fasten it among things known to be
true, that to wrench it out of their minds is hardly less difficult
than pulling up an oak. Thus, as the Judge required an impossibility
of Clifford, the latter, as he could not perform it, must needs perish.
For what, in the grasp of a man like this, was to become of Clifford's
soft poetic nature, that never should have had a task more stubborn
than to set a life of beautiful enjoyment to the flow and rhythm of
musical cadences! Indeed, what had become of it already? Broken!
Blighted! All but annihilated! Soon to be wholly so!
For a moment, the thought crossed Hepzibah's mind, whether Clifford
might not really have such knowledge of their deceased uncle's vanished
estate as the Judge imputed to him. She remembered some vague
intimations, on her brother's part, which--if the supposition were not
essentially preposterous--might have been so interpreted. There had
been schemes of travel and residence abroad, day-dreams of brilliant
life at home, and splendid castles in the air, which it would have
required boundless wealth to build and realize. Had this wealth been
in her power, how gladly would Hepzibah have bestowed it all upon her
iron-hearted kinsman, to buy for Clifford the freedom and seclusion of
the desolate old house! But she believed that her brother's schemes
were as destitute of actual substance and purpose as a child's pictures
of its future life, while sitting in a little chair by its mother's
knee. Clifford had none but shadowy gold at his command; and it was
not the stuff to satisfy Judge Pyncheon!
Was there no help in their extremity? It seemed strange that there
should be none, with a city round about her. It would be so easy to
throw up the window, and send forth a shriek, at the strange agony of
which everybody would come hastening to the rescue, well understanding
it to be the cry of a human soul, at some dreadful crisis! But how
wild, how almost laughable, the fatality,--and yet how continually it
comes to pass, thought Hepzibah, in this dull delirium of a
world,--that whosoever, and with however kindly a purpose, should come
to help, they would be sure to help the strongest side! Might and wrong
combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible
attraction. There would be Judge Pyncheon,--a person eminent in the
public view, of high station and great wealth, a philanthropist, a
member of Congress and of the church, and intimately associated with
whatever else bestows good name,--so imposing, in these advantageous
lights, that Hepzibah herself could hardly help shrinking from her own
conclusions as to his hollow integrity. The Judge, on one side! And
who, on the other? The guilty Clifford! Once a byword! Now, an
indistinctly remembered ignominy!
Nevertheless, in spite of this perception that the Judge would draw all
human aid to his own behalf, Hepzibah was so unaccustomed to act for
herself, that the least word of counsel would have swayed her to any
mode of action. Little Phoebe Pyncheon would at once have lighted up
the whole scene, if not by any available suggestion, yet simply by the
warm vivacity of her character. The idea of the artist occurred to
Hepzibah. Young and unknown, mere vagrant adventurer as he was, she had
been conscious of a force in Holgrave which might well adapt him to be
the champion of a crisis. With this thought in her mind, she unbolted a
door, cobwebbed and long disused, but which had served as a former
medium of communication between her own part of the house and the gable
where the wandering daguerreotypist had now established his temporary
home. He was not there. A book, face downward, on the table, a roll of
manuscript, a half-written sheet, a newspaper, some tools of his
present occupation, and several rejected daguerreotypes, conveyed an
impression as if he were close at hand. But, at this period of the day,
as Hepzibah might have anticipated, the artist was at his public rooms.
With an impulse of idle curiosity, that flickered among her heavy
thoughts, she looked at one of the daguerreotypes, and beheld Judge
Pyncheon frowning at her. Fate stared her in the face. She turned back
from her fruitless quest, with a heartsinking sense of disappointment.
In all her years of seclusion, she had never felt, as now, what it was
to be alone. It seemed as if the house stood in a desert, or, by some
spell, was made invisible to those who dwelt around, or passed beside
it; so that any mode of misfortune, miserable accident, or crime might
happen in it without the possibility of aid. In her grief and wounded
pride, Hepzibah had spent her life in divesting herself of friends; she
had wilfully cast off the support which God has ordained his creatures
to need from one another; and it was now her punishment, that Clifford
and herself would fall the easier victims to their kindred enemy.
Returning to the arched window, she lifted her eyes,--scowling, poor,
dim-sighted Hepzibah, in the face of Heaven!--and strove hard to send
up a prayer through the dense gray pavement of clouds. Those mists had
gathered, as if to symbolize a great, brooding mass of human trouble,
doubt, confusion, and chill indifference, between earth and the better
regions. Her faith was too weak; the prayer too heavy to be thus
uplifted. It fell back, a lump of lead, upon her heart. It smote her
with the wretched conviction that Providence intermeddled not in these
petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor had any balm for
these little agonies of a solitary soul; but shed its justice, and its
mercy, in a broad, sunlike sweep, over half the universe at once. Its
vastness made it nothing. But Hepzibah did not see that, just as there
comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of
God's care and pity for every separate need.
At last, finding no other pretext for deferring the torture that she
was to inflict on Clifford,--her reluctance to which was the true cause
of her loitering at the window, her search for the artist, and even her
abortive prayer,--dreading, also, to hear the stern voice of Judge
Pyncheon from below stairs, chiding her delay,--she crept slowly, a
pale, grief-stricken figure, a dismal shape of woman, with almost
torpid limbs, slowly to her brother's door, and knocked!
There was no reply.
And how should there have been? Her hand, tremulous with the shrinking
purpose which directed it, had smitten so feebly against the door that
the sound could hardly have gone inward. She knocked again. Still no
response! Nor was it to be wondered at. She had struck with the entire
force of her heart's vibration, communicating, by some subtile
magnetism, her own terror to the summons. Clifford would turn his face
to the pillow, and cover his head beneath the bedclothes, like a
startled child at midnight. She knocked a third time, three regular
strokes, gentle, but perfectly distinct, and with meaning in them; for,
modulate it with what cautious art we will, the hand cannot help
playing some tune of what we feel upon the senseless wood.
Clifford returned no answer.
"Clifford! Dear brother!" said Hepzibah. "Shall I come in?"
A silence.
Two or three times, and more, Hepzibah repeated his name, without
result; till, thinking her brother's sleep unwontedly profound, she
undid the door, and entering, found the chamber vacant. How could he
have come forth, and when, without her knowledge? Was it possible
that, in spite of the stormy day, and worn out with the irksomeness
within doors he had betaken himself to his customary haunt in the
garden, and was now shivering under the cheerless shelter of the
summer-house? She hastily threw up a window, thrust forth her turbaned
head and the half of her gaunt figure, and searched the whole garden
through, as completely as her dim vision would allow. She could see
the interior of the summer-house, and its circular seat, kept moist by
the droppings of the roof. It had no occupant. Clifford was not
thereabouts; unless, indeed, he had crept for concealment (as, for a
moment, Hepzibah fancied might be the case) into a great, wet mass of
tangled and broad-leaved shadow, where the squash-vines were clambering
tumultuously upon an old wooden framework, set casually aslant against
the fence. This could not be, however; he was not there; for, while
Hepzibah was looking, a strange grimalkin stole forth from the very
spot, and picked his way across the garden. Twice he paused to snuff
the air, and then anew directed his course towards the parlor window.
Whether it was only on account of the stealthy, prying manner common to
the race, or that this cat seemed to have more than ordinary mischief
in his thoughts, the old gentlewoman, in spite of her much perplexity,
felt an impulse to drive the animal away, and accordingly flung down a
window stick. The cat stared up at her, like a detected thief or
murderer, and, the next instant, took to flight. No other living
creature was visible in the garden. Chanticleer and his family had
either not left their roost, disheartened by the interminable rain, or
had done the next wisest thing, by seasonably returning to it.
Hepzibah closed the window.
But where was Clifford? Could it be that, aware of the presence of his
Evil Destiny, he had crept silently down the staircase, while the Judge
and Hepzibah stood talking in the shop, and had softly undone the
fastenings of the outer door, and made his escape into the street?
With that thought, she seemed to behold his gray, wrinkled, yet
childlike aspect, in the old-fashioned garments which he wore about the
house; a figure such as one sometimes imagines himself to be, with the
world's eye upon him, in a troubled dream. This figure of her wretched
brother would go wandering through the city, attracting all eyes, and
everybody's wonder and repugnance, like a ghost, the more to be
shuddered at because visible at noontide. To incur the ridicule of the
younger crowd, that knew him not,--the harsher scorn and indignation of
a few old men, who might recall his once familiar features! To be the
sport of boys, who, when old enough to run about the streets, have no
more reverence for what is beautiful and holy, nor pity for what is
sad,--no more sense of sacred misery, sanctifying the human shape in
which it embodies itself,--than if Satan were the father of them all!
Goaded by their taunts, their loud, shrill cries, and cruel
laughter,--insulted by the filth of the public ways, which they would
fling upon him,--or, as it might well be, distracted by the mere
strangeness of his situation, though nobody should afflict him with so
much as a thoughtless word,--what wonder if Clifford were to break into
some wild extravagance which was certain to be interpreted as lunacy?
Thus Judge Pyncheon's fiendish scheme would be ready accomplished to
his hands!
Then Hepzibah reflected that the town was almost completely
water-girdled. The wharves stretched out towards the centre of the
harbor, and, in this inclement weather, were deserted by the ordinary
throng of merchants, laborers, and sea-faring men; each wharf a
solitude, with the vessels moored stem and stern, along its misty
length. Should her brother's aimless footsteps stray thitherward, and
he but bend, one moment, over the deep, black tide, would he not
bethink himself that here was the sure refuge within his reach, and
that, with a single step, or the slightest overbalance of his body, he
might be forever beyond his kinsman's gripe? Oh, the temptation! To
make of his ponderous sorrow a security! To sink, with its leaden
weight upon him, and never rise again!
The horror of this last conception was too much for Hepzibah. Even
Jaffrey Pyncheon must help her now She hastened down the staircase,
shrieking as she went.
"Clifford is gone!" she cried. "I cannot find my brother. Help,
Jaffrey Pyncheon! Some harm will happen to him!"
She threw open the parlor-door. But, what with the shade of branches
across the windows, and the smoke-blackened ceiling, and the dark
oak-panelling of the walls, there was hardly so much daylight in the
room that Hepzibah's imperfect sight could accurately distinguish the
Judge's figure. She was certain, however, that she saw him sitting in
the ancestral arm-chair, near the centre of the floor, with his face
somewhat averted, and looking towards a window. So firm and quiet is
the nervous system of such men as Judge Pyncheon, that he had perhaps
stirred not more than once since her departure, but, in the hard
composure of his temperament, retained the position into which accident
had thrown him.
"I tell you, Jaffrey," cried Hepzibah impatiently, as she turned from
the parlor-door to search other rooms, "my brother is not in his
chamber! You must help me seek him!"
But Judge Pyncheon was not the man to let himself be startled from an
easy-chair with haste ill-befitting either the dignity of his character
or his broad personal basis, by the alarm of an hysteric woman. Yet,
considering his own interest in the matter, he might have bestirred
himself with a little more alacrity.
"Do you hear me, Jaffrey Pyncheon?" screamed Hepzibah, as she again
approached the parlor-door, after an ineffectual search elsewhere.
"Clifford is gone."
At this instant, on the threshold of the parlor, emerging from within,
appeared Clifford himself! His face was preternaturally pale; so deadly
white, indeed, that, through all the glimmering indistinctness of the
passageway, Hepzibah could discern his features, as if a light fell on
them alone. Their vivid and wild expression seemed likewise sufficient
to illuminate them; it was an expression of scorn and mockery,
coinciding with the emotions indicated by his gesture. As Clifford
stood on the threshold, partly turning back, he pointed his finger
within the parlor, and shook it slowly as though he would have
summoned, not Hepzibah alone, but the whole world, to gaze at some
object inconceivably ridiculous. This action, so ill-timed and
extravagant,--accompanied, too, with a look that showed more like joy
than any other kind of excitement,--compelled Hepzibah to dread that
her stern kinsman's ominous visit had driven her poor brother to
absolute insanity. Nor could she otherwise account for the Judge's
quiescent mood than by supposing him craftily on the watch, while
Clifford developed these symptoms of a distracted mind.
"Be quiet, Clifford!" whispered his sister, raising her hand to impress
caution. "Oh, for Heaven's sake, be quiet!"
"Let him be quiet! What can he do better?" answered Clifford, with a
still wilder gesture, pointing into the room which he had just quitted.
"As for us, Hepzibah, we can dance now!--we can sing, laugh, play, do
what we will! The weight is gone, Hepzibah! It is gone off this weary
old world, and we may be as light-hearted as little Phoebe herself."
And, in accordance with his words, he began to laugh, still pointing
his finger at the object, invisible to Hepzibah, within the parlor.
She was seized with a sudden intuition of some horrible thing. She
thrust herself past Clifford, and disappeared into the room; but almost
immediately returned, with a cry choking in her throat. Gazing at her
brother with an affrighted glance of inquiry, she beheld him all in a
tremor and a quake, from head to foot, while, amid these commoted
elements of passion or alarm, still flickered his gusty mirth.
"My God! what is to become of us?" gasped Hepzibah.
"Come!" said Clifford in a tone of brief decision, most unlike what was
usual with him. "We stay here too long! Let us leave the old house to
our cousin Jaffrey! He will take good care of it!"
Hepzibah now noticed that Clifford had on a cloak,--a garment of long
ago,--in which he had constantly muffled himself during these days of
easterly storm. He beckoned with his hand, and intimated, so far as
she could comprehend him, his purpose that they should go together from
the house. There are chaotic, blind, or drunken moments, in the lives
of persons who lack real force of character,--moments of test, in which
courage would most assert itself,--but where these individuals, if left
to themselves, stagger aimlessly along, or follow implicitly whatever
guidance may befall them, even if it be a child's. No matter how
preposterous or insane, a purpose is a Godsend to them. Hepzibah had
reached this point. Unaccustomed to action or responsibility,--full of
horror at what she had seen, and afraid to inquire, or almost to
imagine, how it had come to pass,--affrighted at the fatality which
seemed to pursue her brother,--stupefied by the dim, thick, stifling
atmosphere of dread which filled the house as with a death-smell, and
obliterated all definiteness of thought,--she yielded without a
question, and on the instant, to the will which Clifford expressed.
For herself, she was like a person in a dream, when the will always
sleeps. Clifford, ordinarily so destitute of this faculty, had found
it in the tension of the crisis.
"Why do you delay so?" cried he sharply. "Put on your cloak and hood,
or whatever it pleases you to wear! No matter what; you cannot look
beautiful nor brilliant, my poor Hepzibah! Take your purse, with money
in it, and come along!"
Hepzibah obeyed these instructions, as if nothing else were to be done
or thought of. She began to wonder, it is true, why she did not wake
up, and at what still more intolerable pitch of dizzy trouble her
spirit would struggle out of the maze, and make her conscious that
nothing of all this had actually happened. Of course it was not real;
no such black, easterly day as this had yet begun to be; Judge Pyncheon
had not talked with, her. Clifford had not laughed, pointed, beckoned
her away with him; but she had merely been afflicted--as lonely
sleepers often are--with a great deal of unreasonable misery, in a
morning dream!
"Now--now--I shall certainly awake!" thought Hepzibah, as she went to
and fro, making her little preparations. "I can bear it no longer I
must wake up now!"
But it came not, that awakening moment! It came not, even when, just
before they left the house, Clifford stole to the parlor-door, and made
a parting obeisance to the sole occupant of the room.
"What an absurd figure the old fellow cuts now!" whispered he to
Hepzibah. "Just when he fancied he had me completely under his thumb!
Come, come; make haste! or he will start up, like Giant Despair in
pursuit of Christian and Hopeful, and catch us yet!"
As they passed into the street, Clifford directed Hepzibah's attention
to something on one of the posts of the front door. It was merely the
initials of his own name, which, with somewhat of his characteristic
grace about the forms of the letters, he had cut there when a boy. The
brother and sister departed, and left Judge Pyncheon sitting in the old
home of his forefathers, all by himself; so heavy and lumpish that we
can liken him to nothing better than a defunct nightmare, which had
perished in the midst of its wickedness, and left its flabby corpse on
the breast of the tormented one, to be gotten rid of as it might!
| Clifford's Chamber Hepzibah very slowly mounts the stairs that lead to Clifford's room, pausing on the way to look through the window at the busy street outside. She wonders if Clifford actually knows of any hidden gold, and she wonders what it would mean for them if he did. Hepzibah soon sees, however, that no one as feeble as Clifford could know such a secret, and she wonders at the horrible things the Judge will do to her frail brother in order to obtain this information that Clifford does not know. Hepzibah contemplates calling for help, but she knows the village would invariably take the Judge's side. Hepzibah knocks on Clifford's door, and there is no answer. When Hepzibah enters, the room is empty, and she has panicked visions of Clifford drowning himself to avoid persecution. She runs downstairs to ask the Judge for his help, but the Judge remains motionless in his chair in the parlor regardless of how loudly Hepzibah yells. Suddenly, Clifford springs out of the parlor, gleefully proclaiming they are "free" as he points grotesquely inside the room. Puzzled, Hepzibah rushes inside to see what the matter is, then recoils in horror. Clifford tells her they must flee, and after Hepzibah grabs her cloak and purse, they escape into the night, leaving the Judge's body slumped in his chair like "a defunct nightmare. | summary |
NEVER had the old house appeared so dismal to poor Hepzibah as when she
departed on that wretched errand. There was a strange aspect in it.
As she trode along the foot-worn passages, and opened one crazy door
after another, and ascended the creaking staircase, she gazed wistfully
and fearfully around. It would have been no marvel, to her excited
mind, if, behind or beside her, there had been the rustle of dead
people's garments, or pale visages awaiting her on the landing-place
above. Her nerves were set all ajar by the scene of passion and terror
through which she had just struggled. Her colloquy with Judge
Pyncheon, who so perfectly represented the person and attributes of the
founder of the family, had called back the dreary past. It weighed
upon her heart. Whatever she had heard, from legendary aunts and
grandmothers, concerning the good or evil fortunes of the
Pyncheons,--stories which had heretofore been kept warm in her
remembrance by the chimney-corner glow that was associated with
them,--now recurred to her, sombre, ghastly, cold, like most passages
of family history, when brooded over in melancholy mood. The whole
seemed little else but a series of calamity, reproducing itself in
successive generations, with one general hue, and varying in little,
save the outline. But Hepzibah now felt as if the Judge, and Clifford,
and herself,--they three together,--were on the point of adding another
incident to the annals of the house, with a bolder relief of wrong and
sorrow, which would cause it to stand out from all the rest. Thus it
is that the grief of the passing moment takes upon itself an
individuality, and a character of climax, which it is destined to lose
after a while, and to fade into the dark gray tissue common to the
grave or glad events of many years ago. It is but for a moment,
comparatively, that anything looks strange or startling,--a truth that
has the bitter and the sweet in it.
But Hepzibah could not rid herself of the sense of something
unprecedented at that instant passing and soon to be accomplished. Her
nerves were in a shake. Instinctively she paused before the arched
window, and looked out upon the street, in order to seize its permanent
objects with her mental grasp, and thus to steady herself from the reel
and vibration which affected her more immediate sphere. It brought her
up, as we may say, with a kind of shock, when she beheld everything
under the same appearance as the day before, and numberless preceding
days, except for the difference between sunshine and sullen storm. Her
eyes travelled along the street, from doorstep to doorstep, noting the
wet sidewalks, with here and there a puddle in hollows that had been
imperceptible until filled with water. She screwed her dim optics to
their acutest point, in the hope of making out, with greater
distinctness, a certain window, where she half saw, half guessed, that
a tailor's seamstress was sitting at her work. Hepzibah flung herself
upon that unknown woman's companionship, even thus far off. Then she
was attracted by a chaise rapidly passing, and watched its moist and
glistening top, and its splashing wheels, until it had turned the
corner, and refused to carry any further her idly trifling, because
appalled and overburdened, mind. When the vehicle had disappeared, she
allowed herself still another loitering moment; for the patched figure
of good Uncle Venner was now visible, coming slowly from the head of
the street downward, with a rheumatic limp, because the east wind had
got into his joints. Hepzibah wished that he would pass yet more
slowly, and befriend her shivering solitude a little longer. Anything
that would take her out of the grievous present, and interpose human
beings betwixt herself and what was nearest to her,--whatever would
defer for an instant the inevitable errand on which she was bound,--all
such impediments were welcome. Next to the lightest heart, the
heaviest is apt to be most playful.
Hepzibah had little hardihood for her own proper pain, and far less for
what she must inflict on Clifford. Of so slight a nature, and so
shattered by his previous calamities, it could not well be short of
utter ruin to bring him face to face with the hard, relentless man who
had been his evil destiny through life. Even had there been no bitter
recollections, nor any hostile interest now at stake between them, the
mere natural repugnance of the more sensitive system to the massive,
weighty, and unimpressible one, must, in itself, have been disastrous
to the former. It would be like flinging a porcelain vase, with
already a crack in it, against a granite column. Never before had
Hepzibah so adequately estimated the powerful character of her cousin
Jaffrey,--powerful by intellect, energy of will, the long habit of
acting among men, and, as she believed, by his unscrupulous pursuit of
selfish ends through evil means. It did but increase the difficulty
that Judge Pyncheon was under a delusion as to the secret which he
supposed Clifford to possess. Men of his strength of purpose and
customary sagacity, if they chance to adopt a mistaken opinion in
practical matters, so wedge it and fasten it among things known to be
true, that to wrench it out of their minds is hardly less difficult
than pulling up an oak. Thus, as the Judge required an impossibility
of Clifford, the latter, as he could not perform it, must needs perish.
For what, in the grasp of a man like this, was to become of Clifford's
soft poetic nature, that never should have had a task more stubborn
than to set a life of beautiful enjoyment to the flow and rhythm of
musical cadences! Indeed, what had become of it already? Broken!
Blighted! All but annihilated! Soon to be wholly so!
For a moment, the thought crossed Hepzibah's mind, whether Clifford
might not really have such knowledge of their deceased uncle's vanished
estate as the Judge imputed to him. She remembered some vague
intimations, on her brother's part, which--if the supposition were not
essentially preposterous--might have been so interpreted. There had
been schemes of travel and residence abroad, day-dreams of brilliant
life at home, and splendid castles in the air, which it would have
required boundless wealth to build and realize. Had this wealth been
in her power, how gladly would Hepzibah have bestowed it all upon her
iron-hearted kinsman, to buy for Clifford the freedom and seclusion of
the desolate old house! But she believed that her brother's schemes
were as destitute of actual substance and purpose as a child's pictures
of its future life, while sitting in a little chair by its mother's
knee. Clifford had none but shadowy gold at his command; and it was
not the stuff to satisfy Judge Pyncheon!
Was there no help in their extremity? It seemed strange that there
should be none, with a city round about her. It would be so easy to
throw up the window, and send forth a shriek, at the strange agony of
which everybody would come hastening to the rescue, well understanding
it to be the cry of a human soul, at some dreadful crisis! But how
wild, how almost laughable, the fatality,--and yet how continually it
comes to pass, thought Hepzibah, in this dull delirium of a
world,--that whosoever, and with however kindly a purpose, should come
to help, they would be sure to help the strongest side! Might and wrong
combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible
attraction. There would be Judge Pyncheon,--a person eminent in the
public view, of high station and great wealth, a philanthropist, a
member of Congress and of the church, and intimately associated with
whatever else bestows good name,--so imposing, in these advantageous
lights, that Hepzibah herself could hardly help shrinking from her own
conclusions as to his hollow integrity. The Judge, on one side! And
who, on the other? The guilty Clifford! Once a byword! Now, an
indistinctly remembered ignominy!
Nevertheless, in spite of this perception that the Judge would draw all
human aid to his own behalf, Hepzibah was so unaccustomed to act for
herself, that the least word of counsel would have swayed her to any
mode of action. Little Phoebe Pyncheon would at once have lighted up
the whole scene, if not by any available suggestion, yet simply by the
warm vivacity of her character. The idea of the artist occurred to
Hepzibah. Young and unknown, mere vagrant adventurer as he was, she had
been conscious of a force in Holgrave which might well adapt him to be
the champion of a crisis. With this thought in her mind, she unbolted a
door, cobwebbed and long disused, but which had served as a former
medium of communication between her own part of the house and the gable
where the wandering daguerreotypist had now established his temporary
home. He was not there. A book, face downward, on the table, a roll of
manuscript, a half-written sheet, a newspaper, some tools of his
present occupation, and several rejected daguerreotypes, conveyed an
impression as if he were close at hand. But, at this period of the day,
as Hepzibah might have anticipated, the artist was at his public rooms.
With an impulse of idle curiosity, that flickered among her heavy
thoughts, she looked at one of the daguerreotypes, and beheld Judge
Pyncheon frowning at her. Fate stared her in the face. She turned back
from her fruitless quest, with a heartsinking sense of disappointment.
In all her years of seclusion, she had never felt, as now, what it was
to be alone. It seemed as if the house stood in a desert, or, by some
spell, was made invisible to those who dwelt around, or passed beside
it; so that any mode of misfortune, miserable accident, or crime might
happen in it without the possibility of aid. In her grief and wounded
pride, Hepzibah had spent her life in divesting herself of friends; she
had wilfully cast off the support which God has ordained his creatures
to need from one another; and it was now her punishment, that Clifford
and herself would fall the easier victims to their kindred enemy.
Returning to the arched window, she lifted her eyes,--scowling, poor,
dim-sighted Hepzibah, in the face of Heaven!--and strove hard to send
up a prayer through the dense gray pavement of clouds. Those mists had
gathered, as if to symbolize a great, brooding mass of human trouble,
doubt, confusion, and chill indifference, between earth and the better
regions. Her faith was too weak; the prayer too heavy to be thus
uplifted. It fell back, a lump of lead, upon her heart. It smote her
with the wretched conviction that Providence intermeddled not in these
petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor had any balm for
these little agonies of a solitary soul; but shed its justice, and its
mercy, in a broad, sunlike sweep, over half the universe at once. Its
vastness made it nothing. But Hepzibah did not see that, just as there
comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of
God's care and pity for every separate need.
At last, finding no other pretext for deferring the torture that she
was to inflict on Clifford,--her reluctance to which was the true cause
of her loitering at the window, her search for the artist, and even her
abortive prayer,--dreading, also, to hear the stern voice of Judge
Pyncheon from below stairs, chiding her delay,--she crept slowly, a
pale, grief-stricken figure, a dismal shape of woman, with almost
torpid limbs, slowly to her brother's door, and knocked!
There was no reply.
And how should there have been? Her hand, tremulous with the shrinking
purpose which directed it, had smitten so feebly against the door that
the sound could hardly have gone inward. She knocked again. Still no
response! Nor was it to be wondered at. She had struck with the entire
force of her heart's vibration, communicating, by some subtile
magnetism, her own terror to the summons. Clifford would turn his face
to the pillow, and cover his head beneath the bedclothes, like a
startled child at midnight. She knocked a third time, three regular
strokes, gentle, but perfectly distinct, and with meaning in them; for,
modulate it with what cautious art we will, the hand cannot help
playing some tune of what we feel upon the senseless wood.
Clifford returned no answer.
"Clifford! Dear brother!" said Hepzibah. "Shall I come in?"
A silence.
Two or three times, and more, Hepzibah repeated his name, without
result; till, thinking her brother's sleep unwontedly profound, she
undid the door, and entering, found the chamber vacant. How could he
have come forth, and when, without her knowledge? Was it possible
that, in spite of the stormy day, and worn out with the irksomeness
within doors he had betaken himself to his customary haunt in the
garden, and was now shivering under the cheerless shelter of the
summer-house? She hastily threw up a window, thrust forth her turbaned
head and the half of her gaunt figure, and searched the whole garden
through, as completely as her dim vision would allow. She could see
the interior of the summer-house, and its circular seat, kept moist by
the droppings of the roof. It had no occupant. Clifford was not
thereabouts; unless, indeed, he had crept for concealment (as, for a
moment, Hepzibah fancied might be the case) into a great, wet mass of
tangled and broad-leaved shadow, where the squash-vines were clambering
tumultuously upon an old wooden framework, set casually aslant against
the fence. This could not be, however; he was not there; for, while
Hepzibah was looking, a strange grimalkin stole forth from the very
spot, and picked his way across the garden. Twice he paused to snuff
the air, and then anew directed his course towards the parlor window.
Whether it was only on account of the stealthy, prying manner common to
the race, or that this cat seemed to have more than ordinary mischief
in his thoughts, the old gentlewoman, in spite of her much perplexity,
felt an impulse to drive the animal away, and accordingly flung down a
window stick. The cat stared up at her, like a detected thief or
murderer, and, the next instant, took to flight. No other living
creature was visible in the garden. Chanticleer and his family had
either not left their roost, disheartened by the interminable rain, or
had done the next wisest thing, by seasonably returning to it.
Hepzibah closed the window.
But where was Clifford? Could it be that, aware of the presence of his
Evil Destiny, he had crept silently down the staircase, while the Judge
and Hepzibah stood talking in the shop, and had softly undone the
fastenings of the outer door, and made his escape into the street?
With that thought, she seemed to behold his gray, wrinkled, yet
childlike aspect, in the old-fashioned garments which he wore about the
house; a figure such as one sometimes imagines himself to be, with the
world's eye upon him, in a troubled dream. This figure of her wretched
brother would go wandering through the city, attracting all eyes, and
everybody's wonder and repugnance, like a ghost, the more to be
shuddered at because visible at noontide. To incur the ridicule of the
younger crowd, that knew him not,--the harsher scorn and indignation of
a few old men, who might recall his once familiar features! To be the
sport of boys, who, when old enough to run about the streets, have no
more reverence for what is beautiful and holy, nor pity for what is
sad,--no more sense of sacred misery, sanctifying the human shape in
which it embodies itself,--than if Satan were the father of them all!
Goaded by their taunts, their loud, shrill cries, and cruel
laughter,--insulted by the filth of the public ways, which they would
fling upon him,--or, as it might well be, distracted by the mere
strangeness of his situation, though nobody should afflict him with so
much as a thoughtless word,--what wonder if Clifford were to break into
some wild extravagance which was certain to be interpreted as lunacy?
Thus Judge Pyncheon's fiendish scheme would be ready accomplished to
his hands!
Then Hepzibah reflected that the town was almost completely
water-girdled. The wharves stretched out towards the centre of the
harbor, and, in this inclement weather, were deserted by the ordinary
throng of merchants, laborers, and sea-faring men; each wharf a
solitude, with the vessels moored stem and stern, along its misty
length. Should her brother's aimless footsteps stray thitherward, and
he but bend, one moment, over the deep, black tide, would he not
bethink himself that here was the sure refuge within his reach, and
that, with a single step, or the slightest overbalance of his body, he
might be forever beyond his kinsman's gripe? Oh, the temptation! To
make of his ponderous sorrow a security! To sink, with its leaden
weight upon him, and never rise again!
The horror of this last conception was too much for Hepzibah. Even
Jaffrey Pyncheon must help her now She hastened down the staircase,
shrieking as she went.
"Clifford is gone!" she cried. "I cannot find my brother. Help,
Jaffrey Pyncheon! Some harm will happen to him!"
She threw open the parlor-door. But, what with the shade of branches
across the windows, and the smoke-blackened ceiling, and the dark
oak-panelling of the walls, there was hardly so much daylight in the
room that Hepzibah's imperfect sight could accurately distinguish the
Judge's figure. She was certain, however, that she saw him sitting in
the ancestral arm-chair, near the centre of the floor, with his face
somewhat averted, and looking towards a window. So firm and quiet is
the nervous system of such men as Judge Pyncheon, that he had perhaps
stirred not more than once since her departure, but, in the hard
composure of his temperament, retained the position into which accident
had thrown him.
"I tell you, Jaffrey," cried Hepzibah impatiently, as she turned from
the parlor-door to search other rooms, "my brother is not in his
chamber! You must help me seek him!"
But Judge Pyncheon was not the man to let himself be startled from an
easy-chair with haste ill-befitting either the dignity of his character
or his broad personal basis, by the alarm of an hysteric woman. Yet,
considering his own interest in the matter, he might have bestirred
himself with a little more alacrity.
"Do you hear me, Jaffrey Pyncheon?" screamed Hepzibah, as she again
approached the parlor-door, after an ineffectual search elsewhere.
"Clifford is gone."
At this instant, on the threshold of the parlor, emerging from within,
appeared Clifford himself! His face was preternaturally pale; so deadly
white, indeed, that, through all the glimmering indistinctness of the
passageway, Hepzibah could discern his features, as if a light fell on
them alone. Their vivid and wild expression seemed likewise sufficient
to illuminate them; it was an expression of scorn and mockery,
coinciding with the emotions indicated by his gesture. As Clifford
stood on the threshold, partly turning back, he pointed his finger
within the parlor, and shook it slowly as though he would have
summoned, not Hepzibah alone, but the whole world, to gaze at some
object inconceivably ridiculous. This action, so ill-timed and
extravagant,--accompanied, too, with a look that showed more like joy
than any other kind of excitement,--compelled Hepzibah to dread that
her stern kinsman's ominous visit had driven her poor brother to
absolute insanity. Nor could she otherwise account for the Judge's
quiescent mood than by supposing him craftily on the watch, while
Clifford developed these symptoms of a distracted mind.
"Be quiet, Clifford!" whispered his sister, raising her hand to impress
caution. "Oh, for Heaven's sake, be quiet!"
"Let him be quiet! What can he do better?" answered Clifford, with a
still wilder gesture, pointing into the room which he had just quitted.
"As for us, Hepzibah, we can dance now!--we can sing, laugh, play, do
what we will! The weight is gone, Hepzibah! It is gone off this weary
old world, and we may be as light-hearted as little Phoebe herself."
And, in accordance with his words, he began to laugh, still pointing
his finger at the object, invisible to Hepzibah, within the parlor.
She was seized with a sudden intuition of some horrible thing. She
thrust herself past Clifford, and disappeared into the room; but almost
immediately returned, with a cry choking in her throat. Gazing at her
brother with an affrighted glance of inquiry, she beheld him all in a
tremor and a quake, from head to foot, while, amid these commoted
elements of passion or alarm, still flickered his gusty mirth.
"My God! what is to become of us?" gasped Hepzibah.
"Come!" said Clifford in a tone of brief decision, most unlike what was
usual with him. "We stay here too long! Let us leave the old house to
our cousin Jaffrey! He will take good care of it!"
Hepzibah now noticed that Clifford had on a cloak,--a garment of long
ago,--in which he had constantly muffled himself during these days of
easterly storm. He beckoned with his hand, and intimated, so far as
she could comprehend him, his purpose that they should go together from
the house. There are chaotic, blind, or drunken moments, in the lives
of persons who lack real force of character,--moments of test, in which
courage would most assert itself,--but where these individuals, if left
to themselves, stagger aimlessly along, or follow implicitly whatever
guidance may befall them, even if it be a child's. No matter how
preposterous or insane, a purpose is a Godsend to them. Hepzibah had
reached this point. Unaccustomed to action or responsibility,--full of
horror at what she had seen, and afraid to inquire, or almost to
imagine, how it had come to pass,--affrighted at the fatality which
seemed to pursue her brother,--stupefied by the dim, thick, stifling
atmosphere of dread which filled the house as with a death-smell, and
obliterated all definiteness of thought,--she yielded without a
question, and on the instant, to the will which Clifford expressed.
For herself, she was like a person in a dream, when the will always
sleeps. Clifford, ordinarily so destitute of this faculty, had found
it in the tension of the crisis.
"Why do you delay so?" cried he sharply. "Put on your cloak and hood,
or whatever it pleases you to wear! No matter what; you cannot look
beautiful nor brilliant, my poor Hepzibah! Take your purse, with money
in it, and come along!"
Hepzibah obeyed these instructions, as if nothing else were to be done
or thought of. She began to wonder, it is true, why she did not wake
up, and at what still more intolerable pitch of dizzy trouble her
spirit would struggle out of the maze, and make her conscious that
nothing of all this had actually happened. Of course it was not real;
no such black, easterly day as this had yet begun to be; Judge Pyncheon
had not talked with, her. Clifford had not laughed, pointed, beckoned
her away with him; but she had merely been afflicted--as lonely
sleepers often are--with a great deal of unreasonable misery, in a
morning dream!
"Now--now--I shall certainly awake!" thought Hepzibah, as she went to
and fro, making her little preparations. "I can bear it no longer I
must wake up now!"
But it came not, that awakening moment! It came not, even when, just
before they left the house, Clifford stole to the parlor-door, and made
a parting obeisance to the sole occupant of the room.
"What an absurd figure the old fellow cuts now!" whispered he to
Hepzibah. "Just when he fancied he had me completely under his thumb!
Come, come; make haste! or he will start up, like Giant Despair in
pursuit of Christian and Hopeful, and catch us yet!"
As they passed into the street, Clifford directed Hepzibah's attention
to something on one of the posts of the front door. It was merely the
initials of his own name, which, with somewhat of his characteristic
grace about the forms of the letters, he had cut there when a boy. The
brother and sister departed, and left Judge Pyncheon sitting in the old
home of his forefathers, all by himself; so heavy and lumpish that we
can liken him to nothing better than a defunct nightmare, which had
perished in the midst of its wickedness, and left its flabby corpse on
the breast of the tormented one, to be gotten rid of as it might!
| In Chapter 15, the Judge is further fleshed out as the novel's villain, and though it is never questioned that his motives are cruel and self-serving, Hawthorne does add some depth to this discussion by suggesting that the Judge may not be aware of his own faults. The Judge sees himself as a man of many accomplishments and just a few misdeeds. He is a pious and active member of the community--a judge, a preacher, and a leader of the temperance movement. The Judge's smile, since it reflects his sense of self-satisfaction, while misguided, can no longer honestly be called fake or a deception. The fact that the Judge remains the obvious antagonist of The House of the Seven Gables makes the novel both an indictment of the society which allows gestures to override true integrity and an even sterner view of human conduct than we might expect from the Judge himself. The Judge's conscience is clear, but Hawthorne has little use for what some might call mitigating circumstances and condemns the Judge nonetheless. These chapters both masterfully employ suspense to build up what will prove to be the climax of the book. Although Hepzibah greets the Judge apprehensively, he is kind at first and slow to anger. Given the urgency of his task and the fact that he has so often been rejected by Hepzibah, we might expect the Judge to immediately and explosively butt heads with his cousin, but he continues to bide his time. Even once his anger is aroused, the Judge speaks through clenched teeth instead of raising his voice, and we are left hungering for some kind of resolution. The suspense is carried over into the next chapter, and the tension rises with every step up the stairs the Hepzibah takes. When Hepzibah finally gets to Clifford's room, the scene seems like an inspiration for countless horror movies--she knocks on the door and there is no answer, then she swings the door open slowly and steps into the empty room. As Hepzibah is suddenly struck by the thought of Clifford trying to end his own misery, the prose springs to life, as Hepzibah races down the halls, calls loudly to the Judge at the top of her lungs, and Clifford suddenly pops up in the parlor. Yet the novel continues to deny us any resolution. Even though the Judge is left slumped in his chair, exactly what has happened is left unclear and an aura of mystery hangs over the next few chapters | analysis |
SUMMER as it was, the east wind set poor Hepzibah's few remaining teeth
chattering in her head, as she and Clifford faced it, on their way up
Pyncheon Street, and towards the centre of the town. Not merely was it
the shiver which this pitiless blast brought to her frame (although her
feet and hands, especially, had never seemed so death-a-cold as now),
but there was a moral sensation, mingling itself with the physical
chill, and causing her to shake more in spirit than in body. The
world's broad, bleak atmosphere was all so comfortless! Such, indeed,
is the impression which it makes on every new adventurer, even if he
plunge into it while the warmest tide of life is bubbling through his
veins. What, then, must it have been to Hepzibah and Clifford,--so
time-stricken as they were, yet so like children in their
inexperience,--as they left the doorstep, and passed from beneath the
wide shelter of the Pyncheon Elm! They were wandering all abroad, on
precisely such a pilgrimage as a child often meditates, to the world's
end, with perhaps a sixpence and a biscuit in his pocket. In
Hepzibah's mind, there was the wretched consciousness of being adrift.
She had lost the faculty of self-guidance; but, in view of the
difficulties around her, felt it hardly worth an effort to regain it,
and was, moreover, incapable of making one.
As they proceeded on their strange expedition, she now and then cast a
look sidelong at Clifford, and could not but observe that he was
possessed and swayed by a powerful excitement. It was this, indeed,
that gave him the control which he had at once, and so irresistibly,
established over his movements. It not a little resembled the
exhilaration of wine. Or, it might more fancifully be compared to a
joyous piece of music, played with wild vivacity, but upon a disordered
instrument. As the cracked jarring note might always be heard, and as
it jarred loudest amidst the loftiest exultation of the melody, so was
there a continual quake through Clifford, causing him most to quiver
while he wore a triumphant smile, and seemed almost under a necessity
to skip in his gait.
They met few people abroad, even on passing from the retired
neighborhood of the House of the Seven Gables into what was ordinarily
the more thronged and busier portion of the town. Glistening
sidewalks, with little pools of rain, here and there, along their
unequal surface; umbrellas displayed ostentatiously in the
shop-windows, as if the life of trade had concentrated itself in that
one article; wet leaves of the horse-chestnut or elm-trees, torn off
untimely by the blast and scattered along the public way; an unsightly,
accumulation of mud in the middle of the street, which perversely grew
the more unclean for its long and laborious washing,--these were the
more definable points of a very sombre picture. In the way of movement
and human life, there was the hasty rattle of a cab or coach, its
driver protected by a waterproof cap over his head and shoulders; the
forlorn figure of an old man, who seemed to have crept out of some
subterranean sewer, and was stooping along the kennel, and poking the
wet rubbish with a stick, in quest of rusty nails; a merchant or two,
at the door of the post-office, together with an editor and a
miscellaneous politician, awaiting a dilatory mail; a few visages of
retired sea-captains at the window of an insurance office, looking out
vacantly at the vacant street, blaspheming at the weather, and fretting
at the dearth as well of public news as local gossip. What a
treasure-trove to these venerable quidnuncs, could they have guessed
the secret which Hepzibah and Clifford were carrying along with them!
But their two figures attracted hardly so much notice as that of a
young girl, who passed at the same instant, and happened to raise her
skirt a trifle too high above her ankles. Had it been a sunny and
cheerful day, they could hardly have gone through the streets without
making themselves obnoxious to remark. Now, probably, they were felt
to be in keeping with the dismal and bitter weather, and therefore did
not stand out in strong relief, as if the sun were shining on them, but
melted into the gray gloom and were forgotten as soon as gone.
Poor Hepzibah! Could she have understood this fact, it would have
brought her some little comfort; for, to all her other
troubles,--strange to say!--there was added the womanish and
old-maiden-like misery arising from a sense of unseemliness in her
attire. Thus, she was fain to shrink deeper into herself, as it were,
as if in the hope of making people suppose that here was only a cloak
and hood, threadbare and woefully faded, taking an airing in the midst
of the storm, without any wearer!
As they went on, the feeling of indistinctness and unreality kept dimly
hovering round about her, and so diffusing itself into her system that
one of her hands was hardly palpable to the touch of the other. Any
certainty would have been preferable to this. She whispered to
herself, again and again, "Am I awake?--Am I awake?" and sometimes
exposed her face to the chill spatter of the wind, for the sake of its
rude assurance that she was. Whether it was Clifford's purpose, or
only chance, had led them thither, they now found themselves passing
beneath the arched entrance of a large structure of gray stone.
Within, there was a spacious breadth, and an airy height from floor to
roof, now partially filled with smoke and steam, which eddied
voluminously upward and formed a mimic cloud-region over their heads.
A train of cars was just ready for a start; the locomotive was fretting
and fuming, like a steed impatient for a headlong rush; and the bell
rang out its hasty peal, so well expressing the brief summons which
life vouchsafes to us in its hurried career. Without question or
delay,--with the irresistible decision, if not rather to be called
recklessness, which had so strangely taken possession of him, and
through him of Hepzibah,--Clifford impelled her towards the cars, and
assisted her to enter. The signal was given; the engine puffed forth
its short, quick breaths; the train began its movement; and, along with
a hundred other passengers, these two unwonted travellers sped onward
like the wind.
At last, therefore, and after so long estrangement from everything that
the world acted or enjoyed, they had been drawn into the great current
of human life, and were swept away with it, as by the suction of fate
itself.
Still haunted with the idea that not one of the past incidents,
inclusive of Judge Pyncheon's visit, could be real, the recluse of the
Seven Gables murmured in her brother's ear,--
"Clifford! Clifford! Is not this a dream?"
"A dream, Hepzibah!" repeated he, almost laughing in her face. "On the
contrary, I have never been awake before!"
Meanwhile, looking from the window, they could see the world racing
past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the
next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it
had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of
meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the
broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its
age-long rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to
their own.
Within the car there was the usual interior life of the railroad,
offering little to the observation of other passengers, but full of
novelty for this pair of strangely enfranchised prisoners. It was
novelty enough, indeed, that there were fifty human beings in close
relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by
the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its
grasp. It seemed marvellous how all these people could remain so
quietly in their seats, while so much noisy strength was at work in
their behalf. Some, with tickets in their hats (long travellers these,
before whom lay a hundred miles of railroad), had plunged into the
English scenery and adventures of pamphlet novels, and were keeping
company with dukes and earls. Others, whose briefer span forbade their
devoting themselves to studies so abstruse, beguiled the little tedium
of the way with penny-papers. A party of girls, and one young man, on
opposite sides of the car, found huge amusement in a game of ball.
They tossed it to and fro, with peals of laughter that might be
measured by mile-lengths; for, faster than the nimble ball could fly,
the merry players fled unconsciously along, leaving the trail of their
mirth afar behind, and ending their game under another sky than had
witnessed its commencement. Boys, with apples, cakes, candy, and rolls
of variously tinctured lozenges,--merchandise that reminded Hepzibah of
her deserted shop,--appeared at each momentary stopping-place, doing up
their business in a hurry, or breaking it short off, lest the market
should ravish them away with it. New people continually entered. Old
acquaintances--for such they soon grew to be, in this rapid current of
affairs--continually departed. Here and there, amid the rumble and the
tumult, sat one asleep. Sleep; sport; business; graver or lighter
study; and the common and inevitable movement onward! It was life
itself!
Clifford's naturally poignant sympathies were all aroused. He caught
the color of what was passing about him, and threw it back more vividly
than he received it, but mixed, nevertheless, with a lurid and
portentous hue. Hepzibah, on the other hand, felt herself more apart
from human kind than even in the seclusion which she had just quitted.
"You are not happy, Hepzibah!" said Clifford apart, in a tone of
approach. "You are thinking of that dismal old house, and of Cousin
Jaffrey"--here came the quake through him,--"and of Cousin Jaffrey
sitting there, all by himself! Take my advice,--follow my example,--and
let such things slip aside. Here we are, in the world, Hepzibah!--in
the midst of life!--in the throng of our fellow beings! Let you and I
be happy! As happy as that youth and those pretty girls, at their game
of ball!"
"Happy--" thought Hepzibah, bitterly conscious, at the word, of her
dull and heavy heart, with the frozen pain in it,--"happy. He is mad
already; and, if I could once feel myself broad awake, I should go mad
too!"
If a fixed idea be madness, she was perhaps not remote from it. Fast
and far as they had rattled and clattered along the iron track, they
might just as well, as regarded Hepzibah's mental images, have been
passing up and down Pyncheon Street. With miles and miles of varied
scenery between, there was no scene for her save the seven old
gable-peaks, with their moss, and the tuft of weeds in one of the
angles, and the shop-window, and a customer shaking the door, and
compelling the little bell to jingle fiercely, but without disturbing
Judge Pyncheon! This one old house was everywhere! It transported its
great, lumbering bulk with more than railroad speed, and set itself
phlegmatically down on whatever spot she glanced at. The quality of
Hepzibah's mind was too unmalleable to take new impressions so readily
as Clifford's. He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable
kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots.
Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her
brother and herself was changed. At home, she was his guardian; here,
Clifford had become hers, and seemed to comprehend whatever belonged to
their new position with a singular rapidity of intelligence. He had
been startled into manhood and intellectual vigor; or, at least, into a
condition that resembled them, though it might be both diseased and
transitory.
The conductor now applied for their tickets; and Clifford, who had made
himself the purse-bearer, put a bank-note into his hand, as he had
observed others do.
"For the lady and yourself?" asked the conductor. "And how far?"
"As far as that will carry us," said Clifford. "It is no great matter.
We are riding for pleasure merely."
"You choose a strange day for it, sir!" remarked a gimlet-eyed old
gentleman on the other side of the car, looking at Clifford and his
companion, as if curious to make them out. "The best chance of
pleasure, in an easterly rain, I take it, is in a man's own house, with
a nice little fire in the chimney."
"I cannot precisely agree with you," said Clifford, courteously bowing
to the old gentleman, and at once taking up the clew of conversation
which the latter had proffered. "It had just occurred to me, on the
contrary, that this admirable invention of the railroad--with the vast
and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and
convenience--is destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and
fireside, and substitute something better."
"In the name of common-sense," asked the old gentleman rather testily,
"what can be better for a man than his own parlor and chimney-corner?"
"These things have not the merit which many good people attribute to
them," replied Clifford. "They may be said, in few and pithy words, to
have ill served a poor purpose. My impression is, that our wonderfully
increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to
bring us around again to the nomadic state. You are aware, my dear
sir,--you must have observed it in your own experience,--that all human
progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful
figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going
straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new
position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried
and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and
perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy
of the present and the future. To apply this truth to the topic now
under discussion. In the early epochs of our race, men dwelt in
temporary huts, of bowers of branches, as easily constructed as a
bird's-nest, and which they built,--if it should be called building,
when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made
with hands,--which Nature, we will say, assisted them to rear where
fruit abounded, where fish and game were plentiful, or, most
especially, where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier
shade than elsewhere, and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood,
and hill. This life possessed a charm which, ever since man quitted
it, has vanished from existence. And it typified something better than
itself. It had its drawbacks; such as hunger and thirst, inclement
weather, hot sunshine, and weary and foot-blistering marches over
barren and ugly tracts, that lay between the sites desirable for their
fertility and beauty. But in our ascending spiral, we escape all this.
These railroads--could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble
and the jar got rid of--are positively the greatest blessing that the
ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the
toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being
so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why,
therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily
be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life
in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as
easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,--in a better sense, wherever the
fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?"
Clifford's countenance glowed, as he divulged this theory; a youthful
character shone out from within, converting the wrinkles and pallid
duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask. The merry girls let
their ball drop upon the floor, and gazed at him. They said to
themselves, perhaps, that, before his hair was gray and the crow's-feet
tracked his temples, this now decaying man must have stamped the
impress of his features on many a woman's heart. But, alas! no woman's
eye had seen his face while it was beautiful.
"I should scarcely call it an improved state of things," observed
Clifford's new acquaintance, "to live everywhere and nowhere!"
"Would you not?" exclaimed Clifford, with singular energy. "It is as
clear to me as sunshine,--were there any in the sky,--that the greatest
possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and
improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with
mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men
painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home!
The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it. Morbid
influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about hearths, and
pollute the life of households. There is no such unwholesome
atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one's defunct
forefathers and relatives. I speak of what I know. There is a certain
house within my familiar recollection,--one of those peaked-gable
(there are seven of them), projecting-storied edifices, such as you
occasionally see in our older towns,--a rusty, crazy, creaky,
dry-rotted, dingy, dark, and miserable old dungeon, with an arched
window over the porch, and a little shop-door on one side, and a great,
melancholy elm before it! Now, sir, whenever my thoughts recur to this
seven-gabled mansion (the fact is so very curious that I must needs
mention it), immediately I have a vision or image of an elderly man, of
remarkably stern countenance, sitting in an oaken elbow-chair, dead,
stone-dead, with an ugly flow of blood upon his shirt-bosom! Dead, but
with open eyes! He taints the whole house, as I remember it. I could
never flourish there, nor be happy, nor do nor enjoy what God meant me
to do and enjoy."
His face darkened, and seemed to contract, and shrivel itself up, and
wither into age.
"Never, sir!" he repeated. "I could never draw cheerful breath there!"
"I should think not," said the old gentleman, eyeing Clifford
earnestly, and rather apprehensively. "I should conceive not, sir,
with that notion in your head!"
"Surely not," continued Clifford; "and it were a relief to me if that
house could be torn down, or burnt up, and so the earth be rid of it,
and grass be sown abundantly over its foundation. Not that I should
ever visit its site again! for, sir, the farther I get away from it,
the more does the joy, the lightsome freshness, the heart-leap, the
intellectual dance, the youth, in short,--yes, my youth, my youth!--the
more does it come back to me. No longer ago than this morning, I was
old. I remember looking in the glass, and wondering at my own gray
hair, and the wrinkles, many and deep, right across my brow, and the
furrows down my cheeks, and the prodigious trampling of crow's-feet
about my temples! It was too soon! I could not bear it! Age had no
right to come! I had not lived! But now do I look old? If so, my
aspect belies me strangely; for--a great weight being off my mind--I
feel in the very heyday of my youth, with the world and my best days
before me!"
"I trust you may find it so," said the old gentleman, who seemed rather
embarrassed, and desirous of avoiding the observation which Clifford's
wild talk drew on them both. "You have my best wishes for it."
"For Heaven's sake, dear Clifford, be quiet!" whispered his sister.
"They think you mad."
"Be quiet yourself, Hepzibah!" returned her brother. "No matter what
they think! I am not mad. For the first time in thirty years my
thoughts gush up and find words ready for them. I must talk, and I
will!"
He turned again towards the old gentleman, and renewed the conversation.
"Yes, my dear sir," said he, "it is my firm belief and hope that these
terms of roof and hearth-stone, which have so long been held to embody
something sacred, are soon to pass out of men's daily use, and be
forgotten. Just imagine, for a moment, how much of human evil will
crumble away, with this one change! What we call real estate--the solid
ground to build a house on--is the broad foundation on which nearly all
the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit almost any wrong,--he
will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and
which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages,--only to
build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in,
and for his posterity to be miserable in. He lays his own dead corpse
beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning
picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an evil
destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there. I
do not speak wildly. I have just such a house in my mind's eye!"
"Then, sir," said the old gentleman, getting anxious to drop the
subject, "you are not to blame for leaving it."
"Within the lifetime of the child already born," Clifford went on, "all
this will be done away. The world is growing too ethereal and
spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer. To me,
though, for a considerable period of time, I have lived chiefly in
retirement, and know less of such things than most men,--even to me,
the harbingers of a better era are unmistakable. Mesmerism, now! Will
that effect nothing, think you, towards purging away the grossness out
of human life?"
"All a humbug!" growled the old gentleman.
"These rapping spirits, that little Phoebe told us of, the other day,"
said Clifford,--"what are these but the messengers of the spiritual
world, knocking at the door of substance? And it shall be flung wide
open!"
"A humbug, again!" cried the old gentleman, growing more and more testy
at these glimpses of Clifford's metaphysics. "I should like to rap
with a good stick on the empty pates of the dolts who circulate such
nonsense!"
"Then there is electricity,--the demon, the angel, the mighty physical
power, the all-pervading intelligence!" exclaimed Clifford. "Is that a
humbug, too? Is it a fact--or have I dreamt it--that, by means of
electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating
thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round
globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall
we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the
substance which we deemed it!"
"If you mean the telegraph," said the old gentleman, glancing his eye
toward its wire, alongside the rail-track, "it is an excellent
thing,--that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics
don't get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly
as regards the detection of bank-robbers and murderers."
"I don't quite like it, in that point of view," replied Clifford. "A
bank-robber, and what you call a murderer, likewise, has his rights,
which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard in so
much the more liberal spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to
controvert their existence. An almost spiritual medium, like the
electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and
holy missions. Lovers, day by, day--hour by hour, if so often moved to
do it,--might send their heart-throbs from Maine to Florida, with some
such words as these 'I love you forever!'--'My heart runs over with
love!'--'I love you more than I can!' and, again, at the next message
'I have lived an hour longer, and love you twice as much!' Or, when a
good man has departed, his distant friend should be conscious of an
electric thrill, as from the world of happy spirits, telling him 'Your
dear friend is in bliss!' Or, to an absent husband, should come tidings
thus 'An immortal being, of whom you are the father, has this moment
come from God!' and immediately its little voice would seem to have
reached so far, and to be echoing in his heart. But for these poor
rogues, the bank-robbers,--who, after all, are about as honest as nine
people in ten, except that they disregard certain formalities, and
prefer to transact business at midnight rather than 'Change-hours,--and
for these murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the
motives of their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public
benefactors, if we consider only its result,--for unfortunate
individuals like these, I really cannot applaud the enlistment of an
immaterial and miraculous power in the universal world-hunt at their
heels!"
"You can't, hey?" cried the old gentleman, with a hard look.
"Positively, no!" answered Clifford. "It puts them too miserably at
disadvantage. For example, sir, in a dark, low, cross-beamed, panelled
room of an old house, let us suppose a dead man, sitting in an
arm-chair, with a blood-stain on his shirt-bosom,--and let us add to
our hypothesis another man, issuing from the house, which he feels to
be over-filled with the dead man's presence,--and let us lastly imagine
him fleeing, Heaven knows whither, at the speed of a hurricane, by
railroad! Now, sir, if the fugitive alight in some distant town, and
find all the people babbling about that self-same dead man, whom he has
fled so far to avoid the sight and thought of, will you not allow that
his natural rights have been infringed? He has been deprived of his
city of refuge, and, in my humble opinion, has suffered infinite wrong!"
"You are a strange man; Sir!" said the old gentleman, bringing his
gimlet-eye to a point on Clifford, as if determined to bore right into
him. "I can't see through you!"
"No, I'll be bound you can't!" cried Clifford, laughing. "And yet, my
dear sir, I am as transparent as the water of Maule's well! But come,
Hepzibah! We have flown far enough for once. Let us alight, as the
birds do, and perch ourselves on the nearest twig, and consult wither
we shall fly next!"
Just then, as it happened, the train reached a solitary way-station.
Taking advantage of the brief pause, Clifford left the car, and drew
Hepzibah along with him. A moment afterwards, the train--with all the
life of its interior, amid which Clifford had made himself so
conspicuous an object--was gliding away in the distance, and rapidly
lessening to a point which, in another moment, vanished. The world had
fled away from these two wanderers. They gazed drearily about them.
At a little distance stood a wooden church, black with age, and in a
dismal state of ruin and decay, with broken windows, a great rift
through the main body of the edifice, and a rafter dangling from the
top of the square tower. Farther off was a farm-house, in the old
style, as venerably black as the church, with a roof sloping downward
from the three-story peak, to within a man's height of the ground. It
seemed uninhabited. There were the relics of a wood-pile, indeed, near
the door, but with grass sprouting up among the chips and scattered
logs. The small rain-drops came down aslant; the wind was not
turbulent, but sullen, and full of chilly moisture.
Clifford shivered from head to foot. The wild effervescence of his
mood--which had so readily supplied thoughts, fantasies, and a strange
aptitude of words, and impelled him to talk from the mere necessity of
giving vent to this bubbling-up gush of ideas had entirely subsided. A
powerful excitement had given him energy and vivacity. Its operation
over, he forthwith began to sink.
"You must take the lead now, Hepzibah!" murmured he, with a torpid and
reluctant utterance. "Do with me as you will!" She knelt down upon the
platform where they were standing and lifted her clasped hands to the
sky. The dull, gray weight of clouds made it invisible; but it was no
hour for disbelief,--no juncture this to question that there was a sky
above, and an Almighty Father looking from it!
"O God!"--ejaculated poor, gaunt Hepzibah,--then paused a moment, to
consider what her prayer should be,--"O God,--our Father,--are we not
thy children? Have mercy on us!"
| The Flight of Two Owls Clifford and Hepzibah flee the house of the seven gables, worried that they will be implicated in the death of Judge Pyncheon. They walk along the village streets, fading into the gloomy background of the overcast day, noticed by no one. Hepzibah feels as if she is living in a nightmare, but Clifford has never seemed more youthful or alive; the death of the Judge has left him feeling liberated and elated. They board a train, and an old gentleman sitting on the other side of their passenger car strikes up a conversation with Clifford. He remarks that it is a poor day to travel and would be better spent inside near a fireplace. Clifford, however, disagrees, arguing that the "admirable invention of the railroad" will "do away with those stale ideas of home and fireside, and substitute something better. The old man disagrees, and Clifford begins to speak at length. He outlines his belief that mankind moves in an "ascending spiral," where previous ideas are revived and reformed. In this case, the advent of the railroad will allow mankind to return to the nomadic culture of its primitive era, and will prevent people from becoming "prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber. Clifford becomes very animated and almost youthful during this lecture. He goes on to suggest that houses, particularly those created by people guilty of something, can visit old curses on future generations. Clifford describes a "hypothetical" house, with seven gables, where a dead man sits in the parlor. He says, "I could never flourish there, nor be happy," and claims it would be a relief if this house were torn down or destroyed. He hopes for a more "nomadic" future, where houses are out of daily use. He also believes that a more spiritual age is approaching, and speaks on the unifying nature of the telegraph, which he believes will serve to make the world smaller by allowing lovers to talk over long distances. He deplores, however, the ability of the telegraph to aid in hunting down criminals, because it prevents them from being able to escape their crimes and start afresh, robs them of their rights, and deprives them of a "city of refuge. The old man becomes very embarrassed and suspicious during Clifford's tirade. Clifford and Hepzibah get off the train at a lonely way station, where Clifford's strength leaves him. Exhausted, Clifford tells Hepzibah to do with him as she will | summary |
JUDGE PYNCHEON, while his two relatives have fled away with such
ill-considered haste, still sits in the old parlor, keeping house, as
the familiar phrase is, in the absence of its ordinary occupants. To
him, and to the venerable House of the Seven Gables, does our story now
betake itself, like an owl, bewildered in the daylight, and hastening
back to his hollow tree.
The Judge has not shifted his position for a long while now. He has
not stirred hand or foot, nor withdrawn his eyes so much as a
hair's-breadth from their fixed gaze towards the corner of the room,
since the footsteps of Hepzibah and Clifford creaked along the passage,
and the outer door was closed cautiously behind their exit. He holds
his watch in his left hand, but clutched in such a manner that you
cannot see the dial-plate. How profound a fit of meditation! Or,
supposing him asleep, how infantile a quietude of conscience, and what
wholesome order in the gastric region, are betokened by slumber so
entirely undisturbed with starts, cramp, twitches, muttered dreamtalk,
trumpet-blasts through the nasal organ, or any slightest irregularity
of breath! You must hold your own breath, to satisfy yourself whether
he breathes at all. It is quite inaudible. You hear the ticking of
his watch; his breath you do not hear. A most refreshing slumber,
doubtless! And yet, the Judge cannot be asleep. His eyes are open! A
veteran politician, such as he, would never fall asleep with wide-open
eyes, lest some enemy or mischief-maker, taking him thus at unawares,
should peep through these windows into his consciousness, and make
strange discoveries among the reminiscences, projects, hopes,
apprehensions, weaknesses, and strong points, which he has heretofore
shared with nobody. A cautious man is proverbially said to sleep with
one eye open. That may be wisdom. But not with both; for this were
heedlessness! No, no! Judge Pyncheon cannot be asleep.
It is odd, however, that a gentleman so burdened with engagements,--and
noted, too, for punctuality,--should linger thus in an old lonely
mansion, which he has never seemed very fond of visiting. The oaken
chair, to be sure, may tempt him with its roominess. It is, indeed, a
spacious, and, allowing for the rude age that fashioned it, a
moderately easy seat, with capacity enough, at all events, and offering
no restraint to the Judge's breadth of beam. A bigger man might find
ample accommodation in it. His ancestor, now pictured upon the wall,
with all his English beef about him, used hardly to present a front
extending from elbow to elbow of this chair, or a base that would cover
its whole cushion. But there are better chairs than this,--mahogany,
black walnut, rosewood, spring-seated and damask-cushioned, with varied
slopes, and innumerable artifices to make them easy, and obviate the
irksomeness of too tame an ease,--a score of such might be at Judge
Pyncheon's service. Yes! in a score of drawing-rooms he would be more
than welcome. Mamma would advance to meet him, with outstretched hand;
the virgin daughter, elderly as he has now got to be,--an old widower,
as he smilingly describes himself,--would shake up the cushion for the
Judge, and do her pretty utmost to make him comfortable. For the Judge
is a prosperous man. He cherishes his schemes, moreover, like other
people, and reasonably brighter than most others; or did so, at least,
as he lay abed this morning, in an agreeable half-drowse, planning the
business of the day, and speculating on the probabilities of the next
fifteen years. With his firm health, and the little inroad that age
has made upon him, fifteen years or twenty--yes, or perhaps
five-and-twenty!--are no more than he may fairly call his own.
Five-and-twenty years for the enjoyment of his real estate in town and
country, his railroad, bank, and insurance shares, his United States
stock,--his wealth, in short, however invested, now in possession, or
soon to be acquired; together with the public honors that have fallen
upon him, and the weightier ones that are yet to fall! It is good! It
is excellent! It is enough!
Still lingering in the old chair! If the Judge has a little time to
throw away, why does not he visit the insurance office, as is his
frequent custom, and sit awhile in one of their leathern-cushioned
arm-chairs, listening to the gossip of the day, and dropping some
deeply designed chance-word, which will be certain to become the gossip
of to-morrow. And have not the bank directors a meeting at which it
was the Judge's purpose to be present, and his office to preside?
Indeed they have; and the hour is noted on a card, which is, or ought
to be, in Judge Pyncheon's right vest-pocket. Let him go thither, and
loll at ease upon his moneybags! He has lounged long enough in the old
chair!
This was to have been such a busy day. In the first place, the
interview with Clifford. Half an hour, by the Judge's reckoning, was
to suffice for that; it would probably be less, but--taking into
consideration that Hepzibah was first to be dealt with, and that these
women are apt to make many words where a few would do much better--it
might be safest to allow half an hour. Half an hour? Why, Judge, it is
already two hours, by your own undeviatingly accurate chronometer.
Glance your eye down at it and see! Ah; he will not give himself the
trouble either to bend his head, or elevate his hand, so as to bring
the faithful time-keeper within his range of vision! Time, all at once,
appears to have become a matter of no moment with the Judge!
And has he forgotten all the other items of his memoranda? Clifford's
affair arranged, he was to meet a State Street broker, who has
undertaken to procure a heavy percentage, and the best of paper, for a
few loose thousands which the Judge happens to have by him, uninvested.
The wrinkled note-shaver will have taken his railroad trip in vain.
Half an hour later, in the street next to this, there was to be an
auction of real estate, including a portion of the old Pyncheon
property, originally belonging to Maule's garden ground. It has been
alienated from the Pyncheons these four-score years; but the Judge had
kept it in his eye, and had set his heart on reannexing it to the small
demesne still left around the Seven Gables; and now, during this odd
fit of oblivion, the fatal hammer must have fallen, and transferred our
ancient patrimony to some alien possessor. Possibly, indeed, the sale
may have been postponed till fairer weather. If so, will the Judge
make it convenient to be present, and favor the auctioneer with his
bid, On the proximate occasion?
The next affair was to buy a horse for his own driving. The one
heretofore his favorite stumbled, this very morning, on the road to
town, and must be at once discarded. Judge Pyncheon's neck is too
precious to be risked on such a contingency as a stumbling steed.
Should all the above business be seasonably got through with, he might
attend the meeting of a charitable society; the very name of which,
however, in the multiplicity of his benevolence, is quite forgotten; so
that this engagement may pass unfulfilled, and no great harm done. And
if he have time, amid the press of more urgent matters, he must take
measures for the renewal of Mrs. Pyncheon's tombstone, which, the
sexton tells him, has fallen on its marble face, and is cracked quite
in twain. She was a praiseworthy woman enough, thinks the Judge, in
spite of her nervousness, and the tears that she was so oozy with, and
her foolish behavior about the coffee; and as she took her departure so
seasonably, he will not grudge the second tombstone. It is better, at
least, than if she had never needed any! The next item on his list was
to give orders for some fruit-trees, of a rare variety, to be
deliverable at his country-seat in the ensuing autumn. Yes, buy them,
by all means; and may the peaches be luscious in your mouth, Judge
Pyncheon! After this comes something more important. A committee of
his political party has besought him for a hundred or two of dollars,
in addition to his previous disbursements, towards carrying on the fall
campaign. The Judge is a patriot; the fate of the country is staked on
the November election; and besides, as will be shadowed forth in
another paragraph, he has no trifling stake of his own in the same
great game. He will do what the committee asks; nay, he will be
liberal beyond their expectations; they shall have a check for five
hundred dollars, and more anon, if it be needed. What next? A decayed
widow, whose husband was Judge Pyncheon's early friend, has laid her
case of destitution before him, in a very moving letter. She and her
fair daughter have scarcely bread to eat. He partly intends to call on
her to-day,--perhaps so--perhaps not,--accordingly as he may happen to
have leisure, and a small bank-note.
Another business, which, however, he puts no great weight on (it is
well, you know, to be heedful, but not over-anxious, as respects one's
personal health),--another business, then, was to consult his family
physician. About what, for Heaven's sake? Why, it is rather difficult
to describe the symptoms. A mere dimness of sight and dizziness of
brain, was it?--or disagreeable choking, or stifling, or gurgling, or
bubbling, in the region of the thorax, as the anatomists say?--or was
it a pretty severe throbbing and kicking of the heart, rather
creditable to him than otherwise, as showing that the organ had not
been left out of the Judge's physical contrivance? No matter what it
was. The doctor probably would smile at the statement of such trifles
to his professional ear; the Judge would smile in his turn; and meeting
one another's eyes, they would enjoy a hearty laugh together! But a fig
for medical advice. The Judge will never need it.
Pray, pray, Judge Pyncheon, look at your watch, Now! What--not a
glance! It is within ten minutes of the dinner hour! It surely cannot
have slipped your memory that the dinner of to-day is to be the most
important, in its consequences, of all the dinners you ever ate. Yes,
precisely the most important; although, in the course of your somewhat
eminent career, you have been placed high towards the head of the
table, at splendid banquets, and have poured out your festive eloquence
to ears yet echoing with Webster's mighty organ-tones. No public
dinner this, however. It is merely a gathering of some dozen or so of
friends from several districts of the State; men of distinguished
character and influence, assembling, almost casually, at the house of a
common friend, likewise distinguished, who will make them welcome to a
little better than his ordinary fare. Nothing in the way of French
cookery, but an excellent dinner, nevertheless. Real turtle, we
understand, and salmon, tautog, canvas-backs, pig, English mutton, good
roast beef, or dainties of that serious kind, fit for substantial
country gentlemen, as these honorable persons mostly are. The
delicacies of the season, in short, and flavored by a brand of old
Madeira which has been the pride of many seasons. It is the Juno
brand; a glorious wine, fragrant, and full of gentle might; a
bottled-up happiness, put by for use; a golden liquid, worth more than
liquid gold; so rare and admirable, that veteran wine-bibbers count it
among their epochs to have tasted it! It drives away the heart-ache,
and substitutes no head-ache! Could the Judge but quaff a glass, it
might enable him to shake off the unaccountable lethargy which (for the
ten intervening minutes, and five to boot, are already past) has made
him such a laggard at this momentous dinner. It would all but revive a
dead man! Would you like to sip it now, Judge Pyncheon?
Alas, this dinner. Have you really forgotten its true object? Then
let us whisper it, that you may start at once out of the oaken chair,
which really seems to be enchanted, like the one in Comus, or that in
which Moll Pitcher imprisoned your own grandfather. But ambition is a
talisman more powerful than witchcraft. Start up, then, and, hurrying
through the streets, burst in upon the company, that they may begin
before the fish is spoiled! They wait for you; and it is little for
your interest that they should wait. These gentlemen--need you be told
it?--have assembled, not without purpose, from every quarter of the
State. They are practised politicians, every man of them, and skilled
to adjust those preliminary measures which steal from the people,
without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers. The
popular voice, at the next gubernatorial election, though loud as
thunder, will be really but an echo of what these gentlemen shall
speak, under their breath, at your friend's festive board. They meet
to decide upon their candidate. This little knot of subtle schemers
will control the convention, and, through it, dictate to the party.
And what worthier candidate,--more wise and learned, more noted for
philanthropic liberality, truer to safe principles, tried oftener by
public trusts, more spotless in private character, with a larger stake
in the common welfare, and deeper grounded, by hereditary descent, in
the faith and practice of the Puritans,--what man can be presented for
the suffrage of the people, so eminently combining all these claims to
the chief-rulership as Judge Pyncheon here before us?
Make haste, then! Do your part! The meed for which you have toiled, and
fought, and climbed, and crept, is ready for your grasp! Be present at
this dinner!--drink a glass or two of that noble wine!--make your
pledges in as low a whisper as you will!--and you rise up from table
virtually governor of the glorious old State! Governor Pyncheon of
Massachusetts!
And is there no potent and exhilarating cordial in a certainty like
this? It has been the grand purpose of half your lifetime to obtain it.
Now, when there needs little more than to signify your acceptance, why
do you sit so lumpishly in your great-great-grandfather's oaken chair,
as if preferring it to the gubernatorial one? We have all heard of King
Log; but, in these jostling times, one of that royal kindred will
hardly win the race for an elective chief-magistracy.
Well; it is absolutely too late for dinner! Turtle, salmon, tautog,
woodcock, boiled turkey, South-Down mutton, pig, roast-beef, have
vanished, or exist only in fragments, with lukewarm potatoes, and
gravies crusted over with cold fat. The Judge, had he done nothing
else, would have achieved wonders with his knife and fork. It was he,
you know, of whom it used to be said, in reference to his ogre-like
appetite, that his Creator made him a great animal, but that the
dinner-hour made him a great beast. Persons of his large sensual
endowments must claim indulgence, at their feeding-time. But, for
once, the Judge is entirely too late for dinner! Too late, we fear,
even to join the party at their wine! The guests are warm and merry;
they have given up the Judge; and, concluding that the Free-Soilers
have him, they will fix upon another candidate. Were our friend now to
stalk in among them, with that wide-open stare, at once wild and
stolid, his ungenial presence would be apt to change their cheer.
Neither would it be seemly in Judge Pyncheon, generally so scrupulous
in his attire, to show himself at a dinner-table with that crimson
stain upon his shirt-bosom. By the bye, how came it there? It is an
ugly sight, at any rate; and the wisest way for the Judge is to button
his coat closely over his breast, and, taking his horse and chaise from
the livery stable, to make all speed to his own house. There, after a
glass of brandy and water, and a mutton-chop, a beefsteak, a broiled
fowl, or some such hasty little dinner and supper all in one, he had
better spend the evening by the fireside. He must toast his slippers a
long while, in order to get rid of the chilliness which the air of this
vile old house has sent curdling through his veins.
Up, therefore, Judge Pyncheon, up! You have lost a day. But to-morrow
will be here anon. Will you rise, betimes, and make the most of it?
To-morrow. To-morrow! To-morrow. We, that are alive, may rise betimes
to-morrow. As for him that has died to-day, his morrow will be the
resurrection morn.
Meanwhile the twilight is glooming upward out of the corners of the
room. The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper, and at first
become more definite; then, spreading wider, they lose their
distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion, as it were,
that creeps slowly over the various objects, and the one human figure
sitting in the midst of them. The gloom has not entered from without;
it has brooded here all day, and now, taking its own inevitable time,
will possess itself of everything. The Judge's face, indeed, rigid and
singularly white, refuses to melt into this universal solvent. Fainter
and fainter grows the light. It is as if another double-handful of
darkness had been scattered through the air. Now it is no longer gray,
but sable. There is still a faint appearance at the window; neither a
glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmer,--any phrase of light would express
something far brighter than this doubtful perception, or sense, rather,
that there is a window there. Has it yet vanished? No!--yes!--not
quite! And there is still the swarthy whiteness,--we shall venture to
marry these ill-agreeing words,--the swarthy whiteness of Judge
Pyncheon's face. The features are all gone: there is only the paleness
of them left. And how looks it now? There is no window! There is no
face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where
is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos,
may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and
murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!
Is there no other sound? One other, and a fearful one. It is the
ticking of the Judge's watch, which, ever since Hepzibah left the room
in search of Clifford, he has been holding in his hand. Be the cause
what it may, this little, quiet, never-ceasing throb of Time's pulse,
repeating its small strokes with such busy regularity, in Judge
Pyncheon's motionless hand, has an effect of terror, which we do not
find in any other accompaniment of the scene.
But, listen! That puff of the breeze was louder. It had a tone unlike
the dreary and sullen one which has bemoaned itself, and afflicted all
mankind with miserable sympathy, for five days past. The wind has
veered about! It now comes boisterously from the northwest, and, taking
hold of the aged framework of the Seven Gables, gives it a shake, like
a wrestler that would try strength with his antagonist. Another and
another sturdy tussle with the blast! The old house creaks again, and
makes a vociferous but somewhat unintelligible bellowing in its sooty
throat (the big flue, we mean, of its wide chimney), partly in
complaint at the rude wind, but rather, as befits their century and a
half of hostile intimacy, in tough defiance. A rumbling kind of a
bluster roars behind the fire-board. A door has slammed above stairs.
A window, perhaps, has been left open, or else is driven in by an
unruly gust. It is not to be conceived, before-hand, what wonderful
wind-instruments are these old timber mansions, and how haunted with
the strangest noises, which immediately begin to sing, and sigh, and
sob, and shriek,--and to smite with sledge-hammers, airy but ponderous,
in some distant chamber,--and to tread along the entries as with
stately footsteps, and rustle up and down the staircase, as with silks
miraculously stiff,--whenever the gale catches the house with a window
open, and gets fairly into it. Would that we were not an attendant
spirit here! It is too awful! This clamor of the wind through the
lonely house; the Judge's quietude, as he sits invisible; and that
pertinacious ticking of his watch!
As regards Judge Pyncheon's invisibility, however, that matter will
soon be remedied. The northwest wind has swept the sky clear. The
window is distinctly seen. Through its panes, moreover, we dimly catch
the sweep of the dark, clustering foliage outside, fluttering with a
constant irregularity of movement, and letting in a peep of starlight,
now here, now there. Oftener than any other object, these glimpses
illuminate the Judge's face. But here comes more effectual light.
Observe that silvery dance upon the upper branches of the pear-tree,
and now a little lower, and now on the whole mass of boughs, while,
through their shifting intricacies, the moonbeams fall aslant into the
room. They play over the Judge's figure and show that he has not
stirred throughout the hours of darkness. They follow the shadows, in
changeful sport, across his unchanging features. They gleam upon his
watch. His grasp conceals the dial-plate,--but we know that the
faithful hands have met; for one of the city clocks tells midnight.
A man of sturdy understanding, like Judge Pyncheon, cares no more for
twelve o'clock at night than for the corresponding hour of noon.
However just the parallel drawn, in some of the preceding pages,
between his Puritan ancestor and himself, it fails in this point. The
Pyncheon of two centuries ago, in common with most of his
contemporaries, professed his full belief in spiritual ministrations,
although reckoning them chiefly of a malignant character. The Pyncheon
of to-night, who sits in yonder arm-chair, believes in no such
nonsense. Such, at least, was his creed, some few hours since. His
hair will not bristle, therefore, at the stories which--in times when
chimney-corners had benches in them, where old people sat poking into
the ashes of the past, and raking out traditions like live coals--used
to be told about this very room of his ancestral house. In fact, these
tales are too absurd to bristle even childhood's hair. What sense,
meaning, or moral, for example, such as even ghost-stories should be
susceptible of, can be traced in the ridiculous legend, that, at
midnight, all the dead Pyncheons are bound to assemble in this parlor?
And, pray, for what? Why, to see whether the portrait of their ancestor
still keeps its place upon the wall, in compliance with his
testamentary directions! Is it worth while to come out of their graves
for that?
We are tempted to make a little sport with the idea. Ghost-stories are
hardly to be treated seriously any longer. The family-party of the
defunct Pyncheons, we presume, goes off in this wise.
First comes the ancestor himself, in his black cloak, steeple-hat, and
trunk-breeches, girt about the waist with a leathern belt, in which
hangs his steel-hilted sword; he has a long staff in his hand, such as
gentlemen in advanced life used to carry, as much for the dignity of
the thing as for the support to be derived from it. He looks up at the
portrait; a thing of no substance, gazing at its own painted image! All
is safe. The picture is still there. The purpose of his brain has
been kept sacred thus long after the man himself has sprouted up in
graveyard grass. See! he lifts his ineffectual hand, and tries the
frame. All safe! But is that a smile?--is it not, rather a frown of
deadly import, that darkens over the shadow of his features? The stout
Colonel is dissatisfied! So decided is his look of discontent as to
impart additional distinctness to his features; through which,
nevertheless, the moonlight passes, and flickers on the wall beyond.
Something has strangely vexed the ancestor! With a grim shake of the
head, he turns away. Here come other Pyncheons, the whole tribe, in
their half a dozen generations, jostling and elbowing one another, to
reach the picture. We behold aged men and grandames, a clergyman with
the Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien, and a red-coated
officer of the old French war; and there comes the shop-keeping
Pyncheon of a century ago, with the ruffles turned back from his
wrists; and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artist's
legend, with the beautiful and pensive Alice, who brings no pride out
of her virgin grave. All try the picture-frame. What do these ghostly
people seek? A mother lifts her child, that his little hands may touch
it! There is evidently a mystery about the picture, that perplexes
these poor Pyncheons when they ought to be at rest. In a corner,
meanwhile, stands the figure of an elderly man, in a leathern jerkin
and breeches, with a carpenter's rule sticking out of his side pocket;
he points his finger at the bearded Colonel and his descendants,
nodding, jeering, mocking, and finally bursting into obstreperous,
though inaudible laughter.
Indulging our fancy in this freak, we have partly lost the power of
restraint and guidance. We distinguish an unlooked-for figure in our
visionary scene. Among those ancestral people there is a young man,
dressed in the very fashion of to-day: he wears a dark frock-coat,
almost destitute of skirts, gray pantaloons, gaiter boots of patent
leather, and has a finely wrought gold chain across his breast, and a
little silver-headed whalebone stick in his hand. Were we to meet this
figure at noonday, we should greet him as young Jaffrey Pyncheon, the
Judge's only surviving child, who has been spending the last two years
in foreign travel. If still in life, how comes his shadow hither? If
dead, what a misfortune! The old Pyncheon property, together with the
great estate acquired by the young man's father, would devolve on whom?
On poor, foolish Clifford, gaunt Hepzibah, and rustic little Phoebe!
But another and a greater marvel greets us! Can we believe our eyes? A
stout, elderly gentleman has made his appearance; he has an aspect of
eminent respectability, wears a black coat and pantaloons, of roomy
width, and might be pronounced scrupulously neat in his attire, but for
a broad crimson stain across his snowy neckcloth and down his
shirt-bosom. Is it the Judge, or no? How can it be Judge Pyncheon? We
discern his figure, as plainly as the flickering moonbeams can show us
anything, still seated in the oaken chair! Be the apparition whose it
may, it advances to the picture, seems to seize the frame, tries to
peep behind it, and turns away, with a frown as black as the ancestral
one.
The fantastic scene just hinted at must by no means be considered as
forming an actual portion of our story. We were betrayed into this
brief extravagance by the quiver of the moonbeams; they dance
hand-in-hand with shadows, and are reflected in the looking-glass,
which, you are aware, is always a kind of window or doorway into the
spiritual world. We needed relief, moreover, from our too long and
exclusive contemplation of that figure in the chair. This wild wind,
too, has tossed our thoughts into strange confusion, but without
tearing them away from their one determined centre. Yonder leaden
Judge sits immovably upon our soul. Will he never stir again? We shall
go mad unless he stirs! You may the better estimate his quietude by the
fearlessness of a little mouse, which sits on its hind legs, in a
streak of moonlight, close by Judge Pyncheon's foot, and seems to
meditate a journey of exploration over this great black bulk. Ha! what
has startled the nimble little mouse? It is the visage of grimalkin,
outside of the window, where he appears to have posted himself for a
deliberate watch. This grimalkin has a very ugly look. Is it a cat
watching for a mouse, or the devil for a human soul? Would we could
scare him from the window!
Thank Heaven, the night is well-nigh past! The moonbeams have no longer
so silvery a gleam, nor contrast so strongly with the blackness of the
shadows among which they fall. They are paler now; the shadows look
gray, not black. The boisterous wind is hushed. What is the hour? Ah!
the watch has at last ceased to tick; for the Judge's forgetful fingers
neglected to wind it up, as usual, at ten o'clock, being half an hour
or so before his ordinary bedtime,--and it has run down, for the first
time in five years. But the great world-clock of Time still keeps its
beat. The dreary night--for, oh, how dreary seems its haunted waste,
behind us!--gives place to a fresh, transparent, cloudless morn.
Blessed, blessed radiance! The daybeam--even what little of it finds
its way into this always dusky parlor--seems part of the universal
benediction, annulling evil, and rendering all goodness possible, and
happiness attainable. Will Judge Pyncheon now rise up from his chair?
Will he go forth, and receive the early sunbeams on his brow? Will he
begin this new day,--which God has smiled upon, and blessed, and given
to mankind,--will he begin it with better purposes than the many that
have been spent amiss? Or are all the deep-laid schemes of yesterday as
stubborn in his heart, and as busy in his brain, as ever?
In this latter case, there is much to do. Will the Judge still insist
with Hepzibah on the interview with Clifford? Will he buy a safe,
elderly gentleman's horse? Will he persuade the purchaser of the old
Pyncheon property to relinquish the bargain in his favor? Will he see
his family physician, and obtain a medicine that shall preserve him, to
be an honor and blessing to his race, until the utmost term of
patriarchal longevity? Will Judge Pyncheon, above all, make due
apologies to that company of honorable friends, and satisfy them that
his absence from the festive board was unavoidable, and so fully
retrieve himself in their good opinion that he shall yet be Governor of
Massachusetts? And all these great purposes accomplished, will he walk
the streets again, with that dog-day smile of elaborate benevolence,
sultry enough to tempt flies to come and buzz in it? Or will he, after
the tomb-like seclusion of the past day and night, go forth a humbled
and repentant man, sorrowful, gentle, seeking no profit, shrinking from
worldly honor, hardly daring to love God, but bold to love his fellow
man, and to do him what good he may? Will he bear about with him,--no
odious grin of feigned benignity, insolent in its pretence, and
loathsome in its falsehood,--but the tender sadness of a contrite
heart, broken, at last, beneath its own weight of sin? For it is our
belief, whatever show of honor he may have piled upon it, that there
was heavy sin at the base of this man's being.
Rise up, Judge Pyncheon! The morning sunshine glimmers through the
foliage, and, beautiful and holy as it is, shuns not to kindle up your
face. Rise up, thou subtle, worldly, selfish, iron-hearted hypocrite,
and make thy choice whether still to be subtle, worldly, selfish,
iron-hearted, and hypocritical, or to tear these sins out of thy
nature, though they bring the lifeblood with them! The Avenger is upon
thee! Rise up, before it be too late!
What! Thou art not stirred by this last appeal? No, not a jot! And
there we see a fly,--one of your common house-flies, such as are always
buzzing on the window-pane,--which has smelt out Governor Pyncheon, and
alights, now on his forehead, now on his chin, and now, Heaven help us!
is creeping over the bridge of his nose, towards the would-be
chief-magistrate's wide-open eyes! Canst thou not brush the fly away?
Art thou too sluggish? Thou man, that hadst so many busy projects
yesterday! Art thou too weak, that wast so powerful? Not brush away a
fly? Nay, then, we give thee up!
And hark! the shop-bell rings. After hours like these latter ones,
through which we have borne our heavy tale, it is good to be made
sensible that there is a living world, and that even this old, lonely
mansion retains some manner of connection with it. We breathe more
freely, emerging from Judge Pyncheon's presence into the street before
the Seven Gables.
| Governor Pyncheon Judge Pyncheon is both spoken of and directly addressed in this chapter, as if the man were not dead but merely asleep or meditating in his chair. The narrator exhorts the Judge to awaken while simultaneously listing all of the scheduled plans that the Judge is now missing. The most significant is a dinner meeting at which the Judge had planned to get himself nominated as a candidate for governor of Massachusetts. Even for this, however, the bloated body will not wake up. A solemn march of ghosts begins. Deceased Pyncheon after deceased Pyncheon parades by, from Colonel Pyncheon on. Each of them stops at the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon and shakes it, looking in vain for something hidden inside the painting. Among them is the Judge's own son, whom he has long ago disowned. The novel wonders what the son is doing here--if he is dead, then the Judge's property will go to Clifford and Hepzibah. The next day comes, and Judge Pyncheon still resists the narrator's jeers and calls to wake up. A fly crawls across his face and creeps toward his open eyes. The narrator gives up in disgust. The Judge continues to sit slumped in his chair, and the novel's reverie is interrupted by the tinkling of the shop bell. | summary |
JUDGE PYNCHEON, while his two relatives have fled away with such
ill-considered haste, still sits in the old parlor, keeping house, as
the familiar phrase is, in the absence of its ordinary occupants. To
him, and to the venerable House of the Seven Gables, does our story now
betake itself, like an owl, bewildered in the daylight, and hastening
back to his hollow tree.
The Judge has not shifted his position for a long while now. He has
not stirred hand or foot, nor withdrawn his eyes so much as a
hair's-breadth from their fixed gaze towards the corner of the room,
since the footsteps of Hepzibah and Clifford creaked along the passage,
and the outer door was closed cautiously behind their exit. He holds
his watch in his left hand, but clutched in such a manner that you
cannot see the dial-plate. How profound a fit of meditation! Or,
supposing him asleep, how infantile a quietude of conscience, and what
wholesome order in the gastric region, are betokened by slumber so
entirely undisturbed with starts, cramp, twitches, muttered dreamtalk,
trumpet-blasts through the nasal organ, or any slightest irregularity
of breath! You must hold your own breath, to satisfy yourself whether
he breathes at all. It is quite inaudible. You hear the ticking of
his watch; his breath you do not hear. A most refreshing slumber,
doubtless! And yet, the Judge cannot be asleep. His eyes are open! A
veteran politician, such as he, would never fall asleep with wide-open
eyes, lest some enemy or mischief-maker, taking him thus at unawares,
should peep through these windows into his consciousness, and make
strange discoveries among the reminiscences, projects, hopes,
apprehensions, weaknesses, and strong points, which he has heretofore
shared with nobody. A cautious man is proverbially said to sleep with
one eye open. That may be wisdom. But not with both; for this were
heedlessness! No, no! Judge Pyncheon cannot be asleep.
It is odd, however, that a gentleman so burdened with engagements,--and
noted, too, for punctuality,--should linger thus in an old lonely
mansion, which he has never seemed very fond of visiting. The oaken
chair, to be sure, may tempt him with its roominess. It is, indeed, a
spacious, and, allowing for the rude age that fashioned it, a
moderately easy seat, with capacity enough, at all events, and offering
no restraint to the Judge's breadth of beam. A bigger man might find
ample accommodation in it. His ancestor, now pictured upon the wall,
with all his English beef about him, used hardly to present a front
extending from elbow to elbow of this chair, or a base that would cover
its whole cushion. But there are better chairs than this,--mahogany,
black walnut, rosewood, spring-seated and damask-cushioned, with varied
slopes, and innumerable artifices to make them easy, and obviate the
irksomeness of too tame an ease,--a score of such might be at Judge
Pyncheon's service. Yes! in a score of drawing-rooms he would be more
than welcome. Mamma would advance to meet him, with outstretched hand;
the virgin daughter, elderly as he has now got to be,--an old widower,
as he smilingly describes himself,--would shake up the cushion for the
Judge, and do her pretty utmost to make him comfortable. For the Judge
is a prosperous man. He cherishes his schemes, moreover, like other
people, and reasonably brighter than most others; or did so, at least,
as he lay abed this morning, in an agreeable half-drowse, planning the
business of the day, and speculating on the probabilities of the next
fifteen years. With his firm health, and the little inroad that age
has made upon him, fifteen years or twenty--yes, or perhaps
five-and-twenty!--are no more than he may fairly call his own.
Five-and-twenty years for the enjoyment of his real estate in town and
country, his railroad, bank, and insurance shares, his United States
stock,--his wealth, in short, however invested, now in possession, or
soon to be acquired; together with the public honors that have fallen
upon him, and the weightier ones that are yet to fall! It is good! It
is excellent! It is enough!
Still lingering in the old chair! If the Judge has a little time to
throw away, why does not he visit the insurance office, as is his
frequent custom, and sit awhile in one of their leathern-cushioned
arm-chairs, listening to the gossip of the day, and dropping some
deeply designed chance-word, which will be certain to become the gossip
of to-morrow. And have not the bank directors a meeting at which it
was the Judge's purpose to be present, and his office to preside?
Indeed they have; and the hour is noted on a card, which is, or ought
to be, in Judge Pyncheon's right vest-pocket. Let him go thither, and
loll at ease upon his moneybags! He has lounged long enough in the old
chair!
This was to have been such a busy day. In the first place, the
interview with Clifford. Half an hour, by the Judge's reckoning, was
to suffice for that; it would probably be less, but--taking into
consideration that Hepzibah was first to be dealt with, and that these
women are apt to make many words where a few would do much better--it
might be safest to allow half an hour. Half an hour? Why, Judge, it is
already two hours, by your own undeviatingly accurate chronometer.
Glance your eye down at it and see! Ah; he will not give himself the
trouble either to bend his head, or elevate his hand, so as to bring
the faithful time-keeper within his range of vision! Time, all at once,
appears to have become a matter of no moment with the Judge!
And has he forgotten all the other items of his memoranda? Clifford's
affair arranged, he was to meet a State Street broker, who has
undertaken to procure a heavy percentage, and the best of paper, for a
few loose thousands which the Judge happens to have by him, uninvested.
The wrinkled note-shaver will have taken his railroad trip in vain.
Half an hour later, in the street next to this, there was to be an
auction of real estate, including a portion of the old Pyncheon
property, originally belonging to Maule's garden ground. It has been
alienated from the Pyncheons these four-score years; but the Judge had
kept it in his eye, and had set his heart on reannexing it to the small
demesne still left around the Seven Gables; and now, during this odd
fit of oblivion, the fatal hammer must have fallen, and transferred our
ancient patrimony to some alien possessor. Possibly, indeed, the sale
may have been postponed till fairer weather. If so, will the Judge
make it convenient to be present, and favor the auctioneer with his
bid, On the proximate occasion?
The next affair was to buy a horse for his own driving. The one
heretofore his favorite stumbled, this very morning, on the road to
town, and must be at once discarded. Judge Pyncheon's neck is too
precious to be risked on such a contingency as a stumbling steed.
Should all the above business be seasonably got through with, he might
attend the meeting of a charitable society; the very name of which,
however, in the multiplicity of his benevolence, is quite forgotten; so
that this engagement may pass unfulfilled, and no great harm done. And
if he have time, amid the press of more urgent matters, he must take
measures for the renewal of Mrs. Pyncheon's tombstone, which, the
sexton tells him, has fallen on its marble face, and is cracked quite
in twain. She was a praiseworthy woman enough, thinks the Judge, in
spite of her nervousness, and the tears that she was so oozy with, and
her foolish behavior about the coffee; and as she took her departure so
seasonably, he will not grudge the second tombstone. It is better, at
least, than if she had never needed any! The next item on his list was
to give orders for some fruit-trees, of a rare variety, to be
deliverable at his country-seat in the ensuing autumn. Yes, buy them,
by all means; and may the peaches be luscious in your mouth, Judge
Pyncheon! After this comes something more important. A committee of
his political party has besought him for a hundred or two of dollars,
in addition to his previous disbursements, towards carrying on the fall
campaign. The Judge is a patriot; the fate of the country is staked on
the November election; and besides, as will be shadowed forth in
another paragraph, he has no trifling stake of his own in the same
great game. He will do what the committee asks; nay, he will be
liberal beyond their expectations; they shall have a check for five
hundred dollars, and more anon, if it be needed. What next? A decayed
widow, whose husband was Judge Pyncheon's early friend, has laid her
case of destitution before him, in a very moving letter. She and her
fair daughter have scarcely bread to eat. He partly intends to call on
her to-day,--perhaps so--perhaps not,--accordingly as he may happen to
have leisure, and a small bank-note.
Another business, which, however, he puts no great weight on (it is
well, you know, to be heedful, but not over-anxious, as respects one's
personal health),--another business, then, was to consult his family
physician. About what, for Heaven's sake? Why, it is rather difficult
to describe the symptoms. A mere dimness of sight and dizziness of
brain, was it?--or disagreeable choking, or stifling, or gurgling, or
bubbling, in the region of the thorax, as the anatomists say?--or was
it a pretty severe throbbing and kicking of the heart, rather
creditable to him than otherwise, as showing that the organ had not
been left out of the Judge's physical contrivance? No matter what it
was. The doctor probably would smile at the statement of such trifles
to his professional ear; the Judge would smile in his turn; and meeting
one another's eyes, they would enjoy a hearty laugh together! But a fig
for medical advice. The Judge will never need it.
Pray, pray, Judge Pyncheon, look at your watch, Now! What--not a
glance! It is within ten minutes of the dinner hour! It surely cannot
have slipped your memory that the dinner of to-day is to be the most
important, in its consequences, of all the dinners you ever ate. Yes,
precisely the most important; although, in the course of your somewhat
eminent career, you have been placed high towards the head of the
table, at splendid banquets, and have poured out your festive eloquence
to ears yet echoing with Webster's mighty organ-tones. No public
dinner this, however. It is merely a gathering of some dozen or so of
friends from several districts of the State; men of distinguished
character and influence, assembling, almost casually, at the house of a
common friend, likewise distinguished, who will make them welcome to a
little better than his ordinary fare. Nothing in the way of French
cookery, but an excellent dinner, nevertheless. Real turtle, we
understand, and salmon, tautog, canvas-backs, pig, English mutton, good
roast beef, or dainties of that serious kind, fit for substantial
country gentlemen, as these honorable persons mostly are. The
delicacies of the season, in short, and flavored by a brand of old
Madeira which has been the pride of many seasons. It is the Juno
brand; a glorious wine, fragrant, and full of gentle might; a
bottled-up happiness, put by for use; a golden liquid, worth more than
liquid gold; so rare and admirable, that veteran wine-bibbers count it
among their epochs to have tasted it! It drives away the heart-ache,
and substitutes no head-ache! Could the Judge but quaff a glass, it
might enable him to shake off the unaccountable lethargy which (for the
ten intervening minutes, and five to boot, are already past) has made
him such a laggard at this momentous dinner. It would all but revive a
dead man! Would you like to sip it now, Judge Pyncheon?
Alas, this dinner. Have you really forgotten its true object? Then
let us whisper it, that you may start at once out of the oaken chair,
which really seems to be enchanted, like the one in Comus, or that in
which Moll Pitcher imprisoned your own grandfather. But ambition is a
talisman more powerful than witchcraft. Start up, then, and, hurrying
through the streets, burst in upon the company, that they may begin
before the fish is spoiled! They wait for you; and it is little for
your interest that they should wait. These gentlemen--need you be told
it?--have assembled, not without purpose, from every quarter of the
State. They are practised politicians, every man of them, and skilled
to adjust those preliminary measures which steal from the people,
without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers. The
popular voice, at the next gubernatorial election, though loud as
thunder, will be really but an echo of what these gentlemen shall
speak, under their breath, at your friend's festive board. They meet
to decide upon their candidate. This little knot of subtle schemers
will control the convention, and, through it, dictate to the party.
And what worthier candidate,--more wise and learned, more noted for
philanthropic liberality, truer to safe principles, tried oftener by
public trusts, more spotless in private character, with a larger stake
in the common welfare, and deeper grounded, by hereditary descent, in
the faith and practice of the Puritans,--what man can be presented for
the suffrage of the people, so eminently combining all these claims to
the chief-rulership as Judge Pyncheon here before us?
Make haste, then! Do your part! The meed for which you have toiled, and
fought, and climbed, and crept, is ready for your grasp! Be present at
this dinner!--drink a glass or two of that noble wine!--make your
pledges in as low a whisper as you will!--and you rise up from table
virtually governor of the glorious old State! Governor Pyncheon of
Massachusetts!
And is there no potent and exhilarating cordial in a certainty like
this? It has been the grand purpose of half your lifetime to obtain it.
Now, when there needs little more than to signify your acceptance, why
do you sit so lumpishly in your great-great-grandfather's oaken chair,
as if preferring it to the gubernatorial one? We have all heard of King
Log; but, in these jostling times, one of that royal kindred will
hardly win the race for an elective chief-magistracy.
Well; it is absolutely too late for dinner! Turtle, salmon, tautog,
woodcock, boiled turkey, South-Down mutton, pig, roast-beef, have
vanished, or exist only in fragments, with lukewarm potatoes, and
gravies crusted over with cold fat. The Judge, had he done nothing
else, would have achieved wonders with his knife and fork. It was he,
you know, of whom it used to be said, in reference to his ogre-like
appetite, that his Creator made him a great animal, but that the
dinner-hour made him a great beast. Persons of his large sensual
endowments must claim indulgence, at their feeding-time. But, for
once, the Judge is entirely too late for dinner! Too late, we fear,
even to join the party at their wine! The guests are warm and merry;
they have given up the Judge; and, concluding that the Free-Soilers
have him, they will fix upon another candidate. Were our friend now to
stalk in among them, with that wide-open stare, at once wild and
stolid, his ungenial presence would be apt to change their cheer.
Neither would it be seemly in Judge Pyncheon, generally so scrupulous
in his attire, to show himself at a dinner-table with that crimson
stain upon his shirt-bosom. By the bye, how came it there? It is an
ugly sight, at any rate; and the wisest way for the Judge is to button
his coat closely over his breast, and, taking his horse and chaise from
the livery stable, to make all speed to his own house. There, after a
glass of brandy and water, and a mutton-chop, a beefsteak, a broiled
fowl, or some such hasty little dinner and supper all in one, he had
better spend the evening by the fireside. He must toast his slippers a
long while, in order to get rid of the chilliness which the air of this
vile old house has sent curdling through his veins.
Up, therefore, Judge Pyncheon, up! You have lost a day. But to-morrow
will be here anon. Will you rise, betimes, and make the most of it?
To-morrow. To-morrow! To-morrow. We, that are alive, may rise betimes
to-morrow. As for him that has died to-day, his morrow will be the
resurrection morn.
Meanwhile the twilight is glooming upward out of the corners of the
room. The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper, and at first
become more definite; then, spreading wider, they lose their
distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion, as it were,
that creeps slowly over the various objects, and the one human figure
sitting in the midst of them. The gloom has not entered from without;
it has brooded here all day, and now, taking its own inevitable time,
will possess itself of everything. The Judge's face, indeed, rigid and
singularly white, refuses to melt into this universal solvent. Fainter
and fainter grows the light. It is as if another double-handful of
darkness had been scattered through the air. Now it is no longer gray,
but sable. There is still a faint appearance at the window; neither a
glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmer,--any phrase of light would express
something far brighter than this doubtful perception, or sense, rather,
that there is a window there. Has it yet vanished? No!--yes!--not
quite! And there is still the swarthy whiteness,--we shall venture to
marry these ill-agreeing words,--the swarthy whiteness of Judge
Pyncheon's face. The features are all gone: there is only the paleness
of them left. And how looks it now? There is no window! There is no
face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where
is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos,
may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and
murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!
Is there no other sound? One other, and a fearful one. It is the
ticking of the Judge's watch, which, ever since Hepzibah left the room
in search of Clifford, he has been holding in his hand. Be the cause
what it may, this little, quiet, never-ceasing throb of Time's pulse,
repeating its small strokes with such busy regularity, in Judge
Pyncheon's motionless hand, has an effect of terror, which we do not
find in any other accompaniment of the scene.
But, listen! That puff of the breeze was louder. It had a tone unlike
the dreary and sullen one which has bemoaned itself, and afflicted all
mankind with miserable sympathy, for five days past. The wind has
veered about! It now comes boisterously from the northwest, and, taking
hold of the aged framework of the Seven Gables, gives it a shake, like
a wrestler that would try strength with his antagonist. Another and
another sturdy tussle with the blast! The old house creaks again, and
makes a vociferous but somewhat unintelligible bellowing in its sooty
throat (the big flue, we mean, of its wide chimney), partly in
complaint at the rude wind, but rather, as befits their century and a
half of hostile intimacy, in tough defiance. A rumbling kind of a
bluster roars behind the fire-board. A door has slammed above stairs.
A window, perhaps, has been left open, or else is driven in by an
unruly gust. It is not to be conceived, before-hand, what wonderful
wind-instruments are these old timber mansions, and how haunted with
the strangest noises, which immediately begin to sing, and sigh, and
sob, and shriek,--and to smite with sledge-hammers, airy but ponderous,
in some distant chamber,--and to tread along the entries as with
stately footsteps, and rustle up and down the staircase, as with silks
miraculously stiff,--whenever the gale catches the house with a window
open, and gets fairly into it. Would that we were not an attendant
spirit here! It is too awful! This clamor of the wind through the
lonely house; the Judge's quietude, as he sits invisible; and that
pertinacious ticking of his watch!
As regards Judge Pyncheon's invisibility, however, that matter will
soon be remedied. The northwest wind has swept the sky clear. The
window is distinctly seen. Through its panes, moreover, we dimly catch
the sweep of the dark, clustering foliage outside, fluttering with a
constant irregularity of movement, and letting in a peep of starlight,
now here, now there. Oftener than any other object, these glimpses
illuminate the Judge's face. But here comes more effectual light.
Observe that silvery dance upon the upper branches of the pear-tree,
and now a little lower, and now on the whole mass of boughs, while,
through their shifting intricacies, the moonbeams fall aslant into the
room. They play over the Judge's figure and show that he has not
stirred throughout the hours of darkness. They follow the shadows, in
changeful sport, across his unchanging features. They gleam upon his
watch. His grasp conceals the dial-plate,--but we know that the
faithful hands have met; for one of the city clocks tells midnight.
A man of sturdy understanding, like Judge Pyncheon, cares no more for
twelve o'clock at night than for the corresponding hour of noon.
However just the parallel drawn, in some of the preceding pages,
between his Puritan ancestor and himself, it fails in this point. The
Pyncheon of two centuries ago, in common with most of his
contemporaries, professed his full belief in spiritual ministrations,
although reckoning them chiefly of a malignant character. The Pyncheon
of to-night, who sits in yonder arm-chair, believes in no such
nonsense. Such, at least, was his creed, some few hours since. His
hair will not bristle, therefore, at the stories which--in times when
chimney-corners had benches in them, where old people sat poking into
the ashes of the past, and raking out traditions like live coals--used
to be told about this very room of his ancestral house. In fact, these
tales are too absurd to bristle even childhood's hair. What sense,
meaning, or moral, for example, such as even ghost-stories should be
susceptible of, can be traced in the ridiculous legend, that, at
midnight, all the dead Pyncheons are bound to assemble in this parlor?
And, pray, for what? Why, to see whether the portrait of their ancestor
still keeps its place upon the wall, in compliance with his
testamentary directions! Is it worth while to come out of their graves
for that?
We are tempted to make a little sport with the idea. Ghost-stories are
hardly to be treated seriously any longer. The family-party of the
defunct Pyncheons, we presume, goes off in this wise.
First comes the ancestor himself, in his black cloak, steeple-hat, and
trunk-breeches, girt about the waist with a leathern belt, in which
hangs his steel-hilted sword; he has a long staff in his hand, such as
gentlemen in advanced life used to carry, as much for the dignity of
the thing as for the support to be derived from it. He looks up at the
portrait; a thing of no substance, gazing at its own painted image! All
is safe. The picture is still there. The purpose of his brain has
been kept sacred thus long after the man himself has sprouted up in
graveyard grass. See! he lifts his ineffectual hand, and tries the
frame. All safe! But is that a smile?--is it not, rather a frown of
deadly import, that darkens over the shadow of his features? The stout
Colonel is dissatisfied! So decided is his look of discontent as to
impart additional distinctness to his features; through which,
nevertheless, the moonlight passes, and flickers on the wall beyond.
Something has strangely vexed the ancestor! With a grim shake of the
head, he turns away. Here come other Pyncheons, the whole tribe, in
their half a dozen generations, jostling and elbowing one another, to
reach the picture. We behold aged men and grandames, a clergyman with
the Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien, and a red-coated
officer of the old French war; and there comes the shop-keeping
Pyncheon of a century ago, with the ruffles turned back from his
wrists; and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artist's
legend, with the beautiful and pensive Alice, who brings no pride out
of her virgin grave. All try the picture-frame. What do these ghostly
people seek? A mother lifts her child, that his little hands may touch
it! There is evidently a mystery about the picture, that perplexes
these poor Pyncheons when they ought to be at rest. In a corner,
meanwhile, stands the figure of an elderly man, in a leathern jerkin
and breeches, with a carpenter's rule sticking out of his side pocket;
he points his finger at the bearded Colonel and his descendants,
nodding, jeering, mocking, and finally bursting into obstreperous,
though inaudible laughter.
Indulging our fancy in this freak, we have partly lost the power of
restraint and guidance. We distinguish an unlooked-for figure in our
visionary scene. Among those ancestral people there is a young man,
dressed in the very fashion of to-day: he wears a dark frock-coat,
almost destitute of skirts, gray pantaloons, gaiter boots of patent
leather, and has a finely wrought gold chain across his breast, and a
little silver-headed whalebone stick in his hand. Were we to meet this
figure at noonday, we should greet him as young Jaffrey Pyncheon, the
Judge's only surviving child, who has been spending the last two years
in foreign travel. If still in life, how comes his shadow hither? If
dead, what a misfortune! The old Pyncheon property, together with the
great estate acquired by the young man's father, would devolve on whom?
On poor, foolish Clifford, gaunt Hepzibah, and rustic little Phoebe!
But another and a greater marvel greets us! Can we believe our eyes? A
stout, elderly gentleman has made his appearance; he has an aspect of
eminent respectability, wears a black coat and pantaloons, of roomy
width, and might be pronounced scrupulously neat in his attire, but for
a broad crimson stain across his snowy neckcloth and down his
shirt-bosom. Is it the Judge, or no? How can it be Judge Pyncheon? We
discern his figure, as plainly as the flickering moonbeams can show us
anything, still seated in the oaken chair! Be the apparition whose it
may, it advances to the picture, seems to seize the frame, tries to
peep behind it, and turns away, with a frown as black as the ancestral
one.
The fantastic scene just hinted at must by no means be considered as
forming an actual portion of our story. We were betrayed into this
brief extravagance by the quiver of the moonbeams; they dance
hand-in-hand with shadows, and are reflected in the looking-glass,
which, you are aware, is always a kind of window or doorway into the
spiritual world. We needed relief, moreover, from our too long and
exclusive contemplation of that figure in the chair. This wild wind,
too, has tossed our thoughts into strange confusion, but without
tearing them away from their one determined centre. Yonder leaden
Judge sits immovably upon our soul. Will he never stir again? We shall
go mad unless he stirs! You may the better estimate his quietude by the
fearlessness of a little mouse, which sits on its hind legs, in a
streak of moonlight, close by Judge Pyncheon's foot, and seems to
meditate a journey of exploration over this great black bulk. Ha! what
has startled the nimble little mouse? It is the visage of grimalkin,
outside of the window, where he appears to have posted himself for a
deliberate watch. This grimalkin has a very ugly look. Is it a cat
watching for a mouse, or the devil for a human soul? Would we could
scare him from the window!
Thank Heaven, the night is well-nigh past! The moonbeams have no longer
so silvery a gleam, nor contrast so strongly with the blackness of the
shadows among which they fall. They are paler now; the shadows look
gray, not black. The boisterous wind is hushed. What is the hour? Ah!
the watch has at last ceased to tick; for the Judge's forgetful fingers
neglected to wind it up, as usual, at ten o'clock, being half an hour
or so before his ordinary bedtime,--and it has run down, for the first
time in five years. But the great world-clock of Time still keeps its
beat. The dreary night--for, oh, how dreary seems its haunted waste,
behind us!--gives place to a fresh, transparent, cloudless morn.
Blessed, blessed radiance! The daybeam--even what little of it finds
its way into this always dusky parlor--seems part of the universal
benediction, annulling evil, and rendering all goodness possible, and
happiness attainable. Will Judge Pyncheon now rise up from his chair?
Will he go forth, and receive the early sunbeams on his brow? Will he
begin this new day,--which God has smiled upon, and blessed, and given
to mankind,--will he begin it with better purposes than the many that
have been spent amiss? Or are all the deep-laid schemes of yesterday as
stubborn in his heart, and as busy in his brain, as ever?
In this latter case, there is much to do. Will the Judge still insist
with Hepzibah on the interview with Clifford? Will he buy a safe,
elderly gentleman's horse? Will he persuade the purchaser of the old
Pyncheon property to relinquish the bargain in his favor? Will he see
his family physician, and obtain a medicine that shall preserve him, to
be an honor and blessing to his race, until the utmost term of
patriarchal longevity? Will Judge Pyncheon, above all, make due
apologies to that company of honorable friends, and satisfy them that
his absence from the festive board was unavoidable, and so fully
retrieve himself in their good opinion that he shall yet be Governor of
Massachusetts? And all these great purposes accomplished, will he walk
the streets again, with that dog-day smile of elaborate benevolence,
sultry enough to tempt flies to come and buzz in it? Or will he, after
the tomb-like seclusion of the past day and night, go forth a humbled
and repentant man, sorrowful, gentle, seeking no profit, shrinking from
worldly honor, hardly daring to love God, but bold to love his fellow
man, and to do him what good he may? Will he bear about with him,--no
odious grin of feigned benignity, insolent in its pretence, and
loathsome in its falsehood,--but the tender sadness of a contrite
heart, broken, at last, beneath its own weight of sin? For it is our
belief, whatever show of honor he may have piled upon it, that there
was heavy sin at the base of this man's being.
Rise up, Judge Pyncheon! The morning sunshine glimmers through the
foliage, and, beautiful and holy as it is, shuns not to kindle up your
face. Rise up, thou subtle, worldly, selfish, iron-hearted hypocrite,
and make thy choice whether still to be subtle, worldly, selfish,
iron-hearted, and hypocritical, or to tear these sins out of thy
nature, though they bring the lifeblood with them! The Avenger is upon
thee! Rise up, before it be too late!
What! Thou art not stirred by this last appeal? No, not a jot! And
there we see a fly,--one of your common house-flies, such as are always
buzzing on the window-pane,--which has smelt out Governor Pyncheon, and
alights, now on his forehead, now on his chin, and now, Heaven help us!
is creeping over the bridge of his nose, towards the would-be
chief-magistrate's wide-open eyes! Canst thou not brush the fly away?
Art thou too sluggish? Thou man, that hadst so many busy projects
yesterday! Art thou too weak, that wast so powerful? Not brush away a
fly? Nay, then, we give thee up!
And hark! the shop-bell rings. After hours like these latter ones,
through which we have borne our heavy tale, it is good to be made
sensible that there is a living world, and that even this old, lonely
mansion retains some manner of connection with it. We breathe more
freely, emerging from Judge Pyncheon's presence into the street before
the Seven Gables.
| In Clifford's animated discussion with the old gentleman on the train, we see both a continuation of and a variation on Holgrave's arguments in Chapter 12. Like Holgrave, Clifford ridicules the idea of relying too heavily on the institutions of the past; he sees society as rolling toward nomadic greatness on an unstoppable tidal wave of progress. He is especially offended by the habit of "planting" a family in a single spot, which he says traps people in old misery and taunts them with the memories of their past glory. Unlike Holgrave, however, Clifford does not dismiss all of the past and even holds up humankind's primitive era as an example of the ideal society. His contempt seems to be more for the more recent past. Clifford's tirade constitutes an escape, a mental abandonment of the house that parallels his physical flight on the train, and his elation is due to the fact that he feels real liberty awaits him ahead. The house does not give up easily, though, and even at a distance it pushes Clifford toward insanity, prompting him to reveal the presence of his cousin's body in the house and to commit other indiscretions, even as he cheers on the house's destruction | analysis |
UNCLE VENNER, trundling a wheelbarrow, was the earliest person stirring
in the neighborhood the day after the storm.
Pyncheon Street, in front of the House of the Seven Gables, was a far
pleasanter scene than a by-lane, confined by shabby fences, and
bordered with wooden dwellings of the meaner class, could reasonably be
expected to present. Nature made sweet amends, that morning, for the
five unkindly days which had preceded it. It would have been enough to
live for, merely to look up at the wide benediction of the sky, or as
much of it as was visible between the houses, genial once more with
sunshine. Every object was agreeable, whether to be gazed at in the
breadth, or examined more minutely. Such, for example, were the
well-washed pebbles and gravel of the sidewalk; even the sky-reflecting
pools in the centre of the street; and the grass, now freshly verdant,
that crept along the base of the fences, on the other side of which, if
one peeped over, was seen the multifarious growth of gardens.
Vegetable productions, of whatever kind, seemed more than negatively
happy, in the juicy warmth and abundance of their life. The Pyncheon
Elm, throughout its great circumference, was all alive, and full of the
morning sun and a sweet-tempered little breeze, which lingered within
this verdant sphere, and set a thousand leafy tongues a-whispering all
at once. This aged tree appeared to have suffered nothing from the
gale. It had kept its boughs unshattered, and its full complement of
leaves; and the whole in perfect verdure, except a single branch, that,
by the earlier change with which the elm-tree sometimes prophesies the
autumn, had been transmuted to bright gold. It was like the golden
branch that gained Aeneas and the Sibyl admittance into Hades.
This one mystic branch hung down before the main entrance of the Seven
Gables, so nigh the ground that any passer-by might have stood on
tiptoe and plucked it off. Presented at the door, it would have been a
symbol of his right to enter, and be made acquainted with all the
secrets of the house. So little faith is due to external appearance,
that there was really an inviting aspect over the venerable edifice,
conveying an idea that its history must be a decorous and happy one,
and such as would be delightful for a fireside tale. Its windows
gleamed cheerfully in the slanting sunlight. The lines and tufts of
green moss, here and there, seemed pledges of familiarity and
sisterhood with Nature; as if this human dwelling-place, being of such
old date, had established its prescriptive title among primeval oaks
and whatever other objects, by virtue of their long continuance, have
acquired a gracious right to be. A person of imaginative temperament,
while passing by the house, would turn, once and again, and peruse it
well: its many peaks, consenting together in the clustered chimney;
the deep projection over its basement-story; the arched window,
imparting a look, if not of grandeur, yet of antique gentility, to the
broken portal over which it opened; the luxuriance of gigantic
burdocks, near the threshold; he would note all these characteristics,
and be conscious of something deeper than he saw. He would conceive
the mansion to have been the residence of the stubborn old Puritan,
Integrity, who, dying in some forgotten generation, had left a blessing
in all its rooms and chambers, the efficacy of which was to be seen in
the religion, honesty, moderate competence, or upright poverty and
solid happiness, of his descendants, to this day.
One object, above all others, would take root in the imaginative
observer's memory. It was the great tuft of flowers,--weeds, you would
have called them, only a week ago,--the tuft of crimson-spotted
flowers, in the angle between the two front gables. The old people used
to give them the name of Alice's Posies, in remembrance of fair Alice
Pyncheon, who was believed to have brought their seeds from Italy.
They were flaunting in rich beauty and full bloom to-day, and seemed,
as it were, a mystic expression that something within the house was
consummated.
It was but little after sunrise, when Uncle Venner made his appearance,
as aforesaid, impelling a wheelbarrow along the street. He was going
his matutinal rounds to collect cabbage-leaves, turnip-tops,
potato-skins, and the miscellaneous refuse of the dinner-pot, which the
thrifty housewives of the neighborhood were accustomed to put aside, as
fit only to feed a pig. Uncle Venner's pig was fed entirely, and kept
in prime order, on these eleemosynary contributions; insomuch that the
patched philosopher used to promise that, before retiring to his farm,
he would make a feast of the portly grunter, and invite all his
neighbors to partake of the joints and spare-ribs which they had helped
to fatten. Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon's housekeeping had so greatly
improved, since Clifford became a member of the family, that her share
of the banquet would have been no lean one; and Uncle Venner,
accordingly, was a good deal disappointed not to find the large earthen
pan, full of fragmentary eatables, that ordinarily awaited his coming
at the back doorstep of the Seven Gables.
"I never knew Miss Hepzibah so forgetful before," said the patriarch to
himself. "She must have had a dinner yesterday,--no question of that!
She always has one, nowadays. So where's the pot-liquor and
potato-skins, I ask? Shall I knock, and see if she's stirring yet? No,
no,--'t won't do! If little Phoebe was about the house, I should not
mind knocking; but Miss Hepzibah, likely as not, would scowl down at me
out of the window, and look cross, even if she felt pleasantly. So,
I'll come back at noon."
With these reflections, the old man was shutting the gate of the little
back-yard. Creaking on its hinges, however, like every other gate and
door about the premises, the sound reached the ears of the occupant of
the northern gable, one of the windows of which had a side-view towards
the gate.
"Good-morning, Uncle Venner!" said the daguerreotypist, leaning out of
the window. "Do you hear nobody stirring?"
"Not a soul," said the man of patches. "But that's no wonder. 'Tis
barely half an hour past sunrise, yet. But I'm really glad to see you,
Mr. Holgrave! There's a strange, lonesome look about this side of the
house; so that my heart misgave me, somehow or other, and I felt as if
there was nobody alive in it. The front of the house looks a good deal
cheerier; and Alice's Posies are blooming there beautifully; and if I
were a young man, Mr. Holgrave, my sweetheart should have one of those
flowers in her bosom, though I risked my neck climbing for it! Well,
and did the wind keep you awake last night?"
"It did, indeed!" answered the artist, smiling. "If I were a believer
in ghosts,--and I don't quite know whether I am or not,--I should have
concluded that all the old Pyncheons were running riot in the lower
rooms, especially in Miss Hepzibah's part of the house. But it is very
quiet now."
"Yes, Miss Hepzibah will be apt to over-sleep herself, after being
disturbed, all night, with the racket," said Uncle Venner. "But it
would be odd, now, wouldn't it, if the Judge had taken both his cousins
into the country along with him? I saw him go into the shop yesterday."
"At what hour?" inquired Holgrave.
"Oh, along in the forenoon," said the old man. "Well, well! I must go
my rounds, and so must my wheelbarrow. But I'll be back here at
dinner-time; for my pig likes a dinner as well as a breakfast. No
meal-time, and no sort of victuals, ever seems to come amiss to my pig.
Good morning to you! And, Mr. Holgrave, if I were a young man, like
you, I'd get one of Alice's Posies, and keep it in water till Phoebe
comes back."
"I have heard," said the daguerreotypist, as he drew in his head, "that
the water of Maule's well suits those flowers best."
Here the conversation ceased, and Uncle Venner went on his way. For
half an hour longer, nothing disturbed the repose of the Seven Gables;
nor was there any visitor, except a carrier-boy, who, as he passed the
front doorstep, threw down one of his newspapers; for Hepzibah, of
late, had regularly taken it in. After a while, there came a fat
woman, making prodigious speed, and stumbling as she ran up the steps
of the shop-door. Her face glowed with fire-heat, and, it being a
pretty warm morning, she bubbled and hissed, as it were, as if all
a-fry with chimney-warmth, and summer-warmth, and the warmth of her own
corpulent velocity. She tried the shop-door; it was fast. She tried
it again, with so angry a jar that the bell tinkled angrily back at her.
"The deuce take Old Maid Pyncheon!" muttered the irascible housewife.
"Think of her pretending to set up a cent-shop, and then lying abed
till noon! These are what she calls gentlefolk's airs, I suppose! But
I'll either start her ladyship, or break the door down!"
She shook it accordingly, and the bell, having a spiteful little temper
of its own, rang obstreperously, making its remonstrances heard,--not,
indeed, by the ears for which they were intended,--but by a good lady
on the opposite side of the street. She opened the window, and
addressed the impatient applicant.
"You'll find nobody there, Mrs. Gubbins."
"But I must and will find somebody here!" cried Mrs. Gubbins,
inflicting another outrage on the bell. "I want a half-pound of pork,
to fry some first-rate flounders for Mr. Gubbins's breakfast; and, lady
or not, Old Maid Pyncheon shall get up and serve me with it!"
"But do hear reason, Mrs. Gubbins!" responded the lady opposite. "She,
and her brother too, have both gone to their cousin's, Judge Pyncheon's
at his country-seat. There's not a soul in the house, but that young
daguerreotype-man that sleeps in the north gable. I saw old Hepzibah
and Clifford go away yesterday; and a queer couple of ducks they were,
paddling through the mud-puddles! They're gone, I'll assure you."
"And how do you know they're gone to the Judge's?" asked Mrs. Gubbins.
"He's a rich man; and there's been a quarrel between him and Hepzibah
this many a day, because he won't give her a living. That's the main
reason of her setting up a cent-shop."
"I know that well enough," said the neighbor. "But they're
gone,--that's one thing certain. And who but a blood relation, that
couldn't help himself, I ask you, would take in that awful-tempered old
maid, and that dreadful Clifford? That's it, you may be sure."
Mrs. Gubbins took her departure, still brimming over with hot wrath
against the absent Hepzibah. For another half-hour, or, perhaps,
considerably more, there was almost as much quiet on the outside of the
house as within. The elm, however, made a pleasant, cheerful, sunny
sigh, responsive to the breeze that was elsewhere imperceptible; a
swarm of insects buzzed merrily under its drooping shadow, and became
specks of light whenever they darted into the sunshine; a locust sang,
once or twice, in some inscrutable seclusion of the tree; and a
solitary little bird, with plumage of pale gold, came and hovered about
Alice's Posies.
At last our small acquaintance, Ned Higgins, trudged up the street, on
his way to school; and happening, for the first time in a fortnight, to
be the possessor of a cent, he could by no means get past the shop-door
of the Seven Gables. But it would not open. Again and again, however,
and half a dozen other agains, with the inexorable pertinacity of a
child intent upon some object important to itself, did he renew his
efforts for admittance. He had, doubtless, set his heart upon an
elephant; or, possibly, with Hamlet, he meant to eat a crocodile. In
response to his more violent attacks, the bell gave, now and then, a
moderate tinkle, but could not be stirred into clamor by any exertion
of the little fellow's childish and tiptoe strength. Holding by the
door-handle, he peeped through a crevice of the curtain, and saw that
the inner door, communicating with the passage towards the parlor, was
closed.
"Miss Pyncheon!" screamed the child, rapping on the window-pane, "I
want an elephant!"
There being no answer to several repetitions of the summons, Ned began
to grow impatient; and his little pot of passion quickly boiling over,
he picked up a stone, with a naughty purpose to fling it through the
window; at the same time blubbering and sputtering with wrath. A
man--one of two who happened to be passing by--caught the urchin's arm.
"What's the trouble, old gentleman?" he asked.
"I want old Hepzibah, or Phoebe, or any of them!" answered Ned,
sobbing. "They won't open the door; and I can't get my elephant!"
"Go to school, you little scamp!" said the man. "There's another
cent-shop round the corner. 'T is very strange, Dixey," added he to
his companion, "what's become of all these Pyncheon's! Smith, the
livery-stable keeper, tells me Judge Pyncheon put his horse up
yesterday, to stand till after dinner, and has not taken him away yet.
And one of the Judge's hired men has been in, this morning, to make
inquiry about him. He's a kind of person, they say, that seldom breaks
his habits, or stays out o' nights."
"Oh, he'll turn up safe enough!" said Dixey. "And as for Old Maid
Pyncheon, take my word for it, she has run in debt, and gone off from
her creditors. I foretold, you remember, the first morning she set up
shop, that her devilish scowl would frighten away customers. They
couldn't stand it!"
"I never thought she'd make it go," remarked his friend. "This
business of cent-shops is overdone among the women-folks. My wife
tried it, and lost five dollars on her outlay!"
"Poor business!" said Dixey, shaking his head. "Poor business!"
In the course of the morning, there were various other attempts to open
a communication with the supposed inhabitants of this silent and
impenetrable mansion. The man of root-beer came, in his neatly painted
wagon, with a couple of dozen full bottles, to be exchanged for empty
ones; the baker, with a lot of crackers which Hepzibah had ordered for
her retail custom; the butcher, with a nice titbit which he fancied she
would be eager to secure for Clifford. Had any observer of these
proceedings been aware of the fearful secret hidden within the house,
it would have affected him with a singular shape and modification of
horror, to see the current of human life making this small eddy
hereabouts,--whirling sticks, straws and all such trifles, round and
round, right over the black depth where a dead corpse lay unseen!
The butcher was so much in earnest with his sweetbread of lamb, or
whatever the dainty might be, that he tried every accessible door of
the Seven Gables, and at length came round again to the shop, where he
ordinarily found admittance.
"It's a nice article, and I know the old lady would jump at it," said
he to himself. "She can't be gone away! In fifteen years that I have
driven my cart through Pyncheon Street, I've never known her to be away
from home; though often enough, to be sure, a man might knock all day
without bringing her to the door. But that was when she'd only herself
to provide for."
Peeping through the same crevice of the curtain where, only a little
while before, the urchin of elephantine appetite had peeped, the
butcher beheld the inner door, not closed, as the child had seen it,
but ajar, and almost wide open. However it might have happened, it was
the fact. Through the passage-way there was a dark vista into the
lighter but still obscure interior of the parlor. It appeared to the
butcher that he could pretty clearly discern what seemed to be the
stalwart legs, clad in black pantaloons, of a man sitting in a large
oaken chair, the back of which concealed all the remainder of his
figure. This contemptuous tranquillity on the part of an occupant of
the house, in response to the butcher's indefatigable efforts to
attract notice, so piqued the man of flesh that he determined to
withdraw.
"So," thought he, "there sits Old Maid Pyncheon's bloody brother, while
I've been giving myself all this trouble! Why, if a hog hadn't more
manners, I'd stick him! I call it demeaning a man's business to trade
with such people; and from this time forth, if they want a sausage or
an ounce of liver, they shall run after the cart for it!"
He tossed the titbit angrily into his cart, and drove off in a pet.
Not a great while afterwards there was a sound of music turning the
corner and approaching down the street, with several intervals of
silence, and then a renewed and nearer outbreak of brisk melody. A mob
of children was seen moving onward, or stopping, in unison with the
sound, which appeared to proceed from the centre of the throng; so that
they were loosely bound together by slender strains of harmony, and
drawn along captive; with ever and anon an accession of some little
fellow in an apron and straw-hat, capering forth from door or gateway.
Arriving under the shadow of the Pyncheon Elm, it proved to be the
Italian boy, who, with his monkey and show of puppets, had once before
played his hurdy-gurdy beneath the arched window. The pleasant face of
Phoebe--and doubtless, too, the liberal recompense which she had flung
him--still dwelt in his remembrance. His expressive features kindled
up, as he recognized the spot where this trifling incident of his
erratic life had chanced. He entered the neglected yard (now wilder
than ever, with its growth of hog-weed and burdock), stationed himself
on the doorstep of the main entrance, and, opening his show-box, began
to play. Each individual of the automatic community forthwith set to
work, according to his or her proper vocation: the monkey, taking off
his Highland bonnet, bowed and scraped to the by-standers most
obsequiously, with ever an observant eye to pick up a stray cent; and
the young foreigner himself, as he turned the crank of his machine,
glanced upward to the arched window, expectant of a presence that would
make his music the livelier and sweeter. The throng of children stood
near; some on the sidewalk; some within the yard; two or three
establishing themselves on the very door-step; and one squatting on the
threshold. Meanwhile, the locust kept singing in the great old
Pyncheon Elm.
"I don't hear anybody in the house," said one of the children to
another. "The monkey won't pick up anything here."
"There is somebody at home," affirmed the urchin on the threshold. "I
heard a step!"
Still the young Italian's eye turned sidelong upward; and it really
seemed as if the touch of genuine, though slight and almost playful,
emotion communicated a juicier sweetness to the dry, mechanical process
of his minstrelsy. These wanderers are readily responsive to any
natural kindness--be it no more than a smile, or a word itself not
understood, but only a warmth in it--which befalls them on the roadside
of life. They remember these things, because they are the little
enchantments which, for the instant,--for the space that reflects a
landscape in a soap-bubble,--build up a home about them. Therefore,
the Italian boy would not be discouraged by the heavy silence with
which the old house seemed resolute to clog the vivacity of his
instrument. He persisted in his melodious appeals; he still looked
upward, trusting that his dark, alien countenance would soon be
brightened by Phoebe's sunny aspect. Neither could he be willing to
depart without again beholding Clifford, whose sensibility, like
Phoebe's smile, had talked a kind of heart's language to the foreigner.
He repeated all his music over and over again, until his auditors were
getting weary. So were the little wooden people in his show-box, and
the monkey most of all. There was no response, save the singing of the
locust.
"No children live in this house," said a schoolboy, at last. "Nobody
lives here but an old maid and an old man. You'll get nothing here!
Why don't you go along?"
"You fool, you, why do you tell him?" whispered a shrewd little Yankee,
caring nothing for the music, but a good deal for the cheap rate at
which it was had. "Let him play as he likes! If there's nobody to pay
him, that's his own lookout!"
Once more, however, the Italian ran over his round of melodies. To the
common observer--who could understand nothing of the case, except the
music and the sunshine on the hither side of the door--it might have
been amusing to watch the pertinacity of the street-performer. Will he
succeed at last? Will that stubborn door be suddenly flung open? Will a
group of joyous children, the young ones of the house, come dancing,
shouting, laughing, into the open air, and cluster round the show-box,
looking with eager merriment at the puppets, and tossing each a copper
for long-tailed Mammon, the monkey, to pick up?
But to us, who know the inner heart of the Seven Gables as well as its
exterior face, there is a ghastly effect in this repetition of light
popular tunes at its door-step. It would be an ugly business, indeed,
if Judge Pyncheon (who would not have cared a fig for Paganini's fiddle
in his most harmonious mood) should make his appearance at the door,
with a bloody shirt-bosom, and a grim frown on his swarthily white
visage, and motion the foreign vagabond away! Was ever before such a
grinding out of jigs and waltzes, where nobody was in the cue to dance?
Yes, very often. This contrast, or intermingling of tragedy with mirth,
happens daily, hourly, momently. The gloomy and desolate old house,
deserted of life, and with awful Death sitting sternly in its solitude,
was the emblem of many a human heart, which, nevertheless, is compelled
to hear the thrill and echo of the world's gayety around it.
Before the conclusion of the Italian's performance, a couple of men
happened to be passing, On their way to dinner. "I say, you young
French fellow!" called out one of them,--"come away from that doorstep,
and go somewhere else with your nonsense! The Pyncheon family live
there; and they are in great trouble, just about this time. They don't
feel musical to-day. It is reported all over town that Judge Pyncheon,
who owns the house, has been murdered; and the city marshal is going to
look into the matter. So be off with you, at once!"
As the Italian shouldered his hurdy-gurdy, he saw on the doorstep a
card, which had been covered, all the morning, by the newspaper that
the carrier had flung upon it, but was now shuffled into sight. He
picked it up, and perceiving something written in pencil, gave it to
the man to read. In fact, it was an engraved card of Judge Pyncheon's
with certain pencilled memoranda on the back, referring to various
businesses which it had been his purpose to transact during the
preceding day. It formed a prospective epitome of the day's history;
only that affairs had not turned out altogether in accordance with the
programme. The card must have been lost from the Judge's vest-pocket
in his preliminary attempt to gain access by the main entrance of the
house. Though well soaked with rain, it was still partially legible.
"Look here; Dixey!" cried the man. "This has something to do with
Judge Pyncheon. See!--here's his name printed on it; and here, I
suppose, is some of his handwriting."
"Let's go to the city marshal with it!" said Dixey. "It may give him
just the clew he wants. After all," whispered he in his companion's
ear, "it would be no wonder if the Judge has gone into that door and
never come out again! A certain cousin of his may have been at his old
tricks. And Old Maid Pyncheon having got herself in debt by the
cent-shop,--and the Judge's pocket-book being well filled,--and bad
blood amongst them already! Put all these things together and see what
they make!"
"Hush, hush!" whispered the other. "It seems like a sin to be the
first to speak of such a thing. But I think, with you, that we had
better go to the city marshal."
"Yes, yes!" said Dixey. "Well!--I always said there was something
devilish in that woman's scowl!"
The men wheeled about, accordingly, and retraced their steps up the
street. The Italian, also, made the best of his way off, with a
parting glance up at the arched window. As for the children, they took
to their heels, with one accord, and scampered as if some giant or ogre
were in pursuit, until, at a good distance from the house, they stopped
as suddenly and simultaneously as they had set out. Their susceptible
nerves took an indefinite alarm from what they had overheard. Looking
back at the grotesque peaks and shadowy angles of the old mansion, they
fancied a gloom diffused about it which no brightness of the sunshine
could dispel. An imaginary Hepzibah scowled and shook her finger at
them, from several windows at the same moment. An imaginary
Clifford--for (and it would have deeply wounded him to know it) he had
always been a horror to these small people--stood behind the unreal
Hepzibah, making awful gestures, in a faded dressing-gown. Children
are even more apt, if possible, than grown people, to catch the
contagion of a panic terror. For the rest of the day, the more timid
went whole streets about, for the sake of avoiding the Seven Gables;
while the bolder signalized their hardihood by challenging their
comrades to race past the mansion at full speed.
It could not have been more than half an hour after the disappearance
of the Italian boy, with his unseasonable melodies, when a cab drove
down the street. It stopped beneath the Pyncheon Elm; the cabman took
a trunk, a canvas bag, and a bandbox, from the top of his vehicle, and
deposited them on the doorstep of the old house; a straw bonnet, and
then the pretty figure of a young girl, came into view from the
interior of the cab. It was Phoebe! Though not altogether so blooming
as when she first tripped into our story,--for, in the few intervening
weeks, her experiences had made her graver, more womanly, and
deeper-eyed, in token of a heart that had begun to suspect its
depths,--still there was the quiet glow of natural sunshine over her.
Neither had she forfeited her proper gift of making things look real,
rather than fantastic, within her sphere. Yet we feel it to be a
questionable venture, even for Phoebe, at this juncture, to cross the
threshold of the Seven Gables. Is her healthful presence potent enough
to chase away the crowd of pale, hideous, and sinful phantoms, that
have gained admittance there since her departure? Or will she,
likewise, fade, sicken, sadden, and grow into deformity, and be only
another pallid phantom, to glide noiselessly up and down the stairs,
and affright children as she pauses at the window?
At least, we would gladly forewarn the unsuspecting girl that there is
nothing in human shape or substance to receive her, unless it be the
figure of Judge Pyncheon, who--wretched spectacle that he is, and
frightful in our remembrance, since our night-long vigil with
him!--still keeps his place in the oaken chair.
Phoebe first tried the shop-door. It did not yield to her hand; and
the white curtain, drawn across the window which formed the upper
section of the door, struck her quick perceptive faculty as something
unusual. Without making another effort to enter here, she betook
herself to the great portal, under the arched window. Finding it
fastened, she knocked. A reverberation came from the emptiness within.
She knocked again, and a third time; and, listening intently, fancied
that the floor creaked, as if Hepzibah were coming, with her ordinary
tiptoe movement, to admit her. But so dead a silence ensued upon this
imaginary sound, that she began to question whether she might not have
mistaken the house, familiar as she thought herself with its exterior.
Her notice was now attracted by a child's voice, at some distance. It
appeared to call her name. Looking in the direction whence it
proceeded, Phoebe saw little Ned Higgins, a good way down the street,
stamping, shaking his head violently, making deprecatory gestures with
both hands, and shouting to her at mouth-wide screech.
"No, no, Phoebe!" he screamed. "Don't you go in! There's something
wicked there! Don't--don't--don't go in!"
But, as the little personage could not be induced to approach near
enough to explain himself, Phoebe concluded that he had been
frightened, on some of his visits to the shop, by her cousin Hepzibah;
for the good lady's manifestations, in truth, ran about an equal chance
of scaring children out of their wits, or compelling them to unseemly
laughter. Still, she felt the more, for this incident, how
unaccountably silent and impenetrable the house had become. As her
next resort, Phoebe made her way into the garden, where on so warm and
bright a day as the present, she had little doubt of finding Clifford,
and perhaps Hepzibah also, idling away the noontide in the shadow of
the arbor. Immediately on her entering the garden gate, the family of
hens half ran, half flew to meet her; while a strange grimalkin, which
was prowling under the parlor window, took to his heels, clambered
hastily over the fence, and vanished. The arbor was vacant, and its
floor, table, and circular bench were still damp, and bestrewn with
twigs and the disarray of the past storm. The growth of the garden
seemed to have got quite out of bounds; the weeds had taken advantage
of Phoebe's absence, and the long-continued rain, to run rampant over
the flowers and kitchen-vegetables. Maule's well had overflowed its
stone border, and made a pool of formidable breadth in that corner of
the garden.
The impression of the whole scene was that of a spot where no human
foot had left its print for many preceding days,--probably not since
Phoebe's departure,--for she saw a side-comb of her own under the table
of the arbor, where it must have fallen on the last afternoon when she
and Clifford sat there.
The girl knew that her two relatives were capable of far greater
oddities than that of shutting themselves up in their old house, as
they appeared now to have done. Nevertheless, with indistinct
misgivings of something amiss, and apprehensions to which she could not
give shape, she approached the door that formed the customary
communication between the house and garden. It was secured within,
like the two which she had already tried. She knocked, however; and
immediately, as if the application had been expected, the door was
drawn open, by a considerable exertion of some unseen person's
strength, not wide, but far enough to afford her a sidelong entrance.
As Hepzibah, in order not to expose herself to inspection from without,
invariably opened a door in this manner, Phoebe necessarily concluded
that it was her cousin who now admitted her.
Without hesitation, therefore, she stepped across the threshold, and
had no sooner entered than the door closed behind her.
| Alice's Posies Pyncheon Street, which runs in front of the house of the seven gables, is beautiful and abounds with vegetables growing in the neighbors' gardens and the leaves of the great Pyncheon elm whispering in the wind. Alice's Posies, the flowers that grow in the dust between two gables, have bloomed. Uncle Venner passes by, but Holgrave, from his window, tells him no one is home. A customer bangs angrily on the door of Hepzibah's store, but a neighbor says the brother and sister have left. Little Ned Higgins finds the store closed when he tries to buy a gingerbread man, and the workmen guffaw that the business has already gone under. A butcher who knocks grumbles about being ignored. The Judge's horse still stands where the Judge left it, and some villagers begin to suspect bloody deeds. The organ-grinder returns and plays in front of the window, but a man tells him the city marshal is coming to investigate and warns him to be gone. The novel remarks that this is just as well: it would be a terrifying sight if Judge Pyncheon were to answer the door, his shirt caked in blood. Phoebe returns, as good and bright as ever. Ned Higgins, from a distance, shouts and warns that there is something evil inside the house, and although Phoebe assumes he has been scared by Hepzibah's scowl, she enters with some apprehension. The door opens a crack and slams shut once she has entered | summary |
PHOEBE, coming so suddenly from the sunny daylight, was altogether
bedimmed in such density of shadow as lurked in most of the passages of
the old house. She was not at first aware by whom she had been
admitted. Before her eyes had adapted themselves to the obscurity, a
hand grasped her own with a firm but gentle and warm pressure, thus
imparting a welcome which caused her heart to leap and thrill with an
indefinable shiver of enjoyment. She felt herself drawn along, not
towards the parlor, but into a large and unoccupied apartment, which
had formerly been the grand reception-room of the Seven Gables. The
sunshine came freely into all the uncurtained windows of this room, and
fell upon the dusty floor; so that Phoebe now clearly saw--what,
indeed, had been no secret, after the encounter of a warm hand with
hers--that it was not Hepzibah nor Clifford, but Holgrave, to whom she
owed her reception. The subtile, intuitive communication, or, rather,
the vague and formless impression of something to be told, had made her
yield unresistingly to his impulse. Without taking away her hand, she
looked eagerly in his face, not quick to forebode evil, but unavoidably
conscious that the state of the family had changed since her departure,
and therefore anxious for an explanation.
The artist looked paler than ordinary; there was a thoughtful and
severe contraction of his forehead, tracing a deep, vertical line
between the eyebrows. His smile, however, was full of genuine warmth,
and had in it a joy, by far the most vivid expression that Phoebe had
ever witnessed, shining out of the New England reserve with which
Holgrave habitually masked whatever lay near his heart. It was the
look wherewith a man, brooding alone over some fearful object, in a
dreary forest or illimitable desert, would recognize the familiar
aspect of his dearest friend, bringing up all the peaceful ideas that
belong to home, and the gentle current of every-day affairs. And yet,
as he felt the necessity of responding to her look of inquiry, the
smile disappeared.
"I ought not to rejoice that you have come, Phoebe," said he. "We meet
at a strange moment!"
"What has happened!" she exclaimed. "Why is the house so deserted?
Where are Hepzibah and Clifford?"
"Gone! I cannot imagine where they are!" answered Holgrave. "We are
alone in the house!"
"Hepzibah and Clifford gone?" cried Phoebe. "It is not possible! And
why have you brought me into this room, instead of the parlor? Ah,
something terrible has happened! I must run and see!"
"No, no, Phoebe!" said Holgrave holding her back. "It is as I have
told you. They are gone, and I know not whither. A terrible event
has, indeed happened, but not to them, nor, as I undoubtingly believe,
through any agency of theirs. If I read your character rightly,
Phoebe," he continued, fixing his eyes on hers with stern anxiety,
intermixed with tenderness, "gentle as you are, and seeming to have
your sphere among common things, you yet possess remarkable strength.
You have wonderful poise, and a faculty which, when tested, will prove
itself capable of dealing with matters that fall far out of the
ordinary rule."
"Oh, no, I am very weak!" replied Phoebe, trembling. "But tell me what
has happened!"
"You are strong!" persisted Holgrave. "You must be both strong and
wise; for I am all astray, and need your counsel. It may be you can
suggest the one right thing to do!"
"Tell me!--tell me!" said Phoebe, all in a tremble. "It oppresses,--it
terrifies me,--this mystery! Anything else I can bear!"
The artist hesitated. Notwithstanding what he had just said, and most
sincerely, in regard to the self-balancing power with which Phoebe
impressed him, it still seemed almost wicked to bring the awful secret
of yesterday to her knowledge. It was like dragging a hideous shape of
death into the cleanly and cheerful space before a household fire,
where it would present all the uglier aspect, amid the decorousness of
everything about it. Yet it could not be concealed from her; she must
needs know it.
"Phoebe," said he, "do you remember this?" He put into her hand a
daguerreotype; the same that he had shown her at their first interview
in the garden, and which so strikingly brought out the hard and
relentless traits of the original.
"What has this to do with Hepzibah and Clifford?" asked Phoebe, with
impatient surprise that Holgrave should so trifle with her at such a
moment. "It is Judge Pyncheon! You have shown it to me before!"
"But here is the same face, taken within this half-hour" said the
artist, presenting her with another miniature. "I had just finished it
when I heard you at the door."
"This is death!" shuddered Phoebe, turning very pale. "Judge Pyncheon
dead!"
"Such as there represented," said Holgrave, "he sits in the next room.
The Judge is dead, and Clifford and Hepzibah have vanished! I know no
more. All beyond is conjecture. On returning to my solitary chamber,
last evening, I noticed no light, either in the parlor, or Hepzibah's
room, or Clifford's; no stir nor footstep about the house. This
morning, there was the same death-like quiet. From my window, I
overheard the testimony of a neighbor, that your relatives were seen
leaving the house in the midst of yesterday's storm. A rumor reached
me, too, of Judge Pyncheon being missed. A feeling which I cannot
describe--an indefinite sense of some catastrophe, or
consummation--impelled me to make my way into this part of the house,
where I discovered what you see. As a point of evidence that may be
useful to Clifford, and also as a memorial valuable to myself,--for,
Phoebe, there are hereditary reasons that connect me strangely with
that man's fate,--I used the means at my disposal to preserve this
pictorial record of Judge Pyncheon's death."
Even in her agitation, Phoebe could not help remarking the calmness of
Holgrave's demeanor. He appeared, it is true, to feel the whole
awfulness of the Judge's death, yet had received the fact into his mind
without any mixture of surprise, but as an event preordained, happening
inevitably, and so fitting itself into past occurrences that it could
almost have been prophesied.
"Why have you not thrown open the doors, and called in witnesses?"
inquired she with a painful shudder. "It is terrible to be here alone!"
"But Clifford!" suggested the artist. "Clifford and Hepzibah! We must
consider what is best to be done in their behalf. It is a wretched
fatality that they should have disappeared! Their flight will throw the
worst coloring over this event of which it is susceptible. Yet how
easy is the explanation, to those who know them! Bewildered and
terror-stricken by the similarity of this death to a former one, which
was attended with such disastrous consequences to Clifford, they have
had no idea but of removing themselves from the scene. How miserably
unfortunate! Had Hepzibah but shrieked aloud,--had Clifford flung wide
the door, and proclaimed Judge Pyncheon's death,--it would have been,
however awful in itself, an event fruitful of good consequences to
them. As I view it, it would have gone far towards obliterating the
black stain on Clifford's character."
"And how," asked Phoebe, "could any good come from what is so very
dreadful?"
"Because," said the artist, "if the matter can be fairly considered and
candidly interpreted, it must be evident that Judge Pyncheon could not
have come unfairly to his end. This mode of death had been an
idiosyncrasy with his family, for generations past; not often
occurring, indeed, but, when it does occur, usually attacking
individuals about the Judge's time of life, and generally in the
tension of some mental crisis, or, perhaps, in an access of wrath. Old
Maule's prophecy was probably founded on a knowledge of this physical
predisposition in the Pyncheon race. Now, there is a minute and almost
exact similarity in the appearances connected with the death that
occurred yesterday and those recorded of the death of Clifford's uncle
thirty years ago. It is true, there was a certain arrangement of
circumstances, unnecessary to be recounted, which made it possible nay,
as men look at these things, probable, or even certain--that old
Jaffrey Pyncheon came to a violent death, and by Clifford's hands."
"Whence came those circumstances?" exclaimed Phoebe. "He being
innocent, as we know him to be!"
"They were arranged," said Holgrave,--"at least such has long been my
conviction,--they were arranged after the uncle's death, and before it
was made public, by the man who sits in yonder parlor. His own death,
so like that former one, yet attended by none of those suspicious
circumstances, seems the stroke of God upon him, at once a punishment
for his wickedness, and making plain the innocence of Clifford. But
this flight,--it distorts everything! He may be in concealment, near at
hand. Could we but bring him back before the discovery of the Judge's
death, the evil might be rectified."
"We must not hide this thing a moment longer!" said Phoebe. "It is
dreadful to keep it so closely in our hearts. Clifford is innocent.
God will make it manifest! Let us throw open the doors, and call all
the neighborhood to see the truth!"
"You are right, Phoebe," rejoined Holgrave. "Doubtless you are right."
Yet the artist did not feel the horror, which was proper to Phoebe's
sweet and order-loving character, at thus finding herself at issue with
society, and brought in contact with an event that transcended ordinary
rules. Neither was he in haste, like her, to betake himself within the
precincts of common life. On the contrary, he gathered a wild
enjoyment,--as it were, a flower of strange beauty, growing in a
desolate spot, and blossoming in the wind,--such a flower of momentary
happiness he gathered from his present position. It separated Phoebe
and himself from the world, and bound them to each other, by their
exclusive knowledge of Judge Pyncheon's mysterious death, and the
counsel which they were forced to hold respecting it. The secret, so
long as it should continue such, kept them within the circle of a
spell, a solitude in the midst of men, a remoteness as entire as that
of an island in mid-ocean; once divulged, the ocean would flow betwixt
them, standing on its widely sundered shores. Meanwhile, all the
circumstances of their situation seemed to draw them together; they
were like two children who go hand in hand, pressing closely to one
another's side, through a shadow-haunted passage. The image of awful
Death, which filled the house, held them united by his stiffened grasp.
These influences hastened the development of emotions that might not
otherwise have flowered so. Possibly, indeed, it had been Holgrave's
purpose to let them die in their undeveloped germs. "Why do we delay
so?" asked Phoebe. "This secret takes away my breath! Let us throw
open the doors!"
"In all our lives there can never come another moment like this!" said
Holgrave. "Phoebe, is it all terror?--nothing but terror? Are you
conscious of no joy, as I am, that has made this the only point of life
worth living for?"
"It seems a sin," replied Phoebe, trembling, "to think of joy at such a
time!"
"Could you but know, Phoebe, how it was with me the hour before you
came!" exclaimed the artist. "A dark, cold, miserable hour! The
presence of yonder dead man threw a great black shadow over everything;
he made the universe, so far as my perception could reach, a scene of
guilt and of retribution more dreadful than the guilt. The sense of it
took away my youth. I never hoped to feel young again! The world
looked strange, wild, evil, hostile; my past life, so lonesome and
dreary; my future, a shapeless gloom, which I must mould into gloomy
shapes! But, Phoebe, you crossed the threshold; and hope, warmth, and
joy came in with you! The black moment became at once a blissful one.
It must not pass without the spoken word. I love you!"
"How can you love a simple girl like me?" asked Phoebe, compelled by
his earnestness to speak. "You have many, many thoughts, with which I
should try in vain to sympathize. And I,--I, too,--I have tendencies
with which you would sympathize as little. That is less matter. But I
have not scope enough to make you happy."
"You are my only possibility of happiness!" answered Holgrave. "I have
no faith in it, except as you bestow it on me!"
"And then--I am afraid!" continued Phoebe, shrinking towards Holgrave,
even while she told him so frankly the doubts with which he affected
her. "You will lead me out of my own quiet path. You will make me
strive to follow you where it is pathless. I cannot do so. It is not
my nature. I shall sink down and perish!"
"Ah, Phoebe!" exclaimed Holgrave, with almost a sigh, and a smile that
was burdened with thought.
"It will be far otherwise than as you forebode. The world owes all its
onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines
himself within ancient limits. I have a presentiment that, hereafter,
it will be my lot to set out trees, to make fences,--perhaps, even, in
due time, to build a house for another generation,--in a word, to
conform myself to laws and the peaceful practice of society. Your
poise will be more powerful than any oscillating tendency of mine."
"I would not have it so!" said Phoebe earnestly.
"Do you love me?" asked Holgrave. "If we love one another, the moment
has room for nothing more. Let us pause upon it, and be satisfied. Do
you love me, Phoebe?"
"You look into my heart," said she, letting her eyes drop. "You know I
love you!"
And it was in this hour, so full of doubt and awe, that the one miracle
was wrought, without which every human existence is a blank. The bliss
which makes all things true, beautiful, and holy shone around this
youth and maiden. They were conscious of nothing sad nor old. They
transfigured the earth, and made it Eden again, and themselves the two
first dwellers in it. The dead man, so close beside them, was
forgotten. At such a crisis, there is no death; for immortality is
revealed anew, and embraces everything in its hallowed atmosphere.
But how soon the heavy earth-dream settled down again!
"Hark!" whispered Phoebe. "Somebody is at the street door!"
"Now let us meet the world!" said Holgrave. "No doubt, the rumor of
Judge Pyncheon's visit to this house, and the flight of Hepzibah and
Clifford, is about to lead to the investigation of the premises. We
have no way but to meet it. Let us open the door at once."
But, to their surprise, before they could reach the street door,--even
before they quitted the room in which the foregoing interview had
passed,--they heard footsteps in the farther passage. The door,
therefore, which they supposed to be securely locked,--which Holgrave,
indeed, had seen to be so, and at which Phoebe had vainly tried to
enter,--must have been opened from without. The sound of footsteps was
not harsh, bold, decided, and intrusive, as the gait of strangers would
naturally be, making authoritative entrance into a dwelling where they
knew themselves unwelcome. It was feeble, as of persons either weak or
weary; there was the mingled murmur of two voices, familiar to both the
listeners.
"Can it be?" whispered Holgrave.
"It is they!" answered Phoebe. "Thank God!--thank God!"
And then, as if in sympathy with Phoebe's whispered ejaculation, they
heard Hepzibah's voice more distinctly.
"Thank God, my brother, we are at home!"
"Well!--Yes!--thank God!" responded Clifford. "A dreary home,
Hepzibah! But you have done well to bring me hither! Stay! That parlor
door is open. I cannot pass by it! Let me go and rest me in the arbor,
where I used,--oh, very long ago, it seems to me, after what has
befallen us,--where I used to be so happy with little Phoebe!"
But the house was not altogether so dreary as Clifford imagined it.
They had not made many steps,--in truth, they were lingering in the
entry, with the listlessness of an accomplished purpose, uncertain what
to do next,--when Phoebe ran to meet them. On beholding her, Hepzibah
burst into tears. With all her might, she had staggered onward beneath
the burden of grief and responsibility, until now that it was safe to
fling it down. Indeed, she had not energy to fling it down, but had
ceased to uphold it, and suffered it to press her to the earth.
Clifford appeared the stronger of the two.
"It is our own little Phoebe!--Ah! and Holgrave with, her" exclaimed
he, with a glance of keen and delicate insight, and a smile, beautiful,
kind, but melancholy. "I thought of you both, as we came down the
street, and beheld Alice's Posies in full bloom. And so the flower of
Eden has bloomed, likewise, in this old, darksome house to-day."
| The Flower of Eden Phoebe is pulled into the house by a strange, warm hand, and when she steps into the light she realizes it is Holgrave. Holgrave has an attitude of genuine warmth, as if something wonderful has happened, but he refuses to let Phoebe look in the parlor. He shows her his old daguerreotype of Judge Pyncheon and then a new one he has just made of the Judge lying dead. Holgrave tells Phoebe that he has not told the police or called witnesses because he knows that to do so would implicate the absent Clifford and Hepzibah, and he hopes that the two return soon. Holgrave mentions that it would have been better had Hepzibah and Clifford immediately made the Judge's death public, since the circumstances so strongly resemble the death of Clifford's uncle Jaffrey Pyncheon, for which Clifford was blamed. Holgrave adds that Clifford was blamed largely due to the efforts of the Judge. Phoebe is shocked and wants to immediately inform the village of what has happened, but Holgrave is possessed by a strange joy, and finally tells Phoebe he loves her. Phoebe is doubtful that she can make a restless spirit like Holgrave happy, but he convinces her that he is willing to give all of this up for her. Phoebe protests this vow, but she eventually caves in and tells Holgrave she loves him as well. At that moment, Clifford and Hepzibah return to the house of the seven gables. When they see the young people, Hepzibah is so glad she is finally able to set down her burden of grief that she bursts into tears | summary |
THE sudden death of so prominent a member of the social world as the
Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a sensation (at least, in the
circles more immediately connected with the deceased) which had hardly
quite subsided in a fortnight.
It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which constitute a
person's biography, there is scarcely one--none, certainly, of anything
like a similar importance--to which the world so easily reconciles
itself as to his death. In most other cases and contingencies, the
individual is present among us, mixed up with the daily revolution of
affairs, and affording a definite point for observation. At his
decease, there is only a vacancy, and a momentary eddy,--very small, as
compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated object,--and a
bubble or two, ascending out of the black depth and bursting at the
surface. As regarded Judge Pyncheon, it seemed probable, at first
blush, that the mode of his final departure might give him a larger and
longer posthumous vogue than ordinarily attends the memory of a
distinguished man. But when it came to be understood, on the highest
professional authority, that the event was a natural, and--except for
some unimportant particulars, denoting a slight idiosyncrasy--by no
means an unusual form of death, the public, with its customary
alacrity, proceeded to forget that he had ever lived. In short, the
honorable Judge was beginning to be a stale subject before half the
country newspapers had found time to put their columns in mourning, and
publish his exceedingly eulogistic obituary.
Nevertheless, creeping darkly through the places which this excellent
person had haunted in his lifetime, there was a hidden stream of
private talk, such as it would have shocked all decency to speak loudly
at the street-corners. It is very singular, how the fact of a man's
death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether
for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and
acting among them. Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes
falsehood, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the
gold, and dishonors the baser metal. Could the departed, whoever he
may be, return in a week after his decease, he would almost invariably
find himself at a higher or lower point than he had formerly occupied,
on the scale of public appreciation. But the talk, or scandal, to
which we now allude, had reference to matters of no less old a date
than the supposed murder, thirty or forty years ago, of the late Judge
Pyncheon's uncle. The medical opinion with regard to his own recent
and regretted decease had almost entirely obviated the idea that a
murder was committed in the former case. Yet, as the record showed,
there were circumstances irrefragably indicating that some person had
gained access to old Jaffrey Pyncheon's private apartments, at or near
the moment of his death. His desk and private drawers, in a room
contiguous to his bedchamber, had been ransacked; money and valuable
articles were missing; there was a bloody hand-print on the old man's
linen; and, by a powerfully welded chain of deductive evidence, the
guilt of the robbery and apparent murder had been fixed on Clifford,
then residing with his uncle in the House of the Seven Gables.
Whencesoever originating, there now arose a theory that undertook so to
account for these circumstances as to exclude the idea of Clifford's
agency. Many persons affirmed that the history and elucidation of the
facts, long so mysterious, had been obtained by the daguerreotypist
from one of those mesmerical seers who, nowadays, so strangely perplex
the aspect of human affairs, and put everybody's natural vision to the
blush, by the marvels which they see with their eyes shut.
According to this version of the story, Judge Pyncheon, exemplary as we
have portrayed him in our narrative, was, in his youth, an apparently
irreclaimable scapegrace. The brutish, the animal instincts, as is
often the case, had been developed earlier than the intellectual
qualities, and the force of character, for which he was afterwards
remarkable. He had shown himself wild, dissipated, addicted to low
pleasures, little short of ruffianly in his propensities, and
recklessly expensive, with no other resources than the bounty of his
uncle. This course of conduct had alienated the old bachelor's
affection, once strongly fixed upon him. Now it is averred,--but
whether on authority available in a court of justice, we do not pretend
to have investigated,--that the young man was tempted by the devil, one
night, to search his uncle's private drawers, to which he had
unsuspected means of access. While thus criminally occupied, he was
startled by the opening of the chamber-door. There stood old Jaffrey
Pyncheon, in his nightclothes! The surprise of such a discovery, his
agitation, alarm, and horror, brought on the crisis of a disorder to
which the old bachelor had an hereditary liability; he seemed to choke
with blood, and fell upon the floor, striking his temple a heavy blow
against the corner of a table. What was to be done? The old man was
surely dead! Assistance would come too late! What a misfortune, indeed,
should it come too soon, since his reviving consciousness would bring
the recollection of the ignominious offence which he had beheld his
nephew in the very act of committing!
But he never did revive. With the cool hardihood that always pertained
to him, the young man continued his search of the drawers, and found a
will, of recent date, in favor of Clifford,--which he destroyed,--and
an older one, in his own favor, which he suffered to remain. But
before retiring, Jaffrey bethought himself of the evidence, in these
ransacked drawers, that some one had visited the chamber with sinister
purposes. Suspicion, unless averted, might fix upon the real offender.
In the very presence of the dead man, therefore, he laid a scheme that
should free himself at the expense of Clifford, his rival, for whose
character he had at once a contempt and a repugnance. It is not
probable, be it said, that he acted with any set purpose of involving
Clifford in a charge of murder. Knowing that his uncle did not die by
violence, it may not have occurred to him, in the hurry of the crisis,
that such an inference might be drawn. But, when the affair took this
darker aspect, Jaffrey's previous steps had already pledged him to
those which remained. So craftily had he arranged the circumstances,
that, at Clifford's trial, his cousin hardly found it necessary to
swear to anything false, but only to withhold the one decisive
explanation, by refraining to state what he had himself done and
witnessed.
Thus Jaffrey Pyncheon's inward criminality, as regarded Clifford, was,
indeed, black and damnable; while its mere outward show and positive
commission was the smallest that could possibly consist with so great a
sin. This is just the sort of guilt that a man of eminent
respectability finds it easiest to dispose of. It was suffered to fade
out of sight or be reckoned a venial matter, in the Honorable Judge
Pyncheon's long subsequent survey of his own life. He shuffled it
aside, among the forgotten and forgiven frailties of his youth, and
seldom thought of it again.
We leave the Judge to his repose. He could not be styled fortunate at
the hour of death. Unknowingly, he was a childless man, while striving
to add more wealth to his only child's inheritance. Hardly a week
after his decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of
the death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheon's son, just at the point of
embarkation for his native land. By this misfortune Clifford became
rich; so did Hepzibah; so did our little village maiden, and, through
her, that sworn foe of wealth and all manner of conservatism,--the wild
reformer,--Holgrave!
It was now far too late in Clifford's life for the good opinion of
society to be worth the trouble and anguish of a formal vindication.
What he needed was the love of a very few; not the admiration, or even
the respect, of the unknown many. The latter might probably have been
won for him, had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had
fallen deemed it advisable to expose Clifford to a miserable
resuscitation of past ideas, when the condition of whatever comfort he
might expect lay in the calm of forgetfulness. After such wrong as he
had suffered, there is no reparation. The pitiable mockery of it,
which the world might have been ready enough to offer, coming so long
after the agony had done its utmost work, would have been fit only to
provoke bitterer laughter than poor Clifford was ever capable of. It
is a truth (and it would be a very sad one but for the higher hopes
which it suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in
our mortal sphere, is ever really set right. Time, the continual
vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of
death, render it impossible. If, after long lapse of years, the right
seems to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in. The better
remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought
his irreparable ruin far behind him.
The shock of Judge Pyncheon's death had a permanently invigorating and
ultimately beneficial effect on Clifford. That strong and ponderous
man had been Clifford's nightmare. There was no free breath to be
drawn, within the sphere of so malevolent an influence. The first
effect of freedom, as we have witnessed in Clifford's aimless flight,
was a tremulous exhilaration. Subsiding from it, he did not sink into
his former intellectual apathy. He never, it is true, attained to
nearly the full measure of what might have been his faculties. But he
recovered enough of them partially to light up his character, to
display some outline of the marvellous grace that was abortive in it,
and to make him the object of no less deep, although less melancholy
interest than heretofore. He was evidently happy. Could we pause to
give another picture of his daily life, with all the appliances now at
command to gratify his instinct for the Beautiful, the garden scenes,
that seemed so sweet to him, would look mean and trivial in comparison.
Very soon after their change of fortune, Clifford, Hepzibah, and little
Phoebe, with the approval of the artist, concluded to remove from the
dismal old House of the Seven Gables, and take up their abode, for the
present, at the elegant country-seat of the late Judge Pyncheon.
Chanticleer and his family had already been transported thither, where
the two hens had forthwith begun an indefatigable process of
egg-laying, with an evident design, as a matter of duty and conscience,
to continue their illustrious breed under better auspices than for a
century past. On the day set for their departure, the principal
personages of our story, including good Uncle Venner, were assembled in
the parlor.
"The country-house is certainly a very fine one, so far as the plan
goes," observed Holgrave, as the party were discussing their future
arrangements. "But I wonder that the late Judge--being so opulent, and
with a reasonable prospect of transmitting his wealth to descendants of
his own--should not have felt the propriety of embodying so excellent a
piece of domestic architecture in stone, rather than in wood. Then,
every generation of the family might have altered the interior, to suit
its own taste and convenience; while the exterior, through the lapse of
years, might have been adding venerableness to its original beauty, and
thus giving that impression of permanence which I consider essential to
the happiness of any one moment."
"Why," cried Phoebe, gazing into the artist's face with infinite
amazement, "how wonderfully your ideas are changed! A house of stone,
indeed! It is but two or three weeks ago that you seemed to wish people
to live in something as fragile and temporary as a bird's-nest!"
"Ah, Phoebe, I told you how it would be!" said the artist, with a
half-melancholy laugh. "You find me a conservative already! Little
did I think ever to become one. It is especially unpardonable in this
dwelling of so much hereditary misfortune, and under the eye of yonder
portrait of a model conservative, who, in that very character, rendered
himself so long the evil destiny of his race."
"That picture!" said Clifford, seeming to shrink from its stern glance.
"Whenever I look at it, there is an old dreamy recollection haunting
me, but keeping just beyond the grasp of my mind. Wealth, it seems to
say!--boundless wealth!--unimaginable wealth! I could fancy that, when
I was a child, or a youth, that portrait had spoken, and told me a rich
secret, or had held forth its hand, with the written record of hidden
opulence. But those old matters are so dim with me, nowadays! What
could this dream have been?"
"Perhaps I can recall it," answered Holgrave. "See! There are a
hundred chances to one that no person, unacquainted with the secret,
would ever touch this spring."
"A secret spring!" cried Clifford. "Ah, I remember now! I did discover
it, one summer afternoon, when I was idling and dreaming about the
house, long, long ago. But the mystery escapes me."
The artist put his finger on the contrivance to which he had referred.
In former days, the effect would probably have been to cause the
picture to start forward. But, in so long a period of concealment, the
machinery had been eaten through with rust; so that at Holgrave's
pressure, the portrait, frame and all, tumbled suddenly from its
position, and lay face downward on the floor. A recess in the wall was
thus brought to light, in which lay an object so covered with a
century's dust that it could not immediately be recognized as a folded
sheet of parchment. Holgrave opened it, and displayed an ancient deed,
signed with the hieroglyphics of several Indian sagamores, and
conveying to Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs, forever, a vast extent of
territory at the Eastward.
"This is the very parchment, the attempt to recover which cost the
beautiful Alice Pyncheon her happiness and life," said the artist,
alluding to his legend. "It is what the Pyncheons sought in vain,
while it was valuable; and now that they find the treasure, it has long
been worthless."
"Poor Cousin Jaffrey! This is what deceived him," exclaimed Hepzibah.
"When they were young together, Clifford probably made a kind of
fairy-tale of this discovery. He was always dreaming hither and
thither about the house, and lighting up its dark corners with
beautiful stories. And poor Jaffrey, who took hold of everything as if
it were real, thought my brother had found out his uncle's wealth. He
died with this delusion in his mind!"
"But," said Phoebe, apart to Holgrave, "how came you to know the
secret?"
"My dearest Phoebe," said Holgrave, "how will it please you to assume
the name of Maule? As for the secret, it is the only inheritance that
has come down to me from my ancestors. You should have known sooner
(only that I was afraid of frightening you away) that, in this long
drama of wrong and retribution, I represent the old wizard, and am
probably as much a wizard as ever he was. The son of the executed
Matthew Maule, while building this house, took the opportunity to
construct that recess, and hide away the Indian deed, on which depended
the immense land-claim of the Pyncheons. Thus they bartered their
eastern territory for Maule's garden-ground."
"And now" said Uncle Venner "I suppose their whole claim is not worth
one man's share in my farm yonder!"
"Uncle Venner," cried Phoebe, taking the patched philosopher's hand,
"you must never talk any more about your farm! You shall never go
there, as long as you live! There is a cottage in our new garden,--the
prettiest little yellowish-brown cottage you ever saw; and the
sweetest-looking place, for it looks just as if it were made of
gingerbread,--and we are going to fit it up and furnish it, on purpose
for you. And you shall do nothing but what you choose, and shall be as
happy as the day is long, and shall keep Cousin Clifford in spirits
with the wisdom and pleasantness which is always dropping from your
lips!"
"Ah! my dear child," quoth good Uncle Venner, quite overcome, "if you
were to speak to a young man as you do to an old one, his chance of
keeping his heart another minute would not be worth one of the buttons
on my waistcoat! And--soul alive!--that great sigh, which you made me
heave, has burst off the very last of them! But, never mind! It was the
happiest sigh I ever did heave; and it seems as if I must have drawn in
a gulp of heavenly breath, to make it with. Well, well, Miss Phoebe!
They'll miss me in the gardens hereabouts, and round by the back doors;
and Pyncheon Street, I'm afraid, will hardly look the same without old
Uncle Venner, who remembers it with a mowing field on one side, and the
garden of the Seven Gables on the other. But either I must go to your
country-seat, or you must come to my farm,--that's one of two things
certain; and I leave you to choose which!"
"Oh, come with us, by all means, Uncle Venner!" said Clifford, who had
a remarkable enjoyment of the old man's mellow, quiet, and simple
spirit. "I want you always to be within five minutes, saunter of my
chair. You are the only philosopher I ever knew of whose wisdom has
not a drop of bitter essence at the bottom!"
"Dear me!" cried Uncle Venner, beginning partly to realize what manner
of man he was. "And yet folks used to set me down among the simple
ones, in my younger days! But I suppose I am like a Roxbury russet,--a
great deal the better, the longer I can be kept. Yes; and my words of
wisdom, that you and Phoebe tell me of, are like the golden dandelions,
which never grow in the hot months, but may be seen glistening among
the withered grass, and under the dry leaves, sometimes as late as
December. And you are welcome, friends, to my mess of dandelions, if
there were twice as many!"
A plain, but handsome, dark-green barouche had now drawn up in front of
the ruinous portal of the old mansion-house. The party came forth, and
(with the exception of good Uncle Venner, who was to follow in a few
days) proceeded to take their places. They were chatting and laughing
very pleasantly together; and--as proves to be often the case, at
moments when we ought to palpitate with sensibility--Clifford and
Hepzibah bade a final farewell to the abode of their forefathers, with
hardly more emotion than if they had made it their arrangement to
return thither at tea-time. Several children were drawn to the spot by
so unusual a spectacle as the barouche and pair of gray horses.
Recognizing little Ned Higgins among them, Hepzibah put her hand into
her pocket, and presented the urchin, her earliest and staunchest
customer, with silver enough to people the Domdaniel cavern of his
interior with as various a procession of quadrupeds as passed into the
ark.
Two men were passing, just as the barouche drove off.
"Well, Dixey," said one of them, "what do you think of this? My wife
kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay.
Old Maid Pyncheon has been in trade just about as long, and rides off
in her carriage with a couple of hundred thousand,--reckoning her
share, and Clifford's, and Phoebe's,--and some say twice as much! If
you choose to call it luck, it is all very well; but if we are to take
it as the will of Providence, why, I can't exactly fathom it!"
"Pretty good business!" quoth the sagacious Dixey,--"pretty good
business!"
Maule's well, all this time, though left in solitude, was throwing up a
succession of kaleidoscopic pictures, in which a gifted eye might have
seen foreshadowed the coming fortunes of Hepzibah and Clifford, and the
descendant of the legendary wizard, and the village maiden, over whom
he had thrown love's web of sorcery. The Pyncheon Elm, moreover, with
what foliage the September gale had spared to it, whispered
unintelligible prophecies. And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from
the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that
sweet Alice Pyncheon--after witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and
this present happiness, of her kindred mortals--had given one farewell
touch of a spirit's joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward
from the HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES!
| The Departure The death of Judge Pyncheon creates only a mild sensation around town, but it does prompt rumors about the man's ugly past. The death of old Jaffrey Pyncheon thirty or forty years before was dismissed by doctors as an accident, but circumstances made it seem suspicious, and the suspicion fell on Clifford. However, it turns out that, in his youth, the Judge was a wild and hot-tempered man, and it is implied that one night, as he rummaged through his uncle's papers, the younger Jaffrey Pyncheon was surprised by the older Jaffrey Pyncheon, who died instantly from shock. The actual cause of his death was apoplexy, the bloody brain hemorrhage that killed Colonel Pyncheon, but rather than being dismayed by the sight, young Jaffrey continued rifling through his uncle's drawers and destroyed a will that left the property to Clifford. Aware that his uncle's death might arouse suspicion, young Jaffrey -Pyncheon arranged the evidence to point toward Clifford, and though he may not have intended for his cousin to be accused of murder, young Jaffrey kept quiet when Clifford was put on trial. Despite the cruelty of this behavior, the Judge managed to convince himself he was blameless and tucked the whole incident away as a -youthful indiscretion. The Judge would be saddened could he know the circumstances that followed his death. Unbeknownst to him, his son has died of cholera in Europe, and his inheritance now goes to Clifford, who decides to move to the Judge's lavish estate with Hepzibah, Phoebe, and, the novel sarcastically notes, that sworn enemy of wealth, Holgrave. Phoebe teases Holgrave when he remarks with regret that the new house is built of impermanent wood rather than permanent stone, and he acknowledges with a melancholy smile that he is rapidly becoming a conservative. He finds his new views "especially unpardonable in this dwelling of so much hereditary misfortune," standing beneath the stern gaze of the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, who "rendered himself so long the Evil Destiny of his race. Clifford remarks that the portrait has always made him think of great wealth, and Holgrave responds by pushing a hidden spring that knocks the portrait to the floor, revealing an ancient parchment entitling the Pyncheons to the giant tract of land in Maine. Hepzibah remarks that Clifford must have found the parchment and, dreamer that he was, told stories about it. The more literal-minded Judge must have confused the parchment with the missing records of the older Jaffrey Pyncheon, and it was this that he was seeking when he came to confront Clifford. Holgrave adds that he knows about the spring because he is a Maule, and that the parchment was hidden by the older Matthew Maule's son when he built the house. Uncle Venner jokes that now the claim is not worth a single share in his farm, but Phoebe protests that Uncle Venner need no longer go to his farm, as there is an empty cottage on their property that would be perfect for him. Everyone agrees that Uncle Venner's optimistic philosophy would be welcome, and he marvels at this, as he was once considered a simpleton. Uncle Venner proposes to join them in a few days, and as the rest of the company get into their carriage, Hepzibah gives money to little Ned Higgins, her first and most loyal customer. The two workmen comment that the world works in mysterious ways, and as Uncle Venner walks past the house of the seven gables, he thinks he hears the strains of Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord. | summary |
THE sudden death of so prominent a member of the social world as the
Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a sensation (at least, in the
circles more immediately connected with the deceased) which had hardly
quite subsided in a fortnight.
It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which constitute a
person's biography, there is scarcely one--none, certainly, of anything
like a similar importance--to which the world so easily reconciles
itself as to his death. In most other cases and contingencies, the
individual is present among us, mixed up with the daily revolution of
affairs, and affording a definite point for observation. At his
decease, there is only a vacancy, and a momentary eddy,--very small, as
compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated object,--and a
bubble or two, ascending out of the black depth and bursting at the
surface. As regarded Judge Pyncheon, it seemed probable, at first
blush, that the mode of his final departure might give him a larger and
longer posthumous vogue than ordinarily attends the memory of a
distinguished man. But when it came to be understood, on the highest
professional authority, that the event was a natural, and--except for
some unimportant particulars, denoting a slight idiosyncrasy--by no
means an unusual form of death, the public, with its customary
alacrity, proceeded to forget that he had ever lived. In short, the
honorable Judge was beginning to be a stale subject before half the
country newspapers had found time to put their columns in mourning, and
publish his exceedingly eulogistic obituary.
Nevertheless, creeping darkly through the places which this excellent
person had haunted in his lifetime, there was a hidden stream of
private talk, such as it would have shocked all decency to speak loudly
at the street-corners. It is very singular, how the fact of a man's
death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether
for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and
acting among them. Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes
falsehood, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the
gold, and dishonors the baser metal. Could the departed, whoever he
may be, return in a week after his decease, he would almost invariably
find himself at a higher or lower point than he had formerly occupied,
on the scale of public appreciation. But the talk, or scandal, to
which we now allude, had reference to matters of no less old a date
than the supposed murder, thirty or forty years ago, of the late Judge
Pyncheon's uncle. The medical opinion with regard to his own recent
and regretted decease had almost entirely obviated the idea that a
murder was committed in the former case. Yet, as the record showed,
there were circumstances irrefragably indicating that some person had
gained access to old Jaffrey Pyncheon's private apartments, at or near
the moment of his death. His desk and private drawers, in a room
contiguous to his bedchamber, had been ransacked; money and valuable
articles were missing; there was a bloody hand-print on the old man's
linen; and, by a powerfully welded chain of deductive evidence, the
guilt of the robbery and apparent murder had been fixed on Clifford,
then residing with his uncle in the House of the Seven Gables.
Whencesoever originating, there now arose a theory that undertook so to
account for these circumstances as to exclude the idea of Clifford's
agency. Many persons affirmed that the history and elucidation of the
facts, long so mysterious, had been obtained by the daguerreotypist
from one of those mesmerical seers who, nowadays, so strangely perplex
the aspect of human affairs, and put everybody's natural vision to the
blush, by the marvels which they see with their eyes shut.
According to this version of the story, Judge Pyncheon, exemplary as we
have portrayed him in our narrative, was, in his youth, an apparently
irreclaimable scapegrace. The brutish, the animal instincts, as is
often the case, had been developed earlier than the intellectual
qualities, and the force of character, for which he was afterwards
remarkable. He had shown himself wild, dissipated, addicted to low
pleasures, little short of ruffianly in his propensities, and
recklessly expensive, with no other resources than the bounty of his
uncle. This course of conduct had alienated the old bachelor's
affection, once strongly fixed upon him. Now it is averred,--but
whether on authority available in a court of justice, we do not pretend
to have investigated,--that the young man was tempted by the devil, one
night, to search his uncle's private drawers, to which he had
unsuspected means of access. While thus criminally occupied, he was
startled by the opening of the chamber-door. There stood old Jaffrey
Pyncheon, in his nightclothes! The surprise of such a discovery, his
agitation, alarm, and horror, brought on the crisis of a disorder to
which the old bachelor had an hereditary liability; he seemed to choke
with blood, and fell upon the floor, striking his temple a heavy blow
against the corner of a table. What was to be done? The old man was
surely dead! Assistance would come too late! What a misfortune, indeed,
should it come too soon, since his reviving consciousness would bring
the recollection of the ignominious offence which he had beheld his
nephew in the very act of committing!
But he never did revive. With the cool hardihood that always pertained
to him, the young man continued his search of the drawers, and found a
will, of recent date, in favor of Clifford,--which he destroyed,--and
an older one, in his own favor, which he suffered to remain. But
before retiring, Jaffrey bethought himself of the evidence, in these
ransacked drawers, that some one had visited the chamber with sinister
purposes. Suspicion, unless averted, might fix upon the real offender.
In the very presence of the dead man, therefore, he laid a scheme that
should free himself at the expense of Clifford, his rival, for whose
character he had at once a contempt and a repugnance. It is not
probable, be it said, that he acted with any set purpose of involving
Clifford in a charge of murder. Knowing that his uncle did not die by
violence, it may not have occurred to him, in the hurry of the crisis,
that such an inference might be drawn. But, when the affair took this
darker aspect, Jaffrey's previous steps had already pledged him to
those which remained. So craftily had he arranged the circumstances,
that, at Clifford's trial, his cousin hardly found it necessary to
swear to anything false, but only to withhold the one decisive
explanation, by refraining to state what he had himself done and
witnessed.
Thus Jaffrey Pyncheon's inward criminality, as regarded Clifford, was,
indeed, black and damnable; while its mere outward show and positive
commission was the smallest that could possibly consist with so great a
sin. This is just the sort of guilt that a man of eminent
respectability finds it easiest to dispose of. It was suffered to fade
out of sight or be reckoned a venial matter, in the Honorable Judge
Pyncheon's long subsequent survey of his own life. He shuffled it
aside, among the forgotten and forgiven frailties of his youth, and
seldom thought of it again.
We leave the Judge to his repose. He could not be styled fortunate at
the hour of death. Unknowingly, he was a childless man, while striving
to add more wealth to his only child's inheritance. Hardly a week
after his decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of
the death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheon's son, just at the point of
embarkation for his native land. By this misfortune Clifford became
rich; so did Hepzibah; so did our little village maiden, and, through
her, that sworn foe of wealth and all manner of conservatism,--the wild
reformer,--Holgrave!
It was now far too late in Clifford's life for the good opinion of
society to be worth the trouble and anguish of a formal vindication.
What he needed was the love of a very few; not the admiration, or even
the respect, of the unknown many. The latter might probably have been
won for him, had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had
fallen deemed it advisable to expose Clifford to a miserable
resuscitation of past ideas, when the condition of whatever comfort he
might expect lay in the calm of forgetfulness. After such wrong as he
had suffered, there is no reparation. The pitiable mockery of it,
which the world might have been ready enough to offer, coming so long
after the agony had done its utmost work, would have been fit only to
provoke bitterer laughter than poor Clifford was ever capable of. It
is a truth (and it would be a very sad one but for the higher hopes
which it suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in
our mortal sphere, is ever really set right. Time, the continual
vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of
death, render it impossible. If, after long lapse of years, the right
seems to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in. The better
remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought
his irreparable ruin far behind him.
The shock of Judge Pyncheon's death had a permanently invigorating and
ultimately beneficial effect on Clifford. That strong and ponderous
man had been Clifford's nightmare. There was no free breath to be
drawn, within the sphere of so malevolent an influence. The first
effect of freedom, as we have witnessed in Clifford's aimless flight,
was a tremulous exhilaration. Subsiding from it, he did not sink into
his former intellectual apathy. He never, it is true, attained to
nearly the full measure of what might have been his faculties. But he
recovered enough of them partially to light up his character, to
display some outline of the marvellous grace that was abortive in it,
and to make him the object of no less deep, although less melancholy
interest than heretofore. He was evidently happy. Could we pause to
give another picture of his daily life, with all the appliances now at
command to gratify his instinct for the Beautiful, the garden scenes,
that seemed so sweet to him, would look mean and trivial in comparison.
Very soon after their change of fortune, Clifford, Hepzibah, and little
Phoebe, with the approval of the artist, concluded to remove from the
dismal old House of the Seven Gables, and take up their abode, for the
present, at the elegant country-seat of the late Judge Pyncheon.
Chanticleer and his family had already been transported thither, where
the two hens had forthwith begun an indefatigable process of
egg-laying, with an evident design, as a matter of duty and conscience,
to continue their illustrious breed under better auspices than for a
century past. On the day set for their departure, the principal
personages of our story, including good Uncle Venner, were assembled in
the parlor.
"The country-house is certainly a very fine one, so far as the plan
goes," observed Holgrave, as the party were discussing their future
arrangements. "But I wonder that the late Judge--being so opulent, and
with a reasonable prospect of transmitting his wealth to descendants of
his own--should not have felt the propriety of embodying so excellent a
piece of domestic architecture in stone, rather than in wood. Then,
every generation of the family might have altered the interior, to suit
its own taste and convenience; while the exterior, through the lapse of
years, might have been adding venerableness to its original beauty, and
thus giving that impression of permanence which I consider essential to
the happiness of any one moment."
"Why," cried Phoebe, gazing into the artist's face with infinite
amazement, "how wonderfully your ideas are changed! A house of stone,
indeed! It is but two or three weeks ago that you seemed to wish people
to live in something as fragile and temporary as a bird's-nest!"
"Ah, Phoebe, I told you how it would be!" said the artist, with a
half-melancholy laugh. "You find me a conservative already! Little
did I think ever to become one. It is especially unpardonable in this
dwelling of so much hereditary misfortune, and under the eye of yonder
portrait of a model conservative, who, in that very character, rendered
himself so long the evil destiny of his race."
"That picture!" said Clifford, seeming to shrink from its stern glance.
"Whenever I look at it, there is an old dreamy recollection haunting
me, but keeping just beyond the grasp of my mind. Wealth, it seems to
say!--boundless wealth!--unimaginable wealth! I could fancy that, when
I was a child, or a youth, that portrait had spoken, and told me a rich
secret, or had held forth its hand, with the written record of hidden
opulence. But those old matters are so dim with me, nowadays! What
could this dream have been?"
"Perhaps I can recall it," answered Holgrave. "See! There are a
hundred chances to one that no person, unacquainted with the secret,
would ever touch this spring."
"A secret spring!" cried Clifford. "Ah, I remember now! I did discover
it, one summer afternoon, when I was idling and dreaming about the
house, long, long ago. But the mystery escapes me."
The artist put his finger on the contrivance to which he had referred.
In former days, the effect would probably have been to cause the
picture to start forward. But, in so long a period of concealment, the
machinery had been eaten through with rust; so that at Holgrave's
pressure, the portrait, frame and all, tumbled suddenly from its
position, and lay face downward on the floor. A recess in the wall was
thus brought to light, in which lay an object so covered with a
century's dust that it could not immediately be recognized as a folded
sheet of parchment. Holgrave opened it, and displayed an ancient deed,
signed with the hieroglyphics of several Indian sagamores, and
conveying to Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs, forever, a vast extent of
territory at the Eastward.
"This is the very parchment, the attempt to recover which cost the
beautiful Alice Pyncheon her happiness and life," said the artist,
alluding to his legend. "It is what the Pyncheons sought in vain,
while it was valuable; and now that they find the treasure, it has long
been worthless."
"Poor Cousin Jaffrey! This is what deceived him," exclaimed Hepzibah.
"When they were young together, Clifford probably made a kind of
fairy-tale of this discovery. He was always dreaming hither and
thither about the house, and lighting up its dark corners with
beautiful stories. And poor Jaffrey, who took hold of everything as if
it were real, thought my brother had found out his uncle's wealth. He
died with this delusion in his mind!"
"But," said Phoebe, apart to Holgrave, "how came you to know the
secret?"
"My dearest Phoebe," said Holgrave, "how will it please you to assume
the name of Maule? As for the secret, it is the only inheritance that
has come down to me from my ancestors. You should have known sooner
(only that I was afraid of frightening you away) that, in this long
drama of wrong and retribution, I represent the old wizard, and am
probably as much a wizard as ever he was. The son of the executed
Matthew Maule, while building this house, took the opportunity to
construct that recess, and hide away the Indian deed, on which depended
the immense land-claim of the Pyncheons. Thus they bartered their
eastern territory for Maule's garden-ground."
"And now" said Uncle Venner "I suppose their whole claim is not worth
one man's share in my farm yonder!"
"Uncle Venner," cried Phoebe, taking the patched philosopher's hand,
"you must never talk any more about your farm! You shall never go
there, as long as you live! There is a cottage in our new garden,--the
prettiest little yellowish-brown cottage you ever saw; and the
sweetest-looking place, for it looks just as if it were made of
gingerbread,--and we are going to fit it up and furnish it, on purpose
for you. And you shall do nothing but what you choose, and shall be as
happy as the day is long, and shall keep Cousin Clifford in spirits
with the wisdom and pleasantness which is always dropping from your
lips!"
"Ah! my dear child," quoth good Uncle Venner, quite overcome, "if you
were to speak to a young man as you do to an old one, his chance of
keeping his heart another minute would not be worth one of the buttons
on my waistcoat! And--soul alive!--that great sigh, which you made me
heave, has burst off the very last of them! But, never mind! It was the
happiest sigh I ever did heave; and it seems as if I must have drawn in
a gulp of heavenly breath, to make it with. Well, well, Miss Phoebe!
They'll miss me in the gardens hereabouts, and round by the back doors;
and Pyncheon Street, I'm afraid, will hardly look the same without old
Uncle Venner, who remembers it with a mowing field on one side, and the
garden of the Seven Gables on the other. But either I must go to your
country-seat, or you must come to my farm,--that's one of two things
certain; and I leave you to choose which!"
"Oh, come with us, by all means, Uncle Venner!" said Clifford, who had
a remarkable enjoyment of the old man's mellow, quiet, and simple
spirit. "I want you always to be within five minutes, saunter of my
chair. You are the only philosopher I ever knew of whose wisdom has
not a drop of bitter essence at the bottom!"
"Dear me!" cried Uncle Venner, beginning partly to realize what manner
of man he was. "And yet folks used to set me down among the simple
ones, in my younger days! But I suppose I am like a Roxbury russet,--a
great deal the better, the longer I can be kept. Yes; and my words of
wisdom, that you and Phoebe tell me of, are like the golden dandelions,
which never grow in the hot months, but may be seen glistening among
the withered grass, and under the dry leaves, sometimes as late as
December. And you are welcome, friends, to my mess of dandelions, if
there were twice as many!"
A plain, but handsome, dark-green barouche had now drawn up in front of
the ruinous portal of the old mansion-house. The party came forth, and
(with the exception of good Uncle Venner, who was to follow in a few
days) proceeded to take their places. They were chatting and laughing
very pleasantly together; and--as proves to be often the case, at
moments when we ought to palpitate with sensibility--Clifford and
Hepzibah bade a final farewell to the abode of their forefathers, with
hardly more emotion than if they had made it their arrangement to
return thither at tea-time. Several children were drawn to the spot by
so unusual a spectacle as the barouche and pair of gray horses.
Recognizing little Ned Higgins among them, Hepzibah put her hand into
her pocket, and presented the urchin, her earliest and staunchest
customer, with silver enough to people the Domdaniel cavern of his
interior with as various a procession of quadrupeds as passed into the
ark.
Two men were passing, just as the barouche drove off.
"Well, Dixey," said one of them, "what do you think of this? My wife
kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay.
Old Maid Pyncheon has been in trade just about as long, and rides off
in her carriage with a couple of hundred thousand,--reckoning her
share, and Clifford's, and Phoebe's,--and some say twice as much! If
you choose to call it luck, it is all very well; but if we are to take
it as the will of Providence, why, I can't exactly fathom it!"
"Pretty good business!" quoth the sagacious Dixey,--"pretty good
business!"
Maule's well, all this time, though left in solitude, was throwing up a
succession of kaleidoscopic pictures, in which a gifted eye might have
seen foreshadowed the coming fortunes of Hepzibah and Clifford, and the
descendant of the legendary wizard, and the village maiden, over whom
he had thrown love's web of sorcery. The Pyncheon Elm, moreover, with
what foliage the September gale had spared to it, whispered
unintelligible prophecies. And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from
the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that
sweet Alice Pyncheon--after witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and
this present happiness, of her kindred mortals--had given one farewell
touch of a spirit's joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward
from the HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES!
| Chapter 19 explicitly sets the stage for the novel's conclusion by reintroducing minor characters and obscuring the primary characters. First of all, the sudden appearance of characters like the workmen and the gingerbread-guzzling Ned Higgins seems almost like a curtain call, the story's cast taking a final bow before the main characters bring the novel to its conclusion. Second, this interesting narrative technique pulls the novel out of the claustrophobic setting of the house and puts it back into the context of the village, mirroring the transition that the house's occupants themselves will make. Despite the commotion surrounding it, the house seems far less forbidding from the outside than it does from within, and when Holgrave pops his head out the window to answer Uncle Venner's questions, the image is so quaint and neighborly that it almost makes us forget the terrible sight that lurks inside. With such a bustling world outside, the house itself seems almost insignificant. The whole chapter is written as a breath of fresh air; that we receive it as such presages the relief that awaits the house's inhabitants. Throughout the novel, the village has been as guilty of myopia as the inhabitants of the house; the last chapters serve as an across-the-board rejection of popular opinion, the most pertinent example being the way in which the Judge's reputation comes tumbling down so rapidly. Before his death, the Judge's only guilt seemed to be his unjust treatment of his cousin, and even that was seen exclusively through Hepzibah's eyes. With his death from apoplexy, however, the floodgates are suddenly opened. Now, not only does his attempt to extort property from Clifford become apparent, but the rumors that he is a thief, and responsible for the older Jaffrey's death, snowball. The speed with which these truths is revealed is remarkable, but it also leaves room for doubt, and the fact that the novel prefers to call this gossip rather than absolute truth allows Hawthorne to both smear his villain and make us marvel at how quickly, and maybe even unfairly, popular opinion can make or break reputations. The character of Uncle Venner substantiates this point, as he is the novel's wisest personality but confesses that he was once thought to be rather simple. On the surface, the union of Phoebe and Holgrave seems like the quintessential fairy-tale romance, and the marriage between the two families ties up many of the novel's loose ends. Holgrave's reform is phrased with such regret, however, that it is hard to accept this interpretation. His love certainly seems genuine, but it comes at a high price, and in Chapter 20 Phoebe herself protests Holgrave's promise to settle down. Of Clifford's little band, Holgrave is the only one whom the novel scorns for moving to the Judge's estate, a telling moment of sarcasm on the author's part. Phoebe's joking with Holgrave about his wishing for a stone house seems good-natured, but his reply is specifically and unmistakably characterized as "half-melancholy," a word which seems to point to reluctance on Holgrave's part. In fact, Holgrave, a onetime free spirit, seems to be held prisoner by a sense of the inevitable, and his entire proposal to Phoebe is tainted as a result. While Holgrave loves Phoebe, his later lack of enthusiasm makes his decision to marry her seem more like a gesture of resignation than of passion. Consequently, it is hard for us to enjoy Clifford and Hepzibah's good fortune. It is difficult to celebrate their release from captivity when another character seems to be headed toward similar confinement | analysis |
Chiswick Mall
While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning
in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton's
academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with
two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a
three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour. A black
servant, who reposed on the box beside the fat coachman, uncurled his
bandy legs as soon as the equipage drew up opposite Miss Pinkerton's
shining brass plate, and as he pulled the bell at least a score of
young heads were seen peering out of the narrow windows of the stately
old brick house. Nay, the acute observer might have recognized the
little red nose of good-natured Miss Jemima Pinkerton herself, rising
over some geranium pots in the window of that lady's own drawing-room.
"It is Mrs. Sedley's coach, sister," said Miss Jemima. "Sambo, the
black servant, has just rung the bell; and the coachman has a new red
waistcoat."
"Have you completed all the necessary preparations incident to Miss
Sedley's departure, Miss Jemima?" asked Miss Pinkerton herself, that
majestic lady; the Semiramis of Hammersmith, the friend of Doctor
Johnson, the correspondent of Mrs. Chapone herself.
"The girls were up at four this morning, packing her trunks, sister,"
replied Miss Jemima; "we have made her a bow-pot."
"Say a bouquet, sister Jemima, 'tis more genteel."
"Well, a booky as big almost as a haystack; I have put up two bottles
of the gillyflower water for Mrs. Sedley, and the receipt for making
it, in Amelia's box."
"And I trust, Miss Jemima, you have made a copy of Miss Sedley's
account. This is it, is it? Very good--ninety-three pounds, four
shillings. Be kind enough to address it to John Sedley, Esquire, and
to seal this billet which I have written to his lady."
In Miss Jemima's eyes an autograph letter of her sister, Miss
Pinkerton, was an object of as deep veneration as would have been a
letter from a sovereign. Only when her pupils quitted the
establishment, or when they were about to be married, and once, when
poor Miss Birch died of the scarlet fever, was Miss Pinkerton known to
write personally to the parents of her pupils; and it was Jemima's
opinion that if anything could console Mrs. Birch for her daughter's
loss, it would be that pious and eloquent composition in which Miss
Pinkerton announced the event.
In the present instance Miss Pinkerton's "billet" was to the following
effect:--
The Mall, Chiswick, June 15, 18
MADAM,--After her six years' residence at the Mall, I have the honour
and happiness of presenting Miss Amelia Sedley to her parents, as a
young lady not unworthy to occupy a fitting position in their polished
and refined circle. Those virtues which characterize the young English
gentlewoman, those accomplishments which become her birth and station,
will not be found wanting in the amiable Miss Sedley, whose INDUSTRY
and OBEDIENCE have endeared her to her instructors, and whose
delightful sweetness of temper has charmed her AGED and her YOUTHFUL
companions.
In music, in dancing, in orthography, in every variety of embroidery
and needlework, she will be found to have realized her friends' fondest
wishes. In geography there is still much to be desired; and a careful
and undeviating use of the backboard, for four hours daily during the
next three years, is recommended as necessary to the acquirement of
that dignified DEPORTMENT AND CARRIAGE, so requisite for every young
lady of FASHION.
In the principles of religion and morality, Miss Sedley will be found
worthy of an establishment which has been honoured by the presence of
THE GREAT LEXICOGRAPHER, and the patronage of the admirable Mrs.
Chapone. In leaving the Mall, Miss Amelia carries with her the hearts
of her companions, and the affectionate regards of her mistress, who
has the honour to subscribe herself,
Madam, Your most obliged humble servant, BARBARA PINKERTON
P.S.--Miss Sharp accompanies Miss Sedley. It is particularly requested
that Miss Sharp's stay in Russell Square may not exceed ten days. The
family of distinction with whom she is engaged, desire to avail
themselves of her services as soon as possible.
This letter completed, Miss Pinkerton proceeded to write her own name,
and Miss Sedley's, in the fly-leaf of a Johnson's Dictionary--the
interesting work which she invariably presented to her scholars, on
their departure from the Mall. On the cover was inserted a copy of
"Lines addressed to a young lady on quitting Miss Pinkerton's school,
at the Mall; by the late revered Doctor Samuel Johnson." In fact, the
Lexicographer's name was always on the lips of this majestic woman, and
a visit he had paid to her was the cause of her reputation and her
fortune.
Being commanded by her elder sister to get "the Dictionary" from the
cupboard, Miss Jemima had extracted two copies of the book from the
receptacle in question. When Miss Pinkerton had finished the
inscription in the first, Jemima, with rather a dubious and timid air,
handed her the second.
"For whom is this, Miss Jemima?" said Miss Pinkerton, with awful
coldness.
"For Becky Sharp," answered Jemima, trembling very much, and blushing
over her withered face and neck, as she turned her back on her sister.
"For Becky Sharp: she's going too."
"MISS JEMIMA!" exclaimed Miss Pinkerton, in the largest capitals. "Are
you in your senses? Replace the Dixonary in the closet, and never
venture to take such a liberty in future."
"Well, sister, it's only two-and-ninepence, and poor Becky will be
miserable if she don't get one."
"Send Miss Sedley instantly to me," said Miss Pinkerton. And so
venturing not to say another word, poor Jemima trotted off, exceedingly
flurried and nervous.
Miss Sedley's papa was a merchant in London, and a man of some wealth;
whereas Miss Sharp was an articled pupil, for whom Miss Pinkerton had
done, as she thought, quite enough, without conferring upon her at
parting the high honour of the Dixonary.
Although schoolmistresses' letters are to be trusted no more nor less
than churchyard epitaphs; yet, as it sometimes happens that a person
departs this life who is really deserving of all the praises the stone
cutter carves over his bones; who IS a good Christian, a good parent,
child, wife, or husband; who actually DOES leave a disconsolate family
to mourn his loss; so in academies of the male and female sex it occurs
every now and then that the pupil is fully worthy of the praises
bestowed by the disinterested instructor. Now, Miss Amelia Sedley was a
young lady of this singular species; and deserved not only all that
Miss Pinkerton said in her praise, but had many charming qualities
which that pompous old Minerva of a woman could not see, from the
differences of rank and age between her pupil and herself.
For she could not only sing like a lark, or a Mrs. Billington, and
dance like Hillisberg or Parisot; and embroider beautifully; and spell
as well as a Dixonary itself; but she had such a kindly, smiling,
tender, gentle, generous heart of her own, as won the love of everybody
who came near her, from Minerva herself down to the poor girl in the
scullery, and the one-eyed tart-woman's daughter, who was permitted to
vend her wares once a week to the young ladies in the Mall. She had
twelve intimate and bosom friends out of the twenty-four young ladies.
Even envious Miss Briggs never spoke ill of her; high and mighty Miss
Saltire (Lord Dexter's granddaughter) allowed that her figure was
genteel; and as for Miss Swartz, the rich woolly-haired mulatto from
St. Kitt's, on the day Amelia went away, she was in such a passion of
tears that they were obliged to send for Dr. Floss, and half tipsify
her with salvolatile. Miss Pinkerton's attachment was, as may be
supposed from the high position and eminent virtues of that lady, calm
and dignified; but Miss Jemima had already whimpered several times at
the idea of Amelia's departure; and, but for fear of her sister, would
have gone off in downright hysterics, like the heiress (who paid
double) of St. Kitt's. Such luxury of grief, however, is only allowed
to parlour-boarders. Honest Jemima had all the bills, and the washing,
and the mending, and the puddings, and the plate and crockery, and the
servants to superintend. But why speak about her? It is probable that
we shall not hear of her again from this moment to the end of time, and
that when the great filigree iron gates are once closed on her, she and
her awful sister will never issue therefrom into this little world of
history.
But as we are to see a great deal of Amelia, there is no harm in
saying, at the outset of our acquaintance, that she was a dear little
creature; and a great mercy it is, both in life and in novels, which
(and the latter especially) abound in villains of the most sombre sort,
that we are to have for a constant companion so guileless and
good-natured a person. As she is not a heroine, there is no need to
describe her person; indeed I am afraid that her nose was rather short
than otherwise, and her cheeks a great deal too round and red for a
heroine; but her face blushed with rosy health, and her lips with the
freshest of smiles, and she had a pair of eyes which sparkled with the
brightest and honestest good-humour, except indeed when they filled
with tears, and that was a great deal too often; for the silly thing
would cry over a dead canary-bird; or over a mouse, that the cat haply
had seized upon; or over the end of a novel, were it ever so stupid;
and as for saying an unkind word to her, were any persons hard-hearted
enough to do so--why, so much the worse for them. Even Miss Pinkerton,
that austere and godlike woman, ceased scolding her after the first
time, and though she no more comprehended sensibility than she did
Algebra, gave all masters and teachers particular orders to treat Miss
Sedley with the utmost gentleness, as harsh treatment was injurious to
her.
So that when the day of departure came, between her two customs of
laughing and crying, Miss Sedley was greatly puzzled how to act. She
was glad to go home, and yet most woefully sad at leaving school. For
three days before, little Laura Martin, the orphan, followed her about
like a little dog. She had to make and receive at least fourteen
presents--to make fourteen solemn promises of writing every week:
"Send my letters under cover to my grandpapa, the Earl of Dexter," said
Miss Saltire (who, by the way, was rather shabby). "Never mind the
postage, but write every day, you dear darling," said the impetuous and
woolly-headed, but generous and affectionate Miss Swartz; and the
orphan little Laura Martin (who was just in round-hand), took her
friend's hand and said, looking up in her face wistfully, "Amelia, when
I write to you I shall call you Mamma." All which details, I have no
doubt, JONES, who reads this book at his Club, will pronounce to be
excessively foolish, trivial, twaddling, and ultra-sentimental. Yes; I
can see Jones at this minute (rather flushed with his joint of mutton
and half pint of wine), taking out his pencil and scoring under the
words "foolish, twaddling," &c., and adding to them his own remark of
"QUITE TRUE." Well, he is a lofty man of genius, and admires the great
and heroic in life and novels; and so had better take warning and go
elsewhere.
Well, then. The flowers, and the presents, and the trunks, and
bonnet-boxes of Miss Sedley having been arranged by Mr. Sambo in the
carriage, together with a very small and weather-beaten old cow's-skin
trunk with Miss Sharp's card neatly nailed upon it, which was delivered
by Sambo with a grin, and packed by the coachman with a corresponding
sneer--the hour for parting came; and the grief of that moment was
considerably lessened by the admirable discourse which Miss Pinkerton
addressed to her pupil. Not that the parting speech caused Amelia to
philosophise, or that it armed her in any way with a calmness, the
result of argument; but it was intolerably dull, pompous, and tedious;
and having the fear of her schoolmistress greatly before her eyes, Miss
Sedley did not venture, in her presence, to give way to any ebullitions
of private grief. A seed-cake and a bottle of wine were produced in
the drawing-room, as on the solemn occasions of the visits of parents,
and these refreshments being partaken of, Miss Sedley was at liberty to
depart.
"You'll go in and say good-by to Miss Pinkerton, Becky!" said Miss
Jemima to a young lady of whom nobody took any notice, and who was
coming downstairs with her own bandbox.
"I suppose I must," said Miss Sharp calmly, and much to the wonder of
Miss Jemima; and the latter having knocked at the door, and receiving
permission to come in, Miss Sharp advanced in a very unconcerned
manner, and said in French, and with a perfect accent, "Mademoiselle,
je viens vous faire mes adieux."
Miss Pinkerton did not understand French; she only directed those who
did: but biting her lips and throwing up her venerable and Roman-nosed
head (on the top of which figured a large and solemn turban), she said,
"Miss Sharp, I wish you a good morning." As the Hammersmith Semiramis
spoke, she waved one hand, both by way of adieu, and to give Miss Sharp
an opportunity of shaking one of the fingers of the hand which was left
out for that purpose.
Miss Sharp only folded her own hands with a very frigid smile and bow,
and quite declined to accept the proffered honour; on which Semiramis
tossed up her turban more indignantly than ever. In fact, it was a
little battle between the young lady and the old one, and the latter
was worsted. "Heaven bless you, my child," said she, embracing Amelia,
and scowling the while over the girl's shoulder at Miss Sharp. "Come
away, Becky," said Miss Jemima, pulling the young woman away in great
alarm, and the drawing-room door closed upon them for ever.
Then came the struggle and parting below. Words refuse to tell it. All
the servants were there in the hall--all the dear friends--all the young
ladies--the dancing-master who had just arrived; and there was such a
scuffling, and hugging, and kissing, and crying, with the hysterical
YOOPS of Miss Swartz, the parlour-boarder, from her room, as no pen can
depict, and as the tender heart would fain pass over. The embracing was
over; they parted--that is, Miss Sedley parted from her friends. Miss
Sharp had demurely entered the carriage some minutes before. Nobody
cried for leaving HER.
Sambo of the bandy legs slammed the carriage door on his young weeping
mistress. He sprang up behind the carriage. "Stop!" cried Miss
Jemima, rushing to the gate with a parcel.
"It's some sandwiches, my dear," said she to Amelia. "You may be
hungry, you know; and Becky, Becky Sharp, here's a book for you that my
sister--that is, I--Johnson's Dixonary, you know; you mustn't leave us
without that. Good-by. Drive on, coachman. God bless you!"
And the kind creature retreated into the garden, overcome with emotion.
But, lo! and just as the coach drove off, Miss Sharp put her pale face
out of the window and actually flung the book back into the garden.
This almost caused Jemima to faint with terror. "Well, I never"--said
she--"what an audacious"--Emotion prevented her from completing either
sentence. The carriage rolled away; the great gates were closed; the
bell rang for the dancing lesson. The world is before the two young
ladies; and so, farewell to Chiswick Mall.
| The Sedleys' coach comes to pick Amelia Sedley up from Miss Pinkerton's school. She just graduated. Woo-hoo! Mortarboard in the air! Miss Pinkerton sends her on her way with a nice letter about what a nice young lady she is, her bill, a fancy dictionary, and a note saying that her friend Becky Sharp is also graduating and is coming to the Sedleys to visit, but can't stay longer than ten days since she's supposed to be starting work as a governess. Jemima, Miss Pinkerton's weaker, stupider sister offers to give Becky a dictionary too, but Miss Pinkerton isn't having any of it. Turns out Becky wasn't paying tuition but was instead working as a teacher's aide to go to the school. Miss Pinkerton is not a fan of the poor. Everyone falls all over themselves to say goodbye to Amelia. She is lovely and wonderful, though the narrator manages to make fun of her by saying that not only is she actually not the heroine of the novel, but that "her nose was rather short than otherwise, and her cheeks a great deal too round" and that she is "a silly thing" who only has two reactions to anything that happens - laughing or crying . Becky says good-bye to Miss Pinkerton in French, making fun of the fact that the old woman cannot speak it. Back in the day, not knowing French was low-class, so Becky is rubbing it in. Finally the two girls are in the carriage and Jemima gives them some sandwiches for the road and hands Becky a dictionary that she has somehow managed to sneak out of the school. Becky laughs and flings the dictionary out of the carriage onto the ground. | summary |
In Which Miss Sharp and Miss Sedley Prepare to Open the Campaign
When Miss Sharp had performed the heroical act mentioned in the last
chapter, and had seen the Dixonary, flying over the pavement of the
little garden, fall at length at the feet of the astonished Miss
Jemima, the young lady's countenance, which had before worn an almost
livid look of hatred, assumed a smile that perhaps was scarcely more
agreeable, and she sank back in the carriage in an easy frame of mind,
saying--"So much for the Dixonary; and, thank God, I'm out of Chiswick."
Miss Sedley was almost as flurried at the act of defiance as Miss
Jemima had been; for, consider, it was but one minute that she had left
school, and the impressions of six years are not got over in that space
of time. Nay, with some persons those awes and terrors of youth last
for ever and ever. I know, for instance, an old gentleman of
sixty-eight, who said to me one morning at breakfast, with a very
agitated countenance, "I dreamed last night that I was flogged by Dr.
Raine." Fancy had carried him back five-and-fifty years in the course
of that evening. Dr. Raine and his rod were just as awful to him in
his heart, then, at sixty-eight, as they had been at thirteen. If the
Doctor, with a large birch, had appeared bodily to him, even at the age
of threescore and eight, and had said in awful voice, "Boy, take down
your pant--"? Well, well, Miss Sedley was exceedingly alarmed at this
act of insubordination.
"How could you do so, Rebecca?" at last she said, after a pause.
"Why, do you think Miss Pinkerton will come out and order me back to
the black-hole?" said Rebecca, laughing.
"No: but--"
"I hate the whole house," continued Miss Sharp in a fury. "I hope I
may never set eyes on it again. I wish it were in the bottom of the
Thames, I do; and if Miss Pinkerton were there, I wouldn't pick her
out, that I wouldn't. O how I should like to see her floating in the
water yonder, turban and all, with her train streaming after her, and
her nose like the beak of a wherry."
"Hush!" cried Miss Sedley.
"Why, will the black footman tell tales?" cried Miss Rebecca, laughing.
"He may go back and tell Miss Pinkerton that I hate her with all my
soul; and I wish he would; and I wish I had a means of proving it, too.
For two years I have only had insults and outrage from her. I have been
treated worse than any servant in the kitchen. I have never had a
friend or a kind word, except from you. I have been made to tend the
little girls in the lower schoolroom, and to talk French to the Misses,
until I grew sick of my mother tongue. But that talking French to Miss
Pinkerton was capital fun, wasn't it? She doesn't know a word of
French, and was too proud to confess it. I believe it was that which
made her part with me; and so thank Heaven for French. Vive la France!
Vive l'Empereur! Vive Bonaparte!"
"O Rebecca, Rebecca, for shame!" cried Miss Sedley; for this was the
greatest blasphemy Rebecca had as yet uttered; and in those days, in
England, to say, "Long live Bonaparte!" was as much as to say, "Long
live Lucifer!" "How can you--how dare you have such wicked, revengeful
thoughts?"
"Revenge may be wicked, but it's natural," answered Miss Rebecca. "I'm
no angel." And, to say the truth, she certainly was not.
For it may be remarked in the course of this little conversation (which
took place as the coach rolled along lazily by the river side) that
though Miss Rebecca Sharp has twice had occasion to thank Heaven, it
has been, in the first place, for ridding her of some person whom she
hated, and secondly, for enabling her to bring her enemies to some sort
of perplexity or confusion; neither of which are very amiable motives
for religious gratitude, or such as would be put forward by persons of
a kind and placable disposition. Miss Rebecca was not, then, in the
least kind or placable. All the world used her ill, said this young
misanthropist, and we may be pretty certain that persons whom all the
world treats ill, deserve entirely the treatment they get. The world
is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his
own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh
at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all
young persons take their choice. This is certain, that if the world
neglected Miss Sharp, she never was known to have done a good action in
behalf of anybody; nor can it be expected that twenty-four young ladies
should all be as amiable as the heroine of this work, Miss Sedley (whom
we have selected for the very reason that she was the best-natured of
all, otherwise what on earth was to have prevented us from putting up
Miss Swartz, or Miss Crump, or Miss Hopkins, as heroine in her place!)
it could not be expected that every one should be of the humble and
gentle temper of Miss Amelia Sedley; should take every opportunity to
vanquish Rebecca's hard-heartedness and ill-humour; and, by a thousand
kind words and offices, overcome, for once at least, her hostility to
her kind.
Miss Sharp's father was an artist, and in that quality had given
lessons of drawing at Miss Pinkerton's school. He was a clever man; a
pleasant companion; a careless student; with a great propensity for
running into debt, and a partiality for the tavern. When he was drunk,
he used to beat his wife and daughter; and the next morning, with a
headache, he would rail at the world for its neglect of his genius, and
abuse, with a good deal of cleverness, and sometimes with perfect
reason, the fools, his brother painters. As it was with the utmost
difficulty that he could keep himself, and as he owed money for a mile
round Soho, where he lived, he thought to better his circumstances by
marrying a young woman of the French nation, who was by profession an
opera-girl. The humble calling of her female parent Miss Sharp never
alluded to, but used to state subsequently that the Entrechats were a
noble family of Gascony, and took great pride in her descent from them.
And curious it is that as she advanced in life this young lady's
ancestors increased in rank and splendour.
Rebecca's mother had had some education somewhere, and her daughter
spoke French with purity and a Parisian accent. It was in those days
rather a rare accomplishment, and led to her engagement with the
orthodox Miss Pinkerton. For her mother being dead, her father,
finding himself not likely to recover, after his third attack of
delirium tremens, wrote a manly and pathetic letter to Miss Pinkerton,
recommending the orphan child to her protection, and so descended to
the grave, after two bailiffs had quarrelled over his corpse. Rebecca
was seventeen when she came to Chiswick, and was bound over as an
articled pupil; her duties being to talk French, as we have seen; and
her privileges to live cost free, and, with a few guineas a year, to
gather scraps of knowledge from the professors who attended the school.
She was small and slight in person; pale, sandy-haired, and with eyes
habitually cast down: when they looked up they were very large, odd,
and attractive; so attractive that the Reverend Mr. Crisp, fresh from
Oxford, and curate to the Vicar of Chiswick, the Reverend Mr.
Flowerdew, fell in love with Miss Sharp; being shot dead by a glance of
her eyes which was fired all the way across Chiswick Church from the
school-pew to the reading-desk. This infatuated young man used
sometimes to take tea with Miss Pinkerton, to whom he had been
presented by his mamma, and actually proposed something like marriage
in an intercepted note, which the one-eyed apple-woman was charged to
deliver. Mrs. Crisp was summoned from Buxton, and abruptly carried off
her darling boy; but the idea, even, of such an eagle in the Chiswick
dovecot caused a great flutter in the breast of Miss Pinkerton, who
would have sent away Miss Sharp but that she was bound to her under a
forfeit, and who never could thoroughly believe the young lady's
protestations that she had never exchanged a single word with Mr.
Crisp, except under her own eyes on the two occasions when she had met
him at tea.
By the side of many tall and bouncing young ladies in the
establishment, Rebecca Sharp looked like a child. But she had the
dismal precocity of poverty. Many a dun had she talked to, and turned
away from her father's door; many a tradesman had she coaxed and
wheedled into good-humour, and into the granting of one meal more. She
sate commonly with her father, who was very proud of her wit, and heard
the talk of many of his wild companions--often but ill-suited for a
girl to hear. But she never had been a girl, she said; she had been a
woman since she was eight years old. Oh, why did Miss Pinkerton let
such a dangerous bird into her cage?
The fact is, the old lady believed Rebecca to be the meekest creature
in the world, so admirably, on the occasions when her father brought
her to Chiswick, used Rebecca to perform the part of the ingenue; and
only a year before the arrangement by which Rebecca had been admitted
into her house, and when Rebecca was sixteen years old, Miss Pinkerton
majestically, and with a little speech, made her a present of a
doll--which was, by the way, the confiscated property of Miss Swindle,
discovered surreptitiously nursing it in school-hours. How the father
and daughter laughed as they trudged home together after the evening
party (it was on the occasion of the speeches, when all the professors
were invited) and how Miss Pinkerton would have raged had she seen the
caricature of herself which the little mimic, Rebecca, managed to make
out of her doll. Becky used to go through dialogues with it; it formed
the delight of Newman Street, Gerrard Street, and the Artists' quarter:
and the young painters, when they came to take their gin-and-water with
their lazy, dissolute, clever, jovial senior, used regularly to ask
Rebecca if Miss Pinkerton was at home: she was as well known to them,
poor soul! as Mr. Lawrence or President West. Once Rebecca had the
honour to pass a few days at Chiswick; after which she brought back
Jemima, and erected another doll as Miss Jemmy: for though that honest
creature had made and given her jelly and cake enough for three
children, and a seven-shilling piece at parting, the girl's sense of
ridicule was far stronger than her gratitude, and she sacrificed Miss
Jemmy quite as pitilessly as her sister.
The catastrophe came, and she was brought to the Mall as to her home.
The rigid formality of the place suffocated her: the prayers and the
meals, the lessons and the walks, which were arranged with a conventual
regularity, oppressed her almost beyond endurance; and she looked back
to the freedom and the beggary of the old studio in Soho with so much
regret, that everybody, herself included, fancied she was consumed with
grief for her father. She had a little room in the garret, where the
maids heard her walking and sobbing at night; but it was with rage, and
not with grief. She had not been much of a dissembler, until now her
loneliness taught her to feign. She had never mingled in the society of
women: her father, reprobate as he was, was a man of talent; his
conversation was a thousand times more agreeable to her than the talk
of such of her own sex as she now encountered. The pompous vanity of
the old schoolmistress, the foolish good-humour of her sister, the
silly chat and scandal of the elder girls, and the frigid correctness
of the governesses equally annoyed her; and she had no soft maternal
heart, this unlucky girl, otherwise the prattle and talk of the younger
children, with whose care she was chiefly intrusted, might have soothed
and interested her; but she lived among them two years, and not one was
sorry that she went away. The gentle tender-hearted Amelia Sedley was
the only person to whom she could attach herself in the least; and who
could help attaching herself to Amelia?
The happiness--the superior advantages of the young women round about
her, gave Rebecca inexpressible pangs of envy. "What airs that girl
gives herself, because she is an Earl's grand-daughter," she said of
one. "How they cringe and bow to that Creole, because of her hundred
thousand pounds! I am a thousand times cleverer and more charming than
that creature, for all her wealth. I am as well bred as the Earl's
grand-daughter, for all her fine pedigree; and yet every one passes me
by here. And yet, when I was at my father's, did not the men give up
their gayest balls and parties in order to pass the evening with me?"
She determined at any rate to get free from the prison in which she
found herself, and now began to act for herself, and for the first time
to make connected plans for the future.
She took advantage, therefore, of the means of study the place offered
her; and as she was already a musician and a good linguist, she
speedily went through the little course of study which was considered
necessary for ladies in those days. Her music she practised
incessantly, and one day, when the girls were out, and she had remained
at home, she was overheard to play a piece so well that Minerva
thought, wisely, she could spare herself the expense of a master for
the juniors, and intimated to Miss Sharp that she was to instruct them
in music for the future.
The girl refused; and for the first time, and to the astonishment of
the majestic mistress of the school. "I am here to speak French with
the children," Rebecca said abruptly, "not to teach them music, and
save money for you. Give me money, and I will teach them."
Minerva was obliged to yield, and, of course, disliked her from that
day. "For five-and-thirty years," she said, and with great justice, "I
never have seen the individual who has dared in my own house to
question my authority. I have nourished a viper in my bosom."
"A viper--a fiddlestick," said Miss Sharp to the old lady, almost
fainting with astonishment. "You took me because I was useful. There
is no question of gratitude between us. I hate this place, and want to
leave it. I will do nothing here but what I am obliged to do."
It was in vain that the old lady asked her if she was aware she was
speaking to Miss Pinkerton? Rebecca laughed in her face, with a horrid
sarcastic demoniacal laughter, that almost sent the schoolmistress into
fits. "Give me a sum of money," said the girl, "and get rid of me--or,
if you like better, get me a good place as governess in a nobleman's
family--you can do so if you please." And in their further disputes
she always returned to this point, "Get me a situation--we hate each
other, and I am ready to go."
Worthy Miss Pinkerton, although she had a Roman nose and a turban, and
was as tall as a grenadier, and had been up to this time an
irresistible princess, had no will or strength like that of her little
apprentice, and in vain did battle against her, and tried to overawe
her. Attempting once to scold her in public, Rebecca hit upon the
before-mentioned plan of answering her in French, which quite routed
the old woman. In order to maintain authority in her school, it became
necessary to remove this rebel, this monster, this serpent, this
firebrand; and hearing about this time that Sir Pitt Crawley's family
was in want of a governess, she actually recommended Miss Sharp for the
situation, firebrand and serpent as she was. "I cannot, certainly,"
she said, "find fault with Miss Sharp's conduct, except to myself; and
must allow that her talents and accomplishments are of a high order. As
far as the head goes, at least, she does credit to the educational
system pursued at my establishment."
And so the schoolmistress reconciled the recommendation to her
conscience, and the indentures were cancelled, and the apprentice was
free. The battle here described in a few lines, of course, lasted for
some months. And as Miss Sedley, being now in her seventeenth year,
was about to leave school, and had a friendship for Miss Sharp ("'tis
the only point in Amelia's behaviour," said Minerva, "which has not
been satisfactory to her mistress"), Miss Sharp was invited by her
friend to pass a week with her at home, before she entered upon her
duties as governess in a private family.
Thus the world began for these two young ladies. For Amelia it was
quite a new, fresh, brilliant world, with all the bloom upon it. It
was not quite a new one for Rebecca--(indeed, if the truth must be told
with respect to the Crisp affair, the tart-woman hinted to somebody,
who took an affidavit of the fact to somebody else, that there was a
great deal more than was made public regarding Mr. Crisp and Miss
Sharp, and that his letter was in answer to another letter). But who
can tell you the real truth of the matter? At all events, if Rebecca
was not beginning the world, she was beginning it over again.
By the time the young ladies reached Kensington turnpike, Amelia had
not forgotten her companions, but had dried her tears, and had blushed
very much and been delighted at a young officer of the Life Guards, who
spied her as he was riding by, and said, "A dem fine gal, egad!" and
before the carriage arrived in Russell Square, a great deal of
conversation had taken place about the Drawing-room, and whether or not
young ladies wore powder as well as hoops when presented, and whether
she was to have that honour: to the Lord Mayor's ball she knew she was
to go. And when at length home was reached, Miss Amelia Sedley skipped
out on Sambo's arm, as happy and as handsome a girl as any in the whole
big city of London. Both he and coachman agreed on this point, and so
did her father and mother, and so did every one of the servants in the
house, as they stood bobbing, and curtseying, and smiling, in the hall
to welcome their young mistress.
You may be sure that she showed Rebecca over every room of the house,
and everything in every one of her drawers; and her books, and her
piano, and her dresses, and all her necklaces, brooches, laces, and
gimcracks. She insisted upon Rebecca accepting the white cornelian and
the turquoise rings, and a sweet sprigged muslin, which was too small
for her now, though it would fit her friend to a nicety; and she
determined in her heart to ask her mother's permission to present her
white Cashmere shawl to her friend. Could she not spare it? and had
not her brother Joseph just brought her two from India?
When Rebecca saw the two magnificent Cashmere shawls which Joseph
Sedley had brought home to his sister, she said, with perfect truth,
"that it must be delightful to have a brother," and easily got the pity
of the tender-hearted Amelia for being alone in the world, an orphan
without friends or kindred.
"Not alone," said Amelia; "you know, Rebecca, I shall always be your
friend, and love you as a sister--indeed I will."
"Ah, but to have parents, as you have--kind, rich, affectionate
parents, who give you everything you ask for; and their love, which is
more precious than all! My poor papa could give me nothing, and I had
but two frocks in all the world! And then, to have a brother, a dear
brother! Oh, how you must love him!"
Amelia laughed.
"What! don't you love him? you, who say you love everybody?"
"Yes, of course, I do--only--"
"Only what?"
"Only Joseph doesn't seem to care much whether I love him or not. He
gave me two fingers to shake when he arrived after ten years' absence!
He is very kind and good, but he scarcely ever speaks to me; I think he
loves his pipe a great deal better than his"--but here Amelia checked
herself, for why should she speak ill of her brother? "He was very kind
to me as a child," she added; "I was but five years old when he went
away."
"Isn't he very rich?" said Rebecca. "They say all Indian nabobs are
enormously rich."
"I believe he has a very large income."
"And is your sister-in-law a nice pretty woman?"
"La! Joseph is not married," said Amelia, laughing again.
Perhaps she had mentioned the fact already to Rebecca, but that young
lady did not appear to have remembered it; indeed, vowed and protested
that she expected to see a number of Amelia's nephews and nieces. She
was quite disappointed that Mr. Sedley was not married; she was sure
Amelia had said he was, and she doted so on little children.
"I think you must have had enough of them at Chiswick," said Amelia,
rather wondering at the sudden tenderness on her friend's part; and
indeed in later days Miss Sharp would never have committed herself so
far as to advance opinions, the untruth of which would have been so
easily detected. But we must remember that she is but nineteen as yet,
unused to the art of deceiving, poor innocent creature! and making her
own experience in her own person. The meaning of the above series of
queries, as translated in the heart of this ingenious young woman, was
simply this: "If Mr. Joseph Sedley is rich and unmarried, why should I
not marry him? I have only a fortnight, to be sure, but there is no
harm in trying." And she determined within herself to make this
laudable attempt. She redoubled her caresses to Amelia; she kissed the
white cornelian necklace as she put it on; and vowed she would never,
never part with it. When the dinner-bell rang she went downstairs with
her arm round her friend's waist, as is the habit of young ladies. She
was so agitated at the drawing-room door, that she could hardly find
courage to enter. "Feel my heart, how it beats, dear!" said she to her
friend.
"No, it doesn't," said Amelia. "Come in, don't be frightened. Papa
won't do you any harm."
| Amelia is sort of shocked by Becky's throwing the dictionary out of the carriage. It figures - she's all prim and proper and always psyched to obey authority. Becky? Not so much. Now we get a little background on Rebecca Sharp. Daddy was a broke, semi-alcoholic artist. Mommy was a French "opera-girl" . This is how Becky comes by her native fluency in French and also why she describes herself as having "been a woman since she was eight years old" . It's not totally clear what that means. Either it has something to do with the fact that she was a model for her father's artist friends , or the fact that she spent a lot of time talking tradesmen out of arresting her father for debt. So, in sum, a craptastic childhood. Daddy taught art at Miss Pinkerton's school, and Becky pretended to be a shy, innocent girl around the headmistress. When Mr. Sharp died, Miss Pinkerton took Becky on as an indentured student . Becky hated the place and hated how super-snobby all the students and teachers were. But she did make friends with Amelia. She also studied her butt off and got really good at singing and playing the piano. Miss Pinkerton tried to tap her to give music lessons on top of the French lessons she was already doing but Becky told her off. Miss Pinkerton resolved to get rid of Becky as fast as possible and found her a job as a governess for Sir Pitt Crawley's family. And that's how Amelia and Becky find themselves in the carriage. They get to the Sedleys' London house, which is middle-class swanky. Turns out Amelia has an older, unmarried, really rich brother named Jos, who was just back from his job in India. Becky decides to try to marry him. Becky tries to fake a fast heartbeat but Amelia sees through that pretty quickly. The narrator tells us that soon Becky's illusions and deceptions will get way better. She's a quick study. | summary |
Rebecca Is in Presence of the Enemy
A VERY stout, puffy man, in buckskins and Hessian boots, with several
immense neckcloths that rose almost to his nose, with a red striped
waistcoat and an apple green coat with steel buttons almost as large as
crown pieces (it was the morning costume of a dandy or blood of those
days) was reading the paper by the fire when the two girls entered, and
bounced off his arm-chair, and blushed excessively, and hid his entire
face almost in his neckcloths at this apparition.
"It's only your sister, Joseph," said Amelia, laughing and shaking the
two fingers which he held out. "I've come home FOR GOOD, you know; and
this is my friend, Miss Sharp, whom you have heard me mention."
"No, never, upon my word," said the head under the neckcloth, shaking
very much--"that is, yes--what abominably cold weather, Miss"--and
herewith he fell to poking the fire with all his might, although it was
in the middle of June.
"He's very handsome," whispered Rebecca to Amelia, rather loud.
"Do you think so?" said the latter. "I'll tell him."
"Darling! not for worlds," said Miss Sharp, starting back as timid as a
fawn. She had previously made a respectful virgin-like curtsey to the
gentleman, and her modest eyes gazed so perseveringly on the carpet
that it was a wonder how she should have found an opportunity to see
him.
"Thank you for the beautiful shawls, brother," said Amelia to the fire
poker. "Are they not beautiful, Rebecca?"
"O heavenly!" said Miss Sharp, and her eyes went from the carpet
straight to the chandelier.
Joseph still continued a huge clattering at the poker and tongs,
puffing and blowing the while, and turning as red as his yellow face
would allow him. "I can't make you such handsome presents, Joseph,"
continued his sister, "but while I was at school, I have embroidered
for you a very beautiful pair of braces."
"Good Gad! Amelia," cried the brother, in serious alarm, "what do you
mean?" and plunging with all his might at the bell-rope, that article
of furniture came away in his hand, and increased the honest fellow's
confusion. "For heaven's sake see if my buggy's at the door. I CAN'T
wait. I must go. D---- that groom of mine. I must go."
At this minute the father of the family walked in, rattling his seals
like a true British merchant. "What's the matter, Emmy?" says he.
"Joseph wants me to see if his--his buggy is at the door. What is a
buggy, Papa?"
"It is a one-horse palanquin," said the old gentleman, who was a wag in
his way.
Joseph at this burst out into a wild fit of laughter; in which,
encountering the eye of Miss Sharp, he stopped all of a sudden, as if
he had been shot.
"This young lady is your friend? Miss Sharp, I am very happy to see
you. Have you and Emmy been quarrelling already with Joseph, that he
wants to be off?"
"I promised Bonamy of our service, sir," said Joseph, "to dine with
him."
"O fie! didn't you tell your mother you would dine here?"
"But in this dress it's impossible."
"Look at him, isn't he handsome enough to dine anywhere, Miss Sharp?"
On which, of course, Miss Sharp looked at her friend, and they both set
off in a fit of laughter, highly agreeable to the old gentleman.
"Did you ever see a pair of buckskins like those at Miss Pinkerton's?"
continued he, following up his advantage.
"Gracious heavens! Father," cried Joseph.
"There now, I have hurt his feelings. Mrs. Sedley, my dear, I have
hurt your son's feelings. I have alluded to his buckskins. Ask Miss
Sharp if I haven't? Come, Joseph, be friends with Miss Sharp, and let
us all go to dinner."
"There's a pillau, Joseph, just as you like it, and Papa has brought
home the best turbot in Billingsgate."
"Come, come, sir, walk downstairs with Miss Sharp, and I will follow
with these two young women," said the father, and he took an arm of
wife and daughter and walked merrily off.
If Miss Rebecca Sharp had determined in her heart upon making the
conquest of this big beau, I don't think, ladies, we have any right to
blame her; for though the task of husband-hunting is generally, and
with becoming modesty, entrusted by young persons to their mammas,
recollect that Miss Sharp had no kind parent to arrange these delicate
matters for her, and that if she did not get a husband for herself,
there was no one else in the wide world who would take the trouble off
her hands. What causes young people to "come out," but the noble
ambition of matrimony? What sends them trooping to watering-places?
What keeps them dancing till five o'clock in the morning through a
whole mortal season? What causes them to labour at pianoforte sonatas,
and to learn four songs from a fashionable master at a guinea a lesson,
and to play the harp if they have handsome arms and neat elbows, and to
wear Lincoln Green toxophilite hats and feathers, but that they may
bring down some "desirable" young man with those killing bows and
arrows of theirs? What causes respectable parents to take up their
carpets, set their houses topsy-turvy, and spend a fifth of their
year's income in ball suppers and iced champagne? Is it sheer love of
their species, and an unadulterated wish to see young people happy and
dancing? Psha! they want to marry their daughters; and, as honest Mrs.
Sedley has, in the depths of her kind heart, already arranged a score
of little schemes for the settlement of her Amelia, so also had our
beloved but unprotected Rebecca determined to do her very best to
secure the husband, who was even more necessary for her than for her
friend. She had a vivid imagination; she had, besides, read the Arabian
Nights and Guthrie's Geography; and it is a fact that while she was
dressing for dinner, and after she had asked Amelia whether her brother
was very rich, she had built for herself a most magnificent castle in
the air, of which she was mistress, with a husband somewhere in the
background (she had not seen him as yet, and his figure would not
therefore be very distinct); she had arrayed herself in an infinity of
shawls, turbans, and diamond necklaces, and had mounted upon an
elephant to the sound of the march in Bluebeard, in order to pay a
visit of ceremony to the Grand Mogul. Charming Alnaschar visions! it is
the happy privilege of youth to construct you, and many a fanciful
young creature besides Rebecca Sharp has indulged in these delightful
day-dreams ere now!
Joseph Sedley was twelve years older than his sister Amelia. He was in
the East India Company's Civil Service, and his name appeared, at the
period of which we write, in the Bengal division of the East India
Register, as collector of Boggley Wollah, an honourable and lucrative
post, as everybody knows: in order to know to what higher posts Joseph
rose in the service, the reader is referred to the same periodical.
Boggley Wollah is situated in a fine, lonely, marshy, jungly district,
famous for snipe-shooting, and where not unfrequently you may flush a
tiger. Ramgunge, where there is a magistrate, is only forty miles off,
and there is a cavalry station about thirty miles farther; so Joseph
wrote home to his parents, when he took possession of his
collectorship. He had lived for about eight years of his life, quite
alone, at this charming place, scarcely seeing a Christian face except
twice a year, when the detachment arrived to carry off the revenues
which he had collected, to Calcutta.
Luckily, at this time he caught a liver complaint, for the cure of
which he returned to Europe, and which was the source of great comfort
and amusement to him in his native country. He did not live with his
family while in London, but had lodgings of his own, like a gay young
bachelor. Before he went to India he was too young to partake of the
delightful pleasures of a man about town, and plunged into them on his
return with considerable assiduity. He drove his horses in the Park;
he dined at the fashionable taverns (for the Oriental Club was not as
yet invented); he frequented the theatres, as the mode was in those
days, or made his appearance at the opera, laboriously attired in
tights and a cocked hat.
On returning to India, and ever after, he used to talk of the pleasure
of this period of his existence with great enthusiasm, and give you to
understand that he and Brummel were the leading bucks of the day. But
he was as lonely here as in his jungle at Boggley Wollah. He scarcely
knew a single soul in the metropolis: and were it not for his doctor,
and the society of his blue-pill, and his liver complaint, he must have
died of loneliness. He was lazy, peevish, and a bon-vivant; the
appearance of a lady frightened him beyond measure; hence it was but
seldom that he joined the paternal circle in Russell Square, where
there was plenty of gaiety, and where the jokes of his good-natured old
father frightened his amour-propre. His bulk caused Joseph much
anxious thought and alarm; now and then he would make a desperate
attempt to get rid of his superabundant fat; but his indolence and love
of good living speedily got the better of these endeavours at reform,
and he found himself again at his three meals a day. He never was well
dressed; but he took the hugest pains to adorn his big person, and
passed many hours daily in that occupation. His valet made a fortune
out of his wardrobe: his toilet-table was covered with as many pomatums
and essences as ever were employed by an old beauty: he had tried, in
order to give himself a waist, every girth, stay, and waistband then
invented. Like most fat men, he would have his clothes made too tight,
and took care they should be of the most brilliant colours and youthful
cut. When dressed at length, in the afternoon, he would issue forth to
take a drive with nobody in the Park; and then would come back in order
to dress again and go and dine with nobody at the Piazza Coffee-House.
He was as vain as a girl; and perhaps his extreme shyness was one of
the results of his extreme vanity. If Miss Rebecca can get the better
of him, and at her first entrance into life, she is a young person of
no ordinary cleverness.
The first move showed considerable skill. When she called Sedley a
very handsome man, she knew that Amelia would tell her mother, who
would probably tell Joseph, or who, at any rate, would be pleased by
the compliment paid to her son. All mothers are. If you had told
Sycorax that her son Caliban was as handsome as Apollo, she would have
been pleased, witch as she was. Perhaps, too, Joseph Sedley would
overhear the compliment--Rebecca spoke loud enough--and he did hear,
and (thinking in his heart that he was a very fine man) the praise
thrilled through every fibre of his big body, and made it tingle with
pleasure. Then, however, came a recoil. "Is the girl making fun of
me?" he thought, and straightway he bounced towards the bell, and was
for retreating, as we have seen, when his father's jokes and his
mother's entreaties caused him to pause and stay where he was. He
conducted the young lady down to dinner in a dubious and agitated frame
of mind. "Does she really think I am handsome?" thought he, "or is she
only making game of me?" We have talked of Joseph Sedley being as vain
as a girl. Heaven help us! the girls have only to turn the tables, and
say of one of their own sex, "She is as vain as a man," and they will
have perfect reason. The bearded creatures are quite as eager for
praise, quite as finikin over their toilettes, quite as proud of their
personal advantages, quite as conscious of their powers of fascination,
as any coquette in the world.
Downstairs, then, they went, Joseph very red and blushing, Rebecca very
modest, and holding her green eyes downwards. She was dressed in
white, with bare shoulders as white as snow--the picture of youth,
unprotected innocence, and humble virgin simplicity. "I must be very
quiet," thought Rebecca, "and very much interested about India."
Now we have heard how Mrs. Sedley had prepared a fine curry for her
son, just as he liked it, and in the course of dinner a portion of this
dish was offered to Rebecca. "What is it?" said she, turning an
appealing look to Mr. Joseph.
"Capital," said he. His mouth was full of it: his face quite red with
the delightful exercise of gobbling. "Mother, it's as good as my own
curries in India."
"Oh, I must try some, if it is an Indian dish," said Miss Rebecca. "I
am sure everything must be good that comes from there."
"Give Miss Sharp some curry, my dear," said Mr. Sedley, laughing.
Rebecca had never tasted the dish before.
"Do you find it as good as everything else from India?" said Mr. Sedley.
"Oh, excellent!" said Rebecca, who was suffering tortures with the
cayenne pepper.
"Try a chili with it, Miss Sharp," said Joseph, really interested.
"A chili," said Rebecca, gasping. "Oh yes!" She thought a chili was
something cool, as its name imported, and was served with some. "How
fresh and green they look," she said, and put one into her mouth. It
was hotter than the curry; flesh and blood could bear it no longer.
She laid down her fork. "Water, for Heaven's sake, water!" she cried.
Mr. Sedley burst out laughing (he was a coarse man, from the Stock
Exchange, where they love all sorts of practical jokes). "They are
real Indian, I assure you," said he. "Sambo, give Miss Sharp some
water."
The paternal laugh was echoed by Joseph, who thought the joke capital.
The ladies only smiled a little. They thought poor Rebecca suffered
too much. She would have liked to choke old Sedley, but she swallowed
her mortification as well as she had the abominable curry before it,
and as soon as she could speak, said, with a comical, good-humoured
air, "I ought to have remembered the pepper which the Princess of
Persia puts in the cream-tarts in the Arabian Nights. Do you put
cayenne into your cream-tarts in India, sir?"
Old Sedley began to laugh, and thought Rebecca was a good-humoured
girl. Joseph simply said, "Cream-tarts, Miss? Our cream is very bad in
Bengal. We generally use goats' milk; and, 'gad, do you know, I've got
to prefer it!"
"You won't like EVERYTHING from India now, Miss Sharp," said the old
gentleman; but when the ladies had retired after dinner, the wily old
fellow said to his son, "Have a care, Joe; that girl is setting her cap
at you."
"Pooh! nonsense!" said Joe, highly flattered. "I recollect, sir, there
was a girl at Dumdum, a daughter of Cutler of the Artillery, and
afterwards married to Lance, the surgeon, who made a dead set at me in
the year '4--at me and Mulligatawney, whom I mentioned to you before
dinner--a devilish good fellow Mulligatawney--he's a magistrate at
Budgebudge, and sure to be in council in five years. Well, sir, the
Artillery gave a ball, and Quintin, of the King's 14th, said to me,
'Sedley,' said he, 'I bet you thirteen to ten that Sophy Cutler hooks
either you or Mulligatawney before the rains.' 'Done,' says I; and
egad, sir--this claret's very good. Adamson's or Carbonell's?"
A slight snore was the only reply: the honest stockbroker was asleep,
and so the rest of Joseph's story was lost for that day. But he was
always exceedingly communicative in a man's party, and has told this
delightful tale many scores of times to his apothecary, Dr. Gollop,
when he came to inquire about the liver and the blue-pill.
Being an invalid, Joseph Sedley contented himself with a bottle of
claret besides his Madeira at dinner, and he managed a couple of plates
full of strawberries and cream, and twenty-four little rout cakes that
were lying neglected in a plate near him, and certainly (for novelists
have the privilege of knowing everything) he thought a great deal about
the girl upstairs. "A nice, gay, merry young creature," thought he to
himself. "How she looked at me when I picked up her handkerchief at
dinner! She dropped it twice. Who's that singing in the drawing-room?
'Gad! shall I go up and see?"
But his modesty came rushing upon him with uncontrollable force. His
father was asleep: his hat was in the hall: there was a hackney-coach
standing hard by in Southampton Row. "I'll go and see the Forty
Thieves," said he, "and Miss Decamp's dance"; and he slipped away
gently on the pointed toes of his boots, and disappeared, without
waking his worthy parent.
"There goes Joseph," said Amelia, who was looking from the open windows
of the drawing-room, while Rebecca was singing at the piano.
"Miss Sharp has frightened him away," said Mrs. Sedley. "Poor Joe, why
WILL he be so shy?"
| Becky and Amelia make their way downstairs and meet Jos, who turns out to be a very fat, awkward, shy man. Becky tries to flirt on his level, putting on some super-virginal airs. Jos is kind of into it, but when his father, Mr. Sedley, comes home and starts to make fun of the fashion-victim way Jos is dressed, the whole scene gets to be too much for him. Jos tries to escape the house, until Mrs. Sedley tells him about the yummy Indian-food dinner that's waiting. The narrator chimes in with an important little tidbit: basically, Becky has to arrange her own marriage since she doesn't have a mom to do it for her. Now we get a little background info on Jos. Turns out he works for the East India Company as the revenue collector of Boggley Wollah . Also, turns out he's really, really into his clothes and fancy lifestyle, and is very vain about himself and his appearance. Except he is also painfully lonely and doesn't really know how to be around other people. And, to top it all off, he is fat and self-conscious about it. He wears all sorts of complicated girdles to hide it and buys clothes that are too tight for him. Brain Snack: Thackeray described himself a fat, somewhat awkward guy, so Jos is a bit of a self-parody. At dinner, Becky is all of a sudden super-interested in all things Indian. She tries a curry dish and is sort of gasping from all the cayenne pepper and spices, when Jos offers her a chili pepper. Thinking it'll be cool , she eats it whole and has a mouth-on-fire attack. But she is a good sport about it, and Jos and Mr. Sedley like her. After dinner, Mr. Sedley tells Jos that Becky digs him. Predictably, this freaks Jos out, and he leaves to go the theater instead of hanging out with Amelia, Becky, and Mrs. Sedley. | summary |
The Green Silk Purse
Poor Joe's panic lasted for two or three days; during which he did not
visit the house, nor during that period did Miss Rebecca ever mention
his name. She was all respectful gratitude to Mrs. Sedley; delighted
beyond measure at the Bazaars; and in a whirl of wonder at the theatre,
whither the good-natured lady took her. One day, Amelia had a
headache, and could not go upon some party of pleasure to which the two
young people were invited: nothing could induce her friend to go
without her. "What! you who have shown the poor orphan what happiness
and love are for the first time in her life--quit YOU? Never!" and
the green eyes looked up to Heaven and filled with tears; and Mrs.
Sedley could not but own that her daughter's friend had a charming kind
heart of her own.
As for Mr. Sedley's jokes, Rebecca laughed at them with a cordiality
and perseverance which not a little pleased and softened that
good-natured gentleman. Nor was it with the chiefs of the family alone
that Miss Sharp found favour. She interested Mrs. Blenkinsop by
evincing the deepest sympathy in the raspberry-jam preserving, which
operation was then going on in the Housekeeper's room; she persisted in
calling Sambo "Sir," and "Mr. Sambo," to the delight of that attendant;
and she apologised to the lady's maid for giving her trouble in
venturing to ring the bell, with such sweetness and humility, that the
Servants' Hall was almost as charmed with her as the Drawing Room.
Once, in looking over some drawings which Amelia had sent from school,
Rebecca suddenly came upon one which caused her to burst into tears and
leave the room. It was on the day when Joe Sedley made his second
appearance.
Amelia hastened after her friend to know the cause of this display of
feeling, and the good-natured girl came back without her companion,
rather affected too. "You know, her father was our drawing-master,
Mamma, at Chiswick, and used to do all the best parts of our drawings."
"My love! I'm sure I always heard Miss Pinkerton say that he did not
touch them--he only mounted them." "It was called mounting, Mamma.
Rebecca remembers the drawing, and her father working at it, and the
thought of it came upon her rather suddenly--and so, you know, she--"
"The poor child is all heart," said Mrs. Sedley.
"I wish she could stay with us another week," said Amelia.
"She's devilish like Miss Cutler that I used to meet at Dumdum, only
fairer. She's married now to Lance, the Artillery Surgeon. Do you
know, Ma'am, that once Quintin, of the 14th, bet me--"
"O Joseph, we know that story," said Amelia, laughing. "Never mind about
telling that; but persuade Mamma to write to Sir Something Crawley for
leave of absence for poor dear Rebecca: here she comes, her eyes red
with weeping."
"I'm better, now," said the girl, with the sweetest smile possible,
taking good-natured Mrs. Sedley's extended hand and kissing it
respectfully. "How kind you all are to me! All," she added, with a
laugh, "except you, Mr. Joseph."
"Me!" said Joseph, meditating an instant departure. "Gracious Heavens!
Good Gad! Miss Sharp!'
"Yes; how could you be so cruel as to make me eat that horrid
pepper-dish at dinner, the first day I ever saw you? You are not so
good to me as dear Amelia."
"He doesn't know you so well," cried Amelia.
"I defy anybody not to be good to you, my dear," said her mother.
"The curry was capital; indeed it was," said Joe, quite gravely.
"Perhaps there was NOT enough citron juice in it--no, there was NOT."
"And the chilis?"
"By Jove, how they made you cry out!" said Joe, caught by the ridicule
of the circumstance, and exploding in a fit of laughter which ended
quite suddenly, as usual.
"I shall take care how I let YOU choose for me another time," said
Rebecca, as they went down again to dinner. "I didn't think men were
fond of putting poor harmless girls to pain."
"By Gad, Miss Rebecca, I wouldn't hurt you for the world."
"No," said she, "I KNOW you wouldn't"; and then she gave him ever so
gentle a pressure with her little hand, and drew it back quite
frightened, and looked first for one instant in his face, and then down
at the carpet-rods; and I am not prepared to say that Joe's heart did
not thump at this little involuntary, timid, gentle motion of regard on
the part of the simple girl.
It was an advance, and as such, perhaps, some ladies of indisputable
correctness and gentility will condemn the action as immodest; but, you
see, poor dear Rebecca had all this work to do for herself. If a
person is too poor to keep a servant, though ever so elegant, he must
sweep his own rooms: if a dear girl has no dear Mamma to settle matters
with the young man, she must do it for herself. And oh, what a mercy
it is that these women do not exercise their powers oftener! We can't
resist them, if they do. Let them show ever so little inclination, and
men go down on their knees at once: old or ugly, it is all the same.
And this I set down as a positive truth. A woman with fair
opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES.
Only let us be thankful that the darlings are like the beasts of the
field, and don't know their own power. They would overcome us entirely
if they did.
"Egad!" thought Joseph, entering the dining-room, "I exactly begin to
feel as I did at Dumdum with Miss Cutler." Many sweet little appeals,
half tender, half jocular, did Miss Sharp make to him about the dishes
at dinner; for by this time she was on a footing of considerable
familiarity with the family, and as for the girls, they loved each
other like sisters. Young unmarried girls always do, if they are in a
house together for ten days.
As if bent upon advancing Rebecca's plans in every way--what must
Amelia do, but remind her brother of a promise made last Easter
holidays--"When I was a girl at school," said she, laughing--a promise
that he, Joseph, would take her to Vauxhall. "Now," she said, "that
Rebecca is with us, will be the very time."
"O, delightful!" said Rebecca, going to clap her hands; but she
recollected herself, and paused, like a modest creature, as she was.
"To-night is not the night," said Joe.
"Well, to-morrow."
"To-morrow your Papa and I dine out," said Mrs. Sedley.
"You don't suppose that I'm going, Mrs. Sed?" said her husband, "and
that a woman of your years and size is to catch cold, in such an
abominable damp place?"
"The children must have someone with them," cried Mrs. Sedley.
"Let Joe go," said-his father, laughing. "He's big enough." At which
speech even Mr. Sambo at the sideboard burst out laughing, and poor fat
Joe felt inclined to become a parricide almost.
"Undo his stays!" continued the pitiless old gentleman. "Fling some
water in his face, Miss Sharp, or carry him upstairs: the dear
creature's fainting. Poor victim! carry him up; he's as light as a
feather!"
"If I stand this, sir, I'm d------!" roared Joseph.
"Order Mr. Jos's elephant, Sambo!" cried the father. "Send to Exeter
'Change, Sambo"; but seeing Jos ready almost to cry with vexation, the
old joker stopped his laughter, and said, holding out his hand to his
son, "It's all fair on the Stock Exchange, Jos--and, Sambo, never mind
the elephant, but give me and Mr. Jos a glass of Champagne. Boney
himself hasn't got such in his cellar, my boy!"
A goblet of Champagne restored Joseph's equanimity, and before the
bottle was emptied, of which as an invalid he took two-thirds, he had
agreed to take the young ladies to Vauxhall.
"The girls must have a gentleman apiece," said the old gentleman. "Jos
will be sure to leave Emmy in the crowd, he will be so taken up with
Miss Sharp here. Send to 96, and ask George Osborne if he'll come."
At this, I don't know in the least for what reason, Mrs. Sedley looked
at her husband and laughed. Mr. Sedley's eyes twinkled in a manner
indescribably roguish, and he looked at Amelia; and Amelia, hanging
down her head, blushed as only young ladies of seventeen know how to
blush, and as Miss Rebecca Sharp never blushed in her life--at least
not since she was eight years old, and when she was caught stealing jam
out of a cupboard by her godmother. "Amelia had better write a note,"
said her father; "and let George Osborne see what a beautiful
handwriting we have brought back from Miss Pinkerton's. Do you
remember when you wrote to him to come on Twelfth-night, Emmy, and
spelt twelfth without the f?"
"That was years ago," said Amelia.
"It seems like yesterday, don't it, John?" said Mrs. Sedley to her
husband; and that night in a conversation which took place in a front
room in the second floor, in a sort of tent, hung round with chintz of
a rich and fantastic India pattern, and double with calico of a tender
rose-colour; in the interior of which species of marquee was a
featherbed, on which were two pillows, on which were two round red
faces, one in a laced nightcap, and one in a simple cotton one, ending
in a tassel--in a CURTAIN LECTURE, I say, Mrs. Sedley took her husband
to task for his cruel conduct to poor Joe.
"It was quite wicked of you, Mr. Sedley," said she, "to torment the
poor boy so."
"My dear," said the cotton-tassel in defence of his conduct, "Jos is a
great deal vainer than you ever were in your life, and that's saying a
good deal. Though, some thirty years ago, in the year seventeen
hundred and eighty--what was it?--perhaps you had a right to be vain--I
don't say no. But I've no patience with Jos and his dandified modesty.
It is out-Josephing Joseph, my dear, and all the while the boy is only
thinking of himself, and what a fine fellow he is. I doubt, Ma'am, we
shall have some trouble with him yet. Here is Emmy's little friend
making love to him as hard as she can; that's quite clear; and if she
does not catch him some other will. That man is destined to be a prey
to woman, as I am to go on 'Change every day. It's a mercy he did not
bring us over a black daughter-in-law, my dear. But, mark my words,
the first woman who fishes for him, hooks him."
"She shall go off to-morrow, the little artful creature," said Mrs.
Sedley, with great energy.
"Why not she as well as another, Mrs. Sedley? The girl's a white face
at any rate. I don't care who marries him. Let Joe please himself."
And presently the voices of the two speakers were hushed, or were
replaced by the gentle but unromantic music of the nose; and save when
the church bells tolled the hour and the watchman called it, all was
silent at the house of John Sedley, Esquire, of Russell Square, and the
Stock Exchange.
When morning came, the good-natured Mrs. Sedley no longer thought of
executing her threats with regard to Miss Sharp; for though nothing is
more keen, nor more common, nor more justifiable, than maternal
jealousy, yet she could not bring herself to suppose that the little,
humble, grateful, gentle governess would dare to look up to such a
magnificent personage as the Collector of Boggley Wollah. The petition,
too, for an extension of the young lady's leave of absence had already
been despatched, and it would be difficult to find a pretext for
abruptly dismissing her.
And as if all things conspired in favour of the gentle Rebecca, the
very elements (although she was not inclined at first to acknowledge
their action in her behalf) interposed to aid her. For on the evening
appointed for the Vauxhall party, George Osborne having come to dinner,
and the elders of the house having departed, according to invitation,
to dine with Alderman Balls at Highbury Barn, there came on such a
thunder-storm as only happens on Vauxhall nights, and as obliged the
young people, perforce, to remain at home. Mr. Osborne did not seem in
the least disappointed at this occurrence. He and Joseph Sedley drank a
fitting quantity of port-wine, tete-a-tete, in the dining-room, during
the drinking of which Sedley told a number of his best Indian stories;
for he was extremely talkative in man's society; and afterwards Miss
Amelia Sedley did the honours of the drawing-room; and these four young
persons passed such a comfortable evening together, that they declared
they were rather glad of the thunder-storm than otherwise, which had
caused them to put off their visit to Vauxhall.
Osborne was Sedley's godson, and had been one of the family any time
these three-and-twenty years. At six weeks old, he had received from
John Sedley a present of a silver cup; at six months old, a coral with
gold whistle and bells; from his youth upwards he was "tipped"
regularly by the old gentleman at Christmas: and on going back to
school, he remembered perfectly well being thrashed by Joseph Sedley,
when the latter was a big, swaggering hobbadyhoy, and George an
impudent urchin of ten years old. In a word, George was as familiar
with the family as such daily acts of kindness and intercourse could
make him.
"Do you remember, Sedley, what a fury you were in, when I cut off the
tassels of your Hessian boots, and how Miss--hem!--how Amelia rescued
me from a beating, by falling down on her knees and crying out to her
brother Jos, not to beat little George?"
Jos remembered this remarkable circumstance perfectly well, but vowed
that he had totally forgotten it.
"Well, do you remember coming down in a gig to Dr. Swishtail's to see
me, before you went to India, and giving me half a guinea and a pat on
the head? I always had an idea that you were at least seven feet high,
and was quite astonished at your return from India to find you no
taller than myself."
"How good of Mr. Sedley to go to your school and give you the money!"
exclaimed Rebecca, in accents of extreme delight.
"Yes, and after I had cut the tassels of his boots too. Boys never
forget those tips at school, nor the givers."
"I delight in Hessian boots," said Rebecca. Jos Sedley, who admired
his own legs prodigiously, and always wore this ornamental chaussure,
was extremely pleased at this remark, though he drew his legs under his
chair as it was made.
"Miss Sharp!" said George Osborne, "you who are so clever an artist,
you must make a grand historical picture of the scene of the boots.
Sedley shall be represented in buckskins, and holding one of the
injured boots in one hand; by the other he shall have hold of my
shirt-frill. Amelia shall be kneeling near him, with her little hands
up; and the picture shall have a grand allegorical title, as the
frontispieces have in the Medulla and the spelling-book."
"I shan't have time to do it here," said Rebecca. "I'll do it
when--when I'm gone." And she dropped her voice, and looked so sad and
piteous, that everybody felt how cruel her lot was, and how sorry they
would be to part with her.
"O that you could stay longer, dear Rebecca," said Amelia.
"Why?" answered the other, still more sadly. "That I may be only the
more unhap--unwilling to lose you?" And she turned away her head.
Amelia began to give way to that natural infirmity of tears which, we
have said, was one of the defects of this silly little thing. George
Osborne looked at the two young women with a touched curiosity; and
Joseph Sedley heaved something very like a sigh out of his big chest,
as he cast his eyes down towards his favourite Hessian boots.
"Let us have some music, Miss Sedley--Amelia," said George, who felt at
that moment an extraordinary, almost irresistible impulse to seize the
above-mentioned young woman in his arms, and to kiss her in the face of
the company; and she looked at him for a moment, and if I should say
that they fell in love with each other at that single instant of time,
I should perhaps be telling an untruth, for the fact is that these two
young people had been bred up by their parents for this very purpose,
and their banns had, as it were, been read in their respective families
any time these ten years. They went off to the piano, which was
situated, as pianos usually are, in the back drawing-room; and as it
was rather dark, Miss Amelia, in the most unaffected way in the world,
put her hand into Mr. Osborne's, who, of course, could see the way
among the chairs and ottomans a great deal better than she could. But
this arrangement left Mr. Joseph Sedley tete-a-tete with Rebecca, at
the drawing-room table, where the latter was occupied in knitting a
green silk purse.
"There is no need to ask family secrets," said Miss Sharp. "Those two
have told theirs."
"As soon as he gets his company," said Joseph, "I believe the affair is
settled. George Osborne is a capital fellow."
"And your sister the dearest creature in the world," said Rebecca.
"Happy the man who wins her!" With this, Miss Sharp gave a great sigh.
When two unmarried persons get together, and talk upon such delicate
subjects as the present, a great deal of confidence and intimacy is
presently established between them. There is no need of giving a
special report of the conversation which now took place between Mr.
Sedley and the young lady; for the conversation, as may be judged from
the foregoing specimen, was not especially witty or eloquent; it seldom
is in private societies, or anywhere except in very high-flown and
ingenious novels. As there was music in the next room, the talk was
carried on, of course, in a low and becoming tone, though, for the
matter of that, the couple in the next apartment would not have been
disturbed had the talking been ever so loud, so occupied were they with
their own pursuits.
Almost for the first time in his life, Mr. Sedley found himself
talking, without the least timidity or hesitation, to a person of the
other sex. Miss Rebecca asked him a great number of questions about
India, which gave him an opportunity of narrating many interesting
anecdotes about that country and himself. He described the balls at
Government House, and the manner in which they kept themselves cool in
the hot weather, with punkahs, tatties, and other contrivances; and he
was very witty regarding the number of Scotchmen whom Lord Minto, the
Governor-General, patronised; and then he described a tiger-hunt; and
the manner in which the mahout of his elephant had been pulled off his
seat by one of the infuriated animals. How delighted Miss Rebecca was
at the Government balls, and how she laughed at the stories of the
Scotch aides-de-camp, and called Mr. Sedley a sad wicked satirical
creature; and how frightened she was at the story of the elephant! "For
your mother's sake, dear Mr. Sedley," she said, "for the sake of all
your friends, promise NEVER to go on one of those horrid expeditions."
"Pooh, pooh, Miss Sharp," said he, pulling up his shirt-collars; "the
danger makes the sport only the pleasanter." He had never been but once
at a tiger-hunt, when the accident in question occurred, and when he
was half killed--not by the tiger, but by the fright. And as he talked
on, he grew quite bold, and actually had the audacity to ask Miss
Rebecca for whom she was knitting the green silk purse? He was quite
surprised and delighted at his own graceful familiar manner.
"For any one who wants a purse," replied Miss Rebecca, looking at him
in the most gentle winning way. Sedley was going to make one of the
most eloquent speeches possible, and had begun--"O Miss Sharp, how--"
when some song which was performed in the other room came to an end,
and caused him to hear his own voice so distinctly that he stopped,
blushed, and blew his nose in great agitation.
"Did you ever hear anything like your brother's eloquence?" whispered
Mr. Osborne to Amelia. "Why, your friend has worked miracles."
"The more the better," said Miss Amelia; who, like almost all women who
are worth a pin, was a match-maker in her heart, and would have been
delighted that Joseph should carry back a wife to India. She had, too,
in the course of this few days' constant intercourse, warmed into a
most tender friendship for Rebecca, and discovered a million of virtues
and amiable qualities in her which she had not perceived when they were
at Chiswick together. For the affection of young ladies is of as rapid
growth as Jack's bean-stalk, and reaches up to the sky in a night. It
is no blame to them that after marriage this Sehnsucht nach der Liebe
subsides. It is what sentimentalists, who deal in very big words, call
a yearning after the Ideal, and simply means that women are commonly
not satisfied until they have husbands and children on whom they may
centre affections, which are spent elsewhere, as it were, in small
change.
Having expended her little store of songs, or having stayed long enough
in the back drawing-room, it now appeared proper to Miss Amelia to ask
her friend to sing. "You would not have listened to me," she said to
Mr. Osborne (though she knew she was telling a fib), "had you heard
Rebecca first."
"I give Miss Sharp warning, though," said Osborne, "that, right or
wrong, I consider Miss Amelia Sedley the first singer in the world."
"You shall hear," said Amelia; and Joseph Sedley was actually polite
enough to carry the candles to the piano. Osborne hinted that he should
like quite as well to sit in the dark; but Miss Sedley, laughing,
declined to bear him company any farther, and the two accordingly
followed Mr. Joseph. Rebecca sang far better than her friend (though
of course Osborne was free to keep his opinion), and exerted herself to
the utmost, and, indeed, to the wonder of Amelia, who had never known
her perform so well. She sang a French song, which Joseph did not
understand in the least, and which George confessed he did not
understand, and then a number of those simple ballads which were the
fashion forty years ago, and in which British tars, our King, poor
Susan, blue-eyed Mary, and the like, were the principal themes. They
are not, it is said, very brilliant, in a musical point of view, but
contain numberless good-natured, simple appeals to the affections,
which people understood better than the milk-and-water lagrime,
sospiri, and felicita of the eternal Donizettian music with which we
are favoured now-a-days.
Conversation of a sentimental sort, befitting the subject, was carried
on between the songs, to which Sambo, after he had brought the tea, the
delighted cook, and even Mrs. Blenkinsop, the housekeeper, condescended
to listen on the landing-place.
Among these ditties was one, the last of the concert, and to the
following effect:
Ah! bleak and barren was the moor, Ah! loud and piercing was the storm,
The cottage roof was shelter'd sure, The cottage hearth was bright and
warm--An orphan boy the lattice pass'd, And, as he mark'd its cheerful
glow, Felt doubly keen the midnight blast, And doubly cold the fallen
snow.
They mark'd him as he onward prest, With fainting heart and weary limb;
Kind voices bade him turn and rest, And gentle faces welcomed him. The
dawn is up--the guest is gone, The cottage hearth is blazing still;
Heaven pity all poor wanderers lone! Hark to the wind upon the hill!
It was the sentiment of the before-mentioned words, "When I'm gone,"
over again. As she came to the last words, Miss Sharp's "deep-toned
voice faltered." Everybody felt the allusion to her departure, and to
her hapless orphan state. Joseph Sedley, who was fond of music, and
soft-hearted, was in a state of ravishment during the performance of
the song, and profoundly touched at its conclusion. If he had had the
courage; if George and Miss Sedley had remained, according to the
former's proposal, in the farther room, Joseph Sedley's bachelorhood
would have been at an end, and this work would never have been written.
But at the close of the ditty, Rebecca quitted the piano, and giving
her hand to Amelia, walked away into the front drawing-room twilight;
and, at this moment, Mr. Sambo made his appearance with a tray,
containing sandwiches, jellies, and some glittering glasses and
decanters, on which Joseph Sedley's attention was immediately fixed.
When the parents of the house of Sedley returned from their
dinner-party, they found the young people so busy in talking, that they
had not heard the arrival of the carriage, and Mr. Joseph was in the
act of saying, "My dear Miss Sharp, one little teaspoonful of jelly to
recruit you after your immense--your--your delightful exertions."
"Bravo, Jos!" said Mr. Sedley; on hearing the bantering of which
well-known voice, Jos instantly relapsed into an alarmed silence, and
quickly took his departure. He did not lie awake all night thinking
whether or not he was in love with Miss Sharp; the passion of love
never interfered with the appetite or the slumber of Mr. Joseph Sedley;
but he thought to himself how delightful it would be to hear such songs
as those after Cutcherry--what a distinguee girl she was--how she could
speak French better than the Governor-General's lady herself--and what
a sensation she would make at the Calcutta balls. "It's evident the
poor devil's in love with me," thought he. "She is just as rich as
most of the girls who come out to India. I might go farther, and fare
worse, egad!" And in these meditations he fell asleep.
How Miss Sharp lay awake, thinking, will he come or not to-morrow? need
not be told here. To-morrow came, and, as sure as fate, Mr. Joseph
Sedley made his appearance before luncheon. He had never been known
before to confer such an honour on Russell Square. George Osborne was
somehow there already (sadly "putting out" Amelia, who was writing to
her twelve dearest friends at Chiswick Mall), and Rebecca was employed
upon her yesterday's work. As Joe's buggy drove up, and while, after
his usual thundering knock and pompous bustle at the door, the
ex-Collector of Boggley Wollah laboured up stairs to the drawing-room,
knowing glances were telegraphed between Osborne and Miss Sedley, and
the pair, smiling archly, looked at Rebecca, who actually blushed as
she bent her fair ringlets over her knitting. How her heart beat as
Joseph appeared--Joseph, puffing from the staircase in shining creaking
boots--Joseph, in a new waistcoat, red with heat and nervousness, and
blushing behind his wadded neckcloth. It was a nervous moment for all;
and as for Amelia, I think she was more frightened than even the people
most concerned.
Sambo, who flung open the door and announced Mr. Joseph, followed
grinning, in the Collector's rear, and bearing two handsome nosegays of
flowers, which the monster had actually had the gallantry to purchase
in Covent Garden Market that morning--they were not as big as the
haystacks which ladies carry about with them now-a-days, in cones of
filigree paper; but the young women were delighted with the gift, as
Joseph presented one to each, with an exceedingly solemn bow.
"Bravo, Jos!" cried Osborne.
"Thank you, dear Joseph," said Amelia, quite ready to kiss her brother,
if he were so minded. (And I think for a kiss from such a dear
creature as Amelia, I would purchase all Mr. Lee's conservatories out
of hand.)
"O heavenly, heavenly flowers!" exclaimed Miss Sharp, and smelt them
delicately, and held them to her bosom, and cast up her eyes to the
ceiling, in an ecstasy of admiration. Perhaps she just looked first
into the bouquet, to see whether there was a billet-doux hidden among
the flowers; but there was no letter.
"Do they talk the language of flowers at Boggley Wollah, Sedley?" asked
Osborne, laughing.
"Pooh, nonsense!" replied the sentimental youth. "Bought 'em at
Nathan's; very glad you like 'em; and eh, Amelia, my dear, I bought a
pine-apple at the same time, which I gave to Sambo. Let's have it for
tiffin; very cool and nice this hot weather." Rebecca said she had
never tasted a pine, and longed beyond everything to taste one.
So the conversation went on. I don't know on what pretext Osborne left
the room, or why, presently, Amelia went away, perhaps to superintend
the slicing of the pine-apple; but Jos was left alone with Rebecca, who
had resumed her work, and the green silk and the shining needles were
quivering rapidly under her white slender fingers.
"What a beautiful, BYOO-OOTIFUL song that was you sang last night, dear
Miss Sharp," said the Collector. "It made me cry almost; 'pon my
honour it did."
"Because you have a kind heart, Mr. Joseph; all the Sedleys have, I
think."
"It kept me awake last night, and I was trying to hum it this morning,
in bed; I was, upon my honour. Gollop, my doctor, came in at eleven
(for I'm a sad invalid, you know, and see Gollop every day), and, 'gad!
there I was, singing away like--a robin."
"O you droll creature! Do let me hear you sing it."
"Me? No, you, Miss Sharp; my dear Miss Sharp, do sing it." "Not now,
Mr. Sedley," said Rebecca, with a sigh. "My spirits are not equal to
it; besides, I must finish the purse. Will you help me, Mr. Sedley?"
And before he had time to ask how, Mr. Joseph Sedley, of the East India
Company's service, was actually seated tete-a-tete with a young lady,
looking at her with a most killing expression; his arms stretched out
before her in an imploring attitude, and his hands bound in a web of
green silk, which she was unwinding.
In this romantic position Osborne and Amelia found the interesting
pair, when they entered to announce that tiffin was ready. The skein
of silk was just wound round the card; but Mr. Jos had never spoken.
"I am sure he will to-night, dear," Amelia said, as she pressed
Rebecca's hand; and Sedley, too, had communed with his soul, and said
to himself, "'Gad, I'll pop the question at Vauxhall."
| A few days later, Jos comes back. In the meantime, Becky has ingratiated herself into the Sedley family and household . Becky demurely flirts with Jos, going so far as to actually squeeze his hand slightly. Amelia suggests spending an evening at Vauxhall, a kind of park with music, cafes, and other entertainment. Mr. Sedley wants Jos to chaperone the ladies, but also thinks they should invite George Osborne to go with them. Amelia is a little swoony at this idea. In bed that night, Mr. and Mrs. Sedley discuss the idea of Becky marrying Jos, and decide basically that better her than an Indian girl. The next night there is a huge thunderstorm, so Vauxhall is put off. Instead, Amelia, George, Jos, and Becky hang out at home by themselves. There is some piano playing and singing . There is some flirting and extremely mild hanky-panky. We're guessing Amelia and George maybe kiss a little when they go off by themselves into a darkened room with no candle. Turns out George is the son of a very old family friend, and he and Amelia have basically been raised to eventually marry each other. So it's helpful that they are also in love. Meanwhile, Becky draws out Jos, as much as he can be drawn out. He's really an ungainly, socially inept fellow. But he's starting to really be into Becky. And why not? She's hot and is basically throwing herself at him. Becky makes everyone feel sad about the fact that she has to leave to go be a governess. Everything seems to be working according to plan, and she thinks that the next morning Jos will propose. The next morning, Jos does not propose. However, what does happen is this: Becky is knitting a green purse and gets Jos to help her hold the skein of silk yarn by winding it around his arms until he is tied up and can't move. Symbolism alert: Becky is a spider, and Jos is caught in her silk web! OK, everyone can sit back down now and take a deep breath. | summary |
Dobbin of Ours
Cuff's fight with Dobbin, and the unexpected issue of that contest,
will long be remembered by every man who was educated at Dr.
Swishtail's famous school. The latter Youth (who used to be called
Heigh-ho Dobbin, Gee-ho Dobbin, and by many other names indicative of
puerile contempt) was the quietest, the clumsiest, and, as it seemed,
the dullest of all Dr. Swishtail's young gentlemen. His parent was a
grocer in the city: and it was bruited abroad that he was admitted into
Dr. Swishtail's academy upon what are called "mutual principles"--that
is to say, the expenses of his board and schooling were defrayed by his
father in goods, not money; and he stood there--most at the bottom of
the school--in his scraggy corduroys and jacket, through the seams of
which his great big bones were bursting--as the representative of so
many pounds of tea, candles, sugar, mottled-soap, plums (of which a
very mild proportion was supplied for the puddings of the
establishment), and other commodities. A dreadful day it was for young
Dobbin when one of the youngsters of the school, having run into the
town upon a poaching excursion for hardbake and polonies, espied the
cart of Dobbin & Rudge, Grocers and Oilmen, Thames Street, London, at
the Doctor's door, discharging a cargo of the wares in which the firm
dealt.
Young Dobbin had no peace after that. The jokes were frightful, and
merciless against him. "Hullo, Dobbin," one wag would say, "here's
good news in the paper. Sugars is ris', my boy." Another would set a
sum--"If a pound of mutton-candles cost sevenpence-halfpenny, how much
must Dobbin cost?" and a roar would follow from all the circle of young
knaves, usher and all, who rightly considered that the selling of goods
by retail is a shameful and infamous practice, meriting the contempt
and scorn of all real gentlemen.
"Your father's only a merchant, Osborne," Dobbin said in private to the
little boy who had brought down the storm upon him. At which the
latter replied haughtily, "My father's a gentleman, and keeps his
carriage"; and Mr. William Dobbin retreated to a remote outhouse in the
playground, where he passed a half-holiday in the bitterest sadness and
woe. Who amongst us is there that does not recollect similar hours of
bitter, bitter childish grief? Who feels injustice; who shrinks before
a slight; who has a sense of wrong so acute, and so glowing a gratitude
for kindness, as a generous boy? and how many of those gentle souls do
you degrade, estrange, torture, for the sake of a little loose
arithmetic, and miserable dog-latin?
Now, William Dobbin, from an incapacity to acquire the rudiments of the
above language, as they are propounded in that wonderful book the Eton
Latin Grammar, was compelled to remain among the very last of Doctor
Swishtail's scholars, and was "taken down" continually by little
fellows with pink faces and pinafores when he marched up with the lower
form, a giant amongst them, with his downcast, stupefied look, his
dog's-eared primer, and his tight corduroys. High and low, all made
fun of him. They sewed up those corduroys, tight as they were. They
cut his bed-strings. They upset buckets and benches, so that he might
break his shins over them, which he never failed to do. They sent him
parcels, which, when opened, were found to contain the paternal soap
and candles. There was no little fellow but had his jeer and joke at
Dobbin; and he bore everything quite patiently, and was entirely dumb
and miserable.
Cuff, on the contrary, was the great chief and dandy of the Swishtail
Seminary. He smuggled wine in. He fought the town-boys. Ponies used
to come for him to ride home on Saturdays. He had his top-boots in his
room, in which he used to hunt in the holidays. He had a gold
repeater: and took snuff like the Doctor. He had been to the Opera,
and knew the merits of the principal actors, preferring Mr. Kean to Mr.
Kemble. He could knock you off forty Latin verses in an hour. He
could make French poetry. What else didn't he know, or couldn't he do?
They said even the Doctor himself was afraid of him.
Cuff, the unquestioned king of the school, ruled over his subjects, and
bullied them, with splendid superiority. This one blacked his shoes:
that toasted his bread, others would fag out, and give him balls at
cricket during whole summer afternoons. "Figs" was the fellow whom he
despised most, and with whom, though always abusing him, and sneering
at him, he scarcely ever condescended to hold personal communication.
One day in private, the two young gentlemen had had a difference. Figs,
alone in the schoolroom, was blundering over a home letter; when Cuff,
entering, bade him go upon some message, of which tarts were probably
the subject.
"I can't," says Dobbin; "I want to finish my letter."
"You CAN'T?" says Mr. Cuff, laying hold of that document (in which many
words were scratched out, many were mis-spelt, on which had been spent
I don't know how much thought, and labour, and tears; for the poor
fellow was writing to his mother, who was fond of him, although she was
a grocer's wife, and lived in a back parlour in Thames Street). "You
CAN'T?" says Mr. Cuff: "I should like to know why, pray? Can't you
write to old Mother Figs to-morrow?"
"Don't call names," Dobbin said, getting off the bench very nervous.
"Well, sir, will you go?" crowed the cock of the school.
"Put down the letter," Dobbin replied; "no gentleman readth letterth."
"Well, NOW will you go?" says the other.
"No, I won't. Don't strike, or I'll THMASH you," roars out Dobbin,
springing to a leaden inkstand, and looking so wicked, that Mr. Cuff
paused, turned down his coat sleeves again, put his hands into his
pockets, and walked away with a sneer. But he never meddled personally
with the grocer's boy after that; though we must do him the justice to
say he always spoke of Mr. Dobbin with contempt behind his back.
Some time after this interview, it happened that Mr. Cuff, on a
sunshiny afternoon, was in the neighbourhood of poor William Dobbin,
who was lying under a tree in the playground, spelling over a favourite
copy of the Arabian Nights which he had apart from the rest of the
school, who were pursuing their various sports--quite lonely, and
almost happy. If people would but leave children to themselves; if
teachers would cease to bully them; if parents would not insist upon
directing their thoughts, and dominating their feelings--those feelings
and thoughts which are a mystery to all (for how much do you and I know
of each other, of our children, of our fathers, of our neighbour, and
how far more beautiful and sacred are the thoughts of the poor lad or
girl whom you govern likely to be, than those of the dull and
world-corrupted person who rules him?)--if, I say, parents and masters
would leave their children alone a little more, small harm would
accrue, although a less quantity of as in praesenti might be acquired.
Well, William Dobbin had for once forgotten the world, and was away
with Sindbad the Sailor in the Valley of Diamonds, or with Prince Ahmed
and the Fairy Peribanou in that delightful cavern where the Prince
found her, and whither we should all like to make a tour; when shrill
cries, as of a little fellow weeping, woke up his pleasant reverie; and
looking up, he saw Cuff before him, belabouring a little boy.
It was the lad who had peached upon him about the grocer's cart; but he
bore little malice, not at least towards the young and small. "How dare
you, sir, break the bottle?" says Cuff to the little urchin, swinging a
yellow cricket-stump over him.
The boy had been instructed to get over the playground wall (at a
selected spot where the broken glass had been removed from the top, and
niches made convenient in the brick); to run a quarter of a mile; to
purchase a pint of rum-shrub on credit; to brave all the Doctor's
outlying spies, and to clamber back into the playground again; during
the performance of which feat, his foot had slipt, and the bottle was
broken, and the shrub had been spilt, and his pantaloons had been
damaged, and he appeared before his employer a perfectly guilty and
trembling, though harmless, wretch.
"How dare you, sir, break it?" says Cuff; "you blundering little thief.
You drank the shrub, and now you pretend to have broken the bottle.
Hold out your hand, sir."
Down came the stump with a great heavy thump on the child's hand. A
moan followed. Dobbin looked up. The Fairy Peribanou had fled into the
inmost cavern with Prince Ahmed: the Roc had whisked away Sindbad the
Sailor out of the Valley of Diamonds out of sight, far into the clouds:
and there was everyday life before honest William; and a big boy
beating a little one without cause.
"Hold out your other hand, sir," roars Cuff to his little schoolfellow,
whose face was distorted with pain. Dobbin quivered, and gathered
himself up in his narrow old clothes.
"Take that, you little devil!" cried Mr. Cuff, and down came the wicket
again on the child's hand.--Don't be horrified, ladies, every boy at a
public school has done it. Your children will so do and be done by, in
all probability. Down came the wicket again; and Dobbin started up.
I can't tell what his motive was. Torture in a public school is as
much licensed as the knout in Russia. It would be ungentlemanlike (in
a manner) to resist it. Perhaps Dobbin's foolish soul revolted against
that exercise of tyranny; or perhaps he had a hankering feeling of
revenge in his mind, and longed to measure himself against that
splendid bully and tyrant, who had all the glory, pride, pomp,
circumstance, banners flying, drums beating, guards saluting, in the
place. Whatever may have been his incentive, however, up he sprang,
and screamed out, "Hold off, Cuff; don't bully that child any more; or
I'll--"
"Or you'll what?" Cuff asked in amazement at this interruption. "Hold
out your hand, you little beast."
"I'll give you the worst thrashing you ever had in your life," Dobbin
said, in reply to the first part of Cuff's sentence; and little
Osborne, gasping and in tears, looked up with wonder and incredulity at
seeing this amazing champion put up suddenly to defend him: while
Cuff's astonishment was scarcely less. Fancy our late monarch George
III when he heard of the revolt of the North American colonies: fancy
brazen Goliath when little David stepped forward and claimed a meeting;
and you have the feelings of Mr. Reginald Cuff when this rencontre was
proposed to him.
"After school," says he, of course; after a pause and a look, as much
as to say, "Make your will, and communicate your last wishes to your
friends between this time and that."
"As you please," Dobbin said. "You must be my bottle holder, Osborne."
"Well, if you like," little Osborne replied; for you see his papa kept
a carriage, and he was rather ashamed of his champion.
Yes, when the hour of battle came, he was almost ashamed to say, "Go
it, Figs"; and not a single other boy in the place uttered that cry for
the first two or three rounds of this famous combat; at the
commencement of which the scientific Cuff, with a contemptuous smile on
his face, and as light and as gay as if he was at a ball, planted his
blows upon his adversary, and floored that unlucky champion three times
running. At each fall there was a cheer; and everybody was anxious to
have the honour of offering the conqueror a knee.
"What a licking I shall get when it's over," young Osborne thought,
picking up his man. "You'd best give in," he said to Dobbin; "it's
only a thrashing, Figs, and you know I'm used to it." But Figs, all
whose limbs were in a quiver, and whose nostrils were breathing rage,
put his little bottle-holder aside, and went in for a fourth time.
As he did not in the least know how to parry the blows that were aimed
at himself, and Cuff had begun the attack on the three preceding
occasions, without ever allowing his enemy to strike, Figs now
determined that he would commence the engagement by a charge on his own
part; and accordingly, being a left-handed man, brought that arm into
action, and hit out a couple of times with all his might--once at Mr.
Cuff's left eye, and once on his beautiful Roman nose.
Cuff went down this time, to the astonishment of the assembly. "Well
hit, by Jove," says little Osborne, with the air of a connoisseur,
clapping his man on the back. "Give it him with the left, Figs my boy."
Figs's left made terrific play during all the rest of the combat. Cuff
went down every time. At the sixth round, there were almost as many
fellows shouting out, "Go it, Figs," as there were youths exclaiming,
"Go it, Cuff." At the twelfth round the latter champion was all abroad,
as the saying is, and had lost all presence of mind and power of attack
or defence. Figs, on the contrary, was as calm as a quaker. His face
being quite pale, his eyes shining open, and a great cut on his
underlip bleeding profusely, gave this young fellow a fierce and
ghastly air, which perhaps struck terror into many spectators.
Nevertheless, his intrepid adversary prepared to close for the
thirteenth time.
If I had the pen of a Napier, or a Bell's Life, I should like to
describe this combat properly. It was the last charge of the
Guard--(that is, it would have been, only Waterloo had not yet taken
place)--it was Ney's column breasting the hill of La Haye Sainte,
bristling with ten thousand bayonets, and crowned with twenty
eagles--it was the shout of the beef-eating British, as leaping down
the hill they rushed to hug the enemy in the savage arms of battle--in
other words, Cuff coming up full of pluck, but quite reeling and
groggy, the Fig-merchant put in his left as usual on his adversary's
nose, and sent him down for the last time.
"I think that will do for him," Figs said, as his opponent dropped as
neatly on the green as I have seen Jack Spot's ball plump into the
pocket at billiards; and the fact is, when time was called, Mr.
Reginald Cuff was not able, or did not choose, to stand up again.
And now all the boys set up such a shout for Figs as would have made
you think he had been their darling champion through the whole battle;
and as absolutely brought Dr. Swishtail out of his study, curious to
know the cause of the uproar. He threatened to flog Figs violently, of
course; but Cuff, who had come to himself by this time, and was washing
his wounds, stood up and said, "It's my fault, sir--not Figs'--not
Dobbin's. I was bullying a little boy; and he served me right." By
which magnanimous speech he not only saved his conqueror a whipping,
but got back all his ascendancy over the boys which his defeat had
nearly cost him.
Young Osborne wrote home to his parents an account of the transaction.
Sugarcane House, Richmond, March, 18--
DEAR MAMA,--I hope you are quite well. I should be much obliged to you
to send me a cake and five shillings. There has been a fight here
between Cuff & Dobbin. Cuff, you know, was the Cock of the School.
They fought thirteen rounds, and Dobbin Licked. So Cuff is now Only
Second Cock. The fight was about me. Cuff was licking me for breaking
a bottle of milk, and Figs wouldn't stand it. We call him Figs because
his father is a Grocer--Figs & Rudge, Thames St., City--I think as he
fought for me you ought to buy your Tea & Sugar at his father's. Cuff
goes home every Saturday, but can't this, because he has 2 Black Eyes.
He has a white Pony to come and fetch him, and a groom in livery on a
bay mare. I wish my Papa would let me have a Pony, and I am
Your dutiful Son, GEORGE SEDLEY OSBORNE
P.S.--Give my love to little Emmy. I am cutting her out a Coach in
cardboard. Please not a seed-cake, but a plum-cake.
In consequence of Dobbin's victory, his character rose prodigiously in
the estimation of all his schoolfellows, and the name of Figs, which
had been a byword of reproach, became as respectable and popular a
nickname as any other in use in the school. "After all, it's not his
fault that his father's a grocer," George Osborne said, who, though a
little chap, had a very high popularity among the Swishtail youth; and
his opinion was received with great applause. It was voted low to sneer
at Dobbin about this accident of birth. "Old Figs" grew to be a name of
kindness and endearment; and the sneak of an usher jeered at him no
longer.
And Dobbin's spirit rose with his altered circumstances. He made
wonderful advances in scholastic learning. The superb Cuff himself, at
whose condescension Dobbin could only blush and wonder, helped him on
with his Latin verses; "coached" him in play-hours: carried him
triumphantly out of the little-boy class into the middle-sized form;
and even there got a fair place for him. It was discovered, that
although dull at classical learning, at mathematics he was uncommonly
quick. To the contentment of all he passed third in algebra, and got a
French prize-book at the public Midsummer examination. You should have
seen his mother's face when Telemaque (that delicious romance) was
presented to him by the Doctor in the face of the whole school and the
parents and company, with an inscription to Gulielmo Dobbin. All the
boys clapped hands in token of applause and sympathy. His blushes, his
stumbles, his awkwardness, and the number of feet which he crushed as
he went back to his place, who shall describe or calculate? Old Dobbin,
his father, who now respected him for the first time, gave him two
guineas publicly; most of which he spent in a general tuck-out for the
school: and he came back in a tail-coat after the holidays.
Dobbin was much too modest a young fellow to suppose that this happy
change in all his circumstances arose from his own generous and manly
disposition: he chose, from some perverseness, to attribute his good
fortune to the sole agency and benevolence of little George Osborne, to
whom henceforth he vowed such a love and affection as is only felt by
children--such an affection, as we read in the charming fairy-book,
uncouth Orson had for splendid young Valentine his conqueror. He flung
himself down at little Osborne's feet, and loved him. Even before they
were acquainted, he had admired Osborne in secret. Now he was his
valet, his dog, his man Friday. He believed Osborne to be the
possessor of every perfection, to be the handsomest, the bravest, the
most active, the cleverest, the most generous of created boys. He
shared his money with him: bought him uncountable presents of knives,
pencil-cases, gold seals, toffee, Little Warblers, and romantic books,
with large coloured pictures of knights and robbers, in many of which
latter you might read inscriptions to George Sedley Osborne, Esquire,
from his attached friend William Dobbin--the which tokens of homage
George received very graciously, as became his superior merit.
So that Lieutenant Osborne, when coming to Russell Square on the day of
the Vauxhall party, said to the ladies, "Mrs. Sedley, Ma'am, I hope you
have room; I've asked Dobbin of ours to come and dine here, and go with
us to Vauxhall. He's almost as modest as Jos."
"Modesty! pooh," said the stout gentleman, casting a vainqueur look at
Miss Sharp.
"He is--but you are incomparably more graceful, Sedley," Osborne added,
laughing. "I met him at the Bedford, when I went to look for you; and
I told him that Miss Amelia was come home, and that we were all bent on
going out for a night's pleasuring; and that Mrs. Sedley had forgiven
his breaking the punch-bowl at the child's party. Don't you remember
the catastrophe, Ma'am, seven years ago?"
"Over Mrs. Flamingo's crimson silk gown," said good-natured Mrs.
Sedley. "What a gawky it was! And his sisters are not much more
graceful. Lady Dobbin was at Highbury last night with three of them.
Such figures! my dears."
"The Alderman's very rich, isn't he?" Osborne said archly. "Don't you
think one of the daughters would be a good spec for me, Ma'am?"
"You foolish creature! Who would take you, I should like to know, with
your yellow face?"
"Mine a yellow face? Stop till you see Dobbin. Why, he had the yellow
fever three times; twice at Nassau, and once at St. Kitts."
"Well, well; yours is quite yellow enough for us. Isn't it, Emmy?"
Mrs. Sedley said: at which speech Miss Amelia only made a smile and a
blush; and looking at Mr. George Osborne's pale interesting
countenance, and those beautiful black, curling, shining whiskers,
which the young gentleman himself regarded with no ordinary
complacency, she thought in her little heart that in His Majesty's
army, or in the wide world, there never was such a face or such a hero.
"I don't care about Captain Dobbin's complexion," she said, "or about
his awkwardness. I shall always like him, I know," her little reason
being, that he was the friend and champion of George.
"There's not a finer fellow in the service," Osborne said, "nor a
better officer, though he is not an Adonis, certainly." And he looked
towards the glass himself with much naivete; and in so doing, caught
Miss Sharp's eye fixed keenly upon him, at which he blushed a little,
and Rebecca thought in her heart, "Ah, mon beau Monsieur! I think I
have YOUR gauge"--the little artful minx!
That evening, when Amelia came tripping into the drawing-room in a
white muslin frock, prepared for conquest at Vauxhall, singing like a
lark, and as fresh as a rose--a very tall ungainly gentleman, with
large hands and feet, and large ears, set off by a closely cropped head
of black hair, and in the hideous military frogged coat and cocked hat
of those times, advanced to meet her, and made her one of the clumsiest
bows that was ever performed by a mortal.
This was no other than Captain William Dobbin, of His Majesty's
Regiment of Foot, returned from yellow fever, in the West Indies, to
which the fortune of the service had ordered his regiment, whilst so
many of his gallant comrades were reaping glory in the Peninsula.
He had arrived with a knock so very timid and quiet that it was
inaudible to the ladies upstairs: otherwise, you may be sure Miss
Amelia would never have been so bold as to come singing into the room.
As it was, the sweet fresh little voice went right into the Captain's
heart, and nestled there. When she held out her hand for him to shake,
before he enveloped it in his own, he paused, and thought--"Well, is it
possible--are you the little maid I remember in the pink frock, such a
short time ago--the night I upset the punch-bowl, just after I was
gazetted? Are you the little girl that George Osborne said should marry
him? What a blooming young creature you seem, and what a prize the
rogue has got!" All this he thought, before he took Amelia's hand into
his own, and as he let his cocked hat fall.
His history since he left school, until the very moment when we have
the pleasure of meeting him again, although not fully narrated, has
yet, I think, been indicated sufficiently for an ingenious reader by
the conversation in the last page. Dobbin, the despised grocer, was
Alderman Dobbin--Alderman Dobbin was Colonel of the City Light Horse,
then burning with military ardour to resist the French Invasion.
Colonel Dobbin's corps, in which old Mr. Osborne himself was but an
indifferent corporal, had been reviewed by the Sovereign and the Duke
of York; and the colonel and alderman had been knighted. His son had
entered the army: and young Osborne followed presently in the same
regiment. They had served in the West Indies and in Canada. Their
regiment had just come home, and the attachment of Dobbin to George
Osborne was as warm and generous now as it had been when the two were
schoolboys.
So these worthy people sat down to dinner presently. They talked about
war and glory, and Boney and Lord Wellington, and the last Gazette. In
those famous days every gazette had a victory in it, and the two
gallant young men longed to see their own names in the glorious list,
and cursed their unlucky fate to belong to a regiment which had been
away from the chances of honour. Miss Sharp kindled with this exciting
talk, but Miss Sedley trembled and grew quite faint as she heard it.
Mr. Jos told several of his tiger-hunting stories, finished the one
about Miss Cutler and Lance the surgeon; helped Rebecca to everything
on the table, and himself gobbled and drank a great deal.
He sprang to open the door for the ladies, when they retired, with the
most killing grace--and coming back to the table, filled himself bumper
after bumper of claret, which he swallowed with nervous rapidity.
"He's priming himself," Osborne whispered to Dobbin, and at length the
hour and the carriage arrived for Vauxhall.
| Another kid at the school was Cuff, who was the popular, bullying jock type. Everyone who was there will always remember the day Dobbin saw Cuff about to beat up George. It's not really clear how old everyone is at this point. We'll hazard a guess that George was 9ish, Dobbin 11ish, and Cuff 14ish. Point being that Cuff was way bigger than George. Dobbin intervened, and he and Cuff planned to fight after school. The fight was very much one-sided, with a half-crazed Dobbin "licking" Cuff . After this, Dobbin's reputation went way up, and the other kids started being so nice to him that he actually began doing really well in school. Turns out he wasn't stupid after all, but just too miserable to study or otherwise function. The other result of the fight? Dobbin and George became best friends. Or rather, George condescended to let Dobbin be really attached to him. Since all this happened, however, Dobbin's dad has become an alderman and has gotten knighted, meaning he is now Sir Dobbin, and is thus a much higher social class than when Dobbin was at school. Dobbin is now Captain Dobbin and is an officer in George's regiment. The reason for all this history? To explain why George invites Dobbin to Vauxhall as kind of a fifth wheel. Dobbin comes over to the Sedley house, sees Amelia, and instantly falls in love with her. The five young people hang out, having a good time, until it's time to go. Jos has a few strong drinks for the road, or maybe to give himself some liquid courage to ask Becky to marry him. | summary |
Vauxhall
I know that the tune I am piping is a very mild one (although there are
some terrific chapters coming presently), and must beg the good-natured
reader to remember that we are only discoursing at present about a
stockbroker's family in Russell Square, who are taking walks, or
luncheon, or dinner, or talking and making love as people do in common
life, and without a single passionate and wonderful incident to mark
the progress of their loves. The argument stands thus--Osborne, in
love with Amelia, has asked an old friend to dinner and to
Vauxhall--Jos Sedley is in love with Rebecca. Will he marry her? That
is the great subject now in hand.
We might have treated this subject in the genteel, or in the romantic,
or in the facetious manner. Suppose we had laid the scene in Grosvenor
Square, with the very same adventures--would not some people have
listened? Suppose we had shown how Lord Joseph Sedley fell in love, and
the Marquis of Osborne became attached to Lady Amelia, with the full
consent of the Duke, her noble father: or instead of the supremely
genteel, suppose we had resorted to the entirely low, and described
what was going on in Mr. Sedley's kitchen--how black Sambo was in love
with the cook (as indeed he was), and how he fought a battle with the
coachman in her behalf; how the knife-boy was caught stealing a cold
shoulder of mutton, and Miss Sedley's new femme de chambre refused to
go to bed without a wax candle; such incidents might be made to provoke
much delightful laughter, and be supposed to represent scenes of
"life." Or if, on the contrary, we had taken a fancy for the terrible,
and made the lover of the new femme de chambre a professional burglar,
who bursts into the house with his band, slaughters black Sambo at the
feet of his master, and carries off Amelia in her night-dress, not to
be let loose again till the third volume, we should easily have
constructed a tale of thrilling interest, through the fiery chapters of
which the reader should hurry, panting. But my readers must hope for
no such romance, only a homely story, and must be content with a
chapter about Vauxhall, which is so short that it scarce deserves to be
called a chapter at all. And yet it is a chapter, and a very important
one too. Are not there little chapters in everybody's life, that seem
to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?
Let us then step into the coach with the Russell Square party, and be
off to the Gardens. There is barely room between Jos and Miss Sharp,
who are on the front seat. Mr. Osborne sitting bodkin opposite,
between Captain Dobbin and Amelia.
Every soul in the coach agreed that on that night Jos would propose to
make Rebecca Sharp Mrs. Sedley. The parents at home had acquiesced in
the arrangement, though, between ourselves, old Mr. Sedley had a
feeling very much akin to contempt for his son. He said he was vain,
selfish, lazy, and effeminate. He could not endure his airs as a man
of fashion, and laughed heartily at his pompous braggadocio stories.
"I shall leave the fellow half my property," he said; "and he will
have, besides, plenty of his own; but as I am perfectly sure that if
you, and I, and his sister were to die to-morrow, he would say 'Good
Gad!' and eat his dinner just as well as usual, I am not going to make
myself anxious about him. Let him marry whom he likes. It's no affair
of mine."
Amelia, on the other hand, as became a young woman of her prudence and
temperament, was quite enthusiastic for the match. Once or twice Jos
had been on the point of saying something very important to her, to
which she was most willing to lend an ear, but the fat fellow could not
be brought to unbosom himself of his great secret, and very much to his
sister's disappointment he only rid himself of a large sigh and turned
away.
This mystery served to keep Amelia's gentle bosom in a perpetual
flutter of excitement. If she did not speak with Rebecca on the tender
subject, she compensated herself with long and intimate conversations
with Mrs. Blenkinsop, the housekeeper, who dropped some hints to the
lady's-maid, who may have cursorily mentioned the matter to the cook,
who carried the news, I have no doubt, to all the tradesmen, so that
Mr. Jos's marriage was now talked of by a very considerable number of
persons in the Russell Square world.
It was, of course, Mrs. Sedley's opinion that her son would demean
himself by a marriage with an artist's daughter. "But, lor', Ma'am,"
ejaculated Mrs. Blenkinsop, "we was only grocers when we married Mr.
S., who was a stock-broker's clerk, and we hadn't five hundred pounds
among us, and we're rich enough now." And Amelia was entirely of this
opinion, to which, gradually, the good-natured Mrs. Sedley was brought.
Mr. Sedley was neutral. "Let Jos marry whom he likes," he said; "it's
no affair of mine. This girl has no fortune; no more had Mrs. Sedley.
She seems good-humoured and clever, and will keep him in order,
perhaps. Better she, my dear, than a black Mrs. Sedley, and a dozen of
mahogany grandchildren."
So that everything seemed to smile upon Rebecca's fortunes. She took
Jos's arm, as a matter of course, on going to dinner; she had sate by
him on the box of his open carriage (a most tremendous "buck" he was,
as he sat there, serene, in state, driving his greys), and though
nobody said a word on the subject of the marriage, everybody seemed to
understand it. All she wanted was the proposal, and ah! how Rebecca
now felt the want of a mother!--a dear, tender mother, who would have
managed the business in ten minutes, and, in the course of a little
delicate confidential conversation, would have extracted the
interesting avowal from the bashful lips of the young man!
Such was the state of affairs as the carriage crossed Westminster
bridge.
The party was landed at the Royal Gardens in due time. As the majestic
Jos stepped out of the creaking vehicle the crowd gave a cheer for the
fat gentleman, who blushed and looked very big and mighty, as he walked
away with Rebecca under his arm. George, of course, took charge of
Amelia. She looked as happy as a rose-tree in sunshine.
"I say, Dobbin," says George, "just look to the shawls and things,
there's a good fellow." And so while he paired off with Miss Sedley,
and Jos squeezed through the gate into the gardens with Rebecca at his
side, honest Dobbin contented himself by giving an arm to the shawls,
and by paying at the door for the whole party.
He walked very modestly behind them. He was not willing to spoil
sport. About Rebecca and Jos he did not care a fig. But he thought
Amelia worthy even of the brilliant George Osborne, and as he saw that
good-looking couple threading the walks to the girl's delight and
wonder, he watched her artless happiness with a sort of fatherly
pleasure. Perhaps he felt that he would have liked to have something
on his own arm besides a shawl (the people laughed at seeing the gawky
young officer carrying this female burthen); but William Dobbin was
very little addicted to selfish calculation at all; and so long as his
friend was enjoying himself, how should he be discontented? And the
truth is, that of all the delights of the Gardens; of the hundred
thousand extra lamps, which were always lighted; the fiddlers in cocked
hats, who played ravishing melodies under the gilded cockle-shell in
the midst of the gardens; the singers, both of comic and sentimental
ballads, who charmed the ears there; the country dances, formed by
bouncing cockneys and cockneyesses, and executed amidst jumping,
thumping and laughter; the signal which announced that Madame Saqui was
about to mount skyward on a slack-rope ascending to the stars; the
hermit that always sat in the illuminated hermitage; the dark walks, so
favourable to the interviews of young lovers; the pots of stout handed
about by the people in the shabby old liveries; and the twinkling
boxes, in which the happy feasters made-believe to eat slices of almost
invisible ham--of all these things, and of the gentle Simpson, that
kind smiling idiot, who, I daresay, presided even then over the
place--Captain William Dobbin did not take the slightest notice.
He carried about Amelia's white cashmere shawl, and having attended
under the gilt cockle-shell, while Mrs. Salmon performed the Battle of
Borodino (a savage cantata against the Corsican upstart, who had lately
met with his Russian reverses)--Mr. Dobbin tried to hum it as he walked
away, and found he was humming--the tune which Amelia Sedley sang on
the stairs, as she came down to dinner.
He burst out laughing at himself; for the truth is, he could sing no
better than an owl.
It is to be understood, as a matter of course, that our young people,
being in parties of two and two, made the most solemn promises to keep
together during the evening, and separated in ten minutes afterwards.
Parties at Vauxhall always did separate, but 'twas only to meet again
at supper-time, when they could talk of their mutual adventures in the
interval.
What were the adventures of Mr. Osborne and Miss Amelia? That is a
secret. But be sure of this--they were perfectly happy, and correct in
their behaviour; and as they had been in the habit of being together
any time these fifteen years, their tete-a-tete offered no particular
novelty.
But when Miss Rebecca Sharp and her stout companion lost themselves in
a solitary walk, in which there were not above five score more of
couples similarly straying, they both felt that the situation was
extremely tender and critical, and now or never was the moment Miss
Sharp thought, to provoke that declaration which was trembling on the
timid lips of Mr. Sedley. They had previously been to the panorama of
Moscow, where a rude fellow, treading on Miss Sharp's foot, caused her
to fall back with a little shriek into the arms of Mr. Sedley, and this
little incident increased the tenderness and confidence of that
gentleman to such a degree, that he told her several of his favourite
Indian stories over again for, at least, the sixth time.
"How I should like to see India!" said Rebecca.
"SHOULD you?" said Joseph, with a most killing tenderness; and was no
doubt about to follow up this artful interrogatory by a question still
more tender (for he puffed and panted a great deal, and Rebecca's hand,
which was placed near his heart, could count the feverish pulsations of
that organ), when, oh, provoking! the bell rang for the fireworks, and,
a great scuffling and running taking place, these interesting lovers
were obliged to follow in the stream of people.
Captain Dobbin had some thoughts of joining the party at supper: as, in
truth, he found the Vauxhall amusements not particularly lively--but he
paraded twice before the box where the now united couples were met, and
nobody took any notice of him. Covers were laid for four. The mated
pairs were prattling away quite happily, and Dobbin knew he was as
clean forgotten as if he had never existed in this world.
"I should only be de trop," said the Captain, looking at them rather
wistfully. "I'd best go and talk to the hermit,"--and so he strolled
off out of the hum of men, and noise, and clatter of the banquet, into
the dark walk, at the end of which lived that well-known pasteboard
Solitary. It wasn't very good fun for Dobbin--and, indeed, to be alone
at Vauxhall, I have found, from my own experience, to be one of the
most dismal sports ever entered into by a bachelor.
The two couples were perfectly happy then in their box: where the most
delightful and intimate conversation took place. Jos was in his glory,
ordering about the waiters with great majesty. He made the salad; and
uncorked the Champagne; and carved the chickens; and ate and drank the
greater part of the refreshments on the tables. Finally, he insisted
upon having a bowl of rack punch; everybody had rack punch at Vauxhall.
"Waiter, rack punch."
That bowl of rack punch was the cause of all this history. And why not
a bowl of rack punch as well as any other cause? Was not a bowl of
prussic acid the cause of Fair Rosamond's retiring from the world? Was
not a bowl of wine the cause of the demise of Alexander the Great, or,
at least, does not Dr. Lempriere say so?--so did this bowl of rack
punch influence the fates of all the principal characters in this
"Novel without a Hero," which we are now relating. It influenced their
life, although most of them did not taste a drop of it.
The young ladies did not drink it; Osborne did not like it; and the
consequence was that Jos, that fat gourmand, drank up the whole
contents of the bowl; and the consequence of his drinking up the whole
contents of the bowl was a liveliness which at first was astonishing,
and then became almost painful; for he talked and laughed so loud as to
bring scores of listeners round the box, much to the confusion of the
innocent party within it; and, volunteering to sing a song (which he
did in that maudlin high key peculiar to gentlemen in an inebriated
state), he almost drew away the audience who were gathered round the
musicians in the gilt scollop-shell, and received from his hearers a
great deal of applause.
"Brayvo, Fat un!" said one; "Angcore, Daniel Lambert!" said another;
"What a figure for the tight-rope!" exclaimed another wag, to the
inexpressible alarm of the ladies, and the great anger of Mr. Osborne.
"For Heaven's sake, Jos, let us get up and go," cried that gentleman,
and the young women rose.
"Stop, my dearest diddle-diddle-darling," shouted Jos, now as bold as a
lion, and clasping Miss Rebecca round the waist. Rebecca started, but
she could not get away her hand. The laughter outside redoubled. Jos
continued to drink, to make love, and to sing; and, winking and waving
his glass gracefully to his audience, challenged all or any to come in
and take a share of his punch.
Mr. Osborne was just on the point of knocking down a gentleman in
top-boots, who proposed to take advantage of this invitation, and a
commotion seemed to be inevitable, when by the greatest good luck a
gentleman of the name of Dobbin, who had been walking about the
gardens, stepped up to the box. "Be off, you fools!" said this
gentleman--shouldering off a great number of the crowd, who vanished
presently before his cocked hat and fierce appearance--and he entered
the box in a most agitated state.
"Good Heavens! Dobbin, where have you been?" Osborne said, seizing the
white cashmere shawl from his friend's arm, and huddling up Amelia in
it.--"Make yourself useful, and take charge of Jos here, whilst I take
the ladies to the carriage."
Jos was for rising to interfere--but a single push from Osborne's
finger sent him puffing back into his seat again, and the lieutenant
was enabled to remove the ladies in safety. Jos kissed his hand to
them as they retreated, and hiccupped out "Bless you! Bless you!" Then,
seizing Captain Dobbin's hand, and weeping in the most pitiful way, he
confided to that gentleman the secret of his loves. He adored that
girl who had just gone out; he had broken her heart, he knew he had, by
his conduct; he would marry her next morning at St. George's, Hanover
Square; he'd knock up the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth: he
would, by Jove! and have him in readiness; and, acting on this hint,
Captain Dobbin shrewdly induced him to leave the gardens and hasten to
Lambeth Palace, and, when once out of the gates, easily conveyed Mr.
Jos Sedley into a hackney-coach, which deposited him safely at his
lodgings.
George Osborne conducted the girls home in safety: and when the door
was closed upon them, and as he walked across Russell Square, laughed
so as to astonish the watchman. Amelia looked very ruefully at her
friend, as they went up stairs, and kissed her, and went to bed without
any more talking.
"He must propose to-morrow," thought Rebecca. "He called me his soul's
darling, four times; he squeezed my hand in Amelia's presence. He must
propose to-morrow." And so thought Amelia, too. And I dare say she
thought of the dress she was to wear as bridesmaid, and of the presents
which she should make to her nice little sister-in-law, and of a
subsequent ceremony in which she herself might play a principal part,
&c., and &c., and &c., and &c.
Oh, ignorant young creatures! How little do you know the effect of rack
punch! What is the rack in the punch, at night, to the rack in the head
of a morning? To this truth I can vouch as a man; there is no headache
in the world like that caused by Vauxhall punch. Through the lapse of
twenty years, I can remember the consequence of two glasses! two
wine-glasses! but two, upon the honour of a gentleman; and Joseph
Sedley, who had a liver complaint, had swallowed at least a quart of
the abominable mixture.
That next morning, which Rebecca thought was to dawn upon her fortune,
found Sedley groaning in agonies which the pen refuses to describe.
Soda-water was not invented yet. Small beer--will it be believed!--was
the only drink with which unhappy gentlemen soothed the fever of their
previous night's potation. With this mild beverage before him, George
Osborne found the ex-Collector of Boggley Wollah groaning on the sofa
at his lodgings. Dobbin was already in the room, good-naturedly
tending his patient of the night before. The two officers, looking at
the prostrate Bacchanalian, and askance at each other, exchanged the
most frightful sympathetic grins. Even Sedley's valet, the most solemn
and correct of gentlemen, with the muteness and gravity of an
undertaker, could hardly keep his countenance in order, as he looked at
his unfortunate master.
"Mr. Sedley was uncommon wild last night, sir," he whispered in
confidence to Osborne, as the latter mounted the stair. "He wanted to
fight the 'ackney-coachman, sir. The Capting was obliged to bring him
upstairs in his harms like a babby." A momentary smile flickered over
Mr. Brush's features as he spoke; instantly, however, they relapsed
into their usual unfathomable calm, as he flung open the drawing-room
door, and announced "Mr. Hosbin."
"How are you, Sedley?" that young wag began, after surveying his
victim. "No bones broke? There's a hackney-coachman downstairs with a
black eye, and a tied-up head, vowing he'll have the law of you."
"What do you mean--law?" Sedley faintly asked.
"For thrashing him last night--didn't he, Dobbin? You hit out, sir,
like Molyneux. The watchman says he never saw a fellow go down so
straight. Ask Dobbin."
"You DID have a round with the coachman," Captain Dobbin said, "and
showed plenty of fight too."
"And that fellow with the white coat at Vauxhall! How Jos drove at him!
How the women screamed! By Jove, sir, it did my heart good to see you.
I thought you civilians had no pluck; but I'll never get in your way
when you are in your cups, Jos."
"I believe I'm very terrible, when I'm roused," ejaculated Jos from the
sofa, and made a grimace so dreary and ludicrous, that the Captain's
politeness could restrain him no longer, and he and Osborne fired off a
ringing volley of laughter.
Osborne pursued his advantage pitilessly. He thought Jos a milksop. He
had been revolving in his mind the marriage question pending between
Jos and Rebecca, and was not over well pleased that a member of a
family into which he, George Osborne, of the --th, was going to marry,
should make a mesalliance with a little nobody--a little upstart
governess. "You hit, you poor old fellow!" said Osborne. "You
terrible! Why, man, you couldn't stand--you made everybody laugh in the
Gardens, though you were crying yourself. You were maudlin, Jos.
Don't you remember singing a song?"
"A what?" Jos asked.
"A sentimental song, and calling Rosa, Rebecca, what's her name,
Amelia's little friend--your dearest diddle-diddle-darling?" And this
ruthless young fellow, seizing hold of Dobbin's hand, acted over the
scene, to the horror of the original performer, and in spite of
Dobbin's good-natured entreaties to him to have mercy.
"Why should I spare him?" Osborne said to his friend's remonstrances,
when they quitted the invalid, leaving him under the hands of Doctor
Gollop. "What the deuce right has he to give himself his patronizing
airs, and make fools of us at Vauxhall? Who's this little schoolgirl
that is ogling and making love to him? Hang it, the family's low enough
already, without HER. A governess is all very well, but I'd rather
have a lady for my sister-in-law. I'm a liberal man; but I've proper
pride, and know my own station: let her know hers. And I'll take down
that great hectoring Nabob, and prevent him from being made a greater
fool than he is. That's why I told him to look out, lest she brought
an action against him."
"I suppose you know best," Dobbin said, though rather dubiously. "You
always were a Tory, and your family's one of the oldest in England.
But--"
"Come and see the girls, and make love to Miss Sharp yourself," the
lieutenant here interrupted his friend; but Captain Dobbin declined to
join Osborne in his daily visit to the young ladies in Russell Square.
As George walked down Southampton Row, from Holborn, he laughed as he
saw, at the Sedley Mansion, in two different stories two heads on the
look-out.
The fact is, Miss Amelia, in the drawing-room balcony, was looking very
eagerly towards the opposite side of the Square, where Mr. Osborne
dwelt, on the watch for the lieutenant himself; and Miss Sharp, from
her little bed-room on the second floor, was in observation until Mr.
Joseph's great form should heave in sight.
"Sister Anne is on the watch-tower," said he to Amelia, "but there's
nobody coming"; and laughing and enjoying the joke hugely, he described
in the most ludicrous terms to Miss Sedley, the dismal condition of her
brother.
"I think it's very cruel of you to laugh, George," she said, looking
particularly unhappy; but George only laughed the more at her piteous
and discomfited mien, persisted in thinking the joke a most diverting
one, and when Miss Sharp came downstairs, bantered her with a great
deal of liveliness upon the effect of her charms on the fat civilian.
"O Miss Sharp! if you could but see him this morning," he
said--"moaning in his flowered dressing-gown--writhing on his sofa; if
you could but have seen him lolling out his tongue to Gollop the
apothecary."
"See whom?" said Miss Sharp.
"Whom? O whom? Captain Dobbin, of course, to whom we were all so
attentive, by the way, last night."
"We were very unkind to him," Emmy said, blushing very much. "I--I
quite forgot him."
"Of course you did," cried Osborne, still on the laugh.
"One can't be ALWAYS thinking about Dobbin, you know, Amelia. Can one,
Miss Sharp?"
"Except when he overset the glass of wine at dinner," Miss Sharp said,
with a haughty air and a toss of the head, "I never gave the existence
of Captain Dobbin one single moment's consideration."
"Very good, Miss Sharp, I'll tell him," Osborne said; and as he spoke
Miss Sharp began to have a feeling of distrust and hatred towards this
young officer, which he was quite unconscious of having inspired. "He
is to make fun of me, is he?" thought Rebecca. "Has he been laughing
about me to Joseph? Has he frightened him? Perhaps he won't come."--A
film passed over her eyes, and her heart beat quite quick.
"You're always joking," said she, smiling as innocently as she could.
"Joke away, Mr. George; there's nobody to defend ME." And George
Osborne, as she walked away--and Amelia looked reprovingly at him--felt
some little manly compunction for having inflicted any unnecessary
unkindness upon this helpless creature. "My dearest Amelia," said he,
"you are too good--too kind. You don't know the world. I do. And
your little friend Miss Sharp must learn her station."
"Don't you think Jos will--"
"Upon my word, my dear, I don't know. He may, or may not. I'm not his
master. I only know he is a very foolish vain fellow, and put my dear
little girl into a very painful and awkward position last night. My
dearest diddle-diddle-darling!" He was off laughing again, and he did
it so drolly that Emmy laughed too.
All that day Jos never came. But Amelia had no fear about this; for
the little schemer had actually sent away the page, Mr. Sambo's
aide-de-camp, to Mr. Joseph's lodgings, to ask for some book he had
promised, and how he was; and the reply through Jos's man, Mr. Brush,
was, that his master was ill in bed, and had just had the doctor with
him. He must come to-morrow, she thought, but she never had the
courage to speak a word on the subject to Rebecca; nor did that young
woman herself allude to it in any way during the whole evening after
the night at Vauxhall.
The next day, however, as the two young ladies sate on the sofa,
pretending to work, or to write letters, or to read novels, Sambo came
into the room with his usual engaging grin, with a packet under his
arm, and a note on a tray. "Note from Mr. Jos, Miss," says Sambo.
How Amelia trembled as she opened it!
So it ran:
Dear Amelia,--I send you the "Orphan of the Forest." I was too ill to
come yesterday. I leave town to-day for Cheltenham. Pray excuse me,
if you can, to the amiable Miss Sharp, for my conduct at Vauxhall, and
entreat her to pardon and forget every word I may have uttered when
excited by that fatal supper. As soon as I have recovered, for my
health is very much shaken, I shall go to Scotland for some months, and
am
Truly yours, Jos Sedley
It was the death-warrant. All was over. Amelia did not dare to look
at Rebecca's pale face and burning eyes, but she dropt the letter into
her friend's lap; and got up, and went upstairs to her room, and cried
her little heart out.
Blenkinsop, the housekeeper, there sought her presently with
consolation, on whose shoulder Amelia wept confidentially, and relieved
herself a good deal. "Don't take on, Miss. I didn't like to tell you.
But none of us in the house have liked her except at fust. I sor her
with my own eyes reading your Ma's letters. Pinner says she's always
about your trinket-box and drawers, and everybody's drawers, and she's
sure she's put your white ribbing into her box."
"I gave it her, I gave it her," Amelia said.
But this did not alter Mrs. Blenkinsop's opinion of Miss Sharp. "I
don't trust them governesses, Pinner," she remarked to the maid. "They
give themselves the hairs and hupstarts of ladies, and their wages is
no better than you nor me."
It now became clear to every soul in the house, except poor Amelia,
that Rebecca should take her departure, and high and low (always with
the one exception) agreed that that event should take place as speedily
as possible. Our good child ransacked all her drawers, cupboards,
reticules, and gimcrack boxes--passed in review all her gowns, fichus,
tags, bobbins, laces, silk stockings, and fallals--selecting this thing
and that and the other, to make a little heap for Rebecca. And going
to her Papa, that generous British merchant, who had promised to give
her as many guineas as she was years old--she begged the old gentleman
to give the money to dear Rebecca, who must want it, while she lacked
for nothing.
She even made George Osborne contribute, and nothing loth (for he was
as free-handed a young fellow as any in the army), he went to Bond
Street, and bought the best hat and spenser that money could buy.
"That's George's present to you, Rebecca, dear," said Amelia, quite
proud of the bandbox conveying these gifts. "What a taste he has!
There's nobody like him."
"Nobody," Rebecca answered. "How thankful I am to him!" She was
thinking in her heart, "It was George Osborne who prevented my
marriage."--And she loved George Osborne accordingly.
She made her preparations for departure with great equanimity; and
accepted all the kind little Amelia's presents, after just the proper
degree of hesitation and reluctance. She vowed eternal gratitude to
Mrs. Sedley, of course; but did not intrude herself upon that good lady
too much, who was embarrassed, and evidently wishing to avoid her. She
kissed Mr. Sedley's hand, when he presented her with the purse; and
asked permission to consider him for the future as her kind, kind
friend and protector. Her behaviour was so affecting that he was going
to write her a cheque for twenty pounds more; but he restrained his
feelings: the carriage was in waiting to take him to dinner, so he
tripped away with a "God bless you, my dear, always come here when you
come to town, you know.--Drive to the Mansion House, James."
Finally came the parting with Miss Amelia, over which picture I intend
to throw a veil. But after a scene in which one person was in earnest
and the other a perfect performer--after the tenderest caresses, the
most pathetic tears, the smelling-bottle, and some of the very best
feelings of the heart, had been called into requisition--Rebecca and
Amelia parted, the former vowing to love her friend for ever and ever
and ever.
| The narrator wonders how the story would change if the main characters were at the top of the social heap , or if they were servants. It seems that necessarily at least the tone of the novel would be completely different. Anyhoodle, the five young people finally go to Vauxhall. Everyone is convinced that Jos will propose there. As predicted, Dobbin is the fifth wheel, walking behind the two couples carrying their bags and shawls. He doesn't seem to mind too much and thinks about Amelia. The couples split up. George and Amelia have a "perfectly happy and correct" time, just like every other time they've been alone together for the past fifteen years . Becky and Jos, meanwhile, are talking, but just as Jos is about to ask Becky how she'd like to come to India for good, the bell rings to announce the Vauxhall fireworks. Fireworks time is dinnertime. At dinner, Jos eats an enormous amount of food. He also drinks a bottle of champagne almost by himself, as well as a bowl of alcoholic punch. Jos is wasted. He sings songs, is loud, calls Becky his "dearest diddle-diddle-darling" , and makes a huge fool out of himself. It's a ridiculous disaster. Dobbin and George take Becky and Amelia home, then carry Jos home half passed out. That night, Becky thinks Jos will propose tomorrow. Amelia agrees. George, meanwhile, is not too psyched to have a poor art teacher's daughter for a sister-in-law. The next morning, George mercilessly teases Jos about what an idiot he made out of himself. Jos is beyond embarrassed and does not come to see Becky. George does come to see Becky and Amelia, and Becky quickly figures out that he scared Jos out of coming and proposing. So Becky is no longer a big fan of George. Meanwhile, Jos writes a note to Amelia saying that he is leaving the country and going off to Scotland. So, the whole proposal-and-marriage thing is totally off. Becky gets ready to leave. Mrs. Blenkinsop, the housekeeper, confesses to Amelia that no one really likes Becky anymore. She's been sneaking around, spying on the family, and maybe even stealing things. Amelia doesn't want to hear it, and it seems like she's really the only one who is sad to see Becky go. Still, the Sedleys and George give Becky a bunch of money as a going-away present. | summary |
Crawley of Queen's Crawley
Among the most respected of the names beginning in C which the
Court-Guide contained, in the year 18--, was that of Crawley, Sir Pitt,
Baronet, Great Gaunt Street, and Queen's Crawley, Hants. This
honourable name had figured constantly also in the Parliamentary list
for many years, in conjunction with that of a number of other worthy
gentlemen who sat in turns for the borough.
It is related, with regard to the borough of Queen's Crawley, that
Queen Elizabeth in one of her progresses, stopping at Crawley to
breakfast, was so delighted with some remarkably fine Hampshire beer
which was then presented to her by the Crawley of the day (a handsome
gentleman with a trim beard and a good leg), that she forthwith erected
Crawley into a borough to send two members to Parliament; and the
place, from the day of that illustrious visit, took the name of Queen's
Crawley, which it holds up to the present moment. And though, by the
lapse of time, and those mutations which age produces in empires,
cities, and boroughs, Queen's Crawley was no longer so populous a place
as it had been in Queen Bess's time--nay, was come down to that
condition of borough which used to be denominated rotten--yet, as Sir
Pitt Crawley would say with perfect justice in his elegant way,
"Rotten! be hanged--it produces me a good fifteen hundred a year."
Sir Pitt Crawley (named after the great Commoner) was the son of
Walpole Crawley, first Baronet, of the Tape and Sealing-Wax Office in
the reign of George II., when he was impeached for peculation, as were
a great number of other honest gentlemen of those days; and Walpole
Crawley was, as need scarcely be said, son of John Churchill Crawley,
named after the celebrated military commander of the reign of Queen
Anne. The family tree (which hangs up at Queen's Crawley) furthermore
mentions Charles Stuart, afterwards called Barebones Crawley, son of
the Crawley of James the First's time; and finally, Queen Elizabeth's
Crawley, who is represented as the foreground of the picture in his
forked beard and armour. Out of his waistcoat, as usual, grows a tree,
on the main branches of which the above illustrious names are
inscribed. Close by the name of Sir Pitt Crawley, Baronet (the subject
of the present memoir), are written that of his brother, the Reverend
Bute Crawley (the great Commoner was in disgrace when the reverend
gentleman was born), rector of Crawley-cum-Snailby, and of various
other male and female members of the Crawley family.
Sir Pitt was first married to Grizzel, sixth daughter of Mungo Binkie,
Lord Binkie, and cousin, in consequence, of Mr. Dundas. She brought
him two sons: Pitt, named not so much after his father as after the
heaven-born minister; and Rawdon Crawley, from the Prince of Wales's
friend, whom his Majesty George IV forgot so completely. Many years
after her ladyship's demise, Sir Pitt led to the altar Rosa, daughter
of Mr. G. Dawson, of Mudbury, by whom he had two daughters, for whose
benefit Miss Rebecca Sharp was now engaged as governess. It will be
seen that the young lady was come into a family of very genteel
connexions, and was about to move in a much more distinguished circle
than that humble one which she had just quitted in Russell Square.
She had received her orders to join her pupils, in a note which was
written upon an old envelope, and which contained the following words:
Sir Pitt Crawley begs Miss Sharp and baggidge may be hear on Tuesday,
as I leaf for Queen's Crawley to-morrow morning ERLY.
Great Gaunt Street.
Rebecca had never seen a Baronet, as far as she knew, and as soon as
she had taken leave of Amelia, and counted the guineas which
good-natured Mr. Sedley had put into a purse for her, and as soon as
she had done wiping her eyes with her handkerchief (which operation she
concluded the very moment the carriage had turned the corner of the
street), she began to depict in her own mind what a Baronet must be. "I
wonder, does he wear a star?" thought she, "or is it only lords that
wear stars? But he will be very handsomely dressed in a court suit,
with ruffles, and his hair a little powdered, like Mr. Wroughton at
Covent Garden. I suppose he will be awfully proud, and that I shall be
treated most contemptuously. Still I must bear my hard lot as well as
I can--at least, I shall be amongst GENTLEFOLKS, and not with vulgar
city people": and she fell to thinking of her Russell Square friends
with that very same philosophical bitterness with which, in a certain
apologue, the fox is represented as speaking of the grapes.
Having passed through Gaunt Square into Great Gaunt Street, the
carriage at length stopped at a tall gloomy house between two other
tall gloomy houses, each with a hatchment over the middle drawing-room
window; as is the custom of houses in Great Gaunt Street, in which
gloomy locality death seems to reign perpetual. The shutters of the
first-floor windows of Sir Pitt's mansion were closed--those of the
dining-room were partially open, and the blinds neatly covered up in
old newspapers.
John, the groom, who had driven the carriage alone, did not care to
descend to ring the bell; and so prayed a passing milk-boy to perform
that office for him. When the bell was rung, a head appeared between
the interstices of the dining-room shutters, and the door was opened by
a man in drab breeches and gaiters, with a dirty old coat, a foul old
neckcloth lashed round his bristly neck, a shining bald head, a leering
red face, a pair of twinkling grey eyes, and a mouth perpetually on the
grin.
"This Sir Pitt Crawley's?" says John, from the box.
"Ees," says the man at the door, with a nod.
"Hand down these 'ere trunks then," said John.
"Hand 'n down yourself," said the porter.
"Don't you see I can't leave my hosses? Come, bear a hand, my fine
feller, and Miss will give you some beer," said John, with a
horse-laugh, for he was no longer respectful to Miss Sharp, as her
connexion with the family was broken off, and as she had given nothing
to the servants on coming away.
The bald-headed man, taking his hands out of his breeches pockets,
advanced on this summons, and throwing Miss Sharp's trunk over his
shoulder, carried it into the house.
"Take this basket and shawl, if you please, and open the door," said
Miss Sharp, and descended from the carriage in much indignation. "I
shall write to Mr. Sedley and inform him of your conduct," said she to
the groom.
"Don't," replied that functionary. "I hope you've forgot nothink? Miss
'Melia's gownds--have you got them--as the lady's maid was to have 'ad?
I hope they'll fit you. Shut the door, Jim, you'll get no good out of
'ER," continued John, pointing with his thumb towards Miss Sharp: "a
bad lot, I tell you, a bad lot," and so saying, Mr. Sedley's groom
drove away. The truth is, he was attached to the lady's maid in
question, and indignant that she should have been robbed of her
perquisites.
On entering the dining-room, by the orders of the individual in
gaiters, Rebecca found that apartment not more cheerful than such rooms
usually are, when genteel families are out of town. The faithful
chambers seem, as it were, to mourn the absence of their masters. The
turkey carpet has rolled itself up, and retired sulkily under the
sideboard: the pictures have hidden their faces behind old sheets of
brown paper: the ceiling lamp is muffled up in a dismal sack of brown
holland: the window-curtains have disappeared under all sorts of shabby
envelopes: the marble bust of Sir Walpole Crawley is looking from its
black corner at the bare boards and the oiled fire-irons, and the empty
card-racks over the mantelpiece: the cellaret has lurked away behind
the carpet: the chairs are turned up heads and tails along the walls:
and in the dark corner opposite the statue, is an old-fashioned crabbed
knife-box, locked and sitting on a dumb waiter.
Two kitchen chairs, and a round table, and an attenuated old poker and
tongs were, however, gathered round the fire-place, as was a saucepan
over a feeble sputtering fire. There was a bit of cheese and bread,
and a tin candlestick on the table, and a little black porter in a
pint-pot.
"Had your dinner, I suppose? It is not too warm for you? Like a drop of
beer?"
"Where is Sir Pitt Crawley?" said Miss Sharp majestically.
"He, he! I'm Sir Pitt Crawley. Reklect you owe me a pint for bringing
down your luggage. He, he! Ask Tinker if I aynt. Mrs. Tinker, Miss
Sharp; Miss Governess, Mrs. Charwoman. Ho, ho!"
The lady addressed as Mrs. Tinker at this moment made her appearance
with a pipe and a paper of tobacco, for which she had been despatched a
minute before Miss Sharp's arrival; and she handed the articles over to
Sir Pitt, who had taken his seat by the fire.
"Where's the farden?" said he. "I gave you three halfpence. Where's
the change, old Tinker?"
"There!" replied Mrs. Tinker, flinging down the coin; "it's only
baronets as cares about farthings."
"A farthing a day is seven shillings a year," answered the M.P.; "seven
shillings a year is the interest of seven guineas. Take care of your
farthings, old Tinker, and your guineas will come quite nat'ral."
"You may be sure it's Sir Pitt Crawley, young woman," said Mrs. Tinker,
surlily; "because he looks to his farthings. You'll know him better
afore long."
"And like me none the worse, Miss Sharp," said the old gentleman, with
an air almost of politeness. "I must be just before I'm generous."
"He never gave away a farthing in his life," growled Tinker.
"Never, and never will: it's against my principle. Go and get another
chair from the kitchen, Tinker, if you want to sit down; and then we'll
have a bit of supper."
Presently the baronet plunged a fork into the saucepan on the fire, and
withdrew from the pot a piece of tripe and an onion, which he divided
into pretty equal portions, and of which he partook with Mrs. Tinker.
"You see, Miss Sharp, when I'm not here Tinker's on board wages: when
I'm in town she dines with the family. Haw! haw! I'm glad Miss Sharp's
not hungry, ain't you, Tink?" And they fell to upon their frugal supper.
After supper Sir Pitt Crawley began to smoke his pipe; and when it
became quite dark, he lighted the rushlight in the tin candlestick, and
producing from an interminable pocket a huge mass of papers, began
reading them, and putting them in order.
"I'm here on law business, my dear, and that's how it happens that I
shall have the pleasure of such a pretty travelling companion
to-morrow."
"He's always at law business," said Mrs. Tinker, taking up the pot of
porter.
"Drink and drink about," said the Baronet. "Yes; my dear, Tinker is
quite right: I've lost and won more lawsuits than any man in England.
Look here at Crawley, Bart. v. Snaffle. I'll throw him over, or my
name's not Pitt Crawley. Podder and another versus Crawley, Bart.
Overseers of Snaily parish against Crawley, Bart. They can't prove it's
common: I'll defy 'em; the land's mine. It no more belongs to the
parish than it does to you or Tinker here. I'll beat 'em, if it cost
me a thousand guineas. Look over the papers; you may if you like, my
dear. Do you write a good hand? I'll make you useful when we're at
Queen's Crawley, depend on it, Miss Sharp. Now the dowager's dead I
want some one."
"She was as bad as he," said Tinker. "She took the law of every one of
her tradesmen; and turned away forty-eight footmen in four year."
"She was close--very close," said the Baronet, simply; "but she was a
valyble woman to me, and saved me a steward."--And in this confidential
strain, and much to the amusement of the new-comer, the conversation
continued for a considerable time. Whatever Sir Pitt Crawley's
qualities might be, good or bad, he did not make the least disguise of
them. He talked of himself incessantly, sometimes in the coarsest and
vulgarest Hampshire accent; sometimes adopting the tone of a man of the
world. And so, with injunctions to Miss Sharp to be ready at five in
the morning, he bade her good night. "You'll sleep with Tinker
to-night," he said; "it's a big bed, and there's room for two. Lady
Crawley died in it. Good night."
Sir Pitt went off after this benediction, and the solemn Tinker,
rushlight in hand, led the way up the great bleak stone stairs, past
the great dreary drawing-room doors, with the handles muffled up in
paper, into the great front bedroom, where Lady Crawley had slept her
last. The bed and chamber were so funereal and gloomy, you might have
fancied, not only that Lady Crawley died in the room, but that her
ghost inhabited it. Rebecca sprang about the apartment, however, with
the greatest liveliness, and had peeped into the huge wardrobes, and
the closets, and the cupboards, and tried the drawers which were
locked, and examined the dreary pictures and toilette appointments,
while the old charwoman was saying her prayers. "I shouldn't like to
sleep in this yeer bed without a good conscience, Miss," said the old
woman. "There's room for us and a half-dozen of ghosts in it," says
Rebecca. "Tell me all about Lady Crawley and Sir Pitt Crawley, and
everybody, my DEAR Mrs. Tinker."
But old Tinker was not to be pumped by this little cross-questioner;
and signifying to her that bed was a place for sleeping, not
conversation, set up in her corner of the bed such a snore as only the
nose of innocence can produce. Rebecca lay awake for a long, long
time, thinking of the morrow, and of the new world into which she was
going, and of her chances of success there. The rushlight flickered in
the basin. The mantelpiece cast up a great black shadow, over half of
a mouldy old sampler, which her defunct ladyship had worked, no doubt,
and over two little family pictures of young lads, one in a college
gown, and the other in a red jacket like a soldier. When she went to
sleep, Rebecca chose that one to dream about.
At four o'clock, on such a roseate summer's morning as even made Great
Gaunt Street look cheerful, the faithful Tinker, having wakened her
bedfellow, and bid her prepare for departure, unbarred and unbolted the
great hall door (the clanging and clapping whereof startled the
sleeping echoes in the street), and taking her way into Oxford Street,
summoned a coach from a stand there. It is needless to particularize
the number of the vehicle, or to state that the driver was stationed
thus early in the neighbourhood of Swallow Street, in hopes that some
young buck, reeling homeward from the tavern, might need the aid of his
vehicle, and pay him with the generosity of intoxication.
It is likewise needless to say that the driver, if he had any such
hopes as those above stated, was grossly disappointed; and that the
worthy Baronet whom he drove to the City did not give him one single
penny more than his fare. It was in vain that Jehu appealed and
stormed; that he flung down Miss Sharp's bandboxes in the gutter at the
'Necks, and swore he would take the law of his fare.
"You'd better not," said one of the ostlers; "it's Sir Pitt Crawley."
"So it is, Joe," cried the Baronet, approvingly; "and I'd like to see
the man can do me."
"So should oi," said Joe, grinning sulkily, and mounting the Baronet's
baggage on the roof of the coach.
"Keep the box for me, Leader," exclaims the Member of Parliament to the
coachman; who replied, "Yes, Sir Pitt," with a touch of his hat, and
rage in his soul (for he had promised the box to a young gentleman from
Cambridge, who would have given a crown to a certainty), and Miss Sharp
was accommodated with a back seat inside the carriage, which might be
said to be carrying her into the wide world.
How the young man from Cambridge sulkily put his five great-coats in
front; but was reconciled when little Miss Sharp was made to quit the
carriage, and mount up beside him--when he covered her up in one of his
Benjamins, and became perfectly good-humoured--how the asthmatic
gentleman, the prim lady, who declared upon her sacred honour she had
never travelled in a public carriage before (there is always such a
lady in a coach--Alas! was; for the coaches, where are they?), and the
fat widow with the brandy-bottle, took their places inside--how the
porter asked them all for money, and got sixpence from the gentleman
and five greasy halfpence from the fat widow--and how the carriage at
length drove away--now threading the dark lanes of Aldersgate, anon
clattering by the Blue Cupola of St. Paul's, jingling rapidly by the
strangers' entry of Fleet-Market, which, with Exeter 'Change, has now
departed to the world of shadows--how they passed the White Bear in
Piccadilly, and saw the dew rising up from the market-gardens of
Knightsbridge--how Turnhamgreen, Brentwood, Bagshot, were passed--need
not be told here. But the writer of these pages, who has pursued in
former days, and in the same bright weather, the same remarkable
journey, cannot but think of it with a sweet and tender regret. Where
is the road now, and its merry incidents of life? Is there no Chelsea
or Greenwich for the old honest pimple-nosed coachmen? I wonder where
are they, those good fellows? Is old Weller alive or dead? and the
waiters, yea, and the inns at which they waited, and the cold rounds of
beef inside, and the stunted ostler, with his blue nose and clinking
pail, where is he, and where is his generation? To those great
geniuses now in petticoats, who shall write novels for the beloved
reader's children, these men and things will be as much legend and
history as Nineveh, or Coeur de Lion, or Jack Sheppard. For them
stage-coaches will have become romances--a team of four bays as
fabulous as Bucephalus or Black Bess. Ah, how their coats shone, as
the stable-men pulled their clothes off, and away they went--ah, how
their tails shook, as with smoking sides at the stage's end they
demurely walked away into the inn-yard. Alas! we shall never hear the
horn sing at midnight, or see the pike-gates fly open any more.
Whither, however, is the light four-inside Trafalgar coach carrying us?
Let us be set down at Queen's Crawley without further divagation, and
see how Miss Rebecca Sharp speeds there.
| The narrator tells us a bit about Sir Pitt, with the upshot being that he comes from a very long line of nobility. On the road to a fancy London house, Sir Pitt's mansion, Becky wonders how fancy a man the Baronet will be. At the door of the mansion, an old, dirty man meets the carriage and grudgingly helps Becky with her bags. She assumes this is some skeevy servant, but he instead reveals himself to be...Sir Pitt himself! Sir Pitt speaks with a low-class Hampshire accent. He eats tripe and onions for dinner with Mrs. Tinker, the cleaning lady. What would the Victorians think? Tripe and onions? Gross poor-people food. Eating with the servants? Total aristocracy no-no. Not only is he rude, unpleasant, and not very clean, but Sir Pitt is also very cheap and super litigious. All he does is sue people and get sued in return. He asks whether Becky has good handwriting, implying that she is going do some secretarial work for him on top of her governess-ing. The next morning, Sir Pitt and Becky take a coach down to Queen's Crawley, the Pitt estate in the country. This is yet one more sign of his cheapness - a Baronet would usually have his own carriage and not take public transportation. | summary |
Private and Confidential
Miss Rebecca Sharp to Miss Amelia Sedley, Russell Square, London.
(Free.--Pitt Crawley.)
MY DEAREST, SWEETEST AMELIA,
With what mingled joy and sorrow do I take up the pen to write to my
dearest friend! Oh, what a change between to-day and yesterday! Now I
am friendless and alone; yesterday I was at home, in the sweet company
of a sister, whom I shall ever, ever cherish!
I will not tell you in what tears and sadness I passed the fatal night
in which I separated from you. YOU went on Tuesday to joy and
happiness, with your mother and YOUR DEVOTED YOUNG SOLDIER by your
side; and I thought of you all night, dancing at the Perkins's, the
prettiest, I am sure, of all the young ladies at the Ball. I was
brought by the groom in the old carriage to Sir Pitt Crawley's town
house, where, after John the groom had behaved most rudely and
insolently to me (alas! 'twas safe to insult poverty and misfortune!),
I was given over to Sir P.'s care, and made to pass the night in an old
gloomy bed, and by the side of a horrid gloomy old charwoman, who keeps
the house. I did not sleep one single wink the whole night.
Sir Pitt is not what we silly girls, when we used to read Cecilia at
Chiswick, imagined a baronet must have been. Anything, indeed, less
like Lord Orville cannot be imagined. Fancy an old, stumpy, short,
vulgar, and very dirty man, in old clothes and shabby old gaiters, who
smokes a horrid pipe, and cooks his own horrid supper in a saucepan.
He speaks with a country accent, and swore a great deal at the old
charwoman, at the hackney coachman who drove us to the inn where the
coach went from, and on which I made the journey OUTSIDE FOR THE
GREATER PART OF THE WAY.
I was awakened at daybreak by the charwoman, and having arrived at the
inn, was at first placed inside the coach. But, when we got to a place
called Leakington, where the rain began to fall very heavily--will you
believe it?--I was forced to come outside; for Sir Pitt is a proprietor
of the coach, and as a passenger came at Mudbury, who wanted an inside
place, I was obliged to go outside in the rain, where, however, a young
gentleman from Cambridge College sheltered me very kindly in one of his
several great coats.
This gentleman and the guard seemed to know Sir Pitt very well, and
laughed at him a great deal. They both agreed in calling him an old
screw; which means a very stingy, avaricious person. He never gives
any money to anybody, they said (and this meanness I hate); and the
young gentleman made me remark that we drove very slow for the last two
stages on the road, because Sir Pitt was on the box, and because he is
proprietor of the horses for this part of the journey. "But won't I
flog 'em on to Squashmore, when I take the ribbons?" said the young
Cantab. "And sarve 'em right, Master Jack," said the guard. When I
comprehended the meaning of this phrase, and that Master Jack intended
to drive the rest of the way, and revenge himself on Sir Pitt's horses,
of course I laughed too.
A carriage and four splendid horses, covered with armorial bearings,
however, awaited us at Mudbury, four miles from Queen's Crawley, and we
made our entrance to the baronet's park in state. There is a fine
avenue of a mile long leading to the house, and the woman at the
lodge-gate (over the pillars of which are a serpent and a dove, the
supporters of the Crawley arms), made us a number of curtsies as she
flung open the old iron carved doors, which are something like those at
odious Chiswick.
"There's an avenue," said Sir Pitt, "a mile long. There's six thousand
pound of timber in them there trees. Do you call that nothing?" He
pronounced avenue--EVENUE, and nothing--NOTHINK, so droll; and he had a
Mr. Hodson, his hind from Mudbury, into the carriage with him, and they
talked about distraining, and selling up, and draining and subsoiling,
and a great deal about tenants and farming--much more than I could
understand. Sam Miles had been caught poaching, and Peter Bailey had
gone to the workhouse at last. "Serve him right," said Sir Pitt; "him
and his family has been cheating me on that farm these hundred and
fifty years." Some old tenant, I suppose, who could not pay his rent.
Sir Pitt might have said "he and his family," to be sure; but rich
baronets do not need to be careful about grammar, as poor governesses
must be.
As we passed, I remarked a beautiful church-spire rising above some old
elms in the park; and before them, in the midst of a lawn, and some
outhouses, an old red house with tall chimneys covered with ivy, and
the windows shining in the sun. "Is that your church, sir?" I said.
"Yes, hang it," (said Sir Pitt, only he used, dear, A MUCH WICKEDER
WORD); "how's Buty, Hodson? Buty's my brother Bute, my dear--my brother
the parson. Buty and the Beast I call him, ha, ha!"
Hodson laughed too, and then looking more grave and nodding his head,
said, "I'm afraid he's better, Sir Pitt. He was out on his pony
yesterday, looking at our corn."
"Looking after his tithes, hang'un (only he used the same wicked word).
Will brandy and water never kill him? He's as tough as old
whatdyecallum--old Methusalem."
Mr. Hodson laughed again. "The young men is home from college. They've
whopped John Scroggins till he's well nigh dead."
"Whop my second keeper!" roared out Sir Pitt.
"He was on the parson's ground, sir," replied Mr. Hodson; and Sir Pitt
in a fury swore that if he ever caught 'em poaching on his ground, he'd
transport 'em, by the lord he would. However, he said, "I've sold the
presentation of the living, Hodson; none of that breed shall get it, I
war'nt"; and Mr. Hodson said he was quite right: and I have no doubt
from this that the two brothers are at variance--as brothers often are,
and sisters too. Don't you remember the two Miss Scratchleys at
Chiswick, how they used always to fight and quarrel--and Mary Box, how
she was always thumping Louisa?
Presently, seeing two little boys gathering sticks in the wood, Mr.
Hodson jumped out of the carriage, at Sir Pitt's order, and rushed upon
them with his whip. "Pitch into 'em, Hodson," roared the baronet;
"flog their little souls out, and bring 'em up to the house, the
vagabonds; I'll commit 'em as sure as my name's Pitt." And presently we
heard Mr. Hodson's whip cracking on the shoulders of the poor little
blubbering wretches, and Sir Pitt, seeing that the malefactors were in
custody, drove on to the hall.
All the servants were ready to meet us, and . . .
Here, my dear, I was interrupted last night by a dreadful thumping at
my door: and who do you think it was? Sir Pitt Crawley in his night-cap
and dressing-gown, such a figure! As I shrank away from such a visitor,
he came forward and seized my candle. "No candles after eleven
o'clock, Miss Becky," said he. "Go to bed in the dark, you pretty
little hussy" (that is what he called me), "and unless you wish me to
come for the candle every night, mind and be in bed at eleven." And
with this, he and Mr. Horrocks the butler went off laughing. You may
be sure I shall not encourage any more of their visits. They let loose
two immense bloodhounds at night, which all last night were yelling and
howling at the moon. "I call the dog Gorer," said Sir Pitt; "he's
killed a man that dog has, and is master of a bull, and the mother I
used to call Flora; but now I calls her Aroarer, for she's too old to
bite. Haw, haw!"
Before the house of Queen's Crawley, which is an odious old-fashioned
red brick mansion, with tall chimneys and gables of the style of Queen
Bess, there is a terrace flanked by the family dove and serpent, and on
which the great hall-door opens. And oh, my dear, the great hall I am
sure is as big and as glum as the great hall in the dear castle of
Udolpho. It has a large fireplace, in which we might put half Miss
Pinkerton's school, and the grate is big enough to roast an ox at the
very least. Round the room hang I don't know how many generations of
Crawleys, some with beards and ruffs, some with huge wigs and toes
turned out, some dressed in long straight stays and gowns that look as
stiff as towers, and some with long ringlets, and oh, my dear! scarcely
any stays at all. At one end of the hall is the great staircase all in
black oak, as dismal as may be, and on either side are tall doors with
stags' heads over them, leading to the billiard-room and the library,
and the great yellow saloon and the morning-rooms. I think there are
at least twenty bedrooms on the first floor; one of them has the bed in
which Queen Elizabeth slept; and I have been taken by my new pupils
through all these fine apartments this morning. They are not rendered
less gloomy, I promise you, by having the shutters always shut; and
there is scarce one of the apartments, but when the light was let into
it, I expected to see a ghost in the room. We have a schoolroom on the
second floor, with my bedroom leading into it on one side, and that of
the young ladies on the other. Then there are Mr. Pitt's
apartments--Mr. Crawley, he is called--the eldest son, and Mr. Rawdon
Crawley's rooms--he is an officer like SOMEBODY, and away with his
regiment. There is no want of room I assure you. You might lodge all
the people in Russell Square in the house, I think, and have space to
spare.
Half an hour after our arrival, the great dinner-bell was rung, and I
came down with my two pupils (they are very thin insignificant little
chits of ten and eight years old). I came down in your dear muslin
gown (about which that odious Mrs. Pinner was so rude, because you gave
it me); for I am to be treated as one of the family, except on company
days, when the young ladies and I are to dine upstairs.
Well, the great dinner-bell rang, and we all assembled in the little
drawing-room where my Lady Crawley sits. She is the second Lady
Crawley, and mother of the young ladies. She was an ironmonger's
daughter, and her marriage was thought a great match. She looks as if
she had been handsome once, and her eyes are always weeping for the
loss of her beauty. She is pale and meagre and high-shouldered, and
has not a word to say for herself, evidently. Her stepson Mr. Crawley,
was likewise in the room. He was in full dress, as pompous as an
undertaker. He is pale, thin, ugly, silent; he has thin legs, no
chest, hay-coloured whiskers, and straw-coloured hair. He is the very
picture of his sainted mother over the mantelpiece--Griselda of the
noble house of Binkie.
"This is the new governess, Mr. Crawley," said Lady Crawley, coming
forward and taking my hand. "Miss Sharp."
"O!" said Mr. Crawley, and pushed his head once forward and began again
to read a great pamphlet with which he was busy.
"I hope you will be kind to my girls," said Lady Crawley, with her pink
eyes always full of tears.
"Law, Ma, of course she will," said the eldest: and I saw at a glance
that I need not be afraid of THAT woman. "My lady is served," says the
butler in black, in an immense white shirt-frill, that looked as if it
had been one of the Queen Elizabeth's ruffs depicted in the hall; and
so, taking Mr. Crawley's arm, she led the way to the dining-room,
whither I followed with my little pupils in each hand.
Sir Pitt was already in the room with a silver jug. He had just been
to the cellar, and was in full dress too; that is, he had taken his
gaiters off, and showed his little dumpy legs in black worsted
stockings. The sideboard was covered with glistening old plate--old
cups, both gold and silver; old salvers and cruet-stands, like Rundell
and Bridge's shop. Everything on the table was in silver too, and two
footmen, with red hair and canary-coloured liveries, stood on either
side of the sideboard.
Mr. Crawley said a long grace, and Sir Pitt said amen, and the great
silver dish-covers were removed.
"What have we for dinner, Betsy?" said the Baronet.
"Mutton broth, I believe, Sir Pitt," answered Lady Crawley.
"Mouton aux navets," added the butler gravely (pronounce, if you
please, moutongonavvy); "and the soup is potage de mouton a
l'Ecossaise. The side-dishes contain pommes de terre au naturel, and
choufleur a l'eau."
"Mutton's mutton," said the Baronet, "and a devilish good thing. What
SHIP was it, Horrocks, and when did you kill?" "One of the black-faced
Scotch, Sir Pitt: we killed on Thursday."
"Who took any?"
"Steel, of Mudbury, took the saddle and two legs, Sir Pitt; but he says
the last was too young and confounded woolly, Sir Pitt."
"Will you take some potage, Miss ah--Miss Blunt? said Mr. Crawley.
"Capital Scotch broth, my dear," said Sir Pitt, "though they call it by
a French name."
"I believe it is the custom, sir, in decent society," said Mr. Crawley,
haughtily, "to call the dish as I have called it"; and it was served to
us on silver soup plates by the footmen in the canary coats, with the
mouton aux navets. Then "ale and water" were brought, and served to us
young ladies in wine-glasses. I am not a judge of ale, but I can say
with a clear conscience I prefer water.
While we were enjoying our repast, Sir Pitt took occasion to ask what
had become of the shoulders of the mutton.
"I believe they were eaten in the servants' hall," said my lady, humbly.
"They was, my lady," said Horrocks, "and precious little else we get
there neither."
Sir Pitt burst into a horse-laugh, and continued his conversation with
Mr. Horrocks. "That there little black pig of the Kent sow's breed
must be uncommon fat now."
"It's not quite busting, Sir Pitt," said the butler with the gravest
air, at which Sir Pitt, and with him the young ladies, this time, began
to laugh violently.
"Miss Crawley, Miss Rose Crawley," said Mr. Crawley, "your laughter
strikes me as being exceedingly out of place."
"Never mind, my lord," said the Baronet, "we'll try the porker on
Saturday. Kill un on Saturday morning, John Horrocks. Miss Sharp
adores pork, don't you, Miss Sharp?"
And I think this is all the conversation that I remember at dinner.
When the repast was concluded a jug of hot water was placed before Sir
Pitt, with a case-bottle containing, I believe, rum. Mr. Horrocks
served myself and my pupils with three little glasses of wine, and a
bumper was poured out for my lady. When we retired, she took from her
work-drawer an enormous interminable piece of knitting; the young
ladies began to play at cribbage with a dirty pack of cards. We had
but one candle lighted, but it was in a magnificent old silver
candlestick, and after a very few questions from my lady, I had my
choice of amusement between a volume of sermons, and a pamphlet on the
corn-laws, which Mr. Crawley had been reading before dinner.
So we sat for an hour until steps were heard.
"Put away the cards, girls," cried my lady, in a great tremor; "put
down Mr. Crawley's books, Miss Sharp"; and these orders had been
scarcely obeyed, when Mr. Crawley entered the room.
"We will resume yesterday's discourse, young ladies," said he, "and you
shall each read a page by turns; so that Miss a--Miss Short may have an
opportunity of hearing you"; and the poor girls began to spell a long
dismal sermon delivered at Bethesda Chapel, Liverpool, on behalf of the
mission for the Chickasaw Indians. Was it not a charming evening?
At ten the servants were told to call Sir Pitt and the household to
prayers. Sir Pitt came in first, very much flushed, and rather
unsteady in his gait; and after him the butler, the canaries, Mr.
Crawley's man, three other men, smelling very much of the stable, and
four women, one of whom, I remarked, was very much overdressed, and who
flung me a look of great scorn as she plumped down on her knees.
After Mr. Crawley had done haranguing and expounding, we received our
candles, and then we went to bed; and then I was disturbed in my
writing, as I have described to my dearest sweetest Amelia.
Good night. A thousand, thousand, thousand kisses!
Saturday.--This morning, at five, I heard the shrieking of the little
black pig. Rose and Violet introduced me to it yesterday; and to the
stables, and to the kennel, and to the gardener, who was picking fruit
to send to market, and from whom they begged hard a bunch of hot-house
grapes; but he said that Sir Pitt had numbered every "Man Jack" of
them, and it would be as much as his place was worth to give any away.
The darling girls caught a colt in a paddock, and asked me if I would
ride, and began to ride themselves, when the groom, coming with horrid
oaths, drove them away.
Lady Crawley is always knitting the worsted. Sir Pitt is always tipsy,
every night; and, I believe, sits with Horrocks, the butler. Mr.
Crawley always reads sermons in the evening, and in the morning is
locked up in his study, or else rides to Mudbury, on county business,
or to Squashmore, where he preaches, on Wednesdays and Fridays, to the
tenants there.
A hundred thousand grateful loves to your dear papa and mamma. Is your
poor brother recovered of his rack-punch? Oh, dear! Oh, dear! How men
should beware of wicked punch!
Ever and ever thine own REBECCA
Everything considered, I think it is quite as well for our dear Amelia
Sedley, in Russell Square, that Miss Sharp and she are parted. Rebecca
is a droll funny creature, to be sure; and those descriptions of the
poor lady weeping for the loss of her beauty, and the gentleman "with
hay-coloured whiskers and straw-coloured hair," are very smart,
doubtless, and show a great knowledge of the world. That she might,
when on her knees, have been thinking of something better than Miss
Horrocks's ribbons, has possibly struck both of us. But my kind reader
will please to remember that this history has "Vanity Fair" for a
title, and that Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full
of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions. And while the
moralist, who is holding forth on the cover ( an accurate portrait of
your humble servant), professes to wear neither gown nor bands, but
only the very same long-eared livery in which his congregation is
arrayed: yet, look you, one is bound to speak the truth as far as one
knows it, whether one mounts a cap and bells or a shovel hat; and a
deal of disagreeable matter must come out in the course of such an
undertaking.
I have heard a brother of the story-telling trade, at Naples, preaching
to a pack of good-for-nothing honest lazy fellows by the sea-shore,
work himself up into such a rage and passion with some of the villains
whose wicked deeds he was describing and inventing, that the audience
could not resist it; and they and the poet together would burst out
into a roar of oaths and execrations against the fictitious monster of
the tale, so that the hat went round, and the bajocchi tumbled into it,
in the midst of a perfect storm of sympathy.
At the little Paris theatres, on the other hand, you will not only hear
the people yelling out "Ah gredin! Ah monstre:" and cursing the tyrant
of the play from the boxes; but the actors themselves positively refuse
to play the wicked parts, such as those of infames Anglais, brutal
Cossacks, and what not, and prefer to appear at a smaller salary, in
their real characters as loyal Frenchmen. I set the two stories one
against the other, so that you may see that it is not from mere
mercenary motives that the present performer is desirous to show up and
trounce his villains; but because he has a sincere hatred of them,
which he cannot keep down, and which must find a vent in suitable abuse
and bad language.
I warn my "kyind friends," then, that I am going to tell a story of
harrowing villainy and complicated--but, as I trust, intensely
interesting--crime. My rascals are no milk-and-water rascals, I
promise you. When we come to the proper places we won't spare fine
language--No, no! But when we are going over the quiet country we must
perforce be calm. A tempest in a slop-basin is absurd. We will
reserve that sort of thing for the mighty ocean and the lonely
midnight. The present Chapter is very mild. Others--But we will not
anticipate THOSE.
And, as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a man and
a brother, not only to introduce them, but occasionally to step down
from the platform, and talk about them: if they are good and kindly, to
love them and shake them by the hand: if they are silly, to laugh at
them confidentially in the reader's sleeve: if they are wicked and
heartless, to abuse them in the strongest terms which politeness admits
of.
Otherwise you might fancy it was I who was sneering at the practice of
devotion, which Miss Sharp finds so ridiculous; that it was I who
laughed good-humouredly at the reeling old Silenus of a
baronet--whereas the laughter comes from one who has no reverence
except for prosperity, and no eye for anything beyond success. Such
people there are living and flourishing in the world--Faithless,
Hopeless, Charityless: let us have at them, dear friends, with might
and main. Some there are, and very successful too, mere quacks and
fools: and it was to combat and expose such as those, no doubt, that
Laughter was made.
| This chapter is a letter that Becky writes to Amelia, describing life at Queen's Crawley. On the way to this big estate, Sir Pitt talks to one of his groundskeepers about the various tenants on his land , various ongoing lawsuits, and the general upkeep of a large country estate. Becky learns that Sir Pitt has a younger brother, Bute Crawley, who is the local parson. At night, Sir Pitt enforces a strict lights-out policy and takes away Becky's candle to save money. His cheapness is made funnier by the fact that the mansion on the estate is enormous, with twenty bedrooms. Turns out the Crawley family is complex. Sir Pitt is on his second marriage. He has two sons from his first: Mr. Pitt Crawley , and a dragoon whom we have not yet met. He also has two daughters from his second marriage. These are the girls Becky will be teaching; they are eight and ten years old. At dinner there is a minor scuffle as Mr. Crawley insists on calling all the sad, poor food by its French names for the sake of fanciness and propriety, and his father speaks in his Hampshire accent just to provoke him. Mr. Crawley is kind of a priss. Meanwhile, Lady Crawley is a sickly, sad woman, whom Sir Pitt clearly only married for her looks, which are now gone. Becky instantly sees that Lady Crawley has no power or authority in the house and disregards her. The two Misses Crawley - Becky's students - are almost totally wild and uncivilized, since no one cares enough to deal with them. They mostly like to run around outside and climb on things. Here the letter ends. The narrator makes a little warning. Becky seems amusing and likeable now, but don't get too attached. There's going to be some drama, some crimes, and some horrendous behavior later. | summary |
Family Portraits
Sir Pitt Crawley was a philosopher with a taste for what is called low
life. His first marriage with the daughter of the noble Binkie had
been made under the auspices of his parents; and as he often told Lady
Crawley in her lifetime she was such a confounded quarrelsome high-bred
jade that when she died he was hanged if he would ever take another of
her sort, at her ladyship's demise he kept his promise, and selected
for a second wife Miss Rose Dawson, daughter of Mr. John Thomas Dawson,
ironmonger, of Mudbury. What a happy woman was Rose to be my Lady
Crawley!
Let us set down the items of her happiness. In the first place, she
gave up Peter Butt, a young man who kept company with her, and in
consequence of his disappointment in love, took to smuggling, poaching,
and a thousand other bad courses. Then she quarrelled, as in duty
bound, with all the friends and intimates of her youth, who, of course,
could not be received by my Lady at Queen's Crawley--nor did she find
in her new rank and abode any persons who were willing to welcome her.
Who ever did? Sir Huddleston Fuddleston had three daughters who all
hoped to be Lady Crawley. Sir Giles Wapshot's family were insulted
that one of the Wapshot girls had not the preference in the marriage,
and the remaining baronets of the county were indignant at their
comrade's misalliance. Never mind the commoners, whom we will leave to
grumble anonymously.
Sir Pitt did not care, as he said, a brass farden for any one of them.
He had his pretty Rose, and what more need a man require than to please
himself? So he used to get drunk every night: to beat his pretty Rose
sometimes: to leave her in Hampshire when he went to London for the
parliamentary session, without a single friend in the wide world. Even
Mrs. Bute Crawley, the Rector's wife, refused to visit her, as she said
she would never give the pas to a tradesman's daughter.
As the only endowments with which Nature had gifted Lady Crawley were
those of pink cheeks and a white skin, and as she had no sort of
character, nor talents, nor opinions, nor occupations, nor amusements,
nor that vigour of soul and ferocity of temper which often falls to the
lot of entirely foolish women, her hold upon Sir Pitt's affections was
not very great. Her roses faded out of her cheeks, and the pretty
freshness left her figure after the birth of a couple of children, and
she became a mere machine in her husband's house of no more use than
the late Lady Crawley's grand piano. Being a light-complexioned woman,
she wore light clothes, as most blondes will, and appeared, in
preference, in draggled sea-green, or slatternly sky-blue. She worked
that worsted day and night, or other pieces like it. She had
counterpanes in the course of a few years to all the beds in Crawley.
She had a small flower-garden, for which she had rather an affection;
but beyond this no other like or disliking. When her husband was rude
to her she was apathetic: whenever he struck her she cried. She had
not character enough to take to drinking, and moaned about, slipshod
and in curl-papers all day. O Vanity Fair--Vanity Fair! This might
have been, but for you, a cheery lass--Peter Butt and Rose a happy man
and wife, in a snug farm, with a hearty family; and an honest portion
of pleasures, cares, hopes and struggles--but a title and a coach and
four are toys more precious than happiness in Vanity Fair: and if Harry
the Eighth or Bluebeard were alive now, and wanted a tenth wife, do you
suppose he could not get the prettiest girl that shall be presented
this season?
The languid dulness of their mamma did not, as it may be supposed,
awaken much affection in her little daughters, but they were very happy
in the servants' hall and in the stables; and the Scotch gardener
having luckily a good wife and some good children, they got a little
wholesome society and instruction in his lodge, which was the only
education bestowed upon them until Miss Sharp came.
Her engagement was owing to the remonstrances of Mr. Pitt Crawley, the
only friend or protector Lady Crawley ever had, and the only person,
besides her children, for whom she entertained a little feeble
attachment. Mr. Pitt took after the noble Binkies, from whom he was
descended, and was a very polite and proper gentleman. When he grew to
man's estate, and came back from Christchurch, he began to reform the
slackened discipline of the hall, in spite of his father, who stood in
awe of him. He was a man of such rigid refinement, that he would have
starved rather than have dined without a white neckcloth. Once, when
just from college, and when Horrocks the butler brought him a letter
without placing it previously on a tray, he gave that domestic a look,
and administered to him a speech so cutting, that Horrocks ever after
trembled before him; the whole household bowed to him: Lady Crawley's
curl-papers came off earlier when he was at home: Sir Pitt's muddy
gaiters disappeared; and if that incorrigible old man still adhered to
other old habits, he never fuddled himself with rum-and-water in his
son's presence, and only talked to his servants in a very reserved and
polite manner; and those persons remarked that Sir Pitt never swore at
Lady Crawley while his son was in the room.
It was he who taught the butler to say, "My lady is served," and who
insisted on handing her ladyship in to dinner. He seldom spoke to her,
but when he did it was with the most powerful respect; and he never let
her quit the apartment without rising in the most stately manner to
open the door, and making an elegant bow at her egress.
At Eton he was called Miss Crawley; and there, I am sorry to say, his
younger brother Rawdon used to lick him violently. But though his
parts were not brilliant, he made up for his lack of talent by
meritorious industry, and was never known, during eight years at
school, to be subject to that punishment which it is generally thought
none but a cherub can escape.
At college his career was of course highly creditable. And here he
prepared himself for public life, into which he was to be introduced by
the patronage of his grandfather, Lord Binkie, by studying the ancient
and modern orators with great assiduity, and by speaking unceasingly at
the debating societies. But though he had a fine flux of words, and
delivered his little voice with great pomposity and pleasure to
himself, and never advanced any sentiment or opinion which was not
perfectly trite and stale, and supported by a Latin quotation; yet he
failed somehow, in spite of a mediocrity which ought to have insured
any man a success. He did not even get the prize poem, which all his
friends said he was sure of.
After leaving college he became Private Secretary to Lord Binkie, and
was then appointed Attache to the Legation at Pumpernickel, which post
he filled with perfect honour, and brought home despatches, consisting
of Strasburg pie, to the Foreign Minister of the day. After remaining
ten years Attache (several years after the lamented Lord Binkie's
demise), and finding the advancement slow, he at length gave up the
diplomatic service in some disgust, and began to turn country gentleman.
He wrote a pamphlet on Malt on returning to England (for he was an
ambitious man, and always liked to be before the public), and took a
strong part in the Negro Emancipation question. Then he became a
friend of Mr. Wilberforce's, whose politics he admired, and had that
famous correspondence with the Reverend Silas Hornblower, on the
Ashantee Mission. He was in London, if not for the Parliament session,
at least in May, for the religious meetings. In the country he was a
magistrate, and an active visitor and speaker among those destitute of
religious instruction. He was said to be paying his addresses to Lady
Jane Sheepshanks, Lord Southdown's third daughter, and whose sister,
Lady Emily, wrote those sweet tracts, "The Sailor's True Binnacle," and
"The Applewoman of Finchley Common."
Miss Sharp's accounts of his employment at Queen's Crawley were not
caricatures. He subjected the servants there to the devotional
exercises before mentioned, in which (and so much the better) he
brought his father to join. He patronised an Independent meeting-house
in Crawley parish, much to the indignation of his uncle the Rector, and
to the consequent delight of Sir Pitt, who was induced to go himself
once or twice, which occasioned some violent sermons at Crawley parish
church, directed point-blank at the Baronet's old Gothic pew there.
Honest Sir Pitt, however, did not feel the force of these discourses,
as he always took his nap during sermon-time.
Mr. Crawley was very earnest, for the good of the nation and of the
Christian world, that the old gentleman should yield him up his place
in Parliament; but this the elder constantly refused to do. Both were
of course too prudent to give up the fifteen hundred a year which was
brought in by the second seat (at this period filled by Mr. Quadroon,
with carte blanche on the Slave question); indeed the family estate was
much embarrassed, and the income drawn from the borough was of great
use to the house of Queen's Crawley.
It had never recovered the heavy fine imposed upon Walpole Crawley,
first baronet, for peculation in the Tape and Sealing Wax Office. Sir
Walpole was a jolly fellow, eager to seize and to spend money (alieni
appetens, sui profusus, as Mr. Crawley would remark with a sigh), and
in his day beloved by all the county for the constant drunkenness and
hospitality which was maintained at Queen's Crawley. The cellars were
filled with burgundy then, the kennels with hounds, and the stables
with gallant hunters; now, such horses as Queen's Crawley possessed
went to plough, or ran in the Trafalgar Coach; and it was with a team
of these very horses, on an off-day, that Miss Sharp was brought to the
Hall; for boor as he was, Sir Pitt was a stickler for his dignity while
at home, and seldom drove out but with four horses, and though he dined
off boiled mutton, had always three footmen to serve it.
If mere parsimony could have made a man rich, Sir Pitt Crawley might
have become very wealthy--if he had been an attorney in a country town,
with no capital but his brains, it is very possible that he would have
turned them to good account, and might have achieved for himself a very
considerable influence and competency. But he was unluckily endowed
with a good name and a large though encumbered estate, both of which
went rather to injure than to advance him. He had a taste for law,
which cost him many thousands yearly; and being a great deal too clever
to be robbed, as he said, by any single agent, allowed his affairs to
be mismanaged by a dozen, whom he all equally mistrusted. He was such a
sharp landlord, that he could hardly find any but bankrupt tenants; and
such a close farmer, as to grudge almost the seed to the ground,
whereupon revengeful Nature grudged him the crops which she granted to
more liberal husbandmen. He speculated in every possible way; he worked
mines; bought canal-shares; horsed coaches; took government contracts,
and was the busiest man and magistrate of his county. As he would not
pay honest agents at his granite quarry, he had the satisfaction of
finding that four overseers ran away, and took fortunes with them to
America. For want of proper precautions, his coal-mines filled with
water: the government flung his contract of damaged beef upon his
hands: and for his coach-horses, every mail proprietor in the kingdom
knew that he lost more horses than any man in the country, from
underfeeding and buying cheap. In disposition he was sociable, and far
from being proud; nay, he rather preferred the society of a farmer or a
horse-dealer to that of a gentleman, like my lord, his son: he was fond
of drink, of swearing, of joking with the farmers' daughters: he was
never known to give away a shilling or to do a good action, but was of
a pleasant, sly, laughing mood, and would cut his joke and drink his
glass with a tenant and sell him up the next day; or have his laugh
with the poacher he was transporting with equal good humour. His
politeness for the fair sex has already been hinted at by Miss Rebecca
Sharp--in a word, the whole baronetage, peerage, commonage of England,
did not contain a more cunning, mean, selfish, foolish, disreputable
old man. That blood-red hand of Sir Pitt Crawley's would be in
anybody's pocket except his own; and it is with grief and pain, that,
as admirers of the British aristocracy, we find ourselves obliged to
admit the existence of so many ill qualities in a person whose name is
in Debrett.
One great cause why Mr. Crawley had such a hold over the affections of
his father, resulted from money arrangements. The Baronet owed his son
a sum of money out of the jointure of his mother, which he did not find
it convenient to pay; indeed he had an almost invincible repugnance to
paying anybody, and could only be brought by force to discharge his
debts. Miss Sharp calculated (for she became, as we shall hear
speedily, inducted into most of the secrets of the family) that the
mere payment of his creditors cost the honourable Baronet several
hundreds yearly; but this was a delight he could not forego; he had a
savage pleasure in making the poor wretches wait, and in shifting from
court to court and from term to term the period of satisfaction.
What's the good of being in Parliament, he said, if you must pay your
debts? Hence, indeed, his position as a senator was not a little useful
to him.
Vanity Fair--Vanity Fair! Here was a man, who could not spell, and did
not care to read--who had the habits and the cunning of a boor: whose
aim in life was pettifogging: who never had a taste, or emotion, or
enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet he had rank, and
honours, and power, somehow: and was a dignitary of the land, and a
pillar of the state. He was high sheriff, and rode in a golden coach.
Great ministers and statesmen courted him; and in Vanity Fair he had a
higher place than the most brilliant genius or spotless virtue.
Sir Pitt had an unmarried half-sister who inherited her mother's large
fortune, and though the Baronet proposed to borrow this money of her on
mortgage, Miss Crawley declined the offer, and preferred the security
of the funds. She had signified, however, her intention of leaving her
inheritance between Sir Pitt's second son and the family at the
Rectory, and had once or twice paid the debts of Rawdon Crawley in his
career at college and in the army. Miss Crawley was, in consequence, an
object of great respect when she came to Queen's Crawley, for she had a
balance at her banker's which would have made her beloved anywhere.
What a dignity it gives an old lady, that balance at the banker's! How
tenderly we look at her faults if she is a relative (and may every
reader have a score of such), what a kind good-natured old creature we
find her! How the junior partner of Hobbs and Dobbs leads her smiling
to the carriage with the lozenge upon it, and the fat wheezy coachman!
How, when she comes to pay us a visit, we generally find an opportunity
to let our friends know her station in the world! We say (and with
perfect truth) I wish I had Miss MacWhirter's signature to a cheque for
five thousand pounds. She wouldn't miss it, says your wife. She is my
aunt, say you, in an easy careless way, when your friend asks if Miss
MacWhirter is any relative. Your wife is perpetually sending her
little testimonies of affection, your little girls work endless worsted
baskets, cushions, and footstools for her. What a good fire there is
in her room when she comes to pay you a visit, although your wife laces
her stays without one! The house during her stay assumes a festive,
neat, warm, jovial, snug appearance not visible at other seasons. You
yourself, dear sir, forget to go to sleep after dinner, and find
yourself all of a sudden (though you invariably lose) very fond of a
rubber. What good dinners you have--game every day, Malmsey-Madeira,
and no end of fish from London. Even the servants in the kitchen share
in the general prosperity; and, somehow, during the stay of Miss
MacWhirter's fat coachman, the beer is grown much stronger, and the
consumption of tea and sugar in the nursery (where her maid takes her
meals) is not regarded in the least. Is it so, or is it not so? I
appeal to the middle classes. Ah, gracious powers! I wish you would
send me an old aunt--a maiden aunt--an aunt with a lozenge on her
carriage, and a front of light coffee-coloured hair--how my children
should work workbags for her, and my Julia and I would make her
comfortable! Sweet--sweet vision! Foolish--foolish dream!
| So, this is one those chapters that doesn't advance the plot or anything, but instead gives us some more details and biography about the characters. First up, Lady Crawley. Sir Pitt's first wife had been a very high-class, aristocratic lady. They did not get along too well. So the second time around, he decided to marry down, picking the daughter of an ironmonger . The narrator has a sarcastic little tidbit telling us that if Lady Crawley had been allowed to stay in her own socioeconomic class, she would have been a pretty happy, if somewhat silly, wife. As it is, she no longer has any friends. Her old friends are too low-class for a Lady, but her low birth makes her too low-class for other aristocrats. She is kind of dumb, and since she no longer has her good looks, she exists as "a mere machine in her husband's house, of no more use than the late Lady Crawley's grand piano." She doesn't even have "character enough to take to drinking." Ouch. OK, enough about her. Now for Mr. Pitt Crawley, Sir Pitt's oldest son. He's prissy and a little compulsive with the whole acting-like-a-gentleman thing. He's so fixated on manners that at college his nickname was "Miss Crawley." Kids can be so cruel. Mr. Crawley is also very ambitious, and the narrator mocks him for having "a mediocrity which ought to have insured any man a success" . Get it? The joke is that only the average and boring get promoted. So far, Mr. Crawley's ambitions haven't gotten too many results. He's published some articles and is active in the government of the county. These achievements are meant to sound way lame. So that's Mr. Crawley. Here's a bit more about Sir Pitt: his cheapness and general bad nature make him a poor money manager. In the long run, he doesn't invest in his estate - which decreases any money he could make from it. And he is a horrible landlord and people person - which means that no good people will work for him and he is constantly swindled by the thieves that surround him. Now, more about the family finances. Sir Pitt still owes Mr. Crawley a bunch of money. This is money that Sir Pitt's first wife left to her eldest son , but which Sir Pitt has yet to give to Mr. Crawley. Probably because it's already been spent. And finally, one more family member. Sir Pitt and his brother Bute have a half-sister, Miss Crawley. She is super-rich and has no children. Both Sir Pitt and Bute really, really want her money. And even maybe more than that, they want the other one not to get any of it. | summary |
Miss Sharp Begins to Make Friends
And now, being received as a member of the amiable family whose
portraits we have sketched in the foregoing pages, it became naturally
Rebecca's duty to make herself, as she said, agreeable to her
benefactors, and to gain their confidence to the utmost of her power.
Who can but admire this quality of gratitude in an unprotected orphan;
and, if there entered some degree of selfishness into her calculations,
who can say but that her prudence was perfectly justifiable? "I am
alone in the world," said the friendless girl. "I have nothing to look
for but what my own labour can bring me; and while that little
pink-faced chit Amelia, with not half my sense, has ten thousand pounds
and an establishment secure, poor Rebecca (and my figure is far better
than hers) has only herself and her own wits to trust to. Well, let us
see if my wits cannot provide me with an honourable maintenance, and if
some day or the other I cannot show Miss Amelia my real superiority
over her. Not that I dislike poor Amelia: who can dislike such a
harmless, good-natured creature?--only it will be a fine day when I can
take my place above her in the world, as why, indeed, should I not?"
Thus it was that our little romantic friend formed visions of the
future for herself--nor must we be scandalised that, in all her castles
in the air, a husband was the principal inhabitant. Of what else have
young ladies to think, but husbands? Of what else do their dear mammas
think? "I must be my own mamma," said Rebecca; not without a tingling
consciousness of defeat, as she thought over her little misadventure
with Jos Sedley.
So she wisely determined to render her position with the Queen's
Crawley family comfortable and secure, and to this end resolved to make
friends of every one around her who could at all interfere with her
comfort.
As my Lady Crawley was not one of these personages, and a woman,
moreover, so indolent and void of character as not to be of the least
consequence in her own house, Rebecca soon found that it was not at all
necessary to cultivate her good will--indeed, impossible to gain it.
She used to talk to her pupils about their "poor mamma"; and, though
she treated that lady with every demonstration of cool respect, it was
to the rest of the family that she wisely directed the chief part of
her attentions.
With the young people, whose applause she thoroughly gained, her method
was pretty simple. She did not pester their young brains with too much
learning, but, on the contrary, let them have their own way in regard
to educating themselves; for what instruction is more effectual than
self-instruction? The eldest was rather fond of books, and as there was
in the old library at Queen's Crawley a considerable provision of works
of light literature of the last century, both in the French and English
languages (they had been purchased by the Secretary of the Tape and
Sealing Wax Office at the period of his disgrace), and as nobody ever
troubled the bookshelves but herself, Rebecca was enabled agreeably,
and, as it were, in playing, to impart a great deal of instruction to
Miss Rose Crawley.
She and Miss Rose thus read together many delightful French and English
works, among which may be mentioned those of the learned Dr. Smollett,
of the ingenious Mr. Henry Fielding, of the graceful and fantastic
Monsieur Crebillon the younger, whom our immortal poet Gray so much
admired, and of the universal Monsieur de Voltaire. Once, when Mr.
Crawley asked what the young people were reading, the governess replied
"Smollett." "Oh, Smollett," said Mr. Crawley, quite satisfied. "His
history is more dull, but by no means so dangerous as that of Mr. Hume.
It is history you are reading?" "Yes," said Miss Rose; without,
however, adding that it was the history of Mr. Humphrey Clinker. On
another occasion he was rather scandalised at finding his sister with a
book of French plays; but as the governess remarked that it was for the
purpose of acquiring the French idiom in conversation, he was fain to
be content. Mr. Crawley, as a diplomatist, was exceedingly proud of
his own skill in speaking the French language (for he was of the world
still), and not a little pleased with the compliments which the
governess continually paid him upon his proficiency.
Miss Violet's tastes were, on the contrary, more rude and boisterous
than those of her sister. She knew the sequestered spots where the
hens laid their eggs. She could climb a tree to rob the nests of the
feathered songsters of their speckled spoils. And her pleasure was to
ride the young colts, and to scour the plains like Camilla. She was the
favourite of her father and of the stablemen. She was the darling, and
withal the terror of the cook; for she discovered the haunts of the
jam-pots, and would attack them when they were within her reach. She
and her sister were engaged in constant battles. Any of which
peccadilloes, if Miss Sharp discovered, she did not tell them to Lady
Crawley; who would have told them to the father, or worse, to Mr.
Crawley; but promised not to tell if Miss Violet would be a good girl
and love her governess.
With Mr. Crawley Miss Sharp was respectful and obedient. She used to
consult him on passages of French which she could not understand,
though her mother was a Frenchwoman, and which he would construe to her
satisfaction: and, besides giving her his aid in profane literature, he
was kind enough to select for her books of a more serious tendency, and
address to her much of his conversation. She admired, beyond measure,
his speech at the Quashimaboo-Aid Society; took an interest in his
pamphlet on malt: was often affected, even to tears, by his discourses
of an evening, and would say--"Oh, thank you, sir," with a sigh, and a
look up to heaven, that made him occasionally condescend to shake hands
with her. "Blood is everything, after all," would that aristocratic
religionist say. "How Miss Sharp is awakened by my words, when not one
of the people here is touched. I am too fine for them--too delicate. I
must familiarise my style--but she understands it. Her mother was a
Montmorency."
Indeed it was from this famous family, as it appears, that Miss Sharp,
by the mother's side, was descended. Of course she did not say that her
mother had been on the stage; it would have shocked Mr. Crawley's
religious scruples. How many noble emigres had this horrid revolution
plunged in poverty! She had several stories about her ancestors ere
she had been many months in the house; some of which Mr. Crawley
happened to find in D'Hozier's dictionary, which was in the library,
and which strengthened his belief in their truth, and in the
high-breeding of Rebecca. Are we to suppose from this curiosity and
prying into dictionaries, could our heroine suppose that Mr. Crawley
was interested in her?--no, only in a friendly way. Have we not stated
that he was attached to Lady Jane Sheepshanks?
He took Rebecca to task once or twice about the propriety of playing at
backgammon with Sir Pitt, saying that it was a godless amusement, and
that she would be much better engaged in reading "Thrump's Legacy," or
"The Blind Washerwoman of Moorfields," or any work of a more serious
nature; but Miss Sharp said her dear mother used often to play the same
game with the old Count de Trictrac and the venerable Abbe du Cornet,
and so found an excuse for this and other worldly amusements.
But it was not only by playing at backgammon with the Baronet, that the
little governess rendered herself agreeable to her employer. She found
many different ways of being useful to him. She read over, with
indefatigable patience, all those law papers, with which, before she
came to Queen's Crawley, he had promised to entertain her. She
volunteered to copy many of his letters, and adroitly altered the
spelling of them so as to suit the usages of the present day. She
became interested in everything appertaining to the estate, to the
farm, the park, the garden, and the stables; and so delightful a
companion was she, that the Baronet would seldom take his
after-breakfast walk without her (and the children of course), when she
would give her advice as to the trees which were to be lopped in the
shrubberies, the garden-beds to be dug, the crops which were to be cut,
the horses which were to go to cart or plough. Before she had been a
year at Queen's Crawley she had quite won the Baronet's confidence; and
the conversation at the dinner-table, which before used to be held
between him and Mr. Horrocks the butler, was now almost exclusively
between Sir Pitt and Miss Sharp. She was almost mistress of the house
when Mr. Crawley was absent, but conducted herself in her new and
exalted situation with such circumspection and modesty as not to offend
the authorities of the kitchen and stable, among whom her behaviour was
always exceedingly modest and affable. She was quite a different
person from the haughty, shy, dissatisfied little girl whom we have
known previously, and this change of temper proved great prudence, a
sincere desire of amendment, or at any rate great moral courage on her
part. Whether it was the heart which dictated this new system of
complaisance and humility adopted by our Rebecca, is to be proved by
her after-history. A system of hypocrisy, which lasts through whole
years, is one seldom satisfactorily practised by a person of
one-and-twenty; however, our readers will recollect, that, though young
in years, our heroine was old in life and experience, and we have
written to no purpose if they have not discovered that she was a very
clever woman.
The elder and younger son of the house of Crawley were, like the
gentleman and lady in the weather-box, never at home together--they
hated each other cordially: indeed, Rawdon Crawley, the dragoon, had a
great contempt for the establishment altogether, and seldom came
thither except when his aunt paid her annual visit.
The great good quality of this old lady has been mentioned. She
possessed seventy thousand pounds, and had almost adopted Rawdon. She
disliked her elder nephew exceedingly, and despised him as a milksop.
In return he did not hesitate to state that her soul was irretrievably
lost, and was of opinion that his brother's chance in the next world
was not a whit better. "She is a godless woman of the world," would
Mr. Crawley say; "she lives with atheists and Frenchmen. My mind
shudders when I think of her awful, awful situation, and that, near as
she is to the grave, she should be so given up to vanity,
licentiousness, profaneness, and folly." In fact, the old lady declined
altogether to hear his hour's lecture of an evening; and when she came
to Queen's Crawley alone, he was obliged to pretermit his usual
devotional exercises.
"Shut up your sarmons, Pitt, when Miss Crawley comes down," said his
father; "she has written to say that she won't stand the preachifying."
"O, sir! consider the servants."
"The servants be hanged," said Sir Pitt; and his son thought even worse
would happen were they deprived of the benefit of his instruction.
"Why, hang it, Pitt!" said the father to his remonstrance. "You
wouldn't be such a flat as to let three thousand a year go out of the
family?"
"What is money compared to our souls, sir?" continued Mr. Crawley.
"You mean that the old lady won't leave the money to you?"--and who
knows but it was Mr. Crawley's meaning?
Old Miss Crawley was certainly one of the reprobate. She had a snug
little house in Park Lane, and, as she ate and drank a great deal too
much during the season in London, she went to Harrowgate or Cheltenham
for the summer. She was the most hospitable and jovial of old vestals,
and had been a beauty in her day, she said. (All old women were
beauties once, we very well know.) She was a bel esprit, and a dreadful
Radical for those days. She had been in France (where St. Just, they
say, inspired her with an unfortunate passion), and loved, ever after,
French novels, French cookery, and French wines. She read Voltaire,
and had Rousseau by heart; talked very lightly about divorce, and most
energetically of the rights of women. She had pictures of Mr. Fox in
every room in the house: when that statesman was in opposition, I am
not sure that she had not flung a main with him; and when he came into
office, she took great credit for bringing over to him Sir Pitt and his
colleague for Queen's Crawley, although Sir Pitt would have come over
himself, without any trouble on the honest lady's part. It is needless
to say that Sir Pitt was brought to change his views after the death of
the great Whig statesman.
This worthy old lady took a fancy to Rawdon Crawley when a boy, sent
him to Cambridge (in opposition to his brother at Oxford), and, when
the young man was requested by the authorities of the first-named
University to quit after a residence of two years, she bought him his
commission in the Life Guards Green.
A perfect and celebrated "blood," or dandy about town, was this young
officer. Boxing, rat-hunting, the fives court, and four-in-hand
driving were then the fashion of our British aristocracy; and he was an
adept in all these noble sciences. And though he belonged to the
household troops, who, as it was their duty to rally round the Prince
Regent, had not shown their valour in foreign service yet, Rawdon
Crawley had already (apropos of play, of which he was immoderately
fond) fought three bloody duels, in which he gave ample proofs of his
contempt for death.
"And for what follows after death," would Mr. Crawley observe, throwing
his gooseberry-coloured eyes up to the ceiling. He was always thinking
of his brother's soul, or of the souls of those who differed with him
in opinion: it is a sort of comfort which many of the serious give
themselves.
Silly, romantic Miss Crawley, far from being horrified at the courage
of her favourite, always used to pay his debts after his duels; and
would not listen to a word that was whispered against his morality.
"He will sow his wild oats," she would say, "and is worth far more than
that puling hypocrite of a brother of his."
| OK, back to the actual plot. Becky has now become even smarter and better at faking niceness than before. She uses her new skills to worm her way into the Crawley family. She endears herself to the two girls in her charge by not making them learn anything and generally leaving them alone to do whatever they want to do. She then gets on prissy Mr. Crawley's good side by telling him how he smart he is. Finally, she ingratiates herself with Sir Pitt in two ways. One, she's really pretty, and he's into hot young women. And two, she actually is really smart and starts to help him manage the Queen's Crawley estate and deal with all of his lawsuits in an organized way. ? Becky is awesome and is making all kinds of lemonade with the Crawley lemons. Oh, and here's some more info about Miss Crawley, Sir Pitt's rich old sister. She really loves her nephew. Not Mr. Crawley, but his younger brother, Rawdon. He's a dragoon , and an all around super-macho guy. He likes pool, cards, drinking, and the ladies. He got kicked out of college for this lifestyle and joined the army. Unlike his brother, he has certainly never been called "Miss Crawley." | summary |
Arcadian Simplicity
Besides these honest folks at the Hall (whose simplicity and sweet
rural purity surely show the advantage of a country life over a town
one), we must introduce the reader to their relatives and neighbours at
the Rectory, Bute Crawley and his wife.
The Reverend Bute Crawley was a tall, stately, jolly, shovel-hatted
man, far more popular in his county than the Baronet his brother. At
college he pulled stroke-oar in the Christchurch boat, and had thrashed
all the best bruisers of the "town." He carried his taste for boxing
and athletic exercises into private life; there was not a fight within
twenty miles at which he was not present, nor a race, nor a coursing
match, nor a regatta, nor a ball, nor an election, nor a visitation
dinner, nor indeed a good dinner in the whole county, but he found
means to attend it. You might see his bay mare and gig-lamps a score
of miles away from his Rectory House, whenever there was any
dinner-party at Fuddleston, or at Roxby, or at Wapshot Hall, or at the
great lords of the county, with all of whom he was intimate. He had a
fine voice; sang "A southerly wind and a cloudy sky"; and gave the
"whoop" in chorus with general applause. He rode to hounds in a
pepper-and-salt frock, and was one of the best fishermen in the county.
Mrs. Crawley, the rector's wife, was a smart little body, who wrote
this worthy divine's sermons. Being of a domestic turn, and keeping
the house a great deal with her daughters, she ruled absolutely within
the Rectory, wisely giving her husband full liberty without. He was
welcome to come and go, and dine abroad as many days as his fancy
dictated, for Mrs. Crawley was a saving woman and knew the price of
port wine. Ever since Mrs. Bute carried off the young Rector of
Queen's Crawley (she was of a good family, daughter of the late
Lieut.-Colonel Hector McTavish, and she and her mother played for Bute
and won him at Harrowgate), she had been a prudent and thrifty wife to
him. In spite of her care, however, he was always in debt. It took
him at least ten years to pay off his college bills contracted during
his father's lifetime. In the year 179-, when he was just clear of
these incumbrances, he gave the odds of 100 to 1 (in twenties) against
Kangaroo, who won the Derby. The Rector was obliged to take up the
money at a ruinous interest, and had been struggling ever since. His
sister helped him with a hundred now and then, but of course his great
hope was in her death--when "hang it" (as he would say), "Matilda must
leave me half her money."
So that the Baronet and his brother had every reason which two brothers
possibly can have for being by the ears. Sir Pitt had had the better
of Bute in innumerable family transactions. Young Pitt not only did
not hunt, but set up a meeting house under his uncle's very nose.
Rawdon, it was known, was to come in for the bulk of Miss Crawley's
property. These money transactions--these speculations in life and
death--these silent battles for reversionary spoil--make brothers very
loving towards each other in Vanity Fair. I, for my part, have known a
five-pound note to interpose and knock up a half century's attachment
between two brethren; and can't but admire, as I think what a fine and
durable thing Love is among worldly people.
It cannot be supposed that the arrival of such a personage as Rebecca
at Queen's Crawley, and her gradual establishment in the good graces of
all people there, could be unremarked by Mrs. Bute Crawley. Mrs. Bute,
who knew how many days the sirloin of beef lasted at the Hall; how much
linen was got ready at the great wash; how many peaches were on the
south wall; how many doses her ladyship took when she was ill--for such
points are matters of intense interest to certain persons in the
country--Mrs. Bute, I say, could not pass over the Hall governess
without making every inquiry respecting her history and character.
There was always the best understanding between the servants at the
Rectory and the Hall. There was always a good glass of ale in the
kitchen of the former place for the Hall people, whose ordinary drink
was very small--and, indeed, the Rector's lady knew exactly how much
malt went to every barrel of Hall beer--ties of relationship existed
between the Hall and Rectory domestics, as between their masters; and
through these channels each family was perfectly well acquainted with
the doings of the other. That, by the way, may be set down as a
general remark. When you and your brother are friends, his doings are
indifferent to you. When you have quarrelled, all his outgoings and
incomings you know, as if you were his spy.
Very soon then after her arrival, Rebecca began to take a regular place
in Mrs. Crawley's bulletin from the Hall. It was to this effect: "The
black porker's killed--weighed x stone--salted the sides--pig's pudding
and leg of pork for dinner. Mr. Cramp from Mudbury, over with Sir Pitt
about putting John Blackmore in gaol--Mr. Pitt at meeting (with all the
names of the people who attended)--my lady as usual--the young ladies
with the governess."
Then the report would come--the new governess be a rare manager--Sir
Pitt be very sweet on her--Mr. Crawley too--He be reading tracts to
her--"What an abandoned wretch!" said little, eager, active,
black-faced Mrs. Bute Crawley.
Finally, the reports were that the governess had "come round"
everybody, wrote Sir Pitt's letters, did his business, managed his
accounts--had the upper hand of the whole house, my lady, Mr. Crawley,
the girls and all--at which Mrs. Crawley declared she was an artful
hussy, and had some dreadful designs in view. Thus the doings at the
Hall were the great food for conversation at the Rectory, and Mrs.
Bute's bright eyes spied out everything that took place in the enemy's
camp--everything and a great deal besides.
Mrs. Bute Crawley to Miss Pinkerton, The Mall, Chiswick.
Rectory, Queen's Crawley, December--.
My Dear Madam,--Although it is so many years since I profited by your
delightful and invaluable instructions, yet I have ever retained the
FONDEST and most reverential regard for Miss Pinkerton, and DEAR
Chiswick. I hope your health is GOOD. The world and the cause of
education cannot afford to lose Miss Pinkerton for MANY MANY YEARS.
When my friend, Lady Fuddleston, mentioned that her dear girls required
an instructress (I am too poor to engage a governess for mine, but was
I not educated at Chiswick?)--"Who," I exclaimed, "can we consult but
the excellent, the incomparable Miss Pinkerton?" In a word, have you,
dear madam, any ladies on your list, whose services might be made
available to my kind friend and neighbour? I assure you she will take
no governess BUT OF YOUR CHOOSING.
My dear husband is pleased to say that he likes EVERYTHING WHICH COMES
FROM MISS PINKERTON'S SCHOOL. How I wish I could present him and my
beloved girls to the friend of my youth, and the ADMIRED of the great
lexicographer of our country! If you ever travel into Hampshire, Mr.
Crawley begs me to say, he hopes you will adorn our RURAL RECTORY with
your presence. 'Tis the humble but happy home of
Your affectionate Martha Crawley
P.S. Mr. Crawley's brother, the baronet, with whom we are not, alas!
upon those terms of UNITY in which it BECOMES BRETHREN TO DWELL, has a
governess for his little girls, who, I am told, had the good fortune to
be educated at Chiswick. I hear various reports of her; and as I have
the tenderest interest in my dearest little nieces, whom I wish, in
spite of family differences, to see among my own children--and as I
long to be attentive to ANY PUPIL OF YOURS--do, my dear Miss Pinkerton,
tell me the history of this young lady, whom, for YOUR SAKE, I am most
anxious to befriend.--M. C.
Miss Pinkerton to Mrs. Bute Crawley.
Johnson House, Chiswick, Dec. 18--.
Dear Madam,--I have the honour to acknowledge your polite
communication, to which I promptly reply. 'Tis most gratifying to one
in my most arduous position to find that my maternal cares have
elicited a responsive affection; and to recognize in the amiable Mrs.
Bute Crawley my excellent pupil of former years, the sprightly and
accomplished Miss Martha MacTavish. I am happy to have under my charge
now the daughters of many of those who were your contemporaries at my
establishment--what pleasure it would give me if your own beloved young
ladies had need of my instructive superintendence!
Presenting my respectful compliments to Lady Fuddleston, I have the
honour (epistolarily) to introduce to her ladyship my two friends, Miss
Tuffin and Miss Hawky.
Either of these young ladies is PERFECTLY QUALIFIED to instruct in
Greek, Latin, and the rudiments of Hebrew; in mathematics and history;
in Spanish, French, Italian, and geography; in music, vocal and
instrumental; in dancing, without the aid of a master; and in the
elements of natural sciences. In the use of the globes both are
proficients. In addition to these Miss Tuffin, who is daughter of the
late Reverend Thomas Tuffin (Fellow of Corpus College, Cambridge), can
instruct in the Syriac language, and the elements of Constitutional
law. But as she is only eighteen years of age, and of exceedingly
pleasing personal appearance, perhaps this young lady may be
objectionable in Sir Huddleston Fuddleston's family.
Miss Letitia Hawky, on the other hand, is not personally well-favoured.
She is twenty-nine; her face is much pitted with the small-pox. She
has a halt in her gait, red hair, and a trifling obliquity of vision.
Both ladies are endowed with EVERY MORAL AND RELIGIOUS VIRTUE. Their
terms, of course, are such as their accomplishments merit. With my
most grateful respects to the Reverend Bute Crawley, I have the honour
to be,
Dear Madam,
Your most faithful and obedient servant, Barbara Pinkerton.
P.S. The Miss Sharp, whom you mention as governess to Sir Pitt
Crawley, Bart., M.P., was a pupil of mine, and I have nothing to say in
her disfavour. Though her appearance is disagreeable, we cannot control
the operations of nature: and though her parents were disreputable (her
father being a painter, several times bankrupt, and her mother, as I
have since learned, with horror, a dancer at the Opera); yet her
talents are considerable, and I cannot regret that I received her OUT
OF CHARITY. My dread is, lest the principles of the mother--who was
represented to me as a French Countess, forced to emigrate in the late
revolutionary horrors; but who, as I have since found, was a person of
the very lowest order and morals--should at any time prove to be
HEREDITARY in the unhappy young woman whom I took as AN OUTCAST. But
her principles have hitherto been correct (I believe), and I am sure
nothing will occur to injure them in the elegant and refined circle of
the eminent Sir Pitt Crawley.
Miss Rebecca Sharp to Miss Amelia Sedley.
I have not written to my beloved Amelia for these many weeks past, for
what news was there to tell of the sayings and doings at Humdrum Hall,
as I have christened it; and what do you care whether the turnip crop
is good or bad; whether the fat pig weighed thirteen stone or fourteen;
and whether the beasts thrive well upon mangelwurzel? Every day since I
last wrote has been like its neighbour. Before breakfast, a walk with
Sir Pitt and his spud; after breakfast studies (such as they are) in
the schoolroom; after schoolroom, reading and writing about lawyers,
leases, coal-mines, canals, with Sir Pitt (whose secretary I am
become); after dinner, Mr. Crawley's discourses on the baronet's
backgammon; during both of which amusements my lady looks on with equal
placidity. She has become rather more interesting by being ailing of
late, which has brought a new visitor to the Hall, in the person of a
young doctor. Well, my dear, young women need never despair. The young
doctor gave a certain friend of yours to understand that, if she chose
to be Mrs. Glauber, she was welcome to ornament the surgery! I told his
impudence that the gilt pestle and mortar was quite ornament enough; as
if I was born, indeed, to be a country surgeon's wife! Mr. Glauber went
home seriously indisposed at his rebuff, took a cooling draught, and is
now quite cured. Sir Pitt applauded my resolution highly; he would be
sorry to lose his little secretary, I think; and I believe the old
wretch likes me as much as it is in his nature to like any one. Marry,
indeed! and with a country apothecary, after-- No, no, one cannot so
soon forget old associations, about which I will talk no more. Let us
return to Humdrum Hall.
For some time past it is Humdrum Hall no longer. My dear, Miss Crawley
has arrived with her fat horses, fat servants, fat spaniel--the great
rich Miss Crawley, with seventy thousand pounds in the five per cents.,
whom, or I had better say WHICH, her two brothers adore. She looks
very apoplectic, the dear soul; no wonder her brothers are anxious
about her. You should see them struggling to settle her cushions, or
to hand her coffee! "When I come into the country," she says (for she
has a great deal of humour), "I leave my toady, Miss Briggs, at home.
My brothers are my toadies here, my dear, and a pretty pair they are!"
When she comes into the country our hall is thrown open, and for a
month, at least, you would fancy old Sir Walpole was come to life
again. We have dinner-parties, and drive out in the coach-and-four--the
footmen put on their newest canary-coloured liveries; we drink claret
and champagne as if we were accustomed to it every day. We have wax
candles in the schoolroom, and fires to warm ourselves with. Lady
Crawley is made to put on the brightest pea-green in her wardrobe, and
my pupils leave off their thick shoes and tight old tartan pelisses,
and wear silk stockings and muslin frocks, as fashionable baronets'
daughters should. Rose came in yesterday in a sad plight--the
Wiltshire sow (an enormous pet of hers) ran her down, and destroyed a
most lovely flowered lilac silk dress by dancing over it--had this
happened a week ago, Sir Pitt would have sworn frightfully, have boxed
the poor wretch's ears, and put her upon bread and water for a month.
All he said was, "I'll serve you out, Miss, when your aunt's gone," and
laughed off the accident as quite trivial. Let us hope his wrath will
have passed away before Miss Crawley's departure. I hope so, for Miss
Rose's sake, I am sure. What a charming reconciler and peacemaker money
is!
Another admirable effect of Miss Crawley and her seventy thousand
pounds is to be seen in the conduct of the two brothers Crawley. I
mean the baronet and the rector, not OUR brothers--but the former, who
hate each other all the year round, become quite loving at Christmas.
I wrote to you last year how the abominable horse-racing rector was in
the habit of preaching clumsy sermons at us at church, and how Sir Pitt
snored in answer. When Miss Crawley arrives there is no such thing as
quarrelling heard of--the Hall visits the Rectory, and vice versa--the
parson and the Baronet talk about the pigs and the poachers, and the
county business, in the most affable manner, and without quarrelling in
their cups, I believe--indeed Miss Crawley won't hear of their
quarrelling, and vows that she will leave her money to the Shropshire
Crawleys if they offend her. If they were clever people, those
Shropshire Crawleys, they might have it all, I think; but the
Shropshire Crawley is a clergyman like his Hampshire cousin, and
mortally offended Miss Crawley (who had fled thither in a fit of rage
against her impracticable brethren) by some strait-laced notions of
morality. He would have prayers in the house, I believe.
Our sermon books are shut up when Miss Crawley arrives, and Mr. Pitt,
whom she abominates, finds it convenient to go to town. On the other
hand, the young dandy--"blood," I believe, is the term--Captain Crawley
makes his appearance, and I suppose you will like to know what sort of
a person he is.
Well, he is a very large young dandy. He is six feet high, and speaks
with a great voice; and swears a great deal; and orders about the
servants, who all adore him nevertheless; for he is very generous of
his money, and the domestics will do anything for him. Last week the
keepers almost killed a bailiff and his man who came down from London
to arrest the Captain, and who were found lurking about the Park
wall--they beat them, ducked them, and were going to shoot them for
poachers, but the baronet interfered.
The Captain has a hearty contempt for his father, I can see, and calls
him an old PUT, an old SNOB, an old CHAW-BACON, and numberless other
pretty names. He has a DREADFUL REPUTATION among the ladies. He brings
his hunters home with him, lives with the Squires of the county, asks
whom he pleases to dinner, and Sir Pitt dares not say no, for fear of
offending Miss Crawley, and missing his legacy when she dies of her
apoplexy. Shall I tell you a compliment the Captain paid me? I must,
it is so pretty. One evening we actually had a dance; there was Sir
Huddleston Fuddleston and his family, Sir Giles Wapshot and his young
ladies, and I don't know how many more. Well, I heard him say--"By
Jove, she's a neat little filly!" meaning your humble servant; and he
did me the honour to dance two country-dances with me. He gets on
pretty gaily with the young Squires, with whom he drinks, bets, rides,
and talks about hunting and shooting; but he says the country girls are
BORES; indeed, I don't think he is far wrong. You should see the
contempt with which they look down on poor me! When they dance I sit
and play the piano very demurely; but the other night, coming in rather
flushed from the dining-room, and seeing me employed in this way, he
swore out loud that I was the best dancer in the room, and took a great
oath that he would have the fiddlers from Mudbury.
"I'll go and play a country-dance," said Mrs. Bute Crawley, very
readily (she is a little, black-faced old woman in a turban, rather
crooked, and with very twinkling eyes); and after the Captain and your
poor little Rebecca had performed a dance together, do you know she
actually did me the honour to compliment me upon my steps! Such a thing
was never heard of before; the proud Mrs. Bute Crawley, first cousin to
the Earl of Tiptoff, who won't condescend to visit Lady Crawley, except
when her sister is in the country. Poor Lady Crawley! during most part
of these gaieties, she is upstairs taking pills.
Mrs. Bute has all of a sudden taken a great fancy to me. "My dear Miss
Sharp," she says, "why not bring over your girls to the Rectory?--their
cousins will be so happy to see them." I know what she means. Signor
Clementi did not teach us the piano for nothing; at which price Mrs.
Bute hopes to get a professor for her children. I can see through her
schemes, as though she told them to me; but I shall go, as I am
determined to make myself agreeable--is it not a poor governess's duty,
who has not a friend or protector in the world? The Rector's wife paid
me a score of compliments about the progress my pupils made, and
thought, no doubt, to touch my heart--poor, simple, country soul!--as
if I cared a fig about my pupils!
Your India muslin and your pink silk, dearest Amelia, are said to
become me very well. They are a good deal worn now; but, you know, we
poor girls can't afford des fraiches toilettes. Happy, happy you! who
have but to drive to St. James's Street, and a dear mother who will
give you any thing you ask. Farewell, dearest girl,
Your affectionate Rebecca.
P.S.--I wish you could have seen the faces of the Miss Blackbrooks
(Admiral Blackbrook's daughters, my dear), fine young ladies, with
dresses from London, when Captain Rawdon selected poor me for a partner!
When Mrs. Bute Crawley (whose artifices our ingenious Rebecca had so
soon discovered) had procured from Miss Sharp the promise of a visit,
she induced the all-powerful Miss Crawley to make the necessary
application to Sir Pitt, and the good-natured old lady, who loved to be
gay herself, and to see every one gay and happy round about her, was
quite charmed, and ready to establish a reconciliation and intimacy
between her two brothers. It was therefore agreed that the young people
of both families should visit each other frequently for the future, and
the friendship of course lasted as long as the jovial old mediatrix was
there to keep the peace.
"Why did you ask that scoundrel, Rawdon Crawley, to dine?" said the
Rector to his lady, as they were walking home through the park. "I
don't want the fellow. He looks down upon us country people as so many
blackamoors. He's never content unless he gets my yellow-sealed wine,
which costs me ten shillings a bottle, hang him! Besides, he's such an
infernal character--he's a gambler--he's a drunkard--he's a profligate
in every way. He shot a man in a duel--he's over head and ears in
debt, and he's robbed me and mine of the best part of Miss Crawley's
fortune. Waxy says she has him"--here the Rector shook his fist at the
moon, with something very like an oath, and added, in a melancholious
tone, "--down in her will for fifty thousand; and there won't be above
thirty to divide."
"I think she's going," said the Rector's wife. "She was very red in
the face when we left dinner. I was obliged to unlace her."
"She drank seven glasses of champagne," said the reverend gentleman, in
a low voice; "and filthy champagne it is, too, that my brother poisons
us with--but you women never know what's what."
"We know nothing," said Mrs. Bute Crawley.
"She drank cherry-brandy after dinner," continued his Reverence, "and
took curacao with her coffee. I wouldn't take a glass for a five-pound
note: it kills me with heartburn. She can't stand it, Mrs.
Crawley--she must go--flesh and blood won't bear it! and I lay five to
two, Matilda drops in a year."
Indulging in these solemn speculations, and thinking about his debts,
and his son Jim at College, and Frank at Woolwich, and the four girls,
who were no beauties, poor things, and would not have a penny but what
they got from the aunt's expected legacy, the Rector and his lady
walked on for a while.
"Pitt can't be such an infernal villain as to sell the reversion of the
living. And that Methodist milksop of an eldest son looks to
Parliament," continued Mr. Crawley, after a pause.
"Sir Pitt Crawley will do anything," said the Rector's wife. "We must
get Miss Crawley to make him promise it to James."
"Pitt will promise anything," replied the brother. "He promised he'd
pay my college bills, when my father died; he promised he'd build the
new wing to the Rectory; he promised he'd let me have Jibb's field and
the Six-acre Meadow--and much he executed his promises! And it's to
this man's son--this scoundrel, gambler, swindler, murderer of a Rawdon
Crawley, that Matilda leaves the bulk of her money. I say it's
un-Christian. By Jove, it is. The infamous dog has got every vice
except hypocrisy, and that belongs to his brother."
"Hush, my dearest love! we're in Sir Pitt's grounds," interposed his
wife.
"I say he has got every vice, Mrs. Crawley. Don't Ma'am, bully me.
Didn't he shoot Captain Marker? Didn't he rob young Lord Dovedale at
the Cocoa-Tree? Didn't he cross the fight between Bill Soames and the
Cheshire Trump, by which I lost forty pound? You know he did; and as
for the women, why, you heard that before me, in my own magistrate's
room."
"For heaven's sake, Mr. Crawley," said the lady, "spare me the details."
"And you ask this villain into your house!" continued the exasperated
Rector. "You, the mother of a young family--the wife of a clergyman of
the Church of England. By Jove!"
"Bute Crawley, you are a fool," said the Rector's wife scornfully.
"Well, Ma'am, fool or not--and I don't say, Martha, I'm so clever as
you are, I never did. But I won't meet Rawdon Crawley, that's flat.
I'll go over to Huddleston, that I will, and see his black greyhound,
Mrs. Crawley; and I'll run Lancelot against him for fifty. By Jove, I
will; or against any dog in England. But I won't meet that beast
Rawdon Crawley."
"Mr. Crawley, you are intoxicated, as usual," replied his wife. And
the next morning, when the Rector woke, and called for small beer, she
put him in mind of his promise to visit Sir Huddleston Fuddleston on
Saturday, and as he knew he should have a wet night, it was agreed that
he might gallop back again in time for church on Sunday morning. Thus
it will be seen that the parishioners of Crawley were equally happy in
their Squire and in their Rector.
Miss Crawley had not long been established at the Hall before Rebecca's
fascinations had won the heart of that good-natured London rake, as
they had of the country innocents whom we have been describing. Taking
her accustomed drive, one day, she thought fit to order that "that
little governess" should accompany her to Mudbury. Before they had
returned Rebecca had made a conquest of her; having made her laugh four
times, and amused her during the whole of the little journey.
"Not let Miss Sharp dine at table!" said she to Sir Pitt, who had
arranged a dinner of ceremony, and asked all the neighbouring baronets.
"My dear creature, do you suppose I can talk about the nursery with
Lady Fuddleston, or discuss justices' business with that goose, old Sir
Giles Wapshot? I insist upon Miss Sharp appearing. Let Lady Crawley
remain upstairs, if there is no room. But little Miss Sharp! Why, she's
the only person fit to talk to in the county!"
Of course, after such a peremptory order as this, Miss Sharp, the
governess, received commands to dine with the illustrious company below
stairs. And when Sir Huddleston had, with great pomp and ceremony,
handed Miss Crawley in to dinner, and was preparing to take his place
by her side, the old lady cried out, in a shrill voice, "Becky Sharp!
Miss Sharp! Come you and sit by me and amuse me; and let Sir
Huddleston sit by Lady Wapshot."
When the parties were over, and the carriages had rolled away, the
insatiable Miss Crawley would say, "Come to my dressing room, Becky,
and let us abuse the company"--which, between them, this pair of
friends did perfectly. Old Sir Huddleston wheezed a great deal at
dinner; Sir Giles Wapshot had a particularly noisy manner of imbibing
his soup, and her ladyship a wink of the left eye; all of which Becky
caricatured to admiration; as well as the particulars of the night's
conversation; the politics; the war; the quarter-sessions; the famous
run with the H.H., and those heavy and dreary themes, about which
country gentlemen converse. As for the Misses Wapshot's toilettes and
Lady Fuddleston's famous yellow hat, Miss Sharp tore them to tatters,
to the infinite amusement of her audience.
"My dear, you are a perfect trouvaille," Miss Crawley would say. "I
wish you could come to me in London, but I couldn't make a butt of you
as I do of poor Briggs no, no, you little sly creature; you are too
clever--Isn't she, Firkin?"
Mrs. Firkin (who was dressing the very small remnant of hair which
remained on Miss Crawley's pate), flung up her head and said, "I think
Miss is very clever," with the most killing sarcastic air. In fact,
Mrs. Firkin had that natural jealousy which is one of the main
principles of every honest woman.
After rebuffing Sir Huddleston Fuddleston, Miss Crawley ordered that
Rawdon Crawley should lead her in to dinner every day, and that Becky
should follow with her cushion--or else she would have Becky's arm and
Rawdon with the pillow. "We must sit together," she said. "We're the
only three Christians in the county, my love"--in which case, it must
be confessed, that religion was at a very low ebb in the county of
Hants.
Besides being such a fine religionist, Miss Crawley was, as we have
said, an Ultra-liberal in opinions, and always took occasion to express
these in the most candid manner.
"What is birth, my dear!" she would say to Rebecca--"Look at my brother
Pitt; look at the Huddlestons, who have been here since Henry II; look
at poor Bute at the parsonage--is any one of them equal to you in
intelligence or breeding? Equal to you--they are not even equal to poor
dear Briggs, my companion, or Bowls, my butler. You, my love, are a
little paragon--positively a little jewel--You have more brains than
half the shire--if merit had its reward you ought to be a Duchess--no,
there ought to be no duchesses at all--but you ought to have no
superior, and I consider you, my love, as my equal in every respect;
and--will you put some coals on the fire, my dear; and will you pick
this dress of mine, and alter it, you who can do it so well?" So this
old philanthropist used to make her equal run of her errands, execute
her millinery, and read her to sleep with French novels, every night.
At this time, as some old readers may recollect, the genteel world had
been thrown into a considerable state of excitement by two events,
which, as the papers say, might give employment to the gentlemen of the
long robe. Ensign Shafton had run away with Lady Barbara Fitzurse, the
Earl of Bruin's daughter and heiress; and poor Vere Vane, a gentleman
who, up to forty, had maintained a most respectable character and
reared a numerous family, suddenly and outrageously left his home, for
the sake of Mrs. Rougemont, the actress, who was sixty-five years of
age.
"That was the most beautiful part of dear Lord Nelson's character,"
Miss Crawley said. "He went to the deuce for a woman. There must be
good in a man who will do that. I adore all imprudent matches.-- What
I like best, is for a nobleman to marry a miller's daughter, as Lord
Flowerdale did--it makes all the women so angry--I wish some great man
would run away with you, my dear; I'm sure you're pretty enough."
"Two post-boys!--Oh, it would be delightful!" Rebecca owned.
"And what I like next best, is for a poor fellow to run away with a
rich girl. I have set my heart on Rawdon running away with some one."
"A rich some one, or a poor some one?"
"Why, you goose! Rawdon has not a shilling but what I give him. He is
crible de dettes--he must repair his fortunes, and succeed in the
world."
"Is he very clever?" Rebecca asked.
"Clever, my love?--not an idea in the world beyond his horses, and his
regiment, and his hunting, and his play; but he must succeed--he's so
delightfully wicked. Don't you know he has hit a man, and shot an
injured father through the hat only? He's adored in his regiment; and
all the young men at Wattier's and the Cocoa-Tree swear by him."
When Miss Rebecca Sharp wrote to her beloved friend the account of the
little ball at Queen's Crawley, and the manner in which, for the first
time, Captain Crawley had distinguished her, she did not, strange to
relate, give an altogether accurate account of the transaction. The
Captain had distinguished her a great number of times before. The
Captain had met her in a half-score of walks. The Captain had lighted
upon her in a half-hundred of corridors and passages. The Captain had
hung over her piano twenty times of an evening (my Lady was now
upstairs, being ill, and nobody heeded her) as Miss Sharp sang. The
Captain had written her notes (the best that the great blundering
dragoon could devise and spell; but dulness gets on as well as any
other quality with women). But when he put the first of the notes into
the leaves of the song she was singing, the little governess, rising
and looking him steadily in the face, took up the triangular missive
daintily, and waved it about as if it were a cocked hat, and she,
advancing to the enemy, popped the note into the fire, and made him a
very low curtsey, and went back to her place, and began to sing away
again more merrily than ever.
"What's that?" said Miss Crawley, interrupted in her after-dinner doze
by the stoppage of the music.
"It's a false note," Miss Sharp said with a laugh; and Rawdon Crawley
fumed with rage and mortification.
Seeing the evident partiality of Miss Crawley for the new governess,
how good it was of Mrs. Bute Crawley not to be jealous, and to welcome
the young lady to the Rectory, and not only her, but Rawdon Crawley,
her husband's rival in the Old Maid's five per cents! They became very
fond of each other's society, Mrs. Crawley and her nephew. He gave up
hunting; he declined entertainments at Fuddleston: he would not dine
with the mess of the depot at Mudbury: his great pleasure was to stroll
over to Crawley parsonage--whither Miss Crawley came too; and as their
mamma was ill, why not the children with Miss Sharp? So the children
(little dears!) came with Miss Sharp; and of an evening some of the
party would walk back together. Not Miss Crawley--she preferred her
carriage--but the walk over the Rectory fields, and in at the little
park wicket, and through the dark plantation, and up the checkered
avenue to Queen's Crawley, was charming in the moonlight to two such
lovers of the picturesque as the Captain and Miss Rebecca.
"O those stars, those stars!" Miss Rebecca would say, turning her
twinkling green eyes up towards them. "I feel myself almost a spirit
when I gaze upon them."
"O--ah--Gad--yes, so do I exactly, Miss Sharp," the other enthusiast
replied. "You don't mind my cigar, do you, Miss Sharp?" Miss Sharp
loved the smell of a cigar out of doors beyond everything in the
world--and she just tasted one too, in the prettiest way possible, and
gave a little puff, and a little scream, and a little giggle, and
restored the delicacy to the Captain, who twirled his moustache, and
straightway puffed it into a blaze that glowed quite red in the dark
plantation, and swore--"Jove--aw--Gad--aw--it's the finest segaw I ever
smoked in the world aw," for his intellect and conversation were alike
brilliant and becoming to a heavy young dragoon.
Old Sir Pitt, who was taking his pipe and beer, and talking to John
Horrocks about a "ship" that was to be killed, espied the pair so
occupied from his study-window, and with dreadful oaths swore that if
it wasn't for Miss Crawley, he'd take Rawdon and bundle un out of
doors, like a rogue as he was.
"He be a bad'n, sure enough," Mr. Horrocks remarked; "and his man
Flethers is wuss, and have made such a row in the housekeeper's room
about the dinners and hale, as no lord would make--but I think Miss
Sharp's a match for'n, Sir Pitt," he added, after a pause.
And so, in truth, she was--for father and son too.
| OK, now a bit about the other side of the family - Sir Pitt and Miss Crawley's younger brother Bute Crawley, who is a minister. And what a minister! He likes drinking, gambling, hunting, and going out to dinner. His wife writes all his sermons and tries to deal with his gambling debts. He's basically waiting for his sister, Miss Crawley, to die and leave him her money. Since Sir Pitt is hoping for the same, you can imagine how friendly that makes the two of them. Mrs. Bute as a matter of course bribes all the servants from Queen's Crawley to tell her what is going on there. She soon learns about Becky and how well she has been getting along with everyone. This makes Mrs. Bute worry - most likely, she is worried that Sir Pitt will marry Becky. Mrs. Bute writes a letter to Miss Pinkerton. Turns out Mrs. Bute went to Pinkerton's school too, and wants some dish about this new governess. Miss Pinkerton sends back a super passive-aggressive note all about Becky's low-class birth , basically implying that Becky herself is probably two steps away from being a prostitute. Meanwhile, Becky writes Amelia another letter with news and adventures: Lady Crawley has been sick, and her doctor proposed to Becky. Becky turned him down, pretty angrily - "as if I was born, indeed, to be a country surgeon's wife!" . At the same time, Miss Crawley, Sir Pitt's rich sister, has come to visit. She's a real character: she overeats, overdrinks, and is used to being overindulged because of her money. When she visits , Sir Pitt and Bute pretend to get along. Mr. Pitt, the prissy one, leaves for London , and Rawdon comes to town. Becky tells Amelia that Rawdon has paid her a compliment. When he saw her dancing, he said, "By Jove, she's a neat little filly!" . He's quite a charmer. After the letter ends, the narrator tells us that Rawdon and Becky have quite the little flirtation going on. She's been puffing on his cigar and everything. | summary |
Quite a Sentimental Chapter
We must now take leave of Arcadia, and those amiable people practising
the rural virtues there, and travel back to London, to inquire what has
become of Miss Amelia.
"We don't care a fig for her," writes some unknown correspondent with a
pretty little handwriting and a pink seal to her note. "She is fade and
insipid," and adds some more kind remarks in this strain, which I should
never have repeated at all, but that they are in truth prodigiously
complimentary to the young lady whom they concern.
Has the beloved reader, in his experience of society, never heard
similar remarks by good-natured female friends; who always wonder what
you CAN see in Miss Smith that is so fascinating; or what COULD induce
Major Jones to propose for that silly insignificant simpering Miss
Thompson, who has nothing but her wax-doll face to recommend her? What
is there in a pair of pink cheeks and blue eyes forsooth? these dear
Moralists ask, and hint wisely that the gifts of genius, the
accomplishments of the mind, the mastery of Mangnall's Questions, and a
ladylike knowledge of botany and geology, the knack of making poetry,
the power of rattling sonatas in the Herz-manner, and so forth, are far
more valuable endowments for a female, than those fugitive charms which
a few years will inevitably tarnish. It is quite edifying to hear
women speculate upon the worthlessness and the duration of beauty.
But though virtue is a much finer thing, and those hapless creatures
who suffer under the misfortune of good looks ought to be continually
put in mind of the fate which awaits them; and though, very likely, the
heroic female character which ladies admire is a more glorious and
beautiful object than the kind, fresh, smiling, artless, tender little
domestic goddess, whom men are inclined to worship--yet the latter and
inferior sort of women must have this consolation--that the men do
admire them after all; and that, in spite of all our kind friends'
warnings and protests, we go on in our desperate error and folly, and
shall to the end of the chapter. Indeed, for my own part, though I have
been repeatedly told by persons for whom I have the greatest respect,
that Miss Brown is an insignificant chit, and Mrs. White has nothing
but her petit minois chiffonne, and Mrs. Black has not a word to say
for herself; yet I know that I have had the most delightful
conversations with Mrs. Black (of course, my dear Madam, they are
inviolable): I see all the men in a cluster round Mrs. White's chair:
all the young fellows battling to dance with Miss Brown; and so I am
tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great
compliment to a woman.
The young ladies in Amelia's society did this for her very
satisfactorily. For instance, there was scarcely any point upon which
the Misses Osborne, George's sisters, and the Mesdemoiselles Dobbin
agreed so well as in their estimate of her very trifling merits: and
their wonder that their brothers could find any charms in her. "We are
kind to her," the Misses Osborne said, a pair of fine black-browed
young ladies who had had the best of governesses, masters, and
milliners; and they treated her with such extreme kindness and
condescension, and patronised her so insufferably, that the poor little
thing was in fact perfectly dumb in their presence, and to all outward
appearance as stupid as they thought her. She made efforts to like
them, as in duty bound, and as sisters of her future husband. She
passed "long mornings" with them--the most dreary and serious of
forenoons. She drove out solemnly in their great family coach with
them, and Miss Wirt their governess, that raw-boned Vestal. They took
her to the ancient concerts by way of a treat, and to the oratorio, and
to St. Paul's to see the charity children, where in such terror was she
of her friends, she almost did not dare be affected by the hymn the
children sang. Their house was comfortable; their papa's table rich
and handsome; their society solemn and genteel; their self-respect
prodigious; they had the best pew at the Foundling: all their habits
were pompous and orderly, and all their amusements intolerably dull and
decorous. After every one of her visits (and oh how glad she was when
they were over!) Miss Osborne and Miss Maria Osborne, and Miss Wirt,
the vestal governess, asked each other with increased wonder, "What
could George find in that creature?"
How is this? some carping reader exclaims. How is it that Amelia, who
had such a number of friends at school, and was so beloved there, comes
out into the world and is spurned by her discriminating sex? My dear
sir, there were no men at Miss Pinkerton's establishment except the old
dancing-master; and you would not have had the girls fall out about
HIM? When George, their handsome brother, ran off directly after
breakfast, and dined from home half-a-dozen times a week, no wonder the
neglected sisters felt a little vexation. When young Bullock (of the
firm of Hulker, Bullock & Co., Bankers, Lombard Street), who had been
making up to Miss Maria the last two seasons, actually asked Amelia to
dance the cotillon, could you expect that the former young lady should
be pleased? And yet she said she was, like an artless forgiving
creature. "I'm so delighted you like dear Amelia," she said quite
eagerly to Mr. Bullock after the dance. "She's engaged to my brother
George; there's not much in her, but she's the best-natured and most
unaffected young creature: at home we're all so fond of her." Dear
girl! who can calculate the depth of affection expressed in that
enthusiastic SO?
Miss Wirt and these two affectionate young women so earnestly and
frequently impressed upon George Osborne's mind the enormity of the
sacrifice he was making, and his romantic generosity in throwing
himself away upon Amelia, that I'm not sure but that he really thought
he was one of the most deserving characters in the British army, and
gave himself up to be loved with a good deal of easy resignation.
Somehow, although he left home every morning, as was stated, and dined
abroad six days in the week, when his sisters believed the infatuated
youth to be at Miss Sedley's apron-strings: he was NOT always with
Amelia, whilst the world supposed him at her feet. Certain it is that
on more occasions than one, when Captain Dobbin called to look for his
friend, Miss Osborne (who was very attentive to the Captain, and
anxious to hear his military stories, and to know about the health of
his dear Mamma), would laughingly point to the opposite side of the
square, and say, "Oh, you must go to the Sedleys' to ask for George; WE
never see him from morning till night." At which kind of speech the
Captain would laugh in rather an absurd constrained manner, and turn
off the conversation, like a consummate man of the world, to some topic
of general interest, such as the Opera, the Prince's last ball at
Carlton House, or the weather--that blessing to society.
"What an innocent it is, that pet of yours," Miss Maria would then say
to Miss Jane, upon the Captain's departure. "Did you see how he
blushed at the mention of poor George on duty?"
"It's a pity Frederick Bullock hadn't some of his modesty, Maria,"
replies the elder sister, with a toss of he head.
"Modesty! Awkwardness you mean, Jane. I don't want Frederick to
trample a hole in my muslin frock, as Captain Dobbin did in yours at
Mrs. Perkins'."
"In YOUR frock, he, he! How could he? Wasn't he dancing with Amelia?"
The fact is, when Captain Dobbin blushed so, and looked so awkward, he
remembered a circumstance of which he did not think it was necessary to
inform the young ladies, viz., that he had been calling at Mr. Sedley's
house already, on the pretence of seeing George, of course, and George
wasn't there, only poor little Amelia, with rather a sad wistful face,
seated near the drawing-room window, who, after some very trifling
stupid talk, ventured to ask, was there any truth in the report that
the regiment was soon to be ordered abroad; and had Captain Dobbin seen
Mr. Osborne that day?
The regiment was not ordered abroad as yet; and Captain Dobbin had not
seen George. "He was with his sister, most likely," the Captain said.
"Should he go and fetch the truant?" So she gave him her hand kindly
and gratefully: and he crossed the square; and she waited and waited,
but George never came.
Poor little tender heart! and so it goes on hoping and beating, and
longing and trusting. You see it is not much of a life to describe.
There is not much of what you call incident in it. Only one feeling
all day--when will he come? only one thought to sleep and wake upon. I
believe George was playing billiards with Captain Cannon in Swallow
Street at the time when Amelia was asking Captain Dobbin about him; for
George was a jolly sociable fellow, and excellent in all games of skill.
Once, after three days of absence, Miss Amelia put on her bonnet, and
actually invaded the Osborne house. "What! leave our brother to come to
us?" said the young ladies. "Have you had a quarrel, Amelia? Do tell
us!" No, indeed, there had been no quarrel. "Who could quarrel with
him?" says she, with her eyes filled with tears. She only came over
to--to see her dear friends; they had not met for so long. And this
day she was so perfectly stupid and awkward, that the Misses Osborne
and their governess, who stared after her as she went sadly away,
wondered more than ever what George could see in poor little Amelia.
Of course they did. How was she to bare that timid little heart for
the inspection of those young ladies with their bold black eyes? It was
best that it should shrink and hide itself. I know the Misses Osborne
were excellent critics of a Cashmere shawl, or a pink satin slip; and
when Miss Turner had hers dyed purple, and made into a spencer; and
when Miss Pickford had her ermine tippet twisted into a muff and
trimmings, I warrant you the changes did not escape the two intelligent
young women before mentioned. But there are things, look you, of a
finer texture than fur or satin, and all Solomon's glories, and all the
wardrobe of the Queen of Sheba--things whereof the beauty escapes the
eyes of many connoisseurs. And there are sweet modest little souls on
which you light, fragrant and blooming tenderly in quiet shady places;
and there are garden-ornaments, as big as brass warming-pans, that are
fit to stare the sun itself out of countenance. Miss Sedley was not of
the sunflower sort; and I say it is out of the rules of all proportion
to draw a violet of the size of a double dahlia.
No, indeed; the life of a good young girl who is in the paternal nest
as yet, can't have many of those thrilling incidents to which the
heroine of romance commonly lays claim. Snares or shot may take off
the old birds foraging without--hawks may be abroad, from which they
escape or by whom they suffer; but the young ones in the nest have a
pretty comfortable unromantic sort of existence in the down and the
straw, till it comes to their turn, too, to get on the wing. While
Becky Sharp was on her own wing in the country, hopping on all sorts of
twigs, and amid a multiplicity of traps, and pecking up her food quite
harmless and successful, Amelia lay snug in her home of Russell Square;
if she went into the world, it was under the guidance of the elders;
nor did it seem that any evil could befall her or that opulent cheery
comfortable home in which she was affectionately sheltered. Mamma had
her morning duties, and her daily drive, and the delightful round of
visits and shopping which forms the amusement, or the profession as you
may call it, of the rich London lady. Papa conducted his mysterious
operations in the City--a stirring place in those days, when war was
raging all over Europe, and empires were being staked; when the
"Courier" newspaper had tens of thousands of subscribers; when one day
brought you a battle of Vittoria, another a burning of Moscow, or a
newsman's horn blowing down Russell Square about dinner-time, announced
such a fact as--"Battle of Leipsic--six hundred thousand men
engaged--total defeat of the French--two hundred thousand killed." Old
Sedley once or twice came home with a very grave face; and no wonder,
when such news as this was agitating all the hearts and all the Stocks
of Europe.
Meanwhile matters went on in Russell Square, Bloomsbury, just as if
matters in Europe were not in the least disorganised. The retreat from
Leipsic made no difference in the number of meals Mr. Sambo took in the
servants' hall; the allies poured into France, and the dinner-bell rang
at five o'clock just as usual. I don't think poor Amelia cared
anything about Brienne and Montmirail, or was fairly interested in the
war until the abdication of the Emperor; when she clapped her hands and
said prayers--oh, how grateful! and flung herself into George Osborne's
arms with all her soul, to the astonishment of everybody who witnessed
that ebullition of sentiment. The fact is, peace was declared, Europe
was going to be at rest; the Corsican was overthrown, and Lieutenant
Osborne's regiment would not be ordered on service. That was the way
in which Miss Amelia reasoned. The fate of Europe was Lieutenant
George Osborne to her. His dangers being over, she sang Te Deum. He
was her Europe: her emperor: her allied monarchs and august prince
regent. He was her sun and moon; and I believe she thought the grand
illumination and ball at the Mansion House, given to the sovereigns,
were especially in honour of George Osborne.
We have talked of shift, self, and poverty, as those dismal instructors
under whom poor Miss Becky Sharp got her education. Now, love was Miss
Amelia Sedley's last tutoress, and it was amazing what progress our
young lady made under that popular teacher. In the course of fifteen
or eighteen months' daily and constant attention to this eminent
finishing governess, what a deal of secrets Amelia learned, which Miss
Wirt and the black-eyed young ladies over the way, which old Miss
Pinkerton of Chiswick herself, had no cognizance of! As, indeed, how
should any of those prim and reputable virgins? With Misses P. and W.
the tender passion is out of the question: I would not dare to breathe
such an idea regarding them. Miss Maria Osborne, it is true, was
"attached" to Mr. Frederick Augustus Bullock, of the firm of Hulker,
Bullock & Bullock; but hers was a most respectable attachment, and she
would have taken Bullock Senior just the same, her mind being fixed--as
that of a well-bred young woman should be--upon a house in Park Lane, a
country house at Wimbledon, a handsome chariot, and two prodigious tall
horses and footmen, and a fourth of the annual profits of the eminent
firm of Hulker & Bullock, all of which advantages were represented in
the person of Frederick Augustus. Had orange blossoms been invented
then (those touching emblems of female purity imported by us from
France, where people's daughters are universally sold in marriage),
Miss Maria, I say, would have assumed the spotless wreath, and stepped
into the travelling carriage by the side of gouty, old, bald-headed,
bottle-nosed Bullock Senior; and devoted her beautiful existence to his
happiness with perfect modesty--only the old gentleman was married
already; so she bestowed her young affections on the junior partner.
Sweet, blooming, orange flowers! The other day I saw Miss Trotter
(that was), arrayed in them, trip into the travelling carriage at St.
George's, Hanover Square, and Lord Methuselah hobbled in after. With
what an engaging modesty she pulled down the blinds of the chariot--the
dear innocent! There were half the carriages of Vanity Fair at the
wedding.
This was not the sort of love that finished Amelia's education; and in
the course of a year turned a good young girl into a good young
woman--to be a good wife presently, when the happy time should come.
This young person (perhaps it was very imprudent in her parents to
encourage her, and abet her in such idolatry and silly romantic ideas)
loved, with all her heart, the young officer in His Majesty's service
with whom we have made a brief acquaintance. She thought about him the
very first moment on waking; and his was the very last name mentioned
in her prayers. She never had seen a man so beautiful or so clever:
such a figure on horseback: such a dancer: such a hero in general.
Talk of the Prince's bow! what was it to George's? She had seen Mr.
Brummell, whom everybody praised so. Compare such a person as that to
her George! Not amongst all the beaux at the Opera (and there were
beaux in those days with actual opera hats) was there any one to equal
him. He was only good enough to be a fairy prince; and oh, what
magnanimity to stoop to such a humble Cinderella! Miss Pinkerton would
have tried to check this blind devotion very likely, had she been
Amelia's confidante; but not with much success, depend upon it. It is
in the nature and instinct of some women. Some are made to scheme, and
some to love; and I wish any respected bachelor that reads this may
take the sort that best likes him.
While under this overpowering impression, Miss Amelia neglected her
twelve dear friends at Chiswick most cruelly, as such selfish people
commonly will do. She had but this subject, of course, to think about;
and Miss Saltire was too cold for a confidante, and she couldn't bring
her mind to tell Miss Swartz, the woolly-haired young heiress from St.
Kitt's. She had little Laura Martin home for the holidays; and my
belief is, she made a confidante of her, and promised that Laura should
come and live with her when she was married, and gave Laura a great
deal of information regarding the passion of love, which must have been
singularly useful and novel to that little person. Alas, alas! I fear
poor Emmy had not a well-regulated mind.
What were her parents doing, not to keep this little heart from beating
so fast? Old Sedley did not seem much to notice matters. He was graver
of late, and his City affairs absorbed him. Mrs. Sedley was of so easy
and uninquisitive a nature that she wasn't even jealous. Mr. Jos was
away, being besieged by an Irish widow at Cheltenham. Amelia had the
house to herself--ah! too much to herself sometimes--not that she ever
doubted; for, to be sure, George must be at the Horse Guards; and he
can't always get leave from Chatham; and he must see his friends and
sisters, and mingle in society when in town (he, such an ornament to
every society!); and when he is with the regiment, he is too tired to
write long letters. I know where she kept that packet she had--and can
steal in and out of her chamber like Iachimo--like Iachimo? No--that
is a bad part. I will only act Moonshine, and peep harmless into the
bed where faith and beauty and innocence lie dreaming.
But if Osborne's were short and soldierlike letters, it must be
confessed, that were Miss Sedley's letters to Mr. Osborne to be
published, we should have to extend this novel to such a multiplicity
of volumes as not the most sentimental reader could support; that she
not only filled sheets of large paper, but crossed them with the most
astonishing perverseness; that she wrote whole pages out of
poetry-books without the least pity; that she underlined words and
passages with quite a frantic emphasis; and, in fine, gave the usual
tokens of her condition. She wasn't a heroine. Her letters were full
of repetition. She wrote rather doubtful grammar sometimes, and in her
verses took all sorts of liberties with the metre. But oh, mesdames,
if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax,
and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between
trimeter and tetrameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every
schoolmaster perish miserably!
| OK, enough fun with Becky; let's check back in on Amelia. The narrator apologizes that Amelia so super-boring, but argues that this is because she is such a good and nice person. Nice people don't make good heroines of novels, apparently. Amelia doesn't have too much to do in life, since she is rich and protected by her family. She doesn't need to figure out her future like Becky does. She hangs out with George's sisters, who are totally condescending and generally act like rhymes-with-witches to her and to each other. They might be jealous of how much George likes her. The dynamic of Amelia and George's relationship is worked out. She is madly in love with him and worships the ground he walks on. He loves her OK. His sisters tell him he is some kind of martyr for being with her since she is so lame and dumb, and he starts to believe it. Everyone at George's house thinks that when he isn't around he must be with Amelia, but it turns out he actually hangs out with his friends, drinks, shops, and does basically whatever he wants. Amelia writes him long, repetitive, annoyingly sweet letters. He writes her back short, crummy, not particularly nice ones. | summary |
Sentimental and Otherwise
I fear the gentleman to whom Miss Amelia's letters were addressed was
rather an obdurate critic. Such a number of notes followed Lieutenant
Osborne about the country, that he became almost ashamed of the jokes
of his mess-room companions regarding them, and ordered his servant
never to deliver them except at his private apartment. He was seen
lighting his cigar with one, to the horror of Captain Dobbin, who, it
is my belief, would have given a bank-note for the document.
For some time George strove to keep the liaison a secret. There was a
woman in the case, that he admitted. "And not the first either," said
Ensign Spooney to Ensign Stubble. "That Osborne's a devil of a fellow.
There was a judge's daughter at Demerara went almost mad about him;
then there was that beautiful quadroon girl, Miss Pye, at St.
Vincent's, you know; and since he's been home, they say he's a regular
Don Giovanni, by Jove."
Stubble and Spooney thought that to be a "regular Don Giovanni, by
Jove" was one of the finest qualities a man could possess, and
Osborne's reputation was prodigious amongst the young men of the
regiment. He was famous in field-sports, famous at a song, famous on
parade; free with his money, which was bountifully supplied by his
father. His coats were better made than any man's in the regiment, and
he had more of them. He was adored by the men. He could drink more
than any officer of the whole mess, including old Heavytop, the
colonel. He could spar better than Knuckles, the private (who would
have been a corporal but for his drunkenness, and who had been in the
prize-ring); and was the best batter and bowler, out and out, of the
regimental club. He rode his own horse, Greased Lightning, and won the
Garrison cup at Quebec races. There were other people besides Amelia
who worshipped him. Stubble and Spooney thought him a sort of Apollo;
Dobbin took him to be an Admirable Crichton; and Mrs. Major O'Dowd
acknowledged he was an elegant young fellow, and put her in mind of
Fitzjurld Fogarty, Lord Castlefogarty's second son.
Well, Stubble and Spooney and the rest indulged in most romantic
conjectures regarding this female correspondent of Osborne's--opining
that it was a Duchess in London who was in love with him--or that it
was a General's daughter, who was engaged to somebody else, and madly
attached to him--or that it was a Member of Parliament's lady, who
proposed four horses and an elopement--or that it was some other victim
of a passion delightfully exciting, romantic, and disgraceful to all
parties, on none of which conjectures would Osborne throw the least
light, leaving his young admirers and friends to invent and arrange
their whole history.
And the real state of the case would never have been known at all in
the regiment but for Captain Dobbin's indiscretion. The Captain was
eating his breakfast one day in the mess-room, while Cackle, the
assistant-surgeon, and the two above-named worthies were speculating
upon Osborne's intrigue--Stubble holding out that the lady was a
Duchess about Queen Charlotte's court, and Cackle vowing she was an
opera-singer of the worst reputation. At this idea Dobbin became so
moved, that though his mouth was full of eggs and bread-and-butter at
the time, and though he ought not to have spoken at all, yet he
couldn't help blurting out, "Cackle, you're a stupid fool. You're
always talking nonsense and scandal. Osborne is not going to run off
with a Duchess or ruin a milliner. Miss Sedley is one of the most
charming young women that ever lived. He's been engaged to her ever so
long; and the man who calls her names had better not do so in my
hearing." With which, turning exceedingly red, Dobbin ceased speaking,
and almost choked himself with a cup of tea. The story was over the
regiment in half-an-hour; and that very evening Mrs. Major O'Dowd wrote
off to her sister Glorvina at O'Dowdstown not to hurry from
Dublin--young Osborne being prematurely engaged already.
She complimented the Lieutenant in an appropriate speech over a glass
of whisky-toddy that evening, and he went home perfectly furious to
quarrel with Dobbin (who had declined Mrs. Major O'Dowd's party, and
sat in his own room playing the flute, and, I believe, writing poetry
in a very melancholy manner)--to quarrel with Dobbin for betraying his
secret.
"Who the deuce asked you to talk about my affairs?" Osborne shouted
indignantly. "Why the devil is all the regiment to know that I am
going to be married? Why is that tattling old harridan, Peggy O'Dowd,
to make free with my name at her d--d supper-table, and advertise my
engagement over the three kingdoms? After all, what right have you to
say I am engaged, or to meddle in my business at all, Dobbin?"
"It seems to me," Captain Dobbin began.
"Seems be hanged, Dobbin," his junior interrupted him. "I am under
obligations to you, I know it, a d--d deal too well too; but I won't be
always sermonised by you because you're five years my senior. I'm
hanged if I'll stand your airs of superiority and infernal pity and
patronage. Pity and patronage! I should like to know in what I'm your
inferior?"
"Are you engaged?" Captain Dobbin interposed.
"What the devil's that to you or any one here if I am?"
"Are you ashamed of it?" Dobbin resumed.
"What right have you to ask me that question, sir? I should like to
know," George said.
"Good God, you don't mean to say you want to break off?" asked Dobbin,
starting up.
"In other words, you ask me if I'm a man of honour," said Osborne,
fiercely; "is that what you mean? You've adopted such a tone regarding
me lately that I'm ------ if I'll bear it any more."
"What have I done? I've told you you were neglecting a sweet girl,
George. I've told you that when you go to town you ought to go to her,
and not to the gambling-houses about St. James's."
"You want your money back, I suppose," said George, with a sneer.
"Of course I do--I always did, didn't I?" says Dobbin. "You speak like
a generous fellow."
"No, hang it, William, I beg your pardon"--here George interposed in a
fit of remorse; "you have been my friend in a hundred ways, Heaven
knows. You've got me out of a score of scrapes. When Crawley of the
Guards won that sum of money of me I should have been done but for you:
I know I should. But you shouldn't deal so hardly with me; you
shouldn't be always catechising me. I am very fond of Amelia; I adore
her, and that sort of thing. Don't look angry. She's faultless; I
know she is. But you see there's no fun in winning a thing unless you
play for it. Hang it: the regiment's just back from the West Indies, I
must have a little fling, and then when I'm married I'll reform; I will
upon my honour, now. And--I say--Dob--don't be angry with me, and
I'll give you a hundred next month, when I know my father will stand
something handsome; and I'll ask Heavytop for leave, and I'll go to
town, and see Amelia to-morrow--there now, will that satisfy you?"
"It is impossible to be long angry with you, George," said the
good-natured Captain; "and as for the money, old boy, you know if I wanted
it you'd share your last shilling with me."
"That I would, by Jove, Dobbin," George said, with the greatest
generosity, though by the way he never had any money to spare.
"Only I wish you had sown those wild oats of yours, George. If you
could have seen poor little Miss Emmy's face when she asked me about
you the other day, you would have pitched those billiard-balls to the
deuce. Go and comfort her, you rascal. Go and write her a long
letter. Do something to make her happy; a very little will."
"I believe she's d--d fond of me," the Lieutenant said, with a
self-satisfied air; and went off to finish the evening with some jolly
fellows in the mess-room.
Amelia meanwhile, in Russell Square, was looking at the moon, which was
shining upon that peaceful spot, as well as upon the square of the
Chatham barracks, where Lieutenant Osborne was quartered, and thinking
to herself how her hero was employed. Perhaps he is visiting the
sentries, thought she; perhaps he is bivouacking; perhaps he is
attending the couch of a wounded comrade, or studying the art of war up
in his own desolate chamber. And her kind thoughts sped away as if they
were angels and had wings, and flying down the river to Chatham and
Rochester, strove to peep into the barracks where George was. . . . All
things considered, I think it was as well the gates were shut, and the
sentry allowed no one to pass; so that the poor little white-robed
angel could not hear the songs those young fellows were roaring over
the whisky-punch.
The day after the little conversation at Chatham barracks, young
Osborne, to show that he would be as good as his word, prepared to go
to town, thereby incurring Captain Dobbin's applause. "I should have
liked to make her a little present," Osborne said to his friend in
confidence, "only I am quite out of cash until my father tips up." But
Dobbin would not allow this good nature and generosity to be balked,
and so accommodated Mr. Osborne with a few pound notes, which the
latter took after a little faint scruple.
And I dare say he would have bought something very handsome for Amelia;
only, getting off the coach in Fleet Street, he was attracted by a
handsome shirt-pin in a jeweller's window, which he could not resist;
and having paid for that, had very little money to spare for indulging
in any further exercise of kindness. Never mind: you may be sure it
was not his presents Amelia wanted. When he came to Russell Square,
her face lighted up as if he had been sunshine. The little cares,
fears, tears, timid misgivings, sleepless fancies of I don't know how
many days and nights, were forgotten, under one moment's influence of
that familiar, irresistible smile. He beamed on her from the
drawing-room door--magnificent, with ambrosial whiskers, like a god.
Sambo, whose face as he announced Captain Osbin (having conferred a
brevet rank on that young officer) blazed with a sympathetic grin, saw
the little girl start, and flush, and jump up from her watching-place
in the window; and Sambo retreated: and as soon as the door was shut,
she went fluttering to Lieutenant George Osborne's heart as if it was
the only natural home for her to nestle in. Oh, thou poor panting
little soul! The very finest tree in the whole forest, with the
straightest stem, and the strongest arms, and the thickest foliage,
wherein you choose to build and coo, may be marked, for what you know,
and may be down with a crash ere long. What an old, old simile that
is, between man and timber!
In the meanwhile, George kissed her very kindly on her forehead and
glistening eyes, and was very gracious and good; and she thought his
diamond shirt-pin (which she had not known him to wear before) the
prettiest ornament ever seen.
The observant reader, who has marked our young Lieutenant's previous
behaviour, and has preserved our report of the brief conversation which
he has just had with Captain Dobbin, has possibly come to certain
conclusions regarding the character of Mr. Osborne. Some cynical
Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction:
the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated.
Perhaps the love is occasionally on the man's side; perhaps on the
lady's. Perhaps some infatuated swain has ere this mistaken
insensibility for modesty, dulness for maiden reserve, mere vacuity for
sweet bashfulness, and a goose, in a word, for a swan. Perhaps some
beloved female subscriber has arrayed an ass in the splendour and glory
of her imagination; admired his dulness as manly simplicity; worshipped
his selfishness as manly superiority; treated his stupidity as majestic
gravity, and used him as the brilliant fairy Titania did a certain
weaver at Athens. I think I have seen such comedies of errors going on
in the world. But this is certain, that Amelia believed her lover to
be one of the most gallant and brilliant men in the empire: and it is
possible Lieutenant Osborne thought so too.
He was a little wild: how many young men are; and don't girls like a
rake better than a milksop? He hadn't sown his wild oats as yet, but
he would soon: and quit the army now that peace was proclaimed; the
Corsican monster locked up at Elba; promotion by consequence over; and
no chance left for the display of his undoubted military talents and
valour: and his allowance, with Amelia's settlement, would enable them
to take a snug place in the country somewhere, in a good sporting
neighbourhood; and he would hunt a little, and farm a little; and they
would be very happy. As for remaining in the army as a married man,
that was impossible. Fancy Mrs. George Osborne in lodgings in a county
town; or, worse still, in the East or West Indies, with a society of
officers, and patronized by Mrs. Major O'Dowd! Amelia died with
laughing at Osborne's stories about Mrs. Major O'Dowd. He loved her
much too fondly to subject her to that horrid woman and her
vulgarities, and the rough treatment of a soldier's wife. He didn't
care for himself--not he; but his dear little girl should take the
place in society to which, as his wife, she was entitled: and to these
proposals you may be sure she acceded, as she would to any other from
the same author.
Holding this kind of conversation, and building numberless castles in
the air (which Amelia adorned with all sorts of flower-gardens, rustic
walks, country churches, Sunday schools, and the like; while George had
his mind's eye directed to the stables, the kennel, and the cellar),
this young pair passed away a couple of hours very pleasantly; and as
the Lieutenant had only that single day in town, and a great deal of
most important business to transact, it was proposed that Miss Emmy
should dine with her future sisters-in-law. This invitation was
accepted joyfully. He conducted her to his sisters; where he left her
talking and prattling in a way that astonished those ladies, who
thought that George might make something of her; and he then went off
to transact his business.
In a word, he went out and ate ices at a pastry-cook's shop in Charing
Cross; tried a new coat in Pall Mall; dropped in at the Old
Slaughters', and called for Captain Cannon; played eleven games at
billiards with the Captain, of which he won eight, and returned to
Russell Square half an hour late for dinner, but in very good humour.
It was not so with old Mr. Osborne. When that gentleman came from the
City, and was welcomed in the drawing-room by his daughters and the
elegant Miss Wirt, they saw at once by his face--which was puffy,
solemn, and yellow at the best of times--and by the scowl and twitching
of his black eyebrows, that the heart within his large white waistcoat
was disturbed and uneasy. When Amelia stepped forward to salute him,
which she always did with great trembling and timidity, he gave a surly
grunt of recognition, and dropped the little hand out of his great
hirsute paw without any attempt to hold it there. He looked round
gloomily at his eldest daughter; who, comprehending the meaning of his
look, which asked unmistakably, "Why the devil is she here?" said at
once:
"George is in town, Papa; and has gone to the Horse Guards, and will be
back to dinner."
"O he is, is he? I won't have the dinner kept waiting for him, Jane";
with which this worthy man lapsed into his particular chair, and then
the utter silence in his genteel, well-furnished drawing-room was only
interrupted by the alarmed ticking of the great French clock.
When that chronometer, which was surmounted by a cheerful brass group
of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, tolled five in a heavy cathedral tone,
Mr. Osborne pulled the bell at his right hand--violently, and the
butler rushed up.
"Dinner!" roared Mr. Osborne.
"Mr. George isn't come in, sir," interposed the man.
"Damn Mr. George, sir. Am I master of the house? DINNER!" Mr. Osborne
scowled. Amelia trembled. A telegraphic communication of eyes passed
between the other three ladies. The obedient bell in the lower regions
began ringing the announcement of the meal. The tolling over, the head
of the family thrust his hands into the great tail-pockets of his great
blue coat with brass buttons, and without waiting for a further
announcement strode downstairs alone, scowling over his shoulder at the
four females.
"What's the matter now, my dear?" asked one of the other, as they rose
and tripped gingerly behind the sire. "I suppose the funds are
falling," whispered Miss Wirt; and so, trembling and in silence, this
hushed female company followed their dark leader. They took their
places in silence. He growled out a blessing, which sounded as gruffly
as a curse. The great silver dish-covers were removed. Amelia trembled
in her place, for she was next to the awful Osborne, and alone on her
side of the table--the gap being occasioned by the absence of George.
"Soup?" says Mr. Osborne, clutching the ladle, fixing his eyes on her,
in a sepulchral tone; and having helped her and the rest, did not speak
for a while.
"Take Miss Sedley's plate away," at last he said. "She can't eat the
soup--no more can I. It's beastly. Take away the soup, Hicks, and
to-morrow turn the cook out of the house, Jane."
Having concluded his observations upon the soup, Mr. Osborne made a few
curt remarks respecting the fish, also of a savage and satirical
tendency, and cursed Billingsgate with an emphasis quite worthy of the
place. Then he lapsed into silence, and swallowed sundry glasses of
wine, looking more and more terrible, till a brisk knock at the door
told of George's arrival when everybody began to rally.
"He could not come before. General Daguilet had kept him waiting at
the Horse Guards. Never mind soup or fish. Give him anything--he
didn't care what. Capital mutton--capital everything." His good humour
contrasted with his father's severity; and he rattled on unceasingly
during dinner, to the delight of all--of one especially, who need not
be mentioned.
As soon as the young ladies had discussed the orange and the glass of
wine which formed the ordinary conclusion of the dismal banquets at Mr.
Osborne's house, the signal to make sail for the drawing-room was
given, and they all arose and departed. Amelia hoped George would soon
join them there. She began playing some of his favourite waltzes (then
newly imported) at the great carved-legged, leather-cased grand piano
in the drawing-room overhead. This little artifice did not bring him.
He was deaf to the waltzes; they grew fainter and fainter; the
discomfited performer left the huge instrument presently; and though
her three friends performed some of the loudest and most brilliant new
pieces of their repertoire, she did not hear a single note, but sate
thinking, and boding evil. Old Osborne's scowl, terrific always, had
never before looked so deadly to her. His eyes followed her out of the
room, as if she had been guilty of something. When they brought her
coffee, she started as though it were a cup of poison which Mr. Hicks,
the butler, wished to propose to her. What mystery was there lurking?
Oh, those women! They nurse and cuddle their presentiments, and make
darlings of their ugliest thoughts, as they do of their deformed
children.
The gloom on the paternal countenance had also impressed George Osborne
with anxiety. With such eyebrows, and a look so decidedly bilious, how
was he to extract that money from the governor, of which George was
consumedly in want? He began praising his father's wine. That was
generally a successful means of cajoling the old gentleman.
"We never got such Madeira in the West Indies, sir, as yours. Colonel
Heavytop took off three bottles of that you sent me down, under his
belt the other day."
"Did he?" said the old gentleman. "It stands me in eight shillings a
bottle."
"Will you take six guineas a dozen for it, sir?" said George, with a
laugh. "There's one of the greatest men in the kingdom wants some."
"Does he?" growled the senior. "Wish he may get it."
"When General Daguilet was at Chatham, sir, Heavytop gave him a
breakfast, and asked me for some of the wine. The General liked it
just as well--wanted a pipe for the Commander-in-Chief. He's his Royal
Highness's right-hand man."
"It is devilish fine wine," said the Eyebrows, and they looked more
good-humoured; and George was going to take advantage of this
complacency, and bring the supply question on the mahogany, when the
father, relapsing into solemnity, though rather cordial in manner, bade
him ring the bell for claret. "And we'll see if that's as good as the
Madeira, George, to which his Royal Highness is welcome, I'm sure. And
as we are drinking it, I'll talk to you about a matter of importance."
Amelia heard the claret bell ringing as she sat nervously upstairs. She
thought, somehow, it was a mysterious and presentimental bell. Of the
presentiments which some people are always having, some surely must
come right.
"What I want to know, George," the old gentleman said, after slowly
smacking his first bumper--"what I want to know is, how you
and--ah--that little thing upstairs, are carrying on?"
"I think, sir, it is not hard to see," George said, with a
self-satisfied grin. "Pretty clear, sir.--What capital wine!"
"What d'you mean, pretty clear, sir?"
"Why, hang it, sir, don't push me too hard. I'm a modest man.
I--ah--I don't set up to be a lady-killer; but I do own that she's as
devilish fond of me as she can be. Anybody can see that with half an
eye."
"And you yourself?"
"Why, sir, didn't you order me to marry her, and ain't I a good boy?
Haven't our Papas settled it ever so long?"
"A pretty boy, indeed. Haven't I heard of your doings, sir, with Lord
Tarquin, Captain Crawley of the Guards, the Honourable Mr. Deuceace and
that set. Have a care sir, have a care."
The old gentleman pronounced these aristocratic names with the greatest
gusto. Whenever he met a great man he grovelled before him, and
my-lorded him as only a free-born Briton can do. He came home and
looked out his history in the Peerage: he introduced his name into his
daily conversation; he bragged about his Lordship to his daughters. He
fell down prostrate and basked in him as a Neapolitan beggar does in
the sun. George was alarmed when he heard the names. He feared his
father might have been informed of certain transactions at play. But
the old moralist eased him by saying serenely:
"Well, well, young men will be young men. And the comfort to me is,
George, that living in the best society in England, as I hope you do;
as I think you do; as my means will allow you to do--"
"Thank you, sir," says George, making his point at once. "One can't
live with these great folks for nothing; and my purse, sir, look at
it"; and he held up a little token which had been netted by Amelia, and
contained the very last of Dobbin's pound notes.
"You shan't want, sir. The British merchant's son shan't want, sir. My
guineas are as good as theirs, George, my boy; and I don't grudge 'em.
Call on Mr. Chopper as you go through the City to-morrow; he'll have
something for you. I don't grudge money when I know you're in good
society, because I know that good society can never go wrong. There's
no pride in me. I was a humbly born man--but you have had advantages.
Make a good use of 'em. Mix with the young nobility. There's many of
'em who can't spend a dollar to your guinea, my boy. And as for the
pink bonnets (here from under the heavy eyebrows there came a knowing
and not very pleasing leer)--why boys will be boys. Only there's one
thing I order you to avoid, which, if you do not, I'll cut you off with
a shilling, by Jove; and that's gambling."
"Oh, of course, sir," said George.
"But to return to the other business about Amelia: why shouldn't you
marry higher than a stockbroker's daughter, George--that's what I want
to know?"
"It's a family business, sir," says George, cracking filberts. "You
and Mr. Sedley made the match a hundred years ago."
"I don't deny it; but people's positions alter, sir. I don't deny that
Sedley made my fortune, or rather put me in the way of acquiring, by my
own talents and genius, that proud position, which, I may say, I occupy
in the tallow trade and the City of London. I've shown my gratitude to
Sedley; and he's tried it of late, sir, as my cheque-book can show.
George! I tell you in confidence I don't like the looks of Mr.
Sedley's affairs. My chief clerk, Mr. Chopper, does not like the looks
of 'em, and he's an old file, and knows 'Change as well as any man in
London. Hulker & Bullock are looking shy at him. He's been dabbling
on his own account I fear. They say the Jeune Amelie was his, which was
taken by the Yankee privateer Molasses. And that's flat--unless I see
Amelia's ten thousand down you don't marry her. I'll have no lame
duck's daughter in my family. Pass the wine, sir--or ring for coffee."
With which Mr. Osborne spread out the evening paper, and George knew
from this signal that the colloquy was ended, and that his papa was
about to take a nap.
He hurried upstairs to Amelia in the highest spirits. What was it that
made him more attentive to her on that night than he had been for a
long time--more eager to amuse her, more tender, more brilliant in
talk? Was it that his generous heart warmed to her at the prospect of
misfortune; or that the idea of losing the dear little prize made him
value it more?
She lived upon the recollections of that happy evening for many days
afterwards, remembering his words; his looks; the song he sang; his
attitude, as he leant over her or looked at her from a distance. As it
seemed to her, no night ever passed so quickly at Mr. Osborne's house
before; and for once this young person was almost provoked to be angry
by the premature arrival of Mr. Sambo with her shawl.
George came and took a tender leave of her the next morning; and then
hurried off to the City, where he visited Mr. Chopper, his father's
head man, and received from that gentleman a document which he
exchanged at Hulker & Bullock's for a whole pocketful of money. As
George entered the house, old John Sedley was passing out of the
banker's parlour, looking very dismal. But his godson was much too
elated to mark the worthy stockbroker's depression, or the dreary eyes
which the kind old gentleman cast upon him. Young Bullock did not come
grinning out of the parlour with him as had been his wont in former
years.
And as the swinging doors of Hulker, Bullock & Co. closed upon Mr.
Sedley, Mr. Quill, the cashier (whose benevolent occupation it is to
hand out crisp bank-notes from a drawer and dispense sovereigns out of
a copper shovel), winked at Mr. Driver, the clerk at the desk on his
right. Mr. Driver winked again.
"No go," Mr. D. whispered.
"Not at no price," Mr. Q. said. "Mr. George Osborne, sir, how will
you take it?" George crammed eagerly a quantity of notes into his
pockets, and paid Dobbin fifty pounds that very evening at mess.
That very evening Amelia wrote him the tenderest of long letters. Her
heart was overflowing with tenderness, but it still foreboded evil.
What was the cause of Mr. Osborne's dark looks? she asked. Had any
difference arisen between him and her papa? Her poor papa returned so
melancholy from the City, that all were alarmed about him at home--in
fine, there were four pages of loves and fears and hopes and
forebodings.
"Poor little Emmy--dear little Emmy. How fond she is of me," George
said, as he perused the missive--"and Gad, what a headache that mixed
punch has given me!" Poor little Emmy, indeed.
| In keeping with his general attitude, George tries to keep his engagement to Amelia on the down low from his fellow soldiers. Instead, he acts like a womanizer, and the other soldiers don't realize that he's a poser and admire him. Only Dobbin is sort of scandalized by the way George treats Amelia. Um, because he's in love with her himself, maybe? Dobbin tells the barracks that George is engaged to a wonderful lady, then makes George go visit her. George borrows some money to buy Amelia a present, but on the way he sees a diamond pin that he likes and buys it for himself instead. Still, he does finally go see Amelia, and they have a very nice day of "building numberless castles in the air" about their future lives together. She wants a nice house and family. He is mostly obsessed with making sure they live appropriately to their social status. The two then go to dinner at George's house. We meet his father, a very rich merchant who is in a bad mood. Afterward the women leave the room. OK, a little aside here. In Victorian times, after dinner the women would go off and have girl-time for an hour or so while the men had man-time. Then the men would rejoin the women for drinks, music, and maybe cards. Anyhow, after the women leave the room, Mr. Osborne tells George that Amelia's father has made some terrible investments and might be broke. This means the engagement between George and Amelia has to be called off. George is all huffy and offended, since breaking the engagement would be dishonorable, and he really prides himself on his honor. Amelia can sense that something is wrong, mostly because George is suddenly much nicer to her than usual for the rest of the evening. The next day, when George picks up his allowance from his father's bank, he sees Mr. Sedley looking pretty grim. | summary |
Miss Crawley at Home
About this time there drove up to an exceedingly snug and
well-appointed house in Park Lane, a travelling chariot with a lozenge on
the panels, a discontented female in a green veil and crimped curls on
the rumble, and a large and confidential man on the box. It was the
equipage of our friend Miss Crawley, returning from Hants. The
carriage windows were shut; the fat spaniel, whose head and tongue
ordinarily lolled out of one of them, reposed on the lap of the
discontented female. When the vehicle stopped, a large round bundle of
shawls was taken out of the carriage by the aid of various domestics
and a young lady who accompanied the heap of cloaks. That bundle
contained Miss Crawley, who was conveyed upstairs forthwith, and put
into a bed and chamber warmed properly as for the reception of an
invalid. Messengers went off for her physician and medical man. They
came, consulted, prescribed, vanished. The young companion of Miss
Crawley, at the conclusion of their interview, came in to receive their
instructions, and administered those antiphlogistic medicines which the
eminent men ordered.
Captain Crawley of the Life Guards rode up from Knightsbridge Barracks
the next day; his black charger pawed the straw before his invalid
aunt's door. He was most affectionate in his inquiries regarding that
amiable relative. There seemed to be much source of apprehension. He
found Miss Crawley's maid (the discontented female) unusually sulky and
despondent; he found Miss Briggs, her dame de compagnie, in tears alone
in the drawing-room. She had hastened home, hearing of her beloved
friend's illness. She wished to fly to her couch, that couch which
she, Briggs, had so often smoothed in the hour of sickness. She was
denied admission to Miss Crawley's apartment. A stranger was
administering her medicines--a stranger from the country--an odious
Miss ... --tears choked the utterance of the dame de compagnie, and
she buried her crushed affections and her poor old red nose in her
pocket handkerchief.
Rawdon Crawley sent up his name by the sulky femme de chambre, and Miss
Crawley's new companion, coming tripping down from the sick-room, put
a little hand into his as he stepped forward eagerly to meet her, gave
a glance of great scorn at the bewildered Briggs, and beckoning the
young Guardsman out of the back drawing-room, led him downstairs into
that now desolate dining-parlour, where so many a good dinner had been
celebrated.
Here these two talked for ten minutes, discussing, no doubt, the
symptoms of the old invalid above stairs; at the end of which period
the parlour bell was rung briskly, and answered on that instant by Mr.
Bowls, Miss Crawley's large confidential butler (who, indeed, happened
to be at the keyhole during the most part of the interview); and the
Captain coming out, curling his mustachios, mounted the black charger
pawing among the straw, to the admiration of the little blackguard boys
collected in the street. He looked in at the dining-room window,
managing his horse, which curvetted and capered beautifully--for one
instant the young person might be seen at the window, when her figure
vanished, and, doubtless, she went upstairs again to resume the
affecting duties of benevolence.
Who could this young woman be, I wonder? That evening a little dinner
for two persons was laid in the dining-room--when Mrs. Firkin, the
lady's maid, pushed into her mistress's apartment, and bustled about
there during the vacancy occasioned by the departure of the new
nurse--and the latter and Miss Briggs sat down to the neat little meal.
Briggs was so much choked by emotion that she could hardly take a
morsel of meat. The young person carved a fowl with the utmost
delicacy, and asked so distinctly for egg-sauce, that poor Briggs,
before whom that delicious condiment was placed, started, made a great
clattering with the ladle, and once more fell back in the most gushing
hysterical state.
"Had you not better give Miss Briggs a glass of wine?" said the person
to Mr. Bowls, the large confidential man. He did so. Briggs seized it
mechanically, gasped it down convulsively, moaned a little, and began
to play with the chicken on her plate.
"I think we shall be able to help each other," said the person with
great suavity: "and shall have no need of Mr. Bowls's kind services.
Mr. Bowls, if you please, we will ring when we want you." He went
downstairs, where, by the way, he vented the most horrid curses upon
the unoffending footman, his subordinate.
"It is a pity you take on so, Miss Briggs," the young lady said, with a
cool, slightly sarcastic, air.
"My dearest friend is so ill, and wo-o-on't see me," gurgled out Briggs
in an agony of renewed grief.
"She's not very ill any more. Console yourself, dear Miss Briggs. She
has only overeaten herself--that is all. She is greatly better. She
will soon be quite restored again. She is weak from being cupped and
from medical treatment, but she will rally immediately. Pray console
yourself, and take a little more wine."
"But why, why won't she see me again?" Miss Briggs bleated out. "Oh,
Matilda, Matilda, after three-and-twenty years' tenderness! is this the
return to your poor, poor Arabella?"
"Don't cry too much, poor Arabella," the other said (with ever so
little of a grin); "she only won't see you, because she says you don't
nurse her as well as I do. It's no pleasure to me to sit up all night.
I wish you might do it instead."
"Have I not tended that dear couch for years?" Arabella said, "and
now--"
"Now she prefers somebody else. Well, sick people have these fancies,
and must be humoured. When she's well I shall go."
"Never, never," Arabella exclaimed, madly inhaling her salts-bottle.
"Never be well or never go, Miss Briggs?" the other said, with the same
provoking good-nature. "Pooh--she will be well in a fortnight, when I
shall go back to my little pupils at Queen's Crawley, and to their
mother, who is a great deal more sick than our friend. You need not be
jealous about me, my dear Miss Briggs. I am a poor little girl without
any friends, or any harm in me. I don't want to supplant you in Miss
Crawley's good graces. She will forget me a week after I am gone: and
her affection for you has been the work of years. Give me a little
wine if you please, my dear Miss Briggs, and let us be friends. I'm
sure I want friends."
The placable and soft-hearted Briggs speechlessly pushed out her hand
at this appeal; but she felt the desertion most keenly for all that,
and bitterly, bitterly moaned the fickleness of her Matilda. At the end
of half an hour, the meal over, Miss Rebecca Sharp (for such,
astonishing to state, is the name of her who has been described
ingeniously as "the person" hitherto), went upstairs again to her
patient's rooms, from which, with the most engaging politeness, she
eliminated poor Firkin. "Thank you, Mrs. Firkin, that will quite do;
how nicely you make it! I will ring when anything is wanted." "Thank
you"; and Firkin came downstairs in a tempest of jealousy, only the
more dangerous because she was forced to confine it in her own bosom.
Could it be the tempest which, as she passed the landing of the first
floor, blew open the drawing-room door? No; it was stealthily opened by
the hand of Briggs. Briggs had been on the watch. Briggs too well heard
the creaking Firkin descend the stairs, and the clink of the spoon and
gruel-basin the neglected female carried.
"Well, Firkin?" says she, as the other entered the apartment. "Well,
Jane?"
"Wuss and wuss, Miss B.," Firkin said, wagging her head.
"Is she not better then?"
"She never spoke but once, and I asked her if she felt a little more
easy, and she told me to hold my stupid tongue. Oh, Miss B., I never
thought to have seen this day!" And the water-works again began to
play.
"What sort of a person is this Miss Sharp, Firkin? I little thought,
while enjoying my Christmas revels in the elegant home of my firm
friends, the Reverend Lionel Delamere and his amiable lady, to find a
stranger had taken my place in the affections of my dearest, my still
dearest Matilda!" Miss Briggs, it will be seen by her language, was of
a literary and sentimental turn, and had once published a volume of
poems--"Trills of the Nightingale"--by subscription.
"Miss B., they are all infatyated about that young woman," Firkin
replied. "Sir Pitt wouldn't have let her go, but he daredn't refuse
Miss Crawley anything. Mrs. Bute at the Rectory jist as bad--never
happy out of her sight. The Capting quite wild about her. Mr. Crawley
mortial jealous. Since Miss C. was took ill, she won't have nobody near
her but Miss Sharp, I can't tell for where nor for why; and I think
somethink has bewidged everybody."
Rebecca passed that night in constant watching upon Miss Crawley; the
next night the old lady slept so comfortably, that Rebecca had time for
several hours' comfortable repose herself on the sofa, at the foot of
her patroness's bed; very soon, Miss Crawley was so well that she sat
up and laughed heartily at a perfect imitation of Miss Briggs and her
grief, which Rebecca described to her. Briggs' weeping snuffle, and her
manner of using the handkerchief, were so completely rendered that Miss
Crawley became quite cheerful, to the admiration of the doctors when
they visited her, who usually found this worthy woman of the world,
when the least sickness attacked her, under the most abject depression
and terror of death.
Captain Crawley came every day, and received bulletins from Miss
Rebecca respecting his aunt's health. This improved so rapidly, that
poor Briggs was allowed to see her patroness; and persons with tender
hearts may imagine the smothered emotions of that sentimental female,
and the affecting nature of the interview.
Miss Crawley liked to have Briggs in a good deal soon. Rebecca used to
mimic her to her face with the most admirable gravity, thereby
rendering the imitation doubly piquant to her worthy patroness.
The causes which had led to the deplorable illness of Miss Crawley, and
her departure from her brother's house in the country, were of such an
unromantic nature that they are hardly fit to be explained in this
genteel and sentimental novel. For how is it possible to hint of a
delicate female, living in good society, that she ate and drank too
much, and that a hot supper of lobsters profusely enjoyed at the
Rectory was the reason of an indisposition which Miss Crawley herself
persisted was solely attributable to the dampness of the weather? The
attack was so sharp that Matilda--as his Reverence expressed it--was
very nearly "off the hooks"; all the family were in a fever of
expectation regarding the will, and Rawdon Crawley was making sure of
at least forty thousand pounds before the commencement of the London
season. Mr. Crawley sent over a choice parcel of tracts, to prepare
her for the change from Vanity Fair and Park Lane for another world;
but a good doctor from Southampton being called in in time, vanquished
the lobster which was so nearly fatal to her, and gave her sufficient
strength to enable her to return to London. The Baronet did not
disguise his exceeding mortification at the turn which affairs took.
While everybody was attending on Miss Crawley, and messengers every
hour from the Rectory were carrying news of her health to the
affectionate folks there, there was a lady in another part of the
house, being exceedingly ill, of whom no one took any notice at all;
and this was the lady of Crawley herself. The good doctor shook his
head after seeing her; to which visit Sir Pitt consented, as it could
be paid without a fee; and she was left fading away in her lonely
chamber, with no more heed paid to her than to a weed in the park.
The young ladies, too, lost much of the inestimable benefit of their
governess's instruction, So affectionate a nurse was Miss Sharp, that
Miss Crawley would take her medicines from no other hand. Firkin had
been deposed long before her mistress's departure from the country.
That faithful attendant found a gloomy consolation on returning to
London, in seeing Miss Briggs suffer the same pangs of jealousy and
undergo the same faithless treatment to which she herself had been
subject.
Captain Rawdon got an extension of leave on his aunt's illness, and
remained dutifully at home. He was always in her antechamber. (She
lay sick in the state bedroom, into which you entered by the little
blue saloon.) His father was always meeting him there; or if he came
down the corridor ever so quietly, his father's door was sure to open,
and the hyena face of the old gentleman to glare out. What was it set
one to watch the other so? A generous rivalry, no doubt, as to which
should be most attentive to the dear sufferer in the state bedroom.
Rebecca used to come out and comfort both of them; or one or the other
of them rather. Both of these worthy gentlemen were most anxious to
have news of the invalid from her little confidential messenger.
At dinner--to which meal she descended for half an hour--she kept the
peace between them: after which she disappeared for the night; when
Rawdon would ride over to the depot of the 150th at Mudbury, leaving
his papa to the society of Mr. Horrocks and his rum and water. She
passed as weary a fortnight as ever mortal spent in Miss Crawley's
sick-room; but her little nerves seemed to be of iron, as she was quite
unshaken by the duty and the tedium of the sick-chamber.
She never told until long afterwards how painful that duty was; how
peevish a patient was the jovial old lady; how angry; how sleepless; in
what horrors of death; during what long nights she lay moaning, and in
almost delirious agonies respecting that future world which she quite
ignored when she was in good health.--Picture to yourself, oh fair
young reader, a worldly, selfish, graceless, thankless, religionless
old woman, writhing in pain and fear, and without her wig. Picture her
to yourself, and ere you be old, learn to love and pray!
Sharp watched this graceless bedside with indomitable patience. Nothing
escaped her; and, like a prudent steward, she found a use for
everything. She told many a good story about Miss Crawley's illness in
after days--stories which made the lady blush through her artificial
carnations. During the illness she was never out of temper; always
alert; she slept light, having a perfectly clear conscience; and could
take that refreshment at almost any minute's warning. And so you saw
very few traces of fatigue in her appearance. Her face might be a
trifle paler, and the circles round her eyes a little blacker than
usual; but whenever she came out from the sick-room she was always
smiling, fresh, and neat, and looked as trim in her little
dressing-gown and cap, as in her smartest evening suit.
The Captain thought so, and raved about her in uncouth convulsions. The
barbed shaft of love had penetrated his dull hide. Six
weeks--appropinquity--opportunity--had victimised him completely. He
made a confidante of his aunt at the Rectory, of all persons in the
world. She rallied him about it; she had perceived his folly; she
warned him; she finished by owning that little Sharp was the most clever,
droll, odd, good-natured, simple, kindly creature in England. Rawdon
must not trifle with her affections, though--dear Miss Crawley would
never pardon him for that; for she, too, was quite overcome by the little
governess, and loved Sharp like a daughter. Rawdon must go away--go
back to his regiment and naughty London, and not play with a poor
artless girl's feelings.
Many and many a time this good-natured lady, compassionating the
forlorn life-guardsman's condition, gave him an opportunity of seeing
Miss Sharp at the Rectory, and of walking home with her, as we have
seen. When men of a certain sort, ladies, are in love, though they see
the hook and the string, and the whole apparatus with which they are to
be taken, they gorge the bait nevertheless--they must come to it--they
must swallow it--and are presently struck and landed gasping. Rawdon
saw there was a manifest intention on Mrs. Bute's part to captivate him
with Rebecca. He was not very wise; but he was a man about town, and
had seen several seasons. A light dawned upon his dusky soul, as he
thought, through a speech of Mrs. Bute's.
"Mark my words, Rawdon," she said. "You will have Miss Sharp one day
for your relation."
"What relation--my cousin, hey, Mrs. Bute? James sweet on her, hey?"
inquired the waggish officer.
"More than that," Mrs. Bute said, with a flash from her black eyes.
"Not Pitt? He sha'n't have her. The sneak a'n't worthy of her. He's
booked to Lady Jane Sheepshanks."
"You men perceive nothing. You silly, blind creature--if anything
happens to Lady Crawley, Miss Sharp will be your mother-in-law; and
that's what will happen."
Rawdon Crawley, Esquire, gave vent to a prodigious whistle, in token of
astonishment at this announcement. He couldn't deny it. His father's
evident liking for Miss Sharp had not escaped him. He knew the old
gentleman's character well; and a more unscrupulous old--whyou--he did
not conclude the sentence, but walked home, curling his mustachios, and
convinced he had found a clue to Mrs. Bute's mystery.
"By Jove, it's too bad," thought Rawdon, "too bad, by Jove! I do
believe the woman wants the poor girl to be ruined, in order that she
shouldn't come into the family as Lady Crawley."
When he saw Rebecca alone, he rallied her about his father's attachment
in his graceful way. She flung up her head scornfully, looked him full
in the face, and said,
"Well, suppose he is fond of me. I know he is, and others too. You
don't think I am afraid of him, Captain Crawley? You don't suppose I
can't defend my own honour," said the little woman, looking as stately
as a queen.
"Oh, ah, why--give you fair warning--look out, you know--that's all,"
said the mustachio-twiddler.
"You hint at something not honourable, then?" said she, flashing out.
"O Gad--really--Miss Rebecca," the heavy dragoon interposed.
"Do you suppose I have no feeling of self-respect, because I am poor
and friendless, and because rich people have none? Do you think,
because I am a governess, I have not as much sense, and feeling, and
good breeding as you gentlefolks in Hampshire? I'm a Montmorency. Do
you suppose a Montmorency is not as good as a Crawley?"
When Miss Sharp was agitated, and alluded to her maternal relatives,
she spoke with ever so slight a foreign accent, which gave a great
charm to her clear ringing voice. "No," she continued, kindling as she
spoke to the Captain; "I can endure poverty, but not shame--neglect,
but not insult; and insult from--from you."
Her feelings gave way, and she burst into tears.
"Hang it, Miss Sharp--Rebecca--by Jove--upon my soul, I wouldn't for a
thousand pounds. Stop, Rebecca!"
She was gone. She drove out with Miss Crawley that day. It was before
the latter's illness. At dinner she was unusually brilliant and
lively; but she would take no notice of the hints, or the nods, or the
clumsy expostulations of the humiliated, infatuated guardsman.
Skirmishes of this sort passed perpetually during the little
campaign--tedious to relate, and similar in result. The Crawley heavy
cavalry was maddened by defeat, and routed every day.
If the Baronet of Queen's Crawley had not had the fear of losing his
sister's legacy before his eyes, he never would have permitted his dear
girls to lose the educational blessings which their invaluable
governess was conferring upon them. The old house at home seemed a
desert without her, so useful and pleasant had Rebecca made herself
there. Sir Pitt's letters were not copied and corrected; his books not
made up; his household business and manifold schemes neglected, now
that his little secretary was away. And it was easy to see how
necessary such an amanuensis was to him, by the tenor and spelling of
the numerous letters which he sent to her, entreating her and
commanding her to return. Almost every day brought a frank from the
Baronet, enclosing the most urgent prayers to Becky for her return, or
conveying pathetic statements to Miss Crawley, regarding the neglected
state of his daughters' education; of which documents Miss Crawley took
very little heed.
Miss Briggs was not formally dismissed, but her place as companion was
a sinecure and a derision; and her company was the fat spaniel in the
drawing-room, or occasionally the discontented Firkin in the
housekeeper's closet. Nor though the old lady would by no means hear
of Rebecca's departure, was the latter regularly installed in office in
Park Lane. Like many wealthy people, it was Miss Crawley's habit to
accept as much service as she could get from her inferiors; and
good-naturedly to take leave of them when she no longer found them
useful. Gratitude among certain rich folks is scarcely natural or to
be thought of. They take needy people's services as their due. Nor
have you, O poor parasite and humble hanger-on, much reason to
complain! Your friendship for Dives is about as sincere as the return
which it usually gets. It is money you love, and not the man; and were
Croesus and his footman to change places you know, you poor rogue, who
would have the benefit of your allegiance.
And I am not sure that, in spite of Rebecca's simplicity and activity,
and gentleness and untiring good humour, the shrewd old London lady,
upon whom these treasures of friendship were lavished, had not a
lurking suspicion all the while of her affectionate nurse and friend.
It must have often crossed Miss Crawley's mind that nobody does
anything for nothing. If she measured her own feeling towards the
world, she must have been pretty well able to gauge those of the world
towards herself; and perhaps she reflected that it is the ordinary lot
of people to have no friends if they themselves care for nobody.
Well, meanwhile Becky was the greatest comfort and convenience to her,
and she gave her a couple of new gowns, and an old necklace and shawl,
and showed her friendship by abusing all her intimate acquaintances to
her new confidante (than which there can't be a more touching proof of
regard), and meditated vaguely some great future benefit--to marry her
perhaps to Clump, the apothecary, or to settle her in some advantageous
way of life; or at any rate, to send her back to Queen's Crawley when
she had done with her, and the full London season had begun.
When Miss Crawley was convalescent and descended to the drawing-room,
Becky sang to her, and otherwise amused her; when she was well enough
to drive out, Becky accompanied her. And amongst the drives which they
took, whither, of all places in the world, did Miss Crawley's admirable
good-nature and friendship actually induce her to penetrate, but to
Russell Square, Bloomsbury, and the house of John Sedley, Esquire.
Ere that event, many notes had passed, as may be imagined, between the
two dear friends. During the months of Rebecca's stay in Hampshire,
the eternal friendship had (must it be owned?) suffered considerable
diminution, and grown so decrepit and feeble with old age as to
threaten demise altogether. The fact is, both girls had their own real
affairs to think of: Rebecca her advance with her employers--Amelia her
own absorbing topic. When the two girls met, and flew into each
other's arms with that impetuosity which distinguishes the behaviour of
young ladies towards each other, Rebecca performed her part of the
embrace with the most perfect briskness and energy. Poor little Amelia
blushed as she kissed her friend, and thought she had been guilty of
something very like coldness towards her.
Their first interview was but a very short one. Amelia was just ready
to go out for a walk. Miss Crawley was waiting in her carriage below,
her people wondering at the locality in which they found themselves,
and gazing upon honest Sambo, the black footman of Bloomsbury, as one
of the queer natives of the place. But when Amelia came down with her
kind smiling looks (Rebecca must introduce her to her friend, Miss
Crawley was longing to see her, and was too ill to leave her
carriage)--when, I say, Amelia came down, the Park Lane shoulder-knot
aristocracy wondered more and more that such a thing could come out of
Bloomsbury; and Miss Crawley was fairly captivated by the sweet
blushing face of the young lady who came forward so timidly and so
gracefully to pay her respects to the protector of her friend.
"What a complexion, my dear! What a sweet voice!" Miss Crawley said, as
they drove away westward after the little interview. "My dear Sharp,
your young friend is charming. Send for her to Park Lane, do you
hear?" Miss Crawley had a good taste. She liked natural manners--a
little timidity only set them off. She liked pretty faces near her; as
she liked pretty pictures and nice china. She talked of Amelia with
rapture half a dozen times that day. She mentioned her to Rawdon
Crawley, who came dutifully to partake of his aunt's chicken.
Of course, on this Rebecca instantly stated that Amelia was engaged to
be married--to a Lieutenant Osborne--a very old flame.
"Is he a man in a line-regiment?" Captain Crawley asked, remembering
after an effort, as became a guardsman, the number of the regiment,
the --th.
Rebecca thought that was the regiment. "The Captain's name," she said,
"was Captain Dobbin."
"A lanky gawky fellow," said Crawley, "tumbles over everybody. I know
him; and Osborne's a goodish-looking fellow, with large black whiskers?"
"Enormous," Miss Rebecca Sharp said, "and enormously proud of them, I
assure you."
Captain Rawdon Crawley burst into a horse-laugh by way of reply; and
being pressed by the ladies to explain, did so when the explosion of
hilarity was over. "He fancies he can play at billiards," said he. "I
won two hundred of him at the Cocoa-Tree. HE play, the young flat!
He'd have played for anything that day, but his friend Captain Dobbin
carried him off, hang him!"
"Rawdon, Rawdon, don't be so wicked," Miss Crawley remarked, highly
pleased.
"Why, ma'am, of all the young fellows I've seen out of the line, I
think this fellow's the greenest. Tarquin and Deuceace get what money
they like out of him. He'd go to the deuce to be seen with a lord. He
pays their dinners at Greenwich, and they invite the company."
"And very pretty company too, I dare say."
"Quite right, Miss Sharp. Right, as usual, Miss Sharp. Uncommon pretty
company--haw, haw!" and the Captain laughed more and more, thinking he
had made a good joke.
"Rawdon, don't be naughty!" his aunt exclaimed.
"Well, his father's a City man--immensely rich, they say. Hang those
City fellows, they must bleed; and I've not done with him yet, I can
tell you. Haw, haw!"
"Fie, Captain Crawley; I shall warn Amelia. A gambling husband!"
"Horrid, ain't he, hey?" the Captain said with great solemnity; and
then added, a sudden thought having struck him: "Gad, I say, ma'am,
we'll have him here."
"Is he a presentable sort of a person?" the aunt inquired.
"Presentable?--oh, very well. You wouldn't see any difference,"
Captain Crawley answered. "Do let's have him, when you begin to see a
few people; and his whatdyecallem--his inamorato--eh, Miss Sharp;
that's what you call it--comes. Gad, I'll write him a note, and have
him; and I'll try if he can play piquet as well as billiards. Where
does he live, Miss Sharp?"
Miss Sharp told Crawley the Lieutenant's town address; and a few days
after this conversation, Lieutenant Osborne received a letter, in
Captain Rawdon's schoolboy hand, and enclosing a note of invitation
from Miss Crawley.
Rebecca despatched also an invitation to her darling Amelia, who, you
may be sure, was ready enough to accept it when she heard that George
was to be of the party. It was arranged that Amelia was to spend the
morning with the ladies of Park Lane, where all were very kind to her.
Rebecca patronised her with calm superiority: she was so much the
cleverer of the two, and her friend so gentle and unassuming, that she
always yielded when anybody chose to command, and so took Rebecca's
orders with perfect meekness and good humour. Miss Crawley's
graciousness was also remarkable. She continued her raptures about
little Amelia, talked about her before her face as if she were a doll,
or a servant, or a picture, and admired her with the most benevolent
wonder possible. I admire that admiration which the genteel world
sometimes extends to the commonalty. There is no more agreeable object
in life than to see Mayfair folks condescending. Miss Crawley's
prodigious benevolence rather fatigued poor little Amelia, and I am not
sure that of the three ladies in Park Lane she did not find honest Miss
Briggs the most agreeable. She sympathised with Briggs as with all
neglected or gentle people: she wasn't what you call a woman of spirit.
George came to dinner--a repast en garcon with Captain Crawley.
The great family coach of the Osbornes transported him to Park Lane
from Russell Square; where the young ladies, who were not themselves
invited, and professed the greatest indifference at that slight,
nevertheless looked at Sir Pitt Crawley's name in the baronetage; and
learned everything which that work had to teach about the Crawley
family and their pedigree, and the Binkies, their relatives, &c., &c.
Rawdon Crawley received George Osborne with great frankness and
graciousness: praised his play at billiards: asked him when he would
have his revenge: was interested about Osborne's regiment: and would
have proposed piquet to him that very evening, but Miss Crawley
absolutely forbade any gambling in her house; so that the young
Lieutenant's purse was not lightened by his gallant patron, for that
day at least. However, they made an engagement for the next,
somewhere: to look at a horse that Crawley had to sell, and to try him
in the Park; and to dine together, and to pass the evening with some
jolly fellows. "That is, if you're not on duty to that pretty Miss
Sedley," Crawley said, with a knowing wink. "Monstrous nice girl, 'pon
my honour, though, Osborne," he was good enough to add. "Lots of tin,
I suppose, eh?"
Osborne wasn't on duty; he would join Crawley with pleasure: and the
latter, when they met the next day, praised his new friend's
horsemanship--as he might with perfect honesty--and introduced him to
three or four young men of the first fashion, whose acquaintance
immensely elated the simple young officer.
"How's little Miss Sharp, by-the-bye?" Osborne inquired of his friend
over their wine, with a dandified air. "Good-natured little girl that.
Does she suit you well at Queen's Crawley? Miss Sedley liked her a good
deal last year."
Captain Crawley looked savagely at the Lieutenant out of his little
blue eyes, and watched him when he went up to resume his acquaintance
with the fair governess. Her conduct must have relieved Crawley if
there was any jealousy in the bosom of that life-guardsman.
When the young men went upstairs, and after Osborne's introduction to
Miss Crawley, he walked up to Rebecca with a patronising, easy swagger.
He was going to be kind to her and protect her. He would even shake
hands with her, as a friend of Amelia's; and saying, "Ah, Miss Sharp!
how-dy-doo?" held out his left hand towards her, expecting that she
would be quite confounded at the honour.
Miss Sharp put out her right forefinger, and gave him a little nod, so
cool and killing, that Rawdon Crawley, watching the operations from the
other room, could hardly restrain his laughter as he saw the
Lieutenant's entire discomfiture; the start he gave, the pause, and the
perfect clumsiness with which he at length condescended to take the
finger which was offered for his embrace.
"She'd beat the devil, by Jove!" the Captain said, in a rapture; and
the Lieutenant, by way of beginning the conversation, agreeably asked
Rebecca how she liked her new place.
"My place?" said Miss Sharp, coolly, "how kind of you to remind me of
it! It's a tolerably good place: the wages are pretty good--not so
good as Miss Wirt's, I believe, with your sisters in Russell Square.
How are those young ladies?--not that I ought to ask."
"Why not?" Mr. Osborne said, amazed.
"Why, they never condescended to speak to me, or to ask me into their
house, whilst I was staying with Amelia; but we poor governesses, you
know, are used to slights of this sort."
"My dear Miss Sharp!" Osborne ejaculated.
"At least in some families," Rebecca continued. "You can't think what
a difference there is though. We are not so wealthy in Hampshire as
you lucky folks of the City. But then I am in a gentleman's
family--good old English stock. I suppose you know Sir Pitt's father
refused a peerage. And you see how I am treated. I am pretty
comfortable. Indeed it is rather a good place. But how very good of
you to inquire!"
Osborne was quite savage. The little governess patronised him and
persiffled him until this young British Lion felt quite uneasy; nor
could he muster sufficient presence of mind to find a pretext for
backing out of this most delectable conversation.
"I thought you liked the City families pretty well," he said, haughtily.
"Last year you mean, when I was fresh from that horrid vulgar school?
Of course I did. Doesn't every girl like to come home for the
holidays? And how was I to know any better? But oh, Mr. Osborne, what
a difference eighteen months' experience makes! eighteen months spent,
pardon me for saying so, with gentlemen. As for dear Amelia, she, I
grant you, is a pearl, and would be charming anywhere. There now, I
see you are beginning to be in a good humour; but oh these queer odd
City people! And Mr. Jos--how is that wonderful Mr. Joseph?"
"It seems to me you didn't dislike that wonderful Mr. Joseph last
year," Osborne said kindly.
"How severe of you! Well, entre nous, I didn't break my heart about
him; yet if he had asked me to do what you mean by your looks (and very
expressive and kind they are, too), I wouldn't have said no."
Mr. Osborne gave a look as much as to say, "Indeed, how very obliging!"
"What an honour to have had you for a brother-in-law, you are thinking?
To be sister-in-law to George Osborne, Esquire, son of John Osborne,
Esquire, son of--what was your grandpapa, Mr. Osborne? Well, don't be
angry. You can't help your pedigree, and I quite agree with you that I
would have married Mr. Joe Sedley; for could a poor penniless girl do
better? Now you know the whole secret. I'm frank and open;
considering all things, it was very kind of you to allude to the
circumstance--very kind and polite. Amelia dear, Mr. Osborne and I
were talking about your poor brother Joseph. How is he?"
Thus was George utterly routed. Not that Rebecca was in the right; but
she had managed most successfully to put him in the wrong. And he now
shamefully fled, feeling, if he stayed another minute, that he would
have been made to look foolish in the presence of Amelia.
Though Rebecca had had the better of him, George was above the meanness
of talebearing or revenge upon a lady--only he could not help cleverly
confiding to Captain Crawley, next day, some notions of his regarding
Miss Rebecca--that she was a sharp one, a dangerous one, a desperate
flirt, &c.; in all of which opinions Crawley agreed laughingly, and
with every one of which Miss Rebecca was made acquainted before
twenty-four hours were over. They added to her original regard for Mr.
Osborne. Her woman's instinct had told her that it was George who had
interrupted the success of her first love-passage, and she esteemed him
accordingly.
"I only just warn you," he said to Rawdon Crawley, with a knowing
look--he had bought the horse, and lost some score of guineas after
dinner, "I just warn you--I know women, and counsel you to be on the
look-out."
"Thank you, my boy," said Crawley, with a look of peculiar gratitude.
"You're wide awake, I see." And George went off, thinking Crawley was
quite right.
He told Amelia of what he had done, and how he had counselled Rawdon
Crawley--a devilish good, straightforward fellow--to be on his guard
against that little sly, scheming Rebecca.
"Against whom?" Amelia cried.
"Your friend the governess.--Don't look so astonished."
"O George, what have you done?" Amelia said. For her woman's eyes,
which Love had made sharp-sighted, had in one instant discovered a
secret which was invisible to Miss Crawley, to poor virgin Briggs, and
above all, to the stupid peepers of that young whiskered prig,
Lieutenant Osborne.
For as Rebecca was shawling her in an upper apartment, where these two
friends had an opportunity for a little of that secret talking and
conspiring which form the delight of female life, Amelia, coming up to
Rebecca, and taking her two little hands in hers, said, "Rebecca, I see
it all."
Rebecca kissed her.
And regarding this delightful secret, not one syllable more was said by
either of the young women. But it was destined to come out before long.
Some short period after the above events, and Miss Rebecca Sharp still
remaining at her patroness's house in Park Lane, one more hatchment
might have been seen in Great Gaunt Street, figuring amongst the many
which usually ornament that dismal quarter. It was over Sir Pitt
Crawley's house; but it did not indicate the worthy baronet's demise.
It was a feminine hatchment, and indeed a few years back had served as
a funeral compliment to Sir Pitt's old mother, the late dowager Lady
Crawley. Its period of service over, the hatchment had come down from
the front of the house, and lived in retirement somewhere in the back
premises of Sir Pitt's mansion. It reappeared now for poor Rose Dawson.
Sir Pitt was a widower again. The arms quartered on the shield along
with his own were not, to be sure, poor Rose's. She had no arms. But
the cherubs painted on the scutcheon answered as well for her as for
Sir Pitt's mother, and Resurgam was written under the coat, flanked by
the Crawley Dove and Serpent. Arms and Hatchments, Resurgam.--Here is
an opportunity for moralising!
Mr. Crawley had tended that otherwise friendless bedside. She went out
of the world strengthened by such words and comfort as he could give
her. For many years his was the only kindness she ever knew; the only
friendship that solaced in any way that feeble, lonely soul. Her heart
was dead long before her body. She had sold it to become Sir Pitt
Crawley's wife. Mothers and daughters are making the same bargain
every day in Vanity Fair.
When the demise took place, her husband was in London attending to some
of his innumerable schemes, and busy with his endless lawyers. He had
found time, nevertheless, to call often in Park Lane, and to despatch
many notes to Rebecca, entreating her, enjoining her, commanding her to
return to her young pupils in the country, who were now utterly without
companionship during their mother's illness. But Miss Crawley would
not hear of her departure; for though there was no lady of fashion in
London who would desert her friends more complacently as soon as she
was tired of their society, and though few tired of them sooner, yet as
long as her engoument lasted her attachment was prodigious, and she
clung still with the greatest energy to Rebecca.
The news of Lady Crawley's death provoked no more grief or comment than
might have been expected in Miss Crawley's family circle. "I suppose I
must put off my party for the 3rd," Miss Crawley said; and added, after
a pause, "I hope my brother will have the decency not to marry again."
"What a confounded rage Pitt will be in if he does," Rawdon remarked,
with his usual regard for his elder brother. Rebecca said nothing. She
seemed by far the gravest and most impressed of the family. She left
the room before Rawdon went away that day; but they met by chance
below, as he was going away after taking leave, and had a parley
together.
On the morrow, as Rebecca was gazing from the window, she startled Miss
Crawley, who was placidly occupied with a French novel, by crying out
in an alarmed tone, "Here's Sir Pitt, Ma'am!" and the Baronet's knock
followed this announcement.
"My dear, I can't see him. I won't see him. Tell Bowls not at home,
or go downstairs and say I'm too ill to receive any one. My nerves
really won't bear my brother at this moment," cried out Miss Crawley,
and resumed the novel.
"She's too ill to see you, sir," Rebecca said, tripping down to Sir
Pitt, who was preparing to ascend.
"So much the better," Sir Pitt answered. "I want to see YOU, Miss
Becky. Come along a me into the parlour," and they entered that
apartment together.
"I wawnt you back at Queen's Crawley, Miss," the baronet said, fixing
his eyes upon her, and taking off his black gloves and his hat with its
great crape hat-band. His eyes had such a strange look, and fixed upon
her so steadfastly, that Rebecca Sharp began almost to tremble.
"I hope to come soon," she said in a low voice, "as soon as Miss
Crawley is better--and return to--to the dear children."
"You've said so these three months, Becky," replied Sir Pitt, "and
still you go hanging on to my sister, who'll fling you off like an old
shoe, when she's wore you out. I tell you I want you. I'm going back
to the Vuneral. Will you come back? Yes or no?"
"I daren't--I don't think--it would be right--to be alone--with you,
sir," Becky said, seemingly in great agitation.
"I say agin, I want you," Sir Pitt said, thumping the table. "I can't
git on without you. I didn't see what it was till you went away. The
house all goes wrong. It's not the same place. All my accounts has
got muddled agin. You MUST come back. Do come back. Dear Becky, do
come."
"Come--as what, sir?" Rebecca gasped out.
"Come as Lady Crawley, if you like," the Baronet said, grasping his
crape hat. "There! will that zatusfy you? Come back and be my wife.
Your vit vor't. Birth be hanged. You're as good a lady as ever I see.
You've got more brains in your little vinger than any baronet's wife in
the county. Will you come? Yes or no?"
"Oh, Sir Pitt!" Rebecca said, very much moved.
"Say yes, Becky," Sir Pitt continued. "I'm an old man, but a good'n.
I'm good for twenty years. I'll make you happy, zee if I don't. You
shall do what you like; spend what you like; and 'ave it all your own
way. I'll make you a zettlement. I'll do everything reglar. Look
year!" and the old man fell down on his knees and leered at her like a
satyr.
Rebecca started back a picture of consternation. In the course of this
history we have never seen her lose her presence of mind; but she did
now, and wept some of the most genuine tears that ever fell from her
eyes.
"Oh, Sir Pitt!" she said. "Oh, sir--I--I'm married ALREADY."
| Miss Crawley comes back from the country to her London house with a new "young person" in tow to take care of her during her illness. The narrator makes it sort of mysterious who this might be, but - spoiler alert - it's Becky! The two women who used to take care of Miss Crawley are totally jealous that she's suddenly all into Becky. Miss Briggs, Miss Crawley's paid companion, has a sobby-weepy conversation with Becky about how sad she is that Miss Crawley has been ignoring her. Becky is half-obnoxious and half-friendly in response and promises to leave as soon as Miss Crawley is feeling better. Miss Briggs is a soft touch and makes up with Becky. Becky also removes Mrs. Firkin, Miss Crawley's maid, from dealing with Miss Crawley directly. Firkin and Briggs commiserate and discuss how close to death Miss Crawley might be. Pretty close, they conclude. Meanwhile, Becky entertains Miss Crawley by doing spot-on and pretty harsh impressions of Briggs and Firkin. Now the narrator shows us what's actually going on with the old woman. Turns out Miss Crawley has overeaten herself into her illness . While everyone is stressing about Miss Crawley, however, Lady Crawley is sick for real. But, like always, she is mostly ignored and stays in her room. Rawdon and Sir Pitt both come to London. Both hang around Miss Crawley's house to check up on her. Both only want Becky to tell them the news about how she's doing. Knowing what we know about each of them, we can guess just how very deeply they are concerned for her health and how much they want her to get better. Becky is actually a really good nurse. She's a hard worker and can put in the effort if she thinks it'll be worth it . And taking care of the super-selfish and super-annoying Miss Crawley really takes a lot of effort. Rawdon realizes that he is in love with Becky. He tells Mrs. Bute Crawley about it. Mrs. Bute keeps egging him on, and teases him that Sir Pitt would like to marry Becky if he could. This makes Rawdon go a little nuts. Rawdon jokes about Sir Pitt to Becky and she gets mad and gives him the cold shoulder. Rawdon is even more in love when she plays hard to get. Honestly, though, he's such a dope that stringing him along is not worth her talents. But whatever. Sir Pitt wants Becky back at Queen's Crawley, but Miss Crawley won't let her go and spends all day every day with her. One day Becky and Miss Crawley go for a ride in the carriage and stop at the Sedleys' house to visit Amelia. Becky and Amelia have mostly fallen out of touch at this point, but Becky, as always, can act any part, so she puts on her best friend face. Miss Crawley thinks Amelia is pretty, and invites her over to her house. Becky tells Miss Crawley about Amelia being engaged to George, and after Rawdon tells Miss Crawley that George could easily pass for a gentleman despite not being born into the nobility, she decides to invite George over too. Rawdon is psyched. Turns out that George is such a snob and so desperate a social climber that he'd "go to the deuce to be seen with a lord" . As a result, George spends time with Rawdon and another winner named Lord Deuceace and basically loses tons of money to them at cards and billiards. George and Amelia come over. George sees Becky and decides to demonstrate his superiority to her as a governess. Instead, Becky totally cuts him down to size with super-politely given insults about his birth. She is a master of insults and he really can't compete. Rawdon sees this exchange and is even more into Becky: "She'd beat the devil, by Jove!" . A little while later, Lady Crawley dies. No one cares, she's such a nonperson. The next day, Sir Pitt comes to Miss Crawley's house and demands that Becky come back to Queen's Crawley. Becky starts to tell him that she can't leave Miss Crawley, with the usual excuses, when Sir Pitt suddenly busts out with a totally shocking thing. Ready? You're not ready, sit down first. OK, ready? He gets down on his knees and asks her to marry him! Crazy! Still sitting down? Because it gets even more nuts. Becky says no. What?! Why? Because...she is already married. What?!?! Now that's what we call a cliffhanger. | summary |
In Which Rebecca's Husband Appears for a Short Time
Every reader of a sentimental turn (and we desire no other) must have
been pleased with the tableau with which the last act of our little
drama concluded; for what can be prettier than an image of Love on his
knees before Beauty?
But when Love heard that awful confession from Beauty that she was
married already, he bounced up from his attitude of humility on the
carpet, uttering exclamations which caused poor little Beauty to be
more frightened than she was when she made her avowal. "Married;
you're joking," the Baronet cried, after the first explosion of rage
and wonder. "You're making vun of me, Becky. Who'd ever go to marry
you without a shilling to your vortune?"
"Married! married!" Rebecca said, in an agony of tears--her voice
choking with emotion, her handkerchief up to her ready eyes, fainting
against the mantelpiece a figure of woe fit to melt the most obdurate
heart. "O Sir Pitt, dear Sir Pitt, do not think me ungrateful for all
your goodness to me. It is only your generosity that has extorted my
secret."
"Generosity be hanged!" Sir Pitt roared out. "Who is it tu, then,
you're married? Where was it?"
"Let me come back with you to the country, sir! Let me watch over you
as faithfully as ever! Don't, don't separate me from dear Queen's
Crawley!"
"The feller has left you, has he?" the Baronet said, beginning, as he
fancied, to comprehend. "Well, Becky--come back if you like. You can't
eat your cake and have it. Any ways I made you a vair offer. Coom
back as governess--you shall have it all your own way." She held out
one hand. She cried fit to break her heart; her ringlets fell over her
face, and over the marble mantelpiece where she laid it.
"So the rascal ran off, eh?" Sir Pitt said, with a hideous attempt at
consolation. "Never mind, Becky, I'LL take care of 'ee."
"Oh, sir! it would be the pride of my life to go back to Queen's
Crawley, and take care of the children, and of you as formerly, when
you said you were pleased with the services of your little Rebecca.
When I think of what you have just offered me, my heart fills with
gratitude indeed it does. I can't be your wife, sir; let me--let me be
your daughter." Saying which, Rebecca went down on HER knees in a most
tragical way, and, taking Sir Pitt's horny black hand between her own
two (which were very pretty and white, and as soft as satin), looked up
in his face with an expression of exquisite pathos and confidence,
when--when the door opened, and Miss Crawley sailed in.
Mrs. Firkin and Miss Briggs, who happened by chance to be at the
parlour door soon after the Baronet and Rebecca entered the apartment,
had also seen accidentally, through the keyhole, the old gentleman
prostrate before the governess, and had heard the generous proposal
which he made her. It was scarcely out of his mouth when Mrs. Firkin
and Miss Briggs had streamed up the stairs, had rushed into the
drawing-room where Miss Crawley was reading the French novel, and had
given that old lady the astounding intelligence that Sir Pitt was on
his knees, proposing to Miss Sharp. And if you calculate the time for
the above dialogue to take place--the time for Briggs and Firkin to fly
to the drawing-room--the time for Miss Crawley to be astonished, and to
drop her volume of Pigault le Brun--and the time for her to come
downstairs--you will see how exactly accurate this history is, and how
Miss Crawley must have appeared at the very instant when Rebecca had
assumed the attitude of humility.
"It is the lady on the ground, and not the gentleman," Miss Crawley
said, with a look and voice of great scorn. "They told me that YOU were
on your knees, Sir Pitt: do kneel once more, and let me see this pretty
couple!"
"I have thanked Sir Pitt Crawley, Ma'am," Rebecca said, rising, "and
have told him that--that I never can become Lady Crawley."
"Refused him!" Miss Crawley said, more bewildered than ever. Briggs
and Firkin at the door opened the eyes of astonishment and the lips of
wonder.
"Yes--refused," Rebecca continued, with a sad, tearful voice.
"And am I to credit my ears that you absolutely proposed to her, Sir
Pitt?" the old lady asked.
"Ees," said the Baronet, "I did."
"And she refused you as she says?"
"Ees," Sir Pitt said, his features on a broad grin.
"It does not seem to break your heart at any rate," Miss Crawley
remarked.
"Nawt a bit," answered Sir Pitt, with a coolness and good-humour which
set Miss Crawley almost mad with bewilderment. That an old gentleman
of station should fall on his knees to a penniless governess, and burst
out laughing because she refused to marry him--that a penniless
governess should refuse a Baronet with four thousand a year--these were
mysteries which Miss Crawley could never comprehend. It surpassed any
complications of intrigue in her favourite Pigault le Brun.
"I'm glad you think it good sport, brother," she continued, groping
wildly through this amazement.
"Vamous," said Sir Pitt. "Who'd ha' thought it! what a sly little
devil! what a little fox it waws!" he muttered to himself, chuckling
with pleasure.
"Who'd have thought what?" cries Miss Crawley, stamping with her foot.
"Pray, Miss Sharp, are you waiting for the Prince Regent's divorce,
that you don't think our family good enough for you?"
"My attitude," Rebecca said, "when you came in, ma'am, did not look as
if I despised such an honour as this good--this noble man has deigned
to offer me. Do you think I have no heart? Have you all loved me, and
been so kind to the poor orphan--deserted--girl, and am I to feel
nothing? O my friends! O my benefactors! may not my love, my life, my
duty, try to repay the confidence you have shown me? Do you grudge me
even gratitude, Miss Crawley? It is too much--my heart is too full";
and she sank down in a chair so pathetically, that most of the audience
present were perfectly melted with her sadness.
"Whether you marry me or not, you're a good little girl, Becky, and I'm
your vriend, mind," said Sir Pitt, and putting on his crape-bound hat,
he walked away--greatly to Rebecca's relief; for it was evident that
her secret was unrevealed to Miss Crawley, and she had the advantage of
a brief reprieve.
Putting her handkerchief to her eyes, and nodding away honest Briggs,
who would have followed her upstairs, she went up to her apartment;
while Briggs and Miss Crawley, in a high state of excitement, remained
to discuss the strange event, and Firkin, not less moved, dived down
into the kitchen regions, and talked of it with all the male and female
company there. And so impressed was Mrs. Firkin with the news, that
she thought proper to write off by that very night's post, "with her
humble duty to Mrs. Bute Crawley and the family at the Rectory, and Sir
Pitt has been and proposed for to marry Miss Sharp, wherein she has
refused him, to the wonder of all."
The two ladies in the dining-room (where worthy Miss Briggs was
delighted to be admitted once more to confidential conversation with
her patroness) wondered to their hearts' content at Sir Pitt's offer,
and Rebecca's refusal; Briggs very acutely suggesting that there must
have been some obstacle in the shape of a previous attachment,
otherwise no young woman in her senses would ever have refused so
advantageous a proposal.
"You would have accepted it yourself, wouldn't you, Briggs?" Miss
Crawley said, kindly.
"Would it not be a privilege to be Miss Crawley's sister?" Briggs
replied, with meek evasion.
"Well, Becky would have made a good Lady Crawley, after all," Miss
Crawley remarked (who was mollified by the girl's refusal, and very
liberal and generous now there was no call for her sacrifices). "She
has brains in plenty (much more wit in her little finger than you have,
my poor dear Briggs, in all your head). Her manners are excellent, now
I have formed her. She is a Montmorency, Briggs, and blood is
something, though I despise it for my part; and she would have held her
own amongst those pompous stupid Hampshire people much better than that
unfortunate ironmonger's daughter."
Briggs coincided as usual, and the "previous attachment" was then
discussed in conjectures. "You poor friendless creatures are always
having some foolish tendre," Miss Crawley said. "You yourself, you
know, were in love with a writing-master (don't cry, Briggs--you're
always crying, and it won't bring him to life again), and I suppose
this unfortunate Becky has been silly and sentimental too--some
apothecary, or house-steward, or painter, or young curate, or something
of that sort."
"Poor thing! poor thing!" says Briggs (who was thinking of twenty-four
years back, and that hectic young writing-master whose lock of yellow
hair, and whose letters, beautiful in their illegibility, she cherished
in her old desk upstairs). "Poor thing, poor thing!" says Briggs.
Once more she was a fresh-cheeked lass of eighteen; she was at evening
church, and the hectic writing-master and she were quavering out of the
same psalm-book.
"After such conduct on Rebecca's part," Miss Crawley said
enthusiastically, "our family should do something. Find out who is the
objet, Briggs. I'll set him up in a shop; or order my portrait of him,
you know; or speak to my cousin, the Bishop and I'll doter Becky, and
we'll have a wedding, Briggs, and you shall make the breakfast, and be
a bridesmaid."
Briggs declared that it would be delightful, and vowed that her dear
Miss Crawley was always kind and generous, and went up to Rebecca's
bedroom to console her and prattle about the offer, and the refusal,
and the cause thereof; and to hint at the generous intentions of Miss
Crawley, and to find out who was the gentleman that had the mastery of
Miss Sharp's heart.
Rebecca was very kind, very affectionate and affected--responded to
Briggs's offer of tenderness with grateful fervour--owned there was a
secret attachment--a delicious mystery--what a pity Miss Briggs had not
remained half a minute longer at the keyhole! Rebecca might, perhaps,
have told more: but five minutes after Miss Briggs's arrival in
Rebecca's apartment, Miss Crawley actually made her appearance
there--an unheard-of honour--her impatience had overcome her; she could
not wait for the tardy operations of her ambassadress: so she came in
person, and ordered Briggs out of the room. And expressing her approval
of Rebecca's conduct, she asked particulars of the interview, and the
previous transactions which had brought about the astonishing offer of
Sir Pitt.
Rebecca said she had long had some notion of the partiality with which
Sir Pitt honoured her (for he was in the habit of making his feelings
known in a very frank and unreserved manner) but, not to mention
private reasons with which she would not for the present trouble Miss
Crawley, Sir Pitt's age, station, and habits were such as to render a
marriage quite impossible; and could a woman with any feeling of
self-respect and any decency listen to proposals at such a moment, when
the funeral of the lover's deceased wife had not actually taken place?
"Nonsense, my dear, you would never have refused him had there not been
some one else in the case," Miss Crawley said, coming to her point at
once. "Tell me the private reasons; what are the private reasons?
There is some one; who is it that has touched your heart?"
Rebecca cast down her eyes, and owned there was. "You have guessed
right, dear lady," she said, with a sweet simple faltering voice. "You
wonder at one so poor and friendless having an attachment, don't you? I
have never heard that poverty was any safeguard against it. I wish it
were."
"My poor dear child," cried Miss Crawley, who was always quite ready to
be sentimental, "is our passion unrequited, then? Are we pining in
secret? Tell me all, and let me console you."
"I wish you could, dear Madam," Rebecca said in the same tearful tone.
"Indeed, indeed, I need it." And she laid her head upon Miss Crawley's
shoulder and wept there so naturally that the old lady, surprised into
sympathy, embraced her with an almost maternal kindness, uttered many
soothing protests of regard and affection for her, vowed that she loved
her as a daughter, and would do everything in her power to serve her.
"And now who is it, my dear? Is it that pretty Miss Sedley's brother?
You said something about an affair with him. I'll ask him here, my
dear. And you shall have him: indeed you shall."
"Don't ask me now," Rebecca said. "You shall know all soon. Indeed
you shall. Dear kind Miss Crawley--dear friend, may I say so?"
"That you may, my child," the old lady replied, kissing her.
"I can't tell you now," sobbed out Rebecca, "I am very miserable. But
O! love me always--promise you will love me always." And in the midst
of mutual tears--for the emotions of the younger woman had awakened the
sympathies of the elder--this promise was solemnly given by Miss
Crawley, who left her little protege, blessing and admiring her as a
dear, artless, tender-hearted, affectionate, incomprehensible creature.
And now she was left alone to think over the sudden and wonderful
events of the day, and of what had been and what might have been. What
think you were the private feelings of Miss, no (begging her pardon) of
Mrs. Rebecca? If, a few pages back, the present writer claimed the
privilege of peeping into Miss Amelia Sedley's bedroom, and
understanding with the omniscience of the novelist all the gentle pains
and passions which were tossing upon that innocent pillow, why should
he not declare himself to be Rebecca's confidante too, master of her
secrets, and seal-keeper of that young woman's conscience?
Well, then, in the first place, Rebecca gave way to some very sincere
and touching regrets that a piece of marvellous good fortune should
have been so near her, and she actually obliged to decline it. In this
natural emotion every properly regulated mind will certainly share.
What good mother is there that would not commiserate a penniless
spinster, who might have been my lady, and have shared four thousand a
year? What well-bred young person is there in all Vanity Fair, who
will not feel for a hard-working, ingenious, meritorious girl, who gets
such an honourable, advantageous, provoking offer, just at the very
moment when it is out of her power to accept it? I am sure our friend
Becky's disappointment deserves and will command every sympathy.
I remember one night being in the Fair myself, at an evening party. I
observed old Miss Toady there also present, single out for her special
attentions and flattery little Mrs. Briefless, the barrister's wife,
who is of a good family certainly, but, as we all know, is as poor as
poor can be.
What, I asked in my own mind, can cause this obsequiousness on the part
of Miss Toady; has Briefless got a county court, or has his wife had a
fortune left her? Miss Toady explained presently, with that simplicity
which distinguishes all her conduct. "You know," she said, "Mrs
Briefless is granddaughter of Sir John Redhand, who is so ill at
Cheltenham that he can't last six months. Mrs. Briefless's papa
succeeds; so you see she will be a baronet's daughter." And Toady asked
Briefless and his wife to dinner the very next week.
If the mere chance of becoming a baronet's daughter can procure a lady
such homage in the world, surely, surely we may respect the agonies of
a young woman who has lost the opportunity of becoming a baronet's
wife. Who would have dreamed of Lady Crawley dying so soon? She was
one of those sickly women that might have lasted these ten
years--Rebecca thought to herself, in all the woes of repentance--and I
might have been my lady! I might have led that old man whither I
would. I might have thanked Mrs. Bute for her patronage, and Mr. Pitt
for his insufferable condescension. I would have had the town-house
newly furnished and decorated. I would have had the handsomest
carriage in London, and a box at the opera; and I would have been
presented next season. All this might have been; and now--now all was
doubt and mystery.
But Rebecca was a young lady of too much resolution and energy of
character to permit herself much useless and unseemly sorrow for the
irrevocable past; so, having devoted only the proper portion of regret
to it, she wisely turned her whole attention towards the future, which
was now vastly more important to her. And she surveyed her position,
and its hopes, doubts, and chances.
In the first place, she was MARRIED--that was a great fact. Sir Pitt
knew it. She was not so much surprised into the avowal, as induced to
make it by a sudden calculation. It must have come some day: and why
not now as at a later period? He who would have married her himself
must at least be silent with regard to her marriage. How Miss Crawley
would bear the news--was the great question. Misgivings Rebecca had;
but she remembered all Miss Crawley had said; the old lady's avowed
contempt for birth; her daring liberal opinions; her general romantic
propensities; her almost doting attachment to her nephew, and her
repeatedly expressed fondness for Rebecca herself. She is so fond of
him, Rebecca thought, that she will forgive him anything: she is so
used to me that I don't think she could be comfortable without me: when
the eclaircissement comes there will be a scene, and hysterics, and a
great quarrel, and then a great reconciliation. At all events, what
use was there in delaying? the die was thrown, and now or to-morrow the
issue must be the same. And so, resolved that Miss Crawley should have
the news, the young person debated in her mind as to the best means of
conveying it to her; and whether she should face the storm that must
come, or fly and avoid it until its first fury was blown over. In this
state of meditation she wrote the following letter:
Dearest Friend,
The great crisis which we have debated about so often is COME. Half of
my secret is known, and I have thought and thought, until I am quite
sure that now is the time to reveal THE WHOLE OF THE MYSTERY. Sir Pitt
came to me this morning, and made--what do you think?--A DECLARATION IN
FORM. Think of that! Poor little me. I might have been Lady Crawley.
How pleased Mrs. Bute would have been: and ma tante if I had taken
precedence of her! I might have been somebody's mamma, instead of--O, I
tremble, I tremble, when I think how soon we must tell all!
Sir Pitt knows I am married, and not knowing to whom, is not very much
displeased as yet. Ma tante is ACTUALLY ANGRY that I should have
refused him. But she is all kindness and graciousness. She
condescends to say I would have made him a good wife; and vows that she
will be a mother to your little Rebecca. She will be shaken when she
first hears the news. But need we fear anything beyond a momentary
anger? I think not: I AM SURE not. She dotes upon you so (you
naughty, good-for-nothing man), that she would pardon you ANYTHING:
and, indeed, I believe, the next place in her heart is mine: and that
she would be miserable without me. Dearest! something TELLS ME we shall
conquer. You shall leave that odious regiment: quit gaming, racing,
and BE A GOOD BOY; and we shall all live in Park Lane, and ma tante
shall leave us all her money.
I shall try and walk to-morrow at 3 in the usual place. If Miss B.
accompanies me, you must come to dinner, and bring an answer, and put
it in the third volume of Porteus's Sermons. But, at all events, come
to your own
R.
To Miss Eliza Styles, At Mr. Barnet's, Saddler, Knightsbridge.
And I trust there is no reader of this little story who has not
discernment enough to perceive that the Miss Eliza Styles (an old
schoolfellow, Rebecca said, with whom she had resumed an active
correspondence of late, and who used to fetch these letters from the
saddler's), wore brass spurs, and large curling mustachios, and was
indeed no other than Captain Rawdon Crawley.
| Sir Pitt is totally floored. Who on earth is Becky married to already? Becky squirms under questioning and asks to just come back to Queen's Crawley anyway. Sir Pitt thinks he has it figured out - "the feller has left you, has he?" - and offers to take Becky as a mistress. Becky is like, um, no. Instead she gets down on her knees and begs to come back as...drum roll...Sir Pitt's daughter! Guys, it's intense here. Turns out Briggs and Firkin have been watching this whole scene through the keyhole...but they ran upstairs to tell Miss Crawley when they saw Sir Pitt propose and missed the whole already-married revelation. Miss Crawley comes downstairs and is just made crazy by the level of insanity. Level one: Sir Pitt proposed to a poor, lowborn governess. Level two: she refused him! Level three: he is totally not upset by her refusal! Becky pretends to pass out in a chair to avoid talking to anyone for a little bit. Sir Pitt leaves with no hard feelings, apparently. Firkin writes a quick letter to Mrs. Bute Crawley telling her the news. Briggs and Miss Crawley gossip and realize that Becky must have a previous engagement because otherwise no way would she have refused such an offer of marriage. Miss Crawley assumes it's someone of Becky's social station - "some apothecary, or a house steward, or painter, or young curate" and decides that she will set them up in life a little bit. Briggs tries to get Becky to tell her who the other man is. Then Miss Crawley tries. Becky won't tell, but is very sad and miserable and asks for Miss Crawley to always be her friend. Oh, good call, if there is anyone whose promises of friendship are reliable, it's Miss Crawley. Briggs and Miss Crawley leave Becky alone. She cries, for real this time, mostly over the missed opportunity. Still, she is a smart and self-sufficient young woman, so she puts it behind her and starts to plan for the future. How should she break the news of her husband's identity to Miss Crawley? How best to do it so that the old woman doesn't get too angry? She writes a letter to her husband telling him all the details of the day. Her husband turns out to be...Rawdon Crawley! OK, fine, that wasn't nearly as much of a shock as the ending of the last chapter. They can't all be nail-biters. | summary |
The Letter on the Pincushion
How they were married is not of the slightest consequence to anybody.
What is to hinder a Captain who is a major, and a young lady who is of
age, from purchasing a licence, and uniting themselves at any church in
this town? Who needs to be told, that if a woman has a will she will
assuredly find a way?--My belief is that one day, when Miss Sharp had
gone to pass the forenoon with her dear friend Miss Amelia Sedley in
Russell Square, a lady very like her might have been seen entering a
church in the City, in company with a gentleman with dyed mustachios,
who, after a quarter of an hour's interval, escorted her back to the
hackney-coach in waiting, and that this was a quiet bridal party.
And who on earth, after the daily experience we have, can question the
probability of a gentleman marrying anybody? How many of the wise and
learned have married their cooks? Did not Lord Eldon himself, the most
prudent of men, make a runaway match? Were not Achilles and Ajax both
in love with their servant maids? And are we to expect a heavy dragoon
with strong desires and small brains, who had never controlled a
passion in his life, to become prudent all of a sudden, and to refuse
to pay any price for an indulgence to which he had a mind? If people
only made prudent marriages, what a stop to population there would be!
It seems to me, for my part, that Mr. Rawdon's marriage was one of the
honestest actions which we shall have to record in any portion of that
gentleman's biography which has to do with the present history. No one
will say it is unmanly to be captivated by a woman, or, being
captivated, to marry her; and the admiration, the delight, the passion,
the wonder, the unbounded confidence, and frantic adoration with which,
by degrees, this big warrior got to regard the little Rebecca, were
feelings which the ladies at least will pronounce were not altogether
discreditable to him. When she sang, every note thrilled in his dull
soul, and tingled through his huge frame. When she spoke, he brought
all the force of his brains to listen and wonder. If she was jocular,
he used to revolve her jokes in his mind, and explode over them half an
hour afterwards in the street, to the surprise of the groom in the
tilbury by his side, or the comrade riding with him in Rotten Row. Her
words were oracles to him, her smallest actions marked by an infallible
grace and wisdom. "How she sings,--how she paints," thought he. "How
she rode that kicking mare at Queen's Crawley!" And he would say to
her in confidential moments, "By Jove, Beck, you're fit to be
Commander-in-Chief, or Archbishop of Canterbury, by Jove." Is his
case a rare one? and don't we see every day in the world many an honest
Hercules at the apron-strings of Omphale, and great whiskered Samsons
prostrate in Delilah's lap?
When, then, Becky told him that the great crisis was near, and the time
for action had arrived, Rawdon expressed himself as ready to act under
her orders, as he would be to charge with his troop at the command of
his colonel. There was no need for him to put his letter into the
third volume of Porteus. Rebecca easily found a means to get rid of
Briggs, her companion, and met her faithful friend in "the usual place"
on the next day. She had thought over matters at night, and
communicated to Rawdon the result of her determinations. He agreed, of
course, to everything; was quite sure that it was all right: that what
she proposed was best; that Miss Crawley would infallibly relent, or
"come round," as he said, after a time. Had Rebecca's resolutions been
entirely different, he would have followed them as implicitly. "You
have head enough for both of us, Beck," said he. "You're sure to get
us out of the scrape. I never saw your equal, and I've met with some
clippers in my time too." And with this simple confession of faith, the
love-stricken dragoon left her to execute his part of the project which
she had formed for the pair.
It consisted simply in the hiring of quiet lodgings at Brompton, or in
the neighbourhood of the barracks, for Captain and Mrs. Crawley. For
Rebecca had determined, and very prudently, we think, to fly. Rawdon
was only too happy at her resolve; he had been entreating her to take
this measure any time for weeks past. He pranced off to engage the
lodgings with all the impetuosity of love. He agreed to pay two
guineas a week so readily, that the landlady regretted she had asked
him so little. He ordered in a piano, and half a nursery-house full of
flowers: and a heap of good things. As for shawls, kid gloves, silk
stockings, gold French watches, bracelets and perfumery, he sent them
in with the profusion of blind love and unbounded credit. And having
relieved his mind by this outpouring of generosity, he went and dined
nervously at the club, waiting until the great moment of his life
should come.
The occurrences of the previous day; the admirable conduct of
Rebecca in refusing an offer so advantageous to her, the secret
unhappiness preying upon her, the sweetness and silence with which she
bore her affliction, made Miss Crawley much more tender than usual. An
event of this nature, a marriage, or a refusal, or a proposal, thrills
through a whole household of women, and sets all their hysterical
sympathies at work. As an observer of human nature, I regularly
frequent St. George's, Hanover Square, during the genteel marriage
season; and though I have never seen the bridegroom's male friends give
way to tears, or the beadles and officiating clergy any way affected,
yet it is not at all uncommon to see women who are not in the least
concerned in the operations going on--old ladies who are long past
marrying, stout middle-aged females with plenty of sons and daughters,
let alone pretty young creatures in pink bonnets, who are on their
promotion, and may naturally take an interest in the ceremony--I say it
is quite common to see the women present piping, sobbing, sniffling;
hiding their little faces in their little useless pocket-handkerchiefs;
and heaving, old and young, with emotion. When my friend, the
fashionable John Pimlico, married the lovely Lady Belgravia Green
Parker, the excitement was so general that even the little snuffy old
pew-opener who let me into the seat was in tears. And wherefore? I
inquired of my own soul: she was not going to be married.
Miss Crawley and Briggs in a word, after the affair of Sir Pitt,
indulged in the utmost luxury of sentiment, and Rebecca became an
object of the most tender interest to them. In her absence Miss
Crawley solaced herself with the most sentimental of the novels in her
library. Little Sharp, with her secret griefs, was the heroine of the
day.
That night Rebecca sang more sweetly and talked more pleasantly than
she had ever been heard to do in Park Lane. She twined herself round
the heart of Miss Crawley. She spoke lightly and laughingly of Sir
Pitt's proposal, ridiculed it as the foolish fancy of an old man; and
her eyes filled with tears, and Briggs's heart with unutterable pangs
of defeat, as she said she desired no other lot than to remain for ever
with her dear benefactress. "My dear little creature," the old lady
said, "I don't intend to let you stir for years, that you may depend
upon it. As for going back to that odious brother of mine after what
has passed, it is out of the question. Here you stay with me and
Briggs. Briggs wants to go to see her relations very often. Briggs,
you may go when you like. But as for you, my dear, you must stay and
take care of the old woman."
If Rawdon Crawley had been then and there present, instead of being at
the club nervously drinking claret, the pair might have gone down on
their knees before the old spinster, avowed all, and been forgiven in a
twinkling. But that good chance was denied to the young couple,
doubtless in order that this story might be written, in which numbers
of their wonderful adventures are narrated--adventures which could
never have occurred to them if they had been housed and sheltered under
the comfortable uninteresting forgiveness of Miss Crawley.
Under Mrs. Firkin's orders, in the Park Lane establishment, was a young
woman from Hampshire, whose business it was, among other duties, to
knock at Miss Sharp's door with that jug of hot water which Firkin
would rather have perished than have presented to the intruder. This
girl, bred on the family estate, had a brother in Captain Crawley's
troop, and if the truth were known, I daresay it would come out that
she was aware of certain arrangements, which have a great deal to do
with this history. At any rate she purchased a yellow shawl, a pair of
green boots, and a light blue hat with a red feather with three guineas
which Rebecca gave her, and as little Sharp was by no means too liberal
with her money, no doubt it was for services rendered that Betty Martin
was so bribed.
On the second day after Sir Pitt Crawley's offer to Miss Sharp, the sun
rose as usual, and at the usual hour Betty Martin, the upstairs maid,
knocked at the door of the governess's bedchamber.
No answer was returned, and she knocked again. Silence was still
uninterrupted; and Betty, with the hot water, opened the door and
entered the chamber.
The little white dimity bed was as smooth and trim as on the day
previous, when Betty's own hands had helped to make it. Two little
trunks were corded in one end of the room; and on the table before the
window--on the pincushion--the great fat pincushion lined with pink
inside, and twilled like a lady's nightcap--lay a letter. It had been
reposing there probably all night.
Betty advanced towards it on tiptoe, as if she were afraid to awake
it--looked at it, and round the room, with an air of great wonder and
satisfaction; took up the letter, and grinned intensely as she turned
it round and over, and finally carried it into Miss Briggs's room below.
How could Betty tell that the letter was for Miss Briggs, I should like
to know? All the schooling Betty had had was at Mrs. Bute Crawley's
Sunday school, and she could no more read writing than Hebrew.
"La, Miss Briggs," the girl exclaimed, "O, Miss, something must have
happened--there's nobody in Miss Sharp's room; the bed ain't been slep
in, and she've run away, and left this letter for you, Miss."
"WHAT!" cries Briggs, dropping her comb, the thin wisp of faded hair
falling over her shoulders; "an elopement! Miss Sharp a fugitive! What,
what is this?" and she eagerly broke the neat seal, and, as they say,
"devoured the contents" of the letter addressed to her.
Dear Miss Briggs [the refugee wrote], the kindest heart in the world,
as yours is, will pity and sympathise with me and excuse me. With
tears, and prayers, and blessings, I leave the home where the poor
orphan has ever met with kindness and affection. Claims even superior
to those of my benefactress call me hence. I go to my duty--to my
HUSBAND. Yes, I am married. My husband COMMANDS me to seek the HUMBLE
HOME which we call ours. Dearest Miss Briggs, break the news as your
delicate sympathy will know how to do it--to my dear, my beloved friend
and benefactress. Tell her, ere I went, I shed tears on her dear
pillow--that pillow that I have so often soothed in sickness--that I
long AGAIN to watch--Oh, with what joy shall I return to dear Park
Lane! How I tremble for the answer which is to SEAL MY FATE! When Sir
Pitt deigned to offer me his hand, an honour of which my beloved Miss
Crawley said I was DESERVING (my blessings go with her for judging the
poor orphan worthy to be HER SISTER!) I told Sir Pitt that I was
already A WIFE. Even he forgave me. But my courage failed me, when I
should have told him all--that I could not be his wife, for I WAS HIS
DAUGHTER! I am wedded to the best and most generous of men--Miss
Crawley's Rawdon is MY Rawdon. At his COMMAND I open my lips, and
follow him to our humble home, as I would THROUGH THE WORLD. O, my
excellent and kind friend, intercede with my Rawdon's beloved aunt for
him and the poor girl to whom all HIS NOBLE RACE have shown such
UNPARALLELED AFFECTION. Ask Miss Crawley to receive HER CHILDREN. I
can say no more, but blessings, blessings on all in the dear house I
leave, prays
Your affectionate and GRATEFUL Rebecca Crawley. Midnight.
Just as Briggs had finished reading this affecting and interesting
document, which reinstated her in her position as first confidante of
Miss Crawley, Mrs. Firkin entered the room. "Here's Mrs. Bute Crawley
just arrived by the mail from Hampshire, and wants some tea; will you
come down and make breakfast, Miss?"
And to the surprise of Firkin, clasping her dressing-gown around her,
the wisp of hair floating dishevelled behind her, the little
curl-papers still sticking in bunches round her forehead, Briggs sailed
down to Mrs. Bute with the letter in her hand containing the wonderful
news.
"Oh, Mrs. Firkin," gasped Betty, "sech a business. Miss Sharp have a
gone and run away with the Capting, and they're off to Gretney Green!"
We would devote a chapter to describe the emotions of Mrs. Firkin, did
not the passions of her mistresses occupy our genteeler muse.
When Mrs. Bute Crawley, numbed with midnight travelling, and warming
herself at the newly crackling parlour fire, heard from Miss Briggs the
intelligence of the clandestine marriage, she declared it was quite
providential that she should have arrived at such a time to assist poor
dear Miss Crawley in supporting the shock--that Rebecca was an artful
little hussy of whom she had always had her suspicions; and that as for
Rawdon Crawley, she never could account for his aunt's infatuation
regarding him, and had long considered him a profligate, lost, and
abandoned being. And this awful conduct, Mrs. Bute said, will have at
least this good effect, it will open poor dear Miss Crawley's eyes to
the real character of this wicked man. Then Mrs. Bute had a
comfortable hot toast and tea; and as there was a vacant room in the
house now, there was no need for her to remain at the Gloster Coffee
House where the Portsmouth mail had set her down, and whence she
ordered Mr. Bowls's aide-de-camp the footman to bring away her trunks.
Miss Crawley, be it known, did not leave her room until near noon--taking
chocolate in bed in the morning, while Becky Sharp read the
Morning Post to her, or otherwise amusing herself or dawdling. The
conspirators below agreed that they would spare the dear lady's
feelings until she appeared in her drawing-room: meanwhile it was
announced to her that Mrs. Bute Crawley had come up from Hampshire by
the mail, was staying at the Gloster, sent her love to Miss Crawley,
and asked for breakfast with Miss Briggs. The arrival of Mrs. Bute,
which would not have caused any extreme delight at another period, was
hailed with pleasure now; Miss Crawley being pleased at the notion of a
gossip with her sister-in-law regarding the late Lady Crawley, the
funeral arrangements pending, and Sir Pitt's abrupt proposal to Rebecca.
It was not until the old lady was fairly ensconced in her usual
arm-chair in the drawing-room, and the preliminary embraces and inquiries
had taken place between the ladies, that the conspirators thought it
advisable to submit her to the operation. Who has not admired the
artifices and delicate approaches with which women "prepare" their
friends for bad news? Miss Crawley's two friends made such an
apparatus of mystery before they broke the intelligence to her, that
they worked her up to the necessary degree of doubt and alarm.
"And she refused Sir Pitt, my dear, dear Miss Crawley, prepare yourself
for it," Mrs. Bute said, "because--because she couldn't help herself."
"Of course there was a reason," Miss Crawley answered. "She liked
somebody else. I told Briggs so yesterday."
"LIKES somebody else!" Briggs gasped. "O my dear friend, she is
married already."
"Married already," Mrs. Bute chimed in; and both sate with clasped
hands looking from each other at their victim.
"Send her to me, the instant she comes in. The little sly wretch: how
dared she not tell me?" cried out Miss Crawley.
"She won't come in soon. Prepare yourself, dear friend--she's gone out
for a long time--she's--she's gone altogether."
"Gracious goodness, and who's to make my chocolate? Send for her and
have her back; I desire that she come back," the old lady said.
"She decamped last night, Ma'am," cried Mrs. Bute.
"She left a letter for me," Briggs exclaimed. "She's married to--"
"Prepare her, for heaven's sake. Don't torture her, my dear Miss
Briggs."
"She's married to whom?" cries the spinster in a nervous fury.
"To--to a relation of--"
"She refused Sir Pitt," cried the victim. "Speak at once. Don't drive
me mad."
"O Ma'am--prepare her, Miss Briggs--she's married to Rawdon Crawley."
"Rawdon married Rebecca--governess--nobod-- Get out of my house, you
fool, you idiot--you stupid old Briggs--how dare you? You're in the
plot--you made him marry, thinking that I'd leave my money from him--you
did, Martha," the poor old lady screamed in hysteric sentences.
"I, Ma'am, ask a member of this family to marry a drawing-master's
daughter?"
"Her mother was a Montmorency," cried out the old lady, pulling at the
bell with all her might.
"Her mother was an opera girl, and she has been on the stage or worse
herself," said Mrs. Bute.
Miss Crawley gave a final scream, and fell back in a faint. They were
forced to take her back to the room which she had just quitted. One fit
of hysterics succeeded another. The doctor was sent for--the
apothecary arrived. Mrs. Bute took up the post of nurse by her bedside.
"Her relations ought to be round about her," that amiable woman said.
She had scarcely been carried up to her room, when a new person arrived
to whom it was also necessary to break the news. This was Sir Pitt.
"Where's Becky?" he said, coming in. "Where's her traps? She's coming
with me to Queen's Crawley."
"Have you not heard the astonishing intelligence regarding her
surreptitious union?" Briggs asked.
"What's that to me?" Sir Pitt asked. "I know she's married. That
makes no odds. Tell her to come down at once, and not keep me."
"Are you not aware, sir," Miss Briggs asked, "that she has left our
roof, to the dismay of Miss Crawley, who is nearly killed by the
intelligence of Captain Rawdon's union with her?"
When Sir Pitt Crawley heard that Rebecca was married to his son, he
broke out into a fury of language, which it would do no good to repeat
in this place, as indeed it sent poor Briggs shuddering out of the
room; and with her we will shut the door upon the figure of the
frenzied old man, wild with hatred and insane with baffled desire.
One day after he went to Queen's Crawley, he burst like a madman into
the room she had used when there--dashed open her boxes with his foot,
and flung about her papers, clothes, and other relics. Miss Horrocks,
the butler's daughter, took some of them. The children dressed
themselves and acted plays in the others. It was but a few days after
the poor mother had gone to her lonely burying-place; and was laid,
unwept and disregarded, in a vault full of strangers.
"Suppose the old lady doesn't come to," Rawdon said to his little wife,
as they sate together in the snug little Brompton lodgings. She had
been trying the new piano all the morning. The new gloves fitted her
to a nicety; the new shawls became her wonderfully; the new rings
glittered on her little hands, and the new watch ticked at her waist;
"suppose she don't come round, eh, Becky?"
"I'LL make your fortune," she said; and Delilah patted Samson's cheek.
"You can do anything," he said, kissing the little hand. "By Jove you
can; and we'll drive down to the Star and Garter, and dine, by Jove."
| The narrator fills in some details for us. How could Becky and Rawdon have gotten married? Easy enough - they are both of age, so they slipped off and just did it one day. It might not have been Rawdon's best decision, but probably his most honorable. After all, isn't that what men are supposed to do - meet a girl, fall in love, then make it legal? Rawdon is happy to leave all the details of their future in his wife's hands. He is at least smart enough to realize that she has a much better head on her shoulders than he does. While Becky is dealing with things, Rawdon rents an apartment for the two of them in a middle-class London neighborhood. That night Becky is playing it to the hilt. She sings, tells stories, plays cards - everything possible to make Miss Crawley happy. The narrator drops in to let us know that if Rawdon had been there that night, and if he and Becky had confessed, Miss Crawley would have instantly forgiven them. But then we'd have no novel. As it is, the next morning, a maid named Betty Martin finds a note addressed to Briggs on Becky's bed, which has clearly not been slept in. Becky's letter tells Briggs that Rawdon is her husband, and that Becky has gone to be with him. Right at that moment, Mrs. Bute comes to Miss Crawley's house . Briggs tells Mrs. Bute the news, and together they very slowly, suspensefully, with as much freaking out as possible, tell Miss Crawley. She totally loses it. Sir Pitt then comes to the house to pick Becky up and take her back to Queen's Crawley. Briggs tells him that she is married to Rawdon and he really flips out. He is beyond jealous of his son , storms back home, and trashes her room and all her stuff. | summary |
How Captain Dobbin Bought a Piano
If there is any exhibition in all Vanity Fair which Satire and
Sentiment can visit arm in arm together; where you light on the
strangest contrasts laughable and tearful: where you may be gentle and
pathetic, or savage and cynical with perfect propriety: it is at one of
those public assemblies, a crowd of which are advertised every day in
the last page of the Times newspaper, and over which the late Mr.
George Robins used to preside with so much dignity. There are very few
London people, as I fancy, who have not attended at these meetings, and
all with a taste for moralizing must have thought, with a sensation and
interest not a little startling and queer, of the day when their turn
shall come too, and Mr. Hammerdown will sell by the orders of Diogenes'
assignees, or will be instructed by the executors, to offer to public
competition, the library, furniture, plate, wardrobe, and choice cellar
of wines of Epicurus deceased.
Even with the most selfish disposition, the Vanity Fairian, as he
witnesses this sordid part of the obsequies of a departed friend, can't
but feel some sympathies and regret. My Lord Dives's remains are in the
family vault: the statuaries are cutting an inscription veraciously
commemorating his virtues, and the sorrows of his heir, who is
disposing of his goods. What guest at Dives's table can pass the
familiar house without a sigh?--the familiar house of which the lights
used to shine so cheerfully at seven o'clock, of which the hall-doors
opened so readily, of which the obsequious servants, as you passed up
the comfortable stair, sounded your name from landing to landing, until
it reached the apartment where jolly old Dives welcomed his friends!
What a number of them he had; and what a noble way of entertaining
them. How witty people used to be here who were morose when they got
out of the door; and how courteous and friendly men who slandered and
hated each other everywhere else! He was pompous, but with such a cook
what would one not swallow? he was rather dull, perhaps, but would not
such wine make any conversation pleasant? We must get some of his
Burgundy at any price, the mourners cry at his club. "I got this box
at old Dives's sale," Pincher says, handing it round, "one of Louis
XV's mistresses--pretty thing, is it not?--sweet miniature," and they
talk of the way in which young Dives is dissipating his fortune.
How changed the house is, though! The front is patched over with
bills, setting forth the particulars of the furniture in staring
capitals. They have hung a shred of carpet out of an upstairs
window--a half dozen of porters are lounging on the dirty steps--the
hall swarms with dingy guests of oriental countenance, who thrust
printed cards into your hand, and offer to bid. Old women and amateurs
have invaded the upper apartments, pinching the bed-curtains, poking
into the feathers, shampooing the mattresses, and clapping the wardrobe
drawers to and fro. Enterprising young housekeepers are measuring the
looking-glasses and hangings to see if they will suit the new menage
(Snob will brag for years that he has purchased this or that at Dives's
sale), and Mr. Hammerdown is sitting on the great mahogany
dining-tables, in the dining-room below, waving the ivory hammer, and
employing all the artifices of eloquence, enthusiasm, entreaty, reason,
despair; shouting to his people; satirizing Mr. Davids for his
sluggishness; inspiriting Mr. Moss into action; imploring, commanding,
bellowing, until down comes the hammer like fate, and we pass to the
next lot. O Dives, who would ever have thought, as we sat round the
broad table sparkling with plate and spotless linen, to have seen such
a dish at the head of it as that roaring auctioneer?
It was rather late in the sale. The excellent drawing-room furniture
by the best makers; the rare and famous wines selected, regardless of
cost, and with the well-known taste of the purchaser; the rich and
complete set of family plate had been sold on the previous days.
Certain of the best wines (which all had a great character among
amateurs in the neighbourhood) had been purchased for his master, who
knew them very well, by the butler of our friend John Osborne, Esquire,
of Russell Square. A small portion of the most useful articles of the
plate had been bought by some young stockbrokers from the City. And
now the public being invited to the purchase of minor objects, it
happened that the orator on the table was expatiating on the merits of
a picture, which he sought to recommend to his audience: it was by no
means so select or numerous a company as had attended the previous days
of the auction.
"No. 369," roared Mr. Hammerdown. "Portrait of a gentleman on an
elephant. Who'll bid for the gentleman on the elephant? Lift up the
picture, Blowman, and let the company examine this lot." A long, pale,
military-looking gentleman, seated demurely at the mahogany table,
could not help grinning as this valuable lot was shown by Mr. Blowman.
"Turn the elephant to the Captain, Blowman. What shall we say, sir,
for the elephant?" but the Captain, blushing in a very hurried and
discomfited manner, turned away his head.
"Shall we say twenty guineas for this work of art?--fifteen, five, name
your own price. The gentleman without the elephant is worth five
pound."
"I wonder it ain't come down with him," said a professional wag, "he's
anyhow a precious big one"; at which (for the elephant-rider was
represented as of a very stout figure) there was a general giggle in
the room.
"Don't be trying to deprecate the value of the lot, Mr. Moss," Mr.
Hammerdown said; "let the company examine it as a work of art--the
attitude of the gallant animal quite according to natur'; the gentleman
in a nankeen jacket, his gun in his hand, is going to the chase; in the
distance a banyhann tree and a pagody, most likely resemblances of some
interesting spot in our famous Eastern possessions. How much for this
lot? Come, gentlemen, don't keep me here all day."
Some one bid five shillings, at which the military gentleman looked
towards the quarter from which this splendid offer had come, and there
saw another officer with a young lady on his arm, who both appeared to
be highly amused with the scene, and to whom, finally, this lot was
knocked down for half a guinea. He at the table looked more surprised
and discomposed than ever when he spied this pair, and his head sank
into his military collar, and he turned his back upon them, so as to
avoid them altogether.
Of all the other articles which Mr. Hammerdown had the honour to offer
for public competition that day it is not our purpose to make mention,
save of one only, a little square piano, which came down from the upper
regions of the house (the state grand piano having been disposed of
previously); this the young lady tried with a rapid and skilful hand
(making the officer blush and start again), and for it, when its turn
came, her agent began to bid.
But there was an opposition here. The Hebrew aide-de-camp in the
service of the officer at the table bid against the Hebrew gentleman
employed by the elephant purchasers, and a brisk battle ensued over
this little piano, the combatants being greatly encouraged by Mr.
Hammerdown.
At last, when the competition had been prolonged for some time, the
elephant captain and lady desisted from the race; and the hammer coming
down, the auctioneer said:--"Mr. Lewis, twenty-five," and Mr. Lewis's
chief thus became the proprietor of the little square piano. Having
effected the purchase, he sate up as if he was greatly relieved, and
the unsuccessful competitors catching a glimpse of him at this moment,
the lady said to her friend,
"Why, Rawdon, it's Captain Dobbin."
I suppose Becky was discontented with the new piano her husband had
hired for her, or perhaps the proprietors of that instrument had
fetched it away, declining farther credit, or perhaps she had a
particular attachment for the one which she had just tried to purchase,
recollecting it in old days, when she used to play upon it, in the
little sitting-room of our dear Amelia Sedley.
The sale was at the old house in Russell Square, where we passed some
evenings together at the beginning of this story. Good old John Sedley
was a ruined man. His name had been proclaimed as a defaulter on the
Stock Exchange, and his bankruptcy and commercial extermination had
followed. Mr. Osborne's butler came to buy some of the famous port
wine to transfer to the cellars over the way. As for one dozen
well-manufactured silver spoons and forks at per oz., and one dozen
dessert ditto ditto, there were three young stockbrokers (Messrs. Dale,
Spiggot, and Dale, of Threadneedle Street, indeed), who, having had
dealings with the old man, and kindnesses from him in days when he was
kind to everybody with whom he dealt, sent this little spar out of the
wreck with their love to good Mrs. Sedley; and with respect to the
piano, as it had been Amelia's, and as she might miss it and want one
now, and as Captain William Dobbin could no more play upon it than he
could dance on the tight rope, it is probable that he did not purchase
the instrument for his own use.
In a word, it arrived that evening at a wonderful small cottage in a
street leading from the Fulham Road--one of those streets which have
the finest romantic names--(this was called St. Adelaide Villas,
Anna-Maria Road West), where the houses look like baby-houses; where
the people, looking out of the first-floor windows, must infallibly, as
you think, sit with their feet in the parlours; where the shrubs in the
little gardens in front bloom with a perennial display of little
children's pinafores, little red socks, caps, &c. (polyandria
polygynia); whence you hear the sound of jingling spinets and women
singing; where little porter pots hang on the railings sunning
themselves; whither of evenings you see City clerks padding wearily:
here it was that Mr. Clapp, the clerk of Mr. Sedley, had his domicile,
and in this asylum the good old gentleman hid his head with his wife
and daughter when the crash came.
Jos Sedley had acted as a man of his disposition would, when the
announcement of the family misfortune reached him. He did not come to
London, but he wrote to his mother to draw upon his agents for whatever
money was wanted, so that his kind broken-spirited old parents had no
present poverty to fear. This done, Jos went on at the boarding-house
at Cheltenham pretty much as before. He drove his curricle; he drank
his claret; he played his rubber; he told his Indian stories, and the
Irish widow consoled and flattered him as usual. His present of money,
needful as it was, made little impression on his parents; and I have
heard Amelia say that the first day on which she saw her father lift up
his head after the failure was on the receipt of the packet of forks
and spoons with the young stockbrokers' love, over which he burst out
crying like a child, being greatly more affected than even his wife, to
whom the present was addressed. Edward Dale, the junior of the house,
who purchased the spoons for the firm, was, in fact, very sweet upon
Amelia, and offered for her in spite of all. He married Miss Louisa
Cutts (daughter of Higham and Cutts, the eminent cornfactors) with a
handsome fortune in 1820; and is now living in splendour, and with a
numerous family, at his elegant villa, Muswell Hill. But we must not
let the recollections of this good fellow cause us to diverge from the
principal history.
I hope the reader has much too good an opinion of Captain and Mrs.
Crawley to suppose that they ever would have dreamed of paying a visit
to so remote a district as Bloomsbury, if they thought the family whom
they proposed to honour with a visit were not merely out of fashion,
but out of money, and could be serviceable to them in no possible
manner. Rebecca was entirely surprised at the sight of the comfortable
old house where she had met with no small kindness, ransacked by
brokers and bargainers, and its quiet family treasures given up to
public desecration and plunder. A month after her flight, she had
bethought her of Amelia, and Rawdon, with a horse-laugh, had expressed
a perfect willingness to see young George Osborne again. "He's a very
agreeable acquaintance, Beck," the wag added. "I'd like to sell him
another horse, Beck. I'd like to play a few more games at billiards
with him. He'd be what I call useful just now, Mrs. C.--ha, ha!" by
which sort of speech it is not to be supposed that Rawdon Crawley had a
deliberate desire to cheat Mr. Osborne at play, but only wished to take
that fair advantage of him which almost every sporting gentleman in
Vanity Fair considers to be his due from his neighbour.
The old aunt was long in "coming-to." A month had elapsed. Rawdon was
denied the door by Mr. Bowls; his servants could not get a lodgment in
the house at Park Lane; his letters were sent back unopened. Miss
Crawley never stirred out--she was unwell--and Mrs. Bute remained still
and never left her. Crawley and his wife both of them augured evil
from the continued presence of Mrs. Bute.
"Gad, I begin to perceive now why she was always bringing us together
at Queen's Crawley," Rawdon said.
"What an artful little woman!" ejaculated Rebecca.
"Well, I don't regret it, if you don't," the Captain cried, still in an
amorous rapture with his wife, who rewarded him with a kiss by way of
reply, and was indeed not a little gratified by the generous confidence
of her husband.
"If he had but a little more brains," she thought to herself, "I might
make something of him"; but she never let him perceive the opinion she
had of him; listened with indefatigable complacency to his stories of
the stable and the mess; laughed at all his jokes; felt the greatest
interest in Jack Spatterdash, whose cab-horse had come down, and Bob
Martingale, who had been taken up in a gambling-house, and Tom
Cinqbars, who was going to ride the steeplechase. When he came home she
was alert and happy: when he went out she pressed him to go: when he
stayed at home, she played and sang for him, made him good drinks,
superintended his dinner, warmed his slippers, and steeped his soul in
comfort. The best of women (I have heard my grandmother say) are
hypocrites. We don't know how much they hide from us: how watchful
they are when they seem most artless and confidential: how often those
frank smiles which they wear so easily, are traps to cajole or elude or
disarm--I don't mean in your mere coquettes, but your domestic models,
and paragons of female virtue. Who has not seen a woman hide the
dulness of a stupid husband, or coax the fury of a savage one? We
accept this amiable slavishness, and praise a woman for it: we call
this pretty treachery truth. A good housewife is of necessity a
humbug; and Cornelia's husband was hoodwinked, as Potiphar was--only in
a different way.
By these attentions, that veteran rake, Rawdon Crawley, found himself
converted into a very happy and submissive married man. His former
haunts knew him not. They asked about him once or twice at his clubs,
but did not miss him much: in those booths of Vanity Fair people seldom
do miss each other. His secluded wife ever smiling and cheerful, his
little comfortable lodgings, snug meals, and homely evenings, had all
the charms of novelty and secrecy. The marriage was not yet declared
to the world, or published in the Morning Post. All his creditors
would have come rushing on him in a body, had they known that he was
united to a woman without fortune. "My relations won't cry fie upon
me," Becky said, with rather a bitter laugh; and she was quite
contented to wait until the old aunt should be reconciled, before she
claimed her place in society. So she lived at Brompton, and meanwhile
saw no one, or only those few of her husband's male companions who were
admitted into her little dining-room. These were all charmed with her.
The little dinners, the laughing and chatting, the music afterwards,
delighted all who participated in these enjoyments. Major Martingale
never thought about asking to see the marriage licence, Captain
Cinqbars was perfectly enchanted with her skill in making punch. And
young Lieutenant Spatterdash (who was fond of piquet, and whom Crawley
would often invite) was evidently and quickly smitten by Mrs. Crawley;
but her own circumspection and modesty never forsook her for a moment,
and Crawley's reputation as a fire-eating and jealous warrior was a
further and complete defence to his little wife.
There are gentlemen of very good blood and fashion in this city, who
never have entered a lady's drawing-room; so that though Rawdon
Crawley's marriage might be talked about in his county, where, of
course, Mrs. Bute had spread the news, in London it was doubted, or not
heeded, or not talked about at all. He lived comfortably on credit.
He had a large capital of debts, which laid out judiciously, will carry
a man along for many years, and on which certain men about town
contrive to live a hundred times better than even men with ready money
can do. Indeed who is there that walks London streets, but can point
out a half-dozen of men riding by him splendidly, while he is on foot,
courted by fashion, bowed into their carriages by tradesmen, denying
themselves nothing, and living on who knows what? We see Jack
Thriftless prancing in the park, or darting in his brougham down Pall
Mall: we eat his dinners served on his miraculous plate. "How did this
begin," we say, "or where will it end?" "My dear fellow," I heard Jack
once say, "I owe money in every capital in Europe." The end must come
some day, but in the meantime Jack thrives as much as ever; people are
glad enough to shake him by the hand, ignore the little dark stories
that are whispered every now and then against him, and pronounce him a
good-natured, jovial, reckless fellow.
Truth obliges us to confess that Rebecca had married a gentleman of
this order. Everything was plentiful in his house but ready money, of
which their menage pretty early felt the want; and reading the Gazette
one day, and coming upon the announcement of "Lieutenant G. Osborne to
be Captain by purchase, vice Smith, who exchanges," Rawdon uttered that
sentiment regarding Amelia's lover, which ended in the visit to Russell
Square.
When Rawdon and his wife wished to communicate with Captain Dobbin at
the sale, and to know particulars of the catastrophe which had befallen
Rebecca's old acquaintances, the Captain had vanished; and such
information as they got was from a stray porter or broker at the
auction.
"Look at them with their hooked beaks," Becky said, getting into the
buggy, her picture under her arm, in great glee. "They're like
vultures after a battle."
"Don't know. Never was in action, my dear. Ask Martingale; he was in
Spain, aide-de-camp to General Blazes."
"He was a very kind old man, Mr. Sedley," Rebecca said; "I'm really
sorry he's gone wrong."
"O stockbrokers--bankrupts--used to it, you know," Rawdon replied,
cutting a fly off the horse's ear.
"I wish we could have afforded some of the plate, Rawdon," the wife
continued sentimentally. "Five-and-twenty guineas was monstrously dear
for that little piano. We chose it at Broadwood's for Amelia, when she
came from school. It only cost five-and-thirty then."
"What-d'-ye-call'em--'Osborne,' will cry off now, I suppose, since the
family is smashed. How cut up your pretty little friend will be; hey,
Becky?"
"I daresay she'll recover it," Becky said with a smile--and they drove
on and talked about something else.
| The chapter opens with an estate auction. The narrator muses about how quickly life can change - one day a guy is rich, and the next all of his belongings are for sale to random strangers. In any case, the next item up for auction is a portrait of a fat guy on an elephant. The painting is heckled and mocked, and finally a young couple buy it for a ridiculously low price. The next auction item is a small piano. The young couple tries to buy it, but it is bought instead by a tall, gangly, awkward army officer . So what's going on? Well, the auction is selling off the property and household goods of the Sedleys. Mr. Sedley has gone bankrupt and has been kicked off the Stock Exchange. The Sedleys have had to move to a tiny house in a very low-rent part of London. At the auction, some people bought things to give back to the Sedleys. The piano, for instance, was bought by Captain Dobbin, to return to Amelia. Meanwhile, it's been a month since Becky left Miss Crawley's house. Miss Crawley still refuses to see Becky or Rawdon, and Mrs. Bute is still there. But so far, married life is nice for them, and Becky still puts on the full charm offensive. The marriage is still secret and has not been published in the paper . The reason? Becky is worried that if all the people to whom Rawdon owes money find out that he has married a poor girl, they won't give him any more credit. And if they don't give him credit, there'll be nothing at all for them to live on. The narrator does a little aside, explaining that manly, self-confident, aristocratic guys like Rawdon have figured out a way to live basically for free. They get credit on the strength of their family name and the expectation that when someone dies they'll get a big inheritance. | summary |
Who Played on the Piano Captain Dobbin Bought
Our surprised story now finds itself for a moment among very famous
events and personages, and hanging on to the skirts of history. When
the eagles of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican upstart, were flying
from Provence, where they had perched after a brief sojourn in Elba,
and from steeple to steeple until they reached the towers of Notre
Dame, I wonder whether the Imperial birds had any eye for a little
corner of the parish of Bloomsbury, London, which you might have
thought so quiet, that even the whirring and flapping of those mighty
wings would pass unobserved there?
"Napoleon has landed at Cannes." Such news might create a panic at
Vienna, and cause Russia to drop his cards, and take Prussia into a
corner, and Talleyrand and Metternich to wag their heads together,
while Prince Hardenberg, and even the present Marquis of Londonderry,
were puzzled; but how was this intelligence to affect a young lady in
Russell Square, before whose door the watchman sang the hours when she
was asleep: who, if she strolled in the square, was guarded there by
the railings and the beadle: who, if she walked ever so short a
distance to buy a ribbon in Southampton Row, was followed by Black
Sambo with an enormous cane: who was always cared for, dressed, put to
bed, and watched over by ever so many guardian angels, with and without
wages? Bon Dieu, I say, is it not hard that the fateful rush of the
great Imperial struggle can't take place without affecting a poor
little harmless girl of eighteen, who is occupied in billing and
cooing, or working muslin collars in Russell Square? You too, kindly,
homely flower!--is the great roaring war tempest coming to sweep you
down, here, although cowering under the shelter of Holborn? Yes;
Napoleon is flinging his last stake, and poor little Emmy Sedley's
happiness forms, somehow, part of it.
In the first place, her father's fortune was swept down with that fatal
news. All his speculations had of late gone wrong with the luckless
old gentleman. Ventures had failed; merchants had broken; funds had
risen when he calculated they would fall. What need to particularize?
If success is rare and slow, everybody knows how quick and easy ruin
is. Old Sedley had kept his own sad counsel. Everything seemed to go
on as usual in the quiet, opulent house; the good-natured mistress
pursuing, quite unsuspiciously, her bustling idleness, and daily easy
avocations; the daughter absorbed still in one selfish, tender thought,
and quite regardless of all the world besides, when that final crash
came, under which the worthy family fell.
One night Mrs. Sedley was writing cards for a party; the Osbornes had
given one, and she must not be behindhand; John Sedley, who had come
home very late from the City, sate silent at the chimney side, while
his wife was prattling to him; Emmy had gone up to her room ailing and
low-spirited. "She's not happy," the mother went on. "George Osborne
neglects her. I've no patience with the airs of those people. The
girls have not been in the house these three weeks; and George has been
twice in town without coming. Edward Dale saw him at the Opera.
Edward would marry her I'm sure: and there's Captain Dobbin who, I
think, would--only I hate all army men. Such a dandy as George has
become. With his military airs, indeed! We must show some folks that
we're as good as they. Only give Edward Dale any encouragement, and
you'll see. We must have a party, Mr. S. Why don't you speak, John?
Shall I say Tuesday fortnight? Why don't you answer? Good God, John,
what has happened?"
John Sedley sprang up out of his chair to meet his wife, who ran to
him. He seized her in his arms, and said with a hasty voice, "We're
ruined, Mary. We've got the world to begin over again, dear. It's
best that you should know all, and at once." As he spoke, he trembled
in every limb, and almost fell. He thought the news would have
overpowered his wife--his wife, to whom he had never said a hard word.
But it was he that was the most moved, sudden as the shock was to her.
When he sank back into his seat, it was the wife that took the office
of consoler. She took his trembling hand, and kissed it, and put it
round her neck: she called him her John--her dear John--her old
man--her kind old man; she poured out a hundred words of incoherent
love and tenderness; her faithful voice and simple caresses wrought
this sad heart up to an inexpressible delight and anguish, and cheered
and solaced his over-burdened soul.
Only once in the course of the long night as they sate together, and
poor Sedley opened his pent-up soul, and told the story of his losses
and embarrassments--the treason of some of his oldest friends, the
manly kindness of some, from whom he never could have expected it--in a
general confession--only once did the faithful wife give way to emotion.
"My God, my God, it will break Emmy's heart," she said.
The father had forgotten the poor girl. She was lying, awake and
unhappy, overhead. In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents,
she was alone. To how many people can any one tell all? Who will be
open where there is no sympathy, or has call to speak to those who
never can understand? Our gentle Amelia was thus solitary. She had no
confidante, so to speak, ever since she had anything to confide. She
could not tell the old mother her doubts and cares; the would-be
sisters seemed every day more strange to her. And she had misgivings
and fears which she dared not acknowledge to herself, though she was
always secretly brooding over them.
Her heart tried to persist in asserting that George Osborne was worthy
and faithful to her, though she knew otherwise. How many a thing had
she said, and got no echo from him. How many suspicions of selfishness
and indifference had she to encounter and obstinately overcome. To
whom could the poor little martyr tell these daily struggles and
tortures? Her hero himself only half understood her. She did not dare
to own that the man she loved was her inferior; or to feel that she had
given her heart away too soon. Given once, the pure bashful maiden was
too modest, too tender, too trustful, too weak, too much woman to
recall it. We are Turks with the affections of our women; and have
made them subscribe to our doctrine too. We let their bodies go abroad
liberally enough, with smiles and ringlets and pink bonnets to disguise
them instead of veils and yakmaks. But their souls must be seen by
only one man, and they obey not unwillingly, and consent to remain at
home as our slaves--ministering to us and doing drudgery for us.
So imprisoned and tortured was this gentle little heart, when in the
month of March, Anno Domini 1815, Napoleon landed at Cannes, and Louis
XVIII fled, and all Europe was in alarm, and the funds fell, and old
John Sedley was ruined.
We are not going to follow the worthy old stockbroker through those
last pangs and agonies of ruin through which he passed before his
commercial demise befell. They declared him at the Stock Exchange; he
was absent from his house of business: his bills were protested: his
act of bankruptcy formal. The house and furniture of Russell Square
were seized and sold up, and he and his family were thrust away, as we
have seen, to hide their heads where they might.
John Sedley had not the heart to review the domestic establishment who
have appeared now and anon in our pages and of whom he was now forced
by poverty to take leave. The wages of those worthy people were
discharged with that punctuality which men frequently show who only owe
in great sums--they were sorry to leave good places--but they did not
break their hearts at parting from their adored master and mistress.
Amelia's maid was profuse in condolences, but went off quite resigned
to better herself in a genteeler quarter of the town. Black Sambo,
with the infatuation of his profession, determined on setting up a
public-house. Honest old Mrs. Blenkinsop indeed, who had seen the
birth of Jos and Amelia, and the wooing of John Sedley and his wife,
was for staying by them without wages, having amassed a considerable
sum in their service: and she accompanied the fallen people into their
new and humble place of refuge, where she tended them and grumbled
against them for a while.
Of all Sedley's opponents in his debates with his creditors which now
ensued, and harassed the feelings of the humiliated old gentleman so
severely, that in six weeks he oldened more than he had done for
fifteen years before--the most determined and obstinate seemed to be
John Osborne, his old friend and neighbour--John Osborne, whom he had
set up in life--who was under a hundred obligations to him--and whose
son was to marry Sedley's daughter. Any one of these circumstances
would account for the bitterness of Osborne's opposition.
When one man has been under very remarkable obligations to another,
with whom he subsequently quarrels, a common sense of decency, as it
were, makes of the former a much severer enemy than a mere stranger
would be. To account for your own hard-heartedness and ingratitude in
such a case, you are bound to prove the other party's crime. It is not
that you are selfish, brutal, and angry at the failure of a
speculation--no, no--it is that your partner has led you into it by the
basest treachery and with the most sinister motives. From a mere sense
of consistency, a persecutor is bound to show that the fallen man is a
villain--otherwise he, the persecutor, is a wretch himself.
And as a general rule, which may make all creditors who are inclined to
be severe pretty comfortable in their minds, no men embarrassed are
altogether honest, very likely. They conceal something; they
exaggerate chances of good luck; hide away the real state of affairs;
say that things are flourishing when they are hopeless, keep a smiling
face (a dreary smile it is) upon the verge of bankruptcy--are ready to
lay hold of any pretext for delay or of any money, so as to stave off
the inevitable ruin a few days longer. "Down with such dishonesty,"
says the creditor in triumph, and reviles his sinking enemy. "You
fool, why do you catch at a straw?" calm good sense says to the man
that is drowning. "You villain, why do you shrink from plunging into
the irretrievable Gazette?" says prosperity to the poor devil battling
in that black gulf. Who has not remarked the readiness with which the
closest of friends and honestest of men suspect and accuse each other
of cheating when they fall out on money matters? Everybody does it.
Everybody is right, I suppose, and the world is a rogue.
Then Osborne had the intolerable sense of former benefits to goad and
irritate him: these are always a cause of hostility aggravated.
Finally, he had to break off the match between Sedley's daughter and
his son; and as it had gone very far indeed, and as the poor girl's
happiness and perhaps character were compromised, it was necessary to
show the strongest reasons for the rupture, and for John Osborne to
prove John Sedley to be a very bad character indeed.
At the meetings of creditors, then, he comported himself with a
savageness and scorn towards Sedley, which almost succeeded in breaking
the heart of that ruined bankrupt man. On George's intercourse with
Amelia he put an instant veto--menacing the youth with maledictions if
he broke his commands, and vilipending the poor innocent girl as the
basest and most artful of vixens. One of the great conditions of anger
and hatred is, that you must tell and believe lies against the hated
object, in order, as we said, to be consistent.
When the great crash came--the announcement of ruin, and the departure
from Russell Square, and the declaration that all was over between her
and George--all over between her and love, her and happiness, her and
faith in the world--a brutal letter from John Osborne told her in a few
curt lines that her father's conduct had been of such a nature that all
engagements between the families were at an end--when the final award
came, it did not shock her so much as her parents, as her mother rather
expected (for John Sedley himself was entirely prostrate in the ruins
of his own affairs and shattered honour). Amelia took the news very
palely and calmly. It was only the confirmation of the dark presages
which had long gone before. It was the mere reading of the
sentence--of the crime she had long ago been guilty--the crime of
loving wrongly, too violently, against reason. She told no more of her
thoughts now than she had before. She seemed scarcely more unhappy now
when convinced all hope was over, than before when she felt but dared
not confess that it was gone. So she changed from the large house to
the small one without any mark or difference; remained in her little
room for the most part; pined silently; and died away day by day. I do
not mean to say that all females are so. My dear Miss Bullock, I do
not think your heart would break in this way. You are a strong-minded
young woman with proper principles. I do not venture to say that mine
would; it has suffered, and, it must be confessed, survived. But there
are some souls thus gently constituted, thus frail, and delicate, and
tender.
Whenever old John Sedley thought of the affair between George and
Amelia, or alluded to it, it was with bitterness almost as great as Mr.
Osborne himself had shown. He cursed Osborne and his family as
heartless, wicked, and ungrateful. No power on earth, he swore, would
induce him to marry his daughter to the son of such a villain, and he
ordered Emmy to banish George from her mind, and to return all the
presents and letters which she had ever had from him.
She promised acquiescence, and tried to obey. She put up the two or
three trinkets: and, as for the letters, she drew them out of the place
where she kept them; and read them over--as if she did not know them by
heart already: but she could not part with them. That effort was too
much for her; she placed them back in her bosom again--as you have seen
a woman nurse a child that is dead. Young Amelia felt that she would
die or lose her senses outright, if torn away from this last
consolation. How she used to blush and lighten up when those letters
came! How she used to trip away with a beating heart, so that she
might read unseen! If they were cold, yet how perversely this fond
little soul interpreted them into warmth. If they were short or
selfish, what excuses she found for the writer!
It was over these few worthless papers that she brooded and brooded.
She lived in her past life--every letter seemed to recall some
circumstance of it. How well she remembered them all! His looks and
tones, his dress, what he said and how--these relics and remembrances
of dead affection were all that were left her in the world. And the
business of her life, was--to watch the corpse of Love.
To death she looked with inexpressible longing. Then, she thought, I
shall always be able to follow him. I am not praising her conduct or
setting her up as a model for Miss Bullock to imitate. Miss B. knows
how to regulate her feelings better than this poor little creature.
Miss B. would never have committed herself as that imprudent Amelia had
done; pledged her love irretrievably; confessed her heart away, and got
back nothing--only a brittle promise which was snapt and worthless in a
moment. A long engagement is a partnership which one party is free to
keep or to break, but which involves all the capital of the other.
Be cautious then, young ladies; be wary how you engage. Be shy of
loving frankly; never tell all you feel, or (a better way still), feel
very little. See the consequences of being prematurely honest and
confiding, and mistrust yourselves and everybody. Get yourselves
married as they do in France, where the lawyers are the bridesmaids and
confidantes. At any rate, never have any feelings which may make you
uncomfortable, or make any promises which you cannot at any required
moment command and withdraw. That is the way to get on, and be
respected, and have a virtuous character in Vanity Fair.
If Amelia could have heard the comments regarding her which were made
in the circle from which her father's ruin had just driven her, she
would have seen what her own crimes were, and how entirely her
character was jeopardised. Such criminal imprudence Mrs. Smith never
knew of; such horrid familiarities Mrs. Brown had always condemned, and
the end might be a warning to HER daughters. "Captain Osborne, of
course, could not marry a bankrupt's daughter," the Misses Dobbin said.
"It was quite enough to have been swindled by the father. As for that
little Amelia, her folly had really passed all--"
"All what?" Captain Dobbin roared out. "Haven't they been engaged ever
since they were children? Wasn't it as good as a marriage? Dare any
soul on earth breathe a word against the sweetest, the purest, the
tenderest, the most angelical of young women?"
"La, William, don't be so highty-tighty with US. We're not men. We
can't fight you," Miss Jane said. "We've said nothing against Miss
Sedley: but that her conduct throughout was MOST IMPRUDENT, not to call
it by any worse name; and that her parents are people who certainly
merit their misfortunes."
"Hadn't you better, now that Miss Sedley is free, propose for her
yourself, William?" Miss Ann asked sarcastically. "It would be a most
eligible family connection. He! he!"
"I marry her!" Dobbin said, blushing very much, and talking quick. "If
you are so ready, young ladies, to chop and change, do you suppose that
she is? Laugh and sneer at that angel. She can't hear it; and she's
miserable and unfortunate, and deserves to be laughed at. Go on
joking, Ann. You're the wit of the family, and the others like to hear
it."
"I must tell you again we're not in a barrack, William," Miss Ann
remarked.
"In a barrack, by Jove--I wish anybody in a barrack would say what you
do," cried out this uproused British lion. "I should like to hear a
man breathe a word against her, by Jupiter. But men don't talk in this
way, Ann: it's only women, who get together and hiss, and shriek, and
cackle. There, get away--don't begin to cry. I only said you were a
couple of geese," Will Dobbin said, perceiving Miss Ann's pink eyes
were beginning to moisten as usual. "Well, you're not geese, you're
swans--anything you like, only do, do leave Miss Sedley alone."
Anything like William's infatuation about that silly little flirting,
ogling thing was never known, the mamma and sisters agreed together in
thinking: and they trembled lest, her engagement being off with
Osborne, she should take up immediately her other admirer and Captain.
In which forebodings these worthy young women no doubt judged according
to the best of their experience; or rather (for as yet they had had no
opportunities of marrying or of jilting) according to their own notions
of right and wrong.
"It is a mercy, Mamma, that the regiment is ordered abroad," the girls
said. "THIS danger, at any rate, is spared our brother."
Such, indeed, was the fact; and so it is that the French Emperor comes
in to perform a part in this domestic comedy of Vanity Fair which we
are now playing, and which would never have been enacted without the
intervention of this august mute personage. It was he that ruined the
Bourbons and Mr. John Sedley. It was he whose arrival in his capital
called up all France in arms to defend him there; and all Europe to
oust him. While the French nation and army were swearing fidelity round
the eagles in the Champ de Mars, four mighty European hosts were
getting in motion for the great chasse a l'aigle; and one of these was
a British army, of which two heroes of ours, Captain Dobbin and Captain
Osborne, formed a portion.
The news of Napoleon's escape and landing was received by the gallant
--th with a fiery delight and enthusiasm, which everybody can
understand who knows that famous corps. From the colonel to the
smallest drummer in the regiment, all were filled with hope and
ambition and patriotic fury; and thanked the French Emperor as for a
personal kindness in coming to disturb the peace of Europe. Now was
the time the --th had so long panted for, to show their comrades in
arms that they could fight as well as the Peninsular veterans, and that
all the pluck and valour of the --th had not been killed by the West
Indies and the yellow fever. Stubble and Spooney looked to get their
companies without purchase. Before the end of the campaign (which she
resolved to share), Mrs. Major O'Dowd hoped to write herself Mrs.
Colonel O'Dowd, C.B. Our two friends (Dobbin and Osborne) were quite
as much excited as the rest: and each in his way--Mr. Dobbin very
quietly, Mr. Osborne very loudly and energetically--was bent upon doing
his duty, and gaining his share of honour and distinction.
The agitation thrilling through the country and army in consequence of
this news was so great, that private matters were little heeded: and
hence probably George Osborne, just gazetted to his company, busy with
preparations for the march, which must come inevitably, and panting for
further promotion--was not so much affected by other incidents which
would have interested him at a more quiet period. He was not, it must
be confessed, very much cast down by good old Mr. Sedley's catastrophe.
He tried his new uniform, which became him very handsomely, on the day
when the first meeting of the creditors of the unfortunate gentleman
took place. His father told him of the wicked, rascally, shameful
conduct of the bankrupt, reminded him of what he had said about Amelia,
and that their connection was broken off for ever; and gave him that
evening a good sum of money to pay for the new clothes and epaulets in
which he looked so well. Money was always useful to this free-handed
young fellow, and he took it without many words. The bills were up in
the Sedley house, where he had passed so many, many happy hours. He
could see them as he walked from home that night (to the Old
Slaughters', where he put up when in town) shining white in the moon.
That comfortable home was shut, then, upon Amelia and her parents:
where had they taken refuge? The thought of their ruin affected him not
a little. He was very melancholy that night in the coffee-room at the
Slaughters'; and drank a good deal, as his comrades remarked there.
Dobbin came in presently, cautioned him about the drink, which he only
took, he said, because he was deuced low; but when his friend began to
put to him clumsy inquiries, and asked him for news in a significant
manner, Osborne declined entering into conversation with him, avowing,
however, that he was devilish disturbed and unhappy.
Three days afterwards, Dobbin found Osborne in his room at the
barracks--his head on the table, a number of papers about, the young
Captain evidently in a state of great despondency. "She--she's sent me
back some things I gave her--some damned trinkets. Look here!" There
was a little packet directed in the well-known hand to Captain George
Osborne, and some things lying about--a ring, a silver knife he had
bought, as a boy, for her at a fair; a gold chain, and a locket with
hair in it. "It's all over," said he, with a groan of sickening
remorse. "Look, Will, you may read it if you like."
There was a little letter of a few lines, to which he pointed, which
said:
My papa has ordered me to return to you these presents, which you made
in happier days to me; and I am to write to you for the last time. I
think, I know you feel as much as I do the blow which has come upon us.
It is I that absolve you from an engagement which is impossible in our
present misery. I am sure you had no share in it, or in the cruel
suspicions of Mr. Osborne, which are the hardest of all our griefs to
bear. Farewell. Farewell. I pray God to strengthen me to bear this
and other calamities, and to bless you always. A.
I shall often play upon the piano--your piano. It was like you to send
it.
Dobbin was very soft-hearted. The sight of women and children in pain
always used to melt him. The idea of Amelia broken-hearted and lonely
tore that good-natured soul with anguish. And he broke out into an
emotion, which anybody who likes may consider unmanly. He swore that
Amelia was an angel, to which Osborne said aye with all his heart. He,
too, had been reviewing the history of their lives--and had seen her
from her childhood to her present age, so sweet, so innocent, so
charmingly simple, and artlessly fond and tender.
What a pang it was to lose all that: to have had it and not prized it!
A thousand homely scenes and recollections crowded on him--in which he
always saw her good and beautiful. And for himself, he blushed with
remorse and shame, as the remembrance of his own selfishness and
indifference contrasted with that perfect purity. For a while, glory,
war, everything was forgotten, and the pair of friends talked about her
only.
"Where are they?" Osborne asked, after a long talk, and a long
pause--and, in truth, with no little shame at thinking that he had
taken no steps to follow her. "Where are they? There's no address to
the note."
Dobbin knew. He had not merely sent the piano; but had written a note
to Mrs. Sedley, and asked permission to come and see her--and he had
seen her, and Amelia too, yesterday, before he came down to Chatham;
and, what is more, he had brought that farewell letter and packet which
had so moved them.
The good-natured fellow had found Mrs. Sedley only too willing to
receive him, and greatly agitated by the arrival of the piano, which,
as she conjectured, MUST have come from George, and was a signal of
amity on his part. Captain Dobbin did not correct this error of the
worthy lady, but listened to all her story of complaints and
misfortunes with great sympathy--condoled with her losses and
privations, and agreed in reprehending the cruel conduct of Mr. Osborne
towards his first benefactor. When she had eased her overflowing bosom
somewhat, and poured forth many of her sorrows, he had the courage to
ask actually to see Amelia, who was above in her room as usual, and
whom her mother led trembling downstairs.
Her appearance was so ghastly, and her look of despair so pathetic,
that honest William Dobbin was frightened as he beheld it; and read the
most fatal forebodings in that pale fixed face. After sitting in his
company a minute or two, she put the packet into his hand, and said,
"Take this to Captain Osborne, if you please, and--and I hope he's
quite well--and it was very kind of you to come and see us--and we like
our new house very much. And I--I think I'll go upstairs, Mamma, for
I'm not very strong." And with this, and a curtsey and a smile, the
poor child went her way. The mother, as she led her up, cast back
looks of anguish towards Dobbin. The good fellow wanted no such
appeal. He loved her himself too fondly for that. Inexpressible
grief, and pity, and terror pursued him, and he came away as if he was
a criminal after seeing her.
When Osborne heard that his friend had found her, he made hot and
anxious inquiries regarding the poor child. How was she? How did she
look? What did she say? His comrade took his hand, and looked him in
the face.
"George, she's dying," William Dobbin said--and could speak no more.
There was a buxom Irish servant-girl, who performed all the duties of
the little house where the Sedley family had found refuge: and this
girl had in vain, on many previous days, striven to give Amelia aid or
consolation. Emmy was much too sad to answer, or even to be aware of
the attempts the other was making in her favour.
Four hours after the talk between Dobbin and Osborne, this servant-maid
came into Amelia's room, where she sate as usual, brooding
silently over her letters--her little treasures. The girl, smiling,
and looking arch and happy, made many trials to attract poor Emmy's
attention, who, however, took no heed of her.
"Miss Emmy," said the girl.
"I'm coming," Emmy said, not looking round.
"There's a message," the maid went on. "There's
something--somebody--sure, here's a new letter for you--don't be reading
them old ones any more." And she gave her a letter, which Emmy took, and
read.
"I must see you," the letter said. "Dearest Emmy--dearest
love--dearest wife, come to me."
George and her mother were outside, waiting until she had read the
letter.
| The narrator steps in for a little aside about the fact that the whole Sedley bankruptcy is happening because of Napoleon. Yes, that Napoleon. He is back from Elba, and in total invasion mode. It's the threat of war that made Mr. Sedley's investments go ka-blooey, and it's the thing that is destroying Amelia's life. Mr. Sedley is a wreck, and Mrs. Sedley is just barely comforting him. Amelia looks and acts like death warmed over. Mr. Osborne writes Amelia a nasty letter saying the engagement is over and forbids George to have anything to do with her. In response, Mr. Sedley orders her to send back anything that George has ever given her. She sends back the presents but keeps his letters. All the servants leave the Sedleys except Mrs. Blenkinsop, who has been with them since before Mr. and Mrs. Sedley were even married. She stays on for free. The Sedleys are now fodder for gossip. Dobbin's sisters join in the general consensus that Amelia shouldn't have been so in love with George and shouldn't have acted like they were already married. She should have stayed coy and been continually playing hard to get. Dobbin is infuriated and yells at them for talking smack about her behind her back. The Misses Dobbin are sort of worried that Dobbin is going to propose to Amelia himself, but then the army is ordered abroad to fight with...Napoleon! All the soldiers in Dobbin's regiment, including George, are psyched to ship out and fight. It's glorious, honorable, macho, and all that jazz. After the excitement wears off, Dobbin finds George depressed in the barracks. He has just received all the things Amelia sent back, along with a letter saying that she frees him from the engagement. The letter also says thanks for the piano, which Amelia assumes George bought. George is moved, but the narrator explains that's it's mostly because now he suddenly doesn't have the thing he was taking for granted all this time. Dobbin is pretty crushed too and decides to find the Sedleys' new house. He succeeds. He goes to visit and finds a gruesomely pale and sad Amelia. Coming back to the barracks, he tells George that she is probably dying. George freaks. Amelia receives a new letter that says, "I must see you, Dearest Emmy - dearest love - dearest wife, come to me" . When she comes out of her room, George is there waiting for her. Awww! Cute. But wait...run, Emmy, run! He's still the same conceited jerk he was before! OK, Shmoop is done throwing popcorn at the screen now. Moving on. | summary |
Miss Crawley at Nurse
We have seen how Mrs. Firkin, the lady's maid, as soon as any event of
importance to the Crawley family came to her knowledge, felt bound to
communicate it to Mrs. Bute Crawley, at the Rectory; and have before
mentioned how particularly kind and attentive that good-natured lady
was to Miss Crawley's confidential servant. She had been a gracious
friend to Miss Briggs, the companion, also; and had secured the
latter's good-will by a number of those attentions and promises, which
cost so little in the making, and are yet so valuable and agreeable to
the recipient. Indeed every good economist and manager of a household
must know how cheap and yet how amiable these professions are, and what
a flavour they give to the most homely dish in life. Who was the
blundering idiot who said that "fine words butter no parsnips"? Half
the parsnips of society are served and rendered palatable with no other
sauce. As the immortal Alexis Soyer can make more delicious soup for a
half-penny than an ignorant cook can concoct with pounds of vegetables
and meat, so a skilful artist will make a few simple and pleasing
phrases go farther than ever so much substantial benefit-stock in the
hands of a mere bungler. Nay, we know that substantial benefits often
sicken some stomachs; whereas, most will digest any amount of fine
words, and be always eager for more of the same food. Mrs. Bute had
told Briggs and Firkin so often of the depth of her affection for them;
and what she would do, if she had Miss Crawley's fortune, for friends
so excellent and attached, that the ladies in question had the deepest
regard for her; and felt as much gratitude and confidence as if Mrs.
Bute had loaded them with the most expensive favours.
Rawdon Crawley, on the other hand, like a selfish heavy dragoon as he
was, never took the least trouble to conciliate his aunt's aides-de-camp,
showed his contempt for the pair with entire frankness--made
Firkin pull off his boots on one occasion--sent her out in the rain on
ignominious messages--and if he gave her a guinea, flung it to her as
if it were a box on the ear. As his aunt, too, made a butt of Briggs,
the Captain followed the example, and levelled his jokes at her--jokes
about as delicate as a kick from his charger. Whereas, Mrs. Bute
consulted her in matters of taste or difficulty, admired her poetry,
and by a thousand acts of kindness and politeness, showed her
appreciation of Briggs; and if she made Firkin a twopenny-halfpenny
present, accompanied it with so many compliments, that the
twopence-half-penny was transmuted into gold in the heart of the
grateful waiting-maid, who, besides, was looking forwards quite
contentedly to some prodigious benefit which must happen to her on the
day when Mrs. Bute came into her fortune.
The different conduct of these two people is pointed out respectfully
to the attention of persons commencing the world. Praise everybody, I
say to such: never be squeamish, but speak out your compliment both
point-blank in a man's face, and behind his back, when you know there
is a reasonable chance of his hearing it again. Never lose a chance of
saying a kind word. As Collingwood never saw a vacant place in his
estate but he took an acorn out of his pocket and popped it in; so deal
with your compliments through life. An acorn costs nothing; but it may
sprout into a prodigious bit of timber.
In a word, during Rawdon Crawley's prosperity, he was only obeyed with
sulky acquiescence; when his disgrace came, there was nobody to help or
pity him. Whereas, when Mrs. Bute took the command at Miss Crawley's
house, the garrison there were charmed to act under such a leader,
expecting all sorts of promotion from her promises, her generosity, and
her kind words.
That he would consider himself beaten, after one defeat, and make no
attempt to regain the position he had lost, Mrs. Bute Crawley never
allowed herself to suppose. She knew Rebecca to be too clever and
spirited and desperate a woman to submit without a struggle; and felt
that she must prepare for that combat, and be incessantly watchful
against assault; or mine, or surprise.
In the first place, though she held the town, was she sure of the
principal inhabitant? Would Miss Crawley herself hold out; and had she
not a secret longing to welcome back the ousted adversary? The old
lady liked Rawdon, and Rebecca, who amused her. Mrs. Bute could not
disguise from herself the fact that none of her party could so
contribute to the pleasures of the town-bred lady. "My girls' singing,
after that little odious governess's, I know is unbearable," the candid
Rector's wife owned to herself. "She always used to go to sleep when
Martha and Louisa played their duets. Jim's stiff college manners and
poor dear Bute's talk about his dogs and horses always annoyed her. If
I took her to the Rectory, she would grow angry with us all, and fly, I
know she would; and might fall into that horrid Rawdon's clutches
again, and be the victim of that little viper of a Sharp. Meanwhile,
it is clear to me that she is exceedingly unwell, and cannot move for
some weeks, at any rate; during which we must think of some plan to
protect her from the arts of those unprincipled people."
In the very best of moments, if anybody told Miss Crawley that she was,
or looked ill, the trembling old lady sent off for her doctor; and I
daresay she was very unwell after the sudden family event, which might
serve to shake stronger nerves than hers. At least, Mrs. Bute thought
it was her duty to inform the physician, and the apothecary, and the
dame-de-compagnie, and the domestics, that Miss Crawley was in a most
critical state, and that they were to act accordingly. She had the
street laid knee-deep with straw; and the knocker put by with Mr.
Bowls's plate. She insisted that the Doctor should call twice a day;
and deluged her patient with draughts every two hours. When anybody
entered the room, she uttered a shshshsh so sibilant and ominous, that
it frightened the poor old lady in her bed, from which she could not
look without seeing Mrs. Bute's beady eyes eagerly fixed on her, as the
latter sate steadfast in the arm-chair by the bedside. They seemed to
lighten in the dark (for she kept the curtains closed) as she moved
about the room on velvet paws like a cat. There Miss Crawley lay for
days--ever so many days--Mr. Bute reading books of devotion to her: for
nights, long nights, during which she had to hear the watchman sing,
the night-light sputter; visited at midnight, the last thing, by the
stealthy apothecary; and then left to look at Mrs. Bute's twinkling
eyes, or the flicks of yellow that the rushlight threw on the dreary
darkened ceiling. Hygeia herself would have fallen sick under such a
regimen; and how much more this poor old nervous victim? It has been
said that when she was in health and good spirits, this venerable
inhabitant of Vanity Fair had as free notions about religion and morals
as Monsieur de Voltaire himself could desire, but when illness overtook
her, it was aggravated by the most dreadful terrors of death, and an
utter cowardice took possession of the prostrate old sinner.
Sick-bed homilies and pious reflections are, to be sure, out of place
in mere story-books, and we are not going (after the fashion of some
novelists of the present day) to cajole the public into a sermon, when
it is only a comedy that the reader pays his money to witness. But,
without preaching, the truth may surely be borne in mind, that the
bustle, and triumph, and laughter, and gaiety which Vanity Fair
exhibits in public, do not always pursue the performer into private
life, and that the most dreary depression of spirits and dismal
repentances sometimes overcome him. Recollection of the best ordained
banquets will scarcely cheer sick epicures. Reminiscences of the most
becoming dresses and brilliant ball triumphs will go very little way to
console faded beauties. Perhaps statesmen, at a particular period of
existence, are not much gratified at thinking over the most triumphant
divisions; and the success or the pleasure of yesterday becomes of very
small account when a certain (albeit uncertain) morrow is in view,
about which all of us must some day or other be speculating. O brother
wearers of motley! Are there not moments when one grows sick of
grinning and tumbling, and the jingling of cap and bells? This, dear
friends and companions, is my amiable object--to walk with you through
the Fair, to examine the shops and the shows there; and that we should
all come home after the flare, and the noise, and the gaiety, and be
perfectly miserable in private.
"If that poor man of mine had a head on his shoulders," Mrs. Bute
Crawley thought to herself, "how useful he might be, under present
circumstances, to this unhappy old lady! He might make her repent of
her shocking free-thinking ways; he might urge her to do her duty, and
cast off that odious reprobate who has disgraced himself and his
family; and he might induce her to do justice to my dear girls and the
two boys, who require and deserve, I am sure, every assistance which
their relatives can give them."
And, as the hatred of vice is always a progress towards virtue, Mrs.
Bute Crawley endeavoured to instil her sister-in-law a proper
abhorrence for all Rawdon Crawley's manifold sins: of which his uncle's
wife brought forward such a catalogue as indeed would have served to
condemn a whole regiment of young officers. If a man has committed
wrong in life, I don't know any moralist more anxious to point his
errors out to the world than his own relations; so Mrs. Bute showed a
perfect family interest and knowledge of Rawdon's history. She had all
the particulars of that ugly quarrel with Captain Marker, in which
Rawdon, wrong from the beginning, ended in shooting the Captain. She
knew how the unhappy Lord Dovedale, whose mamma had taken a house at
Oxford, so that he might be educated there, and who had never touched a
card in his life till he came to London, was perverted by Rawdon at the
Cocoa-Tree, made helplessly tipsy by this abominable seducer and
perverter of youth, and fleeced of four thousand pounds. She described
with the most vivid minuteness the agonies of the country families whom
he had ruined--the sons whom he had plunged into dishonour and
poverty--the daughters whom he had inveigled into perdition. She knew
the poor tradesmen who were bankrupt by his extravagance--the mean
shifts and rogueries with which he had ministered to it--the astounding
falsehoods by which he had imposed upon the most generous of aunts, and
the ingratitude and ridicule by which he had repaid her sacrifices.
She imparted these stories gradually to Miss Crawley; gave her the
whole benefit of them; felt it to be her bounden duty as a Christian
woman and mother of a family to do so; had not the smallest remorse or
compunction for the victim whom her tongue was immolating; nay, very
likely thought her act was quite meritorious, and plumed herself upon
her resolute manner of performing it. Yes, if a man's character is to
be abused, say what you will, there's nobody like a relation to do the
business. And one is bound to own, regarding this unfortunate wretch
of a Rawdon Crawley, that the mere truth was enough to condemn him, and
that all inventions of scandal were quite superfluous pains on his
friends' parts.
Rebecca, too, being now a relative, came in for the fullest share of
Mrs. Bute's kind inquiries. This indefatigable pursuer of truth
(having given strict orders that the door was to be denied to all
emissaries or letters from Rawdon), took Miss Crawley's carriage, and
drove to her old friend Miss Pinkerton, at Minerva House, Chiswick
Mall, to whom she announced the dreadful intelligence of Captain
Rawdon's seduction by Miss Sharp, and from whom she got sundry strange
particulars regarding the ex-governess's birth and early history. The
friend of the Lexicographer had plenty of information to give. Miss
Jemima was made to fetch the drawing-master's receipts and letters.
This one was from a spunging-house: that entreated an advance: another
was full of gratitude for Rebecca's reception by the ladies of
Chiswick: and the last document from the unlucky artist's pen was that
in which, from his dying bed, he recommended his orphan child to Miss
Pinkerton's protection. There were juvenile letters and petitions from
Rebecca, too, in the collection, imploring aid for her father or
declaring her own gratitude. Perhaps in Vanity Fair there are no
better satires than letters. Take a bundle of your dear friend's of
ten years back--your dear friend whom you hate now. Look at a file of
your sister's! how you clung to each other till you quarrelled about
the twenty-pound legacy! Get down the round-hand scrawls of your son
who has half broken your heart with selfish undutifulness since; or a
parcel of your own, breathing endless ardour and love eternal, which
were sent back by your mistress when she married the Nabob--your
mistress for whom you now care no more than for Queen Elizabeth. Vows,
love, promises, confidences, gratitude, how queerly they read after a
while! There ought to be a law in Vanity Fair ordering the destruction
of every written document (except receipted tradesmen's bills) after a
certain brief and proper interval. Those quacks and misanthropes who
advertise indelible Japan ink should be made to perish along with their
wicked discoveries. The best ink for Vanity Fair use would be one that
faded utterly in a couple of days, and left the paper clean and blank,
so that you might write on it to somebody else.
From Miss Pinkerton's the indefatigable Mrs. Bute followed the track of
Sharp and his daughter back to the lodgings in Greek Street, which the
defunct painter had occupied; and where portraits of the landlady in
white satin, and of the husband in brass buttons, done by Sharp in lieu
of a quarter's rent, still decorated the parlour walls. Mrs. Stokes
was a communicative person, and quickly told all she knew about Mr.
Sharp; how dissolute and poor he was; how good-natured and amusing;
how he was always hunted by bailiffs and duns; how, to the landlady's
horror, though she never could abide the woman, he did not marry his
wife till a short time before her death; and what a queer little wild
vixen his daughter was; how she kept them all laughing with her fun and
mimicry; how she used to fetch the gin from the public-house, and was
known in all the studios in the quarter--in brief, Mrs. Bute got such a
full account of her new niece's parentage, education, and behaviour as
would scarcely have pleased Rebecca, had the latter known that such
inquiries were being made concerning her.
Of all these industrious researches Miss Crawley had the full benefit.
Mrs. Rawdon Crawley was the daughter of an opera-girl. She had danced
herself. She had been a model to the painters. She was brought up as
became her mother's daughter. She drank gin with her father, &c. &c.
It was a lost woman who was married to a lost man; and the moral to be
inferred from Mrs. Bute's tale was, that the knavery of the pair was
irremediable, and that no properly conducted person should ever notice
them again.
These were the materials which prudent Mrs. Bute gathered together in
Park Lane, the provisions and ammunition as it were with which she
fortified the house against the siege which she knew that Rawdon and
his wife would lay to Miss Crawley.
But if a fault may be found with her arrangements, it is this, that she
was too eager: she managed rather too well; undoubtedly she made Miss
Crawley more ill than was necessary; and though the old invalid
succumbed to her authority, it was so harassing and severe, that the
victim would be inclined to escape at the very first chance which fell
in her way. Managing women, the ornaments of their sex--women who
order everything for everybody, and know so much better than any person
concerned what is good for their neighbours, don't sometimes speculate
upon the possibility of a domestic revolt, or upon other extreme
consequences resulting from their overstrained authority.
Thus, for instance, Mrs. Bute, with the best intentions no doubt in the
world, and wearing herself to death as she did by foregoing sleep,
dinner, fresh air, for the sake of her invalid sister-in-law, carried
her conviction of the old lady's illness so far that she almost managed
her into her coffin. She pointed out her sacrifices and their results
one day to the constant apothecary, Mr. Clump.
"I am sure, my dear Mr. Clump," she said, "no efforts of mine have been
wanting to restore our dear invalid, whom the ingratitude of her nephew
has laid on the bed of sickness. I never shrink from personal
discomfort: I never refuse to sacrifice myself."
"Your devotion, it must be confessed, is admirable," Mr. Clump says,
with a low bow; "but--"
"I have scarcely closed my eyes since my arrival: I give up sleep,
health, every comfort, to my sense of duty. When my poor James was in
the smallpox, did I allow any hireling to nurse him? No."
"You did what became an excellent mother, my dear Madam--the best of
mothers; but--"
"As the mother of a family and the wife of an English clergyman, I
humbly trust that my principles are good," Mrs. Bute said, with a happy
solemnity of conviction; "and, as long as Nature supports me, never,
never, Mr. Clump, will I desert the post of duty. Others may bring
that grey head with sorrow to the bed of sickness (here Mrs. Bute,
waving her hand, pointed to one of old Miss Crawley's coffee-coloured
fronts, which was perched on a stand in the dressing-room), but I will
never quit it. Ah, Mr. Clump! I fear, I know, that the couch needs
spiritual as well as medical consolation."
"What I was going to observe, my dear Madam,"--here the resolute Clump
once more interposed with a bland air--"what I was going to observe
when you gave utterance to sentiments which do you so much honour, was
that I think you alarm yourself needlessly about our kind friend, and
sacrifice your own health too prodigally in her favour."
"I would lay down my life for my duty, or for any member of my
husband's family," Mrs. Bute interposed.
"Yes, Madam, if need were; but we don't want Mrs Bute Crawley to be a
martyr," Clump said gallantly. "Dr Squills and myself have both
considered Miss Crawley's case with every anxiety and care, as you may
suppose. We see her low-spirited and nervous; family events have
agitated her."
"Her nephew will come to perdition," Mrs. Crawley cried.
"Have agitated her: and you arrived like a guardian angel, my dear
Madam, a positive guardian angel, I assure you, to soothe her under the
pressure of calamity. But Dr. Squills and I were thinking that our
amiable friend is not in such a state as renders confinement to her bed
necessary. She is depressed, but this confinement perhaps adds to her
depression. She should have change, fresh air, gaiety; the most
delightful remedies in the pharmacopoeia," Mr. Clump said, grinning and
showing his handsome teeth. "Persuade her to rise, dear Madam; drag
her from her couch and her low spirits; insist upon her taking little
drives. They will restore the roses too to your cheeks, if I may so
speak to Mrs. Bute Crawley."
"The sight of her horrid nephew casually in the Park, where I am told
the wretch drives with the brazen partner of his crimes," Mrs. Bute
said (letting the cat of selfishness out of the bag of secrecy), "would
cause her such a shock, that we should have to bring her back to bed
again. She must not go out, Mr. Clump. She shall not go out as long
as I remain to watch over her; And as for my health, what matters it?
I give it cheerfully, sir. I sacrifice it at the altar of my duty."
"Upon my word, Madam," Mr. Clump now said bluntly, "I won't answer for
her life if she remains locked up in that dark room. She is so nervous
that we may lose her any day; and if you wish Captain Crawley to be her
heir, I warn you frankly, Madam, that you are doing your very best to
serve him."
"Gracious mercy! is her life in danger?" Mrs. Bute cried. "Why, why,
Mr. Clump, did you not inform me sooner?"
The night before, Mr. Clump and Dr. Squills had had a consultation
(over a bottle of wine at the house of Sir Lapin Warren, whose lady was
about to present him with a thirteenth blessing), regarding Miss
Crawley and her case.
"What a little harpy that woman from Hampshire is, Clump," Squills
remarked, "that has seized upon old Tilly Crawley. Devilish good
Madeira."
"What a fool Rawdon Crawley has been," Clump replied, "to go and marry
a governess! There was something about the girl, too."
"Green eyes, fair skin, pretty figure, famous frontal development,"
Squills remarked. "There is something about her; and Crawley was a
fool, Squills."
"A d---- fool--always was," the apothecary replied.
"Of course the old girl will fling him over," said the physician, and
after a pause added, "She'll cut up well, I suppose."
"Cut up," says Clump with a grin; "I wouldn't have her cut up for two
hundred a year."
"That Hampshire woman will kill her in two months, Clump, my boy, if
she stops about her," Dr. Squills said. "Old woman; full feeder;
nervous subject; palpitation of the heart; pressure on the brain;
apoplexy; off she goes. Get her up, Clump; get her out: or I wouldn't
give many weeks' purchase for your two hundred a year." And it was
acting upon this hint that the worthy apothecary spoke with so much
candour to Mrs. Bute Crawley.
Having the old lady under her hand: in bed: with nobody near, Mrs. Bute
had made more than one assault upon her, to induce her to alter her
will. But Miss Crawley's usual terrors regarding death increased
greatly when such dismal propositions were made to her, and Mrs. Bute
saw that she must get her patient into cheerful spirits and health
before she could hope to attain the pious object which she had in view.
Whither to take her was the next puzzle. The only place where she is
not likely to meet those odious Rawdons is at church, and that won't
amuse her, Mrs. Bute justly felt. "We must go and visit our beautiful
suburbs of London," she then thought. "I hear they are the most
picturesque in the world"; and so she had a sudden interest for
Hampstead, and Hornsey, and found that Dulwich had great charms for
her, and getting her victim into her carriage, drove her to those
rustic spots, beguiling the little journeys with conversations about
Rawdon and his wife, and telling every story to the old lady which
could add to her indignation against this pair of reprobates.
Perhaps Mrs. Bute pulled the string unnecessarily tight. For though she
worked up Miss Crawley to a proper dislike of her disobedient nephew,
the invalid had a great hatred and secret terror of her victimizer, and
panted to escape from her. After a brief space, she rebelled against
Highgate and Hornsey utterly. She would go into the Park. Mrs. Bute
knew they would meet the abominable Rawdon there, and she was right.
One day in the ring, Rawdon's stanhope came in sight; Rebecca was
seated by him. In the enemy's equipage Miss Crawley occupied her usual
place, with Mrs. Bute on her left, the poodle and Miss Briggs on the
back seat. It was a nervous moment, and Rebecca's heart beat quick as
she recognized the carriage; and as the two vehicles crossed each other
in a line, she clasped her hands, and looked towards the spinster with
a face of agonized attachment and devotion. Rawdon himself trembled,
and his face grew purple behind his dyed mustachios. Only old Briggs
was moved in the other carriage, and cast her great eyes nervously
towards her old friends. Miss Crawley's bonnet was resolutely turned
towards the Serpentine. Mrs. Bute happened to be in ecstasies with the
poodle, and was calling him a little darling, and a sweet little zoggy,
and a pretty pet. The carriages moved on, each in his line.
"Done, by Jove," Rawdon said to his wife.
"Try once more, Rawdon," Rebecca answered. "Could not you lock your
wheels into theirs, dearest?"
Rawdon had not the heart for that manoeuvre. When the carriages met
again, he stood up in his stanhope; he raised his hand ready to doff
his hat; he looked with all his eyes. But this time Miss Crawley's
face was not turned away; she and Mrs. Bute looked him full in the
face, and cut their nephew pitilessly. He sank back in his seat with
an oath, and striking out of the ring, dashed away desperately
homewards.
It was a gallant and decided triumph for Mrs. Bute. But she felt the
danger of many such meetings, as she saw the evident nervousness of
Miss Crawley; and she determined that it was most necessary for her
dear friend's health, that they should leave town for a while, and
recommended Brighton very strongly.
| Mrs. Bute quickly gets the upper hand at Miss Crawley's house. She has spent her life ingratiating herself with Briggs and Firkin, so they are happy to have her there and serve her. Rawdon, meanwhile, has spent his life treating them like the servants that they are, so no one there is going to go to bat for him. The narrator pauses here to give us a cynical little moral lesson: try to be nice to anyone who might be of use to you later in life. First things first. Mrs. Bute makes a big deal out of how sick Miss Crawley must be and imposes a restrictive health regimen on her. This mostly consists of Mr. Clump's medicine and lots of indoor time. Also, Mrs. Bute forbids Becky or Rawdon from entering the house. Regretting that her own family is too dumb and boring to entertain Miss Crawley, Mrs. Bute instead starts to badmouth Rawdon and Becky as much as possible to get Miss Crawley to stop liking them. It's pretty easy to do. Rawdon has killed a couple of guys in duels, has seduced and abandoned a bunch of girls, and is a gambler. Becky is not only the daughter of an opera singer, but she herself has been an artist's model and even used to drink gin with her father. They're kind of made for each other, right? Everything would be OK for Mrs. Bute except she's a little too tyrannical. Miss Crawley secretly hates her and doesn't want to be kept as an invalid prisoner. Mr. Clump and Dr. Squills have a very unemotional conversation discussing the likelihood that Miss Crawley will die really soon under Mrs. Bute's oppressive "care." Mr. Clump tells Mrs. Bute that Miss Crawley's life is in danger, and Mrs. Bute freaks out because Miss Crawley has yet to change her will: if she dies now, Rawdon will get all her money. So Mrs. Bute relaxes her iron grip. Miss Crawley starts to go out in her carriage. In the park, her carriage rides past Rawdon and Becky's, but Miss Crawley totally snubs them. Mrs. Bute one, Becky zero. Mrs. Bute decides to take Miss Crawley to Brighton, a seaside resort town. | summary |
In Which Captain Dobbin Acts as the Messenger of Hymen
Without knowing how, Captain William Dobbin found himself the great
promoter, arranger, and manager of the match between George Osborne and
Amelia. But for him it never would have taken place: he could not but
confess as much to himself, and smiled rather bitterly as he thought
that he of all men in the world should be the person upon whom the care
of this marriage had fallen. But though indeed the conducting of this
negotiation was about as painful a task as could be set to him, yet
when he had a duty to perform, Captain Dobbin was accustomed to go
through it without many words or much hesitation: and, having made up
his mind completely, that if Miss Sedley was balked of her husband she
would die of the disappointment, he was determined to use all his best
endeavours to keep her alive.
I forbear to enter into minute particulars of the interview between
George and Amelia, when the former was brought back to the feet (or
should we venture to say the arms?) of his young mistress by the
intervention of his friend honest William. A much harder heart than
George's would have melted at the sight of that sweet face so sadly
ravaged by grief and despair, and at the simple tender accents in which
she told her little broken-hearted story: but as she did not faint when
her mother, trembling, brought Osborne to her; and as she only gave
relief to her overcharged grief, by laying her head on her lover's
shoulder and there weeping for a while the most tender, copious, and
refreshing tears--old Mrs. Sedley, too greatly relieved, thought it was
best to leave the young persons to themselves; and so quitted Emmy
crying over George's hand, and kissing it humbly, as if he were her
supreme chief and master, and as if she were quite a guilty and
unworthy person needing every favour and grace from him.
This prostration and sweet unrepining obedience exquisitely touched and
flattered George Osborne. He saw a slave before him in that simple
yielding faithful creature, and his soul within him thrilled secretly
somehow at the knowledge of his power. He would be generous-minded,
Sultan as he was, and raise up this kneeling Esther and make a queen of
her: besides, her sadness and beauty touched him as much as her
submission, and so he cheered her, and raised her up and forgave her,
so to speak. All her hopes and feelings, which were dying and
withering, this her sun having been removed from her, bloomed again and
at once, its light being restored. You would scarcely have recognised
the beaming little face upon Amelia's pillow that night as the one that
was laid there the night before, so wan, so lifeless, so careless of
all round about. The honest Irish maid-servant, delighted with the
change, asked leave to kiss the face that had grown all of a sudden so
rosy. Amelia put her arms round the girl's neck and kissed her with
all her heart, like a child. She was little more. She had that night
a sweet refreshing sleep, like one--and what a spring of inexpressible
happiness as she woke in the morning sunshine!
"He will be here again to-day," Amelia thought. "He is the greatest
and best of men." And the fact is, that George thought he was one of
the generousest creatures alive: and that he was making a tremendous
sacrifice in marrying this young creature.
While she and Osborne were having their delightful tete-a-tete above
stairs, old Mrs. Sedley and Captain Dobbin were conversing below upon
the state of the affairs, and the chances and future arrangements of
the young people. Mrs. Sedley having brought the two lovers together
and left them embracing each other with all their might, like a true
woman, was of opinion that no power on earth would induce Mr. Sedley to
consent to the match between his daughter and the son of a man who had
so shamefully, wickedly, and monstrously treated him. And she told a
long story about happier days and their earlier splendours, when
Osborne lived in a very humble way in the New Road, and his wife was
too glad to receive some of Jos's little baby things, with which Mrs.
Sedley accommodated her at the birth of one of Osborne's own children.
The fiendish ingratitude of that man, she was sure, had broken Mr. S.'s
heart: and as for a marriage, he would never, never, never, never
consent.
"They must run away together, Ma'am," Dobbin said, laughing, "and
follow the example of Captain Rawdon Crawley, and Miss Emmy's friend
the little governess." Was it possible? Well she never! Mrs. Sedley
was all excitement about this news. She wished that Blenkinsop were
here to hear it: Blenkinsop always mistrusted that Miss Sharp.-- What
an escape Jos had had! and she described the already well-known
love-passages between Rebecca and the Collector of Boggley Wollah.
It was not, however, Mr. Sedley's wrath which Dobbin feared, so much as
that of the other parent concerned, and he owned that he had a very
considerable doubt and anxiety respecting the behaviour of the
black-browed old tyrant of a Russia merchant in Russell Square. He has
forbidden the match peremptorily, Dobbin thought. He knew what a savage
determined man Osborne was, and how he stuck by his word. "The only
chance George has of reconcilement," argued his friend, "is by
distinguishing himself in the coming campaign. If he dies they both go
together. If he fails in distinction--what then? He has some money
from his mother, I have heard enough to purchase his majority--or he
must sell out and go and dig in Canada, or rough it in a cottage in the
country." With such a partner Dobbin thought he would not mind
Siberia--and, strange to say, this absurd and utterly imprudent young
fellow never for a moment considered that the want of means to keep a
nice carriage and horses, and of an income which should enable its
possessors to entertain their friends genteelly, ought to operate as
bars to the union of George and Miss Sedley.
It was these weighty considerations which made him think too that the
marriage should take place as quickly as possible. Was he anxious
himself, I wonder, to have it over?--as people, when death has
occurred, like to press forward the funeral, or when a parting is
resolved upon, hasten it. It is certain that Mr. Dobbin, having taken
the matter in hand, was most extraordinarily eager in the conduct of
it. He urged on George the necessity of immediate action: he showed
the chances of reconciliation with his father, which a favourable
mention of his name in the Gazette must bring about. If need were he
would go himself and brave both the fathers in the business. At all
events, he besought George to go through with it before the orders
came, which everybody expected, for the departure of the regiment from
England on foreign service.
Bent upon these hymeneal projects, and with the applause and consent of
Mrs. Sedley, who did not care to break the matter personally to her
husband, Mr. Dobbin went to seek John Sedley at his house of call in
the City, the Tapioca Coffee-house, where, since his own offices were
shut up, and fate had overtaken him, the poor broken-down old
gentleman used to betake himself daily, and write letters and receive
them, and tie them up into mysterious bundles, several of which he
carried in the flaps of his coat. I don't know anything more dismal
than that business and bustle and mystery of a ruined man: those
letters from the wealthy which he shows you: those worn greasy
documents promising support and offering condolence which he places
wistfully before you, and on which he builds his hopes of restoration
and future fortune. My beloved reader has no doubt in the course of his
experience been waylaid by many such a luckless companion. He takes
you into the corner; he has his bundle of papers out of his gaping coat
pocket; and the tape off, and the string in his mouth, and the
favourite letters selected and laid before you; and who does not know
the sad eager half-crazy look which he fixes on you with his hopeless
eyes?
Changed into a man of this sort, Dobbin found the once florid, jovial,
and prosperous John Sedley. His coat, that used to be so glossy and
trim, was white at the seams, and the buttons showed the copper. His
face had fallen in, and was unshorn; his frill and neckcloth hung limp
under his bagging waistcoat. When he used to treat the boys in old
days at a coffee-house, he would shout and laugh louder than anybody
there, and have all the waiters skipping round him; it was quite
painful to see how humble and civil he was to John of the Tapioca, a
blear-eyed old attendant in dingy stockings and cracked pumps, whose
business it was to serve glasses of wafers, and bumpers of ink in
pewter, and slices of paper to the frequenters of this dreary house of
entertainment, where nothing else seemed to be consumed. As for
William Dobbin, whom he had tipped repeatedly in his youth, and who had
been the old gentleman's butt on a thousand occasions, old Sedley gave
his hand to him in a very hesitating humble manner now, and called him
"Sir." A feeling of shame and remorse took possession of William Dobbin
as the broken old man so received and addressed him, as if he himself
had been somehow guilty of the misfortunes which had brought Sedley so
low.
"I am very glad to see you, Captain Dobbin, sir," says he, after a
skulking look or two at his visitor (whose lanky figure and military
appearance caused some excitement likewise to twinkle in the blear eyes
of the waiter in the cracked dancing pumps, and awakened the old lady
in black, who dozed among the mouldy old coffee-cups in the bar). "How
is the worthy alderman, and my lady, your excellent mother, sir?" He
looked round at the waiter as he said, "My lady," as much as to say,
"Hark ye, John, I have friends still, and persons of rank and
reputation, too." "Are you come to do anything in my way, sir? My
young friends Dale and Spiggot do all my business for me now, until my
new offices are ready; for I'm only here temporarily, you know,
Captain. What can we do for you, sir? Will you like to take anything?"
Dobbin, with a great deal of hesitation and stuttering, protested that
he was not in the least hungry or thirsty; that he had no business to
transact; that he only came to ask if Mr. Sedley was well, and to shake
hands with an old friend; and, he added, with a desperate perversion of
truth, "My mother is very well--that is, she's been very unwell, and is
only waiting for the first fine day to go out and call upon Mrs.
Sedley. How is Mrs. Sedley, sir? I hope she's quite well." And here
he paused, reflecting on his own consummate hypocrisy; for the day was
as fine, and the sunshine as bright as it ever is in Coffin Court,
where the Tapioca Coffee-house is situated: and Mr. Dobbin remembered
that he had seen Mrs. Sedley himself only an hour before, having driven
Osborne down to Fulham in his gig, and left him there tete-a-tete with
Miss Amelia.
"My wife will be very happy to see her ladyship," Sedley replied,
pulling out his papers. "I've a very kind letter here from your
father, sir, and beg my respectful compliments to him. Lady D. will
find us in rather a smaller house than we were accustomed to receive
our friends in; but it's snug, and the change of air does good to my
daughter, who was suffering in town rather--you remember little Emmy,
sir?--yes, suffering a good deal." The old gentleman's eyes were
wandering as he spoke, and he was thinking of something else, as he
sate thrumming on his papers and fumbling at the worn red tape.
"You're a military man," he went on; "I ask you, Bill Dobbin, could any
man ever have speculated upon the return of that Corsican scoundrel
from Elba? When the allied sovereigns were here last year, and we gave
'em that dinner in the City, sir, and we saw the Temple of Concord, and
the fireworks, and the Chinese bridge in St. James's Park, could any
sensible man suppose that peace wasn't really concluded, after we'd
actually sung Te Deum for it, sir? I ask you, William, could I suppose
that the Emperor of Austria was a damned traitor--a traitor, and
nothing more? I don't mince words--a double-faced infernal traitor and
schemer, who meant to have his son-in-law back all along. And I say
that the escape of Boney from Elba was a damned imposition and plot,
sir, in which half the powers of Europe were concerned, to bring the
funds down, and to ruin this country. That's why I'm here, William.
That's why my name's in the Gazette. Why, sir?--because I trusted the
Emperor of Russia and the Prince Regent. Look here. Look at my
papers. Look what the funds were on the 1st of March--what the French
fives were when I bought for the count. And what they're at now.
There was collusion, sir, or that villain never would have escaped.
Where was the English Commissioner who allowed him to get away? He
ought to be shot, sir--brought to a court-martial, and shot, by Jove."
"We're going to hunt Boney out, sir," Dobbin said, rather alarmed at
the fury of the old man, the veins of whose forehead began to swell,
and who sate drumming his papers with his clenched fist. "We are going
to hunt him out, sir--the Duke's in Belgium already, and we expect
marching orders every day."
"Give him no quarter. Bring back the villain's head, sir. Shoot the
coward down, sir," Sedley roared. "I'd enlist myself, by--; but I'm a
broken old man--ruined by that damned scoundrel--and by a parcel of
swindling thieves in this country whom I made, sir, and who are rolling
in their carriages now," he added, with a break in his voice.
Dobbin was not a little affected by the sight of this once kind old
friend, crazed almost with misfortune and raving with senile anger.
Pity the fallen gentleman: you to whom money and fair repute are the
chiefest good; and so, surely, are they in Vanity Fair.
"Yes," he continued, "there are some vipers that you warm, and they
sting you afterwards. There are some beggars that you put on
horseback, and they're the first to ride you down. You know whom I
mean, William Dobbin, my boy. I mean a purse-proud villain in Russell
Square, whom I knew without a shilling, and whom I pray and hope to see
a beggar as he was when I befriended him."
"I have heard something of this, sir, from my friend George," Dobbin
said, anxious to come to his point. "The quarrel between you and his
father has cut him up a great deal, sir. Indeed, I'm the bearer of a
message from him."
"O, THAT'S your errand, is it?" cried the old man, jumping up. "What!
perhaps he condoles with me, does he? Very kind of him, the
stiff-backed prig, with his dandified airs and West End swagger. He's
hankering about my house, is he still? If my son had the courage of a
man, he'd shoot him. He's as big a villain as his father. I won't
have his name mentioned in my house. I curse the day that ever I let
him into it; and I'd rather see my daughter dead at my feet than
married to him."
"His father's harshness is not George's fault, sir. Your daughter's
love for him is as much your doing as his. Who are you, that you are
to play with two young people's affections and break their hearts at
your will?"
"Recollect it's not his father that breaks the match off," old Sedley
cried out. "It's I that forbid it. That family and mine are separated
for ever. I'm fallen low, but not so low as that: no, no. And so you
may tell the whole race--son, and father and sisters, and all."
"It's my belief, sir, that you have not the power or the right to
separate those two," Dobbin answered in a low voice; "and that if you
don't give your daughter your consent it will be her duty to marry
without it. There's no reason she should die or live miserably because
you are wrong-headed. To my thinking, she's just as much married as if
the banns had been read in all the churches in London. And what better
answer can there be to Osborne's charges against you, as charges there
are, than that his son claims to enter your family and marry your
daughter?"
A light of something like satisfaction seemed to break over old Sedley
as this point was put to him: but he still persisted that with his
consent the marriage between Amelia and George should never take place.
"We must do it without," Dobbin said, smiling, and told Mr. Sedley, as
he had told Mrs. Sedley in the day, before, the story of Rebecca's
elopement with Captain Crawley. It evidently amused the old gentleman.
"You're terrible fellows, you Captains," said he, tying up his papers;
and his face wore something like a smile upon it, to the astonishment
of the blear-eyed waiter who now entered, and had never seen such an
expression upon Sedley's countenance since he had used the dismal
coffee-house.
The idea of hitting his enemy Osborne such a blow soothed, perhaps, the
old gentleman: and, their colloquy presently ending, he and Dobbin
parted pretty good friends.
"My sisters say she has diamonds as big as pigeons' eggs," George said,
laughing. "How they must set off her complexion! A perfect
illumination it must be when her jewels are on her neck. Her
jet-black hair is as curly as Sambo's. I dare say she wore a nose ring
when she went to court; and with a plume of feathers in her top-knot
she would look a perfect Belle Sauvage."
George, in conversation with Amelia, was rallying the appearance of a
young lady of whom his father and sisters had lately made the
acquaintance, and who was an object of vast respect to the Russell
Square family. She was reported to have I don't know how many
plantations in the West Indies; a deal of money in the funds; and three
stars to her name in the East India stockholders' list. She had a
mansion in Surrey, and a house in Portland Place. The name of the rich
West India heiress had been mentioned with applause in the Morning
Post. Mrs. Haggistoun, Colonel Haggistoun's widow, her relative,
"chaperoned" her, and kept her house. She was just from school, where
she had completed her education, and George and his sisters had met her
at an evening party at old Hulker's house, Devonshire Place (Hulker,
Bullock, and Co. were long the correspondents of her house in the West
Indies), and the girls had made the most cordial advances to her, which
the heiress had received with great good humour. An orphan in her
position--with her money--so interesting! the Misses Osborne said.
They were full of their new friend when they returned from the Hulker
ball to Miss Wirt, their companion; they had made arrangements for
continually meeting, and had the carriage and drove to see her the very
next day. Mrs. Haggistoun, Colonel Haggistoun's widow, a relation of
Lord Binkie, and always talking of him, struck the dear unsophisticated
girls as rather haughty, and too much inclined to talk about her great
relations: but Rhoda was everything they could wish--the frankest,
kindest, most agreeable creature--wanting a little polish, but so
good-natured. The girls Christian-named each other at once.
"You should have seen her dress for court, Emmy," Osborne cried,
laughing. "She came to my sisters to show it off, before she was
presented in state by my Lady Binkie, the Haggistoun's kinswoman. She's
related to every one, that Haggistoun. Her diamonds blazed out like
Vauxhall on the night we were there. (Do you remember Vauxhall, Emmy,
and Jos singing to his dearest diddle diddle darling?) Diamonds and
mahogany, my dear! think what an advantageous contrast--and the white
feathers in her hair--I mean in her wool. She had earrings like
chandeliers; you might have lighted 'em up, by Jove--and a yellow satin
train that streeled after her like the tail of a comet."
"How old is she?" asked Emmy, to whom George was rattling away
regarding this dark paragon, on the morning of their reunion--rattling
away as no other man in the world surely could.
"Why the Black Princess, though she has only just left school, must be
two or three and twenty. And you should see the hand she writes! Mrs.
Colonel Haggistoun usually writes her letters, but in a moment of
confidence, she put pen to paper for my sisters; she spelt satin
satting, and Saint James's, Saint Jams."
"Why, surely it must be Miss Swartz, the parlour boarder," Emmy said,
remembering that good-natured young mulatto girl, who had been so
hysterically affected when Amelia left Miss Pinkerton's academy.
"The very name," George said. "Her father was a German Jew--a
slave-owner they say--connected with the Cannibal Islands in some way
or other. He died last year, and Miss Pinkerton has finished her
education. She can play two pieces on the piano; she knows three
songs; she can write when Mrs. Haggistoun is by to spell for her; and
Jane and Maria already have got to love her as a sister."
"I wish they would have loved me," said Emmy, wistfully. "They were
always very cold to me."
"My dear child, they would have loved you if you had had two hundred
thousand pounds," George replied. "That is the way in which they have
been brought up. Ours is a ready-money society. We live among bankers
and City big-wigs, and be hanged to them, and every man, as he talks to
you, is jingling his guineas in his pocket. There is that jackass Fred
Bullock is going to marry Maria--there's Goldmore, the East India
Director, there's Dipley, in the tallow trade--OUR trade," George said,
with an uneasy laugh and a blush. "Curse the whole pack of
money-grubbing vulgarians! I fall asleep at their great heavy dinners.
I feel ashamed in my father's great stupid parties. I've been
accustomed to live with gentlemen, and men of the world and fashion,
Emmy, not with a parcel of turtle-fed tradesmen. Dear little woman,
you are the only person of our set who ever looked, or thought, or
spoke like a lady: and you do it because you're an angel and can't help
it. Don't remonstrate. You are the only lady. Didn't Miss Crawley
remark it, who has lived in the best company in Europe? And as for
Crawley, of the Life Guards, hang it, he's a fine fellow: and I like
him for marrying the girl he had chosen."
Amelia admired Mr. Crawley very much, too, for this; and trusted
Rebecca would be happy with him, and hoped (with a laugh) Jos would be
consoled. And so the pair went on prattling, as in quite early days.
Amelia's confidence being perfectly restored to her, though she
expressed a great deal of pretty jealousy about Miss Swartz, and
professed to be dreadfully frightened--like a hypocrite as she was--lest
George should forget her for the heiress and her money and her
estates in Saint Kitt's. But the fact is, she was a great deal too
happy to have fears or doubts or misgivings of any sort: and having
George at her side again, was not afraid of any heiress or beauty, or
indeed of any sort of danger.
When Captain Dobbin came back in the afternoon to these people--which
he did with a great deal of sympathy for them--it did his heart good to
see how Amelia had grown young again--how she laughed, and chirped, and
sang familiar old songs at the piano, which were only interrupted by
the bell from without proclaiming Mr. Sedley's return from the City,
before whom George received a signal to retreat.
Beyond the first smile of recognition--and even that was an hypocrisy,
for she thought his arrival rather provoking--Miss Sedley did not once
notice Dobbin during his visit. But he was content, so that he saw her
happy; and thankful to have been the means of making her so.
| Dobbin is very eager for George and Amelia to be married, probably because he's so hung up on her that he wants to get the whole thing over with. Or something...he's not a very clear thinker. Amelia is thrilled to see George, and he is pretty moved to see how much she still loves him. She very quickly gets better and stops looking quite so pale and deathly. Dobbin and Mrs. Sedley discuss what would happen after the wedding. Mr. Sedley and Mr. Osborne are both opposed to the marriage. The main problem is Mr. Osborne, though, since he is the one who has money and the ability to cut George off, which would leave the couple pretty poor. Dobbin hopes that if George does some heroics in battle, his father will get over any anger about the marriage. He goes to see Mr. Sedley to convince him that the marriage is OK. Sedley is now a really sad, decrepit kind of guy. He is all subservient to the waiters and servants in the coffeehouse where he is doing his work. Dobbin is horrified to see him in this state. Mr. Sedley starts ranting and raving about Napoleon's return. Who could have guessed that war would break out again? He had invested in a French stock that was supposed to go gangbusters - and that's what ruined him. Dobbin tries to calm him down by telling him that the army will give Napoleon what-for. Sedley yells some more about how much they need to kill Napoleon and chop off his head, then he settles down. Dobbin brings the conversation back to George and Amelia, and Mr. Sedley is all over-my-dead-body. Dobbin tells him that technically they don't need his permission since George and Amelia are both of age. He also tells him about Becky and Rawdon, as an example of people who just got married without anyone's permission. Finally, he tells him that if the marriage takes place, that will be a way to stick it to Mr. Osborne. This last thing is what Mr. Sedley seems to be really into. Meanwhile, George is telling Amelia about a Miss Swartz, an orphan whom his sisters have just met and befriended. She is half-Jewish , barely educated, super-rich, and extremely uncultured and vulgar. OK, campers - Brain Snack time. Here is where we can see how racism and anti-Semitism were pretty much okey-dokey in Victorian times. Miss Swartz sounds like a pretty heinous character, but by making her even somewhat sympathetic - and by making fun of how mercenary and fake the Osbornes are in the way they treat her - Thackeray is leaps ahead of most writers of his time. Anyway, the Osbornes are clearly angling for George to marry Miss Swartz, since she is so rich. Amelia realizes that this must be the same Miss Swartz she went to school with . George makes fun of how gross and unmannered this girl is, Amelia pretends to be jealous, and the two are happy and lovey-dovey. | summary |
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