“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, worldlings, 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!

XIV.

Phœbe’s Good-Bye

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 Phœbe’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 Phœbe, 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

Phœbe’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 Phœbe indissoluble.

He made a slight gesture upward with his hand.

“You really mortify me, my dear Miss Phœbe!” 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 Phœbe, 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 Phœbe

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 Phœbe; “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, Phœbe, 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 Phœbe.

“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

Phœbe. “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 Phœbe; “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 Phœbe 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 Phœbe, 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 Phœbe, “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, Phœbe!” 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 Phœbe.

“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 Phœbe, “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 Phœbe 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 Phœbe 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, Phœbe 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 Phœbe’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 Phœbe 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 Phœbe on the window-sill, where

it looked gravely into her face and vented its emotions in a croak.

Phœbe bade it be a good old chicken during her absence, and promised to

bring it a little bag of buckwheat.

“Ah, Phœbe!” 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, Phœbe,” suddenly cried her cousin Clifford, who had said

very little all the morning. “Close!—closer!—and look me in the face!”

Phœbe 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, Phœbe 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, Phœbe,” 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.”

Phœbe 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

Phœbe, 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 Phœbe (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 Phœbe.

“And let it be all the sooner, Phœbe, for the sake of those poor souls

yonder,” continued her companion. “They can never do without you,

now,—never, Phœbe; 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 Phœbe; so

be sure to come back!”

“I am no angel, Uncle Venner,” said Phœbe, 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 Phœbe took the wings of

the morning, and was soon flitting almost as rapidly away as if endowed

with the aerial locomotion of the angels to whom Uncle Venner had so

graciously compared her.

XV.

The Scowl and Smile

Several days passed over the Seven Gables, heavily and drearily enough.

In fact (not to attribute the whole gloom of sky and earth to the one

inauspicious circumstance of Phœbe’s departure), an easterly storm had

set in, and indefatigably applied 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. Phœbe 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.

XVI.

Clifford’s Chamber

Never had the old house appeared so dismal to poor Hepzibah as when she

departed on that wretched errand. There was a strange aspect in it. As

she trode along the 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 Phœbe 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 Phœbe 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!

XVII.

The Flight of Two Owls

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.