“You are not happy, Hepzibah!” said Clifford, apart, in a tone of

reproach. “You are thinking of that dismal old house, and of Cousin

Jaffrey”—here came the quake through him,—“and of Cousin Jaffrey

sitting there, all by himself! Take my advice,—follow my example,—and

let such things slip aside. Here we are, in the world, Hepzibah!—in the

midst of life!—in the throng of our fellow beings! Let you and I be

happy! As happy as that youth and those pretty girls, at their game of

ball!”

“Happy—” thought Hepzibah, bitterly conscious, at the word, of her dull

and heavy heart, with the frozen pain in it,—“happy. He is mad already;

and, if I could once feel myself broad awake, I should go mad too!”

If a fixed idea be madness, she was perhaps not remote from it. Fast

and far as they had rattled and clattered along the iron track, they

might just as well, as regarded Hepzibah’s mental images, have been

passing up and down Pyncheon Street. With miles and miles of varied

scenery between, there was no scene for her save the seven old

gable-peaks, with their moss, and the tuft of weeds in one of the

angles, and the shop-window, and a customer shaking the door, and

compelling the little bell to jingle fiercely, but without disturbing

Judge Pyncheon! This one old house was everywhere! It transported its

great, lumbering bulk with more than railroad speed, and set itself

phlegmatically down on whatever spot she glanced at. The quality of

Hepzibah’s mind was too unmalleable to take new impressions so readily

as Clifford’s. He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable

kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots.

Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her

brother and herself was changed. At home, she was his guardian; here,

Clifford had become hers, and seemed to comprehend whatever belonged to

their new position with a singular rapidity of intelligence. He had

been startled into manhood and intellectual vigor; or, at least, into a

condition that resembled them, though it might be both diseased and

transitory.

The conductor now applied for their tickets; and Clifford, who had made

himself the purse-bearer, put a bank-note into his hand, as he had

observed others do.

“For the lady and yourself?” asked the conductor. “And how far?”

“As far as that will carry us,” said Clifford. “It is no great matter.

We are riding for pleasure merely.”

“You choose a strange day for it, sir!” remarked a gimlet-eyed old

gentleman on the other side of the car, looking at Clifford and his

companion, as if curious to make them out. “The best chance of

pleasure, in an easterly rain, I take it, is in a man’s own house, with

a nice little fire in the chimney.”

“I cannot precisely agree with you,” said Clifford, courteously bowing

to the old gentleman, and at once taking up the clew of conversation

which the latter had proffered. “It had just occurred to me, on the

contrary, that this admirable invention of the railroad—with the vast

and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and

convenience—is destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and

fireside, and substitute something better.”

“In the name of common-sense,” asked the old gentleman rather testily,

“what can be better for a man than his own parlor and chimney-corner?”

“These things have not the merit which many good people attribute to

them,” replied Clifford. “They may be said, in few and pithy words, to

have ill served a poor purpose. My impression is, that our wonderfully

increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to

bring us around again to the nomadic state. You are aware, my dear

sir,—you must have observed it in your own experience,—that all human

progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful

figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going

straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new

position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried

and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and

perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy

of the present and the future. To apply this truth to the topic now

under discussion. In the early epochs of our race, men dwelt in

temporary huts, of bowers of branches, as easily constructed as a

bird’s-nest, and which they built,—if it should be called building,

when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made

with hands,—which Nature, we will say, assisted them to rear where

fruit abounded, where fish and game were plentiful, or, most

especially, where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier

shade than elsewhere, and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood,

and hill. This life possessed a charm which, ever since man quitted it,

has vanished from existence. And it typified something better than

itself. It had its drawbacks; such as hunger and thirst, inclement

weather, hot sunshine, and weary and foot-blistering marches over

barren and ugly tracts, that lay between the sites desirable for their

fertility and beauty. But in our ascending spiral, we escape all this.

These railroads—could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble

and the jar got rid of—are positively the greatest blessing that the

ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the

toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being

so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot? Why,

therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily

be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life

in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as

easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,—in a better sense, wherever the

fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?”

Clifford’s countenance glowed, as he divulged this theory; a youthful

character shone out from within, converting the wrinkles and pallid

duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask. The merry girls let

their ball drop upon the floor, and gazed at him. They said to

themselves, perhaps, that, before his hair was gray and the crow’s-feet

tracked his temples, this now decaying man must have stamped the

impress of his features on many a woman’s heart. But, alas! no woman’s

eye had seen his face while it was beautiful.

“I should scarcely call it an improved state of things,” observed

Clifford’s new acquaintance, “to live everywhere and nowhere!”

“Would you not?” exclaimed Clifford, with singular energy. “It is as

clear to me as sunshine,—were there any in the sky,—that the greatest

possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and

improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with

mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men

painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home!

The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it. Morbid

influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about hearths, and

pollute the life of households. There is no such unwholesome atmosphere

as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one’s defunct forefathers

and relatives. I speak of what I know. There is a certain house within

my familiar recollection,—one of those peaked-gable (there are seven of

them), projecting-storied edifices, such as you occasionally see in our

older towns,—a rusty, crazy, creaky, dry-rotted, dingy, dark, and

miserable old dungeon, with an arched window over the porch, and a

little shop-door on one side, and a great, melancholy elm before it!

Now, sir, whenever my thoughts recur to this seven-gabled mansion (the

fact is so very curious that I must needs mention it), immediately I

have a vision or image of an elderly man, of remarkably stern

countenance, sitting in an oaken elbow-chair, dead, stone-dead, with an

ugly flow of blood upon his shirt-bosom! Dead, but with open eyes! He

taints the whole house, as I remember it. I could never flourish there,

nor be happy, nor do nor enjoy what God meant me to do and enjoy.”

His face darkened, and seemed to contract, and shrivel itself up, and

wither into age.

“Never, sir!” he repeated. “I could never draw cheerful breath there!”

“I should think not,” said the old gentleman, eyeing Clifford

earnestly, and rather apprehensively. “I should conceive not, sir, with

that notion in your head!”

“Surely not,” continued Clifford; “and it were a relief to me if that

house could be torn down, or burnt up, and so the earth be rid of it,

and grass be sown abundantly over its foundation. Not that I should

ever visit its site again! for, sir, the farther I get away from it,

the more does the joy, the lightsome freshness, the heart-leap, the

intellectual dance, the youth, in short,—yes, my youth, my youth!—the

more does it come back to me. No longer ago than this morning, I was

old. I remember looking in the glass, and wondering at my own gray

hair, and the wrinkles, many and deep, right across my brow, and the

furrows down my cheeks, and the prodigious trampling of crow’s-feet

about my temples! It was too soon! I could not bear it! Age had no

right to come! I had not lived! But now do I look old? If so, my aspect

belies me strangely; for—a great weight being off my mind—I feel in the

very heyday of my youth, with the world and my best days before me!”

“I trust you may find it so,” said the old gentleman, who seemed rather

embarrassed, and desirous of avoiding the observation which Clifford’s

wild talk drew on them both. “You have my best wishes for it.”

“For Heaven’s sake, dear Clifford, be quiet!” whispered his sister.

“They think you mad.”

“Be quiet yourself, Hepzibah!” returned her brother. “No matter what

they think! I am not mad. For the first time in thirty years my

thoughts gush up and find words ready for them. I must talk, and I

will!”

He turned again towards the old gentleman, and renewed the

conversation.

“Yes, my dear sir,” said he, “it is my firm belief and hope that these

terms of roof and hearth-stone, which have so long been held to embody

something sacred, are soon to pass out of men’s daily use, and be

forgotten. Just imagine, for a moment, how much of human evil will

crumble away, with this one change! What we call real estate—the solid

ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all

the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit almost any wrong,—he

will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and

which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages,—only to

build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in,

and for his posterity to be miserable in. He lays his own dead corpse

beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning

picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an evil

destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there. I

do not speak wildly. I have just such a house in my mind’s eye!”

“Then, sir,” said the old gentleman, getting anxious to drop the

subject, “you are not to blame for leaving it.”

“Within the lifetime of the child already born,” Clifford went on, “all

this will be done away. The world is growing too ethereal and spiritual

to bear these enormities a great while longer. To me, though, for a

considerable period of time, I have lived chiefly in retirement, and

know less of such things than most men,—even to me, the harbingers of a

better era are unmistakable. Mesmerism, now! Will that effect nothing,

think you, towards purging away the grossness out of human life?”

“All a humbug!” growled the old gentleman.

“These rapping spirits, that little Phœbe told us of, the other day,”

said Clifford,—“what are these but the messengers of the spiritual

world, knocking at the door of substance? And it shall be flung wide

open!”

“A humbug, again!” cried the old gentleman, growing more and more testy

at these glimpses of Clifford’s metaphysics. “I should like to rap with

a good stick on the empty pates of the dolts who circulate such

nonsense!”

“Then there is electricity,—the demon, the angel, the mighty physical

power, the all-pervading intelligence!” exclaimed Clifford. “Is that a

humbug, too? Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by means of

electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating

thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round

globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we

say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the

substance which we deemed it!”

“If you mean the telegraph,” said the old gentleman, glancing his eye

toward its wire, alongside the rail-track, “it is an excellent

thing,—that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics

don’t get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly as

regards the detection of bank-robbers and murderers.”

“I don’t quite like it, in that point of view,” replied Clifford. “A

bank-robber, and what you call a murderer, likewise, has his rights,

which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard in so

much the more liberal spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to

controvert their existence. An almost spiritual medium, like the

electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and

holy missions. Lovers, day by day—hour by hour, if so often moved to do

it,—might send their heart-throbs from Maine to Florida, with some such

words as these ‘I love you forever!’—‘My heart runs over with love!’—‘I

love you more than I can!’ and, again, at the next message ‘I have

lived an hour longer, and love you twice as much!’ Or, when a good man

has departed, his distant friend should be conscious of an electric

thrill, as from the world of happy spirits, telling him ‘Your dear

friend is in bliss!’ Or, to an absent husband, should come tidings thus

‘An immortal being, of whom you are the father, has this moment come

from God!’ and immediately its little voice would seem to have reached

so far, and to be echoing in his heart. But for these poor rogues, the

bank-robbers,—who, after all, are about as honest as nine people in

ten, except that they disregard certain formalities, and prefer to

transact business at midnight rather than ’Change-hours,—and for these

murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the motives of

their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public benefactors, if we

consider only its result,—for unfortunate individuals like these, I

really cannot applaud the enlistment of an immaterial and miraculous

power in the universal world-hunt at their heels!”

“You can’t, hey?” cried the old gentleman, with a hard look.

“Positively, no!” answered Clifford. “It puts them too miserably at

disadvantage. For example, sir, in a dark, low, cross-beamed, panelled

room of an old house, let us suppose a dead man, sitting in an

arm-chair, with a blood-stain on his shirt-bosom,—and let us add to our

hypothesis another man, issuing from the house, which he feels to be

over-filled with the dead man’s presence,—and let us lastly imagine him

fleeing, Heaven knows whither, at the speed of a hurricane, by

railroad! Now, sir, if the fugitive alight in some distant town, and

find all the people babbling about that self-same dead man, whom he has

fled so far to avoid the sight and thought of, will you not allow that

his natural rights have been infringed? He has been deprived of his

city of refuge, and, in my humble opinion, has suffered infinite

wrong!”

“You are a strange man; Sir!” said the old gentleman, bringing his

gimlet-eye to a point on Clifford, as if determined to bore right into

him. “I can’t see through you!”

“No, I’ll be bound you can’t!” cried Clifford, laughing. “And yet, my

dear sir, I am as transparent as the water of Maule’s well! But come,

Hepzibah! We have flown far enough for once. Let us alight, as the

birds do, and perch ourselves on the nearest twig, and consult wither

we shall fly next!”

Just then, as it happened, the train reached a solitary way-station.

Taking advantage of the brief pause, Clifford left the car, and drew

Hepzibah along with him. A moment afterwards, the train—with all the

life of its interior, amid which Clifford had made himself so

conspicuous an object—was gliding away in the distance, and rapidly

lessening to a point which, in another moment, vanished. The world had

fled away from these two wanderers. They gazed drearily about them. At

a little distance stood a wooden church, black with age, and in a

dismal state of ruin and decay, with broken windows, a great rift

through the main body of the edifice, and a rafter dangling from the

top of the square tower. Farther off was a farm-house, in the old

style, as venerably black as the church, with a roof sloping downward

from the three-story peak, to within a man’s height of the ground. It

seemed uninhabited. There were the relics of a wood-pile, indeed, near

the door, but with grass sprouting up among the chips and scattered

logs. The small rain-drops came down aslant; the wind was not

turbulent, but sullen, and full of chilly moisture.

Clifford shivered from head to foot. The wild effervescence of his

mood—which had so readily supplied thoughts, fantasies, and a strange

aptitude of words, and impelled him to talk from the mere necessity of

giving vent to this bubbling-up gush of ideas had entirely subsided. A

powerful excitement had given him energy and vivacity. Its operation

over, he forthwith began to sink.

“You must take the lead now, Hepzibah!” murmured he, with a torpid and

reluctant utterance. “Do with me as you will!” She knelt down upon the

platform where they were standing and lifted her clasped hands to the

sky. The dull, gray weight of clouds made it invisible; but it was no

hour for disbelief,—no juncture this to question that there was a sky

above, and an Almighty Father looking from it!

“O God!”—ejaculated poor, gaunt Hepzibah,—then paused a moment, to

consider what her prayer should be,—“O God,—our Father,—are we not thy

children? Have mercy on us!”

XVIII.

Governor Pyncheon

Judge Pyncheon, while his two relatives have fled away with such

ill-considered haste, still sits in the old parlor, keeping house, as

the familiar phrase is, in the absence of its ordinary occupants. To

him, and to the venerable House of the Seven Gables, does our story now

betake itself, like an owl, bewildered in the daylight, and hastening

back to his hollow tree.

The Judge has not shifted his position for a long while now. He has not

stirred hand or foot, nor withdrawn his eyes so much as a

hair’s-breadth from their fixed gaze towards the corner of the room,

since the footsteps of Hepzibah and Clifford creaked along the passage,

and the outer door was closed cautiously behind their exit. He holds

his watch in his left hand, but clutched in such a manner that you

cannot see the dial-plate. How profound a fit of meditation! Or,

supposing him asleep, how infantile a quietude of conscience, and what

wholesome order in the gastric region, are betokened by slumber so

entirely undisturbed with starts, cramp, twitches, muttered dreamtalk,

trumpet-blasts through the nasal organ, or any slightest irregularity

of breath! You must hold your own breath, to satisfy yourself whether

he breathes at all. It is quite inaudible. You hear the ticking of his

watch; his breath you do not hear. A most refreshing slumber,

doubtless! And yet, the Judge cannot be asleep. His eyes are open! A

veteran politician, such as he, would never fall asleep with wide-open

eyes, lest some enemy or mischief-maker, taking him thus at unawares,

should peep through these windows into his consciousness, and make

strange discoveries among the reminiscences, projects, hopes,

apprehensions, weaknesses, and strong points, which he has heretofore

shared with nobody. A cautious man is proverbially said to sleep with

one eye open. That may be wisdom. But not with both; for this were

heedlessness! No, no! Judge Pyncheon cannot be asleep.

It is odd, however, that a gentleman so burdened with engagements,—and

noted, too, for punctuality,—should linger thus in an old lonely

mansion, which he has never seemed very fond of visiting. The oaken

chair, to be sure, may tempt him with its roominess. It is, indeed, a

spacious, and, allowing for the rude age that fashioned it, a

moderately easy seat, with capacity enough, at all events, and offering

no restraint to the Judge’s breadth of beam. A bigger man might find

ample accommodation in it. His ancestor, now pictured upon the wall,

with all his English beef about him, used hardly to present a front

extending from elbow to elbow of this chair, or a base that would cover

its whole cushion. But there are better chairs than this,—mahogany,

black walnut, rosewood, spring-seated and damask-cushioned, with varied

slopes, and innumerable artifices to make them easy, and obviate the

irksomeness of too tame an ease,—a score of such might be at Judge

Pyncheon’s service. Yes! in a score of drawing-rooms he would be more

than welcome. Mamma would advance to meet him, with outstretched hand;

the virgin daughter, elderly as he has now got to be,—an old widower,

as he smilingly describes himself,—would shake up the cushion for the

Judge, and do her pretty utmost to make him comfortable. For the Judge

is a prosperous man. He cherishes his schemes, moreover, like other

people, and reasonably brighter than most others; or did so, at least,

as he lay abed this morning, in an agreeable half-drowse, planning the

business of the day, and speculating on the probabilities of the next

fifteen years. With his firm health, and the little inroad that age has

made upon him, fifteen years or twenty—yes, or perhaps

five-and-twenty!—are no more than he may fairly call his own.

Five-and-twenty years for the enjoyment of his real estate in town and

country, his railroad, bank, and insurance shares, his United States

stock,—his wealth, in short, however invested, now in possession, or

soon to be acquired; together with the public honors that have fallen

upon him, and the weightier ones that are yet to fall! It is good! It

is excellent! It is enough!

Still lingering in the old chair! If the Judge has a little time to

throw away, why does not he visit the insurance office, as is his

frequent custom, and sit awhile in one of their leathern-cushioned

arm-chairs, listening to the gossip of the day, and dropping some

deeply designed chance-word, which will be certain to become the gossip

of to-morrow. And have not the bank directors a meeting at which it was

the Judge’s purpose to be present, and his office to preside? Indeed

they have; and the hour is noted on a card, which is, or ought to be,

in Judge Pyncheon’s right vest-pocket. Let him go thither, and loll at

ease upon his moneybags! He has lounged long enough in the old chair!

This was to have been such a busy day. In the first place, the

interview with Clifford. Half an hour, by the Judge’s reckoning, was to

suffice for that; it would probably be less, but—taking into

consideration that Hepzibah was first to be dealt with, and that these

women are apt to make many words where a few would do much better—it

might be safest to allow half an hour. Half an hour? Why, Judge, it is

already two hours, by your own undeviatingly accurate chronometer.

Glance your eye down at it and see! Ah; he will not give himself the

trouble either to bend his head, or elevate his hand, so as to bring

the faithful time-keeper within his range of vision! Time, all at once,

appears to have become a matter of no moment with the Judge!

And has he forgotten all the other items of his memoranda? Clifford’s

affair arranged, he was to meet a State Street broker, who has

undertaken to procure a heavy percentage, and the best of paper, for a

few loose thousands which the Judge happens to have by him, uninvested.

The wrinkled note-shaver will have taken his railroad trip in vain.

Half an hour later, in the street next to this, there was to be an

auction of real estate, including a portion of the old Pyncheon

property, originally belonging to Maule’s garden ground. It has been

alienated from the Pyncheons these four-score years; but the Judge had

kept it in his eye, and had set his heart on reannexing it to the small

demesne still left around the Seven Gables; and now, during this odd

fit of oblivion, the fatal hammer must have fallen, and transferred our

ancient patrimony to some alien possessor. Possibly, indeed, the sale

may have been postponed till fairer weather. If so, will the Judge make

it convenient to be present, and favor the auctioneer with his bid, on

the proximate occasion?

The next affair was to buy a horse for his own driving. The one

heretofore his favorite stumbled, this very morning, on the road to

town, and must be at once discarded. Judge Pyncheon’s neck is too

precious to be risked on such a contingency as a stumbling steed.

Should all the above business be seasonably got through with, he might

attend the meeting of a charitable society; the very name of which,

however, in the multiplicity of his benevolence, is quite forgotten; so

that this engagement may pass unfulfilled, and no great harm done. And

if he have time, amid the press of more urgent matters, he must take

measures for the renewal of Mrs. Pyncheon’s tombstone, which, the

sexton tells him, has fallen on its marble face, and is cracked quite

in twain. She was a praiseworthy woman enough, thinks the Judge, in

spite of her nervousness, and the tears that she was so oozy with, and

her foolish behavior about the coffee; and as she took her departure so

seasonably, he will not grudge the second tombstone. It is better, at

least, than if she had never needed any! The next item on his list was

to give orders for some fruit-trees, of a rare variety, to be

deliverable at his country-seat in the ensuing autumn. Yes, buy them,

by all means; and may the peaches be luscious in your mouth, Judge

Pyncheon! After this comes something more important. A committee of his

political party has besought him for a hundred or two of dollars, in

addition to his previous disbursements, towards carrying on the fall

campaign. The Judge is a patriot; the fate of the country is staked on

the November election; and besides, as will be shadowed forth in

another paragraph, he has no trifling stake of his own in the same

great game. He will do what the committee asks; nay, he will be liberal

beyond their expectations; they shall have a check for five hundred

dollars, and more anon, if it be needed. What next? A decayed widow,

whose husband was Judge Pyncheon’s early friend, has laid her case of

destitution before him, in a very moving letter. She and her fair

daughter have scarcely bread to eat. He partly intends to call on her

to-day,—perhaps so—perhaps not,—accordingly as he may happen to have

leisure, and a small bank-note.

Another business, which, however, he puts no great weight on (it is

well, you know, to be heedful, but not over-anxious, as respects one’s

personal health),—another business, then, was to consult his family

physician. About what, for Heaven’s sake? Why, it is rather difficult

to describe the symptoms. A mere dimness of sight and dizziness of

brain, was it?—or disagreeable choking, or stifling, or gurgling, or

bubbling, in the region of the thorax, as the anatomists say?—or was it

a pretty severe throbbing and kicking of the heart, rather creditable

to him than otherwise, as showing that the organ had not been left out

of the Judge’s physical contrivance? No matter what it was. The doctor

probably would smile at the statement of such trifles to his

professional ear; the Judge would smile in his turn; and meeting one

another’s eyes, they would enjoy a hearty laugh together! But a fig for

medical advice. The Judge will never need it.

Pray, pray, Judge Pyncheon, look at your watch, Now! What—not a glance!

It is within ten minutes of the dinner hour! It surely cannot have

slipped your memory that the dinner of to-day is to be the most

important, in its consequences, of all the dinners you ever ate. Yes,

precisely the most important; although, in the course of your somewhat

eminent career, you have been placed high towards the head of the

table, at splendid banquets, and have poured out your festive eloquence

to ears yet echoing with Webster’s mighty organ-tones. No public dinner

this, however. It is merely a gathering of some dozen or so of friends

from several districts of the State; men of distinguished character and

influence, assembling, almost casually, at the house of a common

friend, likewise distinguished, who will make them welcome to a little

better than his ordinary fare. Nothing in the way of French cookery,

but an excellent dinner, nevertheless. Real turtle, we understand, and

salmon, tautog, canvas-backs, pig, English mutton, good roast beef, or

dainties of that serious kind, fit for substantial country gentlemen,

as these honorable persons mostly are. The delicacies of the season, in

short, and flavored by a brand of old Madeira which has been the pride

of many seasons. It is the Juno brand; a glorious wine, fragrant, and

full of gentle might; a bottled-up happiness, put by for use; a golden

liquid, worth more than liquid gold; so rare and admirable, that

veteran wine-bibbers count it among their epochs to have tasted it! It

drives away the heart-ache, and substitutes no head-ache! Could the

Judge but quaff a glass, it might enable him to shake off the

unaccountable lethargy which (for the ten intervening minutes, and five

to boot, are already past) has made him such a laggard at this

momentous dinner. It would all but revive a dead man! Would you like to

sip it now, Judge Pyncheon?

Alas, this dinner. Have you really forgotten its true object? Then let

us whisper it, that you may start at once out of the oaken chair, which

really seems to be enchanted, like the one in Comus, or that in which

Moll Pitcher imprisoned your own grandfather. But ambition is a

talisman more powerful than witchcraft. Start up, then, and, hurrying

through the streets, burst in upon the company, that they may begin

before the fish is spoiled! They wait for you; and it is little for

your interest that they should wait. These gentlemen—need you be told

it?—have assembled, not without purpose, from every quarter of the

State. They are practised politicians, every man of them, and skilled

to adjust those preliminary measures which steal from the people,

without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers. The

popular voice, at the next gubernatorial election, though loud as

thunder, will be really but an echo of what these gentlemen shall

speak, under their breath, at your friend’s festive board. They meet to

decide upon their candidate. This little knot of subtle schemers will

control the convention, and, through it, dictate to the party. And what

worthier candidate,—more wise and learned, more noted for philanthropic

liberality, truer to safe principles, tried oftener by public trusts,

more spotless in private character, with a larger stake in the common

welfare, and deeper grounded, by hereditary descent, in the faith and

practice of the Puritans,—what man can be presented for the suffrage of

the people, so eminently combining all these claims to the

chief-rulership as Judge Pyncheon here before us?

Make haste, then! Do your part! The meed for which you have toiled, and

fought, and climbed, and crept, is ready for your grasp! Be present at

this dinner!—drink a glass or two of that noble wine!—make your pledges

in as low a whisper as you will!—and you rise up from table virtually

governor of the glorious old State! Governor Pyncheon of Massachusetts!

And is there no potent and exhilarating cordial in a certainty like

this? It has been the grand purpose of half your lifetime to obtain it.

Now, when there needs little more than to signify your acceptance, why

do you sit so lumpishly in your great-great-grandfather’s oaken chair,

as if preferring it to the gubernatorial one? We have all heard of King

Log; but, in these jostling times, one of that royal kindred will

hardly win the race for an elective chief-magistracy.

Well; it is absolutely too late for dinner! Turtle, salmon, tautog,

woodcock, boiled turkey, South-Down mutton, pig, roast-beef, have

vanished, or exist only in fragments, with lukewarm potatoes, and

gravies crusted over with cold fat. The Judge, had he done nothing

else, would have achieved wonders with his knife and fork. It was he,

you know, of whom it used to be said, in reference to his ogre-like

appetite, that his Creator made him a great animal, but that the

dinner-hour made him a great beast. Persons of his large sensual

endowments must claim indulgence, at their feeding-time. But, for once,

the Judge is entirely too late for dinner! Too late, we fear, even to

join the party at their wine! The guests are warm and merry; they have

given up the Judge; and, concluding that the Free-Soilers have him,

they will fix upon another candidate. Were our friend now to stalk in

among them, with that wide-open stare, at once wild and stolid, his

ungenial presence would be apt to change their cheer. Neither would it

be seemly in Judge Pyncheon, generally so scrupulous in his attire, to

show himself at a dinner-table with that crimson stain upon his

shirt-bosom. By the bye, how came it there? It is an ugly sight, at any

rate; and the wisest way for the Judge is to button his coat closely

over his breast, and, taking his horse and chaise from the livery

stable, to make all speed to his own house. There, after a glass of

brandy and water, and a mutton-chop, a beefsteak, a broiled fowl, or

some such hasty little dinner and supper all in one, he had better

spend the evening by the fireside. He must toast his slippers a long

while, in order to get rid of the chilliness which the air of this vile

old house has sent curdling through his veins.

Up, therefore, Judge Pyncheon, up! You have lost a day. But to-morrow

will be here anon. Will you rise, betimes, and make the most of it?

To-morrow. To-morrow! To-morrow. We, that are alive, may rise betimes

to-morrow. As for him that has died to-day, his morrow will be the

resurrection morn.

Meanwhile the twilight is glooming upward out of the corners of the

room. The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper, and at first

become more definite; then, spreading wider, they lose their

distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion, as it were,

that creeps slowly over the various objects, and the one human figure

sitting in the midst of them. The gloom has not entered from without;

it has brooded here all day, and now, taking its own inevitable time,

will possess itself of everything. The Judge’s face, indeed, rigid and

singularly white, refuses to melt into this universal solvent. Fainter

and fainter grows the light. It is as if another double-handful of

darkness had been scattered through the air. Now it is no longer gray,

but sable. There is still a faint appearance at the window; neither a

glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmer,—any phrase of light would express

something far brighter than this doubtful perception, or sense, rather,

that there is a window there. Has it yet vanished? No!—yes!—not quite!

And there is still the swarthy whiteness,—we shall venture to marry

these ill-agreeing words,—the swarthy whiteness of Judge Pyncheon’s

face. The features are all gone: there is only the paleness of them

left. And how looks it now? There is no window! There is no face! An

infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our

universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may

hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring

about in quest of what was once a world!

Is there no other sound? One other, and a fearful one. It is the

ticking of the Judge’s watch, which, ever since Hepzibah left the room

in search of Clifford, he has been holding in his hand. Be the cause

what it may, this little, quiet, never-ceasing throb of Time’s pulse,

repeating its small strokes with such busy regularity, in Judge

Pyncheon’s motionless hand, has an effect of terror, which we do not

find in any other accompaniment of the scene.

But, listen! That puff of the breeze was louder. It had a tone unlike

the dreary and sullen one which has bemoaned itself, and afflicted all

mankind with miserable sympathy, for five days past. The wind has

veered about! It now comes boisterously from the northwest, and, taking

hold of the aged framework of the Seven Gables, gives it a shake, like

a wrestler that would try strength with his antagonist. Another and

another sturdy tussle with the blast! The old house creaks again, and

makes a vociferous but somewhat unintelligible bellowing in its sooty

throat (the big flue, we mean, of its wide chimney), partly in

complaint at the rude wind, but rather, as befits their century and a

half of hostile intimacy, in tough defiance. A rumbling kind of a

bluster roars behind the fire-board. A door has slammed above stairs. A

window, perhaps, has been left open, or else is driven in by an unruly

gust. It is not to be conceived, before-hand, what wonderful

wind-instruments are these old timber mansions, and how haunted with

the strangest noises, which immediately begin to sing, and sigh, and

sob, and shriek,—and to smite with sledge-hammers, airy but ponderous,

in some distant chamber,—and to tread along the entries as with stately

footsteps, and rustle up and down the staircase, as with silks

miraculously stiff,—whenever the gale catches the house with a window

open, and gets fairly into it. Would that we were not an attendant

spirit here! It is too awful! This clamor of the wind through the

lonely house; the Judge’s quietude, as he sits invisible; and that

pertinacious ticking of his watch!

As regards Judge Pyncheon’s invisibility, however, that matter will

soon be remedied. The northwest wind has swept the sky clear. The

window is distinctly seen. Through its panes, moreover, we dimly catch

the sweep of the dark, clustering foliage outside, fluttering with a

constant irregularity of movement, and letting in a peep of starlight,

now here, now there. Oftener than any other object, these glimpses

illuminate the Judge’s face. But here comes more effectual light.

Observe that silvery dance upon the upper branches of the pear-tree,

and now a little lower, and now on the whole mass of boughs, while,

through their shifting intricacies, the moonbeams fall aslant into the

room. They play over the Judge’s figure and show that he has not

stirred throughout the hours of darkness. They follow the shadows, in

changeful sport, across his unchanging features. They gleam upon his

watch. His grasp conceals the dial-plate,—but we know that the faithful

hands have met; for one of the city clocks tells midnight.

A man of sturdy understanding, like Judge Pyncheon, cares no more for

twelve o’clock at night than for the corresponding hour of noon.

However just the parallel drawn, in some of the preceding pages,

between his Puritan ancestor and himself, it fails in this point. The

Pyncheon of two centuries ago, in common with most of his

contemporaries, professed his full belief in spiritual ministrations,

although reckoning them chiefly of a malignant character. The Pyncheon

of to-night, who sits in yonder arm-chair, believes in no such

nonsense. Such, at least, was his creed, some few hours since. His hair

will not bristle, therefore, at the stories which—in times when

chimney-corners had benches in them, where old people sat poking into

the ashes of the past, and raking out traditions like live coals—used

to be told about this very room of his ancestral house. In fact, these

tales are too absurd to bristle even childhood’s hair. What sense,

meaning, or moral, for example, such as even ghost-stories should be

susceptible of, can be traced in the ridiculous legend, that, at

midnight, all the dead Pyncheons are bound to assemble in this parlor?

And, pray, for what? Why, to see whether the portrait of their ancestor

still keeps its place upon the wall, in compliance with his

testamentary directions! Is it worth while to come out of their graves

for that?

We are tempted to make a little sport with the idea. Ghost-stories are

hardly to be treated seriously any longer. The family-party of the

defunct Pyncheons, we presume, goes off in this wise.

First comes the ancestor himself, in his black cloak, steeple-hat, and

trunk-breeches, girt about the waist with a leathern belt, in which

hangs his steel-hilted sword; he has a long staff in his hand, such as

gentlemen in advanced life used to carry, as much for the dignity of

the thing as for the support to be derived from it. He looks up at the

portrait; a thing of no substance, gazing at its own painted image! All

is safe. The picture is still there. The purpose of his brain has been

kept sacred thus long after the man himself has sprouted up in

graveyard grass. See! he lifts his ineffectual hand, and tries the

frame. All safe! But is that a smile?—is it not, rather a frown of

deadly import, that darkens over the shadow of his features? The stout

Colonel is dissatisfied! So decided is his look of discontent as to

impart additional distinctness to his features; through which,

nevertheless, the moonlight passes, and flickers on the wall beyond.

Something has strangely vexed the ancestor! With a grim shake of the

head, he turns away. Here come other Pyncheons, the whole tribe, in

their half a dozen generations, jostling and elbowing one another, to

reach the picture. We behold aged men and grandames, a clergyman with

the Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien, and a red-coated

officer of the old French war; and there comes the shop-keeping

Pyncheon of a century ago, with the ruffles turned back from his

wrists; and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artist’s

legend, with the beautiful and pensive Alice, who brings no pride out

of her virgin grave. All try the picture-frame. What do these ghostly

people seek? A mother lifts her child, that his little hands may touch

it! There is evidently a mystery about the picture, that perplexes

these poor Pyncheons when they ought to be at rest. In a corner,

meanwhile, stands the figure of an elderly man, in a leathern jerkin

and breeches, with a carpenter’s rule sticking out of his side pocket;

he points his finger at the bearded Colonel and his descendants,

nodding, jeering, mocking, and finally bursting into obstreperous,

though inaudible laughter.

Indulging our fancy in this freak, we have partly lost the power of

restraint and guidance. We distinguish an unlooked-for figure in our

visionary scene. Among those ancestral people there is a young man,

dressed in the very fashion of to-day: he wears a dark frock-coat,

almost destitute of skirts, gray pantaloons, gaiter boots of patent

leather, and has a finely wrought gold chain across his breast, and a

little silver-headed whalebone stick in his hand. Were we to meet this

figure at noonday, we should greet him as young Jaffrey Pyncheon, the

Judge’s only surviving child, who has been spending the last two years

in foreign travel. If still in life, how comes his shadow hither? If

dead, what a misfortune! The old Pyncheon property, together with the

great estate acquired by the young man’s father, would devolve on whom?

On poor, foolish Clifford, gaunt Hepzibah, and rustic little Phœbe! But

another and a greater marvel greets us! Can we believe our eyes? A

stout, elderly gentleman has made his appearance; he has an aspect of

eminent respectability, wears a black coat and pantaloons, of roomy

width, and might be pronounced scrupulously neat in his attire, but for

a broad crimson stain across his snowy neckcloth and down his

shirt-bosom. Is it the Judge, or no? How can it be Judge Pyncheon? We

discern his figure, as plainly as the flickering moonbeams can show us

anything, still seated in the oaken chair! Be the apparition whose it

may, it advances to the picture, seems to seize the frame, tries to

peep behind it, and turns away, with a frown as black as the ancestral

one.

The fantastic scene just hinted at must by no means be considered as

forming an actual portion of our story. We were betrayed into this

brief extravagance by the quiver of the moonbeams; they dance

hand-in-hand with shadows, and are reflected in the looking-glass,

which, you are aware, is always a kind of window or doorway into the

spiritual world. We needed relief, moreover, from our too long and

exclusive contemplation of that figure in the chair. This wild wind,

too, has tossed our thoughts into strange confusion, but without

tearing them away from their one determined centre. Yonder leaden Judge

sits immovably upon our soul. Will he never stir again? We shall go mad

unless he stirs! You may the better estimate his quietude by the

fearlessness of a little mouse, which sits on its hind legs, in a

streak of moonlight, close by Judge Pyncheon’s foot, and seems to

meditate a journey of exploration over this great black bulk. Ha! what

has startled the nimble little mouse? It is the visage of grimalkin,

outside of the window, where he appears to have posted himself for a

deliberate watch. This grimalkin has a very ugly look. Is it a cat

watching for a mouse, or the devil for a human soul? Would we could

scare him from the window!

Thank Heaven, the night is well-nigh past! The moonbeams have no longer

so silvery a gleam, nor contrast so strongly with the blackness of the

shadows among which they fall. They are paler now; the shadows look

gray, not black. The boisterous wind is hushed. What is the hour? Ah!

the watch has at last ceased to tick; for the Judge’s forgetful fingers

neglected to wind it up, as usual, at ten o’clock, being half an hour

or so before his ordinary bedtime,—and it has run down, for the first

time in five years. But the great world-clock of Time still keeps its

beat. The dreary night—for, oh, how dreary seems its haunted waste,

behind us!—gives place to a fresh, transparent, cloudless morn.

Blessed, blessed radiance! The daybeam—even what little of it finds its

way into this always dusky parlor—seems part of the universal

benediction, annulling evil, and rendering all goodness possible, and

happiness attainable. Will Judge Pyncheon now rise up from his chair?

Will he go forth, and receive the early sunbeams on his brow? Will he

begin this new day,—which God has smiled upon, and blessed, and given

to mankind,—will he begin it with better purposes than the many that

have been spent amiss? Or are all the deep-laid schemes of yesterday as

stubborn in his heart, and as busy in his brain, as ever?

In this latter case, there is much to do. Will the Judge still insist

with Hepzibah on the interview with Clifford? Will he buy a safe,

elderly gentleman’s horse? Will he persuade the purchaser of the old

Pyncheon property to relinquish the bargain in his favor? Will he see

his family physician, and obtain a medicine that shall preserve him, to

be an honor and blessing to his race, until the utmost term of

patriarchal longevity? Will Judge Pyncheon, above all, make due

apologies to that company of honorable friends, and satisfy them that

his absence from the festive board was unavoidable, and so fully

retrieve himself in their good opinion that he shall yet be Governor of

Massachusetts? And all these great purposes accomplished, will he walk

the streets again, with that dog-day smile of elaborate benevolence,

sultry enough to tempt flies to come and buzz in it? Or will he, after

the tomb-like seclusion of the past day and night, go forth a humbled

and repentant man, sorrowful, gentle, seeking no profit, shrinking from

worldly honor, hardly daring to love God, but bold to love his fellow

man, and to do him what good he may? Will he bear about with him,—no

odious grin of feigned benignity, insolent in its pretence, and

loathsome in its falsehood,—but the tender sadness of a contrite heart,

broken, at last, beneath its own weight of sin? For it is our belief,

whatever show of honor he may have piled upon it, that there was heavy

sin at the base of this man’s being.

Rise up, Judge Pyncheon! The morning sunshine glimmers through the

foliage, and, beautiful and holy as it is, shuns not to kindle up your

face. Rise up, thou subtle, worldly, selfish, iron-hearted hypocrite,

and make thy choice whether still to be subtle, worldly, selfish,

iron-hearted, and hypocritical, or to tear these sins out of thy

nature, though they bring the lifeblood with them! The Avenger is upon

thee! Rise up, before it be too late!

What! Thou art not stirred by this last appeal? No, not a jot! And

there we see a fly,—one of your common house-flies, such as are always

buzzing on the window-pane,—which has smelt out Governor Pyncheon, and

alights, now on his forehead, now on his chin, and now, Heaven help us!

is creeping over the bridge of his nose, towards the would-be

chief-magistrate’s wide-open eyes! Canst thou not brush the fly away?

Art thou too sluggish? Thou man, that hadst so many busy projects

yesterday! Art thou too weak, that wast so powerful? Not brush away a

fly? Nay, then, we give thee up!

And hark! the shop-bell rings. After hours like these latter ones,

through which we have borne our heavy tale, it is good to be made

sensible that there is a living world, and that even this old, lonely

mansion retains some manner of connection with it. We breathe more

freely, emerging from Judge Pyncheon’s presence into the street before

the Seven Gables.

XIX.

Alice’s Posies

Uncle Venner, trundling a wheelbarrow, was the earliest person stirring

in the neighborhood the day after the storm.

Pyncheon Street, in front of the House of the Seven Gables, was a far

pleasanter scene than a by-lane, confined by shabby fences, and

bordered with wooden dwellings of the meaner class, could reasonably be

expected to present. Nature made sweet amends, that morning, for the

five unkindly days which had preceded it. It would have been enough to

live for, merely to look up at the wide benediction of the sky, or as

much of it as was visible between the houses, genial once more with

sunshine. Every object was agreeable, whether to be gazed at in the

breadth, or examined more minutely. Such, for example, were the

well-washed pebbles and gravel of the sidewalk; even the sky-reflecting

pools in the centre of the street; and the grass, now freshly verdant,

that crept along the base of the fences, on the other side of which, if

one peeped over, was seen the multifarious growth of gardens. Vegetable

productions, of whatever kind, seemed more than negatively happy, in

the juicy warmth and abundance of their life. The Pyncheon Elm,

throughout its great circumference, was all alive, and full of the

morning sun and a sweet-tempered little breeze, which lingered within

this verdant sphere, and set a thousand leafy tongues a-whispering all

at once. This aged tree appeared to have suffered nothing from the

gale. It had kept its boughs unshattered, and its full complement of

leaves; and the whole in perfect verdure, except a single branch, that,

by the earlier change with which the elm-tree sometimes prophesies the

autumn, had been transmuted to bright gold. It was like the golden

branch that gained Aeneas and the Sibyl admittance into Hades.

This one mystic branch hung down before the main entrance of the Seven

Gables, so nigh the ground that any passer-by might have stood on

tiptoe and plucked it off. Presented at the door, it would have been a

symbol of his right to enter, and be made acquainted with all the

secrets of the house. So little faith is due to external appearance,

that there was really an inviting aspect over the venerable edifice,

conveying an idea that its history must be a decorous and happy one,

and such as would be delightful for a fireside tale. Its windows

gleamed cheerfully in the slanting sunlight. The lines and tufts of

green moss, here and there, seemed pledges of familiarity and

sisterhood with Nature; as if this human dwelling-place, being of such

old date, had established its prescriptive title among primeval oaks

and whatever other objects, by virtue of their long continuance, have

acquired a gracious right to be. A person of imaginative temperament,

while passing by the house, would turn, once and again, and peruse it

well: its many peaks, consenting together in the clustered chimney; the

deep projection over its basement-story; the arched window, imparting a

look, if not of grandeur, yet of antique gentility, to the broken

portal over which it opened; the luxuriance of gigantic burdocks, near

the threshold; he would note all these characteristics, and be

conscious of something deeper than he saw. He would conceive the

mansion to have been the residence of the stubborn old Puritan,

Integrity, who, dying in some forgotten generation, had left a blessing

in all its rooms and chambers, the efficacy of which was to be seen in

the religion, honesty, moderate competence, or upright poverty and

solid happiness, of his descendants, to this day.

One object, above all others, would take root in the imaginative

observer’s memory. It was the great tuft of flowers,—weeds, you would

have called them, only a week ago,—the tuft of crimson-spotted flowers,

in the angle between the two front gables. The old people used to give

them the name of Alice’s Posies, in remembrance of fair Alice Pyncheon,

who was believed to have brought their seeds from Italy. They were

flaunting in rich beauty and full bloom to-day, and seemed, as it were,

a mystic expression that something within the house was consummated.

It was but little after sunrise, when Uncle Venner made his appearance,

as aforesaid, impelling a wheelbarrow along the street. He was going

his matutinal rounds to collect cabbage-leaves, turnip-tops,

potato-skins, and the miscellaneous refuse of the dinner-pot, which the

thrifty housewives of the neighborhood were accustomed to put aside, as

fit only to feed a pig. Uncle Venner’s pig was fed entirely, and kept

in prime order, on these eleemosynary contributions; insomuch that the

patched philosopher used to promise that, before retiring to his farm,

he would make a feast of the portly grunter, and invite all his

neighbors to partake of the joints and spare-ribs which they had helped

to fatten. Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon’s housekeeping had so greatly

improved, since Clifford became a member of the family, that her share

of the banquet would have been no lean one; and Uncle Venner,

accordingly, was a good deal disappointed not to find the large earthen

pan, full of fragmentary eatables, that ordinarily awaited his coming

at the back doorstep of the Seven Gables.

“I never knew Miss Hepzibah so forgetful before,” said the patriarch to

himself. “She must have had a dinner yesterday,—no question of that!

She always has one, nowadays. So where’s the pot-liquor and

potato-skins, I ask? Shall I knock, and see if she’s stirring yet? No,

no,—’twon’t do! If little Phœbe was about the house, I should not mind

knocking; but Miss Hepzibah, likely as not, would scowl down at me out

of the window, and look cross, even if she felt pleasantly. So, I’ll

come back at noon.”

With these reflections, the old man was shutting the gate of the little

back-yard. Creaking on its hinges, however, like every other gate and

door about the premises, the sound reached the ears of the occupant of

the northern gable, one of the windows of which had a side-view towards

the gate.

“Good-morning, Uncle Venner!” said the daguerreotypist, leaning out of

the window. “Do you hear nobody stirring?”

“Not a soul,” said the man of patches. “But that’s no wonder. ’Tis

barely half an hour past sunrise, yet. But I’m really glad to see you,

Mr. Holgrave! There’s a strange, lonesome look about this side of the

house; so that my heart misgave me, somehow or other, and I felt as if

there was nobody alive in it. The front of the house looks a good deal

cheerier; and Alice’s Posies are blooming there beautifully; and if I

were a young man, Mr. Holgrave, my sweetheart should have one of those

flowers in her bosom, though I risked my neck climbing for it! Well,

and did the wind keep you awake last night?”

“It did, indeed!” answered the artist, smiling. “If I were a believer

in ghosts,—and I don’t quite know whether I am or not,—I should have

concluded that all the old Pyncheons were running riot in the lower

rooms, especially in Miss Hepzibah’s part of the house. But it is very

quiet now.”

“Yes, Miss Hepzibah will be apt to over-sleep herself, after being

disturbed, all night, with the racket,” said Uncle Venner. “But it

would be odd, now, wouldn’t it, if the Judge had taken both his cousins

into the country along with him? I saw him go into the shop yesterday.”

“At what hour?” inquired Holgrave.

“Oh, along in the forenoon,” said the old man. “Well, well! I must go

my rounds, and so must my wheelbarrow. But I’ll be back here at

dinner-time; for my pig likes a dinner as well as a breakfast. No

meal-time, and no sort of victuals, ever seems to come amiss to my pig.

Good morning to you! And, Mr. Holgrave, if I were a young man, like

you, I’d get one of Alice’s Posies, and keep it in water till Phœbe

comes back.”

“I have heard,” said the daguerreotypist, as he drew in his head, “that

the water of Maule’s well suits those flowers best.”

Here the conversation ceased, and Uncle Venner went on his way. For

half an hour longer, nothing disturbed the repose of the Seven Gables;

nor was there any visitor, except a carrier-boy, who, as he passed the

front doorstep, threw down one of his newspapers; for Hepzibah, of

late, had regularly taken it in. After a while, there came a fat woman,

making prodigious speed, and stumbling as she ran up the steps of the

shop-door. Her face glowed with fire-heat, and, it being a pretty warm

morning, she bubbled and hissed, as it were, as if all a-fry with

chimney-warmth, and summer-warmth, and the warmth of her own corpulent

velocity. She tried the shop-door; it was fast. She tried it again,

with so angry a jar that the bell tinkled angrily back at her.

“The deuce take Old Maid Pyncheon!” muttered the irascible housewife.

“Think of her pretending to set up a cent-shop, and then lying abed

till noon! These are what she calls gentlefolk’s airs, I suppose! But

I’ll either start her ladyship, or break the door down!”

She shook it accordingly, and the bell, having a spiteful little temper

of its own, rang obstreperously, making its remonstrances heard,—not,

indeed, by the ears for which they were intended,—but by a good lady on

the opposite side of the street. She opened the window, and addressed

the impatient applicant.

“You’ll find nobody there, Mrs. Gubbins.”

“But I must and will find somebody here!” cried Mrs. Gubbins,

inflicting another outrage on the bell. “I want a half-pound of pork,

to fry some first-rate flounders for Mr. Gubbins’s breakfast; and, lady

or not, Old Maid Pyncheon shall get up and serve me with it!”

“But do hear reason, Mrs. Gubbins!” responded the lady opposite. “She,

and her brother too, have both gone to their cousin’s, Judge Pyncheon’s

at his country-seat. There’s not a soul in the house, but that young

daguerreotype-man that sleeps in the north gable. I saw old Hepzibah

and Clifford go away yesterday; and a queer couple of ducks they were,

paddling through the mud-puddles! They’re gone, I’ll assure you.”

“And how do you know they’re gone to the Judge’s?” asked Mrs. Gubbins.

“He’s a rich man; and there’s been a quarrel between him and Hepzibah

this many a day, because he won’t give her a living. That’s the main

reason of her setting up a cent-shop.”

“I know that well enough,” said the neighbor. “But they’re gone,—that’s

one thing certain. And who but a blood relation, that couldn’t help

himself, I ask you, would take in that awful-tempered old maid, and

that dreadful Clifford? That’s it, you may be sure.”

Mrs. Gubbins took her departure, still brimming over with hot wrath

against the absent Hepzibah. For another half-hour, or, perhaps,

considerably more, there was almost as much quiet on the outside of the

house as within. The elm, however, made a pleasant, cheerful, sunny

sigh, responsive to the breeze that was elsewhere imperceptible; a

swarm of insects buzzed merrily under its drooping shadow, and became

specks of light whenever they darted into the sunshine; a locust sang,

once or twice, in some inscrutable seclusion of the tree; and a

solitary little bird, with plumage of pale gold, came and hovered about

Alice’s Posies.

At last our small acquaintance, Ned Higgins, trudged up the street, on

his way to school; and happening, for the first time in a fortnight, to

be the possessor of a cent, he could by no means get past the shop-door

of the Seven Gables. But it would not open. Again and again, however,

and half a dozen other agains, with the inexorable pertinacity of a

child intent upon some object important to itself, did he renew his

efforts for admittance. He had, doubtless, set his heart upon an

elephant; or, possibly, with Hamlet, he meant to eat a crocodile. In

response to his more violent attacks, the bell gave, now and then, a

moderate tinkle, but could not be stirred into clamor by any exertion

of the little fellow’s childish and tiptoe strength. Holding by the

door-handle, he peeped through a crevice of the curtain, and saw that

the inner door, communicating with the passage towards the parlor, was

closed.

“Miss Pyncheon!” screamed the child, rapping on the window-pane, “I

want an elephant!”

There being no answer to several repetitions of the summons, Ned began

to grow impatient; and his little pot of passion quickly boiling over,

he picked up a stone, with a naughty purpose to fling it through the

window; at the same time blubbering and sputtering with wrath. A

man—one of two who happened to be passing by—caught the urchin’s arm.

“What’s the trouble, old gentleman?” he asked.

“I want old Hepzibah, or Phœbe, or any of them!” answered Ned, sobbing.

“They won’t open the door; and I can’t get my elephant!”

“Go to school, you little scamp!” said the man. “There’s another

cent-shop round the corner. ’Tis very strange, Dixey,” added he to his

companion, “what’s become of all these Pyncheon’s! Smith, the

livery-stable keeper, tells me Judge Pyncheon put his horse up

yesterday, to stand till after dinner, and has not taken him away yet.

And one of the Judge’s hired men has been in, this morning, to make

inquiry about him. He’s a kind of person, they say, that seldom breaks

his habits, or stays out o’ nights.”

“Oh, he’ll turn up safe enough!” said Dixey. “And as for Old Maid

Pyncheon, take my word for it, she has run in debt, and gone off from

her creditors. I foretold, you remember, the first morning she set up

shop, that her devilish scowl would frighten away customers. They

couldn’t stand it!”

“I never thought she’d make it go,” remarked his friend. “This business

of cent-shops is overdone among the women-folks. My wife tried it, and

lost five dollars on her outlay!”

“Poor business!” said Dixey, shaking his head. “Poor business!”

In the course of the morning, there were various other attempts to open

a communication with the supposed inhabitants of this silent and

impenetrable mansion. The man of root-beer came, in his neatly painted

wagon, with a couple of dozen full bottles, to be exchanged for empty

ones; the baker, with a lot of crackers which Hepzibah had ordered for

her retail custom; the butcher, with a nice titbit which he fancied she

would be eager to secure for Clifford. Had any observer of these

proceedings been aware of the fearful secret hidden within the house,

it would have affected him with a singular shape and modification of

horror, to see the current of human life making this small eddy

hereabouts,—whirling sticks, straws and all such trifles, round and

round, right over the black depth where a dead corpse lay unseen!

The butcher was so much in earnest with his sweetbread of lamb, or

whatever the dainty might be, that he tried every accessible door of

the Seven Gables, and at length came round again to the shop, where he

ordinarily found admittance.

“It’s a nice article, and I know the old lady would jump at it,” said

he to himself. “She can’t be gone away! In fifteen years that I have

driven my cart through Pyncheon Street, I’ve never known her to be away

from home; though often enough, to be sure, a man might knock all day

without bringing her to the door. But that was when she’d only herself

to provide for.”

Peeping through the same crevice of the curtain where, only a little

while before, the urchin of elephantine appetite had peeped, the

butcher beheld the inner door, not closed, as the child had seen it,

but ajar, and almost wide open. However it might have happened, it was

the fact. Through the passage-way there was a dark vista into the

lighter but still obscure interior of the parlor. It appeared to the

butcher that he could pretty clearly discern what seemed to be the

stalwart legs, clad in black pantaloons, of a man sitting in a large

oaken chair, the back of which concealed all the remainder of his

figure. This contemptuous tranquillity on the part of an occupant of

the house, in response to the butcher’s indefatigable efforts to

attract notice, so piqued the man of flesh that he determined to

withdraw.

“So,” thought he, “there sits Old Maid Pyncheon’s bloody brother, while

I’ve been giving myself all this trouble! Why, if a hog hadn’t more

manners, I’d stick him! I call it demeaning a man’s business to trade

with such people; and from this time forth, if they want a sausage or

an ounce of liver, they shall run after the cart for it!”

He tossed the titbit angrily into his cart, and drove off in a pet.

Not a great while afterwards there was a sound of music turning the

corner and approaching down the street, with several intervals of

silence, and then a renewed and nearer outbreak of brisk melody. A mob

of children was seen moving onward, or stopping, in unison with the

sound, which appeared to proceed from the centre of the throng; so that

they were loosely bound together by slender strains of harmony, and

drawn along captive; with ever and anon an accession of some little

fellow in an apron and straw-hat, capering forth from door or gateway.

Arriving under the shadow of the Pyncheon Elm, it proved to be the

Italian boy, who, with his monkey and show of puppets, had once before

played his hurdy-gurdy beneath the arched window. The pleasant face of

Phœbe—and doubtless, too, the liberal recompense which she had flung

him—still dwelt in his remembrance. His expressive features kindled up,

as he recognized the spot where this trifling incident of his erratic

life had chanced. He entered the neglected yard (now wilder than ever,

with its growth of hog-weed and burdock), stationed himself on the

doorstep of the main entrance, and, opening his show-box, began to

play. Each individual of the automatic community forthwith set to work,

according to his or her proper vocation: the monkey, taking off his

Highland bonnet, bowed and scraped to the by-standers most

obsequiously, with ever an observant eye to pick up a stray cent; and

the young foreigner himself, as he turned the crank of his machine,

glanced upward to the arched window, expectant of a presence that would

make his music the livelier and sweeter. The throng of children stood

near; some on the sidewalk; some within the yard; two or three

establishing themselves on the very door-step; and one squatting on the

threshold. Meanwhile, the locust kept singing in the great old Pyncheon

Elm.

“I don’t hear anybody in the house,” said one of the children to

another. “The monkey won’t pick up anything here.”

“There is somebody at home,” affirmed the urchin on the threshold. “I

heard a step!”

Still the young Italian’s eye turned sidelong upward; and it really

seemed as if the touch of genuine, though slight and almost playful,

emotion communicated a juicier sweetness to the dry, mechanical process

of his minstrelsy. These wanderers are readily responsive to any

natural kindness—be it no more than a smile, or a word itself not

understood, but only a warmth in it—which befalls them on the roadside

of life. They remember these things, because they are the little

enchantments which, for the instant,—for the space that reflects a

landscape in a soap-bubble,—build up a home about them. Therefore, the

Italian boy would not be discouraged by the heavy silence with which

the old house seemed resolute to clog the vivacity of his instrument.

He persisted in his melodious appeals; he still looked upward, trusting

that his dark, alien countenance would soon be brightened by Phœbe’s

sunny aspect. Neither could he be willing to depart without again

beholding Clifford, whose sensibility, like Phœbe’s smile, had talked a

kind of heart’s language to the foreigner. He repeated all his music

over and over again, until his auditors were getting weary. So were the

little wooden people in his show-box, and the monkey most of all. There

was no response, save the singing of the locust.

“No children live in this house,” said a schoolboy, at last. “Nobody

lives here but an old maid and an old man. You’ll get nothing here! Why

don’t you go along?”

“You fool, you, why do you tell him?” whispered a shrewd little Yankee,

caring nothing for the music, but a good deal for the cheap rate at

which it was had. “Let him play as he likes! If there’s nobody to pay

him, that’s his own lookout!”

Once more, however, the Italian ran over his round of melodies. To the

common observer—who could understand nothing of the case, except the

music and the sunshine on the hither side of the door—it might have

been amusing to watch the pertinacity of the street-performer. Will he

succeed at last? Will that stubborn door be suddenly flung open? Will a

group of joyous children, the young ones of the house, come dancing,

shouting, laughing, into the open air, and cluster round the show-box,

looking with eager merriment at the puppets, and tossing each a copper

for long-tailed Mammon, the monkey, to pick up?

But to us, who know the inner heart of the Seven Gables as well as its

exterior face, there is a ghastly effect in this repetition of light

popular tunes at its door-step. It would be an ugly business, indeed,

if Judge Pyncheon (who would not have cared a fig for Paganini’s fiddle

in his most harmonious mood) should make his appearance at the door,

with a bloody shirt-bosom, and a grim frown on his swarthily white

visage, and motion the foreign vagabond away! Was ever before such a

grinding out of jigs and waltzes, where nobody was in the cue to dance?

Yes, very often. This contrast, or intermingling of tragedy with mirth,

happens daily, hourly, momently. The gloomy and desolate old house,

deserted of life, and with awful Death sitting sternly in its solitude,

was the emblem of many a human heart, which, nevertheless, is compelled

to hear the thrill and echo of the world’s gayety around it.

Before the conclusion of the Italian’s performance, a couple of men

happened to be passing, On their way to dinner. “I say, you young

French fellow!” called out one of them,—“come away from that doorstep,

and go somewhere else with your nonsense! The Pyncheon family live

there; and they are in great trouble, just about this time. They don’t

feel musical to-day. It is reported all over town that Judge Pyncheon,

who owns the house, has been murdered; and the city marshal is going to

look into the matter. So be off with you, at once!”

As the Italian shouldered his hurdy-gurdy, he saw on the doorstep a

card, which had been covered, all the morning, by the newspaper that

the carrier had flung upon it, but was now shuffled into sight. He

picked it up, and perceiving something written in pencil, gave it to

the man to read. In fact, it was an engraved card of Judge Pyncheon’s

with certain pencilled memoranda on the back, referring to various

businesses which it had been his purpose to transact during the

preceding day. It formed a prospective epitome of the day’s history;

only that affairs had not turned out altogether in accordance with the

programme. The card must have been lost from the Judge’s vest-pocket in

his preliminary attempt to gain access by the main entrance of the

house. Though well soaked with rain, it was still partially legible.

“Look here; Dixey!” cried the man. “This has something to do with Judge

Pyncheon. See!—here’s his name printed on it; and here, I suppose, is

some of his handwriting.”

“Let’s go to the city marshal with it!” said Dixey. “It may give him

just the clew he wants. After all,” whispered he in his companion’s

ear, “it would be no wonder if the Judge has gone into that door and

never come out again! A certain cousin of his may have been at his old

tricks. And Old Maid Pyncheon having got herself in debt by the

cent-shop,—and the Judge’s pocket-book being well filled,—and bad blood

amongst them already! Put all these things together and see what they

make!”

“Hush, hush!” whispered the other. “It seems like a sin to be the first

to speak of such a thing. But I think, with you, that we had better go

to the city marshal.”

“Yes, yes!” said Dixey. “Well!—I always said there was something

devilish in that woman’s scowl!”

The men wheeled about, accordingly, and retraced their steps up the

street. The Italian, also, made the best of his way off, with a parting

glance up at the arched window. As for the children, they took to their

heels, with one accord, and scampered as if some giant or ogre were in

pursuit, until, at a good distance from the house, they stopped as

suddenly and simultaneously as they had set out. Their susceptible

nerves took an indefinite alarm from what they had overheard. Looking

back at the grotesque peaks and shadowy angles of the old mansion, they

fancied a gloom diffused about it which no brightness of the sunshine

could dispel. An imaginary Hepzibah scowled and shook her finger at

them, from several windows at the same moment. An imaginary

Clifford—for (and it would have deeply wounded him to know it) he had

always been a horror to these small people—stood behind the unreal

Hepzibah, making awful gestures, in a faded dressing-gown. Children are

even more apt, if possible, than grown people, to catch the contagion

of a panic terror. For the rest of the day, the more timid went whole

streets about, for the sake of avoiding the Seven Gables; while the

bolder signalized their hardihood by challenging their comrades to race

past the mansion at full speed.

It could not have been more than half an hour after the disappearance

of the Italian boy, with his unseasonable melodies, when a cab drove

down the street. It stopped beneath the Pyncheon Elm; the cabman took a

trunk, a canvas bag, and a bandbox, from the top of his vehicle, and

deposited them on the doorstep of the old house; a straw bonnet, and

then the pretty figure of a young girl, came into view from the

interior of the cab. It was Phœbe! Though not altogether so blooming as

when she first tripped into our story,—for, in the few intervening

weeks, her experiences had made her graver, more womanly, and

deeper-eyed, in token of a heart that had begun to suspect its

depths,—still there was the quiet glow of natural sunshine over her.

Neither had she forfeited her proper gift of making things look real,

rather than fantastic, within her sphere. Yet we feel it to be a

questionable venture, even for Phœbe, at this juncture, to cross the

threshold of the Seven Gables. Is her healthful presence potent enough

to chase away the crowd of pale, hideous, and sinful phantoms, that

have gained admittance there since her departure? Or will she,

likewise, fade, sicken, sadden, and grow into deformity, and be only

another pallid phantom, to glide noiselessly up and down the stairs,

and affright children as she pauses at the window?

At least, we would gladly forewarn the unsuspecting girl that there is

nothing in human shape or substance to receive her, unless it be the

figure of Judge Pyncheon, who—wretched spectacle that he is, and

frightful in our remembrance, since our night-long vigil with

him!—still keeps his place in the oaken chair.

Phœbe first tried the shop-door. It did not yield to her hand; and the

white curtain, drawn across the window which formed the upper section

of the door, struck her quick perceptive faculty as something unusual.

Without making another effort to enter here, she betook herself to the

great portal, under the arched window. Finding it fastened, she

knocked. A reverberation came from the emptiness within. She knocked

again, and a third time; and, listening intently, fancied that the

floor creaked, as if Hepzibah were coming, with her ordinary tiptoe

movement, to admit her. But so dead a silence ensued upon this

imaginary sound, that she began to question whether she might not have

mistaken the house, familiar as she thought herself with its exterior.

Her notice was now attracted by a child’s voice, at some distance. It

appeared to call her name. Looking in the direction whence it

proceeded, Phœbe saw little Ned Higgins, a good way down the street,

stamping, shaking his head violently, making deprecatory gestures with

both hands, and shouting to her at mouth-wide screech.

“No, no, Phœbe!” he screamed. “Don’t you go in! There’s something

wicked there! Don’t—don’t—don’t go in!”

But, as the little personage could not be induced to approach near

enough to explain himself, Phœbe concluded that he had been frightened,

on some of his visits to the shop, by her cousin Hepzibah; for the good

lady’s manifestations, in truth, ran about an equal chance of scaring

children out of their wits, or compelling them to unseemly laughter.

Still, she felt the more, for this incident, how unaccountably silent

and impenetrable the house had become. As her next resort, Phœbe made

her way into the garden, where on so warm and bright a day as the

present, she had little doubt of finding Clifford, and perhaps Hepzibah

also, idling away the noontide in the shadow of the arbor. Immediately

on her entering the garden gate, the family of hens half ran, half flew

to meet her; while a strange grimalkin, which was prowling under the

parlor window, took to his heels, clambered hastily over the fence, and

vanished. The arbor was vacant, and its floor, table, and circular

bench were still damp, and bestrewn with twigs and the disarray of the

past storm. The growth of the garden seemed to have got quite out of

bounds; the weeds had taken advantage of Phœbe’s absence, and the

long-continued rain, to run rampant over the flowers and

kitchen-vegetables. Maule’s well had overflowed its stone border, and

made a pool of formidable breadth in that corner of the garden.

The impression of the whole scene was that of a spot where no human

foot had left its print for many preceding days,—probably not since

Phœbe’s departure,—for she saw a side-comb of her own under the table

of the arbor, where it must have fallen on the last afternoon when she

and Clifford sat there.

The girl knew that her two relatives were capable of far greater

oddities than that of shutting themselves up in their old house, as

they appeared now to have done. Nevertheless, with indistinct

misgivings of something amiss, and apprehensions to which she could not

give shape, she approached the door that formed the customary

communication between the house and garden. It was secured within, like

the two which she had already tried. She knocked, however; and

immediately, as if the application had been expected, the door was

drawn open, by a considerable exertion of some unseen person’s

strength, not wide, but far enough to afford her a sidelong entrance.

As Hepzibah, in order not to expose herself to inspection from without,

invariably opened a door in this manner, Phœbe necessarily concluded

that it was her cousin who now admitted her.

Without hesitation, therefore, she stepped across the threshold, and

had no sooner entered than the door closed behind her.

XX.

The Flower of Eden

Phœbe, coming so suddenly from the sunny daylight, was altogether

bedimmed in such density of shadow as lurked in most of the passages of

the old house. She was not at first aware by whom she had been

admitted. Before her eyes had adapted themselves to the obscurity, a

hand grasped her own with a firm but gentle and warm pressure, thus

imparting a welcome which caused her heart to leap and thrill with an

indefinable shiver of enjoyment. She felt herself drawn along, not

towards the parlor, but into a large and unoccupied apartment, which

had formerly been the grand reception-room of the Seven Gables. The

sunshine came freely into all the uncurtained windows of this room, and

fell upon the dusty floor; so that Phœbe now clearly saw—what, indeed,

had been no secret, after the encounter of a warm hand with hers—that

it was not Hepzibah nor Clifford, but Holgrave, to whom she owed her

reception. The subtile, intuitive communication, or, rather, the vague

and formless impression of something to be told, had made her yield

unresistingly to his impulse. Without taking away her hand, she looked

eagerly in his face, not quick to forebode evil, but unavoidably

conscious that the state of the family had changed since her departure,

and therefore anxious for an explanation.

The artist looked paler than ordinary; there was a thoughtful and

severe contraction of his forehead, tracing a deep, vertical line

between the eyebrows. His smile, however, was full of genuine warmth,

and had in it a joy, by far the most vivid expression that Phœbe had

ever witnessed, shining out of the New England reserve with which

Holgrave habitually masked whatever lay near his heart. It was the look

wherewith a man, brooding alone over some fearful object, in a dreary

forest or illimitable desert, would recognize the familiar aspect of

his dearest friend, bringing up all the peaceful ideas that belong to

home, and the gentle current of every-day affairs. And yet, as he felt

the necessity of responding to her look of inquiry, the smile

disappeared.

“I ought not to rejoice that you have come, Phœbe,” said he. “We meet

at a strange moment!”

“What has happened!” she exclaimed. “Why is the house so deserted?

Where are Hepzibah and Clifford?”

“Gone! I cannot imagine where they are!” answered Holgrave. “We are

alone in the house!”

“Hepzibah and Clifford gone?” cried Phœbe. “It is not possible! And why

have you brought me into this room, instead of the parlor? Ah,

something terrible has happened! I must run and see!”

“No, no, Phœbe!” said Holgrave holding her back. “It is as I have told

you. They are gone, and I know not whither. A terrible event has,

indeed happened, but not to them, nor, as I undoubtingly believe,

through any agency of theirs. If I read your character rightly, Phœbe,”

he continued, fixing his eyes on hers with stern anxiety, intermixed

with tenderness, “gentle as you are, and seeming to have your sphere

among common things, you yet possess remarkable strength. You have

wonderful poise, and a faculty which, when tested, will prove itself

capable of dealing with matters that fall far out of the ordinary

rule.”

“Oh, no, I am very weak!” replied Phœbe, trembling. “But tell me what

has happened!”

“You are strong!” persisted Holgrave. “You must be both strong and

wise; for I am all astray, and need your counsel. It may be you can

suggest the one right thing to do!”

“Tell me!—tell me!” said Phœbe, all in a tremble. “It oppresses,—it

terrifies me,—this mystery! Anything else I can bear!”

The artist hesitated. Notwithstanding what he had just said, and most

sincerely, in regard to the self-balancing power with which Phœbe

impressed him, it still seemed almost wicked to bring the awful secret

of yesterday to her knowledge. It was like dragging a hideous shape of

death into the cleanly and cheerful space before a household fire,

where it would present all the uglier aspect, amid the decorousness of

everything about it. Yet it could not be concealed from her; she must

needs know it.

“Phœbe,” said he, “do you remember this?” He put into her hand a

daguerreotype; the same that he had shown her at their first interview

in the garden, and which so strikingly brought out the hard and

relentless traits of the original.

“What has this to do with Hepzibah and Clifford?” asked Phœbe, with

impatient surprise that Holgrave should so trifle with her at such a

moment. “It is Judge Pyncheon! You have shown it to me before!”

“But here is the same face, taken within this half-hour” said the

artist, presenting her with another miniature. “I had just finished it

when I heard you at the door.”

“This is death!” shuddered Phœbe, turning very pale. “Judge Pyncheon

dead!”

“Such as there represented,” said Holgrave, “he sits in the next room.

The Judge is dead, and Clifford and Hepzibah have vanished! I know no

more. All beyond is conjecture. On returning to my solitary chamber,

last evening, I noticed no light, either in the parlor, or Hepzibah’s

room, or Clifford’s; no stir nor footstep about the house. This

morning, there was the same death-like quiet. From my window, I

overheard the testimony of a neighbor, that your relatives were seen

leaving the house in the midst of yesterday’s storm. A rumor reached

me, too, of Judge Pyncheon being missed. A feeling which I cannot

describe—an indefinite sense of some catastrophe, or

consummation—impelled me to make my way into this part of the house,

where I discovered what you see. As a point of evidence that may be

useful to Clifford, and also as a memorial valuable to myself,—for,

Phœbe, there are hereditary reasons that connect me strangely with that

man’s fate,—I used the means at my disposal to preserve this pictorial

record of Judge Pyncheon’s death.”

Even in her agitation, Phœbe could not help remarking the calmness of

Holgrave’s demeanor. He appeared, it is true, to feel the whole

awfulness of the Judge’s death, yet had received the fact into his mind

without any mixture of surprise, but as an event preordained, happening

inevitably, and so fitting itself into past occurrences that it could

almost have been prophesied.

“Why have you not thrown open the doors, and called in witnesses?”

inquired she with a painful shudder. “It is terrible to be here alone!”

“But Clifford!” suggested the artist. “Clifford and Hepzibah! We must

consider what is best to be done in their behalf. It is a wretched

fatality that they should have disappeared! Their flight will throw the

worst coloring over this event of which it is susceptible. Yet how easy

is the explanation, to those who know them! Bewildered and

terror-stricken by the similarity of this death to a former one, which

was attended with such disastrous consequences to Clifford, they have

had no idea but of removing themselves from the scene. How miserably

unfortunate! Had Hepzibah but shrieked aloud,—had Clifford flung wide

the door, and proclaimed Judge Pyncheon’s death,—it would have been,

however awful in itself, an event fruitful of good consequences to

them. As I view it, it would have gone far towards obliterating the

black stain on Clifford’s character.”

“And how,” asked Phœbe, “could any good come from what is so very

dreadful?”

“Because,” said the artist, “if the matter can be fairly considered and

candidly interpreted, it must be evident that Judge Pyncheon could not

have come unfairly to his end. This mode of death had been an

idiosyncrasy with his family, for generations past; not often

occurring, indeed, but, when it does occur, usually attacking

individuals about the Judge’s time of life, and generally in the

tension of some mental crisis, or, perhaps, in an access of wrath. Old

Maule’s prophecy was probably founded on a knowledge of this physical

predisposition in the Pyncheon race. Now, there is a minute and almost

exact similarity in the appearances connected with the death that

occurred yesterday and those recorded of the death of Clifford’s uncle

thirty years ago. It is true, there was a certain arrangement of

circumstances, unnecessary to be recounted, which made it possible—nay,

as men look at these things, probable, or even certain—that old Jaffrey

Pyncheon came to a violent death, and by Clifford’s hands.”

“Whence came those circumstances?” exclaimed Phœbe. “He being innocent,

as we know him to be!”

“They were arranged,” said Holgrave,—“at least such has long been my

conviction,—they were arranged after the uncle’s death, and before it

was made public, by the man who sits in yonder parlor. His own death,

so like that former one, yet attended by none of those suspicious

circumstances, seems the stroke of God upon him, at once a punishment

for his wickedness, and making plain the innocence of Clifford. But

this flight,—it distorts everything! He may be in concealment, near at

hand. Could we but bring him back before the discovery of the Judge’s

death, the evil might be rectified.”

“We must not hide this thing a moment longer!” said Phœbe. “It is

dreadful to keep it so closely in our hearts. Clifford is innocent. God

will make it manifest! Let us throw open the doors, and call all the

neighborhood to see the truth!”

“You are right, Phœbe,” rejoined Holgrave. “Doubtless you are right.”

Yet the artist did not feel the horror, which was proper to Phœbe’s

sweet and order-loving character, at thus finding herself at issue with

society, and brought in contact with an event that transcended ordinary

rules. Neither was he in haste, like her, to betake himself within the

precincts of common life. On the contrary, he gathered a wild

enjoyment,—as it were, a flower of strange beauty, growing in a

desolate spot, and blossoming in the wind,—such a flower of momentary

happiness he gathered from his present position. It separated Phœbe and

himself from the world, and bound them to each other, by their

exclusive knowledge of Judge Pyncheon’s mysterious death, and the

counsel which they were forced to hold respecting it. The secret, so

long as it should continue such, kept them within the circle of a

spell, a solitude in the midst of men, a remoteness as entire as that

of an island in mid-ocean; once divulged, the ocean would flow betwixt

them, standing on its widely sundered shores. Meanwhile, all the

circumstances of their situation seemed to draw them together; they

were like two children who go hand in hand, pressing closely to one

another’s side, through a shadow-haunted passage. The image of awful

Death, which filled the house, held them united by his stiffened grasp.

These influences hastened the development of emotions that might not

otherwise have flowered so. Possibly, indeed, it had been Holgrave’s

purpose to let them die in their undeveloped germs. “Why do we delay

so?” asked Phœbe. “This secret takes away my breath! Let us throw open

the doors!”

“In all our lives there can never come another moment like this!” said

Holgrave. “Phœbe, is it all terror?—nothing but terror? Are you

conscious of no joy, as I am, that has made this the only point of life

worth living for?”

“It seems a sin,” replied Phœbe, trembling, “to think of joy at such a

time!”

“Could you but know, Phœbe, how it was with me the hour before you

came!” exclaimed the artist. “A dark, cold, miserable hour! The

presence of yonder dead man threw a great black shadow over everything;

he made the universe, so far as my perception could reach, a scene of

guilt and of retribution more dreadful than the guilt. The sense of it

took away my youth. I never hoped to feel young again! The world looked

strange, wild, evil, hostile; my past life, so lonesome and dreary; my

future, a shapeless gloom, which I must mould into gloomy shapes! But,

Phœbe, you crossed the threshold; and hope, warmth, and joy came in

with you! The black moment became at once a blissful one. It must not

pass without the spoken word. I love you!”

“How can you love a simple girl like me?” asked Phœbe, compelled by his

earnestness to speak. “You have many, many thoughts, with which I

should try in vain to sympathize. And I,—I, too,—I have tendencies with

which you would sympathize as little. That is less matter. But I have

not scope enough to make you happy.”

“You are my only possibility of happiness!” answered Holgrave. “I have

no faith in it, except as you bestow it on me!”

“And then—I am afraid!” continued Phœbe, shrinking towards Holgrave,

even while she told him so frankly the doubts with which he affected

her. “You will lead me out of my own quiet path. You will make me

strive to follow you where it is pathless. I cannot do so. It is not my

nature. I shall sink down and perish!”

“Ah, Phœbe!” exclaimed Holgrave, with almost a sigh, and a smile that

was burdened with thought.

“It will be far otherwise than as you forebode. The world owes all its

onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines

himself within ancient limits. I have a presentiment that, hereafter,

it will be my lot to set out trees, to make fences,—perhaps, even, in

due time, to build a house for another generation,—in a word, to

conform myself to laws and the peaceful practice of society. Your poise

will be more powerful than any oscillating tendency of mine.”

“I would not have it so!” said Phœbe earnestly.

“Do you love me?” asked Holgrave. “If we love one another, the moment

has room for nothing more. Let us pause upon it, and be satisfied. Do

you love me, Phœbe?”

“You look into my heart,” said she, letting her eyes drop. “You know I

love you!”

And it was in this hour, so full of doubt and awe, that the one miracle

was wrought, without which every human existence is a blank. The bliss

which makes all things true, beautiful, and holy shone around this

youth and maiden. They were conscious of nothing sad nor old. They

transfigured the earth, and made it Eden again, and themselves the two

first dwellers in it. The dead man, so close beside them, was

forgotten. At such a crisis, there is no death; for immortality is

revealed anew, and embraces everything in its hallowed atmosphere.

But how soon the heavy earth-dream settled down again!

“Hark!” whispered Phœbe. “Somebody is at the street door!”

“Now let us meet the world!” said Holgrave. “No doubt, the rumor of

Judge Pyncheon’s visit to this house, and the flight of Hepzibah and

Clifford, is about to lead to the investigation of the premises. We

have no way but to meet it. Let us open the door at once.”

But, to their surprise, before they could reach the street door,—even

before they quitted the room in which the foregoing interview had

passed,—they heard footsteps in the farther passage. The door,

therefore, which they supposed to be securely locked,—which Holgrave,

indeed, had seen to be so, and at which Phœbe had vainly tried to

enter,—must have been opened from without. The sound of footsteps was

not harsh, bold, decided, and intrusive, as the gait of strangers would

naturally be, making authoritative entrance into a dwelling where they

knew themselves unwelcome. It was feeble, as of persons either weak or

weary; there was the mingled murmur of two voices, familiar to both the

listeners.

“Can it be?” whispered Holgrave.

“It is they!” answered Phœbe. “Thank God!—thank God!”

And then, as if in sympathy with Phœbe’s whispered ejaculation, they

heard Hepzibah’s voice more distinctly.

“Thank God, my brother, we are at home!”

“Well!—Yes!—thank God!” responded Clifford. “A dreary home, Hepzibah!

But you have done well to bring me hither! Stay! That parlor door is

open. I cannot pass by it! Let me go and rest me in the arbor, where I

used,—oh, very long ago, it seems to me, after what has befallen

us,—where I used to be so happy with little Phœbe!”

But the house was not altogether so dreary as Clifford imagined it.

They had not made many steps,—in truth, they were lingering in the

entry, with the listlessness of an accomplished purpose, uncertain what

to do next,—when Phœbe ran to meet them. On beholding her, Hepzibah

burst into tears. With all her might, she had staggered onward beneath

the burden of grief and responsibility, until now that it was safe to

fling it down. Indeed, she had not energy to fling it down, but had

ceased to uphold it, and suffered it to press her to the earth.

Clifford appeared the stronger of the two.

“It is our own little Phœbe!—Ah! and Holgrave with, her” exclaimed he,

with a glance of keen and delicate insight, and a smile, beautiful,

kind, but melancholy. “I thought of you both, as we came down the

street, and beheld Alice’s Posies in full bloom. And so the flower of

Eden has bloomed, likewise, in this old, darksome house to-day.”

XXI.

The Departure

The sudden death of so prominent a member of the social world as the

Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a sensation (at least, in the

circles more immediately connected with the deceased) which had hardly

quite subsided in a fortnight.

It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which constitute a

person’s biography, there is scarcely one—none, certainly, of anything

like a similar importance—to which the world so easily reconciles

itself as to his death. In most other cases and contingencies, the

individual is present among us, mixed up with the daily revolution of

affairs, and affording a definite point for observation. At his

decease, there is only a vacancy, and a momentary eddy,—very small, as

compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated object,—and a

bubble or two, ascending out of the black depth and bursting at the

surface. As regarded Judge Pyncheon, it seemed probable, at first

blush, that the mode of his final departure might give him a larger and

longer posthumous vogue than ordinarily attends the memory of a

distinguished man. But when it came to be understood, on the highest

professional authority, that the event was a natural, and—except for

some unimportant particulars, denoting a slight idiosyncrasy—by no

means an unusual form of death, the public, with its customary

alacrity, proceeded to forget that he had ever lived. In short, the

honorable Judge was beginning to be a stale subject before half the

country newspapers had found time to put their columns in mourning, and

publish his exceedingly eulogistic obituary.

Nevertheless, creeping darkly through the places which this excellent

person had haunted in his lifetime, there was a hidden stream of

private talk, such as it would have shocked all decency to speak loudly

at the street-corners. It is very singular, how the fact of a man’s

death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether

for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and

acting among them. Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes

falsehood, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the

gold, and dishonors the baser metal. Could the departed, whoever he may

be, return in a week after his decease, he would almost invariably find

himself at a higher or lower point than he had formerly occupied, on

the scale of public appreciation. But the talk, or scandal, to which we

now allude, had reference to matters of no less old a date than the

supposed murder, thirty or forty years ago, of the late Judge

Pyncheon’s uncle. The medical opinion with regard to his own recent and

regretted decease had almost entirely obviated the idea that a murder

was committed in the former case. Yet, as the record showed, there were

circumstances irrefragably indicating that some person had gained

access to old Jaffrey Pyncheon’s private apartments, at or near the

moment of his death. His desk and private drawers, in a room contiguous

to his bedchamber, had been ransacked; money and valuable articles were

missing; there was a bloody hand-print on the old man’s linen; and, by

a powerfully welded chain of deductive evidence, the guilt of the

robbery and apparent murder had been fixed on Clifford, then residing

with his uncle in the House of the Seven Gables.

Whencesoever originating, there now arose a theory that undertook so to

account for these circumstances as to exclude the idea of Clifford’s

agency. Many persons affirmed that the history and elucidation of the

facts, long so mysterious, had been obtained by the daguerreotypist

from one of those mesmerical seers who, nowadays, so strangely perplex

the aspect of human affairs, and put everybody’s natural vision to the

blush, by the marvels which they see with their eyes shut.

According to this version of the story, Judge Pyncheon, exemplary as we

have portrayed him in our narrative, was, in his youth, an apparently

irreclaimable scapegrace. The brutish, the animal instincts, as is

often the case, had been developed earlier than the intellectual

qualities, and the force of character, for which he was afterwards

remarkable. He had shown himself wild, dissipated, addicted to low

pleasures, little short of ruffianly in his propensities, and

recklessly expensive, with no other resources than the bounty of his

uncle. This course of conduct had alienated the old bachelor’s

affection, once strongly fixed upon him. Now it is averred,—but whether

on authority available in a court of justice, we do not pretend to have

investigated,—that the young man was tempted by the devil, one night,

to search his uncle’s private drawers, to which he had unsuspected

means of access. While thus criminally occupied, he was startled by the

opening of the chamber-door. There stood old Jaffrey Pyncheon, in his

nightclothes! The surprise of such a discovery, his agitation, alarm,

and horror, brought on the crisis of a disorder to which the old

bachelor had an hereditary liability; he seemed to choke with blood,

and fell upon the floor, striking his temple a heavy blow against the

corner of a table. What was to be done? The old man was surely dead!

Assistance would come too late! What a misfortune, indeed, should it

come too soon, since his reviving consciousness would bring the

recollection of the ignominious offence which he had beheld his nephew

in the very act of committing!

But he never did revive. With the cool hardihood that always pertained

to him, the young man continued his search of the drawers, and found a

will, of recent date, in favor of Clifford,—which he destroyed,—and an

older one, in his own favor, which he suffered to remain. But before

retiring, Jaffrey bethought himself of the evidence, in these ransacked

drawers, that some one had visited the chamber with sinister purposes.

Suspicion, unless averted, might fix upon the real offender. In the

very presence of the dead man, therefore, he laid a scheme that should

free himself at the expense of Clifford, his rival, for whose character

he had at once a contempt and a repugnance. It is not probable, be it

said, that he acted with any set purpose of involving Clifford in a

charge of murder. Knowing that his uncle did not die by violence, it

may not have occurred to him, in the hurry of the crisis, that such an

inference might be drawn. But, when the affair took this darker aspect,

Jaffrey’s previous steps had already pledged him to those which

remained. So craftily had he arranged the circumstances, that, at

Clifford’s trial, his cousin hardly found it necessary to swear to

anything false, but only to withhold the one decisive explanation, by

refraining to state what he had himself done and witnessed.

Thus Jaffrey Pyncheon’s inward criminality, as regarded Clifford, was,

indeed, black and damnable; while its mere outward show and positive

commission was the smallest that could possibly consist with so great a

sin. This is just the sort of guilt that a man of eminent

respectability finds it easiest to dispose of. It was suffered to fade

out of sight or be reckoned a venial matter, in the Honorable Judge

Pyncheon’s long subsequent survey of his own life. He shuffled it

aside, among the forgotten and forgiven frailties of his youth, and

seldom thought of it again.

We leave the Judge to his repose. He could not be styled fortunate at

the hour of death. Unknowingly, he was a childless man, while striving

to add more wealth to his only child’s inheritance. Hardly a week after

his decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of the

death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheon’s son, just at the point of

embarkation for his native land. By this misfortune Clifford became

rich; so did Hepzibah; so did our little village maiden, and, through

her, that sworn foe of wealth and all manner of conservatism,—the wild

reformer,—Holgrave!

It was now far too late in Clifford’s life for the good opinion of

society to be worth the trouble and anguish of a formal vindication.

What he needed was the love of a very few; not the admiration, or even

the respect, of the unknown many. The latter might probably have been

won for him, had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had

fallen deemed it advisable to expose Clifford to a miserable

resuscitation of past ideas, when the condition of whatever comfort he

might expect lay in the calm of forgetfulness. After such wrong as he

had suffered, there is no reparation. The pitiable mockery of it, which

the world might have been ready enough to offer, coming so long after

the agony had done its utmost work, would have been fit only to provoke

bitterer laughter than poor Clifford was ever capable of. It is a truth

(and it would be a very sad one but for the higher hopes which it

suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in our

mortal sphere, is ever really set right. Time, the continual

vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of

death, render it impossible. If, after long lapse of years, the right

seems to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in. The better

remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought

his irreparable ruin far behind him.

The shock of Judge Pyncheon’s death had a permanently invigorating and

ultimately beneficial effect on Clifford. That strong and ponderous man

had been Clifford’s nightmare. There was no free breath to be drawn,

within the sphere of so malevolent an influence. The first effect of

freedom, as we have witnessed in Clifford’s aimless flight, was a

tremulous exhilaration. Subsiding from it, he did not sink into his

former intellectual apathy. He never, it is true, attained to nearly

the full measure of what might have been his faculties. But he

recovered enough of them partially to light up his character, to

display some outline of the marvellous grace that was abortive in it,

and to make him the object of no less deep, although less melancholy

interest than heretofore. He was evidently happy. Could we pause to

give another picture of his daily life, with all the appliances now at

command to gratify his instinct for the Beautiful, the garden scenes,

that seemed so sweet to him, would look mean and trivial in comparison.

Very soon after their change of fortune, Clifford, Hepzibah, and little

Phœbe, with the approval of the artist, concluded to remove from the

dismal old House of the Seven Gables, and take up their abode, for the

present, at the elegant country-seat of the late Judge Pyncheon.

Chanticleer and his family had already been transported thither, where

the two hens had forthwith begun an indefatigable process of

egg-laying, with an evident design, as a matter of duty and conscience,

to continue their illustrious breed under better auspices than for a

century past. On the day set for their departure, the principal

personages of our story, including good Uncle Venner, were assembled in

the parlor.

“The country-house is certainly a very fine one, so far as the plan

goes,” observed Holgrave, as the party were discussing their future

arrangements. “But I wonder that the late Judge—being so opulent, and

with a reasonable prospect of transmitting his wealth to descendants of

his own—should not have felt the propriety of embodying so excellent a

piece of domestic architecture in stone, rather than in wood. Then,

every generation of the family might have altered the interior, to suit

its own taste and convenience; while the exterior, through the lapse of

years, might have been adding venerableness to its original beauty, and

thus giving that impression of permanence which I consider essential to

the happiness of any one moment.”

“Why,” cried Phœbe, gazing into the artist’s face with infinite

amazement, “how wonderfully your ideas are changed! A house of stone,

indeed! It is but two or three weeks ago that you seemed to wish people

to live in something as fragile and temporary as a bird’s-nest!”

“Ah, Phœbe, I told you how it would be!” said the artist, with a

half-melancholy laugh. “You find me a conservative already! Little did

I think ever to become one. It is especially unpardonable in this

dwelling of so much hereditary misfortune, and under the eye of yonder

portrait of a model conservative, who, in that very character, rendered

himself so long the evil destiny of his race.”

“That picture!” said Clifford, seeming to shrink from its stern glance.

“Whenever I look at it, there is an old dreamy recollection haunting

me, but keeping just beyond the grasp of my mind. Wealth, it seems to

say!—boundless wealth!—unimaginable wealth! I could fancy that, when I

was a child, or a youth, that portrait had spoken, and told me a rich

secret, or had held forth its hand, with the written record of hidden

opulence. But those old matters are so dim with me, nowadays! What

could this dream have been?”

“Perhaps I can recall it,” answered Holgrave. “See! There are a hundred

chances to one that no person, unacquainted with the secret, would ever

touch this spring.”

“A secret spring!” cried Clifford. “Ah, I remember now! I did discover

it, one summer afternoon, when I was idling and dreaming about the

house, long, long ago. But the mystery escapes me.”

The artist put his finger on the contrivance to which he had referred.

In former days, the effect would probably have been to cause the

picture to start forward. But, in so long a period of concealment, the

machinery had been eaten through with rust; so that at Holgrave’s

pressure, the portrait, frame and all, tumbled suddenly from its

position, and lay face downward on the floor. A recess in the wall was

thus brought to light, in which lay an object so covered with a

century’s dust that it could not immediately be recognized as a folded

sheet of parchment. Holgrave opened it, and displayed an ancient deed,

signed with the hieroglyphics of several Indian sagamores, and

conveying to Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs, forever, a vast extent of

territory at the Eastward.

“This is the very parchment, the attempt to recover which cost the

beautiful Alice Pyncheon her happiness and life,” said the artist,

alluding to his legend. “It is what the Pyncheons sought in vain, while

it was valuable; and now that they find the treasure, it has long been

worthless.”

“Poor Cousin Jaffrey! This is what deceived him,” exclaimed Hepzibah.

“When they were young together, Clifford probably made a kind of

fairy-tale of this discovery. He was always dreaming hither and thither

about the house, and lighting up its dark corners with beautiful

stories. And poor Jaffrey, who took hold of everything as if it were

real, thought my brother had found out his uncle’s wealth. He died with

this delusion in his mind!”

“But,” said Phœbe, apart to Holgrave, “how came you to know the

secret?”

“My dearest Phœbe,” said Holgrave, “how will it please you to assume

the name of Maule? As for the secret, it is the only inheritance that

has come down to me from my ancestors. You should have known sooner

(only that I was afraid of frightening you away) that, in this long

drama of wrong and retribution, I represent the old wizard, and am

probably as much a wizard as ever he was. The son of the executed

Matthew Maule, while building this house, took the opportunity to

construct that recess, and hide away the Indian deed, on which depended

the immense land-claim of the Pyncheons. Thus they bartered their

eastern territory for Maule’s garden-ground.”

“And now” said Uncle Venner “I suppose their whole claim is not worth

one man’s share in my farm yonder!”

“Uncle Venner,” cried Phœbe, taking the patched philosopher’s hand,

“you must never talk any more about your farm! You shall never go

there, as long as you live! There is a cottage in our new garden,—the

prettiest little yellowish-brown cottage you ever saw; and the

sweetest-looking place, for it looks just as if it were made of

gingerbread,—and we are going to fit it up and furnish it, on purpose

for you. And you shall do nothing but what you choose, and shall be as

happy as the day is long, and shall keep Cousin Clifford in spirits

with the wisdom and pleasantness which is always dropping from your

lips!”

“Ah! my dear child,” quoth good Uncle Venner, quite overcome, “if you

were to speak to a young man as you do to an old one, his chance of

keeping his heart another minute would not be worth one of the buttons

on my waistcoat! And—soul alive!—that great sigh, which you made me

heave, has burst off the very last of them! But, never mind! It was the

happiest sigh I ever did heave; and it seems as if I must have drawn in

a gulp of heavenly breath, to make it with. Well, well, Miss Phœbe!

They’ll miss me in the gardens hereabouts, and round by the back doors;

and Pyncheon Street, I’m afraid, will hardly look the same without old

Uncle Venner, who remembers it with a mowing field on one side, and the

garden of the Seven Gables on the other. But either I must go to your

country-seat, or you must come to my farm,—that’s one of two things

certain; and I leave you to choose which!”

“Oh, come with us, by all means, Uncle Venner!” said Clifford, who had

a remarkable enjoyment of the old man’s mellow, quiet, and simple

spirit. “I want you always to be within five minutes’ saunter of my

chair. You are the only philosopher I ever knew of whose wisdom has not

a drop of bitter essence at the bottom!”

“Dear me!” cried Uncle Venner, beginning partly to realize what manner

of man he was. “And yet folks used to set me down among the simple

ones, in my younger days! But I suppose I am like a Roxbury russet,—a

great deal the better, the longer I can be kept. Yes; and my words of

wisdom, that you and Phœbe tell me of, are like the golden dandelions,

which never grow in the hot months, but may be seen glistening among

the withered grass, and under the dry leaves, sometimes as late as

December. And you are welcome, friends, to my mess of dandelions, if

there were twice as many!”

A plain, but handsome, dark-green barouche had now drawn up in front of

the ruinous portal of the old mansion-house. The party came forth, and

(with the exception of good Uncle Venner, who was to follow in a few

days) proceeded to take their places. They were chatting and laughing

very pleasantly together; and—as proves to be often the case, at

moments when we ought to palpitate with sensibility—Clifford and

Hepzibah bade a final farewell to the abode of their forefathers, with

hardly more emotion than if they had made it their arrangement to

return thither at tea-time. Several children were drawn to the spot by

so unusual a spectacle as the barouche and pair of gray horses.

Recognizing little Ned Higgins among them, Hepzibah put her hand into

her pocket, and presented the urchin, her earliest and staunchest

customer, with silver enough to people the Domdaniel cavern of his

interior with as various a procession of quadrupeds as passed into the

ark.

Two men were passing, just as the barouche drove off.

“Well, Dixey,” said one of them, “what do you think of this? My wife

kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay. Old

Maid Pyncheon has been in trade just about as long, and rides off in

her carriage with a couple of hundred thousand,—reckoning her share,

and Clifford’s, and Phœbe’s,—and some say twice as much! If you choose

to call it luck, it is all very well; but if we are to take it as the

will of Providence, why, I can’t exactly fathom it!”

“Pretty good business!” quoth the sagacious Dixey,—“pretty good

business!”

Maule’s well, all this time, though left in solitude, was throwing up a

succession of kaleidoscopic pictures, in which a gifted eye might have

seen foreshadowed the coming fortunes of Hepzibah and Clifford, and the

descendant of the legendary wizard, and the village maiden, over whom

he had thrown love’s web of sorcery. The Pyncheon Elm, moreover, with

what foliage the September gale had spared to it, whispered

unintelligible prophecies. And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from

the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that

sweet Alice Pyncheon—after witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and

this present happiness, of her kindred mortals—had given one farewell

touch of a spirit’s joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward

from the HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES!