House of the Seven Gables E-book

                                      1851
                         THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES

                             by Nathaniel Hawthorne









Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)



                               PREFACE
-
  WHEN a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed
that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and
material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume
had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition
is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the
possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience.
The former- while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to
laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside
from the truth of the human heart- has fairly a right to present
that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own
choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his
atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen
and enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to
make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated, and,
especially, to mingle the Marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and
evanescent flavor, than as any portion of the actual substance of
the dish offered to the public. He can hardly be said, however, to
commit a literary crime even if he disregard this caution.
  In the present work, the author has proposed to himself- but with
what success, fortunately, it is not for him to judge- to keep
undeviatingly within his immunities. The point of view in which this
tale comes under the Romantic definition lies in the attempt to
connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from
us. It is a legend prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the
distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it
some of its legendary mist, which the reader, according to his
pleasure, may either disregard, or allow it to float almost
imperceptibly about the characters and events for the sake of a
picturesque effect. The narrative, it may be, is woven of so humble
a texture as to require this advantage, and, at the same time, to
render it the more difficult of attainment.
  Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose,
at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in
this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral,- the
truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the
successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage,
becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief; and he would feel it a
singular gratification if this romance might effectually convince
mankind- or, indeed, any one man- of the folly of tumbling down an
avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an
unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the
accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms. In
good faith, however, he is not sufficiently imaginative to flatter
himself with the slightest hope of this kind. When romances do
really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is
usually through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one.
The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore,
relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron
rod,- or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly,- thus at
once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly
and unnatural attitude. A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and
skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the
final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but
is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than
at the first.
  The reader may perhaps choose to assign an actual locality to the
imaginary events of this narrative. If permitted by the historical
connection,- which, though slight, was essential to his plan,- the
author would very willingly have avoided anything of this nature.
Not to speak of other objections, it exposes the romance to an
inflexible and exceedingly dangerous species of criticism, by bringing
his fancy-pictures almost into positive contact with the realities
of the moment. It has been no part of his object, however, to describe
local manners, nor in any way to meddle with the characteristics of
a community for whom he cherishes a proper respect and a natural
regard. He trusts not to be considered as unpardonably offending by
laying, out a street that infringes upon nobody's private rights,
and appropriating a lot of land which had no visible owner, and
building a house of materials long in use for constructing castles
in the air. The personages of the tale- though they give themselves
out to be of ancient stability and considerable prominence- are really
of the author's own making, or, at all events, of his own mixing;
their virtues can shed no lustre, nor their defects redound, in the
remotest degree, to the discredit of the venerable town of which
they profess to be inhabitants. He would be glad, therefore, if-
especially in the quarter to which he alludes- the book may be read
strictly as a Romance, having a great deal more to do with the
clouds overhead than with any portion of the actual soil of the County
of Essex.
-
                                                      
  LENOX, January 27, 1851


                                  I
                       THE OLD PYNCHEON FAMILY
-
  HALF-WAY down a by-street of our New England towns stands a rusty
wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various
points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The
street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an
elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar
to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm. On my
occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn
down Pyncheon Street, for the sake of passing through the shadow of
these two antiquities,- the great elm-tree and the weather-beaten
edifice.
  The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a
human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm
and sunshine, but, expressive, also, of the long lapse of mortal life,
and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within. Were these to
be worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small
interest and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain
remarkable unity, which might almost seem the result of artistic
arrangement. But the story would include a chain of events extending
over the better part of two centuries, and, written out with
reasonable amplitude, would fill a bigger folio volume, or a longer
series of duodecimos, than could prudently be appropriated to the
annals of all New England during a similar period. It consequently
becomes imperative to make short work with most of the traditionary
lore of which the old Pyncheon House, otherwise known as the House
of the Seven Gables, has been the theme. With a brief sketch,
therefore, of the circumstances amid which the foundation of the house
was laid, and a rapid glimpse at its quaint exterior, as it grew black
in the prevalent east wind,- pointing, too, here and there, at some
spot of more verdant mossiness on its roof and walls,- we shall
commence the real action of our tale at an epoch not very remote
from the present day. Still, there will be a connection with the
long past- a reference to forgotten events and personages, and to
manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete- which,
if adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate
how much of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human
life. Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the
little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the
germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant
time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which
mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more
enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity.
  The House of the Seven Gables, antique as it now looks, was not
the first habitation erected by civilized man on precisely the same
spot of ground. Pyncheon Street formerly bore the humbler
appellation of Maule's Lane, from the name of the original occupant of
the soil, before whose cottage-door it was a cow-path. A natural
spring of soft and pleasant water- a rare treasure on the sea-girt
peninsula, where the Puritan settlement was made- had early induced
Matthew Maule to build a hut, shaggy with thatch, at this point,
although somewhat too remote from what was then the centre of the
village. In the growth of the town, however, after some thirty or
forty years, the site covered by this rude hovel had become
exceedingly desirable in the eyes of a prominent and powerful
personage, who asserted plausible claims to the proprietorship of
this, and a large adjacent tract of land, on the strength of a grant
from the legislature. Colonel Pyncheon, the claimant, as we gather
from whatever traits of him are preserved, was characterized by an
iron energy of purpose. Matthew Maule, on the other hand, though an
obscure man, was stubborn in the defence of what he considered his
right; and, for several years, he succeeded in protecting the acre
or two of earth, which, with his own toil, he had hewn out of the
primeval forest, to be his garden-ground and homestead. No written
record of this dispute is known to be in existence. Our acquaintance
with the whole subject is derived chiefly from tradition. It would
be bold, therefore, and possibly unjust, to venture a decisive opinion
as to its merits; although it appears to have been at least a matter
of doubt, whether Colonel Pyncheon's claim were not unduly
stretched, in order to make it cover the small metes and bounds of
Matthew Maule. What greatly strengthens such a suspicion is the fact
that this controversy between two ill-matched antagonists- at a
period, moreover, laud it as we may, when personal influence had far
more weight than now- remained for years undecided, and came to a
close only with the death of the party occupying the disputed soil.
The mode of his death, too, affects the mind differently, in our
day, from what it did a century and a half ago. It was a death that
blasted with strange horror the humble name of the dweller in the
cottage, and made it seem almost a religious act to drive the plough
over the little area of his habitation, and obliterate his place and
memory from among men.
  Old Matthew Maule, in a word, was executed for the crime of
witchcraft. He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion, which
should teach us, among its other morals, that the influential classes,
and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are
fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized
the maddest mob. Clergymen, judges, statesmen,- the wisest, calmest,
holiest persons of their day,- stood in the inner circle round about
the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess
themselves miserably deceived. If any one part of their proceedings
can be said to deserve less blame than another, it was the singular
indiscrimination with which they persecuted, not merely the poor and
aged, as in former judicial massacres, but people of all ranks;
their own equals, brethren, and wives. Amid the disorder of such
various ruin, it is not strange that a man of inconsiderable note,
like Maule, should have trodden the martyr's path to the hill of
execution almost unremarked in the throng of his fellow-sufferers.
But, in after days, when the frenzy of that hideous epoch had
subsided, it was remembered how loudly Colonel Pyncheon had joined
in the general cry, to purge the land from witchcraft; nor did it fail
to be whispered, that there was an invidious acrimony in the zeal with
which he had sought the condemnation of Matthew Maule. It was well
known that the victim had recognized the bitterness of personal enmity
in his persecutor's conduct towards him, and that he declared
himself hunted to death for his spoil. At the moment of execution-
with the halter about his neck, and while Colonel Pyncheon sat on
horseback, grimly gazing at the scene- Maule had addressed him from
the scaffold, and uttered a prophecy, of which history, as well as
fireside tradition, has preserved the very words. "God," said the
dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly look, at the undismayed
countenance of his enemy,- "God will give him blood to drink!"
                                                    
  After the reputed wizard's death, his humble homestead had fallen an
easy spoil into Colonel Pyncheon's grasp. When it was understood,
however, that the Colonel intended to erect a family mansion-
spacious, ponderously framed of oaken timber, and calculated to endure
for many generations of his posterity- over the spot first covered
by the log-built hut of Matthew Maule, there was much shaking of the
head among the village gossips. Without absolutely expressing a
doubt whether the stalwart Puritan had acted as a man of conscience
and integrity throughout the proceedings which have been sketched,
they, nevertheless, hinted that he was about to build his house over
an unquiet grave. His home would include the home of the dead and
buried wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind of
privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers into which
future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where children of
the Pyncheon blood were to be born. The terror and ugliness of Maule's
crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment, would darken the
freshly plastered walls, and infect them early with the scent of an
old and melancholy house. Why, then,- while so much of the soil around
him was bestrewn with the virgin forest-leaves,- why should Colonel
Pyncheon prefer a site that had already been accurst?
  But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned
aside from his well-considered scheme, either by dread of the wizard's
ghost, or by flimsy sentimentalities of any kind, however specious.
Had he been told of a bad air, it might have moved him somewhat; but
he was ready to encounter an evil spirit on his own ground. Endowed
with common-sense, as massive and bard as blocks of granite,
fastened together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps,
he followed out his original design, probably without so much as
imagining an objection to it. On the score of delicacy, or any
scrupulousness which a finer sensibility might have taught him, the
Colonel, like most of his breed and generation, was impenetrable.
He, therefore, dug his cellar, and laid the deep foundations of his
mansion, on the square of earth whence Matthew Maule, forty years
before, had first swept away the fallen leaves. It was a curious, and,
as some people thought, an ominous fact, that, very soon after the
workmen began their operations, the spring of water, above
mentioned, entirely lost the deliciousness of its pristine quality.
Whether its sources were disturbed by the depth of the new cellar,
or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the bottom, it is certain that
the water of Maule's Well, as it continued to be called, grew hard and
brackish. Even such we find it now; and any old woman of the
neighborhood will certify that it is productive of intestinal mischief
to those who quench their thirst there.
  The reader may deem it singular that the head carpenter of the new
edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead
gripe the property of the soil had been wrested. Not improbably he was
the best workman of his time; or, perhaps, the Colonel thought it
expedient, or was impelled by some better feeling, thus openly to cast
aside all animosity against the race of his fallen antagonist. Nor was
it out of keeping with the general coarseness and matter-of-fact
character of the age, that the son should be willing to earn an honest
penny, or, rather, a weighty amount of sterling pounds, from the purse
of his father's deadly enemy. At all events, Thomas Maule became the
architect of the House of the Seven Gables, and performed his duty
so faithfully that the timber framework fastened by his hands still
holds together.
  Thus the great house was built. Familiar as it stands in the
writer's recollection,- for it has been an object of curiosity with
him from boyhood, both as a specimen of the best and stateliest
architecture of a long-past epoch, and as the scene of events more
full of human interest, perhaps, than those of a gray feudal
castle,- familiar as it stands, in its rusty old age, it is
therefore only the more difficult to imagine the bright novelty with
which it first caught the sunshine, The impression of its actual
state, at this distance of a hundred and sixty years, darkens
inevitably through the picture which we would fain give of its
appearance on the morning when the Puritan magnate bade all the town
to be his guests. A ceremony of consecration festive as well as
religious, was now to be performed. A prayer and discourse from the
Rev. Mr. Higginson, and the outpouring of a psalm from the general
throat of the community, was to be made acceptable to the grosser
sense by ale, cider, wine, and brandy, in copious effusion, and, as
some authorities aver, by an ox, roasted whole, or at least, by the
weight and substance of an ox, in more manageable joints and sirloins.
The carcass of a deer, shot within twenty miles, had supplied material
for the vast circumference of a pasty. A codfish of sixty pounds,
caught in the bay, had been dissolved into the rich liquid of a
chowder. The chimney of the new house, in short, belching forth its
kitchen-smoke, impregnated the whole air with the scent of meats,
fowls, and fishes, spicily connected with odoriferous herbs, and
onions in abundance. The mere smell of such festivity, making its
way to everybody's nostrils, was at once an invitation and an
appetite.
  Maule's Lane, or Pyncheon Street, as it were now more decorous to
call it, was thronged, at the appointed hour, as with a congregation
on its way to church. All as they approached, looked upward at the
imposing edifice, which was henceforth to assume its rank among the
habitations of mankind. There it rose, a little withdrawn from the
line of the street, but in pride, not modesty. Its whole visible
exterior was ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the
grotesqueness of a Gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the
glittering plaster, composed of lime, pebbles, and bits of glass, with
which the woodwork of the walls was overspread. On every side the
seven gables pointed sharply towards the sky, and presented the aspect
of a whole sisterhood of edifices, breathing through the spiracles
of one great chimney. The many lattices, with their small,
diamond-shaped panes, admitted the sunlight into hall and chamber,
while, nevertheless, the second story, projecting far over the base,
and itself retiring beneath the third, threw a shadowy and
thoughtful gloom into the lower rooms. Carved globes of wood were
affixed under the jutting stories. Little spiral rods of iron
beautified each of the seven peaks. On the triangular portion of the
gable, that fronted next the street, was a dial, put up that very
morning, and on which the sun was still marking the passage of the
first bright hour in a history that was not destined to be all so
bright. All around were scattered shavings, chips, shingles, and
broken halves of bricks; these, together with the lately turned earth,
on which the grass had not begun to grow, contributed to the
impression of strangeness and novelty proper to a house that had yet
its place to make among men's daily interests.
                                                   
  The principal entrance, which had almost the breadth of a
church-door, was in the angle between the two front gables, and was
covered by an open porch, with benches beneath its shelter. Under this
arched doorway, scraping their feet on the unworn threshold, now
trod the clergymen, the elders, the magistrates, the deacons, and
whatever of aristocracy there was in town or county. Thither, too,
thronged the plebeian classes as freely as their betters, and in
larger number. Just within the entrance, however, stood two
serving-men, pointing some of the guests to the neighborhood of the
kitchen, and ushering others into the statelier rooms,- hospitable
alike to all, but still with a scrutinizing regard to the high or
low degree of each. Velvet garments, sombre but rich, stiffly
plaited ruffs and bands, embroidered gloves, venerable beards, the
mien and countenance of authority, made it easy to distinguish the
gentleman of worship, at that period, from the tradesman, with his
plodding air, or the laborer, in his leathern jerkin, stealing
awe-stricken into the house which he had perhaps helped to build.
  One inauspicious circumstance there was, which awakened a hardly
concealed displeasure in the breasts of a few of the more
punctilious visitors. The founder of this stately mansion- a gentleman
noted for the square and ponderous courtesy of his demeanor- ought
surely to have stood in his own hall, and to have offered the first
welcome to so many eminent personages as here presented themselves
in honor of his solemn festival. He was as yet invisible; the most
favored of the guests had not beheld him. This sluggishness on Colonel
Pyncheon's part became still more unaccountable, when the second
dignitary of the province made his appearance, and found no more
ceremonious a reception. The lieutenant-governor, although his visit
was one of the anticipated glories of the day, had alighted from his
horse, and assisted his lady from her side-saddle, and crossed the
Colonel's threshold, without other greeting than that of the principal
domestic.
  This person- a gray-headed man, of quiet and most respectful
deportment- found it necessary to explain that his master still
remained in his study. or private apartment; on entering which, an
hour before, he had expressed a wish on no account to be disturbed.
  "Do not you see, fellow," said the high-sheriff of the county,
taking the servant aside, "that this is no less a man than the
lieutenant-governor? Summon Colonel Pyncheon at once! I know that he
received letters from England this morning; and, in the perusal and
consideration of them, an hour may have passed away without his
noticing it. But he will be ill-pleased, I judge, if you suffer him to
neglect the courtesy due to one of our chief rulers, and who may be
said to represent King William, in the absence of the governor
himself. Call your master instantly!"
  "Nay, please your worship," answered the man, in much perplexity,
but with a backwardness that strikingly indicated the hard and
severe character of Colonel Pyncheon's domestic rule; "master's orders
were exceeding strict; and, as your worship knows, he permits of no
discretion in the obedience of those who owe him service. Let who list
open yonder door; I dare not, though the governor's own voice should
bid me do it!"
                                                   
  "Pooh, pooh, master high-sheriff!" cried the lieutenant-governor,
who had overheard the foregoing discussion, and felt himself high
enough in station to play a little with his dignity. "I will take
the matter into my own hands. It is time that the good Colonel came
forth to greet his friends; else we shall be apt to suspect that he
has taken a sip too much of his Canary wine, in his extreme
deliberation which cask it were best to broach in honor of the day!
But since he is so much behindhand, I will give him a remembrancer
myself!"
  Accordingly, with such a tramp of his ponderous riding-boots as
might of itself have been audible in the remotest of the seven gables,
he advanced to the door, which the servant pointed out, and made its
new panels reecho with a loud, free knock. Then, looking round, with a
smile, to the spectators, he awaited a response. As none came,
however, he knocked again, but with the same unsatisfactory result
as at first. And now, being a trifle choleric in his temperament,
the lieutenant-governor uplifted the heavy hilt of his sword,
wherewith he so beat and banged upon the door, that, as some of the
by-standers whispered, the racket might have disturbed the dead. Be
that as it might, it seemed to produce no awakening effect on
Colonel Pyncheon. When the sound subsided, the silence through the
house was deep, dreary, and oppressive, notwithstanding that the
tongues of many of the guests had already been loosened by a
surreptitious cup or two of wine or spirits.
  "Strange, forsooth!- very strange!" cried the lieutenant-governor,
whose smile was changed to a frown. "But seeing that our host sets
us the good example of forgetting ceremony, I shall likewise throw
it aside, and make free to intrude on his privacy!"
  He tried the door, which yielded to his hand, and was flung wide
open by a sudden gust of wind that passed, as with a loud sigh, from
the outermost portal through all the passages and apartments of the
new house. It rustled the silken garments of the ladies, and waved the
long curls of the gentlemen's wigs, and shook the window-hangings
and the curtains of the bedchambers; causing everywhere a singular
stir, which yet was more like a hush. A shadow of awe and half-fearful
anticipation- nobody knew wherefore, nor of what- had all at once
fallen over the company.
  They thronged, however, to the now open door, pressing the
lieutenant-governor, in the eagerness of their curiosity, into the
room in advance of them. At the first glimpse they beheld nothing
extraordinary: a handsomely furnished room, of moderate size, somewhat
darkened by curtains; books arranged on shelves; a large map on the
wall, and likewise a portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, beneath which sat
the original Colonel himself, in an oaken elbow-chair, with a pen in
his hand. Letters, parchments, and blank sheets of paper were on the
table before him. He appeared to gaze at the curious crowd, in front
of which stood the lieutenant-governor; and there was a frown on his
dark and massive countenance, as if sternly resentful of the
boldness that had impelled them into his private retirement.
                                                   
  A little boy- the Colonel's grandchild, and the only human being
that ever dared to be familiar with him- now made his way among the
guests, and ran towards the seated figure; then pausing half-way, he
began to shriek with terror. The company, tremulous as the leaves of a
tree, when all are shaking together, drew nearer, and perceived that
there was an unnatural distortion in the fixedness of Colonel
Pyncheon's stare; that there was blood on his ruff, and that his hoary
beard was saturated with it. It was too late to give assistance. The
iron-hearted Puritan, the relentless persecutor, the grasping and
strong-willed man, was dead! Dead, in his new house! There is a
tradition, only worth alluding to as lending a tinge of
superstitious awe to a scene perhaps gloomy enough without it, that
a voice spoke loudly among the guests, the tones of which were like
those of old Matthew Maule, the executed wizard,- "God hath given
him blood to drink!"
  Thus early had that one guest,- the only guest who is certain, at
one time or another, to find his way into every human dwelling,-
thus early had Death stepped across the threshold of the House of
the Seven Gables!
  Colonel Pyncheon's sudden and mysterious end made a vast deal of
noise in its day. There were many rumors, some of which have vaguely
drifted down to the present time, how that appearances indicated
violence; that there were the marks of fingers on his throat, and
the print of a bloody hand on his plaited ruff: and that his peaked
beard was dishevelled, as if it had been fiercely clutched and pulled.
It was averred, likewise, that the lattice-window, near the
Colonel's chair, was open; and that, only a few minutes before the
fatal occurrence, the figure of a man had been seen clambering over
the garden-fence, in the rear of the house. But it were folly to lay
any stress on stories of this kind, which are sure to spring up around
such an event as that now related, and which, as in the present
case, sometimes prolong themselves for ages afterwards, like the
toadstools that indicate where the fallen and buried trunk of a tree
has long since mouldered into the earth. For our own part, we allow
them just as little credence as to that other fable of the skeleton
hand which the lieutenant-governor was said to have seen at the
Colonel's throat, but which vanished away, as he advanced farther into
the room. Certain it is, however, that there was a great
consultation and dispute of doctors over the dead body. One- John
Swinnerton by name- who appears to have been a man of eminence, upheld
it, if we have rightly understood his terms of art, to be a case of
apoplexy. His professional brethren, each for himself, adopted various
hypotheses, more or less plausible, but all dressed out in a
perplexing mystery of phrase, which, if it do not show a
bewilderment of mind in these erudite physicians, certainly causes
it in the unlearned peruser of their opinions. The coroner's jury
sat upon the corpse, and, like sensible men, returned an
unassailable verdict of "Sudden Death!"
  It is indeed difficult to imagine that there could have been a
serious suspicion of murder, or the slightest grounds for
implicating any particular individual as the perpetrator. The rank,
wealth, and eminent character of the deceased must have insured the
strictest scrutiny into every ambiguous circumstance. As none such
is on record, it is safe to assume that none existed. Tradition,-
which sometimes brings down truth that history has let slip, but is
oftener the wild babble of the time, such as was formerly spoken at
the fireside and now congeals in newspapers,- tradition is responsible
for all contrary averments. In Colonel Pyncheon's funeral sermon,
which was printed, and is still extant, the Rev. Mr. Higginson
enumerates, among the many felicities of his distinguished
parishioner's earthly career, the happy seasonableness of his death.
His duties all performed,- the highest prosperity attained,- his
race and future generations fixed on a stable basis, and with a
stately roof to shelter them, for centuries to come,- what other
upward step remained for this good man to take, save the final step
from earth to the golden gate of heaven! The pious clergyman surely
would not have uttered words like these had he in the least
suspected that the Colonel had been thrust into the other world with
the clutch of violence upon his throat.
  The family of Colonel Pyncheon, at the epoch of his death, seemed
destined to as fortunate a permanence as can anywise consist with
the inherent instability of human affairs. It might fairly be
anticipated that the progress of time would rather increase and
ripen their prosperity, than wear away and destroy it. For, not only
had his son and heir come into immediate enjoyment of a rich estate,
but there was a claim through an Indian deed, confirmed by a
subsequent grant of the General Court, to a vast and as yet unexplored
and unmeasured tract of Eastern lands. These possessions- for as
such they might almost certainly be reckoned- comprised the greater
part of what is now known as Waldo County, in the State of Maine,
and were more extensive than many a dukedom, or even a reigning
prince's territory, on European soil. When the pathless forest that
still covered this wild principality should give place- as it
inevitably must, though perhaps not till ages hence- to the golden
fertility of human culture, it would be the source of incalculable
wealth to the Pyncheon blood. Had the Colonel survived only a few
weeks longer, it is probable that his great political influence, and
powerful connections at home and abroad, would have consummated all
that was necessary to render the claim available. But, in spite of
good Mr. Higginson's congratulatory eloquence, this appeared to be the
one thing which Colonel Pyncheon, provident and sagacious as he was,
had allowed to go at loose ends. So far as the prospective territory
was concerned, he unquestionably died too soon. His son lacked not
merely the father's eminent position, but the talent and force of
character to achieve it: he could, therefore, effect nothing by dint
of political interest; and the bare justice or legality of the claim
was not so apparent, after the Colonel's decease, as it had been
pronounced in his lifetime. Some connecting link had slipped out of
the evidence, and could not anywhere be found.
                                                   
  Efforts, it is true, were made by the Pyncheons, not only then,
but at various periods for nearly a hundred years afterwards, to
obtain what they stubbornly persisted in deeming their right. But,
in course of time, the territory was partly re-granted to more favored
individuals, and partly cleared and occupied by actual settlers. These
last, if they ever heard of the Pyncheon title, would have laughed
at the idea of any man's asserting a right- on the strength of
mouldy parchments, signed with the faded autographs of governors and
legislators long dead and forgotten- to the lands which they or
their fathers had wrested from the wild hand of nature by their own
sturdy toil. This impalpable claim, therefore, resulted in nothing
more solid than to cherish, from generation to generation, an absurd
delusion of family importance, which all along characterized the
Pyncheons. It caused the poorest member of the race to feel as if he
inherited a kind of nobility, and might yet come into the possession
of princely wealth to support it. In the better specimens of the
breed, this peculiarity threw an ideal grace over the hard material of
human life, without stealing away any truly valuable quality. In the
baser sort, its effect was to increase the liability to sluggishness
and dependence, and induce the victim of a shadowy hope to remit all
self-effort, while awaiting the realization of his dreams. Years and
years after their claim had passed out of the public memory, the
Pyncheons were accustomed to consult the Colonel's ancient map,
which had been projected while Waldo County was still an unbroken
wilderness. Where the old land-surveyor had put down woods, lakes, and
rivers, they marked out the cleared spaces, and dotted the villages
and towns, and calculated the progressively increasing value of the
territory, as if there were yet a prospect of its ultimately forming a
princedom for themselves.
  In almost every generation, nevertheless, there happened to be
some one descendant of the family gifted with a portion of the hard,
keen sense, and practical energy, that had so remarkably distinguished
the original founder. His character, indeed, might be traced all the
way down, as distinctly as if the Colonel himself, a little diluted,
had been gifted with a sort of intermittent immortality on earth. At
two or three epochs, when the fortunes of the family were low, this
representative of hereditary qualities had made his appearance, and
caused the traditionary gossips of the town to whisper among
themselves, "Here is the old Pyncheon come again! Now the Seven Gables
will be new-shingled!" From father to son, they clung to the ancestral
house with singular tenacity of home attachment. For various
reasons, however, and from impressions often too vaguely founded to be
put on paper, the writer cherishes the belief that many, if not
most, of the successive proprietors of this estate were troubled
with doubts as to their moral right to hold it. Of their legal
tenure there could be no question; but old Matthew Maule, it is to
be feared, trode downward from his own age to a far later one,
planting a heavy footstep, all the way, on the conscience of a
Pyncheon. If so, we are left to dispose of the awful query, whether
each inheritor of the property- conscious of wrong, and failing to
rectify it- did not commit anew the great guilt of his ancestor, and
incur all its original responsibilities. And supposing such to be
the case, would it not be a far truer mode of expression to say of the
Pyncheon family, that they inherited a great misfortune, than the
reverse?
  We have already hinted that it is not our purpose to trace down
the history of the Pyncheon family, in its unbroken connection with
the House of the Seven Gables; nor to show, as in a magic picture, how
the rustiness and infirmity of age gathered over the venerable house
itself. As regards its interior life, a large, dim looking-glass
used to hang in one of the rooms, and was fabled to contain within its
depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected there,- the old
Colonel himself, and his many descendants, some in the garb of antique
babyhood, and others in the bloom of feminine beauty or manly prime,
or saddened with the wrinkles of frosty age. Had we the secret of that
mirror, we would gladly sit down before it, and transfer its
revelations to our page. But there was a story, for which it is
difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity of Matthew
Maule had some connection with the mystery of the looking-glass, and
that, by what appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they
could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not
as they had shown themselves to the world nor in their better and
happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the
crisis of life's bitterest sorrow. The popular imagination, indeed,
long kept itself busy with the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon
and the wizard Maule; the curse, which the latter flung from his
scaffold, was remembered, with the very important addition, that it
had become a part of the Pyncheon inheritance. If one of the family
did but gurgle in his throat, a bystander would be likely enough to
whisper, between jest and earnest, "He has Maule's blood to drink!"
The sudden death of a Pyncheon, about a hundred years ago, with
circumstances very similar to what have been related of the
Colonel's exit, was held as giving additional probability to the
received opinion on this topic. It was considered, moreover, an ugly
and ominous circumstance, that Colonel Pyncheon's picture- in
obedience, it was said, to a provision of his will- remained affixed
to the wall of the room in which he died. Those stern, immitigable
features seemed to symbolize an evil influence, and so darkly to
mingle the shadow of their presence with the sunshine of the passing
hour, that no good thoughts or purposes could ever spring up and
blossom there. To the thoughtful mind there will be no tinge of
superstition in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the
ghost of a dead progenitor- perhaps as a portion of his own
punishment- is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family.
  The Pyncheons, in brief, lived along, for, the better part of two
centuries, with perhaps less of outward vicissitude than has
attended most other New England families during the same period of
time. Possessing very distinctive traits of their own, they
nevertheless took the general characteristics of the little
community in which they dwelt; a town noted for its frugal,
discreet, well-ordered, and home-loving inhabitants, as well as for
the somewhat confined scope of its sympathies; but in which, be it
said, there are odder individuals, and, now and then, stranger
occurrences, than one meets with almost anywhere else. During the
Revolution, the Pyncheon of that epoch, adopting the royal side,
became a refugee; but repented, and made his reappearance, just at the
point of time to preserve the House of the Seven Gables from
confiscation. For the last seventy years the most noted event in the
Pyncheon annals had been likewise the heaviest calamity that ever
befell the race; no less than the violent death- for so it was
adjudged- of one member of the family by the criminal act of
another. Certain circumstances attending this fatal occurrence had
brought the deed irresistibly home to a nephew of the deceased
Pyncheon. The young man was tried and convicted of the crime; but
either the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and possibly some
lurking doubt in the breast of the executive, or, lastly,- an argument
of greater weight in a republic than it could have been under a
monarchy,- the high respectability and political influence of the
criminal's connections, had availed to mitigate his doom from death to
perpetual imprisonment. This sad affair had chanced about thirty years
before the action of our story commences. Latterly, there were
rumors (which few believed, and only one or two felt greatly
interested in) that this long-buried man was likely, for some reason
or other, to be summoned forth from his living tomb.
  It is essential to say a few words respecting the victim of this now
almost forgotten murder. He was an old bachelor, and possessed of
great wealth, in addition to the house and real estate which
constituted what remained of the ancient Pyncheon property. Being of
an eccentric and melancholy turn of mind, and greatly given to
rummaging old records and hearkening to old traditions, he had brought
himself, it is averred, to the conclusion that Matthew Maule, the
wizard, had been foully wronged out of his homestead, if not out of
his life. Such being the case, and he, the old bachelor, in possession
of the ill-gotten spoil,- with the black stain of blood sunken deep
into it, and still to be scented by conscientious nostrils,- the
question occurred, whether it were not imperative upon him, even at
this late hour, to make restitution to Maule's posterity. To a man
living so much in the past, and so little in the present, as the
secluded and antiquarian old bachelor, a century and a half seemed not
so vast a period as to obviate the propriety of substituting right for
wrong. It was the belief of those who knew him best, that he would
positively have taken the very singular step of giving up the House of
the Seven Gables to the representative of Matthew Maule, but for the
unspeakable tumult which a suspicion of the old gentleman's project
awakened among his Pyncheon relatives. Their exertions had the
effect of suspending his purpose; but it was feared that he would
perform, after death, by the operation of his last will, what he had
so hardly been prevented from doing in his proper lifetime. But
there is no one thing which men so rarely do, whatever the provocation
or inducement, as to bequeath patrimonial property away from their own
blood. They may love other individuals far better than their
relatives,- they may even cherish dislike, or positive hatred, to
the latter; but yet, in view of death, the strong prejudice of
propinquity revives, and impels the testator to send down his estate
in the line marked out by custom so immemorial that it looks like
nature. In all the Pyncheons, this feeling had the energy of
disease. It was too powerful for the conscientious scruples of the old
bachelor; at whose death, accordingly, the mansion-house, together
with most of his other riches, passed into the possession of his
next legal representative.
                                                   
  This was a nephew, the cousin of the miserable young man who had
been convicted of the uncle's murder. The new heir, up to the period
of his accession, was reckoned rather a dissipated youth, but had at
once reformed, and made himself an exceedingly respectable member of
society. In fact, he showed more of the Pyncheon quality, and had
won higher eminence in the world than any of his race since the time
of the original Puritan. Applying himself in earlier manhood to the
study of the law, and having a natural tendency towards office, he had
attained, many years ago, to a judicial situation in some inferior
court, which gave him for life the very desirable and imposing title
of judge. Later, he had engaged in polities, and served a part of
two terms in Congress, besides making a considerable figure in both
branches of the State legislature. Judge Pyncheon was unquestionably
an honor to his race. He bad built himself a country-seat within a few
miles of his native town, and there spent such portions of his time as
could be spared from public service in the display of every grace
and virtue- as a newspaper phrased it, on the eve of an election-
befitting the Christian, the good citizen, the horticulturist, and the
gentleman.
  There were few of the Pyncheons left to sun themselves in the glow
of the Judge's prosperity. In respect to natural increase, the breed
had not thriven; it appeared rather to be dying out. The only
members of the family known to be extant were, first, the Judge
himself, and a single surviving son, who was now travelling in Europe;
next, the thirty years' prisoner, already alluded to, and a sister
of the latter, who occupied, in an extremely retired manner, the House
of the Seven Gables, in which she had a life-estate by the will of the
old bachelor. She was understood to be wretchedly poor, and seemed
to make it her choice to remain so; inasmuch as her affluent cousin,
the Judge, had repeatedly offered her all the comforts of life, either
in the old mansion or his own modern residence. The last and
youngest Pyncheon was a little country-girl of seventeen, the daughter
of another of the Judge's cousins, who had married a young woman of no
family or property, and died early and in poor circumstances. His
widow had recently taken another husband.
  As for Matthew Maule's posterity, it was supposed now to be extinct.
For a very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however, the
Maules had continued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had
suffered so unjust a death. To all appearance, they were a quiet,
honest, well meaning race of people, cherishing no malice against
individuals or the public for the wrong which had been done them; or
if, at their own fireside, they transmitted, from father to child, any
hostile recollection of the wizard's fate and their lost patrimony, it
was never acted upon, nor openly expressed. Nor would it have been
singular had they ceased to remember that the House of the Seven
Gables was resting its heavy framework on a foundation that was
rightfully their own. There is something so massive, stable, and
almost irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of
established rank and great possessions, that their very existence
seems to give them a right to exist; at least, so excellent a
counterfeit of right, that few poor and humble men have moral force
enough to question it, even in their secret minds. Such is the case
now, after so many ancient prejudices have been overthrown; and it was
far more so in ante-Revolutionary days, when the aristocracy could
venture to be proud, and the low were content to be abased. Thus the
Maules, at all events, kept their resentments within their own
breasts, They were generally poverty-stricken; always plebeian and
obscure: working with unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts;
laboring on the wharves, or following the sea, as sailors before the
mast; living here and there about the town, in hired tenements, and
coming finally to the almshouse as the natural home of their old
age. At last, after creeping as it were, for such a length of time,
along the utmost verge of the opaque puddle of obscurity, they had
taken that downright plunge, which, sooner or later, is the destiny of
all families, whether princely or plebeian. For thirty years past,
neither town-record, nor gravestone, nor the directory, nor the
knowledge or memory of man, bore any trace of Matthew Maule's
descendants. His blood might possibly exist elsewhere; here, where its
lowly current could be traced so far back, it had ceased to keep an
onward course.
  So long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked
out from other men- not strikingly, nor as with a sharp line, but with
an effect that was felt rather than spoken of- by an hereditary
character of reserve. Their companions, or those who endeavored to
become such, grew conscious of a circle round about the Maules, within
the sanctity of the spell of which, in spite of an exterior of
sufficient frankness and good-fellowship, it was impossible for any
man to step. It was this indefinable peculiarity, perhaps, that, by
insulating them from human aid, kept them always so unfortunate in
life. It certainly operated to prolong in their case, and to confirm
to them as their only inheritance, those feelings of repugnance and
superstitious terror with which the people of the town, even after
awakening from their frenzy, continued to regard the memory of the
reputed witches. The mantle, or rather the ragged cloak, of old
Matthew Maule, had fallen upon his children. They were half believed
to inherit mysterious attributes; the family eye was said to possess
strange power. Among other good-for-nothing properties and privileges,
one was especially assigned them,- that of exercising an influence
over people's dreams. The Pyncheons, if all stories were true,
haughtily as they bore themselves in the noonday streets of their
native town, were no better than bond-servants to these plebeian
Maules, on entering the topsy-turvy commonwealth of sleep. Modern
psychology, it may be, will endeavor to reduce these alleged
necromancies within a system, instead of rejecting them as
altogether fabulous.
  A descriptive paragraph or two, treating of the seven-gabled mansion
in its more recent aspect, will bring this preliminary chapter to a
close. The street in which it upreared its venerable peaks has long
ceased to be a fashionable quarter of the town; so that, though the
old edifice was surrounded by habitations of modern date, they were
mostly small, built entirely of wood, and typical of the most plodding
uniformity of common life. Doubtless, however, the whole story of
human existence may be latent in each of them, but with no
picturesqueness, externally, that can attract the imagination or
sympathy to seek it there. But as for the old structure of our
story, its white-oak frame, and its boards, shingles, and crumbling
plaster, and even the huge, clustered chimney in the midst, seemed
to constitute only the least and meanest part of its reality. So
much of mankind's varied experience had passed there,- so much had
been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed,- that the very timbers
were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart. It was itself like a great
human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and sombre
reminiscences.
                                                   
  The deep projection of the second story gave the house such a
meditative look, that you could not pass it without the idea that it
had secrets to keep, and an eventful history to moralize upon. In
front, just on the edge of the unpaved sidewalk, grew the Pyncheon
Elm, which, in reference to such trees as one usually meets with,
might well be termed gigantic. It had been planted by a great-grandson
of the first Pyncheon, and, though now fourscore years of age, or
perhaps nearer a hundred, was still in its strong and broad
maturity, throwing its shadow from side to side of the street,
overtopping the seven gables, and sweeping the whole black roof with
its pendent foliage. It gave beauty to the old edifice, and seemed
to make it a part of nature. The street having been widened about
forty years ago, the front gable was now precisely on a line with
it. On either side extended a ruinous wooden fence of open
lattice-work, through which could be seen a grassy yard, and,
especially in the angles of the building, an enormous fertility of
burdocks, with leaves, it is hardly an exaggeration to say, two or
three feet long. Behind the house there appeared to be a garden, which
undoubtedly had once been extensive, but was now infringed upon by
other enclosures, or shut in by habitations and outbuildings that
stood on another street. It would be an omission, trifling, indeed,
but unpardonable, were we to forget the green moss that had long since
gathered over the projections of the windows, and on the slopes of the
roof; nor must we fail to direct the reader's eye to a crop, not of
weeds, but flower-shrubs, which were growing aloft in the air, not a
great way from the chimney, in the nook between two of the gables.
They were called Alice's Posies. The tradition was, that a certain
Alice Pyncheon had flung up the seeds, in sport, and that the dust
of the street and the decay of the roof gradually formed a kind of
soil for them, out of which they grew, when Alice had long been in her
grave. However the flowers might have come there, it was both sad
and sweet to observe how Nature adopted to herself this desolate,
decaying, gusty, rusty old house of the Pyncheon family; and how the
ever-returning summer did her best to gladden it with tender beauty,
and grew melancholy in the effort.
  There is one other feature, very essential to be noticed, but which,
we greatly fear, may damage any picturesque and romantic impression
which we have been willing to throw over our sketch of this
respectable edifice. In the front gable, under the impending brow of
the second story, and contiguous to the street, was a shop-door,
divided horizontally in the midst, and with a window for its upper
segment, such as is often seen in dwellings of a somewhat ancient
date. This same shop-door had been a subject of no slight
mortification to the present occupant of the august Pyncheon House, as
well as to some of her predecessors. The matter is disagreeably
delicate to handle; but, since the reader must needs be let into the
secret, he will please to understand, that, about a century ago, the
head of the Pyncheons found himself involved in serious financial
difficulties. The fellow (gentleman, as he styled himself) can
hardly have been other than a spurious interloper; for, instead of
seeking office from the king or the royal governor, or urging his
hereditary claim to Eastern lands, he bethought himself of no better
avenue to wealth than by cutting a shop-door through the side of his
ancestral residence. It was the custom of the time, indeed, for
merchants to store their goods and transact business in their own
dwellings. But there was something pitifully small in this old
Pyncheon's mode of setting about his commercial operations; it was
whispered, that, with his own hands, all beruffled as they were, he
used to give change for a shilling, and would turn a half-penny
twice over, to make sure that it was a good one. Beyond all
question, he had the blood of a petty huckster in his veins, through
whatever channel it may have found its way there.
  Immediately on his death, the shop-door had been locked, bolted, and
barred, and, down to the period of our story, had probably never
once been opened. The old counter, shelves, and other fixtures of
the little shop remained just as he had left them. It used to be
affirmed, that the dead shop-keeper, in a white wig, a faded velvet
coat, an apron at his waist, and his ruffles carefully turned back
from his wrists, might be seen through the chinks of the shutters, any
night of the year, ransacking his till, or poring over the dingy pages
of his day-book. From the look of unutterable woe upon his face, it
appeared to be his doom to spend eternity in a vain effort to make his
accounts balance.
  And now- in a very humble way, as will be seen- we proceed to open
our narrative.


                                  II
                        THE LITTLE SHOP-WINDOW
-
  IT still lacked half an hour of sunrise, when Miss Hepzibah
Pyncheon- we will not say awoke, it being doubtful whether the poor
lady had so much as closed her eyes during the brief night of
midsummer- but, at all events, arose from her solitary pillow, and
began what it would be mockery to term the adornment of her person.
Far from us be the indecorum of assisting, even in imagination, at a
maiden lady's toilet! Our story must therefore await Miss Hepzibah
at the threshold of her chamber; only presuming, meanwhile, to note
some of the heavy sighs that labored from her bosom, with little
restraint as to their lugubrious depth and volume of sound, inasmuch
as they could be audible to nobody save a disembodied listener like
ourself. The Old Maid was alone in the old house. Alone, except for
a certain respectable and orderly young man, an artist in the
daguerreotype line, who, for about three months back, had been a
lodger in a remote gable,- quite a house by itself, indeed,- with
locks, bolts, and oaken bars on all the intervening doors.
Inaudible, consequently, were poor Miss Hepzibah's gusty sighs.
Inaudible the creaking joints of her stiffened knees, as she knelt
down by the bedside. And inaudible, too, by mortal ear, but heard with
all-comprehending love and pity in the farthest heaven, that almost
agony of prayer- now whispered, now a groan, now a struggling silence-
wherewith she besought the Divine assistance through the day!
Evidently, this is to be a day of more than ordinary trial to Miss
Hepzibah, who, for above a quarter of a century gone by, has dwelt
in strict seclusion, taking no part in the business of life, and
just as little in its intercourse and pleasures. Not with such
fervor prays the torpid recluse, looking forward to the cold, sunless,
stagnant calm of a day that is to be like innumerable yesterdays!
  The maiden lady's devotions are concluded. Will she now issue
forth over the threshold of our story? Not yet, by many moments.
First, every drawer in the tall, old-fashioned bureau is to be opened,
with difficulty, and with a succession of spasmodic jerks; then, all
must close again, with the same fidgety reluctance. There is a
rustling of stiff silks; a tread of backward and forward footsteps
to and fro across the chamber. We suspect Miss Hepzibah, moreover,
of taking a step upward into a chair, in order to give heedful
regard to her appearance on all sides, and at full length, in the
oval, dingy-framed toilet-glass, that hangs above her table. Truly!
well, indeed! who would have thought it! Is all this precious time
to be lavished on the matutinal repair and beautifying of an elderly
person, who never goes abroad, whom nobody ever visits, and from whom,
when she shall have done her utmost, it were the best charity to
turn one's eyes another way?
  Now she is almost ready. Let us pardon her one other pause; for it
is given to the sole sentiment, or, we might better say,- heightened
and rendered intense, as it has been, by sorrow and seclusion,- to the
strong passion of her life. We heard the turning of a key in a small
lock; she has opened a secret drawer of an escritoire, and is probably
looking at a certain miniature, done in Malbone's most perfect
style, and representing a face worthy of no less delicate a pencil. It
was once our good fortune to see this picture. It is a likeness of a
young man, in a silken dressing-gown of an old fashion, the soft
richness of which is well adapted to the countenance of reverie,
with its full, tender lips, and beautiful eyes, that seem to
indicate not so much capacity of thought, as gentle and voluptuous
emotion. Of the possessor of such features we shall have a right to
ask nothing, except that he would take the rude world easily, and make
himself happy in it. Can it have been an early lover of Miss Hepzibah?
No; she never had a lover- poor thing, how could she?- nor ever
knew, by her own experience, what love technically means. And yet, her
undying faith and trust, her fresh remembrance, and continual
devotedness towards the original of that miniature, have been the only
substance for her heart to feed upon.
  She seems to have put aside the miniature, and is standing again
before the toilet-glass. There are tears to be wiped off. A few more
footsteps to and fro; and here, at last,- with another pitiful sigh,
like a gust of chill, damp wind out of a long-closed vault, the door
of which has accidentally been set ajar,- here comes Miss Hepzibah
Pyncheon! Forth she steps into the dusky, time-darkened passage; a
tall figure, clad in black silk, with a long and shrunken waist,
feeling her way towards the stairs like a near-sighted person, as in
truth she is.
                                                   
  The sun, meanwhile, if not already above the horizon, was
ascending nearer and nearer to its verge. A few clouds, floating
high upward, caught some of the earliest light, and threw down its
golden gleam on the windows of all the houses in the street, not
forgetting the House of the Seven Gables, which- many such sunrises as
it had witnessed- looked cheerfully at the present one. The
reflected radiance served to show, pretty distinctly, the aspect and
arrangement of the room which Hepzibah entered, after descending the
stairs. It was a low-studded room, with a beam across the ceiling,
panelled with dark wood, and having a large chimney-piece, set round
with pictured tiles, but now closed by an iron fire-board, through
which ran the funnel of a modern stove. There was a carpet on the
floor, originally of rich texture, but so worn and faded in these
latter years that its once brilliant figure had quite vanished into
one indistinguishable hue. In the way of furniture, there were two
tables: one, constructed with perplexing intricacy and exhibiting as
many feet as a centipede; the other, most delicately wrought, with
four long and slender legs, so apparently frail that it was almost
incredible what a length of time the ancient tea-table had stood
upon them. Half a dozen chairs stood about the room, straight and
stiff, and so ingeniously contrived for the discomfort of the human
person that they were irksome even to sight, and conveyed the
ugliest possible idea of the state of society to which they could have
been adapted. One exception there was, however, in a very antique
elbow-chair, with a high back, carved elaborately in oak, and a
roomy depth within its arms, that made up, by its spacious
comprehensiveness, for the lack of any of those artistic curves
which abound in a modern chair.
  As for ornamental articles of furniture, we recollect but two, if
such they may be called. One was a map of the Pyncheon territory at
the eastward, not engraved, but the handiwork of some skilful old
draughtsman, and grotesquely illuminated with pictures of Indians
and wild beasts, among which was seen a lion; the natural history of
the region being as little known as its geography, which was put
down most fantastically awry. The other adornment was the portrait
of old Colonel Pyncheon, at two thirds length, representing the
stern features of a Puritanic-looking personage, in a skull-cap,
with a laced band and a grizzly beard; holding a Bible with one
hand, and in the other uplifting an iron sword-hilt. The latter
object, being more successfully depicted by the artist, stood out in
far greater prominence than the sacred volume. Face to face with
this picture, on entering the apartment, Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon came
to a pause; regarding it with a singular scowl, a strange contortion
of the brow, which, by people who did not know her, would probably
have been interpreted as an expression of bitter anger and ill-will.
But it was no such thing. She, in fact, felt a reverence for the
pictured visage, of which only a far-descended and time-stricken
virgin could be susceptible; and this forbidding scowl was the
innocent result of her near-sightedness, and an effort so to
concentrate her powers of vision as to substitute a firm outline of
the object instead of a vague one.
  We must linger a moment on this unfortunate expression of poor
Hepzibah's brow. Her scowl,- as the world, or such part of it as
sometimes caught a transitory glimpse of her at the window, wickedly
persisted in calling it,- her scowl had done Miss Hepzibah a very
ill office, in establishing her character as an ill-tempered old maid;
nor does it appear improbable that, by often gazing at herself in a
dim looking-glass, and perpetually encountering her own frown within
its ghostly sphere, she had been led to interpret the expression
almost as unjustly as the world did. "How miserably cross I look!" she
must often have whispered to herself; and ultimately have fancied
herself so, by a sense of inevitable doom. But her heart never
frowned. It was naturally tender, sensitive, and full of little
tremors and palpitations; all of which weaknesses it retained, while
her visage was growing so perversely stern, and even fierce. Nor had
Hepzibah ever any hardihood, except what came from the very warmest
nook in her affections.
  All this time, however, we are loitering faint-heartedly on the
threshold of our story. In very truth, we have an invincible
reluctance to disclose what Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon was about to do.
  It has already been observed, that, in the basement story of the
gable fronting on the street, an unworthy ancestor, nearly a century
ago, had fitted up a shop. Ever since the old gentleman retired from
trade, and fell asleep under his coffin-lid, not only the shop-door,
but the inner arrangements, had been suffered to remain unchanged;
while the dust of ages gathered inch-deep over the shelves and
counter, and partly filled an old pair of scales, as if it were of
value enough to be weighed. It treasured itself up, too, in the
half-open till, where there still lingered a base sixpence, worth
neither more nor less than the hereditary pride which had here been
put to shame. Such had been the state and condition of the little shop
in old Hepzibah's childhood, when she and her brother used to play
at hide-and-seek in its forsaken precincts. So it had remained,
until within a few days past.
                                                  
  But now, though the shop-window was still closely curtained from the
public gaze, a remarkable change had taken place in its interior.
The rich and heavy festoons of cobweb, which it had cost a long
ancestral succession of spiders their life's labor to spin and
weave, had been carefully brushed away from the ceiling. The
counter, shelves, and floor had all been scoured, and the latter was
overstrewn with fresh blue sand. The brown scales, too, had
evidently undergone rigid discipline, in an unavailing effort to rub
off the rust, which, alas! had eaten through and through their
substance. Neither was the little old shop any longer empty of
merchantable goods. A curious eye, privileged to take an account of
stock, and investigate behind the counter, would have discovered a
barrel,- yea, two or three barrels and half ditto,- one containing
flour, another apples, and a third, perhaps, Indian meal. There was
likewise a square box of pine-wood, full of soap in bars; also,
another of the same size, in which were tallow-candles, ten to the
pound. A small stock of brown sugar, some white beans and split
peas, and a few other commodities of low price, and such as are
constantly in demand, made up the bulkier portion of the
merchandise. It might have been taken for a ghostly or
phantasmagoric reflection of the old shop-keeper Pyncheon's shabbily
provided shelves, save that some of the articles were of a description
and outward form which could hardly have been known in his day. For
instance, there was a glass pickle-jar, filled with fragments of
Gibraltar rock; not, indeed, splinters of the veritable stone
foundation of the famous fortress, but bits of delectable candy,
neatly done up in white paper. Jim Crow, moreover, was seen
executing his world-renowned dance, in gingerbread. A party of
leaden dragoons were galloping along one of the shelves, in equipments
and uniform of modern cut; and there were some sugar figures, with
no strong resemblance to the humanity of any epoch, but less
unsatisfactorily representing our own fashions than those of a hundred
years ago. Another phenomenon, still more strikingly modern, was a
package of lucifer matches, which, in old times, would have been
thought actually to borrow their instantaneous flame from the nether
fires of Tophet.
  In short, to bring the matter at once to a point, it was
incontrovertibly evident that somebody had taken the shop and fixtures
of the long-retired and forgotten Mr. Pyncheon, and was about to renew
the enterprise of that departed worthy, with a different set of
customers. Who could this bold adventurer be? And, of all places in
the world, why had he chosen the House of the Seven Gables as the
scene of his commercial speculations?
  We return to the elderly maiden. She at length withdrew her eyes
from the dark countenance of the Colonel's portrait, heaved a sigh,-
indeed, her breast was a very cave of AEolus that morning,- and
stept across the room on tiptoe, as is the customary gait of elderly
women. Passing through an intervening passage, she opened a door
that communicated with the shop, just now so elaborately described.
Owing to the projection of the upper story- and still more to the
thick shadow of the Pyncheon Elm, which stood almost directly in front
of the gable- the twilight, here, was still as much akin to night as
morning. Another heavy sigh from Miss Hepzibah! After a moment's pause
on the threshold, peering towards the window with her near-sighted
scowl, as if frowning down some bitter enemy, she suddenly projected
herself into the shop. The haste, and, as it were, the galvanic
impulse of the movement, were really quite startling.
  Nervously-in a sort of frenzy, we might almost say- she began to
busy herself in arranging some children's playthings, and other little
wares, on the shelves and at the shop-window. In the aspect of this
dark-arrayed, pale-faced, lady-like old figure there was a deeply
tragic character that contrasted irreconcilably with the ludicrous
pettiness of her employment. It seemed a queer anomaly, that so
gaunt and dismal a personage should take a toy in hand; a miracle,
that the toy did not vanish in her grasp; a miserably absurd idea,
that she should go on perplexing her stiff and sombre intellect with
the question how to tempt little boys into her premises! Yet such is
undoubtedly her object. Now she places a gingerbread elephant
against the window, but with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon
the floor, with the dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it
has ceased to be an elephant, and has become a few bits of musty
gingerbread. There, again, she has upset a tumbler of marbles, all
of which roll different ways, and each individual marble,
devil-directed, into the most difficult obscurity that it can find.
Heaven help our poor old Hepzibah, and forgive us for taking a
ludicrous view of her position! As her rigid and rusty frame goes down
upon its hands and knees, in quest of the absconding marbles, we
positively feel so much the more inclined to shed tears of sympathy,
from the very fact that we must needs turn aside and laugh at her. For
here,- and if we fail to impress it suitably upon the reader, it is
our own fault, not that of the theme,- here is one of the truest
points of melancholy interest that occur in ordinary life. It was
the final throe of what called itself old gentility. A lady- who had
fed herself from childhood with the shadowy food of aristocratic
reminiscences, and whose religion it was that a lady's hand soils
itself irremediably by doing aught for bread- this born lady, after
sixty years of narrowing means, is fain to step down from her pedestal
of imaginary rank. Poverty, treading closely at her heels for a
lifetime, has come up with her at last. She must earn her own food, or
starve! And we have stolen upon Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, too
irreverently, at the instant of time when the patrician lady is to
be transformed into the plebeian woman.
  In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social
life, somebody is always at the drowning-point. The tragedy is enacted
with as continual a repetition as that of a popular drama on a
holiday; and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, perhaps, as when an
hereditary noble sinks below his order. More deeply; since, with us,
rank is the grosser substance of wealth and a splendid
establishment, and has no spiritual existence after the death of
these, but dies hopelessly along with them. And, therefore, since we
have been unfortunate enough to introduce our heroine at so
inauspicious a juncture, we would entreat for a mood of due
solemnity in the spectators of her fate. Let us behold, in poor
Hepzibah, the immemorial lady,- two hundred years old, on this side of
the water, and thrice as many on the other,- with her antique
portraits, pedigrees, coats of arms, records and traditions, and her
claim, as joint heiress, to that princely territory at the eastward,
no longer a wilderness, but a populous fertility,- born, too, in
Pyncheon Street, under the Pyncheon Elm, and in the Pyncheon House,
where she has spent all her days,- reduced now, in that very house, to
be the hucksteress of a cent-shop.
                                                  
  This business of setting up a petty shop is almost the only resource
of women, in circumstances at all similar to those of our
unfortunate recluse. With her near-sightedness, and those tremulous
fingers of hers, at once inflexible and delicate, she could not be a
seamstress; although her sampler, of fifty years gone by, exhibited
some of the most recondite specimens of ornamental needlework. A
school for little children had been often in her thoughts; and, at one
time, she had begun a review of her early studies in the New England
Primer, with a view to prepare herself for the office of instructress.
But the love of children had never been quickened in Hepzibah's heart,
and was now torpid, if not extinct; she watched the little people of
the neighborhood from her chamber-window, and doubted whether she
could tolerate a more intimate acquaintance with them. Besides, in our
day, the very A B C has become a science greatly too abstruse to be
any longer taught by pointing a pin from letter to letter. A modern
child could teach old Hepzibah more than old Hepzibah could teach
the child. So- with many a cold, deep heart-quake at the idea of at
last coming into sordid contact with the world, from which she had
so long kept aloof, while every added day of seclusion had rolled
another stone against the cavern-door of her hermitage- the poor thing
bethought herself of the ancient shop-window, the rusty scales, and
dusty till. She might have held back a little longer; but another
circumstance, not yet hinted at, had somewhat hastened her decision.
Her humble preparations, therefore, were duly made, and the enterprise
was now to be commenced. Nor was she entitled to complain of any
remarkable singularity in her fate; for, in the town of her
nativity, we might point to several little shops of a similar
description, some of them in houses as ancient as that of the Seven
Gables; and one or two, it may be, where a decayed gentlewoman
stands behind the counter, as grim an image of family pride as Miss
Hepzibah Pyncheon herself.
  It was overpoweringly ridiculous- we must honestly confess it- the
deportment of the maiden lady while setting her shop in order for
the public eye. She stole on tiptoe to the window, as cautiously as if
she conceived some bloody-minded villain to be watching behind the
elm-tree, with intent to take her life. Stretching out her long,
lank arm, she put a paper of pearl buttons, a jew's-harp, or
whatever the small article might be, in its destined place, and
straightway vanished back into the dusk, as if the world need never
hope for another glimpse of her. It might have been fancied, indeed,
that she expected to minister to the wants of the community unseen,
like a disembodied divinity or enchantress, holding forth her bargains
to the reverential and awe-stricken purchaser in an invisible hand.
But Hepzibah had no such flattering dream. She was well aware that she
must ultimately come forward, and stand revealed in her proper
individuality; but, like other sensitive persons, she could not bear
to be observed in the gradual process, and chose rather to flash forth
on the world's astonished gaze at once.
  The inevitable moment was not much longer to be delayed. The
sunshine might now be seen stealing down the front of the opposite
house, from the windows of which came a reflected gleam, struggling
through the boughs of the elm-tree, and enlightening the interior of
the shop more distinctly than heretofore. The town appeared to be
waking up. A baker's cart had already rattled through the street,
chasing away the latest vestige of night's sanctity with the
jingle-jangle of its dissonant bells. A milkman was distributing the
contents of his cans from door to door; and the harsh peal of a
fisherman's conch shell was heard far off, around the corner. None
of these tokens escaped Hepzibah's notice. The moment had arrived.
To delay longer would be only to lengthen out her misery. Nothing
remained, except to take down the bar from the shop-door, leaving
the entrance free- more than free- welcome, as if all were household
friends- to every passer-by, whose eyes might be attracted by the
commodities at the window. This last act Hepzibah now performed,
letting the bar fall with what smote upon her excited nerves as a most
astounding clatter. Then- as if the only barrier betwixt herself and
the world had been thrown down, and a flood of evil consequences would
come tumbling through the gap- she fled into the inner parlor, threw
herself into the ancestral elbow-chair, and wept.
  Our miserable old Hepzibah! It is a heavy annoyance to a writer, who
endeavors to represent nature, its various attitudes and
circumstances, in a reasonably correct outline and true coloring, that
so much of the mean and ludicrous should be hopelessly mixed up with
the purest pathos which life anywhere supplies to him. What tragic
dignity, for example, can be wrought into a scene like this! How can
we elevate our history of retribution for the sin of long ago, when,
as one of our most prominent figures, we are compelled to introduce-
 not a young and lovely woman, nor even the stately remains of beauty,
storm-shattered by affliction- but a gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed
maiden, in a long-waisted silk gown, and with the strange horror of
a turban on her head! Her visage is not even ugly, It is redeemed from
insignificance only by the contraction of her eyebrows into a
near-sighted scowl. And, finally, her great life-trial seems to be,
that, after sixty years of idleness, she finds it convenient to earn
comfortable bread by setting up a shop in a small way. Nevertheless,
if we look through all the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find
this same entanglement of something mean and trivial with whatever
is noblest in joy or sorrow. Life is made up of marble and mud. And,
without all the deeper trust in a comprehensive sympathy above us,
we might hence be led to suspect the insult of a sneer, as well as
an immitigable frown, on the iron countenance of fate. What is
called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere of
strangely mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are
compelled to assume a garb so sordid.


                                 III
                          THE FIRST CUSTOMER
-
  MISS HEPZIBAH PYNCHEON sat in the oaken elbow-chair, with her
hands over her face, giving way to that heavy down-sinking of the
heart which most persons have experienced, when the image of hope
itself seems ponderously moulded of lead, on the eve of an
enterprise at once doubtful and momentous. She was suddenly startled
by the tinkling alarum- high, sharp, and irregular- of a little
bell. The maiden lady arose upon her feet, as pale as a ghost at
cock-crow; for she was an enslaved spirit, and this the talisman to
which she owed obedience. This little bell,- to speak in plainer
terms,- being fastened over the shop-door, was so contrived as to
vibrate by means of a steel spring, and thus convey notice to the
inner regions of the house when any customer should cross the
threshold. Its ugly and spiteful little din (heard now for the first
time, perhaps, since Hepzibah's periwigged predecessor had retired
from trade) at once set every nerve of her body in responsive and
tumultuous vibration. The crisis was upon her! Her first customer
was at the door!
  Without giving herself time for a second thought, she rustled into
the shop, pale, wild, desperate in gesture and expression, scowling
portentously, and looking far better qualified to do fierce battle
with a housebreaker than to stand smiling behind the counter,
bartering small wares for a copper recompense. Any ordinary
customer, indeed, would have turned his back and fled. And yet there
was nothing fierce in Hepzibah's poor old heart; nor had she, at the
moment, a single bitter thought against the world at large, or one
individual man or woman. She wished them all well, but wished, too,
that she herself were done with them, and in her quiet grave.
  The applicant, by this time, stood within the doorway. Coming
freshly, as he did, out of the morning light, he appeared to have
brought some of its cheery influences into the shop along with him. It
was a slender young man, not more than one or two and twenty years
old, with rather a grave and thoughtful expression for his years,
but likewise a springy alacrity and vigor. These qualities were not
only perceptible, physically, in his make and motions, but made
themselves felt almost immediately in his character. A brown beard,
not too silken in its texture, fringed his chin, but as yet without
completely hiding it; he wore a short mustache, too, and his dark,
high-featured countenance looked all the better for these natural
ornaments. As for his dress, it was of the simplest kind; a summer
sack of cheap and ordinary material, thin checkered pantaloons, and
a straw hat, by no means of the finest braid. Oak Hall might have
supplied his entire equipment. He was chiefly marked as a gentleman-
if such, indeed, he made any claim to be- by the rather remarkable
whiteness and nicety of his clean linen.
  He met the scowl of old Hepzibah without apparent alarm, as having
heretofore encountered it and found it harmless.
                                                  
  "So, my dear Miss Pyncheon," said the daguerreotypist,- for it was
that sole other occupant of the seven-gabled mansion,- "I am glad to
see that you have not shrunk from your good purpose. I merely look
in to offer my best wishes, and to ask if I can assist you any further
in your preparations."
  People in difficulty and distress, or in any manner at odds with the
world, can endure a vast amount of harsh treatment, and perhaps be
only the stronger for it; whereas they give way at once before the
simplest expression of what they perceive to be genuine sympathy. So
it proved with poor Hepzibah; for, when she saw the young man's
smile,- looking so much the brighter on a thoughtful face,- and
heard his kindly tone, she broke first into a hysteric giggle and then
began to sob.
  "Ah, Mr. Holgrave," cried she, as soon as she could speak, "I
never can go through with it! Never, never, never! I wish I were dead,
and in the old family-tomb, with all my forefathers! With my father,
and my mother, and my sister! Yes, and with my brother, who had far
better find me there than here! The world is too chill and hard,-
and I am too old, and too feeble, and too hopeless!"
  "Oh, believe me, Miss Hepzibah," said the young man, quietly, "these
feelings will not trouble you any longer, after you are once fairly in
the midst of your enterprise. They are unavoidable at this moment,
standing, as you do, on the outer verge of your long seclusion, and
peopling the world with ugly shapes, which you will soon find to be as
unreal as the giants and ogres of a child's story-book. I find nothing
so singular in life, as that everything appears to lose its
substance the instant one actually grapples with it. So it will be
with what you think so terrible."
  "But I am a woman!" said Hepzibah, piteously. "I was going to say, a
lady,- but I consider that as past."
                                                 
  "Well; no matter if it be past!" answered the artist, a strange
gleam of half-hidden sarcasm flashing through the kindliness of his
manner. "Let it go! You are the better without it. I speak frankly, my
dear Miss Pyncheon! for are we not friends? I look upon this as one of
the fortunate days of your life. It ends an epoch and begins one.
Hitherto, the lifeblood has been gradually chilling in your veins as
you sat aloof, within your circle of gentility, while the rest of
the world was fighting out its battle with one kind of necessity or
another. Henceforth, you will at least have the sense of healthy and
natural effort for a purpose, and of lending your strength- be it
great or small- to the united struggle of mankind. This is success,-
all the success that anybody meets with!"
  "It is natural enough, Mr. Holgrave, that you should have ideas like
these," rejoined Hepzibah, drawing up her gaunt figure, with
slightly offended dignity. "You are a man, a young man, and brought
up, I suppose, as almost everybody is nowadays, with a view to seeking
your fortune. But I was born a lady, and have always lived one; no
matter in what narrowness of means, always a lady!"
  "But I was not born a gentleman; neither have I lived like one,"
said Holgrave, slightly smiling; "so, my dear madam, you will hardly
expect me to sympathize with sensibilities of this kind; though,
unless I deceive myself, I have some imperfect comprehension of
them. These names of gentleman and lady had a meaning, in the past
history of the world, and conferred privileges, desirable or
otherwise, on those entitled to bear them. In the present- and still
more in the future condition of society- they imply, not privilege,
but restriction!"
  "These are new notions," said the old gentlewoman, shaking her head.
"I shall never understand them; neither do I wish it."
  "We will cease to speak of them, then," replied the artist, with a
friendlier smile than his last one, "and I will leave you to feel
whether it is not better to be a true woman than a lady. Do you really
think, Miss Hepzibah, that any lady of your family has ever done a
more heroic thing, since this house was built, than you are performing
in it today? Never; and if the Pyncheons had always acted so nobly,
I doubt whether an old wizard Maule's anathema, of which you told me
once, would have had much weight with Providence against them."
                                                 
  "Ah!- no, no!" said Hepzibah, not displeased at this allusion to the
sombre dignity of an inherited curse. "If old Maule's ghost, or a
descendant of his, could see me behind the counter to-day, he would
call it the fulfilment of his worst wishes. But I thank you for your
kindness, Mr. Holgrave, and will do my utmost to be a good
shop-keeper."
  "Pray do," said Holgrave, "and let me have the pleasure of being
your first customer. I am about taking a walk to the seashore,
before going to my rooms, where I misuse Heaven's blessed sunshine
by tracing out human features through its agency. A few of those
biscuits dipt in seawater, will be just what I need for breakfast.
What is the price of half a dozen?"
  "Let me be a lady a moment longer," replied Hepzibah, with a
manner of antique stateliness to which a melancholy smile lent a
kind of grace. She put the biscuits into his hand, but rejected the
compensation. "A Pyncheon must not, at all events under her
forefathers' roof, receive money for a morsel of bread from her only
friend!"
  Holgrave took his departure, leaving her, for the moment, with
spirits not quite so much depressed. Soon, however, they had
subsided nearly to their former dead level. With a beating heart,
she listened to the footsteps of early passengers, which now began
to be frequent along the street. Once or twice they seemed to
linger; these strangers, or neighbors, as the case might be, were
looking at the display of toys and petty commodities in Hepzibah's
shop-window. She was doubly tortured; in part, with a sense of
overwhelming shame that strange and unloving eyes should have the
privilege of gazing, and partly because the idea occurred to her, with
ridiculous importunity, that the window was not arranged so skilfully,
nor nearly to so much advantage, as it might have been. It seemed as
if the whole fortune or failure of her shop might depend on the
display of a different set of articles, or substituting a fairer apple
for one which appeared to be specked. So she made the change, and
straightway fancied that everything was spoiled by it; not recognizing
that it was the nervousness of the juncture, and her own native
squeamishness as an old maid, that wrought all the seeming mischief.
  Anon, there was an encounter, just at the door-step, betwixt two
laboring men, as their rough voices denoted them to be. After some
slight talk about their own affairs, one of them chanced to notice the
shop-window, and directed the other's attention to it.
                                                 
  "See here!" cried he; "what do you think of this? Trade seems to
be looking up in Pyncheon Street!"
  "Well, well, this is a sight, to be sure!" exclaimed the other.
"In the old Pyncheon House, and underneath the Pyncheon Elm! Who would
have thought it? Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a cent-shop!"
  "Will she make it go, think you, Dixey?" said his friend. "I don't
call it a very good stand. There's another shop just round the
corner."
  "Make it go!" cried Dixey, with a most contemptuous expression, as
if the very idea were impossible to be conceived. "Not a bit of it!
Why, her face- I've seen it, for I dug her garden for her one year-
her face is enough to frighten the Old Nick himself, if he had ever so
great a mind to trade with her. People can't stand it, I tell you! She
scowls dreadfully, reason or none, out of pure ugliness of temper!"
  "Well, that's not so much matter," remarked the other man. "These
sour-tempered folks are mostly handy at business, and know pretty well
what they are about. But, as you say, I don't think she'll do much.
This business of keeping cent-shops is overdone, like all other
kinds of trade, handicraft, and bodily labor. I know it, to my cost!
My wife kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her
outlay!"
                                                 
  "Poor business!" responded Dixey, in a tone as if he were shaking
his head,- "poor business!"
  For some reason or other, not very easy to analyze, there had hardly
been so bitter a pang in all her previous misery about the matter as
what thrilled Hepzibah's heart, on overhearing the above conversation.
The testimony in regard to her scowl was frightfully important; it
seemed to hold up her image wholly relieved from the false light of
her self-partialities, and so hideous that she dared not look at it.
She was absurdly hurt, moreover, by the slight and idle effect that
her setting up shop- an event of such breathless interest to
herself- appeared to have upon the public, of which these two men were
the nearest representatives. A glance; a passing word or two; a coarse
laugh; and she was doubtless forgotten before they turned the
corner! They cared nothing for her dignity, and just as little for her
degradation. Then, also, the augury of ill-success, uttered from the
sure wisdom of experience, fell upon her half-dead hope like a clod
into a grave. The man's wife had already tried the same experiment,
and failed! How could the born lady,- the recluse of half a
lifetime, utterly unpractised in the world, at sixty years of age,-
how could she ever dream of succeeding, when the hard, vulgar, keen,
busy, hackneyed New England woman had lost five dollars on her
little outlay! Success presented itself as an impossibility, and the
hope of it as a wild hallucination.
  Some malevolent spirit, doing his utmost to drive Hepzibah mad,
unrolled before her imagination a kind of panorama, representing the
great thoroughfare of a city all astir with customers. So many and
so magnificent shops as there were! Groceries, toy-shops, dry-goods
stores, with their immense panes of plate-glass, their gorgeous
fixtures, their vast and complete assortments of merchandise, in which
fortunes had been invested; and those noble mirrors at the farther end
of each establishment, doubling all this wealth by a brightly
burnished vista of unrealities! On one side of the street this
splendid bazaar, with a multitude of perfumed and glossy salesmen,
smirking, smiling, bowing, and measuring out the goods. On the
other, the dusky old House of the Seven Gables, with the antiquated
shop-window under its projecting story, and Hepzibah herself, in a
gown of rusty black silk, behind the counter, scowling at the world as
it went by! This mighty contrast thrust itself forward as a fair
expression of the odds against which she was to begin her struggle for
a subsistence. Success? Preposterous! She would never think of it
again! The house might just as well be buried in an eternal fog
while all other houses had the sunshine on them; for not a foot
would ever cross the threshold, nor a hand so much as try the door!
  But, at this instant, the shop-bell, right over her head, tinkled as
if it were bewitched. The old gentlewoman's heart seemed to be
attached to the same steel spring, for it went through a series of
sharp jerks, in unison with the sound. The door was thrust open,
although no human form was perceptible on the other side of the
half- window. Hepzibah, nevertheless, stood at a gaze, with her
hands clasped, looking very much as if she had summoned up an evil
spirit, and were afraid, yet resolved, to hazard the encounter.
  "Heaven help me!" she groaned, mentally. "Now is my hour of need!"
                                                 
  The door, which moved with difficulty on its creaking and rusty
hinges, being forced quite open, a square and sturdy little urchin
became apparent, with cheeks as red as an apple. He was clad rather
shabbily (but, as it seemed, more owing to his mother's carelessness
than his father's poverty), in a blue apron, very wide and short
trousers, shoes somewhat out at the toes, and a chip-hat, with the
frizzles of his curly hair sticking through its crevices. A book and a
small slate, under his arm, indicated that he was on his way to
school. He stared at Hepzibah a moment, as an elder customer than
himself would have been likely enough to do, not knowing what to
make of the tragic attitude and queer scowl wherewith she regarded
him.
  "Well, child," said she, taking heart at sight of a personage so
little formidable,- "well, my child, what did you wish for?"
  "That Jim Crow there in the window," answered the urchin, holding
out a cent, and pointing to the gingerbread figure that had
attracted his notice, as he loitered along to school; "the one that
has not a broken foot."
  So Hepzibah put forth her lank arm, and, taking the effigy from
the shop-window, delivered it to her first customer.
  "No matter for the money," said she, giving him a little push
towards the door; for her old gentility was contumaciously squeamish
at sight of the copper coin, and, besides, it seemed such pitiful
meanness to take the child's pocket-money in exchange for a bit of
stale gingerbread. "No matter for the cent. You are welcome to Jim
Crow."
                                                 
  The child, staring with round eyes at this instance of liberality,
wholly unprecedented in his large experience of cent-shops, took the
man of gingerbread, and quitted the premises. No sooner had he reached
the sidewalk (little cannibal that he was!) than Jim Crow's head was
in his mouth. As he had not been careful to shut the door, Hepzibah
was at the pains of closing it after him, with a pettish ejaculation
or two about the troublesomeness of young people, and particularly
of small boys. She had just placed another representative of the
renowned Jim Crow at the window, when again the shop-bell tinkled
clamorously, and again the door being thrust open, with its
characteristic jerk and jar, disclosed the same sturdy little urchin
who, precisely two minutes ago, had made his exit. The crumbs and
discoloration of the cannibal feast, as yet hardly consummated, were
exceedingly visible about his mouth.
  "What is it now, child?" asked the maiden lady, rather impatiently
"did you come back to shut the door?"
  "No," answered the urchin, pointing to the figure that had just been
put up; "I want that other Jim Crow."
  "Well, here it is for you," said Hepzibah, reaching it down; but
recognizing that this pertinacious customer would not quit her on
any other terms, so long as she had a gingerbread figure in her
shop, she partly drew back her extended hand, "Where is the cent?"
  The little boy had the cent ready, but, like a true born Yankee,
would have preferred the better bargain to the worse. Looking somewhat
chagrinned, he put the coin into Hepzibah's hand, and departed,
sending the second Jim Crow in quest of the former one. The new
shopkeeper dropped the first solid result of her commercial enterprise
into the till. It was done! The sordid stain of that copper coin could
never be washed away from her palm. The little school-boy, aided by
the impish figure of the negro dancer, had wrought an irreparable
ruin. The structure of ancient aristocracy had been demolished by him,
even as if his childish gripe had torn down the seven-gabled
mansion. Now let Hepzibah turn the old Pyncheon portraits with their
faces to the wall, and take the map of her Eastern territory to kindle
the kitchen fire, and blow up the flame with the empty breath of her
ancestral traditions! What had she to do with ancestry? Nothing; no
more than with posterity! No lady, now, but simply Hepzibah
Pyncheon, a forlorn old maid, and keeper of a cent-shop!
                                                 
  Nevertheless, even while she paraded these ideas somewhat
ostentatiously through her mind, it is altogether surprising what a
calmness had come over her. The anxiety and misgivings which had
tormented her, whether asleep or in melancholy day-dreams, ever
since her project began to take an aspect of solidity, had now
vanished quite away. She felt the novelty of her position, indeed, but
no longer with disturbance or affright. Now and then, there came a
thrill of almost youthful enjoyment. It was the invigorating breath of
a fresh outward atmosphere, after the long torpor and monotonous
seclusion of her life. So wholesome is effort! So miraculous the
strength that we do not know of! The healthiest glow that Hepzibah had
known for years had come now in the dreaded crisis, when, for the
first time, she had put forth her hand to help herself. The little
circlet of the schoolboy's copper coin- dim and lustreless though it
was, with the small services which it had been doing here and there
about the world- had proved a talisman, fragrant with good, and
deserving to be set in gold and worn next her heart. It was as potent,
and perhaps endowed with the same kind of efficacy, as a galvanic
ring! Hepzibah, at all events, was indebted to its subtile operation
both in body and spirit; so much the more, as it inspired her with
energy to get some breakfast, at which, still the better to keep up
her courage, she allowed herself an extra spoonful in her infusion
of black tea.
  Her introductory day of shop-keeping did not run on, however,
without many and serious interruptions of this mood of cheerful vigor.
As a general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more
than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them
at a reasonably full exertion of their powers. In the case of our
old gentlewoman, after the excitement of new effort had subsided,
the despondency of her whole life threatened, ever and anon, to
return. It was like the heavy mass of clouds which we may often see
obscuring the sky, and making a gray twilight everywhere, until,
towards nightfall, it yields temporarily to a glimpse of sunshine.
But, always, the envious cloud strives to gather again across the
streak of celestial azure.
  Customers came in, as the forenoon advanced, but rather slowly; in
some cases, too, it must be owned, with little satisfaction either
to themselves or Miss Hepzibah; nor, on the whole, with an aggregate
of very rich emolument to the till. A little girl, sent by her
mother to match a skein of cotton thread, of a peculiar hue, took
one that the near-sighted old lady pronounced extremely like, but soon
came running back, with a blunt and cross message, that it would not
do, and, besides, was very rotten! Then, there was a pale,
care-wrinkled woman, not old but haggard, and already with streaks
of gray among her hair, like silver ribbons; one of those women,
naturally delicate, whom you at once recognize as worn to death by a
brute- probably a drunken brute- of a husband, and at least nine
children. She wanted a few pounds of flour, and offered the money,
which the decayed gentlewoman silently rejected, and gave the poor
soul better measure than if she had taken it. Shortly afterwards, a
man in a blue cotton frock, much soiled, came in and bought a pipe,
filling the whole shop, meanwhile, with the hot odor of strong
drink, not only exhaled in the torrid atmosphere of his breath, but
oozing out of his entire system, like an inflammable gas. It was
impressed on Hepzibah's mind that this was the husband of the
care-wrinkled woman. He asked for a paper of tobacco; and as she had
neglected to provide herself with the article, her brutal customer
dashed down his newly-bought pipe and left the shop, muttering some
unintelligible words, which had the tone and bitterness of a curse.
Hereupon Hepzibah threw up her eyes, unintentionally scowling in the
face of Providence!
  No less than five persons, during the forenoon, inquired for
ginger-beer, or root-beer, or any drink of a similar brewage, and,
obtaining nothing of the kind, went off in an exceedingly bad humor.
Three of them left the door open, and the other two pulled it so
spitefully in going out that the little bell played the very deuce
with Hepzibah's nerves. A round, bustling, fire-ruddy housewife of the
neighborhood, burst breathless into the shop, fiercely demanding
yeast; and when the poor gentlewoman, with her cold shyness of manner,
gave her hot customer to understand that she did not keep the article,
this very capable housewife took upon herself to administer a
regular rebuke.
  "A cent-shop, and no yeast!" quoth she; "that will never do! Who
ever heard of such a thing? Your loaf will never rise, no more than
mine will today. You had better shut up shop at once."
                                                 
  "Well," said Hepzibah, heaving a deep sigh, "perhaps I had!"
  Several times, moreover, besides the above instance, her lady-like
sensibilities were seriously infringed upon by the familiar, if not
rude, tone with which people addressed her. They evidently
considered themselves not merely her equals, but her patrons and
superiors, Now, Hepzibah had unconsciously flattered herself with
the idea that there would be a gleam or halo, of some kind or other,
about her person, which would insure an obeisance to her sterling
gentility, or, at least, a tacit recognition of it. On the other hand,
nothing tortured her more intolerably than when this recognition was
too prominently expressed. To one or two rather officious offers of
sympathy, her responses were little short of acrimonious; and, we
regret to say, Hepzibah was thrown into a positively unchristian state
of mind by the suspicion that one of her customers was drawn to the
shop, not by any real need of the article which she pretended to seek,
but by a wicked wish to stare at her. The vulgar creature was
determined to see for herself what sort of a figure a mildewed piece
of aristocracy, after wasting all the bloom and much of the decline of
her life apart from the world, would cut behind a counter. In this
particular case, however mechanical and innocuous it might be at other
times, Hepzibah's contortion of brow served her in good stead.
  "I never was so frightened in my life!" said the curious customer,
in describing the incident to one of her acquaintances. "She's a
real old vixen, take my word of it! She says little, to be sure; but
if you could only see the mischief in her eye!"
  On the whole, therefore, her new experience led our decayed
gentlewoman to very disagreeable conclusions as to the temper and
manners of what she termed the lower classes, whom heretofore she
had looked down upon with a gentle and pitying complaisance, as
herself occupying a sphere of unquestionable superiority. But,
unfortunately, she had likewise to struggle against a bitter emotion
of a directly opposite kind: a sentiment of virulence, we mean,
towards the idle aristocracy to which it had so recently been her
pride to belong. When a lady, in a delicate and costly summer garb,
with a floating veil and gracefully swaying gown, and, altogether,
an etherial lightness that made you look at her beautifully
slippered feet, to see whether she trod on the dust or floated in
the air,- when such a vision happened to pass through this retired
street, leaving it tenderly and delusively fragrant with her
passage, as if a bouquet of tea-roses had been borne along,- then
again, it is to be feared, old Hepzibah's scowl could no longer
vindicate itself entirely on the plea of near-sightedness.
  "For what end," thought she, giving vent to that feeling of
hostility which is the only real abasement of the poor in presence
of the rich,- "for what good end, in the wisdom of Providence, does
that woman live? Must the whole world toil, that the palms of her
hands may be kept white and delicate?"
                                                 
  Then, ashamed and penitent, she hid her face.
  "May God forgive me!" said she.
  Doubtless, God did forgive her. But, taking the inward and outward
history of the first half-day into consideration, Hepzibah began to
fear that the shop would prove her ruin in a moral and religious point
of view, without contributing very essentially towards even her
temporal welfare.


                                  IV
                       A DAY BEHIND THE COUNTER
-
  TOWARDS noon, Hepzibah saw an elderly gentleman, large and portly,
and of remarkably dignified demeanor, passing slowly along on the
opposite side of the white and dusty street. On coming within the
shadow of the Pyncheon Elm, he stopt, and (taking off his hat,
meanwhile, to wipe the perspiration from his brow) seemed to
scrutinize, with especial interest, the dilapidated and
rusty-visaged House of the Seven Gables. He himself, in a very
different style, was as well worth looking at as the house. No
better model need be sought, nor could have been found, of a very high
order of respectability, which, by some indescribable magic, not
merely expressed itself in his looks and gestures, but even governed
the fashion of his garments, and rendered them all proper and
essential to the man. Without appearing to differ, in any tangible
way, from other people's clothes, there was yet a wide and rich
gravity about them that must have been a characteristic of the wearer,
since it could not be defined as pertaining either to the cut or
material. His gold-headed cane, too,- a serviceable staff, of dark
polished wood,- had similar traits, and, had it chosen to take a
walk by itself, would have been recognized anywhere as a tolerably
adequate representative of its master. This character- which showed
itself so strikingly in everything about him, and the effect of
which we seek to convey to the reader- went no deeper than his
station, habits of life, and external circumstances. One perceived him
to be a personage of marked influence and authority; and,
especially, you could feel just as certain that he was opulent as if
he had exhibited his bank account, or as if you had seen him
touching the twigs of the Pyncheon Elm, and, Midas-like, transmuting
them to gold. In his youth, he had probably been considered a handsome
man; at his present age, his brow was too heavy, his temples too bare,
his remaining hair too gray, his eye too cold, his lips too closely
compressed, to bear any relation to mere personal beauty. He would
have made a good and massive portrait; better now, perhaps, than at
any previous period of his life, although his look might grow
positively harsh in the process of being fixed upon the canvas. The
artist would have found it desirable to study his face, and prove
its capacity for varied expression; to darken it with a frown,- to
kindle it up with a smile.
  While the elderly gentleman stood looking at the Pyncheon House,
both the frown and the smile passed successively over his countenance.
His eye rested on the shop-window, and putting up a pair of gold-bowed
spectacles, which he held in his hand, he minutely surveyed Hepzibah's
little arrangement of toys and commodities. At first it seemed not
to please him,- nay, to cause him exceeding displeasure,- and yet, the
very next moment, he smiled. While the latter expression was yet on
his lips, he caught a glimpse of Hepzibah, who had involuntarily
bent forward to the window; and then the smile changed from acrid
and disagreeable to the sunniest complacency and benevolence. He
bowed, with a happy mixture of dignity and courteous kindliness, and
pursued his way.
  "There he is!" said Hepzibah to herself, gulping down a very
bitter emotion, and, since she could not rid herself of it, trying
to drive it back into her heart. "What does he think of it, I
wonder? Does it please him? Ah! he is looking back!"
  The gentleman had paused in the street, and turned himself half
about, still with his eyes fixed on the shop-window. In fact, he
wheeled wholly round, and commenced a step or two, as if designing
to enter the shop; but, as it chanced, his purpose was anticipated
by Hepzibah's first customer, the little cannibal of Jim Crow, who,
staring up at the window, was irresistibly attracted by an elephant of
gingerbread. What a grand appetite had this small urchin!-Two Jim
Crows immediately after breakfast!- and now an elephant, as a
preliminary whet before dinner! By the time this latter purchase was
completed, the elderly gentleman had resumed his way, and turned the
street corner.
                                                   
  "Take it as you like, Cousin Jaffrey!" muttered the maiden lady,
as she drew back, after cautiously thrusting out her head, and looking
up and down the street,- "take it as you like! You have seen my little
shop-window! Well!- what have you to say?- is not the Pyncheon House
my own, while I'm alive?"
  After this incident, Hepzibah retreated to the back parlor, where
she at first caught up a half-finished stocking, and began knitting at
it with nervous and irregular jerks; but quickly finding herself at
odds with the stitches, she threw it aside, and walked hurriedly about
the room. At length, she paused before the portrait of the stern old
Puritan, her ancestor, and the founder of the house. In one sense,
this picture had almost faded into the canvas, and hidden itself
behind the dus