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But ancient superstitions, after being steeped in humanhearts and embodied in human breath, and passing from lip to ear in manifoldrepetition, through a series of generations, become imbued with an effect ofhomely truth. By long transmission among household facts, they grow to look likethem, and have such a familiar way of making themselves at home that theirinfluence is usually greater than we suspect. Fora very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however, the Maules hadcontinued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had suffered so unjust adeath. To all appearance, they were a quiet, honest, well-meaning race ofpeople, cherishing no malice against individuals or the public for the wrongwhich had been done them; or if, at their own fireside, they transmitted fromfather to child any hostile recollection of the wizard’s fate and theirlost patrimony, it was never acted upon, nor openly expressed.
Alice Pyncheon
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It was strewn aboutwith a few old books, and a work-basket, and a dusty writing-desk; and had, onone side, a large black article of furniture, of very strange appearance, whichthe old gentlewoman told Phœbe was a harpsichord. It looked more like a coffinthan anything else; and, indeed,—not having been played upon, or opened,for years,—there must have been a vast deal of dead music in it, stifledfor want of air. Human finger was hardly known to have touched its chords sincethe days of Alice Pyncheon, who had learned the sweet accomplishment of melodyin Europe.
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Less terrible but equally strange is Holgrave, the house’s only lodger. He and Phoebe spend much time together, tending the garden and feeding the house chickens, a once-mighty breed whose former glory is compared to that of the Pyncheons. Holgrave explains his radical politics, which revolve around the principle that each generation should tear down the work of those before it, and asks Phoebe constantly about Clifford and his past. Although Hawthorne claims in his preface that The House of the Seven Gables is not based on any location. However, the Turner House, or Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, in Salem, Massachusetts, was an inspiration for him. The Ingersolls were Hawthorne’s cousins, and he was struck by the house’s history (though, having been renovated to match popular trends, it only boasted three gables at that time).
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Hepzibah fancied that there was something peculiar in her venerablefriend’s look and tone; insomuch, that she gazed into his face withconsiderable earnestness, endeavoring to discover what secret meaning, if any,might be lurking there. Individuals whose affairs have reached an utterlydesperate crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive with hopes, so muchthe more airily magnificent as they have the less of solid matter within theirgrasp whereof to mould any judicious and moderate expectation of good. Thus,all the while Hepzibah was perfecting the scheme of her little shop, she hadcherished an unacknowledged idea that some harlequin trick of fortune wouldintervene in her favor. For example, an uncle—who had sailed for Indiafifty years before, and never been heard of since—might yet return, andadopt her to be the comfort of his very extreme and decrepit age, and adorn herwith pearls, diamonds, and Oriental shawls and turbans, and make her theultimate heiress of his unreckonable riches. Or the member of Parliament, nowat the head of the English branch of the family,—with which the elderstock, on this side of the Atlantic, had held little or no intercourse for thelast two centuries,—this eminent gentleman might invite Hepzibah to quitthe ruinous House of the Seven Gables, and come over to dwell with her kindredat Pyncheon Hall. But, for reasons the most imperative, she could not yield tohis request.
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Itwas not that he intended any rudeness or improper neglect,—which, indeed,he would have blushed to be guilty of,—but it never occurred to him thata person in Maule’s station had a claim on his courtesy, or would troublehimself about it one way or the other. As he stept into the house, a note of sweet and melancholy music thrilled andvibrated along the passage-way, proceeding from one of the rooms above stairs.It was the harpsichord which Alice Pyncheon had brought with her from beyondthe sea. The fair Alice bestowed most of her maiden leisure between flowers andmusic, although the former were apt to droop, and the melodies were often sad.She was of foreign education, and could not take kindly to the New Englandmodes of life, in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed. This young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, it must be observed, was a personlittle understood, and not very generally liked, in the town where he resided;not that anything could be alleged against his integrity, or his skill anddiligence in the handicraft which he exercised. The aversion (as it mightjustly be called) with which many persons regarded him was partly the result ofhis own character and deportment, and partly an inheritance. The only youthful mind with which Phœbe had an opportunity of frequentintercourse was that of the daguerreotypist.
Were our friend now to stalk in among them, with that wide-openstare, at once wild and stolid, his ungenial presence would be apt to changetheir cheer. Neither would it be seemly in Judge Pyncheon, generally soscrupulous in his attire, to show himself at a dinner-table with that crimsonstain upon his shirt-bosom. It is an ugly sight,at any rate; and the wisest way for the Judge is to button his coat closelyover his breast, and, taking his horse and chaise from the livery stable, tomake all speed to his own house.
It was a death that blastedwith strange horror the humble name of the dweller in the cottage, and made itseem almost a religious act to drive the plough over the little area of hishabitation, and obliterate his place and memory from among men. After receiving Mr. Pyncheon’s message, the carpenter merely tarried tofinish a small job, which he happened to have in hand, and then took his waytowards the House of the Seven Gables. This noted edifice, though its stylemight be getting a little out of fashion, was still as respectable a familyresidence as that of any gentleman in town. The present owner, GervaysePyncheon, was said to have contracted a dislike to the house, in consequence ofa shock to his sensibility, in early childhood, from the sudden death of hisgrandfather.
There were few of the Pyncheons left to sun themselves in the glow of theJudge’s prosperity. In respect to natural increase, the breed had notthriven; it appeared rather to be dying out. She was understood to be wretchedly poor, andseemed to make it her choice to remain so; inasmuch as her affluent cousin, theJudge, had repeatedly offered her all the comforts of life, either in the oldmansion or his own modern residence. The last and youngest Pyncheon was alittle country-girl of seventeen, the daughter of another of the Judge’scousins, who had married a young woman of no family or property, and died earlyand in poor circumstances.
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They kept themselves alive, unquestionably, andlaid now and then an egg, and hatched a chicken; not for any pleasure of theirown, but that the world might not absolutely lose what had once been soadmirable a breed of fowls. The distinguishing mark of the hens was a crest oflamentably scanty growth, in these latter days, but so oddly and wickedlyanalogous to Hepzibah’s turban, that Phœbe—to the poignantdistress of her conscience, but inevitably—was led to fancy a generalresemblance betwixt these forlorn bipeds and her respectable relative. Efforts, it is true, were made by the Pyncheons, not only then, but at variousperiods for nearly a hundred years afterwards, to obtain what they stubbornlypersisted in deeming their right. But, in course of time, the territory waspartly regranted to more favored individuals, and partly cleared and occupiedby actual settlers. These last, if they ever heard of the Pyncheon title, wouldhave laughed at the idea of any man’s asserting a right—on thestrength of mouldy parchments, signed with the faded autographs of governorsand legislators long dead and forgotten—to the lands which they or theirfathers had wrested from the wild hand of nature by their own sturdy toil. Thisimpalpable claim, therefore, resulted in nothing more solid than to cherish,from generation to generation, an absurd delusion of family importance, whichall along characterized the Pyncheons.
Soended, for that time, the quest for the lost title-deed of the Pyncheonterritory at the Eastward; nor, though often subsequently renewed, has it everyet befallen a Pyncheon to set his eye upon that parchment. The similarity, intellectual and moral, between the Judge and his ancestorappears to have been at least as strong as the resemblance of mien and featurewould afford reason to anticipate. In old Colonel Pyncheon’s funeraldiscourse the clergyman absolutely canonized his deceased parishioner, andopening, as it were, a vista through the roof of the church, and thence throughthe firmament above, showed him seated, harp in hand, among the crownedchoristers of the spiritual world. On his tombstone, too, the record is highlyeulogistic; nor does history, so far as he holds a place upon its page, assailthe consistency and uprightness of his character. It is often instructive to take the woman’s, the private anddomestic, view of a public man; nor can anything be more curious than the vastdiscrepancy between portraits intended for engraving and the pencil-sketchesthat pass from hand to hand behind the original’s back.
A portrait of this young lady,painted by a Venetian artist, and left by her father in England, is said tohave fallen into the hands of the present Duke of Devonshire, and to be nowpreserved at Chatsworth; not on account of any associations with the original,but for its value as a picture, and the high character of beauty in thecountenance. If ever there was a lady born, and set apart from theworld’s vulgar mass by a certain gentle and cold stateliness, it was thisvery Alice Pyncheon. Yet there was the womanly mixture in her; the tenderness,or, at least, the tender capabilities.
Jaffrey is summoned to his father's home when Clifford informs him that the house is to be sold to pay his father's debts. Jaffrey, terrified at losing the lost treasure, pries up floorboards and searches in the walls at night for the lost gold. He wants to marry his cousin, Hepzibah Pyncheon (Margaret Lindsay), sell the house, and move to New York City. The shock of Judge Pyncheon’s death had a permanently invigorating andultimately beneficial effect on Clifford. There was no free breath to be drawn, withinthe sphere of so malevolent an influence.
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Phœbe put one of her small hands on each elbow of his chair, and leaned herface towards him, so that he might peruse it as carefully as he would. It isprobable that the latent emotions of this parting hour had revived, in somedegree, his bedimmed and enfeebled faculties. At any rate, Phœbe soon feltthat, if not the profound insight of a seer, yet a more than feminine delicacyof appreciation, was making her heart the subject of its regard. A momentbefore, she had known nothing which she would have sought to hide. Now, as ifsome secret were hinted to her own consciousness through the medium ofanother’s perception, she was fain to let her eyelids droop beneathClifford’s gaze. A blush, too,—the redder, because she strove hardto keep it down,—ascended bigger and higher, in a tide of fitfulprogress, until even her brow was all suffused with it.
The girl thenturned towards the House of the Seven Gables, to the door of which,meanwhile,—not the shop-door, but the antique portal,—theomnibus-man had carried a light trunk and a bandbox. First giving a sharp rapof the old iron knocker, he left his passenger and her luggage at thedoor-step, and departed. Coming freshly, as hedid, out of the morning light, he appeared to have brought some of its cheeryinfluences into the shop along with him.
It was a face to which almost any door would have opened ofits own accord. People in difficulty and distress, or in any manner at odds with the world, canendure a vast amount of harsh treatment, and perhaps be only the stronger forit; whereas they give way at once before the simplest expression of what theyperceive to be genuine sympathy. So it proved with poor Hepzibah; for, when shesaw the young man’s smile,—looking so much the brighter on athoughtful face,—and heard his kindly tone, she broke first into ahysteric giggle and then began to sob. After this, Phoebe takes a trip home to her village, and morale in the House of the Seven Gables declines sharply. One day, Judge Pyncheon appears at the House and insists on seeing Clifford. He suspects that Clifford knows the whereabouts of Uncle Jaffrey’s remaining fortune.
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