The House of the Seven Gables
himself a little above common folks, he only stoops so much the lower
to them. I met your cousin, the Judge, ten minutes ago; and, in my old
tow-cloth trousers, as you see, the Judge raised his hat to me, I do
believe! At any rate, the Judge bowed and smiled!”
“Yes,” said Hepzibah, with something bitter stealing unawares into her
tone; “my cousin Jaffrey is thought to have a very pleasant smile!”
“And so he has” replied Uncle Venner. “And that’s rather remarkable in
a Pyncheon; for, begging your pardon, Miss Hepzibah, they never had the
name of being an easy and agreeable set of folks. There was no getting
close to them. But now, Miss Hepzibah, if an old man may be bold to
ask, why don’t Judge Pyncheon, with his great means, step forward, and
tell his cousin to shut up her little shop at once? It’s for your
credit to be doing something, but it’s not for the Judge’s credit to
let you!”
“We won’t talk of this, if you please, Uncle Venner,” said Hepzibah
coldly. “I ought to say, however, that, if I choose to earn bread for
myself, it is not Judge Pyncheon’s fault. Neither will he deserve the
blame,” added she more kindly, remembering Uncle Venner’s privileges of
age and humble familiarity, “if I should, by and by, find it convenient
to retire with you to your farm.”
“And it’s no bad place, either, that farm of mine!” cried the old man
cheerily, as if there were something positively delightful in the
prospect. “No bad place is the great brick farm-house, especially for
them that will find a good many old cronies there, as will be my case.
I quite long to be among them, sometimes, of the winter evenings; for
it is but dull business for a lonesome elderly man, like me, to be
nodding, by the hour together, with no company but his air-tight stove.
Summer or winter, there’s a great deal to be said in favor of my farm!
And, take it in the autumn, what can be pleasanter than to spend a
whole day on the sunny side of a barn or a wood-pile, chatting with
somebody as old as one’s self; or, perhaps, idling away the time with a
natural-born simpleton, who knows how to be idle, because even our busy
Yankees never have found out how to put him to any use? Upon my word,
Miss Hepzibah, I doubt whether I’ve ever been so comfortable as I mean
to be at my farm, which most folks call the workhouse. But you,—you’re
a young woman yet,—you never need go there! Something still better will
turn up for you. I’m sure of it!”
Hepzibah fancied that there was something peculiar in her venerable
friend’s look and tone; insomuch, that she gazed into his face with
considerable earnestness, endeavoring to discover what secret meaning,
if any, might be lurking there. Individuals whose affairs have reached
an utterly desperate crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive
with hopes, so much the more airily magnificent as they have the less
of solid matter within their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and
moderate expectation of good. Thus, all the while Hepzibah was
perfecting the scheme of her little shop, she had cherished an
unacknowledged idea that some harlequin trick of fortune would
intervene in her favor. For example, an uncle—who had sailed for India
fifty years before, and never been heard of since—might yet return, and
adopt her to be the comfort of his very extreme and decrepit age, and
adorn her with pearls, diamonds, and Oriental shawls and turbans, and
make her the ultimate heiress of his unreckonable riches. Or the member
of Parliament, now at the head of the English branch of the
family,—with which the elder stock, on this side of the Atlantic, had
held little or no intercourse for the last two centuries,—this eminent
gentleman might invite Hepzibah to quit the ruinous House of the Seven
Gables, and come over to dwell with her kindred at Pyncheon Hall. But,
for reasons the most imperative, she could not yield to his request. It
was more probable, therefore, that the descendants of a Pyncheon who
had emigrated to Virginia, in some past generation, and became a great
planter there,—hearing of Hepzibah’s destitution, and impelled by the
splendid generosity of character with which their Virginian mixture
must have enriched the New England blood,—would send her a remittance
of a thousand dollars, with a hint of repeating the favor annually.
Or,—and, surely, anything so undeniably just could not be beyond the
limits of reasonable anticipation,—the great claim to the heritage of
Waldo County might finally be decided in favor of the Pyncheons; so
that, instead of keeping a cent-shop, Hepzibah would build a palace,
and look down from its highest tower on hill, dale, forest, field, and
town, as her own share of the ancestral territory.
These were some of the fantasies which she had long dreamed about; and,
aided by these, Uncle Venner’s casual attempt at encouragement kindled
a strange festal glory in the poor, bare, melancholy chambers of her
brain, as if that inner world were suddenly lighted up with gas. But
either he knew nothing of her castles in the air,—as how should he?—or
else her earnest scowl disturbed his recollection, as it might a more
courageous man’s. Instead of pursuing any weightier topic, Uncle Venner
was pleased to favor Hepzibah with some sage counsel in her
shop-keeping capacity.
“Give no credit!”—these were some of his golden maxims,—“Never take
paper-money. Look well to your change! Ring the silver on the
four-pound weight! Shove back all English half-pence and base copper
tokens, such as are very plenty about town! At your leisure hours, knit
children’s woollen socks and mittens! Brew your own yeast, and make
your own ginger-beer!”
And while Hepzibah was doing her utmost to digest the hard little
pellets of his already uttered wisdom, he gave vent to his final, and
what he declared to be his all-important advice, as follows:—
“Put on a bright face for your customers, and smile pleasantly as you
hand them what they ask for! A stale article, if you dip it in a good,
warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that you’ve
scowled upon.”
To this last apothegm poor Hepzibah responded with a sigh so deep and
heavy that it almost rustled Uncle Venner quite away, like a withered
leaf,—as he was,—before an autumnal gale. Recovering himself, however,
he bent forward, and, with a good deal of feeling in his ancient
visage, beckoned her nearer to him.
“When do you expect him home?” whispered he.
“Whom do you mean?” asked Hepzibah, turning pale.
“Ah!—You don’t love to talk about it,” said Uncle Venner. “Well, well!
we’ll say no more, though there’s word of it all over town. I remember
him, Miss Hepzibah, before he could run alone!”
During the remainder of the day, poor Hepzibah acquitted herself even
less creditably, as a shop-keeper, than in her earlier efforts. She
appeared to be walking in a dream; or, more truly, the vivid life and
reality assumed by her emotions made all outward occurrences
unsubstantial, like the teasing phantasms of a half-conscious slumber.
She still responded, mechanically, to the frequent summons of the
shop-bell, and, at the demand of her customers, went prying with vague
eyes about the shop, proffering them one article after another, and
thrusting aside—perversely, as most of them supposed—the identical
thing they asked for. There is sad confusion, indeed, when the spirit
thus flits away into the past, or into the more awful future, or, in
any manner, steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its own region
and the actual world; where the body remains to guide itself as best it
may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life. It is like
death, without death’s quiet privilege,—its freedom from mortal care.
Worst of all, when the actual duties are comprised in such petty
details as now vexed the brooding soul of the old gentlewoman. As the
animosity of fate would have it, there was a great influx of custom in
the course of the afternoon. Hepzibah blundered to and fro about her
small place of business, committing the most unheard-of errors: now
stringing up twelve, and now seven, tallow-candles, instead of ten to
the pound; selling ginger for Scotch snuff, pins for needles, and
needles for pins; misreckoning her change, sometimes to the public
detriment, and much oftener to her own; and thus she went on, doing her
utmost to bring chaos back again, until, at the close of the day’s
labor, to her inexplicable astonishment, she found the money-drawer
almost destitute of coin. After all her painful traffic, the whole
proceeds were perhaps half a dozen coppers, and a questionable
ninepence which ultimately proved to be copper likewise.
At this price, or at whatever price, she rejoiced that the day had
reached its end. Never before had she had such a sense of the
intolerable length of time that creeps between dawn and sunset, and of
the miserable irksomeness of having aught to do, and of the better
wisdom that it would be to lie down at once, in sullen resignation, and
let life, and its toils and vexations, trample over one’s prostrate
body as they may! Hepzibah’s final operation was with the little
devourer of Jim Crow and the elephant, who now proposed to eat a camel.
In her bewilderment, she offered him first a wooden dragoon, and next a
handful of marbles; neither of which being adapted to his else
omnivorous appetite, she hastily held out her whole remaining stock of
natural history in gingerbread, and huddled the small customer out of
the shop. She then muffled the bell in an unfinished stocking, and put
up the oaken bar across the door.
During the latter process, an omnibus came to a stand-still under the
branches of the elm-tree. Hepzibah’s heart was in her mouth. Remote and
dusky, and with no sunshine on all the intervening space, was that
region of the Past whence her only guest might be expected to arrive!
Was she to meet him now?
Somebody, at all events, was passing from the farthest interior of the
omnibus towards its entrance. A gentleman alighted; but it was only to
offer his hand to a young girl whose slender figure, nowise needing
such assistance, now lightly descended the steps, and made an airy
little jump from the final one to the sidewalk. She rewarded her
cavalier with a smile, the cheery glow of which was seen reflected on
his own face as he reentered the vehicle. The girl then turned towards
the House of the Seven Gables, to the door of which, meanwhile,—not the
shop-door, but the antique portal,—the omnibus-man had carried a light
trunk and a bandbox. First giving a sharp rap of the old iron knocker,
he left his passenger and her luggage at the door-step, and departed.
“Who can it be?” thought Hepzibah, who had been screwing her visual
organs into the acutest focus of which they were capable. “The girl
must have mistaken the house.” She stole softly into the hall, and,
herself invisible, gazed through the dusty side-lights of the portal at
the young, blooming, and very cheerful face which presented itself for
admittance into the gloomy old mansion. It was a face to which almost
any door would have opened of its own accord.
The young girl, so fresh, so unconventional, and yet so orderly and
obedient to common rules, as you at once recognized her to be, was
widely in contrast, at that moment, with everything about her. The
sordid and ugly luxuriance of gigantic weeds that grew in the angle of
the house, and the heavy projection that overshadowed her, and the
time-worn framework of the door,—none of these things belonged to her
sphere. But, even as a ray of sunshine, fall into what dismal place it
may, instantaneously creates for itself a propriety in being there, so
did it seem altogether fit that the girl should be standing at the
threshold. It was no less evidently proper that the door should swing