The House of the Seven Gables
as sweet a face as a man’s can be, or ought to be. It has something of
a child’s expression,—and yet not childish,—only one feels so very
kindly towards him! He ought never to suffer anything. One would bear
much for the sake of sparing him toil or sorrow. Who is it, Cousin
Hepzibah?”
“Did you never hear,” whispered her cousin, bending towards her, “of
Clifford Pyncheon?”
“Never. I thought there were no Pyncheons left, except yourself and our
cousin Jaffrey,” answered Phœbe. “And yet I seem to have heard the name
of Clifford Pyncheon. Yes!—from my father or my mother; but has he not
been a long while dead?”
“Well, well, child, perhaps he has!” said Hepzibah with a sad, hollow
laugh; “but, in old houses like this, you know, dead people are very
apt to come back again! We shall see. And, Cousin Phœbe, since, after
all that I have said, your courage does not fail you, we will not part
so soon. You are welcome, my child, for the present, to such a home as
your kinswoman can offer you.”
With this measured, but not exactly cold assurance of a hospitable
purpose, Hepzibah kissed her cheek.
They now went below stairs, where Phœbe—not so much assuming the office
as attracting it to herself, by the magnetism of innate fitness—took
the most active part in preparing breakfast. The mistress of the house,
meanwhile, as is usual with persons of her stiff and unmalleable cast,
stood mostly aside; willing to lend her aid, yet conscious that her
natural inaptitude would be likely to impede the business in hand.
Phœbe and the fire that boiled the teakettle were equally bright,
cheerful, and efficient, in their respective offices. Hepzibah gazed
forth from her habitual sluggishness, the necessary result of long
solitude, as from another sphere. She could not help being interested,
however, and even amused, at the readiness with which her new inmate
adapted herself to the circumstances, and brought the house, moreover,
and all its rusty old appliances, into a suitableness for her purposes.
Whatever she did, too, was done without conscious effort, and with
frequent outbreaks of song, which were exceedingly pleasant to the ear.
This natural tunefulness made Phœbe seem like a bird in a shadowy tree;
or conveyed the idea that the stream of life warbled through her heart
as a brook sometimes warbles through a pleasant little dell. It
betokened the cheeriness of an active temperament, finding joy in its
activity, and, therefore, rendering it beautiful; it was a New England
trait,—the stern old stuff of Puritanism with a gold thread in the web.
Hepzibah brought out some old silver spoons with the family crest upon
them, and a china tea-set painted over with grotesque figures of man,
bird, and beast, in as grotesque a landscape. These pictured people
were odd humorists, in a world of their own,—a world of vivid
brilliancy, so far as color went, and still unfaded, although the
teapot and small cups were as ancient as the custom itself of
tea-drinking.
“Your great-great-great-great-grandmother had these cups, when she was
married,” said Hepzibah to Phœbe. “She was a Davenport, of a good
family. They were almost the first teacups ever seen in the colony; and
if one of them were to be broken, my heart would break with it. But it
is nonsense to speak so about a brittle teacup, when I remember what my
heart has gone through without breaking.”
The cups—not having been used, perhaps, since Hepzibah’s youth—had
contracted no small burden of dust, which Phœbe washed away with so
much care and delicacy as to satisfy even the proprietor of this
invaluable china.
“What a nice little housewife you are!” exclaimed the latter, smiling,
and at the same time frowning so prodigiously that the smile was
sunshine under a thunder-cloud. “Do you do other things as well? Are
you as good at your book as you are at washing teacups?”
“Not quite, I am afraid,” said Phœbe, laughing at the form of
Hepzibah’s question. “But I was schoolmistress for the little children
in our district last summer, and might have been so still.”
“Ah! ’tis all very well!” observed the maiden lady, drawing herself up.
“But these things must have come to you with your mother’s blood. I
never knew a Pyncheon that had any turn for them.”
It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally
quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their
available gifts; as was Hepzibah of this native inapplicability, so to
speak, of the Pyncheons to any useful purpose. She regarded it as an
hereditary trait; and so, perhaps, it was, but unfortunately a morbid
one, such as is often generated in families that remain long above the
surface of society.
Before they left the breakfast-table, the shop-bell rang sharply, and
Hepzibah set down the remnant of her final cup of tea, with a look of
sallow despair that was truly piteous to behold. In cases of
distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the
first. We return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding
torture in our limbs. At all events, Hepzibah had fully satisfied
herself of the impossibility of ever becoming wonted to this peevishly
obstreperous little bell. Ring as often as it might, the sound always
smote upon her nervous system rudely and suddenly. And especially now,
while, with her crested teaspoons and antique china, she was flattering
herself with ideas of gentility, she felt an unspeakable disinclination
to confront a customer.
“Do not trouble yourself, dear cousin!” cried Phœbe, starting lightly
up. “I am shop-keeper to-day.”
“You, child!” exclaimed Hepzibah. “What can a little country girl know
of such matters?”
“Oh, I have done all the shopping for the family at our village store,”
said Phœbe. “And I have had a table at a fancy fair, and made better
sales than anybody. These things are not to be learnt; they depend upon
a knack that comes, I suppose,” added she, smiling, “with one’s
mother’s blood. You shall see that I am as nice a little saleswoman as
I am a housewife!”
The old gentlewoman stole behind Phœbe, and peeped from the passageway
into the shop, to note how she would manage her undertaking. It was a
case of some intricacy. A very ancient woman, in a white short gown and
a green petticoat, with a string of gold beads about her neck, and what
looked like a nightcap on her head, had brought a quantity of yarn to
barter for the commodities of the shop. She was probably the very last
person in town who still kept the time-honored spinning-wheel in
constant revolution. It was worth while to hear the croaking and hollow
tones of the old lady, and the pleasant voice of Phœbe, mingling in one
twisted thread of talk; and still better to contrast their figures,—so
light and bloomy,—so decrepit and dusky,—with only the counter betwixt
them, in one sense, but more than threescore years, in another. As for
the bargain, it was wrinkled slyness and craft pitted against native
truth and sagacity.
“Was not that well done?” asked Phœbe, laughing, when the customer was
gone.
“Nicely done, indeed, child!” answered Hepzibah. “I could not have gone
through with it nearly so well. As you say, it must be a knack that
belongs to you on the mother’s side.”
It is a very genuine admiration, that with which persons too shy or too
awkward to take a due part in the bustling world regard the real actors
in life’s stirring scenes; so genuine, in fact, that the former are
usually fain to make it palatable to their self-love, by assuming that
these active and forcible qualities are incompatible with others, which
they choose to deem higher and more important. Thus, Hepzibah was well
content to acknowledge Phœbe’s vastly superior gifts as a shop-keeper;
she listened, with compliant ear, to her suggestion of various methods
whereby the influx of trade might be increased, and rendered
profitable, without a hazardous outlay of capital. She consented that
the village maiden should manufacture yeast, both liquid and in cakes;
and should brew a certain kind of beer, nectareous to the palate, and
of rare stomachic virtues; and, moreover, should bake and exhibit for
sale some little spice-cakes, which whosoever tasted would longingly
desire to taste again. All such proofs of a ready mind and skilful
handiwork were highly acceptable to the aristocratic hucksteress, so
long as she could murmur to herself with a grim smile, and a
half-natural sigh, and a sentiment of mixed wonder, pity, and growing
affection:—
“What a nice little body she is! If she only could be a lady; too—but
that’s impossible! Phœbe is no Pyncheon. She takes everything from her
mother!”
As to Phœbe’s not being a lady, or whether she were a lady or no, it
was a point, perhaps, difficult to decide, but which could hardly have
come up for judgment at all in any fair and healthy mind. Out of New
England, it would be impossible to meet with a person combining so many
ladylike attributes with so many others that form no necessary (if
compatible) part of the character. She shocked no canon of taste; she
was admirably in keeping with herself, and never jarred against
surrounding circumstances. Her figure, to be sure,—so small as to be
almost childlike, and so elastic that motion seemed as easy or easier
to it than rest, would hardly have suited one’s idea of a countess.
Neither did her face—with the brown ringlets on either side, and the
slightly piquant nose, and the wholesome bloom, and the clear shade of
tan, and the half dozen freckles, friendly remembrances of the April
sun and breeze—precisely give us a right to call her beautiful. But
there was both lustre and depth in her eyes. She was very pretty; as
graceful as a bird, and graceful much in the same way; as pleasant
about the house as a gleam of sunshine falling on the floor through a
shadow of twinkling leaves, or as a ray of firelight that dances on the
wall while evening is drawing nigh. Instead of discussing her claim to
rank among ladies, it would be preferable to regard Phœbe as the
example of feminine grace and availability combined, in a state of
society, if there were any such, where ladies did not exist. There it
should be woman’s office to move in the midst of practical affairs, and
to gild them all, the very homeliest,—were it even the scouring of pots
and kettles,—with an atmosphere of loveliness and joy.
Such was the sphere of Phœbe. To find the born and educated lady, on
the other hand, we need look no farther than Hepzibah, our forlorn old
maid, in her rustling and rusty silks, with her deeply cherished and
ridiculous consciousness of long descent, her shadowy claims to
princely territory, and, in the way of accomplishment, her
recollections, it may be, of having formerly thrummed on a harpsichord,
and walked a minuet, and worked an antique tapestry-stitch on her
sampler. It was a fair parallel between new Plebeianism and old
Gentility.
It really seemed as if the battered visage of the House of the Seven
Gables, black and heavy-browed as it still certainly looked, must have
shown a kind of cheerfulness glimmering through its dusky windows as
Phœbe passed to and fro in the interior. Otherwise, it is impossible to
explain how the people of the neighborhood so soon became aware of the
girl’s presence. There was a great run of custom, setting steadily in,
from about ten o’clock until towards noon,—relaxing, somewhat, at
dinner-time, but recommencing in the afternoon, and, finally, dying
away a half an hour or so before the long day’s sunset. One of the
stanchest patrons was little Ned Higgins, the devourer of Jim Crow and
the elephant, who to-day signalized his omnivorous prowess by
swallowing two dromedaries and a locomotive. Phœbe laughed, as she
summed up her aggregate of sales upon the slate; while Hepzibah, first