The House of the Seven Gables
drawing on a pair of silk gloves, reckoned over the sordid accumulation
of copper coin, not without silver intermixed, that had jingled into
the till.
“We must renew our stock, Cousin Hepzibah!” cried the little
saleswoman. “The gingerbread figures are all gone, and so are those
Dutch wooden milkmaids, and most of our other playthings. There has
been constant inquiry for cheap raisins, and a great cry for whistles,
and trumpets, and jew’s-harps; and at least a dozen little boys have
asked for molasses-candy. And we must contrive to get a peck of russet
apples, late in the season as it is. But, dear cousin, what an enormous
heap of copper! Positively a copper mountain!”
“Well done! well done! well done!” quoth Uncle Venner, who had taken
occasion to shuffle in and out of the shop several times in the course
of the day. “Here’s a girl that will never end her days at my farm!
Bless my eyes, what a brisk little soul!”
“Yes, Phœbe is a nice girl!” said Hepzibah, with a scowl of austere
approbation. “But, Uncle Venner, you have known the family a great many
years. Can you tell me whether there ever was a Pyncheon whom she takes
after?”
“I don’t believe there ever was,” answered the venerable man. “At any
rate, it never was my luck to see her like among them, nor, for that
matter, anywhere else. I’ve seen a great deal of the world, not only in
people’s kitchens and back-yards but at the street-corners, and on the
wharves, and in other places where my business calls me; and I’m free
to say, Miss Hepzibah, that I never knew a human creature do her work
so much like one of God’s angels as this child Phœbe does!”
Uncle Venner’s eulogium, if it appear rather too high-strained for the
person and occasion, had, nevertheless, a sense in which it was both
subtile and true. There was a spiritual quality in Phœbe’s activity.
The life of the long and busy day—spent in occupations that might so
easily have taken a squalid and ugly aspect—had been made pleasant, and
even lovely, by the spontaneous grace with which these homely duties
seemed to bloom out of her character; so that labor, while she dealt
with it, had the easy and flexible charm of play. Angels do not toil,
but let their good works grow out of them; and so did Phœbe.
The two relatives—the young maid and the old one—found time before
nightfall, in the intervals of trade, to make rapid advances towards
affection and confidence. A recluse, like Hepzibah, usually displays
remarkable frankness, and at least temporary affability, on being
absolutely cornered, and brought to the point of personal intercourse;
like the angel whom Jacob wrestled with, she is ready to bless you when
once overcome.
The old gentlewoman took a dreary and proud satisfaction in leading
Phœbe from room to room of the house, and recounting the traditions
with which, as we may say, the walls were lugubriously frescoed. She
showed the indentations made by the lieutenant-governor’s sword-hilt in
the door-panels of the apartment where old Colonel Pyncheon, a dead
host, had received his affrighted visitors with an awful frown. The
dusky terror of that frown, Hepzibah observed, was thought to be
lingering ever since in the passageway. She bade Phœbe step into one of
the tall chairs, and inspect the ancient map of the Pyncheon territory
at the eastward. In a tract of land on which she laid her finger, there
existed a silver mine, the locality of which was precisely pointed out
in some memoranda of Colonel Pyncheon himself, but only to be made
known when the family claim should be recognized by government. Thus it
was for the interest of all New England that the Pyncheons should have
justice done them. She told, too, how that there was undoubtedly an
immense treasure of English guineas hidden somewhere about the house,
or in the cellar, or possibly in the garden.
“If you should happen to find it, Phœbe,” said Hepzibah, glancing aside
at her with a grim yet kindly smile, “we will tie up the shop-bell for
good and all!”
“Yes, dear cousin,” answered Phœbe; “but, in the mean time, I hear
somebody ringing it!”
When the customer was gone, Hepzibah talked rather vaguely, and at
great length, about a certain Alice Pyncheon, who had been exceedingly
beautiful and accomplished in her lifetime, a hundred years ago. The
fragrance of her rich and delightful character still lingered about the
place where she had lived, as a dried rose-bud scents the drawer where
it has withered and perished. This lovely Alice had met with some great
and mysterious calamity, and had grown thin and white, and gradually
faded out of the world. But, even now, she was supposed to haunt the
House of the Seven Gables, and, a great many times,—especially when one
of the Pyncheons was to die,—she had been heard playing sadly and
beautifully on the harpsichord. One of these tunes, just as it had
sounded from her spiritual touch, had been written down by an amateur
of music; it was so exquisitely mournful that nobody, to this day,
could bear to hear it played, unless when a great sorrow had made them
know the still profounder sweetness of it.
“Was it the same harpsichord that you showed me?” inquired Phœbe.
“The very same,” said Hepzibah. “It was Alice Pyncheon’s harpsichord.
When I was learning music, my father would never let me open it. So, as
I could only play on my teacher’s instrument, I have forgotten all my
music long ago.”
Leaving these antique themes, the old lady began to talk about the
daguerreotypist, whom, as he seemed to be a well-meaning and orderly
young man, and in narrow circumstances, she had permitted to take up
his residence in one of the seven gables. But, on seeing more of Mr.
Holgrave, she hardly knew what to make of him. He had the strangest
companions imaginable; men with long beards, and dressed in linen
blouses, and other such new-fangled and ill-fitting garments;
reformers, temperance lecturers, and all manner of cross-looking
philanthropists; community-men, and come-outers, as Hepzibah believed,
who acknowledged no law, and ate no solid food, but lived on the scent
of other people’s cookery, and turned up their noses at the fare. As
for the daguerreotypist, she had read a paragraph in a penny paper, the
other day, accusing him of making a speech full of wild and
disorganizing matter, at a meeting of his banditti-like associates. For
her own part, she had reason to believe that he practised animal
magnetism, and, if such things were in fashion nowadays, should be apt
to suspect him of studying the Black Art up there in his lonesome
chamber.
“But, dear cousin,” said Phœbe, “if the young man is so dangerous, why
do you let him stay? If he does nothing worse, he may set the house on
fire!”
“Why, sometimes,” answered Hepzibah, “I have seriously made it a
question, whether I ought not to send him away. But, with all his
oddities, he is a quiet kind of a person, and has such a way of taking
hold of one’s mind, that, without exactly liking him (for I don’t know
enough of the young man), I should be sorry to lose sight of him
entirely. A woman clings to slight acquaintances when she lives so much
alone as I do.”
“But if Mr. Holgrave is a lawless person!” remonstrated Phœbe, a part
of whose essence it was to keep within the limits of law.
“Oh!” said Hepzibah carelessly,—for, formal as she was, still, in her
life’s experience, she had gnashed her teeth against human law,—“I
suppose he has a law of his own!”
VI.
Maule’s Well
After an early tea, the little country-girl strayed into the garden.
The enclosure had formerly been very extensive, but was now contracted
within small compass, and hemmed about, partly by high wooden fences,
and partly by the outbuildings of houses that stood on another street.
In its centre was a grass-plat, surrounding a ruinous little structure,
which showed just enough of its original design to indicate that it had
once been a summer-house. A hop-vine, springing from last year’s root,
was beginning to clamber over it, but would be long in covering the
roof with its green mantle. Three of the seven gables either fronted or
looked sideways, with a dark solemnity of aspect, down into the garden.
The black, rich soil had fed itself with the decay of a long period of
time; such as fallen leaves, the petals of flowers, and the stalks and
seed-vessels of vagrant and lawless plants, more useful after their
death than ever while flaunting in the sun. The evil of these departed
years would naturally have sprung up again, in such rank weeds
(symbolic of the transmitted vices of society) as are always prone to
root themselves about human dwellings. Phœbe saw, however, that their
growth must have been checked by a degree of careful labor, bestowed
daily and systematically on the garden. The white double rosebush had
evidently been propped up anew against the house since the commencement
of the season; and a pear-tree and three damson-trees, which, except a
row of currant-bushes, constituted the only varieties of fruit, bore
marks of the recent amputation of several superfluous or defective
limbs. There were also a few species of antique and hereditary flowers,
in no very flourishing condition, but scrupulously weeded; as if some
person, either out of love or curiosity, had been anxious to bring them
to such perfection as they were capable of attaining. The remainder of
the garden presented a well-selected assortment of esculent vegetables,
in a praiseworthy state of advancement. Summer squashes almost in their
golden blossom; cucumbers, now evincing a tendency to spread away from
the main stock, and ramble far and wide; two or three rows of
string-beans and as many more that were about to festoon themselves on
poles; tomatoes, occupying a site so sheltered and sunny that the
plants were already gigantic, and promised an early and abundant
harvest.
Phœbe wondered whose care and toil it could have been that had planted
these vegetables, and kept the soil so clean and orderly. Not surely
her cousin Hepzibah’s, who had no taste nor spirits for the lady-like
employment of cultivating flowers, and—with her recluse habits, and
tendency to shelter herself within the dismal shadow of the house—would
hardly have come forth under the speck of open sky to weed and hoe
among the fraternity of beans and squashes.
It being her first day of complete estrangement from rural objects,
Phœbe found an unexpected charm in this little nook of grass, and
foliage, and aristocratic flowers, and plebeian vegetables. The eye of
Heaven seemed to look down into it pleasantly, and with a peculiar
smile, as if glad to perceive that nature, elsewhere overwhelmed, and
driven out of the dusty town, had here been able to retain a
breathing-place. The spot acquired a somewhat wilder grace, and yet a
very gentle one, from the fact that a pair of robins had built their
nest in the pear-tree, and were making themselves exceedingly busy and
happy in the dark intricacy of its boughs. Bees, too,—strange to
say,—had thought it worth their while to come hither, possibly from the
range of hives beside some farm-house miles away. How many aerial
voyages might they have made, in quest of honey, or honey-laden,
betwixt dawn and sunset! Yet, late as it now was, there still arose a
pleasant hum out of one or two of the squash-blossoms, in the depths of
which these bees were plying their golden labor. There was one other
object in the garden which Nature might fairly claim as her inalienable
property, in spite of whatever man could do to render it his own. This
was a fountain, set round with a rim of old mossy stones, and paved, in
its bed, with what appeared to be a sort of mosaic-work of variously
colored pebbles. The play and slight agitation of the water, in its