The House of the Seven Gables
resentful of great ones. So he spoke with only a grieved emotion. “It
was not kind to say so, Hepzibah! What shame can befall me now?”
And then the unnerved man—he that had been born for enjoyment, but had
met a doom so very wretched—burst into a woman’s passion of tears. It
was but of brief continuance, however; soon leaving him in a quiescent,
and, to judge by his countenance, not an uncomfortable state. From this
mood, too, he partially rallied for an instant, and looked at Hepzibah
with a smile, the keen, half-derisory purport of which was a puzzle to
her.
“Are we so very poor, Hepzibah?” said he.
Finally, his chair being deep and softly cushioned, Clifford fell
asleep. Hearing the more regular rise and fall of his breath (which,
however, even then, instead of being strong and full, had a feeble kind
of tremor, corresponding with the lack of vigor in his
character),—hearing these tokens of settled slumber, Hepzibah seized
the opportunity to peruse his face more attentively than she had yet
dared to do. Her heart melted away in tears; her profoundest spirit
sent forth a moaning voice, low, gentle, but inexpressibly sad. In this
depth of grief and pity she felt that there was no irreverence in
gazing at his altered, aged, faded, ruined face. But no sooner was she
a little relieved than her conscience smote her for gazing curiously at
him, now that he was so changed; and, turning hastily away, Hepzibah
let down the curtain over the sunny window, and left Clifford to
slumber there.
VIII.
The Pyncheon of To-day
Phœbe, on entering the shop, beheld there the already familiar face of
the little devourer—if we can reckon his mighty deeds aright—of Jim
Crow, the elephant, the camel, the dromedaries, and the locomotive.
Having expended his private fortune, on the two preceding days, in the
purchase of the above unheard-of luxuries, the young gentleman’s
present errand was on the part of his mother, in quest of three eggs
and half a pound of raisins. These articles Phœbe accordingly supplied,
and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a slight
super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a whale!
The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh,
immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate
whither so varied a caravan had preceded him. This remarkable urchin,
in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, both in respect of
his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because he, as well
as Time, after ingulfing thus much of creation, looked almost as
youthful as if he had been just that moment made.
After partly closing the door, the child turned back, and mumbled
something to Phœbe, which, as the whale was but half disposed of, she
could not perfectly understand.
“What did you say, my little fellow?” asked she.
“Mother wants to know” repeated Ned Higgins more distinctly, “how Old
Maid Pyncheon’s brother does? Folks say he has got home.”
“My cousin Hepzibah’s brother?” exclaimed Phœbe, surprised at this
sudden explanation of the relationship between Hepzibah and her guest.
“Her brother! And where can he have been?”
The little boy only put his thumb to his broad snub-nose, with that
look of shrewdness which a child, spending much of his time in the
street, so soon learns to throw over his features, however
unintelligent in themselves. Then as Phœbe continued to gaze at him,
without answering his mother’s message, he took his departure.
As the child went down the steps, a gentleman ascended them, and made
his entrance into the shop. It was the portly, and, had it possessed
the advantage of a little more height, would have been the stately
figure of a man considerably in the decline of life, dressed in a black
suit of some thin stuff, resembling broadcloth as closely as possible.
A gold-headed cane, of rare Oriental wood, added materially to the high
respectability of his aspect, as did also a neckcloth of the utmost
snowy purity, and the conscientious polish of his boots. His dark,
square countenance, with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows, was
naturally impressive, and would, perhaps, have been rather stern, had
not the gentleman considerately taken upon himself to mitigate the
harsh effect by a look of exceeding good-humor and benevolence. Owing,
however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about
the lower region of his face, the look was, perhaps, unctuous rather
than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshly effulgence, not
altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be. A
susceptible observer, at any rate, might have regarded it as affording
very little evidence of the general benignity of soul whereof it
purported to be the outward reflection. And if the observer chanced to
be ill-natured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably
suspect that the smile on the gentleman’s face was a good deal akin to
the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his
boot-black, respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and
preserve them.
As the stranger entered the little shop, where the projection of the
second story and the thick foliage of the elm-tree, as well as the
commodities at the window, created a sort of gray medium, his smile
grew as intense as if he had set his heart on counteracting the whole
gloom of the atmosphere (besides any moral gloom pertaining to Hepzibah
and her inmates) by the unassisted light of his countenance. On
perceiving a young rose-bud of a girl, instead of the gaunt presence of
the old maid, a look of surprise was manifest. He at first knit his
brows; then smiled with more unctuous benignity than ever.
“Ah, I see how it is!” said he in a deep voice,—a voice which, had it
come from the throat of an uncultivated man, would have been gruff,
but, by dint of careful training, was now sufficiently agreeable,—“I
was not aware that Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon had commenced business under
such favorable auspices. You are her assistant, I suppose?”
“I certainly am,” answered Phœbe, and added, with a little air of
lady-like assumption (for, civil as the gentleman was, he evidently
took her to be a young person serving for wages), “I am a cousin of
Miss Hepzibah, on a visit to her.”
“Her cousin?—and from the country? Pray pardon me, then,” said the
gentleman, bowing and smiling, as Phœbe never had been bowed to nor
smiled on before; “in that case, we must be better acquainted; for,
unless I am sadly mistaken, you are my own little kinswoman likewise!
Let me see,—Mary?—Dolly?—Phœbe?—yes, Phœbe is the name! Is it possible
that you are Phœbe Pyncheon, only child of my dear cousin and
classmate, Arthur? Ah, I see your father now, about your mouth! Yes,
yes! we must be better acquainted! I am your kinsman, my dear. Surely
you must have heard of Judge Pyncheon?”
As Phœbe curtsied in reply, the Judge bent forward, with the pardonable
and even praiseworthy purpose—considering the nearness of blood and the
difference of age—of bestowing on his young relative a kiss of
acknowledged kindred and natural affection. Unfortunately (without
design, or only with such instinctive design as gives no account of
itself to the intellect) Phœbe, just at the critical moment, drew back;
so that her highly respectable kinsman, with his body bent over the
counter and his lips protruded, was betrayed into the rather absurd
predicament of kissing the empty air. It was a modern parallel to the
case of Ixion embracing a cloud, and was so much the more ridiculous as
the Judge prided himself on eschewing all airy matter, and never
mistaking a shadow for a substance. The truth was,—and it is Phœbe’s
only excuse,—that, although Judge Pyncheon’s glowing benignity might
not be absolutely unpleasant to the feminine beholder, with the width
of a street, or even an ordinary-sized room, interposed between, yet it
became quite too intense, when this dark, full-fed physiognomy (so
roughly bearded, too, that no razor could ever make it smooth) sought
to bring itself into actual contact with the object of its regards. The
man, the sex, somehow or other, was entirely too prominent in the
Judge’s demonstrations of that sort. Phœbe’s eyes sank, and, without
knowing why, she felt herself blushing deeply under his look. Yet she
had been kissed before, and without any particular squeamishness, by
perhaps half a dozen different cousins, younger as well as older than
this dark-browned, grisly-bearded, white-neck-clothed, and
unctuously-benevolent Judge! Then, why not by him?
On raising her eyes, Phœbe was startled by the change in Judge
Pyncheon’s face. It was quite as striking, allowing for the difference
of scale, as that betwixt a landscape under a broad sunshine and just
before a thunder-storm; not that it had the passionate intensity of the
latter aspect, but was cold, hard, immitigable, like a day-long
brooding cloud.
“Dear me! what is to be done now?” thought the country-girl to herself.
“He looks as if there were nothing softer in him than a rock, nor
milder than the east wind! I meant no harm! Since he is really my
cousin, I would have let him kiss me, if I could!”
Then, all at once, it struck Phœbe that this very Judge Pyncheon was
the original of the miniature which the daguerreotypist had shown her
in the garden, and that the hard, stern, relentless look, now on his
face, was the same that the sun had so inflexibly persisted in bringing
out. Was it, therefore, no momentary mood, but, however skilfully
concealed, the settled temper of his life? And not merely so, but was
it hereditary in him, and transmitted down, as a precious heirloom,
from that bearded ancestor, in whose picture both the expression and,
to a singular degree, the features of the modern Judge were shown as by
a kind of prophecy? A deeper philosopher than Phœbe might have found
something very terrible in this idea. It implied that the weaknesses
and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral
diseases which lead to crime are handed down from one generation to
another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been
able to establish in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to
entail upon posterity.
But, as it happened, scarcely had Phœbe’s eyes rested again on the
Judge’s countenance than all its ugly sternness vanished; and she found
herself quite overpowered by the sultry, dog-day heat, as it were, of
benevolence, which this excellent man diffused out of his great heart
into the surrounding atmosphere,—very much like a serpent, which, as a
preliminary to fascination, is said to fill the air with his peculiar
odor.
“I like that, Cousin Phœbe!” cried he, with an emphatic nod of
approbation. “I like it much, my little cousin! You are a good child,
and know how to take care of yourself. A young girl—especially if she
be a very pretty one—can never be too chary of her lips.”
“Indeed, sir,” said Phœbe, trying to laugh the matter off, “I did not
mean to be unkind.”
Nevertheless, whether or no it were entirely owing to the inauspicious
commencement of their acquaintance, she still acted under a certain
reserve, which was by no means customary to her frank and genial
nature. The fantasy would not quit her, that the original Puritan, of
whom she had heard so many sombre traditions,—the progenitor of the
whole race of New England Pyncheons, the founder of the House of the
Seven Gables, and who had died so strangely in it,—had now stept into
the shop. In these days of off-hand equipment, the matter was easily
enough arranged. On his arrival from the other world, he had merely
found it necessary to spend a quarter of an hour at a barber’s, who had
trimmed down the Puritan’s full beard into a pair of grizzled whiskers,