The House of the Seven Gables
nevertheless, hinted that he was about to build his house over an
unquiet grave. His home would include the home of the dead and buried
wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind of
privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers into which
future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where children of the
Pyncheon blood were to be born. The terror and ugliness of Maule’s
crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment, would darken the freshly
plastered walls, and infect them early with the scent of an old and
melancholy house. Why, then,—while so much of the soil around him was
bestrewn with the virgin forest leaves,—why should Colonel Pyncheon
prefer a site that had already been accurst?
But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned aside
from his well-considered scheme, either by dread of the wizard’s ghost,
or by flimsy sentimentalities of any kind, however specious. Had he
been told of a bad air, it might have moved him somewhat; but he was
ready to encounter an evil spirit on his own ground. Endowed with
commonsense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, fastened
together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps, he followed
out his original design, probably without so much as imagining an
objection to it. On the score of delicacy, or any scrupulousness which
a finer sensibility might have taught him, the Colonel, like most of
his breed and generation, was impenetrable. He therefore dug his
cellar, and laid the deep foundations of his mansion, on the square of
earth whence Matthew Maule, forty years before, had first swept away
the fallen leaves. It was a curious, and, as some people thought, an
ominous fact, that, very soon after the workmen began their operations,
the spring of water, above mentioned, entirely lost the deliciousness
of its pristine quality. Whether its sources were disturbed by the
depth of the new cellar, or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the
bottom, it is certain that the water of Maule’s Well, as it continued
to be called, grew hard and brackish. Even such we find it now; and any
old woman of the neighborhood will certify that it is productive of
intestinal mischief to those who quench their thirst there.
The reader may deem it singular that the head carpenter of the new
edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead gripe
the property of the soil had been wrested. Not improbably he was the
best workman of his time; or, perhaps, the Colonel thought it
expedient, or was impelled by some better feeling, thus openly to cast
aside all animosity against the race of his fallen antagonist. Nor was
it out of keeping with the general coarseness and matter-of-fact
character of the age, that the son should be willing to earn an honest
penny, or, rather, a weighty amount of sterling pounds, from the purse
of his father’s deadly enemy. At all events, Thomas Maule became the
architect of the House of the Seven Gables, and performed his duty so
faithfully that the timber framework fastened by his hands still holds
together.
Thus the great house was built. Familiar as it stands in the writer’s
recollection,—for it has been an object of curiosity with him from
boyhood, both as a specimen of the best and stateliest architecture of
a longpast epoch, and as the scene of events more full of human
interest, perhaps, than those of a gray feudal castle,—familiar as it
stands, in its rusty old age, it is therefore only the more difficult
to imagine the bright novelty with which it first caught the sunshine.
The impression of its actual state, at this distance of a hundred and
sixty years, darkens inevitably through the picture which we would fain
give of its appearance on the morning when the Puritan magnate bade all
the town to be his guests. A ceremony of consecration, festive as well
as religious, was now to be performed. A prayer and discourse from the
Rev. Mr. Higginson, and the outpouring of a psalm from the general
throat of the community, was to be made acceptable to the grosser sense
by ale, cider, wine, and brandy, in copious effusion, and, as some
authorities aver, by an ox, roasted whole, or at least, by the weight
and substance of an ox, in more manageable joints and sirloins. The
carcass of a deer, shot within twenty miles, had supplied material for
the vast circumference of a pasty. A codfish of sixty pounds, caught in
the bay, had been dissolved into the rich liquid of a chowder. The
chimney of the new house, in short, belching forth its kitchen smoke,
impregnated the whole air with the scent of meats, fowls, and fishes,
spicily concocted with odoriferous herbs, and onions in abundance. The
mere smell of such festivity, making its way to everybody’s nostrils,
was at once an invitation and an appetite.
Maule’s Lane, or Pyncheon Street, as it were now more decorous to call
it, was thronged, at the appointed hour, as with a congregation on its
way to church. All, as they approached, looked upward at the imposing
edifice, which was henceforth to assume its rank among the habitations
of mankind. There it rose, a little withdrawn from the line of the
street, but in pride, not modesty. Its whole visible exterior was
ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the grotesqueness of a
Gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the glittering plaster, composed
of lime, pebbles, and bits of glass, with which the woodwork of the
walls was overspread. On every side the seven gables pointed sharply
towards the sky, and presented the aspect of a whole sisterhood of
edifices, breathing through the spiracles of one great chimney. The
many lattices, with their small, diamond-shaped panes, admitted the
sunlight into hall and chamber, while, nevertheless, the second story,
projecting far over the base, and itself retiring beneath the third,
threw a shadowy and thoughtful gloom into the lower rooms. Carved
globes of wood were affixed under the jutting stories. Little spiral
rods of iron beautified each of the seven peaks. On the triangular
portion of the gable, that fronted next the street, was a dial, put up
that very morning, and on which the sun was still marking the passage
of the first bright hour in a history that was not destined to be all
so bright. All around were scattered shavings, chips, shingles, and
broken halves of bricks; these, together with the lately turned earth,
on which the grass had not begun to grow, contributed to the impression
of strangeness and novelty proper to a house that had yet its place to
make among men’s daily interests.
The principal entrance, which had almost the breadth of a church-door,
was in the angle between the two front gables, and was covered by an
open porch, with benches beneath its shelter. Under this arched
doorway, scraping their feet on the unworn threshold, now trod the
clergymen, the elders, the magistrates, the deacons, and whatever of
aristocracy there was in town or county. Thither, too, thronged the
plebeian classes as freely as their betters, and in larger number. Just
within the entrance, however, stood two serving-men, pointing some of
the guests to the neighborhood of the kitchen and ushering others into
the statelier rooms,—hospitable alike to all, but still with a
scrutinizing regard to the high or low degree of each. Velvet garments
sombre but rich, stiffly plaited ruffs and bands, embroidered gloves,
venerable beards, the mien and countenance of authority, made it easy
to distinguish the gentleman of worship, at that period, from the
tradesman, with his plodding air, or the laborer, in his leathern
jerkin, stealing awe-stricken into the house which he had perhaps
helped to build.
One inauspicious circumstance there was, which awakened a hardly
concealed displeasure in the breasts of a few of the more punctilious
visitors. The founder of this stately mansion—a gentleman noted for the
square and ponderous courtesy of his demeanor, ought surely to have
stood in his own hall, and to have offered the first welcome to so many
eminent personages as here presented themselves in honor of his solemn
festival. He was as yet invisible; the most favored of the guests had
not beheld him. This sluggishness on Colonel Pyncheon’s part became
still more unaccountable, when the second dignitary of the province
made his appearance, and found no more ceremonious a reception. The
lieutenant-governor, although his visit was one of the anticipated
glories of the day, had alighted from his horse, and assisted his lady
from her side-saddle, and crossed the Colonel’s threshold, without
other greeting than that of the principal domestic.
This person—a gray-headed man, of quiet and most respectful
deportment—found it necessary to explain that his master still remained
in his study, or private apartment; on entering which, an hour before,
he had expressed a wish on no account to be disturbed.
“Do not you see, fellow,” said the high-sheriff of the county, taking
the servant aside, “that this is no less a man than the
lieutenant-governor? Summon Colonel Pyncheon at once! I know that he
received letters from England this morning; and, in the perusal and
consideration of them, an hour may have passed away without his
noticing it. But he will be ill-pleased, I judge, if you suffer him to
neglect the courtesy due to one of our chief rulers, and who may be
said to represent King William, in the absence of the governor himself.
Call your master instantly.”
“Nay, please your worship,” answered the man, in much perplexity, but
with a backwardness that strikingly indicated the hard and severe
character of Colonel Pyncheon’s domestic rule; “my master’s orders were
exceeding strict; and, as your worship knows, he permits of no
discretion in the obedience of those who owe him service. Let who list
open yonder door; I dare not, though the governor’s own voice should
bid me do it!”
“Pooh, pooh, master high sheriff!” cried the lieutenant-governor, who
had overheard the foregoing discussion, and felt himself high enough in
station to play a little with his dignity. “I will take the matter into
my own hands. It is time that the good Colonel came forth to greet his
friends; else we shall be apt to suspect that he has taken a sip too
much of his Canary wine, in his extreme deliberation which cask it were
best to broach in honor of the day! But since he is so much behindhand,
I will give him a remembrancer myself!”
Accordingly, with such a tramp of his ponderous riding-boots as might
of itself have been audible in the remotest of the seven gables, he
advanced to the door, which the servant pointed out, and made its new
panels reecho with a loud, free knock. Then, looking round, with a
smile, to the spectators, he awaited a response. As none came, however,
he knocked again, but with the same unsatisfactory result as at first.
And now, being a trifle choleric in his temperament, the
lieutenant-governor uplifted the heavy hilt of his sword, wherewith he
so beat and banged upon the door, that, as some of the bystanders
whispered, the racket might have disturbed the dead. Be that as it
might, it seemed to produce no awakening effect on Colonel Pyncheon.
When the sound subsided, the silence through the house was deep,
dreary, and oppressive, notwithstanding that the tongues of many of the
guests had already been loosened by a surreptitious cup or two of wine
or spirits.
“Strange, forsooth!—very strange!” cried the lieutenant-governor, whose
smile was changed to a frown. “But seeing that our host sets us the
good example of forgetting ceremony, I shall likewise throw it aside,
and make free to intrude on his privacy.”
He tried the door, which yielded to his hand, and was flung wide open
by a sudden gust of wind that passed, as with a loud sigh, from the