The House of the Seven Gables
and was moved only by the inevitable tendency of thought, when rendered
sympathetic by enthusiasm and emotion, to flow into the first safe
reservoir which it finds. But, had you peeped at them through the
chinks of the garden-fence, the young man’s earnestness and heightened
color might have led you to suppose that he was making love to the
young girl!
At length, something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for
Phœbe to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin
Hepzibah, and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old Pyncheon
House. Without directly answering her, he turned from the Future, which
had heretofore been the theme of his discourse, and began to speak of
the influences of the Past. One subject, indeed, is but the
reverberation of the other.
“Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?” cried he, keeping up the
earnest tone of his preceding conversation. “It lies upon the Present
like a giant’s dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant
were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse
of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only
needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle
you to see what slaves we are to bygone times,—to Death, if we give the
matter the right word!”
“But I do not see it,” observed Phœbe.
“For example, then,” continued Holgrave: “a dead man, if he happens to
have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die
intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much
longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and
living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in
dead men’s books! We laugh at dead men’s jokes, and cry at dead men’s
pathos! We are sick of dead men’s diseases, physical and moral, and die
of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We
worship the living Deity according to dead men’s forms and creeds.
Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man’s icy hand
obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man’s white,
immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we
must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence
on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world
of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to
interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men’s
houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!”
“And why not,” said Phœbe, “so long as we can be comfortable in them?”
“But we shall live to see the day, I trust,” went on the artist, “when
no man shall build his house for posterity. Why should he? He might
just as reasonably order a durable suit of clothes,—leather, or
guttapercha, or whatever else lasts longest,—so that his
great-grandchildren should have the benefit of them, and cut precisely
the same figure in the world that he himself does. If each generation
were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change,
comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform
which society is now suffering for. I doubt whether even our public
edifices—our capitols, state-houses, court-houses, city-hall, and
churches,—ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or
brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty
years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and
reform the institutions which they symbolize.”
“How you hate everything old!” said Phœbe in dismay. “It makes me dizzy
to think of such a shifting world!”
“I certainly love nothing mouldy,” answered Holgrave. “Now, this old
Pyncheon House! Is it a wholesome place to live in, with its black
shingles, and the green moss that shows how damp they are?—its dark,
low-studded rooms—its grime and sordidness, which are the
crystallization on its walls of the human breath, that has been drawn
and exhaled here in discontent and anguish? The house ought to be
purified with fire,—purified till only its ashes remain!”
“Then why do you live in it?” asked Phœbe, a little piqued.
“Oh, I am pursuing my studies here; not in books, however,” replied
Holgrave. “The house, in my view, is expressive of that odious and
abominable Past, with all its bad influences, against which I have just
been declaiming. I dwell in it for a while, that I may know the better
how to hate it. By the bye, did you ever hear the story of Maule, the
wizard, and what happened between him and your immeasurably
great-grandfather?”
“Yes, indeed!” said Phœbe; “I heard it long ago, from my father, and
two or three times from my cousin Hepzibah, in the month that I have
been here. She seems to think that all the calamities of the Pyncheons
began from that quarrel with the wizard, as you call him. And you, Mr.
Holgrave look as if you thought so too! How singular that you should
believe what is so very absurd, when you reject many things that are a
great deal worthier of credit!”
“I do believe it,” said the artist seriously; “not as a superstition,
however, but as proved by unquestionable facts, and as exemplifying a
theory. Now, see: under those seven gables, at which we now look
up,—and which old Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the house of his
descendants, in prosperity and happiness, down to an epoch far beyond
the present,—under that roof, through a portion of three centuries,
there has been perpetual remorse of conscience, a constantly defeated
hope, strife amongst kindred, various misery, a strange form of death,
dark suspicion, unspeakable disgrace,—all, or most of which calamity I
have the means of tracing to the old Puritan’s inordinate desire to
plant and endow a family. To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom
of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that,
once in every half-century, at longest, a family should be merged into
the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its
ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in
hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean
pipes. In the family existence of these Pyncheons, for
instance,—forgive me, Phœbe, but I cannot think of you as one of
them,—in their brief New England pedigree, there has been time enough
to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another.”
“You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred,” said Phœbe, debating
with herself whether she ought to take offence.
“I speak true thoughts to a true mind!” answered Holgrave, with a
vehemence which Phœbe had not before witnessed in him. “The truth is as
I say! Furthermore, the original perpetrator and father of this
mischief appears to have perpetuated himself, and still walks the
street,—at least, his very image, in mind and body,—with the fairest
prospect of transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched an
inheritance as he has received! Do you remember the daguerreotype, and
its resemblance to the old portrait?”
“How strangely in earnest you are!” exclaimed Phœbe, looking at him
with surprise and perplexity; half alarmed and partly inclined to
laugh. “You talk of the lunacy of the Pyncheons; is it contagious?”
“I understand you!” said the artist, coloring and laughing. “I believe
I am a little mad. This subject has taken hold of my mind with the
strangest tenacity of clutch since I have lodged in yonder old gable.
As one method of throwing it off, I have put an incident of the
Pyncheon family history, with which I happen to be acquainted, into the
form of a legend, and mean to publish it in a magazine.”
“Do you write for the magazines?” inquired Phœbe.
“Is it possible you did not know it?” cried Holgrave. “Well, such is
literary fame! Yes. Miss Phœbe Pyncheon, among the multitude of my
marvellous gifts I have that of writing stories; and my name has
figured, I can assure you, on the covers of Graham and Godey, making as
respectable an appearance, for aught I could see, as any of the
canonized bead-roll with which it was associated. In the humorous line,
I am thought to have a very pretty way with me; and as for pathos, I am
as provocative of tears as an onion. But shall I read you my story?”
“Yes, if it is not very long,” said Phœbe,—and added laughingly,—“nor
very dull.”
As this latter point was one which the daguerreotypist could not decide
for himself, he forthwith produced his roll of manuscript, and, while
the late sunbeams gilded the seven gables, began to read.
XIII.
Alice Pyncheon
There was a message brought, one day, from the worshipful Gervayse
Pyncheon to young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, desiring his immediate
presence at the House of the Seven Gables.
“And what does your master want with me?” said the carpenter to Mr.
Pyncheon’s black servant. “Does the house need any repair? Well it may,
by this time; and no blame to my father who built it, neither! I was
reading the old Colonel’s tombstone, no longer ago than last Sabbath;
and, reckoning from that date, the house has stood seven-and-thirty
years. No wonder if there should be a job to do on the roof.”
“Don’t know what massa wants,” answered Scipio. “The house is a berry
good house, and old Colonel Pyncheon think so too, I reckon;—else why
the old man haunt it so, and frighten a poor nigga, as he does?”
“Well, well, friend Scipio; let your master know that I’m coming,” said
the carpenter with a laugh. “For a fair, workmanlike job, he’ll find me
his man. And so the house is haunted, is it? It will take a tighter
workman than I am to keep the spirits out of the Seven Gables. Even if
the Colonel would be quiet,” he added, muttering to himself, “my old
grandfather, the wizard, will be pretty sure to stick to the Pyncheons
as long as their walls hold together.”
“What’s that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule?” asked Scipio. “And
what for do you look so black at me?”
“No matter, darky,” said the carpenter. “Do you think nobody is to look
black but yourself? Go tell your master I’m coming; and if you happen
to see Mistress Alice, his daughter, give Matthew Maule’s humble
respects to her. She has brought a fair face from Italy,—fair, and
gentle, and proud,—has that same Alice Pyncheon!”
“He talk of Mistress Alice!” cried Scipio, as he returned from his
errand. “The low carpenter-man! He no business so much as to look at
her a great way off!”
This young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, it must be observed, was a
person little understood, and not very generally liked, in the town
where he resided; not that anything could be alleged against his
integrity, or his skill and diligence in the handicraft which he
exercised. The aversion (as it might justly be called) with which many
persons regarded him was partly the result of his own character and
deportment, and partly an inheritance.
He was the grandson of a former Matthew Maule, one of the early
settlers of the town, and who had been a famous and terrible wizard in
his day. This old reprobate was one of the sufferers when Cotton
Mather, and his brother ministers, and the learned judges, and other
wise men, and Sir William Phipps, the sagacious governor, made such
laudable efforts to weaken the great enemy of souls, by sending a
multitude of his adherents up the rocky pathway of Gallows Hill. Since
those days, no doubt, it had grown to be suspected that, in consequence
of an unfortunate overdoing of a work praiseworthy in itself, the
proceedings against the witches had proved far less acceptable to the
Beneficent Father than to that very Arch Enemy whom they were intended
to distress and utterly overwhelm. It is not the less certain, however,
that awe and terror brooded over the memories of those who died for