The House of the Seven Gables
this horrible crime of witchcraft. Their graves, in the crevices of the
rocks, were supposed to be incapable of retaining the occupants who had
been so hastily thrust into them. Old Matthew Maule, especially, was
known to have as little hesitation or difficulty in rising out of his
grave as an ordinary man in getting out of bed, and was as often seen
at midnight as living people at noonday. This pestilent wizard (in whom
his just punishment seemed to have wrought no manner of amendment) had
an inveterate habit of haunting a certain mansion, styled the House of
the Seven Gables, against the owner of which he pretended to hold an
unsettled claim for ground-rent. The ghost, it appears,—with the
pertinacity which was one of his distinguishing characteristics while
alive,—insisted that he was the rightful proprietor of the site upon
which the house stood. His terms were, that either the aforesaid
ground-rent, from the day when the cellar began to be dug, should be
paid down, or the mansion itself given up; else he, the ghostly
creditor, would have his finger in all the affairs of the Pyncheons,
and make everything go wrong with them, though it should be a thousand
years after his death. It was a wild story, perhaps, but seemed not
altogether so incredible to those who could remember what an inflexibly
obstinate old fellow this wizard Maule had been.
Now, the wizard’s grandson, the young Matthew Maule of our story, was
popularly supposed to have inherited some of his ancestor’s
questionable traits. It is wonderful how many absurdities were
promulgated in reference to the young man. He was fabled, for example,
to have a strange power of getting into people’s dreams, and regulating
matters there according to his own fancy, pretty much like the
stage-manager of a theatre. There was a great deal of talk among the
neighbors, particularly the petticoated ones, about what they called
the witchcraft of Maule’s eye. Some said that he could look into
people’s minds; others, that, by the marvellous power of this eye, he
could draw people into his own mind, or send them, if he pleased, to do
errands to his grandfather, in the spiritual world; others, again, that
it was what is termed an Evil Eye, and possessed the valuable faculty
of blighting corn, and drying children into mummies with the heartburn.
But, after all, what worked most to the young carpenter’s disadvantage
was, first, the reserve and sternness of his natural disposition, and
next, the fact of his not being a church-communicant, and the suspicion
of his holding heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity.
After receiving Mr. Pyncheon’s message, the carpenter merely tarried to
finish a small job, which he happened to have in hand, and then took
his way towards the House of the Seven Gables. This noted edifice,
though its style might be getting a little out of fashion, was still as
respectable a family residence as that of any gentleman in town. The
present owner, Gervayse Pyncheon, was said to have contracted a dislike
to the house, in consequence of a shock to his sensibility, in early
childhood, from the sudden death of his grandfather. In the very act of
running to climb Colonel Pyncheon’s knee, the boy had discovered the
old Puritan to be a corpse. On arriving at manhood, Mr. Pyncheon had
visited England, where he married a lady of fortune, and had
subsequently spent many years, partly in the mother country, and partly
in various cities on the continent of Europe. During this period, the
family mansion had been consigned to the charge of a kinsman, who was
allowed to make it his home for the time being, in consideration of
keeping the premises in thorough repair. So faithfully had this
contract been fulfilled, that now, as the carpenter approached the
house, his practised eye could detect nothing to criticise in its
condition. The peaks of the seven gables rose up sharply; the shingled
roof looked thoroughly water-tight; and the glittering plaster-work
entirely covered the exterior walls, and sparkled in the October sun,
as if it had been new only a week ago.
The house had that pleasant aspect of life which is like the cheery
expression of comfortable activity in the human countenance. You could
see, at once, that there was the stir of a large family within it. A
huge load of oak-wood was passing through the gateway, towards the
outbuildings in the rear; the fat cook—or probably it might be the
housekeeper—stood at the side door, bargaining for some turkeys and
poultry which a countryman had brought for sale. Now and then a
maid-servant, neatly dressed, and now the shining sable face of a
slave, might be seen bustling across the windows, in the lower part of
the house. At an open window of a room in the second story, hanging
over some pots of beautiful and delicate flowers,—exotics, but which
had never known a more genial sunshine than that of the New England
autumn,—was the figure of a young lady, an exotic, like the flowers,
and beautiful and delicate as they. Her presence imparted an
indescribable grace and faint witchery to the whole edifice. In other
respects, it was a substantial, jolly-looking mansion, and seemed fit
to be the residence of a patriarch, who might establish his own
headquarters in the front gable and assign one of the remainder to each
of his six children, while the great chimney in the centre should
symbolize the old fellow’s hospitable heart, which kept them all warm,
and made a great whole of the seven smaller ones.
There was a vertical sundial on the front gable; and as the carpenter
passed beneath it, he looked up and noted the hour.
“Three o’clock!” said he to himself. “My father told me that dial was
put up only an hour before the old Colonel’s death. How truly it has
kept time these seven-and-thirty years past! The shadow creeps and
creeps, and is always looking over the shoulder of the sunshine!”
It might have befitted a craftsman, like Matthew Maule, on being sent
for to a gentleman’s house, to go to the back door, where servants and
work-people were usually admitted; or at least to the side entrance,
where the better class of tradesmen made application. But the carpenter
had a great deal of pride and stiffness in his nature; and, at this
moment, moreover, his heart was bitter with the sense of hereditary
wrong, because he considered the great Pyncheon House to be standing on
soil which should have been his own. On this very site, beside a spring
of delicious water, his grandfather had felled the pine-trees and built
a cottage, in which children had been born to him; and it was only from
a dead man’s stiffened fingers that Colonel Pyncheon had wrested away
the title-deeds. So young Maule went straight to the principal
entrance, beneath a portal of carved oak, and gave such a peal of the
iron knocker that you would have imagined the stern old wizard himself
to be standing at the threshold.
Black Scipio answered the summons in a prodigious hurry; but showed the
whites of his eyes, in amazement on beholding only the carpenter.
“Lord-a-mercy, what a great man he be, this carpenter fellow!” mumbled
Scipio, down in his throat. “Anybody think he beat on the door with his
biggest hammer!”
“Here I am!” said Maule sternly. “Show me the way to your master’s
parlor.”
As he stept into the house, a note of sweet and melancholy music
thrilled and vibrated along the passage-way, proceeding from one of the
rooms above stairs. It was the harpsichord which Alice Pyncheon had
brought with her from beyond the sea. The fair Alice bestowed most of
her maiden leisure between flowers and music, although the former were
apt to droop, and the melodies were often sad. She was of foreign
education, and could not take kindly to the New England modes of life,
in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed.
As Mr. Pyncheon had been impatiently awaiting Maule’s arrival, black
Scipio, of course, lost no time in ushering the carpenter into his
master’s presence. The room in which this gentleman sat was a parlor of
moderate size, looking out upon the garden of the house, and having its
windows partly shadowed by the foliage of fruit-trees. It was Mr.
Pyncheon’s peculiar apartment, and was provided with furniture, in an
elegant and costly style, principally from Paris; the floor (which was
unusual at that day) being covered with a carpet, so skilfully and
richly wrought that it seemed to glow as with living flowers. In one
corner stood a marble woman, to whom her own beauty was the sole and
sufficient garment. Some pictures—that looked old, and had a mellow
tinge diffused through all their artful splendor—hung on the walls.
Near the fireplace was a large and very beautiful cabinet of ebony,
inlaid with ivory; a piece of antique furniture, which Mr. Pyncheon had
bought in Venice, and which he used as the treasure-place for medals,
ancient coins, and whatever small and valuable curiosities he had
picked up on his travels. Through all this variety of decoration,
however, the room showed its original characteristics; its low stud,
its cross-beam, its chimney-piece, with the old-fashioned Dutch tiles;
so that it was the emblem of a mind industriously stored with foreign
ideas, and elaborated into artificial refinement, but neither larger,
nor, in its proper self, more elegant than before.
There were two objects that appeared rather out of place in this very
handsomely furnished room. One was a large map, or surveyor’s plan, of
a tract of land, which looked as if it had been drawn a good many years
ago, and was now dingy with smoke, and soiled, here and there, with the
touch of fingers. The other was a portrait of a stern old man, in a
Puritan garb, painted roughly, but with a bold effect, and a remarkably
strong expression of character.
At a small table, before a fire of English sea-coal, sat Mr. Pyncheon,
sipping coffee, which had grown to be a very favorite beverage with him
in France. He was a middle-aged and really handsome man, with a wig
flowing down upon his shoulders; his coat was of blue velvet, with lace
on the borders and at the button-holes; and the firelight glistened on
the spacious breadth of his waistcoat, which was flowered all over with
gold. On the entrance of Scipio, ushering in the carpenter, Mr.
Pyncheon turned partly round, but resumed his former position, and
proceeded deliberately to finish his cup of coffee, without immediate
notice of the guest whom he had summoned to his presence. It was not
that he intended any rudeness or improper neglect,—which, indeed, he
would have blushed to be guilty of,—but it never occurred to him that a
person in Maule’s station had a claim on his courtesy, or would trouble
himself about it one way or the other.
The carpenter, however, stepped at once to the hearth, and turned
himself about, so as to look Mr. Pyncheon in the face.
“You sent for me,” said he. “Be pleased to explain your business, that
I may go back to my own affairs.”
“Ah! excuse me,” said Mr. Pyncheon quietly. “I did not mean to tax your
time without a recompense. Your name, I think, is Maule,—Thomas or
Matthew Maule,—a son or grandson of the builder of this house?”
“Matthew Maule,” replied the carpenter,—“son of him who built the
house,—grandson of the rightful proprietor of the soil.”
“I know the dispute to which you allude,” observed Mr. Pyncheon with
undisturbed equanimity. “I am well aware that my grandfather was
compelled to resort to a suit at law, in order to establish his claim
to the foundation-site of this edifice. We will not, if you please,
renew the discussion. The matter was settled at the time, and by the
competent authorities,—equitably, it is to be presumed,—and, at all
events, irrevocably. Yet, singularly enough, there is an incidental