The House of the Seven Gables
So Alice Pyncheon was summoned, and appeared. A portrait of this young
lady, painted by a Venetian artist, and left by her father in England,
is said to have fallen into the hands of the present Duke of
Devonshire, and to be now preserved at Chatsworth; not on account of
any associations with the original, but for its value as a picture, and
the high character of beauty in the countenance. If ever there was a
lady born, and set apart from the world’s vulgar mass by a certain
gentle and cold stateliness, it was this very Alice Pyncheon. Yet there
was the womanly mixture in her; the tenderness, or, at least, the
tender capabilities. For the sake of that redeeming quality, a man of
generous nature would have forgiven all her pride, and have been
content, almost, to lie down in her path, and let Alice set her slender
foot upon his heart. All that he would have required was simply the
acknowledgment that he was indeed a man, and a fellow-being, moulded of
the same elements as she.
As Alice came into the room, her eyes fell upon the carpenter, who was
standing near its centre, clad in green woollen jacket, a pair of loose
breeches, open at the knees, and with a long pocket for his rule, the
end of which protruded; it was as proper a mark of the artisan’s
calling as Mr. Pyncheon’s full-dress sword of that gentleman’s
aristocratic pretensions. A glow of artistic approval brightened over
Alice Pyncheon’s face; she was struck with admiration—which she made no
attempt to conceal—of the remarkable comeliness, strength, and energy
of Maule’s figure. But that admiring glance (which most other men,
perhaps, would have cherished as a sweet recollection all through life)
the carpenter never forgave. It must have been the devil himself that
made Maule so subtile in his preception.
“Does the girl look at me as if I were a brute beast?” thought he,
setting his teeth. “She shall know whether I have a human spirit; and
the worse for her, if it prove stronger than her own!”
“My father, you sent for me,” said Alice, in her sweet and harp-like
voice. “But, if you have business with this young man, pray let me go
again. You know I do not love this room, in spite of that Claude, with
which you try to bring back sunny recollections.”
“Stay a moment, young lady, if you please!” said Matthew Maule. “My
business with your father is over. With yourself, it is now to begin!”
Alice looked towards her father, in surprise and inquiry.
“Yes, Alice,” said Mr. Pyncheon, with some disturbance and confusion.
“This young man—his name is Matthew Maule—professes, so far as I can
understand him, to be able to discover, through your means, a certain
paper or parchment, which was missing long before your birth. The
importance of the document in question renders it advisable to neglect
no possible, even if improbable, method of regaining it. You will
therefore oblige me, my dear Alice, by answering this person’s
inquiries, and complying with his lawful and reasonable requests, so
far as they may appear to have the aforesaid object in view. As I shall
remain in the room, you need apprehend no rude nor unbecoming
deportment, on the young man’s part; and, at your slightest wish, of
course, the investigation, or whatever we may call it, shall
immediately be broken off.”
“Mistress Alice Pyncheon,” remarked Matthew Maule, with the utmost
deference, but yet a half-hidden sarcasm in his look and tone, “will no
doubt feel herself quite safe in her father’s presence, and under his
all-sufficient protection.”
“I certainly shall entertain no manner of apprehension, with my father
at hand,” said Alice with maidenly dignity. “Neither do I conceive that
a lady, while true to herself, can have aught to fear from whomsoever,
or in any circumstances!”
Poor Alice! By what unhappy impulse did she thus put herself at once on
terms of defiance against a strength which she could not estimate?
“Then, Mistress Alice,” said Matthew Maule, handing a chair,—gracefully
enough, for a craftsman, “will it please you only to sit down, and do
me the favor (though altogether beyond a poor carpenter’s deserts) to
fix your eyes on mine!”
Alice complied. She was very proud. Setting aside all advantages of
rank, this fair girl deemed herself conscious of a power—combined of
beauty, high, unsullied purity, and the preservative force of
womanhood—that could make her sphere impenetrable, unless betrayed by
treachery within. She instinctively knew, it may be, that some sinister
or evil potency was now striving to pass her barriers; nor would she
decline the contest. So Alice put woman’s might against man’s might; a
match not often equal on the part of woman.
Her father meanwhile had turned away, and seemed absorbed in the
contemplation of a landscape by Claude, where a shadowy and
sun-streaked vista penetrated so remotely into an ancient wood, that it
would have been no wonder if his fancy had lost itself in the picture’s
bewildering depths. But, in truth, the picture was no more to him at
that moment than the blank wall against which it hung. His mind was
haunted with the many and strange tales which he had heard, attributing
mysterious if not supernatural endowments to these Maules, as well the
grandson here present as his two immediate ancestors. Mr. Pyncheon’s
long residence abroad, and intercourse with men of wit and
fashion,—courtiers, worldlings, and free-thinkers,—had done much
towards obliterating the grim Puritan superstitions, which no man of
New England birth at that early period could entirely escape. But, on
the other hand, had not a whole community believed Maule’s grandfather
to be a wizard? Had not the crime been proved? Had not the wizard died
for it? Had he not bequeathed a legacy of hatred against the Pyncheons
to this only grandson, who, as it appeared, was now about to exercise a
subtle influence over the daughter of his enemy’s house? Might not this
influence be the same that was called witchcraft?
Turning half around, he caught a glimpse of Maule’s figure in the
looking-glass. At some paces from Alice, with his arms uplifted in the
air, the carpenter made a gesture as if directing downward a slow,
ponderous, and invisible weight upon the maiden.
“Stay, Maule!” exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, stepping forward. “I forbid your
proceeding further!”
“Pray, my dear father, do not interrupt the young man,” said Alice,
without changing her position. “His efforts, I assure you, will prove
very harmless.”
Again Mr. Pyncheon turned his eyes towards the Claude. It was then his
daughter’s will, in opposition to his own, that the experiment should
be fully tried. Henceforth, therefore, he did but consent, not urge it.
And was it not for her sake far more than for his own that he desired
its success? That lost parchment once restored, the beautiful Alice
Pyncheon, with the rich dowry which he could then bestow, might wed an
English duke or a German reigning-prince, instead of some New England
clergyman or lawyer! At the thought, the ambitious father almost
consented, in his heart, that, if the devil’s power were needed to the
accomplishment of this great object, Maule might evoke him. Alice’s own
purity would be her safeguard.
With his mind full of imaginary magnificence, Mr. Pyncheon heard a
half-uttered exclamation from his daughter. It was very faint and low;
so indistinct that there seemed but half a will to shape out the words,
and too undefined a purport to be intelligible. Yet it was a call for
help!—his conscience never doubted it;—and, little more than a whisper
to his ear, it was a dismal shriek, and long reechoed so, in the region
round his heart! But this time the father did not turn.
After a further interval, Maule spoke.
“Behold your daughter,” said he.
Mr. Pyncheon came hastily forward. The carpenter was standing erect in
front of Alice’s chair, and pointing his finger towards the maiden with
an expression of triumphant power, the limits of which could not be
defined, as, indeed, its scope stretched vaguely towards the unseen and
the infinite. Alice sat in an attitude of profound repose, with the
long brown lashes drooping over her eyes.
“There she is!” said the carpenter. “Speak to her!”
“Alice! My daughter!” exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon. “My own Alice!”
She did not stir.
“Louder!” said Maule, smiling.
“Alice! Awake!” cried her father. “It troubles me to see you thus!
Awake!”
He spoke loudly, with terror in his voice, and close to that delicate
ear which had always been so sensitive to every discord. But the sound
evidently reached her not. It is indescribable what a sense of remote,
dim, unattainable distance betwixt himself and Alice was impressed on
the father by this impossibility of reaching her with his voice.
“Best touch her!” said Matthew Maule “Shake the girl, and roughly, too!
My hands are hardened with too much use of axe, saw, and plane,—else I
might help you!”
Mr. Pyncheon took her hand, and pressed it with the earnestness of
startled emotion. He kissed her, with so great a heart-throb in the
kiss, that he thought she must needs feel it. Then, in a gust of anger
at her insensibility, he shook her maiden form with a violence which,
the next moment, it affrighted him to remember. He withdrew his
encircling arms, and Alice—whose figure, though flexible, had been
wholly impassive—relapsed into the same attitude as before these
attempts to arouse her. Maule having shifted his position, her face was
turned towards him slightly, but with what seemed to be a reference of
her very slumber to his guidance.
Then it was a strange sight to behold how the man of conventionalities
shook the powder out of his periwig; how the reserved and stately
gentleman forgot his dignity; how the gold-embroidered waistcoat
flickered and glistened in the firelight with the convulsion of rage,
terror, and sorrow in the human heart that was beating under it.
“Villain!” cried Mr. Pyncheon, shaking his clenched fist at Maule. “You
and the fiend together have robbed me of my daughter. Give her back,
spawn of the old wizard, or you shall climb Gallows Hill in your
grandfather’s footsteps!”
“Softly, Mr. Pyncheon!” said the carpenter with scornful composure.
“Softly, an’ it please your worship, else you will spoil those rich
lace-ruffles at your wrists! Is it my crime if you have sold your
daughter for the mere hope of getting a sheet of yellow parchment into
your clutch? There sits Mistress Alice quietly asleep. Now let Matthew
Maule try whether she be as proud as the carpenter found her awhile
since.”
He spoke, and Alice responded, with a soft, subdued, inward
acquiescence, and a bending of her form towards him, like the flame of
a torch when it indicates a gentle draught of air. He beckoned with his
hand, and, rising from her chair,—blindly, but undoubtingly, as tending
to her sure and inevitable centre,—the proud Alice approached him. He
waved her back, and, retreating, Alice sank again into her seat.
“She is mine!” said Matthew Maule. “Mine, by the right of the strongest
spirit!”
In the further progress of the legend, there is a long, grotesque, and
occasionally awe-striking account of the carpenter’s incantations (if
so they are to be called), with a view of discovering the lost
document. It appears to have been his object to convert the mind of
Alice into a kind of telescopic medium, through which Mr. Pyncheon and
himself might obtain a glimpse into the spiritual world. He succeeded,
accordingly, in holding an imperfect sort of intercourse, at one
remove, with the departed personages in whose custody the so much
valued secret had been carried beyond the precincts of earth. During
her trance, Alice described three figures as being present to her
spiritualized perception. One was an aged, dignified, stern-looking