The House of the Seven Gables
gentleman, clad as for a solemn festival in grave and costly attire,
but with a great blood-stain on his richly wrought band; the second, an
aged man, meanly dressed, with a dark and malign countenance, and a
broken halter about his neck; the third, a person not so advanced in
life as the former two, but beyond the middle age, wearing a coarse
woollen tunic and leather breeches, and with a carpenter’s rule
sticking out of his side pocket. These three visionary characters
possessed a mutual knowledge of the missing document. One of them, in
truth,—it was he with the blood-stain on his band,—seemed, unless his
gestures were misunderstood, to hold the parchment in his immediate
keeping, but was prevented by his two partners in the mystery from
disburdening himself of the trust. Finally, when he showed a purpose of
shouting forth the secret loudly enough to be heard from his own sphere
into that of mortals, his companions struggled with him, and pressed
their hands over his mouth; and forthwith—whether that he were choked
by it, or that the secret itself was of a crimson hue—there was a fresh
flow of blood upon his band. Upon this, the two meanly dressed figures
mocked and jeered at the much-abashed old dignitary, and pointed their
fingers at the stain.
At this juncture, Maule turned to Mr. Pyncheon.
“It will never be allowed,” said he. “The custody of this secret, that
would so enrich his heirs, makes part of your grandfather’s
retribution. He must choke with it until it is no longer of any value.
And keep you the House of the Seven Gables! It is too dear bought an
inheritance, and too heavy with the curse upon it, to be shifted yet
awhile from the Colonel’s posterity.”
Mr. Pyncheon tried to speak, but—what with fear and passion—could make
only a gurgling murmur in his throat. The carpenter smiled.
“Aha, worshipful sir!—so you have old Maule’s blood to drink!” said he
jeeringly.
“Fiend in man’s shape! why dost thou keep dominion over my child?”
cried Mr. Pyncheon, when his choked utterance could make way. “Give me
back my daughter. Then go thy ways; and may we never meet again!”
“Your daughter!” said Matthew Maule. “Why, she is fairly mine!
Nevertheless, not to be too hard with fair Mistress Alice, I will leave
her in your keeping; but I do not warrant you that she shall never have
occasion to remember Maule, the carpenter.”
He waved his hands with an upward motion; and, after a few repetitions
of similar gestures, the beautiful Alice Pyncheon awoke from her
strange trance. She awoke without the slightest recollection of her
visionary experience; but as one losing herself in a momentary reverie,
and returning to the consciousness of actual life, in almost as brief
an interval as the down-sinking flame of the hearth should quiver again
up the chimney. On recognizing Matthew Maule, she assumed an air of
somewhat cold but gentle dignity, the rather, as there was a certain
peculiar smile on the carpenter’s visage that stirred the native pride
of the fair Alice. So ended, for that time, the quest for the lost
title-deed of the Pyncheon territory at the Eastward; nor, though often
subsequently renewed, has it ever yet befallen a Pyncheon to set his
eye upon that parchment.
But, alas for the beautiful, the gentle, yet too haughty Alice! A power
that she little dreamed of had laid its grasp upon her maiden soul. A
will, most unlike her own, constrained her to do its grotesque and
fantastic bidding. Her father as it proved, had martyred his poor child
to an inordinate desire for measuring his land by miles instead of
acres. And, therefore, while Alice Pyncheon lived, she was Maule’s
slave, in a bondage more humiliating, a thousand-fold, than that which
binds its chain around the body. Seated by his humble fireside, Maule
had but to wave his hand; and, wherever the proud lady chanced to
be,—whether in her chamber, or entertaining her father’s stately
guests, or worshipping at church,—whatever her place or occupation, her
spirit passed from beneath her own control, and bowed itself to Maule.
“Alice, laugh!”—the carpenter, beside his hearth, would say; or perhaps
intensely will it, without a spoken word. And, even were it
prayer-time, or at a funeral, Alice must break into wild laughter.
“Alice, be sad!”—and, at the instant, down would come her tears,
quenching all the mirth of those around her like sudden rain upon a
bonfire. “Alice, dance.”—and dance she would, not in such court-like
measures as she had learned abroad, but some high-paced jig, or
hop-skip rigadoon, befitting the brisk lasses at a rustic merry-making.
It seemed to be Maule’s impulse, not to ruin Alice, nor to visit her
with any black or gigantic mischief, which would have crowned her
sorrows with the grace of tragedy, but to wreak a low, ungenerous scorn
upon her. Thus all the dignity of life was lost. She felt herself too
much abased, and longed to change natures with some worm!
One evening, at a bridal party (but not her own; for, so lost from
self-control, she would have deemed it sin to marry), poor Alice was
beckoned forth by her unseen despot, and constrained, in her gossamer
white dress and satin slippers, to hasten along the street to the mean
dwelling of a laboring-man. There was laughter and good cheer within;
for Matthew Maule, that night, was to wed the laborer’s daughter, and
had summoned proud Alice Pyncheon to wait upon his bride. And so she
did; and when the twain were one, Alice awoke out of her enchanted
sleep. Yet, no longer proud,—humbly, and with a smile all steeped in
sadness,—she kissed Maule’s wife, and went her way. It was an inclement
night; the southeast wind drove the mingled snow and rain into her
thinly sheltered bosom; her satin slippers were wet through and
through, as she trod the muddy sidewalks. The next day a cold; soon, a
settled cough; anon, a hectic cheek, a wasted form, that sat beside the
harpsichord, and filled the house with music! Music in which a strain
of the heavenly choristers was echoed! Oh; joy! For Alice had borne her
last humiliation! Oh, greater joy! For Alice was penitent of her one
earthly sin, and proud no more!
The Pyncheons made a great funeral for Alice. The kith and kin were
there, and the whole respectability of the town besides. But, last in
the procession, came Matthew Maule, gnashing his teeth, as if he would
have bitten his own heart in twain,—the darkest and wofullest man that
ever walked behind a corpse! He meant to humble Alice, not to kill her;
but he had taken a woman’s delicate soul into his rude gripe, to play
with—and she was dead!
XIV.
Phœbe’s Good-Bye
Holgrave, plunging into his tale with the energy and absorption natural
to a young author, had given a good deal of action to the parts capable
of being developed and exemplified in that manner. He now observed that
a certain remarkable drowsiness (wholly unlike that with which the
reader possibly feels himself affected) had been flung over the senses
of his auditress. It was the effect, unquestionably, of the mystic
gesticulations by which he had sought to bring bodily before Phœbe’s
perception the figure of the mesmerizing carpenter. With the lids
drooping over her eyes,—now lifted for an instant, and drawn down again
as with leaden weights,—she leaned slightly towards him, and seemed
almost to regulate her breath by his. Holgrave gazed at her, as he
rolled up his manuscript, and recognized an incipient stage of that
curious psychological condition which, as he had himself told Phœbe, he
possessed more than an ordinary faculty of producing. A veil was
beginning to be muffled about her, in which she could behold only him,
and live only in his thoughts and emotions. His glance, as he fastened
it on the young girl, grew involuntarily more concentrated; in his
attitude there was the consciousness of power, investing his hardly
mature figure with a dignity that did not belong to its physical
manifestation. It was evident, that, with but one wave of his hand and
a corresponding effort of his will, he could complete his mastery over
Phœbe’s yet free and virgin spirit: he could establish an influence
over this good, pure, and simple child, as dangerous, and perhaps as
disastrous, as that which the carpenter of his legend had acquired and
exercised over the ill-fated Alice.
To a disposition like Holgrave’s, at once speculative and active, there
is no temptation so great as the opportunity of acquiring empire over
the human spirit; nor any idea more seductive to a young man than to
become the arbiter of a young girl’s destiny. Let us,
therefore,—whatever his defects of nature and education, and in spite
of his scorn for creeds and institutions,—concede to the
daguerreotypist the rare and high quality of reverence for another’s
individuality. Let us allow him integrity, also, forever after to be
confided in; since he forbade himself to twine that one link more which
might have rendered his spell over Phœbe indissoluble.
He made a slight gesture upward with his hand.
“You really mortify me, my dear Miss Phœbe!” he exclaimed, smiling
half-sarcastically at her. “My poor story, it is but too evident, will
never do for Godey or Graham! Only think of your falling asleep at what
I hoped the newspaper critics would pronounce a most brilliant,
powerful, imaginative, pathetic, and original winding up! Well, the
manuscript must serve to light lamps with;—if, indeed, being so imbued
with my gentle dulness, it is any longer capable of flame!”
“Me asleep! How can you say so?” answered Phœbe, as unconscious of the
crisis through which she had passed as an infant of the precipice to
the verge of which it has rolled. “No, no! I consider myself as having
been very attentive; and, though I don’t remember the incidents quite
distinctly, yet I have an impression of a vast deal of trouble and
calamity,—so, no doubt, the story will prove exceedingly attractive.”
By this time the sun had gone down, and was tinting the clouds towards
the zenith with those bright hues which are not seen there until some
time after sunset, and when the horizon has quite lost its richer
brilliancy. The moon, too, which had long been climbing overhead, and
unobtrusively melting its disk into the azure,—like an ambitious
demagogue, who hides his aspiring purpose by assuming the prevalent hue
of popular sentiment,—now began to shine out, broad and oval, in its
middle pathway. These silvery beams were already powerful enough to
change the character of the lingering daylight. They softened and
embellished the aspect of the old house; although the shadows fell
deeper into the angles of its many gables, and lay brooding under the
projecting story, and within the half-open door. With the lapse of
every moment, the garden grew more picturesque; the fruit-trees,
shrubbery, and flower-bushes had a dark obscurity among them. The
commonplace characteristics—which, at noontide, it seemed to have taken
a century of sordid life to accumulate—were now transfigured by a charm
of romance. A hundred mysterious years were whispering among the
leaves, whenever the slight sea-breeze found its way thither and
stirred them. Through the foliage that roofed the little summer-house
the moonlight flickered to and fro, and fell silvery white on the dark
floor, the table, and the circular bench, with a continual shift and
play, according as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs
admitted or shut out the glimmer.
So sweetly cool was the atmosphere, after all the feverish day, that
the summer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid
moonlight, with a dash of icy temper in them, out of a silver vase.
Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human
heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of