The House of the Seven Gables
“What! How! Is he ill?” exclaimed Judge Pyncheon, starting with what
seemed to be angry alarm; for the very frown of the old Puritan
darkened through the room as he spoke. “Nay, then, I must and will see
him! What if he should die?”
“He is in no danger of death,” said Hepzibah,—and added, with
bitterness that she could repress no longer, “none; unless he shall be
persecuted to death, now, by the same man who long ago attempted it!”
“Cousin Hepzibah,” said the Judge, with an impressive earnestness of
manner, which grew even to tearful pathos as he proceeded, “is it
possible that you do not perceive how unjust, how unkind, how
unchristian, is this constant, this long-continued bitterness against
me, for a part which I was constrained by duty and conscience, by the
force of law, and at my own peril, to act? What did I do, in detriment
to Clifford, which it was possible to leave undone? How could you, his
sister,—if, for your never-ending sorrow, as it has been for mine, you
had known what I did,—have shown greater tenderness? And do you think,
cousin, that it has cost me no pang?—that it has left no anguish in my
bosom, from that day to this, amidst all the prosperity with which
Heaven has blessed me?—or that I do not now rejoice, when it is deemed
consistent with the dues of public justice and the welfare of society
that this dear kinsman, this early friend, this nature so delicately
and beautifully constituted,—so unfortunate, let us pronounce him, and
forbear to say, so guilty,—that our own Clifford, in fine, should be
given back to life, and its possibilities of enjoyment? Ah, you little
know me, Cousin Hepzibah! You little know this heart! It now throbs at
the thought of meeting him! There lives not the human being (except
yourself,—and you not more than I) who has shed so many tears for
Clifford’s calamity. You behold some of them now. There is none who
would so delight to promote his happiness! Try me, Hepzibah!—try me,
Cousin!—try the man whom you have treated as your enemy and
Clifford’s!—try Jaffrey Pyncheon, and you shall find him true, to the
heart’s core!”
“In the name of Heaven,” cried Hepzibah, provoked only to intenser
indignation by this outgush of the inestimable tenderness of a stern
nature,—“in God’s name, whom you insult, and whose power I could almost
question, since he hears you utter so many false words without palsying
your tongue,—give over, I beseech you, this loathsome pretence of
affection for your victim! You hate him! Say so, like a man! You
cherish, at this moment, some black purpose against him in your heart!
Speak it out, at once!—or, if you hope so to promote it better, hide it
till you can triumph in its success! But never speak again of your love
for my poor brother. I cannot bear it! It will drive me beyond a
woman’s decency! It will drive me mad! Forbear! Not another word! It
will make me spurn you!”
For once, Hepzibah’s wrath had given her courage. She had spoken. But,
after all, was this unconquerable distrust of Judge Pyncheon’s
integrity, and this utter denial, apparently, of his claim to stand in
the ring of human sympathies,—were they founded in any just perception
of his character, or merely the offspring of a woman’s unreasonable
prejudice, deduced from nothing?
The Judge, beyond all question, was a man of eminent respectability.
The church acknowledged it; the state acknowledged it. It was denied by
nobody. In all the very extensive sphere of those who knew him, whether
in his public or private capacities, there was not an individual—except
Hepzibah, and some lawless mystic, like the daguerreotypist, and,
possibly, a few political opponents—who would have dreamed of seriously
disputing his claim to a high and honorable place in the world’s
regard. Nor (we must do him the further justice to say) did Judge
Pyncheon himself, probably, entertain many or very frequent doubts,
that his enviable reputation accorded with his deserts. His conscience,
therefore, usually considered the surest witness to a man’s
integrity,—his conscience, unless it might be for the little space of
five minutes in the twenty-four hours, or, now and then, some black day
in the whole year’s circle,—his conscience bore an accordant testimony
with the world’s laudatory voice. And yet, strong as this evidence may
seem to be, we should hesitate to peril our own conscience on the
assertion, that the Judge and the consenting world were right, and that
poor Hepzibah with her solitary prejudice was wrong. Hidden from
mankind,—forgotten by himself, or buried so deeply under a sculptured
and ornamented pile of ostentatious deeds that his daily life could
take no note of it,—there may have lurked some evil and unsightly
thing. Nay, we could almost venture to say, further, that a daily guilt
might have been acted by him, continually renewed, and reddening forth
afresh, like the miraculous blood-stain of a murder, without his
necessarily and at every moment being aware of it.
Men of strong minds, great force of character, and a hard texture of
the sensibilities, are very capable of falling into mistakes of this
kind. They are ordinarily men to whom forms are of paramount
importance. Their field of action lies among the external phenomena of
life. They possess vast ability in grasping, and arranging, and
appropriating to themselves, the big, heavy, solid unrealities, such as
gold, landed estate, offices of trust and emolument, and public honors.
With these materials, and with deeds of goodly aspect, done in the
public eye, an individual of this class builds up, as it were, a tall
and stately edifice, which, in the view of other people, and ultimately
in his own view, is no other than the man’s character, or the man
himself. Behold, therefore, a palace! Its splendid halls and suites of
spacious apartments are floored with a mosaic-work of costly marbles;
its windows, the whole height of each room, admit the sunshine through
the most transparent of plate-glass; its high cornices are gilded, and
its ceilings gorgeously painted; and a lofty dome—through which, from
the central pavement, you may gaze up to the sky, as with no
obstructing medium between—surmounts the whole. With what fairer and
nobler emblem could any man desire to shadow forth his character? Ah!
but in some low and obscure nook,—some narrow closet on the
ground-floor, shut, locked and bolted, and the key flung away,—or
beneath the marble pavement, in a stagnant water-puddle, with the
richest pattern of mosaic-work above,—may lie a corpse, half decayed,
and still decaying, and diffusing its death-scent all through the
palace! The inhabitant will not be conscious of it, for it has long
been his daily breath! Neither will the visitors, for they smell only
the rich odors which the master sedulously scatters through the palace,
and the incense which they bring, and delight to burn before him! Now
and then, perchance, comes in a seer, before whose sadly gifted eye the
whole structure melts into thin air, leaving only the hidden nook, the
bolted closet, with the cobwebs festooned over its forgotten door, or
the deadly hole under the pavement, and the decaying corpse within.
Here, then, we are to seek the true emblem of the man’s character, and
of the deed that gives whatever reality it possesses to his life. And,
beneath the show of a marble palace, that pool of stagnant water, foul
with many impurities, and, perhaps, tinged with blood,—that secret
abomination, above which, possibly, he may say his prayers, without
remembering it,—is this man’s miserable soul!
To apply this train of remark somewhat more closely to Judge Pyncheon.
We might say (without in the least imputing crime to a personage of his
eminent respectability) that there was enough of splendid rubbish in
his life to cover up and paralyze a more active and subtile conscience
than the Judge was ever troubled with. The purity of his judicial
character, while on the bench; the faithfulness of his public service
in subsequent capacities; his devotedness to his party, and the rigid
consistency with which he had adhered to its principles, or, at all
events, kept pace with its organized movements; his remarkable zeal as
president of a Bible society; his unimpeachable integrity as treasurer
of a widow’s and orphan’s fund; his benefits to horticulture, by
producing two much esteemed varieties of the pear and to agriculture,
through the agency of the famous Pyncheon bull; the cleanliness of his
moral deportment, for a great many years past; the severity with which
he had frowned upon, and finally cast off, an expensive and dissipated
son, delaying forgiveness until within the final quarter of an hour of
the young man’s life; his prayers at morning and eventide, and graces
at meal-time; his efforts in furtherance of the temperance cause; his
confining himself, since the last attack of the gout, to five diurnal
glasses of old sherry wine; the snowy whiteness of his linen, the
polish of his boots, the handsomeness of his gold-headed cane, the
square and roomy fashion of his coat, and the fineness of its material,
and, in general, the studied propriety of his dress and equipment; the
scrupulousness with which he paid public notice, in the street, by a
bow, a lifting of the hat, a nod, or a motion of the hand, to all and
sundry of his acquaintances, rich or poor; the smile of broad
benevolence wherewith he made it a point to gladden the whole
world,—what room could possibly be found for darker traits in a
portrait made up of lineaments like these? This proper face was what he
beheld in the looking-glass. This admirably arranged life was what he
was conscious of in the progress of every day. Then might not he claim
to be its result and sum, and say to himself and the community, “Behold
Judge Pyncheon there”?
And allowing that, many, many years ago, in his early and reckless
youth, he had committed some one wrong act,—or that, even now, the
inevitable force of circumstances should occasionally make him do one
questionable deed among a thousand praiseworthy, or, at least,
blameless ones,—would you characterize the Judge by that one necessary
deed, and that half-forgotten act, and let it overshadow the fair
aspect of a lifetime? What is there so ponderous in evil, that a
thumb’s bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil which
were heaped into the other scale! This scale and balance system is a
favorite one with people of Judge Pyncheon’s brotherhood. A hard, cold
man, thus unfortunately situated, seldom or never looking inward, and
resolutely taking his idea of himself from what purports to be his
image as reflected in the mirror of public opinion, can scarcely arrive
at true self-knowledge, except through loss of property and reputation.
Sickness will not always help him do it; not always the death-hour!
But our affair now is with Judge Pyncheon as he stood confronting the
fierce outbreak of Hepzibah’s wrath. Without premeditation, to her own
surprise, and indeed terror, she had given vent, for once, to the
inveteracy of her resentment, cherished against this kinsman for thirty
years.
Thus far the Judge’s countenance had expressed mild forbearance,—grave
and almost gentle deprecation of his cousin’s unbecoming violence,—free
and Christian-like forgiveness of the wrong inflicted by her words. But
when those words were irrevocably spoken, his look assumed sternness,
the sense of power, and immitigable resolve; and this with so natural
and imperceptible a change, that it seemed as if the iron man had stood
there from the first, and the meek man not at all. The effect was as
when the light, vapory clouds, with their soft coloring, suddenly
vanish from the stony brow of a precipitous mountain, and leave there