The House of the Seven Gables
“Happy—” thought Hepzibah, bitterly conscious, at the word, of her dull
and heavy heart, with the frozen pain in it,—“happy. He is mad already;
and, if I could once feel myself broad awake, I should go mad too!”
If a fixed idea be madness, she was perhaps not remote from it. Fast
and far as they had rattled and clattered along the iron track, they
might just as well, as regarded Hepzibah’s mental images, have been
passing up and down Pyncheon Street. With miles and miles of varied
scenery between, there was no scene for her save the seven old
gable-peaks, with their moss, and the tuft of weeds in one of the
angles, and the shop-window, and a customer shaking the door, and
compelling the little bell to jingle fiercely, but without disturbing
Judge Pyncheon! This one old house was everywhere! It transported its
great, lumbering bulk with more than railroad speed, and set itself
phlegmatically down on whatever spot she glanced at. The quality of
Hepzibah’s mind was too unmalleable to take new impressions so readily
as Clifford’s. He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable
kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots.
Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her
brother and herself was changed. At home, she was his guardian; here,
Clifford had become hers, and seemed to comprehend whatever belonged to
their new position with a singular rapidity of intelligence. He had
been startled into manhood and intellectual vigor; or, at least, into a
condition that resembled them, though it might be both diseased and
transitory.
The conductor now applied for their tickets; and Clifford, who had made
himself the purse-bearer, put a bank-note into his hand, as he had
observed others do.
“For the lady and yourself?” asked the conductor. “And how far?”
“As far as that will carry us,” said Clifford. “It is no great matter.
We are riding for pleasure merely.”
“You choose a strange day for it, sir!” remarked a gimlet-eyed old
gentleman on the other side of the car, looking at Clifford and his
companion, as if curious to make them out. “The best chance of
pleasure, in an easterly rain, I take it, is in a man’s own house, with
a nice little fire in the chimney.”
“I cannot precisely agree with you,” said Clifford, courteously bowing
to the old gentleman, and at once taking up the clew of conversation
which the latter had proffered. “It had just occurred to me, on the
contrary, that this admirable invention of the railroad—with the vast
and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and
convenience—is destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and
fireside, and substitute something better.”
“In the name of common-sense,” asked the old gentleman rather testily,
“what can be better for a man than his own parlor and chimney-corner?”
“These things have not the merit which many good people attribute to
them,” replied Clifford. “They may be said, in few and pithy words, to
have ill served a poor purpose. My impression is, that our wonderfully
increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to
bring us around again to the nomadic state. You are aware, my dear
sir,—you must have observed it in your own experience,—that all human
progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful
figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going
straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new
position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried
and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and
perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy
of the present and the future. To apply this truth to the topic now
under discussion. In the early epochs of our race, men dwelt in
temporary huts, of bowers of branches, as easily constructed as a
bird’s-nest, and which they built,—if it should be called building,
when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made
with hands,—which Nature, we will say, assisted them to rear where
fruit abounded, where fish and game were plentiful, or, most
especially, where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier
shade than elsewhere, and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood,
and hill. This life possessed a charm which, ever since man quitted it,
has vanished from existence. And it typified something better than
itself. It had its drawbacks; such as hunger and thirst, inclement
weather, hot sunshine, and weary and foot-blistering marches over
barren and ugly tracts, that lay between the sites desirable for their
fertility and beauty. But in our ascending spiral, we escape all this.
These railroads—could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble
and the jar got rid of—are positively the greatest blessing that the
ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the
toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being
so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot? Why,
therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily
be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life
in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as
easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,—in a better sense, wherever the
fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?”
Clifford’s countenance glowed, as he divulged this theory; a youthful
character shone out from within, converting the wrinkles and pallid
duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask. The merry girls let
their ball drop upon the floor, and gazed at him. They said to
themselves, perhaps, that, before his hair was gray and the crow’s-feet
tracked his temples, this now decaying man must have stamped the
impress of his features on many a woman’s heart. But, alas! no woman’s
eye had seen his face while it was beautiful.
“I should scarcely call it an improved state of things,” observed
Clifford’s new acquaintance, “to live everywhere and nowhere!”
“Would you not?” exclaimed Clifford, with singular energy. “It is as
clear to me as sunshine,—were there any in the sky,—that the greatest
possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and
improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with
mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men
painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home!
The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it. Morbid
influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about hearths, and
pollute the life of households. There is no such unwholesome atmosphere
as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one’s defunct forefathers
and relatives. I speak of what I know. There is a certain house within
my familiar recollection,—one of those peaked-gable (there are seven of
them), projecting-storied edifices, such as you occasionally see in our
older towns,—a rusty, crazy, creaky, dry-rotted, dingy, dark, and
miserable old dungeon, with an arched window over the porch, and a
little shop-door on one side, and a great, melancholy elm before it!
Now, sir, whenever my thoughts recur to this seven-gabled mansion (the
fact is so very curious that I must needs mention it), immediately I
have a vision or image of an elderly man, of remarkably stern
countenance, sitting in an oaken elbow-chair, dead, stone-dead, with an
ugly flow of blood upon his shirt-bosom! Dead, but with open eyes! He
taints the whole house, as I remember it. I could never flourish there,
nor be happy, nor do nor enjoy what God meant me to do and enjoy.”
His face darkened, and seemed to contract, and shrivel itself up, and
wither into age.
“Never, sir!” he repeated. “I could never draw cheerful breath there!”
“I should think not,” said the old gentleman, eyeing Clifford
earnestly, and rather apprehensively. “I should conceive not, sir, with
that notion in your head!”
“Surely not,” continued Clifford; “and it were a relief to me if that
house could be torn down, or burnt up, and so the earth be rid of it,
and grass be sown abundantly over its foundation. Not that I should
ever visit its site again! for, sir, the farther I get away from it,
the more does the joy, the lightsome freshness, the heart-leap, the
intellectual dance, the youth, in short,—yes, my youth, my youth!—the
more does it come back to me. No longer ago than this morning, I was
old. I remember looking in the glass, and wondering at my own gray
hair, and the wrinkles, many and deep, right across my brow, and the
furrows down my cheeks, and the prodigious trampling of crow’s-feet
about my temples! It was too soon! I could not bear it! Age had no
right to come! I had not lived! But now do I look old? If so, my aspect
belies me strangely; for—a great weight being off my mind—I feel in the
very heyday of my youth, with the world and my best days before me!”
“I trust you may find it so,” said the old gentleman, who seemed rather
embarrassed, and desirous of avoiding the observation which Clifford’s
wild talk drew on them both. “You have my best wishes for it.”
“For Heaven’s sake, dear Clifford, be quiet!” whispered his sister.
“They think you mad.”
“Be quiet yourself, Hepzibah!” returned her brother. “No matter what
they think! I am not mad. For the first time in thirty years my
thoughts gush up and find words ready for them. I must talk, and I
will!”
He turned again towards the old gentleman, and renewed the
conversation.
“Yes, my dear sir,” said he, “it is my firm belief and hope that these
terms of roof and hearth-stone, which have so long been held to embody
something sacred, are soon to pass out of men’s daily use, and be
forgotten. Just imagine, for a moment, how much of human evil will
crumble away, with this one change! What we call real estate—the solid
ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all
the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit almost any wrong,—he
will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and
which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages,—only to
build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in,
and for his posterity to be miserable in. He lays his own dead corpse
beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning
picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an evil
destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there. I
do not speak wildly. I have just such a house in my mind’s eye!”
“Then, sir,” said the old gentleman, getting anxious to drop the
subject, “you are not to blame for leaving it.”
“Within the lifetime of the child already born,” Clifford went on, “all
this will be done away. The world is growing too ethereal and spiritual
to bear these enormities a great while longer. To me, though, for a
considerable period of time, I have lived chiefly in retirement, and
know less of such things than most men,—even to me, the harbingers of a
better era are unmistakable. Mesmerism, now! Will that effect nothing,
think you, towards purging away the grossness out of human life?”
“All a humbug!” growled the old gentleman.
“These rapping spirits, that little Phœbe told us of, the other day,”
said Clifford,—“what are these but the messengers of the spiritual
world, knocking at the door of substance? And it shall be flung wide
open!”
“A humbug, again!” cried the old gentleman, growing more and more testy
at these glimpses of Clifford’s metaphysics. “I should like to rap with
a good stick on the empty pates of the dolts who circulate such
nonsense!”
“Then there is electricity,—the demon, the angel, the mighty physical
power, the all-pervading intelligence!” exclaimed Clifford. “Is that a