The House of the Seven Gables
and her brother too, have both gone to their cousin’s, Judge Pyncheon’s
at his country-seat. There’s not a soul in the house, but that young
daguerreotype-man that sleeps in the north gable. I saw old Hepzibah
and Clifford go away yesterday; and a queer couple of ducks they were,
paddling through the mud-puddles! They’re gone, I’ll assure you.”
“And how do you know they’re gone to the Judge’s?” asked Mrs. Gubbins.
“He’s a rich man; and there’s been a quarrel between him and Hepzibah
this many a day, because he won’t give her a living. That’s the main
reason of her setting up a cent-shop.”
“I know that well enough,” said the neighbor. “But they’re gone,—that’s
one thing certain. And who but a blood relation, that couldn’t help
himself, I ask you, would take in that awful-tempered old maid, and
that dreadful Clifford? That’s it, you may be sure.”
Mrs. Gubbins took her departure, still brimming over with hot wrath
against the absent Hepzibah. For another half-hour, or, perhaps,
considerably more, there was almost as much quiet on the outside of the
house as within. The elm, however, made a pleasant, cheerful, sunny
sigh, responsive to the breeze that was elsewhere imperceptible; a
swarm of insects buzzed merrily under its drooping shadow, and became
specks of light whenever they darted into the sunshine; a locust sang,
once or twice, in some inscrutable seclusion of the tree; and a
solitary little bird, with plumage of pale gold, came and hovered about
Alice’s Posies.
At last our small acquaintance, Ned Higgins, trudged up the street, on
his way to school; and happening, for the first time in a fortnight, to
be the possessor of a cent, he could by no means get past the shop-door
of the Seven Gables. But it would not open. Again and again, however,
and half a dozen other agains, with the inexorable pertinacity of a
child intent upon some object important to itself, did he renew his
efforts for admittance. He had, doubtless, set his heart upon an
elephant; or, possibly, with Hamlet, he meant to eat a crocodile. In
response to his more violent attacks, the bell gave, now and then, a
moderate tinkle, but could not be stirred into clamor by any exertion
of the little fellow’s childish and tiptoe strength. Holding by the
door-handle, he peeped through a crevice of the curtain, and saw that
the inner door, communicating with the passage towards the parlor, was
closed.
“Miss Pyncheon!” screamed the child, rapping on the window-pane, “I
want an elephant!”
There being no answer to several repetitions of the summons, Ned began
to grow impatient; and his little pot of passion quickly boiling over,
he picked up a stone, with a naughty purpose to fling it through the
window; at the same time blubbering and sputtering with wrath. A
man—one of two who happened to be passing by—caught the urchin’s arm.
“What’s the trouble, old gentleman?” he asked.
“I want old Hepzibah, or Phœbe, or any of them!” answered Ned, sobbing.
“They won’t open the door; and I can’t get my elephant!”
“Go to school, you little scamp!” said the man. “There’s another
cent-shop round the corner. ’Tis very strange, Dixey,” added he to his
companion, “what’s become of all these Pyncheon’s! Smith, the
livery-stable keeper, tells me Judge Pyncheon put his horse up
yesterday, to stand till after dinner, and has not taken him away yet.
And one of the Judge’s hired men has been in, this morning, to make
inquiry about him. He’s a kind of person, they say, that seldom breaks
his habits, or stays out o’ nights.”
“Oh, he’ll turn up safe enough!” said Dixey. “And as for Old Maid
Pyncheon, take my word for it, she has run in debt, and gone off from
her creditors. I foretold, you remember, the first morning she set up
shop, that her devilish scowl would frighten away customers. They
couldn’t stand it!”
“I never thought she’d make it go,” remarked his friend. “This business
of cent-shops is overdone among the women-folks. My wife tried it, and
lost five dollars on her outlay!”
“Poor business!” said Dixey, shaking his head. “Poor business!”
In the course of the morning, there were various other attempts to open
a communication with the supposed inhabitants of this silent and
impenetrable mansion. The man of root-beer came, in his neatly painted
wagon, with a couple of dozen full bottles, to be exchanged for empty
ones; the baker, with a lot of crackers which Hepzibah had ordered for
her retail custom; the butcher, with a nice titbit which he fancied she
would be eager to secure for Clifford. Had any observer of these
proceedings been aware of the fearful secret hidden within the house,
it would have affected him with a singular shape and modification of
horror, to see the current of human life making this small eddy
hereabouts,—whirling sticks, straws and all such trifles, round and
round, right over the black depth where a dead corpse lay unseen!
The butcher was so much in earnest with his sweetbread of lamb, or
whatever the dainty might be, that he tried every accessible door of
the Seven Gables, and at length came round again to the shop, where he
ordinarily found admittance.
“It’s a nice article, and I know the old lady would jump at it,” said
he to himself. “She can’t be gone away! In fifteen years that I have
driven my cart through Pyncheon Street, I’ve never known her to be away
from home; though often enough, to be sure, a man might knock all day
without bringing her to the door. But that was when she’d only herself
to provide for.”
Peeping through the same crevice of the curtain where, only a little
while before, the urchin of elephantine appetite had peeped, the
butcher beheld the inner door, not closed, as the child had seen it,
but ajar, and almost wide open. However it might have happened, it was
the fact. Through the passage-way there was a dark vista into the
lighter but still obscure interior of the parlor. It appeared to the
butcher that he could pretty clearly discern what seemed to be the
stalwart legs, clad in black pantaloons, of a man sitting in a large
oaken chair, the back of which concealed all the remainder of his
figure. This contemptuous tranquillity on the part of an occupant of
the house, in response to the butcher’s indefatigable efforts to
attract notice, so piqued the man of flesh that he determined to
withdraw.
“So,” thought he, “there sits Old Maid Pyncheon’s bloody brother, while
I’ve been giving myself all this trouble! Why, if a hog hadn’t more
manners, I’d stick him! I call it demeaning a man’s business to trade
with such people; and from this time forth, if they want a sausage or
an ounce of liver, they shall run after the cart for it!”
He tossed the titbit angrily into his cart, and drove off in a pet.
Not a great while afterwards there was a sound of music turning the
corner and approaching down the street, with several intervals of
silence, and then a renewed and nearer outbreak of brisk melody. A mob
of children was seen moving onward, or stopping, in unison with the
sound, which appeared to proceed from the centre of the throng; so that
they were loosely bound together by slender strains of harmony, and
drawn along captive; with ever and anon an accession of some little
fellow in an apron and straw-hat, capering forth from door or gateway.
Arriving under the shadow of the Pyncheon Elm, it proved to be the
Italian boy, who, with his monkey and show of puppets, had once before
played his hurdy-gurdy beneath the arched window. The pleasant face of
Phœbe—and doubtless, too, the liberal recompense which she had flung
him—still dwelt in his remembrance. His expressive features kindled up,
as he recognized the spot where this trifling incident of his erratic
life had chanced. He entered the neglected yard (now wilder than ever,
with its growth of hog-weed and burdock), stationed himself on the
doorstep of the main entrance, and, opening his show-box, began to
play. Each individual of the automatic community forthwith set to work,
according to his or her proper vocation: the monkey, taking off his
Highland bonnet, bowed and scraped to the by-standers most
obsequiously, with ever an observant eye to pick up a stray cent; and
the young foreigner himself, as he turned the crank of his machine,
glanced upward to the arched window, expectant of a presence that would
make his music the livelier and sweeter. The throng of children stood
near; some on the sidewalk; some within the yard; two or three
establishing themselves on the very door-step; and one squatting on the
threshold. Meanwhile, the locust kept singing in the great old Pyncheon
Elm.
“I don’t hear anybody in the house,” said one of the children to
another. “The monkey won’t pick up anything here.”
“There is somebody at home,” affirmed the urchin on the threshold. “I
heard a step!”
Still the young Italian’s eye turned sidelong upward; and it really
seemed as if the touch of genuine, though slight and almost playful,
emotion communicated a juicier sweetness to the dry, mechanical process
of his minstrelsy. These wanderers are readily responsive to any
natural kindness—be it no more than a smile, or a word itself not
understood, but only a warmth in it—which befalls them on the roadside
of life. They remember these things, because they are the little
enchantments which, for the instant,—for the space that reflects a
landscape in a soap-bubble,—build up a home about them. Therefore, the
Italian boy would not be discouraged by the heavy silence with which
the old house seemed resolute to clog the vivacity of his instrument.
He persisted in his melodious appeals; he still looked upward, trusting
that his dark, alien countenance would soon be brightened by Phœbe’s
sunny aspect. Neither could he be willing to depart without again
beholding Clifford, whose sensibility, like Phœbe’s smile, had talked a
kind of heart’s language to the foreigner. He repeated all his music
over and over again, until his auditors were getting weary. So were the
little wooden people in his show-box, and the monkey most of all. There
was no response, save the singing of the locust.
“No children live in this house,” said a schoolboy, at last. “Nobody
lives here but an old maid and an old man. You’ll get nothing here! Why
don’t you go along?”
“You fool, you, why do you tell him?” whispered a shrewd little Yankee,
caring nothing for the music, but a good deal for the cheap rate at
which it was had. “Let him play as he likes! If there’s nobody to pay
him, that’s his own lookout!”
Once more, however, the Italian ran over his round of melodies. To the
common observer—who could understand nothing of the case, except the
music and the sunshine on the hither side of the door—it might have
been amusing to watch the pertinacity of the street-performer. Will he
succeed at last? Will that stubborn door be suddenly flung open? Will a
group of joyous children, the young ones of the house, come dancing,
shouting, laughing, into the open air, and cluster round the show-box,
looking with eager merriment at the puppets, and tossing each a copper
for long-tailed Mammon, the monkey, to pick up?
But to us, who know the inner heart of the Seven Gables as well as its
exterior face, there is a ghastly effect in this repetition of light
popular tunes at its door-step. It would be an ugly business, indeed,
if Judge Pyncheon (who would not have cared a fig for Paganini’s fiddle
in his most harmonious mood) should make his appearance at the door,
with a bloody shirt-bosom, and a grim frown on his swarthily white
visage, and motion the foreign vagabond away! Was ever before such a
grinding out of jigs and waltzes, where nobody was in the cue to dance?
Yes, very often. This contrast, or intermingling of tragedy with mirth,