The House of the Seven Gables
happens daily, hourly, momently. The gloomy and desolate old house,
deserted of life, and with awful Death sitting sternly in its solitude,
was the emblem of many a human heart, which, nevertheless, is compelled
to hear the thrill and echo of the world’s gayety around it.
Before the conclusion of the Italian’s performance, a couple of men
happened to be passing, On their way to dinner. “I say, you young
French fellow!” called out one of them,—“come away from that doorstep,
and go somewhere else with your nonsense! The Pyncheon family live
there; and they are in great trouble, just about this time. They don’t
feel musical to-day. It is reported all over town that Judge Pyncheon,
who owns the house, has been murdered; and the city marshal is going to
look into the matter. So be off with you, at once!”
As the Italian shouldered his hurdy-gurdy, he saw on the doorstep a
card, which had been covered, all the morning, by the newspaper that
the carrier had flung upon it, but was now shuffled into sight. He
picked it up, and perceiving something written in pencil, gave it to
the man to read. In fact, it was an engraved card of Judge Pyncheon’s
with certain pencilled memoranda on the back, referring to various
businesses which it had been his purpose to transact during the
preceding day. It formed a prospective epitome of the day’s history;
only that affairs had not turned out altogether in accordance with the
programme. The card must have been lost from the Judge’s vest-pocket in
his preliminary attempt to gain access by the main entrance of the
house. Though well soaked with rain, it was still partially legible.
“Look here; Dixey!” cried the man. “This has something to do with Judge
Pyncheon. See!—here’s his name printed on it; and here, I suppose, is
some of his handwriting.”
“Let’s go to the city marshal with it!” said Dixey. “It may give him
just the clew he wants. After all,” whispered he in his companion’s
ear, “it would be no wonder if the Judge has gone into that door and
never come out again! A certain cousin of his may have been at his old
tricks. And Old Maid Pyncheon having got herself in debt by the
cent-shop,—and the Judge’s pocket-book being well filled,—and bad blood
amongst them already! Put all these things together and see what they
make!”
“Hush, hush!” whispered the other. “It seems like a sin to be the first
to speak of such a thing. But I think, with you, that we had better go
to the city marshal.”
“Yes, yes!” said Dixey. “Well!—I always said there was something
devilish in that woman’s scowl!”
The men wheeled about, accordingly, and retraced their steps up the
street. The Italian, also, made the best of his way off, with a parting
glance up at the arched window. As for the children, they took to their
heels, with one accord, and scampered as if some giant or ogre were in
pursuit, until, at a good distance from the house, they stopped as
suddenly and simultaneously as they had set out. Their susceptible
nerves took an indefinite alarm from what they had overheard. Looking
back at the grotesque peaks and shadowy angles of the old mansion, they
fancied a gloom diffused about it which no brightness of the sunshine
could dispel. An imaginary Hepzibah scowled and shook her finger at
them, from several windows at the same moment. An imaginary
Clifford—for (and it would have deeply wounded him to know it) he had
always been a horror to these small people—stood behind the unreal
Hepzibah, making awful gestures, in a faded dressing-gown. Children are
even more apt, if possible, than grown people, to catch the contagion
of a panic terror. For the rest of the day, the more timid went whole
streets about, for the sake of avoiding the Seven Gables; while the
bolder signalized their hardihood by challenging their comrades to race
past the mansion at full speed.
It could not have been more than half an hour after the disappearance
of the Italian boy, with his unseasonable melodies, when a cab drove
down the street. It stopped beneath the Pyncheon Elm; the cabman took a
trunk, a canvas bag, and a bandbox, from the top of his vehicle, and
deposited them on the doorstep of the old house; a straw bonnet, and
then the pretty figure of a young girl, came into view from the
interior of the cab. It was Phœbe! Though not altogether so blooming as
when she first tripped into our story,—for, in the few intervening
weeks, her experiences had made her graver, more womanly, and
deeper-eyed, in token of a heart that had begun to suspect its
depths,—still there was the quiet glow of natural sunshine over her.
Neither had she forfeited her proper gift of making things look real,
rather than fantastic, within her sphere. Yet we feel it to be a
questionable venture, even for Phœbe, at this juncture, to cross the
threshold of the Seven Gables. Is her healthful presence potent enough
to chase away the crowd of pale, hideous, and sinful phantoms, that
have gained admittance there since her departure? Or will she,
likewise, fade, sicken, sadden, and grow into deformity, and be only
another pallid phantom, to glide noiselessly up and down the stairs,
and affright children as she pauses at the window?
At least, we would gladly forewarn the unsuspecting girl that there is
nothing in human shape or substance to receive her, unless it be the
figure of Judge Pyncheon, who—wretched spectacle that he is, and
frightful in our remembrance, since our night-long vigil with
him!—still keeps his place in the oaken chair.
Phœbe first tried the shop-door. It did not yield to her hand; and the
white curtain, drawn across the window which formed the upper section
of the door, struck her quick perceptive faculty as something unusual.
Without making another effort to enter here, she betook herself to the
great portal, under the arched window. Finding it fastened, she
knocked. A reverberation came from the emptiness within. She knocked
again, and a third time; and, listening intently, fancied that the
floor creaked, as if Hepzibah were coming, with her ordinary tiptoe
movement, to admit her. But so dead a silence ensued upon this
imaginary sound, that she began to question whether she might not have
mistaken the house, familiar as she thought herself with its exterior.
Her notice was now attracted by a child’s voice, at some distance. It
appeared to call her name. Looking in the direction whence it
proceeded, Phœbe saw little Ned Higgins, a good way down the street,
stamping, shaking his head violently, making deprecatory gestures with
both hands, and shouting to her at mouth-wide screech.
“No, no, Phœbe!” he screamed. “Don’t you go in! There’s something
wicked there! Don’t—don’t—don’t go in!”
But, as the little personage could not be induced to approach near
enough to explain himself, Phœbe concluded that he had been frightened,
on some of his visits to the shop, by her cousin Hepzibah; for the good
lady’s manifestations, in truth, ran about an equal chance of scaring
children out of their wits, or compelling them to unseemly laughter.
Still, she felt the more, for this incident, how unaccountably silent
and impenetrable the house had become. As her next resort, Phœbe made
her way into the garden, where on so warm and bright a day as the
present, she had little doubt of finding Clifford, and perhaps Hepzibah
also, idling away the noontide in the shadow of the arbor. Immediately
on her entering the garden gate, the family of hens half ran, half flew
to meet her; while a strange grimalkin, which was prowling under the
parlor window, took to his heels, clambered hastily over the fence, and
vanished. The arbor was vacant, and its floor, table, and circular
bench were still damp, and bestrewn with twigs and the disarray of the
past storm. The growth of the garden seemed to have got quite out of
bounds; the weeds had taken advantage of Phœbe’s absence, and the
long-continued rain, to run rampant over the flowers and
kitchen-vegetables. Maule’s well had overflowed its stone border, and
made a pool of formidable breadth in that corner of the garden.
The impression of the whole scene was that of a spot where no human
foot had left its print for many preceding days,—probably not since
Phœbe’s departure,—for she saw a side-comb of her own under the table
of the arbor, where it must have fallen on the last afternoon when she
and Clifford sat there.
The girl knew that her two relatives were capable of far greater
oddities than that of shutting themselves up in their old house, as
they appeared now to have done. Nevertheless, with indistinct
misgivings of something amiss, and apprehensions to which she could not
give shape, she approached the door that formed the customary
communication between the house and garden. It was secured within, like
the two which she had already tried. She knocked, however; and
immediately, as if the application had been expected, the door was
drawn open, by a considerable exertion of some unseen person’s
strength, not wide, but far enough to afford her a sidelong entrance.
As Hepzibah, in order not to expose herself to inspection from without,
invariably opened a door in this manner, Phœbe necessarily concluded
that it was her cousin who now admitted her.
Without hesitation, therefore, she stepped across the threshold, and
had no sooner entered than the door closed behind her.
XX.
The Flower of Eden
Phœbe, coming so suddenly from the sunny daylight, was altogether
bedimmed in such density of shadow as lurked in most of the passages of
the old house. She was not at first aware by whom she had been
admitted. Before her eyes had adapted themselves to the obscurity, a
hand grasped her own with a firm but gentle and warm pressure, thus
imparting a welcome which caused her heart to leap and thrill with an
indefinable shiver of enjoyment. She felt herself drawn along, not
towards the parlor, but into a large and unoccupied apartment, which
had formerly been the grand reception-room of the Seven Gables. The
sunshine came freely into all the uncurtained windows of this room, and
fell upon the dusty floor; so that Phœbe now clearly saw—what, indeed,
had been no secret, after the encounter of a warm hand with hers—that
it was not Hepzibah nor Clifford, but Holgrave, to whom she owed her
reception. The subtile, intuitive communication, or, rather, the vague
and formless impression of something to be told, had made her yield
unresistingly to his impulse. Without taking away her hand, she looked
eagerly in his face, not quick to forebode evil, but unavoidably
conscious that the state of the family had changed since her departure,
and therefore anxious for an explanation.
The artist looked paler than ordinary; there was a thoughtful and
severe contraction of his forehead, tracing a deep, vertical line
between the eyebrows. His smile, however, was full of genuine warmth,
and had in it a joy, by far the most vivid expression that Phœbe had
ever witnessed, shining out of the New England reserve with which
Holgrave habitually masked whatever lay near his heart. It was the look
wherewith a man, brooding alone over some fearful object, in a dreary
forest or illimitable desert, would recognize the familiar aspect of
his dearest friend, bringing up all the peaceful ideas that belong to
home, and the gentle current of every-day affairs. And yet, as he felt
the necessity of responding to her look of inquiry, the smile
disappeared.
“I ought not to rejoice that you have come, Phœbe,” said he. “We meet
at a strange moment!”
“What has happened!” she exclaimed. “Why is the house so deserted?
Where are Hepzibah and Clifford?”
“Gone! I cannot imagine where they are!” answered Holgrave. “We are
alone in the house!”
“Hepzibah and Clifford gone?” cried Phœbe. “It is not possible! And why