The House of the Seven Gables
babyhood, and others in the bloom of feminine beauty or manly prime, or
saddened with the wrinkles of frosty age. Had we the secret of that
mirror, we would gladly sit down before it, and transfer its
revelations to our page. But there was a story, for which it is
difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity of Matthew
Maule had some connection with the mystery of the looking-glass, and
that, by what appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they
could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not
as they had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and
happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the
crisis of life’s bitterest sorrow. The popular imagination, indeed,
long kept itself busy with the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon and
the wizard Maule; the curse which the latter flung from his scaffold
was remembered, with the very important addition, that it had become a
part of the Pyncheon inheritance. If one of the family did but gurgle
in his throat, a bystander would be likely enough to whisper, between
jest and earnest, “He has Maule’s blood to drink!” The sudden death of
a Pyncheon, about a hundred years ago, with circumstances very similar
to what have been related of the Colonel’s exit, was held as giving
additional probability to the received opinion on this topic. It was
considered, moreover, an ugly and ominous circumstance, that Colonel
Pyncheon’s picture—in obedience, it was said, to a provision of his
will—remained affixed to the wall of the room in which he died. Those
stern, immitigable features seemed to symbolize an evil influence, and
so darkly to mingle the shadow of their presence with the sunshine of
the passing hour, that no good thoughts or purposes could ever spring
up and blossom there. To the thoughtful mind there will be no tinge of
superstition in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the
ghost of a dead progenitor—perhaps as a portion of his own
punishment—is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family.
The Pyncheons, in brief, lived along, for the better part of two
centuries, with perhaps less of outward vicissitude than has attended
most other New England families during the same period of time.
Possessing very distinctive traits of their own, they nevertheless took
the general characteristics of the little community in which they
dwelt; a town noted for its frugal, discreet, well-ordered, and
home-loving inhabitants, as well as for the somewhat confined scope of
its sympathies; but in which, be it said, there are odder individuals,
and, now and then, stranger occurrences, than one meets with almost
anywhere else. During the Revolution, the Pyncheon of that epoch,
adopting the royal side, became a refugee; but repented, and made his
reappearance, just at the point of time to preserve the House of the
Seven Gables from confiscation. For the last seventy years the most
noted event in the Pyncheon annals had been likewise the heaviest
calamity that ever befell the race; no less than the violent death—for
so it was adjudged—of one member of the family by the criminal act of
another. Certain circumstances attending this fatal occurrence had
brought the deed irresistibly home to a nephew of the deceased
Pyncheon. The young man was tried and convicted of the crime; but
either the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and possibly some
lurking doubts in the breast of the executive, or, lastly—an argument
of greater weight in a republic than it could have been under a
monarchy,—the high respectability and political influence of the
criminal’s connections, had availed to mitigate his doom from death to
perpetual imprisonment. This sad affair had chanced about thirty years
before the action of our story commences. Latterly, there were rumors
(which few believed, and only one or two felt greatly interested in)
that this long-buried man was likely, for some reason or other, to be
summoned forth from his living tomb.
It is essential to say a few words respecting the victim of this now
almost forgotten murder. He was an old bachelor, and possessed of great
wealth, in addition to the house and real estate which constituted what
remained of the ancient Pyncheon property. Being of an eccentric and
melancholy turn of mind, and greatly given to rummaging old records and
hearkening to old traditions, he had brought himself, it is averred, to
the conclusion that Matthew Maule, the wizard, had been foully wronged
out of his homestead, if not out of his life. Such being the case, and
he, the old bachelor, in possession of the ill-gotten spoil,—with the
black stain of blood sunken deep into it, and still to be scented by
conscientious nostrils,—the question occurred, whether it were not
imperative upon him, even at this late hour, to make restitution to
Maule’s posterity. To a man living so much in the past, and so little
in the present, as the secluded and antiquarian old bachelor, a century
and a half seemed not so vast a period as to obviate the propriety of
substituting right for wrong. It was the belief of those who knew him
best, that he would positively have taken the very singular step of
giving up the House of the Seven Gables to the representative of
Matthew Maule, but for the unspeakable tumult which a suspicion of the
old gentleman’s project awakened among his Pyncheon relatives. Their
exertions had the effect of suspending his purpose; but it was feared
that he would perform, after death, by the operation of his last will,
what he had so hardly been prevented from doing in his proper lifetime.
But there is no one thing which men so rarely do, whatever the
provocation or inducement, as to bequeath patrimonial property away
from their own blood. They may love other individuals far better than
their relatives,—they may even cherish dislike, or positive hatred, to
the latter; but yet, in view of death, the strong prejudice of
propinquity revives, and impels the testator to send down his estate in
the line marked out by custom so immemorial that it looks like nature.
In all the Pyncheons, this feeling had the energy of disease. It was
too powerful for the conscientious scruples of the old bachelor; at
whose death, accordingly, the mansion-house, together with most of his
other riches, passed into the possession of his next legal
representative.
This was a nephew, the cousin of the miserable young man who had been
convicted of the uncle’s murder. The new heir, up to the period of his
accession, was reckoned rather a dissipated youth, but had at once
reformed, and made himself an exceedingly respectable member of
society. In fact, he showed more of the Pyncheon quality, and had won
higher eminence in the world, than any of his race since the time of
the original Puritan. Applying himself in earlier manhood to the study
of the law, and having a natural tendency towards office, he had
attained, many years ago, to a judicial situation in some inferior
court, which gave him for life the very desirable and imposing title of
judge. Later, he had engaged in politics, and served a part of two
terms in Congress, besides making a considerable figure in both
branches of the State legislature. Judge Pyncheon was unquestionably an
honor to his race. He had built himself a country-seat within a few
miles of his native town, and there spent such portions of his time as
could be spared from public service in the display of every grace and
virtue—as a newspaper phrased it, on the eve of an election—befitting
the Christian, the good citizen, the horticulturist, and the gentleman.
There were few of the Pyncheons left to sun themselves in the glow of
the Judge’s prosperity. In respect to natural increase, the breed had
not thriven; it appeared rather to be dying out. The only members of
the family known to be extant were, first, the Judge himself, and a
single surviving son, who was now travelling in Europe; next, the
thirty years’ prisoner, already alluded to, and a sister of the latter,
who occupied, in an extremely retired manner, the House of the Seven
Gables, in which she had a life-estate by the will of the old bachelor.
She was understood to be wretchedly poor, and seemed to make it her
choice to remain so; inasmuch as her affluent cousin, the Judge, had
repeatedly offered her all the comforts of life, either in the old
mansion or his own modern residence. The last and youngest Pyncheon was
a little country-girl of seventeen, the daughter of another of the
Judge’s cousins, who had married a young woman of no family or
property, and died early and in poor circumstances. His widow had
recently taken another husband.
As for Matthew Maule’s posterity, it was supposed now to be extinct.
For a very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however, the
Maules had continued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had
suffered so unjust a death. To all appearance, they were a quiet,
honest, well-meaning race of people, cherishing no malice against
individuals or the public for the wrong which had been done them; or
if, at their own fireside, they transmitted from father to child any
hostile recollection of the wizard’s fate and their lost patrimony, it
was never acted upon, nor openly expressed. Nor would it have been
singular had they ceased to remember that the House of the Seven Gables
was resting its heavy framework on a foundation that was rightfully
their own. There is something so massive, stable, and almost
irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank
and great possessions, that their very existence seems to give them a
right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few
poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in
their secret minds. Such is the case now, after so many ancient
prejudices have been overthrown; and it was far more so in
ante-Revolutionary days, when the aristocracy could venture to be
proud, and the low were content to be abased. Thus the Maules, at all
events, kept their resentments within their own breasts. They were
generally poverty-stricken; always plebeian and obscure; working with
unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts; laboring on the wharves, or
following the sea, as sailors before the mast; living here and there
about the town, in hired tenements, and coming finally to the almshouse
as the natural home of their old age. At last, after creeping, as it
were, for such a length of time along the utmost verge of the opaque
puddle of obscurity, they had taken that downright plunge which, sooner
or later, is the destiny of all families, whether princely or plebeian.
For thirty years past, neither town-record, nor gravestone, nor the
directory, nor the knowledge or memory of man, bore any trace of
Matthew Maule’s descendants. His blood might possibly exist elsewhere;
here, where its lowly current could be traced so far back, it had
ceased to keep an onward course.
So long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked out
from other men—not strikingly, nor as with a sharp line, but with an
effect that was felt rather than spoken of—by an hereditary character
of reserve. Their companions, or those who endeavored to become such,
grew conscious of a circle round about the Maules, within the sanctity
or the spell of which, in spite of an exterior of sufficient frankness
and good-fellowship, it was impossible for any man to step. It was this
indefinable peculiarity, perhaps, that, by insulating them from human
aid, kept them always so unfortunate in life. It certainly operated to
prolong in their case, and to confirm to them as their only
inheritance, those feelings of repugnance and superstitious terror with
which the people of the town, even after awakening from their frenzy,