The House of the Seven Gables
“Now let us meet the world!” said Holgrave. “No doubt, the rumor of
Judge Pyncheon’s visit to this house, and the flight of Hepzibah and
Clifford, is about to lead to the investigation of the premises. We
have no way but to meet it. Let us open the door at once.”
But, to their surprise, before they could reach the street door,—even
before they quitted the room in which the foregoing interview had
passed,—they heard footsteps in the farther passage. The door,
therefore, which they supposed to be securely locked,—which Holgrave,
indeed, had seen to be so, and at which Phœbe had vainly tried to
enter,—must have been opened from without. The sound of footsteps was
not harsh, bold, decided, and intrusive, as the gait of strangers would
naturally be, making authoritative entrance into a dwelling where they
knew themselves unwelcome. It was feeble, as of persons either weak or
weary; there was the mingled murmur of two voices, familiar to both the
listeners.
“Can it be?” whispered Holgrave.
“It is they!” answered Phœbe. “Thank God!—thank God!”
And then, as if in sympathy with Phœbe’s whispered ejaculation, they
heard Hepzibah’s voice more distinctly.
“Thank God, my brother, we are at home!”
“Well!—Yes!—thank God!” responded Clifford. “A dreary home, Hepzibah!
But you have done well to bring me hither! Stay! That parlor door is
open. I cannot pass by it! Let me go and rest me in the arbor, where I
used,—oh, very long ago, it seems to me, after what has befallen
us,—where I used to be so happy with little Phœbe!”
But the house was not altogether so dreary as Clifford imagined it.
They had not made many steps,—in truth, they were lingering in the
entry, with the listlessness of an accomplished purpose, uncertain what
to do next,—when Phœbe ran to meet them. On beholding her, Hepzibah
burst into tears. With all her might, she had staggered onward beneath
the burden of grief and responsibility, until now that it was safe to
fling it down. Indeed, she had not energy to fling it down, but had
ceased to uphold it, and suffered it to press her to the earth.
Clifford appeared the stronger of the two.
“It is our own little Phœbe!—Ah! and Holgrave with, her” exclaimed he,
with a glance of keen and delicate insight, and a smile, beautiful,
kind, but melancholy. “I thought of you both, as we came down the
street, and beheld Alice’s Posies in full bloom. And so the flower of
Eden has bloomed, likewise, in this old, darksome house to-day.”
XXI.
The Departure
The sudden death of so prominent a member of the social world as the
Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a sensation (at least, in the
circles more immediately connected with the deceased) which had hardly
quite subsided in a fortnight.
It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which constitute a
person’s biography, there is scarcely one—none, certainly, of anything
like a similar importance—to which the world so easily reconciles
itself as to his death. In most other cases and contingencies, the
individual is present among us, mixed up with the daily revolution of
affairs, and affording a definite point for observation. At his
decease, there is only a vacancy, and a momentary eddy,—very small, as
compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated object,—and a
bubble or two, ascending out of the black depth and bursting at the
surface. As regarded Judge Pyncheon, it seemed probable, at first
blush, that the mode of his final departure might give him a larger and
longer posthumous vogue than ordinarily attends the memory of a
distinguished man. But when it came to be understood, on the highest
professional authority, that the event was a natural, and—except for
some unimportant particulars, denoting a slight idiosyncrasy—by no
means an unusual form of death, the public, with its customary
alacrity, proceeded to forget that he had ever lived. In short, the
honorable Judge was beginning to be a stale subject before half the
country newspapers had found time to put their columns in mourning, and
publish his exceedingly eulogistic obituary.
Nevertheless, creeping darkly through the places which this excellent
person had haunted in his lifetime, there was a hidden stream of
private talk, such as it would have shocked all decency to speak loudly
at the street-corners. It is very singular, how the fact of a man’s
death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether
for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and
acting among them. Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes
falsehood, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the
gold, and dishonors the baser metal. Could the departed, whoever he may
be, return in a week after his decease, he would almost invariably find
himself at a higher or lower point than he had formerly occupied, on
the scale of public appreciation. But the talk, or scandal, to which we
now allude, had reference to matters of no less old a date than the
supposed murder, thirty or forty years ago, of the late Judge
Pyncheon’s uncle. The medical opinion with regard to his own recent and
regretted decease had almost entirely obviated the idea that a murder
was committed in the former case. Yet, as the record showed, there were
circumstances irrefragably indicating that some person had gained
access to old Jaffrey Pyncheon’s private apartments, at or near the
moment of his death. His desk and private drawers, in a room contiguous
to his bedchamber, had been ransacked; money and valuable articles were
missing; there was a bloody hand-print on the old man’s linen; and, by
a powerfully welded chain of deductive evidence, the guilt of the
robbery and apparent murder had been fixed on Clifford, then residing
with his uncle in the House of the Seven Gables.
Whencesoever originating, there now arose a theory that undertook so to
account for these circumstances as to exclude the idea of Clifford’s
agency. Many persons affirmed that the history and elucidation of the
facts, long so mysterious, had been obtained by the daguerreotypist
from one of those mesmerical seers who, nowadays, so strangely perplex
the aspect of human affairs, and put everybody’s natural vision to the
blush, by the marvels which they see with their eyes shut.
According to this version of the story, Judge Pyncheon, exemplary as we
have portrayed him in our narrative, was, in his youth, an apparently
irreclaimable scapegrace. The brutish, the animal instincts, as is
often the case, had been developed earlier than the intellectual
qualities, and the force of character, for which he was afterwards
remarkable. He had shown himself wild, dissipated, addicted to low
pleasures, little short of ruffianly in his propensities, and
recklessly expensive, with no other resources than the bounty of his
uncle. This course of conduct had alienated the old bachelor’s
affection, once strongly fixed upon him. Now it is averred,—but whether
on authority available in a court of justice, we do not pretend to have
investigated,—that the young man was tempted by the devil, one night,
to search his uncle’s private drawers, to which he had unsuspected
means of access. While thus criminally occupied, he was startled by the
opening of the chamber-door. There stood old Jaffrey Pyncheon, in his
nightclothes! The surprise of such a discovery, his agitation, alarm,
and horror, brought on the crisis of a disorder to which the old
bachelor had an hereditary liability; he seemed to choke with blood,
and fell upon the floor, striking his temple a heavy blow against the
corner of a table. What was to be done? The old man was surely dead!
Assistance would come too late! What a misfortune, indeed, should it
come too soon, since his reviving consciousness would bring the
recollection of the ignominious offence which he had beheld his nephew
in the very act of committing!
But he never did revive. With the cool hardihood that always pertained
to him, the young man continued his search of the drawers, and found a
will, of recent date, in favor of Clifford,—which he destroyed,—and an
older one, in his own favor, which he suffered to remain. But before
retiring, Jaffrey bethought himself of the evidence, in these ransacked
drawers, that some one had visited the chamber with sinister purposes.
Suspicion, unless averted, might fix upon the real offender. In the
very presence of the dead man, therefore, he laid a scheme that should
free himself at the expense of Clifford, his rival, for whose character
he had at once a contempt and a repugnance. It is not probable, be it
said, that he acted with any set purpose of involving Clifford in a
charge of murder. Knowing that his uncle did not die by violence, it
may not have occurred to him, in the hurry of the crisis, that such an
inference might be drawn. But, when the affair took this darker aspect,
Jaffrey’s previous steps had already pledged him to those which
remained. So craftily had he arranged the circumstances, that, at
Clifford’s trial, his cousin hardly found it necessary to swear to
anything false, but only to withhold the one decisive explanation, by
refraining to state what he had himself done and witnessed.
Thus Jaffrey Pyncheon’s inward criminality, as regarded Clifford, was,
indeed, black and damnable; while its mere outward show and positive
commission was the smallest that could possibly consist with so great a
sin. This is just the sort of guilt that a man of eminent
respectability finds it easiest to dispose of. It was suffered to fade
out of sight or be reckoned a venial matter, in the Honorable Judge
Pyncheon’s long subsequent survey of his own life. He shuffled it
aside, among the forgotten and forgiven frailties of his youth, and
seldom thought of it again.
We leave the Judge to his repose. He could not be styled fortunate at
the hour of death. Unknowingly, he was a childless man, while striving
to add more wealth to his only child’s inheritance. Hardly a week after
his decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of the
death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheon’s son, just at the point of
embarkation for his native land. By this misfortune Clifford became
rich; so did Hepzibah; so did our little village maiden, and, through
her, that sworn foe of wealth and all manner of conservatism,—the wild
reformer,—Holgrave!
It was now far too late in Clifford’s life for the good opinion of
society to be worth the trouble and anguish of a formal vindication.
What he needed was the love of a very few; not the admiration, or even
the respect, of the unknown many. The latter might probably have been
won for him, had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had
fallen deemed it advisable to expose Clifford to a miserable
resuscitation of past ideas, when the condition of whatever comfort he
might expect lay in the calm of forgetfulness. After such wrong as he
had suffered, there is no reparation. The pitiable mockery of it, which
the world might have been ready enough to offer, coming so long after
the agony had done its utmost work, would have been fit only to provoke
bitterer laughter than poor Clifford was ever capable of. It is a truth
(and it would be a very sad one but for the higher hopes which it
suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in our
mortal sphere, is ever really set right. Time, the continual
vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of
death, render it impossible. If, after long lapse of years, the right
seems to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in. The better
remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought
his irreparable ruin far behind him.
The shock of Judge Pyncheon’s death had a permanently invigorating and