The House of the Seven Gables
of the Seven Gables, which—many such sunrises as it had
witnessed—looked cheerfully at the present one. The reflected radiance
served to show, pretty distinctly, the aspect and arrangement of the
room which Hepzibah entered, after descending the stairs. It was a
low-studded room, with a beam across the ceiling, panelled with dark
wood, and having a large chimney-piece, set round with pictured tiles,
but now closed by an iron fire-board, through which ran the funnel of a
modern stove. There was a carpet on the floor, originally of rich
texture, but so worn and faded in these latter years that its once
brilliant figure had quite vanished into one indistinguishable hue. In
the way of furniture, there were two tables: one, constructed with
perplexing intricacy and exhibiting as many feet as a centipede; the
other, most delicately wrought, with four long and slender legs, so
apparently frail that it was almost incredible what a length of time
the ancient tea-table had stood upon them. Half a dozen chairs stood
about the room, straight and stiff, and so ingeniously contrived for
the discomfort of the human person that they were irksome even to
sight, and conveyed the ugliest possible idea of the state of society
to which they could have been adapted. One exception there was,
however, in a very antique elbow-chair, with a high back, carved
elaborately in oak, and a roomy depth within its arms, that made up, by
its spacious comprehensiveness, for the lack of any of those artistic
curves which abound in a modern chair.
As for ornamental articles of furniture, we recollect but two, if such
they may be called. One was a map of the Pyncheon territory at the
eastward, not engraved, but the handiwork of some skilful old
draughtsman, and grotesquely illuminated with pictures of Indians and
wild beasts, among which was seen a lion; the natural history of the
region being as little known as its geography, which was put down most
fantastically awry. The other adornment was the portrait of old Colonel
Pyncheon, at two thirds length, representing the stern features of a
Puritanic-looking personage, in a skull-cap, with a laced band and a
grizzly beard; holding a Bible with one hand, and in the other
uplifting an iron sword-hilt. The latter object, being more
successfully depicted by the artist, stood out in far greater
prominence than the sacred volume. Face to face with this picture, on
entering the apartment, Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon came to a pause;
regarding it with a singular scowl, a strange contortion of the brow,
which, by people who did not know her, would probably have been
interpreted as an expression of bitter anger and ill-will. But it was
no such thing. She, in fact, felt a reverence for the pictured visage,
of which only a far-descended and time-stricken virgin could be
susceptible; and this forbidding scowl was the innocent result of her
near-sightedness, and an effort so to concentrate her powers of vision
as to substitute a firm outline of the object instead of a vague one.
We must linger a moment on this unfortunate expression of poor
Hepzibah’s brow. Her scowl,—as the world, or such part of it as
sometimes caught a transitory glimpse of her at the window, wickedly
persisted in calling it,—her scowl had done Miss Hepzibah a very ill
office, in establishing her character as an ill-tempered old maid; nor
does it appear improbable that, by often gazing at herself in a dim
looking-glass, and perpetually encountering her own frown with its
ghostly sphere, she had been led to interpret the expression almost as
unjustly as the world did. “How miserably cross I look!” she must often
have whispered to herself; and ultimately have fancied herself so, by a
sense of inevitable doom. But her heart never frowned. It was naturally
tender, sensitive, and full of little tremors and palpitations; all of
which weaknesses it retained, while her visage was growing so
perversely stern, and even fierce. Nor had Hepzibah ever any hardihood,
except what came from the very warmest nook in her affections.
All this time, however, we are loitering faintheartedly on the
threshold of our story. In very truth, we have an invincible reluctance
to disclose what Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon was about to do.
It has already been observed, that, in the basement story of the gable
fronting on the street, an unworthy ancestor, nearly a century ago, had
fitted up a shop. Ever since the old gentleman retired from trade, and
fell asleep under his coffin-lid, not only the shop-door, but the inner
arrangements, had been suffered to remain unchanged; while the dust of
ages gathered inch-deep over the shelves and counter, and partly filled
an old pair of scales, as if it were of value enough to be weighed. It
treasured itself up, too, in the half-open till, where there still
lingered a base sixpence, worth neither more nor less than the
hereditary pride which had here been put to shame. Such had been the
state and condition of the little shop in old Hepzibah’s childhood,
when she and her brother used to play at hide-and-seek in its forsaken
precincts. So it had remained, until within a few days past.
But now, though the shop-window was still closely curtained from the
public gaze, a remarkable change had taken place in its interior. The
rich and heavy festoons of cobweb, which it had cost a long ancestral
succession of spiders their life’s labor to spin and weave, had been
carefully brushed away from the ceiling. The counter, shelves, and
floor had all been scoured, and the latter was overstrewn with fresh
blue sand. The brown scales, too, had evidently undergone rigid
discipline, in an unavailing effort to rub off the rust, which, alas!
had eaten through and through their substance. Neither was the little
old shop any longer empty of merchantable goods. A curious eye,
privileged to take an account of stock and investigate behind the
counter, would have discovered a barrel, yea, two or three barrels and
half ditto,—one containing flour, another apples, and a third, perhaps,
Indian meal. There was likewise a square box of pine-wood, full of soap
in bars; also, another of the same size, in which were tallow candles,
ten to the pound. A small stock of brown sugar, some white beans and
split peas, and a few other commodities of low price, and such as are
constantly in demand, made up the bulkier portion of the merchandise.
It might have been taken for a ghostly or phantasmagoric reflection of
the old shop-keeper Pyncheon’s shabbily provided shelves, save that
some of the articles were of a description and outward form which could
hardly have been known in his day. For instance, there was a glass
pickle-jar, filled with fragments of Gibraltar rock; not, indeed,
splinters of the veritable stone foundation of the famous fortress, but
bits of delectable candy, neatly done up in white paper. Jim Crow,
moreover, was seen executing his world-renowned dance, in gingerbread.
A party of leaden dragoons were galloping along one of the shelves, in
equipments and uniform of modern cut; and there were some sugar
figures, with no strong resemblance to the humanity of any epoch, but
less unsatisfactorily representing our own fashions than those of a
hundred years ago. Another phenomenon, still more strikingly modern,
was a package of lucifer matches, which, in old times, would have been
thought actually to borrow their instantaneous flame from the nether
fires of Tophet.
In short, to bring the matter at once to a point, it was
incontrovertibly evident that somebody had taken the shop and fixtures
of the long-retired and forgotten Mr. Pyncheon, and was about to renew
the enterprise of that departed worthy, with a different set of
customers. Who could this bold adventurer be? And, of all places in the
world, why had he chosen the House of the Seven Gables as the scene of
his commercial speculations?
We return to the elderly maiden. She at length withdrew her eyes from
the dark countenance of the Colonel’s portrait, heaved a sigh,—indeed,
her breast was a very cave of Aolus that morning,—and stept across the
room on tiptoe, as is the customary gait of elderly women. Passing
through an intervening passage, she opened a door that communicated
with the shop, just now so elaborately described. Owing to the
projection of the upper story—and still more to the thick shadow of the
Pyncheon Elm, which stood almost directly in front of the gable—the
twilight, here, was still as much akin to night as morning. Another
heavy sigh from Miss Hepzibah! After a moment’s pause on the threshold,
peering towards the window with her near-sighted scowl, as if frowning
down some bitter enemy, she suddenly projected herself into the shop.
The haste, and, as it were, the galvanic impulse of the movement, were
really quite startling.
Nervously—in a sort of frenzy, we might almost say—she began to busy
herself in arranging some children’s playthings, and other little
wares, on the shelves and at the shop-window. In the aspect of this
dark-arrayed, pale-faced, ladylike old figure there was a deeply tragic
character that contrasted irreconcilably with the ludicrous pettiness
of her employment. It seemed a queer anomaly, that so gaunt and dismal
a personage should take a toy in hand; a miracle, that the toy did not
vanish in her grasp; a miserably absurd idea, that she should go on
perplexing her stiff and sombre intellect with the question how to
tempt little boys into her premises! Yet such is undoubtedly her
object. Now she places a gingerbread elephant against the window, but
with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with the
dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it has ceased to be an
elephant, and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread. There, again,
she has upset a tumbler of marbles, all of which roll different ways,
and each individual marble, devil-directed, into the most difficult
obscurity that it can find. Heaven help our poor old Hepzibah, and
forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of her position! As her rigid
and rusty frame goes down upon its hands and knees, in quest of the
absconding marbles, we positively feel so much the more inclined to
shed tears of sympathy, from the very fact that we must needs turn
aside and laugh at her. For here,—and if we fail to impress it suitably
upon the reader, it is our own fault, not that of the theme, here is
one of the truest points of melancholy interest that occur in ordinary
life. It was the final throe of what called itself old gentility. A
lady—who had fed herself from childhood with the shadowy food of
aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was that a lady’s
hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for bread,—this born
lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain to step down from
her pedestal of imaginary rank. Poverty, treading closely at her heels
for a lifetime, has come up with her at last. She must earn her own
food, or starve! And we have stolen upon Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, too
irreverently, at the instant of time when the patrician lady is to be
transformed into the plebeian woman.
In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social
life, somebody is always at the drowning-point. The tragedy is enacted
with as continual a repetition as that of a popular drama on a holiday,
and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, perhaps, as when an hereditary
noble sinks below his order. More deeply; since, with us, rank is the
grosser substance of wealth and a splendid establishment, and has no
spiritual existence after the death of these, but dies hopelessly along
with them. And, therefore, since we have been unfortunate enough to
introduce our heroine at so inauspicious a juncture, we would entreat
for a mood of due solemnity in the spectators of her fate. Let us