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CHAPTER 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 ***, 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 *** 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 ***
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 ***.
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 ultimately
beneficial effect on Clifford. That strong and ponderous man had been
Clifford's nightmare.
There was no free breath to be drawn, within the sphere of so malevolent an
influence.
The first effect of freedom, as we have witnessed in Clifford's aimless flight, was
a tremulous exhilaration. Subsiding from it, he did not sink into his
former intellectual apathy.
He never, it is true, attained to nearly the full measure of what might have been
his faculties.
But he recovered enough of them partially to light up his character, to display some
outline of the marvellous grace that was abortive in it, and to make him the object
of no less deep, although less melancholy interest than heretofore.
He was evidently happy.
Could we pause to give another picture of his daily life, with all the appliances now
at command to gratify his instinct for the Beautiful, the garden scenes, that seemed
so sweet to him, would look mean and trivial in comparison.
Very soon after their change of fortune, Clifford, Hepzibah, and little Phoebe, with
the approval of the artist, concluded to remove from the dismal old House of the
Seven Gables, and take up their abode, for
the present, at the elegant country-seat of the late Judge Pyncheon.
Chanticleer and his family had already been transported thither, where the two hens had
forthwith begun an indefatigable process of egg-laying, with an evident design, as a
matter of duty and conscience, to continue
their illustrious breed under better auspices than for a century past.
On the day set for their departure, the principal personages of our story,
including good Uncle Venner, were assembled in the parlor.
"The country-house is certainly a very fine one, so far as the plan goes," observed
Holgrave, as the party were discussing their future arrangements.
"But I wonder that the late Judge--being so opulent, and with a reasonable prospect of
transmitting his wealth to descendants of his own--should not have felt the propriety
of embodying so excellent a piece of
domestic architecture in stone, rather than in wood.
Then, every generation of the family might have altered the interior, to suit its own
taste and convenience; while the exterior, through the lapse of years, might have been
adding venerableness to its original
beauty, and thus giving that impression of permanence which I consider essential to
the happiness of any one moment."
"Why," cried Phoebe, gazing into the artist's face with infinite amazement, "how
wonderfully your ideas are changed! A house of stone, indeed!
It is but two or three weeks ago that you seemed to wish people to live in something
as fragile and temporary as a bird's-nest!"
"Ah, Phoebe, I told you how it would be!" said the artist, with a half-melancholy
laugh. "You find me a conservative already!
Little did I think ever to become one.
It is especially unpardonable in this dwelling of so much hereditary misfortune,
and under the eye of yonder portrait of a model conservative, who, in that very
character, rendered himself so long the evil destiny of his race."
"That picture!" said Clifford, seeming to shrink from its stern glance.
"Whenever I look at it, there is an old dreamy recollection haunting me, but
keeping just beyond the grasp of my mind. Wealth, it seems to say!--boundless
wealth!--unimaginable wealth!
I could fancy that, when I was a child, or a youth, that portrait had spoken, and told
me a rich secret, or had held forth its hand, with the written record of hidden
opulence.
But those old matters are so dim with me, nowadays!
What could this dream have been?" "Perhaps I can recall it," answered
Holgrave.
"See! There are a hundred chances to one that no person, unacquainted with the
secret, would ever touch this spring." "A secret spring!" cried Clifford.
"Ah, I remember now!
I did discover it, one summer afternoon, when I was idling and dreaming about the
house, long, long ago. But the mystery escapes me."
The artist put his finger on the contrivance to which he had referred.
In former days, the effect would probably have been to cause the picture to start
forward.
But, in so long a period of concealment, the machinery had been eaten through with
rust; so that at Holgrave's pressure, the portrait, frame and all, tumbled suddenly
from its position, and lay face downward on the floor.
A recess in the wall was thus brought to light, in which lay an object so covered
with a century's dust that it could not immediately be recognized as a folded sheet
of parchment.
Holgrave opened it, and displayed an ancient deed, signed with the hieroglyphics
of several Indian sagamores, and conveying to Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs, forever,
a vast extent of territory at the Eastward.
"This is the very parchment, the attempt to recover which cost the beautiful Alice
Pyncheon her happiness and life," said the artist, alluding to his legend.
"It is what the Pyncheons sought in vain, while it was valuable; and now that they
find the treasure, it has long been worthless."
"Poor Cousin Jaffrey!
This is what deceived him," exclaimed Hepzibah.
"When they were young together, Clifford probably made a kind of fairy-tale of this
discovery.
He was always dreaming hither and thither about the house, and lighting up its dark
corners with beautiful stories.
And poor Jaffrey, who took hold of everything as if it were real, thought my
brother had found out his uncle's wealth. He died with this delusion in his mind!"
"But," said Phoebe, apart to Holgrave, "how came you to know the secret?"
"My dearest Phoebe," said Holgrave, "how will it please you to assume the name of
Maule?
As for the secret, it is the only inheritance that has come down to me from
my ancestors.
You should have known sooner (only that I was afraid of frightening you away) that,
in this long drama of wrong and retribution, I represent the old wizard,
and am probably as much a wizard as ever he was.
The son of the executed Matthew Maule, while building this house, took the
opportunity to construct that recess, and hide away the Indian deed, on which
depended the immense land-claim of the Pyncheons.
Thus they bartered their eastern territory for Maule's garden-ground."
"And now" said Uncle Venner "I suppose their whole claim is not worth one man's
share in my farm yonder!"
"Uncle Venner," cried Phoebe, taking the patched philosopher's hand, "you must never
talk any more about your farm! You shall never go there, as long as you
live!
There is a cottage in our new garden,--the prettiest little yellowish-brown cottage
you ever saw; and the sweetest-looking place, for it looks just as if it were made
of gingerbread,--and we are going to fit it up and furnish it, on purpose for you.
And you shall do nothing but what you choose, and shall be as happy as the day is
long, and shall keep Cousin Clifford in spirits with the wisdom and pleasantness
which is always dropping from your lips!"
"Ah! my dear child," quoth good Uncle Venner, quite overcome, "if you were to
speak to a young man as you do to an old one, his chance of keeping his heart
another minute would not be worth one of the buttons on my waistcoat!
And--soul alive!--that great sigh, which you made me heave, has burst off the very
last of them!
But, never mind! It was the happiest sigh I ever did heave;
and it seems as if I must have drawn in a gulp of heavenly breath, to make it with.
Well, well, Miss Phoebe!
They'll miss me in the gardens hereabouts, and round by the back doors; and Pyncheon
Street, I'm afraid, will hardly look the same without old Uncle Venner, who
remembers it with a mowing field on one
side, and the garden of the Seven Gables on the other.
But either I must go to your country-seat, or you must come to my farm,--that's one of
two things certain; and I leave you to choose which!"
"Oh, come with us, by all means, Uncle Venner!" said Clifford, who had a
remarkable enjoyment of the old man's mellow, quiet, and simple spirit.
"I want you always to be within five minutes, saunter of my chair.
You are the only philosopher I ever knew of whose wisdom has not a drop of bitter
essence at the bottom!"
"Dear me!" cried Uncle Venner, beginning partly to realize what manner of man he
was. "And yet folks used to set me down among
the simple ones, in my younger days!
But I suppose I am like a Roxbury russet,-- a great deal the better, the longer I can
be kept.
Yes; and my words of wisdom, that you and Phoebe tell me of, are like the golden
dandelions, which never grow in the hot months, but may be seen glistening among
the withered grass, and under the dry leaves, sometimes as late as December.
And you are welcome, friends, to my mess of dandelions, if there were twice as many!"
A plain, but handsome, dark-green barouche had now drawn up in front of the ruinous
portal of the old mansion-house.
The party came forth, and (with the exception of good Uncle Venner, who was to
follow in a few days) proceeded to take their places.
They were chatting and laughing very pleasantly together; and--as proves to be
often the case, at moments when we ought to palpitate with sensibility--Clifford and
Hepzibah bade a final farewell to the abode
of their forefathers, with hardly more emotion than if they had made it their
arrangement to return thither at tea-time.
Several children were drawn to the spot by so unusual a spectacle as the barouche and
pair of gray horses.
Recognizing little Ned Higgins among them, Hepzibah put her hand into her pocket, and
presented the urchin, her earliest and staunchest customer, with silver enough to
people the Domdaniel cavern of his interior
with as various a procession of quadrupeds as passed into the ark.
Two men were passing, just as the barouche drove off.
"Well, Dixey," said one of them, "what do you think of this?
My wife kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay.
Old Maid Pyncheon has been in trade just about as long, and rides off in her
carriage with a couple of hundred thousand,--reckoning her share, and
Clifford's, and Phoebe's,--and some say twice as much!
If you choose to call it luck, it is all very well; but if we are to take it as the
will of Providence, why, I can't exactly fathom it!"
"Pretty good business!" quoth the sagacious Dixey,--"pretty good business!"
Maule's well, all this time, though left in solitude, was throwing up a succession of
kaleidoscopic pictures, in which a gifted eye might have seen foreshadowed the coming
fortunes of Hepzibah and Clifford, and the
descendant of the legendary wizard, and the village maiden, over whom he had thrown
love's web of sorcery.
The Pyncheon Elm, moreover, with what foliage the September gale had spared to
it, whispered unintelligible prophecies.
And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain
of music, and fancied that sweet Alice Pyncheon--after witnessing these deeds,
this bygone woe and this present happiness,
of her kindred mortals--had given one farewell touch of a spirit's joy upon her
harpsichord, as she floated heavenward from the HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES!