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CHAPTER XII The Daguerreotypist
IT must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so active as Phoebe
could be wholly confined within the precincts of the old Pyncheon House.
Clifford's demands upon her time were usually satisfied, in those long days,
considerably earlier than sunset.
Quiet as his daily existence seemed, it nevertheless drained all the resources by
which he lived.
It was not physical exercise that overwearied him,--for except that he
sometimes wrought a little with a hoe, or paced the garden-walk, or, in rainy
weather, traversed a large unoccupied
room,--it was his tendency to remain only too quiescent, as regarded any toil of the
limbs and muscles.
But, either there was a smouldering fire within him that consumed his vital energy,
or the monotony that would have dragged itself with benumbing effect over a mind
differently situated was no monotony to Clifford.
Possibly, he was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly
assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights, sounds, and events
which passed as a perfect void to persons more practised with the world.
As all is activity and vicissitude to the new mind of a child, so might it be,
likewise, to a mind that had undergone a kind of new creation, after its long-
suspended life.
Be the cause what it might, Clifford commonly retired to rest, thoroughly
exhausted, while the sunbeams were still melting through his window-curtains, or
were thrown with late lustre on the chamber wall.
And while he thus slept early, as other children do, and dreamed of childhood,
Phoebe was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder of the day and evening.
This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so little susceptible
of morbid influences as that of Phoebe.
The old house, as we have already said, had both the dry-rot and the damp-rot in its
walls; it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere than that.
Hepzibah, though she had her valuable and redeeming traits, had grown to be a kind of
lunatic by imprisoning herself so long in one place, with no other company than a
single series of ideas, and but one affection, and one bitter sense of wrong.
Clifford, the reader may perhaps imagine, was too inert to operate morally on his
fellow-creatures, however intimate and exclusive their relations with him.
But the sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtile and universal than
we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes of organized life, and
vibrates from one to another.
A flower, for instance, as Phoebe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in
Clifford's hand, or Hepzibah's, than in her own; and by the same law, converting her
whole daily life into a flower fragrance
for these two sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much
sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast.
Unless she had now and then indulged her brisk impulses, and breathed rural air in a
suburban walk, or ocean breezes along the shore,--had occasionally obeyed the impulse
of Nature, in New England girls, by
attending a metaphysical or philosophical lecture, or viewing a seven-mile panorama,
or listening to a concert,--had gone shopping about the city, ransacking entire
depots of splendid merchandise, and
bringing home a ribbon,--had employed, likewise, a little time to read the Bible
in her chamber, and had stolen a little more to think of her mother and her native
place--unless for such moral medicines as
the above, we should soon have beheld our poor Phoebe grow thin and put on a
bleached, unwholesome aspect, and assume strange, shy ways, prophetic of old-
maidenhood and a cheerless future.
Even as it was, a change grew visible; a change partly to be regretted, although
whatever charm it infringed upon was repaired by another, perhaps more precious.
She was not so constantly gay, but had her moods of thought, which Clifford, on the
whole, liked better than her former phase of unmingled cheerfulness; because now she
understood him better and more delicately,
and sometimes even interpreted him to himself.
Her eyes looked larger, and darker, and deeper; so deep, at some silent moments,
that they seemed like Artesian wells, down, down, into the infinite.
She was less girlish than when we first beheld her alighting from the omnibus; less
girlish, but more a woman.
The only youthful mind with which Phoebe had an opportunity of frequent intercourse
was that of the daguerreotypist.
Inevitably, by the pressure of the seclusion about them, they had been brought
into habits of some familiarity.
Had they met under different circumstances, neither of these young persons would have
been likely to bestow much thought upon the other, unless, indeed, their extreme
dissimilarity should have proved a principle of mutual attraction.
Both, it is true, were characters proper to New England life, and possessing a common
ground, therefore, in their more external developments; but as unlike, in their
respective interiors, as if their native climes had been at world-wide distance.
During the early part of their acquaintance, Phoebe had held back rather
more than was customary with her frank and simple manners from Holgrave's not very
marked advances.
Nor was she yet satisfied that she knew him well, although they almost daily met and
talked together, in a kind, friendly, and what seemed to be a familiar way.
The artist, in a desultory manner, had imparted to Phoebe something of his
history.
Young as he was, and had his career terminated at the point already attained,
there had been enough of incident to fill, very creditably, an autobiographic volume.
A romance on the plan of Gil Blas, adapted to American society and manners, would
cease to be a romance.
The experience of many individuals among us, who think it hardly worth the telling,
would equal the vicissitudes of the Spaniard's earlier life; while their
ultimate success, or the point whither they
tend, may be incomparably higher than any that a novelist would imagine for his hero.
Holgrave, as he told Phoebe somewhat proudly, could not boast of his origin,
unless as being exceedingly humble, nor of his education, except that it had been the
scantiest possible, and obtained by a few
winter-months' attendance at a district school.
Left early to his own guidance, he had begun to be self-dependent while yet a boy;
and it was a condition aptly suited to his natural force of will.
Though now but twenty-two years old (lacking some months, which are years in
such a life), he had already been, first, a country schoolmaster; next, a salesman in a
country store; and, either at the same time
or afterwards, the political editor of a country newspaper.
He had subsequently travelled New England and the Middle States, as a peddler, in the
employment of a Connecticut manufactory of cologne-water and other essences.
In an episodical way he had studied and practised dentistry, and with very
flattering success, especially in many of the factory-towns along our inland streams.
As a supernumerary official, of some kind or other, aboard a packet-ship, he had
visited Europe, and found means, before his return, to see Italy, and part of France
and Germany.
At a later period he had spent some months in a community of Fourierists.
Still more recently he had been a public lecturer on Mesmerism, for which science
(as he assured Phoebe, and, indeed, satisfactorily proved, by putting
Chanticleer, who happened to be scratching
near by, to sleep) he had very remarkable endowments.
His present phase, as a daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in his own view,
nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the preceding ones.
It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an adventurer, who had his
bread to earn.
It would be thrown aside as carelessly, whenever he should choose to earn his bread
by some other equally digressive means.
But what was most remarkable, and, perhaps, showed a more than common poise in the
young man, was the fact that, amid all these personal vicissitudes, he had never
lost his identity.
Homeless as he had been,--continually changing his whereabout, and, therefore,
responsible neither to public opinion nor to individuals,--putting off one exterior,
and snatching up another, to be soon
shifted for a third,--he had never violated the innermost man, but had carried his
conscience along with him. It was impossible to know Holgrave without
recognizing this to be the fact.
Hepzibah had seen it. Phoebe soon saw it likewise, and gave him
the sort of confidence which such a certainty inspires.
She was startled, however, and sometimes repelled,--not by any doubt of his
integrity to whatever law he acknowledged, but by a sense that his law differed from
her own.
He made her uneasy, and seemed to unsettle everything around her, by his lack of
reverence for what was fixed, unless, at a moment's warning, it could establish its
right to hold its ground.
Then, moreover, she scarcely thought him affectionate in his nature.
He was too calm and cool an observer. Phoebe felt his eye, often; his heart,
seldom or never.
He took a certain kind of interest in Hepzibah and her brother, and Phoebe
herself.
He studied them attentively, and allowed no slightest circumstance of their
individualities to escape him.
He was ready to do them whatever good he might; but, after all, he never exactly
made common cause with them, nor gave any reliable evidence that he loved them better
in proportion as he knew them more.
In his relations with them, he seemed to be in quest of mental food, not heart-
sustenance.
Phoebe could not conceive what interested him so much in her friends and herself,
intellectually, since he cared nothing for them, or, comparatively, so little, as
objects of human affection.
Always, in his interviews with Phoebe, the artist made especial inquiry as to the
welfare of Clifford, whom, except at the Sunday festival, he seldom saw.
"Does he still seem happy?" he asked one day.
"As happy as a child," answered Phoebe; "but--like a child, too--very easily
disturbed."
"How disturbed?" inquired Holgrave. "By things without, or by thoughts within?"
"I cannot see his thoughts! How should I?" replied Phoebe with simple
piquancy.
"Very often his humor changes without any reason that can be guessed at, just as a
cloud comes over the sun.
Latterly, since I have begun to know him better, I feel it to be not quite right to
look closely into his moods. He has had such a great sorrow, that his
heart is made all solemn and sacred by it.
When he is cheerful,--when the sun shines into his mind,--then I venture to peep in,
just as far as the light reaches, but no further.
It is holy ground where the shadow falls!"
"How prettily you express this sentiment!" said the artist.
"I can understand the feeling, without possessing it.
Had I your opportunities, no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to the
full depth of my plummet-line!" "How strange that you should wish it!"
remarked Phoebe involuntarily.
"What is Cousin Clifford to you?" "Oh, nothing,--of course, nothing!"
answered Holgrave with a smile. "Only this is such an odd and
incomprehensible world!
The more I look at it, the more it puzzles me, and I begin to suspect that a man's
bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.
Men and women, and children, too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be
certain that he really knows them; nor ever guess what they have been from what he sees
them to be now.
Judge Pyncheon! Clifford!
What a complex riddle--a complexity of complexities--do they present!
It requires intuitive sympathy, like a young girl's, to solve it.
A mere observer, like myself (who never have any intuitions, and am, at best, only
subtile and acute), is pretty certain to go astray."
The artist now turned the conversation to themes less dark than that which they had
touched upon.
Phoebe and he were young together; nor had Holgrave, in his premature experience of
life, wasted entirely that beautiful spirit of youth, which, gushing forth from one
small heart and fancy, may diffuse itself
over the universe, making it all as bright as on the first day of creation.
Man's own youth is the world's youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines
that the earth's granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he
can mould into whatever shape he likes.
So it was with Holgrave.
He could talk sagely about the world's old age, but never actually believed what he
said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the world--that gray-
bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit,
without being venerable--as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into
all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest promise of becoming.
He had that sense, or inward prophecy,-- which a young man had better never have
been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to
relinquish,--that we are not doomed to
creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are the
harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.
It seemed to Holgrave,--as doubtless it has seemed to the hopeful of every century
since the epoch of Adam's grandchildren,-- that in this age, more than ever before,
the moss-grown and rotten Past is to be
torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their dead
corpses buried, and everything to begin anew.
As to the main point,--may we never live to doubt it!--as to the better centuries that
are coming, the artist was surely right.
His error lay in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is
destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead
of gradually renewing themselves by
patchwork; in applying his own little life- span as the measure of an interminable
achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the
great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or against it.
Yet it was well for him to think so.
This enthusiasm, infusing itself through the calmness of his character, and thus
taking an aspect of settled thought and wisdom, would serve to keep his youth pure,
and make his aspirations high.
And when, with the years settling down more weightily upon him, his early faith should
be modified by inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden
revolution of his sentiments.
He would still have faith in man's brightening destiny, and perhaps love him
all the better, as he should recognize his helplessness in his own behalf; and the
haughty faith, with which he began life,
would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its close, in discerning that man's
best directed effort accomplishes a kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of
realities.
Holgrave had read very little, and that little in passing through the thoroughfare
of life, where the mystic language of his books was necessarily mixed up with the
babble of the multitude, so that both one
and the other were apt to lose any sense that might have been properly their own.
He considered himself a thinker, and was certainly of a thoughtful turn, but, with
his own path to discover, had perhaps hardly yet reached the point where an
educated man begins to think.
The true value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward strength,
which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely like a change of garments; in that
enthusiasm, so quiet that he scarcely knew
of its existence, but which gave a warmth to everything that he laid his hand on; in
that personal ambition, hidden--from his own as well as other eyes--among his more
generous impulses, but in which lurked a
certain efficacy, that might solidify him from a theorist into the champion of some
practicable cause.
Altogether in his culture and want of culture,--in his crude, wild, and misty
philosophy, and the practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies;
in his magnanimous zeal for man's welfare,
and his recklessness of whatever the ages had established in man's behalf; in his
faith, and in his infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lacked,--the artist
might fitly enough stand forth as the
representative of many compeers in his native land.
His career it would be difficult to prefigure.
There appeared to be qualities in Holgrave, such as, in a country where everything is
free to the hand that can grasp it, could hardly fail to put some of the world's
prizes within his reach.
But these matters are delightfully uncertain.
At almost every step in life, we meet with young men of just about Holgrave's age, for
whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, even after much and careful inquiry,
we never happen to hear another word.
The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh gloss of the intellect and
imagination, endow them with a false brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves
and other people.
Like certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely in their first
newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after
washing-day.
But our business is with Holgrave as we find him on this particular afternoon, and
in the arbor of the Pyncheon garden.
In that point of view, it was a pleasant sight to behold this young man, with so
much faith in himself, and so fair an appearance of admirable powers,--so little
harmed, too, by the many tests that had
tried his metal,--it was pleasant to see him in his kindly intercourse with Phoebe.
Her thought had scarcely done him justice when it pronounced him cold; or, if so, he
had grown warmer now.
Without such purpose on her part, and unconsciously on his, she made the House of
the Seven Gables like a home to him, and the garden a familiar precinct.
With the insight on which he prided himself, he fancied that he could look
through Phoebe, and all around her, and could read her off like a page of a child's
story-book.
But these transparent natures are often deceptive in their depth; those pebbles at
the bottom of the fountain are farther from us than we think.
Thus the artist, whatever he might judge of Phoebe's capacity, was beguiled, by some
silent charm of hers, to talk freely of what he dreamed of doing in the world.
He poured himself out as to another self.
Very possibly, he forgot Phoebe while he talked to her, and was moved only by the
inevitable tendency of thought, when rendered sympathetic by enthusiasm and
emotion, to flow into the first safe reservoir which it finds.
But, had you peeped at them through the chinks of the garden-fence, the young man's
earnestness and heightened color might have led you to suppose that he was making love
to the young girl!
At length, something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for Phoebe to inquire
what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin Hepzibah, and why he now chose
to lodge in the desolate old Pyncheon House.
Without directly answering her, he turned from the Future, which had heretofore been
the theme of his discourse, and began to speak of the influences of the Past.
One subject, indeed, is but the reverberation of the other.
"Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?" cried he, keeping up the earnest
tone of his preceding conversation.
"It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body In fact, the case is just as if a
young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of
the old giant, his grandfather, who died a
long while ago, and only needs to be decently buried.
Just think a moment, and it will startle you to see what slaves we are to bygone
times,--to Death, if we give the matter the right word!"
"But I do not see it," observed Phoebe.
"For example, then," continued Holgrave: "a dead man, if he happens to have made a
will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die intestate, it is distributed
in accordance with the notions of men much longer dead than he.
A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and living judges do but search out and
repeat his decisions.
We read in dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at
dead men's pathos!
We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same
remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients!
We worship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds.
Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand obstructs us!
Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man's white, immitigable face encounters
them, and freezes our very heart!
And we must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence on our
own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world of another generation,
with which we shall have no shadow of a right to interfere.
I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's houses; as, for instance, in
this of the Seven Gables!"
"And why not," said Phoebe, "so long as we can be comfortable in them?"
"But we shall live to see the day, I trust," went on the artist, "when no man
shall build his house for posterity.
Why should he?
He might just as reasonably order a durable suit of clothes,--leather, or guttapercha,
or whatever else lasts longest,--so that his great-grandchildren should have the
benefit of them, and cut precisely the same figure in the world that he himself does.
If each generation were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that
single change, comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform
which society is now suffering for.
I doubt whether even our public edifices-- our capitols, state-houses, court-houses,
city-hall, and churches,--ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or
brick.
It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty years, or thereabouts,
as a hint to the people to examine into and reform the institutions which they
symbolize."
"How you hate everything old!" said Phoebe in dismay.
"It makes me dizzy to think of such a shifting world!"
"I certainly love nothing mouldy," answered Holgrave.
"Now, this old Pyncheon House!
Is it a wholesome place to live in, with its black shingles, and the green moss that
shows how damp they are?--its dark, low- studded rooms--its grime and sordidness,
which are the crystallization on its walls
of the human breath, that has been drawn and exhaled here in discontent and anguish?
The house ought to be purified with fire,-- purified till only its ashes remain!"
"Then why do you live in it?" asked Phoebe, a little piqued.
"Oh, I am pursuing my studies here; not in books, however," replied Holgrave.
"The house, in my view, is expressive of that odious and abominable Past, with all
its bad influences, against which I have just been declaiming.
I dwell in it for a while, that I may know the better how to hate it.
By the bye, did you ever hear the story of Maule, the wizard, and what happened
between him and your immeasurably great- grandfather?"
"Yes, indeed!" said Phoebe; "I heard it long ago, from my father, and two or three
times from my cousin Hepzibah, in the month that I have been here.
She seems to think that all the calamities of the Pyncheons began from that quarrel
with the wizard, as you call him. And you, Mr. Holgrave look as if you
thought so too!
How singular that you should believe what is so very absurd, when you reject many
things that are a great deal worthier of credit!"
"I do believe it," said the artist seriously; "not as a superstition, however,
but as proved by unquestionable facts, and as exemplifying a theory.
Now, see: under those seven gables, at which we now look up,--and which old
Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the house of his descendants, in prosperity and
happiness, down to an epoch far beyond the
present,--under that roof, through a portion of three centuries, there has been
perpetual remorse of conscience, a constantly defeated hope, strife amongst
kindred, various misery, a strange form of
death, dark suspicion, unspeakable disgrace,--all, or most of which calamity I
have the means of tracing to the old Puritan's inordinate desire to plant and
endow a family.
To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the
wrong and mischief which men do.
The truth is, that, once in every half- century, at longest, a family should be
merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its
ancestors.
Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in hidden streams, as
the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean pipes.
In the family existence of these Pyncheons, for instance,--forgive me Phoebe, but I
cannot think of you as one of them,--in their brief New England pedigree, there has
been time enough to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another."
"You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred," said Phoebe, debating with
herself whether she ought to take offence.
"I speak true thoughts to a true mind!" answered Holgrave, with a vehemence which
Phoebe had not before witnessed in him. "The truth is as I say!
Furthermore, the original perpetrator and father of this mischief appears to have
perpetuated himself, and still walks the street,--at least, his very image, in mind
and body,--with the fairest prospect of
transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched an inheritance as he has received!
Do you remember the daguerreotype, and its resemblance to the old portrait?"
"How strangely in earnest you are!" exclaimed Phoebe, looking at him with
surprise and perplexity; half alarmed and partly inclined to laugh.
"You talk of the lunacy of the Pyncheons; is it contagious?"
"I understand you!" said the artist, coloring and laughing.
"I believe I am a little mad.
This subject has taken hold of my mind with the strangest tenacity of clutch since I
have lodged in yonder old gable.
As one method of throwing it off, I have put an incident of the Pyncheon family
history, with which I happen to be acquainted, into the form of a legend, and
mean to publish it in a magazine."
"Do you write for the magazines?" inquired Phoebe.
"Is it possible you did not know it?" cried Holgrave.
"Well, such is literary fame!
Yes. Miss Phoebe Pyncheon, among the multitude of my marvellous gifts I have
that of writing stories; and my name has figured, I can assure you, on the covers of
Graham and Godey, making as respectable an
appearance, for aught I could see, as any of the canonized bead-roll with which it
was associated.
In the humorous line, I am thought to have a very pretty way with me; and as for
pathos, I am as provocative of tears as an onion.
But shall I read you my story?"
"Yes, if it is not very long," said Phoebe,--and added laughingly,--"nor very
dull."
As this latter point was one which the daguerreotypist could not decide for
himself, he forthwith produced his roll of manuscript, and, while the late sunbeams
gilded the seven gables, began to read.
>
CHAPTER XIII Alice Pyncheon
THERE was a message brought, one day, from the worshipful Gervayse Pyncheon to young
Matthew Maule, the carpenter, desiring his immediate presence at the House of the
Seven Gables.
"And what does your master want with me?" said the carpenter to Mr. Pyncheon's black
servant. "Does the house need any repair?
Well it may, by this time; and no blame to my father who built it, neither!
I was reading the old Colonel's tombstone, no longer ago than last Sabbath; and,
reckoning from that date, the house has stood seven-and-thirty years.
No wonder if there should be a job to do on the roof."
"Don't know what *** wants," answered Scipio.
"The house is a berry good house, and old Colonel Pyncheon think so too, I reckon;--
else why the old man haunt it so, and frighten a poor ***, As he does?"
"Well, well, friend Scipio; let your master know that I'm coming," said the carpenter
with a laugh. "For a fair, workmanlike job, he'll find me
his man.
And so the house is haunted, is it? It will take a tighter workman than I am to
keep the spirits out of the Seven Gables.
Even if the Colonel would be quiet," he added, muttering to himself, "my old
grandfather, the wizard, will be pretty sure to stick to the Pyncheons as long as
their walls hold together."
"What's that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule?" asked Scipio.
"And what for do you look so black at me?" "No matter, darky," said the carpenter.
"Do you think nobody is to look black but yourself?
Go tell your master I'm coming; and if you happen to see Mistress Alice, his daughter,
give Matthew Maule's humble respects to her.
She has brought a fair face from Italy,-- fair, and gentle, and proud,--has that same
Alice Pyncheon!" "He talk of Mistress Alice!" cried Scipio,
as he returned from his errand.
"The low carpenter-man! He no business so much as to look at her a
great way off!"
This young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, it must be observed, was a person little
understood, and not very generally liked, in the town where he resided; not that
anything could be alleged against his
integrity, or his skill and diligence in the handicraft which he exercised.
The aversion (as it might justly be called) with which many persons regarded him was
partly the result of his own character and deportment, and partly an inheritance.
He was the grandson of a former Matthew Maule, one of the early settlers of the
town, and who had been a famous and terrible wizard in his day.
This old reprobate was one of the sufferers when Cotton Mather, and his brother
ministers, and the learned judges, and other wise men, and Sir William Phipps, the
sagacious governor, made such laudable
efforts to weaken the great enemy of souls, by sending a multitude of his adherents up
the rocky pathway of Gallows Hill.
Since those days, no doubt, it had grown to be suspected that, in consequence of an
unfortunate overdoing of a work praiseworthy in itself, the proceedings
against the witches had proved far less
acceptable to the Beneficent Father than to that very Arch Enemy whom they were
intended to distress and utterly overwhelm.
It is not the less certain, however, that awe and terror brooded over the memories of
those who died for this horrible crime of witchcraft.
Their graves, in the crevices of the rocks, were supposed to be incapable of retaining
the occupants who had been so hastily thrust into them.
Old Matthew Maule, especially, was known to have as little hesitation or difficulty in
rising out of his grave as an ordinary man in getting out of bed, and was as often
seen at midnight as living people at noonday.
This pestilent wizard (in whom his just punishment seemed to have wrought no manner
of amendment) had an inveterate habit of haunting a certain mansion, styled the
House of the Seven Gables, against the
owner of which he pretended to hold an unsettled claim for ground-rent.
The ghost, it appears,--with the pertinacity which was one of his
distinguishing characteristics while alive,--insisted that he was the rightful
proprietor of the site upon which the house stood.
His terms were, that either the aforesaid ground-rent, from the day when the cellar
began to be dug, should be paid down, or the mansion itself given up; else he, the
ghostly creditor, would have his finger in
all the affairs of the Pyncheons, and make everything go wrong with them, though it
should be a thousand years after his death.
It was a wild story, perhaps, but seemed not altogether so incredible to those who
could remember what an inflexibly obstinate old fellow this wizard Maule had been.
Now, the wizard's grandson, the young Matthew Maule of our story, was popularly
supposed to have inherited some of his ancestor's questionable traits.
It is wonderful how many absurdities were promulgated in reference to the young man.
He was fabled, for example, to have a strange power of getting into people's
dreams, and regulating matters there according to his own fancy, pretty much
like the stage-manager of a theatre.
There was a great deal of talk among the neighbors, particularly the petticoated
ones, about what they called the witchcraft of Maule's eye.
Some said that he could look into people's minds; others, that, by the marvellous
power of this eye, he could draw people into his own mind, or send them, if he
pleased, to do errands to his grandfather,
in the spiritual world; others, again, that it was what is termed an Evil Eye, and
possessed the valuable faculty of blighting corn, and drying children into mummies with
the heartburn.
But, after all, what worked most to the young carpenter's disadvantage was, first,
the reserve and sternness of his natural disposition, and next, the fact of his not
being a church-communicant, and the
suspicion of his holding heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity.
After receiving Mr. Pyncheon's message, the carpenter merely tarried to finish a small
job, which he happened to have in hand, and then took his way towards the House of the
Seven Gables.
This noted edifice, though its style might be getting a little out of fashion, was
still as respectable a family residence as that of any gentleman in town.
The present owner, Gervayse Pyncheon, was said to have contracted a dislike to the
house, in consequence of a shock to his sensibility, in early childhood, from the
sudden death of his grandfather.
In the very act of running to climb Colonel Pyncheon's knee, the boy had discovered the
old Puritan to be a corpse.
On arriving at manhood, Mr. Pyncheon had visited England, where he married a lady of
fortune, and had subsequently spent many years, partly in the mother country, and
partly in various cities on the continent of Europe.
During this period, the family mansion had been consigned to the charge of a kinsman,
who was allowed to make it his home for the time being, in consideration of keeping the
premises in thorough repair.
So faithfully had this contract been fulfilled, that now, as the carpenter
approached the house, his practised eye could detect nothing to criticise in its
condition.
The peaks of the seven gables rose up sharply; the shingled roof looked
thoroughly water-tight; and the glittering plaster-work entirely covered the exterior
walls, and sparkled in the October sun, as if it had been new only a week ago.
The house had that pleasant aspect of life which is like the cheery expression of
comfortable activity in the human countenance.
You could see, at once, that there was the stir of a large family within it.
A huge load of oak-wood was passing through the gateway, towards the outbuildings in
the rear; the fat cook--or probably it might be the housekeeper--stood at the side
door, bargaining for some turkeys and
poultry which a countryman had brought for sale.
Now and then a maid-servant, neatly dressed, and now the shining sable face of
a slave, might be seen bustling across the windows, in the lower part of the house.
At an open window of a room in the second story, hanging over some pots of beautiful
and delicate flowers,--exotics, but which had never known a more genial sunshine than
that of the New England autumn,--was the
figure of a young lady, an exotic, like the flowers, and beautiful and delicate as
they.
Her presence imparted an indescribable grace and faint witchery to the whole
edifice.
In other respects, it was a substantial, jolly-looking mansion, and seemed fit to be
the residence of a patriarch, who might establish his own headquarters in the front
gable and assign one of the remainder to
each of his six children, while the great chimney in the centre should symbolize the
old fellow's hospitable heart, which kept them all warm, and made a great whole of
the seven smaller ones.
There was a vertical sundial on the front gable; and as the carpenter passed beneath
it, he looked up and noted the hour. "Three o'clock!" said he to himself.
"My father told me that dial was put up only an hour before the old Colonel's
death. How truly it has kept time these seven-and-
thirty years past!
The shadow creeps and creeps, and is always looking over the shoulder of the sunshine!"
It might have befitted a craftsman, like Matthew Maule, on being sent for to a
gentleman's house, to go to the back door, where servants and work-people were usually
admitted; or at least to the side entrance,
where the better class of tradesmen made application.
But the carpenter had a great deal of pride and stiffness in his nature; and, at this
moment, moreover, his heart was bitter with the sense of hereditary wrong, because he
considered the great Pyncheon House to be
standing on soil which should have been his own.
On this very site, beside a spring of delicious water, his grandfather had felled
the pine-trees and built a cottage, in which children had been born to him; and it
was only from a dead man's stiffened
fingers that Colonel Pyncheon had wrested away the title-deeds.
So young Maule went straight to the principal entrance, beneath a portal of
carved oak, and gave such a peal of the iron knocker that you would have imagined
the stern old wizard himself to be standing at the threshold.
Black Scipio answered the summons in a prodigious, hurry; but showed the whites of
his eyes in amazement on beholding only the carpenter.
"Lord-a-mercy, what a great man he be, this carpenter fellow!" mumbled Scipio, down in
his throat. "Anybody think he beat on the door with his
biggest hammer!"
"Here I am!" said Maule sternly. "Show me the way to your master's parlor."
As he stept into the house, a note of sweet and melancholy music thrilled and vibrated
along the passage-way, proceeding from one of the rooms above stairs.
It was the harpsichord which Alice Pyncheon had brought with her from beyond the sea.
The fair Alice bestowed most of her maiden leisure between flowers and music, although
the former were apt to droop, and the melodies were often sad.
She was of foreign education, and could not take kindly to the New England modes of
life, in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed.
As Mr. Pyncheon had been impatiently awaiting Maule's arrival, black Scipio, of
course, lost no time in ushering the carpenter into his master's presence.
The room in which this gentleman sat was a parlor of moderate size, looking out upon
the garden of the house, and having its windows partly shadowed by the foliage of
fruit-trees.
It was Mr. Pyncheon's peculiar apartment, and was provided with furniture, in an
elegant and costly style, principally from Paris; the floor (which was unusual at that
day) being covered with a carpet, so
skilfully and richly wrought that it seemed to glow as with living flowers.
In one corner stood a marble woman, to whom her own beauty was the sole and sufficient
garment.
Some pictures--that looked old, and had a mellow tinge diffused through all their
artful splendor--hung on the walls.
Near the fireplace was a large and very beautiful cabinet of ebony, inlaid with
ivory; a piece of antique furniture, which Mr. Pyncheon had bought in Venice, and
which he used as the treasure-place for
medals, ancient coins, and whatever small and valuable curiosities he had picked up
on his travels.
Through all this variety of decoration, however, the room showed its original
characteristics; its low stud, its cross- beam, its chimney-piece, with the old-
fashioned Dutch tiles; so that it was the
emblem of a mind industriously stored with foreign ideas, and elaborated into
artificial refinement, but neither larger, nor, in its proper self, more elegant than
before.
There were two objects that appeared rather out of place in this very handsomely
furnished room.
One was a large map, or surveyor's plan, of a tract of land, which looked as if it had
been drawn a good many years ago, and was now dingy with smoke, and soiled, here and
there, with the touch of fingers.
The other was a portrait of a stern old man, in a Puritan garb, painted roughly,
but with a bold effect, and a remarkably strong expression of character.
At a small table, before a fire of English sea-coal, sat Mr. Pyncheon, sipping coffee,
which had grown to be a very favorite beverage with him in France.
He was a middle-aged and really handsome man, with a wig flowing down upon his
shoulders; his coat was of blue velvet, with lace on the borders and at the button-
holes; and the firelight glistened on the
spacious breadth of his waistcoat, which was flowered all over with gold.
On the entrance of Scipio, ushering in the carpenter, Mr. Pyncheon turned partly
round, but resumed his former position, and proceeded deliberately to finish his cup of
coffee, without immediate notice of the guest whom he had summoned to his presence.
It was not that he intended any rudeness or improper neglect,--which, indeed, he would
have blushed to be guilty of,--but it never occurred to him that a person in Maule's
station had a claim on his courtesy, or
would trouble himself about it one way or the other.
The carpenter, however, stepped at once to the hearth, and turned himself about, so as
to look Mr. Pyncheon in the face.
"You sent for me," said he. "Be pleased to explain your business, that
I may go back to my own affairs." "Ah! excuse me," said Mr. Pyncheon quietly.
"I did not mean to tax your time without a recompense.
Your name, I think, is Maule,--Thomas or Matthew Maule,--a son or grandson of the
builder of this house?"
"Matthew Maule," replied the carpenter,-- "son of him who built the house,--grandson
of the rightful proprietor of the soil."
"I know the dispute to which you allude," observed Mr. Pyncheon with undisturbed
equanimity.
"I am well aware that my grandfather was compelled to resort to a suit at law, in
order to establish his claim to the foundation-site of this edifice.
We will not, if you please, renew the discussion.
The matter was settled at the time, and by the competent authorities,--equitably, it
is to be presumed,--and, at all events, irrevocably.
Yet, singularly enough, there is an incidental reference to this very subject
in what I am now about to say to you.
And this same inveterate grudge,--excuse me, I mean no offence,--this irritability,
which you have just shown, is not entirely aside from the matter."
"If you can find anything for your purpose, Mr. Pyncheon," said the carpenter, "in a
man's natural resentment for the wrongs done to his blood, you are welcome to it."
"I take you at your word, Goodman Maule," said the owner of the Seven Gables, with a
smile, "and will proceed to suggest a mode in which your hereditary resentments--
justifiable or otherwise--may have had a bearing on my affairs.
You have heard, I suppose, that the Pyncheon family, ever since my
grandfather's days, have been prosecuting a still unsettled claim to a very large
extent of territory at the Eastward?"
"Often," replied Maule,--and it is said that a smile came over his face,--"very
often,--from my father!"
"This claim," continued Mr. Pyncheon, after pausing a moment, as if to consider what
the carpenter's smile might mean, "appeared to be on the very verge of a settlement and
full allowance, at the period of my grandfather's decease.
It was well known, to those in his confidence, that he anticipated neither
difficulty nor delay.
Now, Colonel Pyncheon, I need hardly say, was a practical man, well acquainted with
public and private business, and not at all the person to cherish ill-founded hopes, or
to attempt the following out of an impracticable scheme.
It is obvious to conclude, therefore, that he had grounds, not apparent to his heirs,
for his confident anticipation of success in the matter of this Eastern claim.
In a word, I believe,--and my legal advisers coincide in the belief, which,
moreover, is authorized, to a certain extent, by the family traditions,--that my
grandfather was in possession of some deed,
or other document, essential to this claim, but which has since disappeared."
"Very likely," said Matthew Maule,--and again, it is said, there was a dark smile
on his face,--"but what can a poor carpenter have to do with the grand affairs
of the Pyncheon family?"
"Perhaps nothing," returned Mr. Pyncheon, "possibly much!"
Here ensued a great many words between Matthew Maule and the proprietor of the
Seven Gables, on the subject which the latter had thus broached.
It seems (although Mr. Pyncheon had some hesitation in referring to stories so
exceedingly absurd in their aspect) that the popular belief pointed to some
mysterious connection and dependence,
existing between the family of the Maules and these vast unrealized possessions of
the Pyncheons.
It was an ordinary saying that the old wizard, hanged though he was, had obtained
the best end of the bargain in his contest with Colonel Pyncheon; inasmuch as he had
got possession of the great Eastern claim,
in exchange for an acre or two of garden- ground.
A very aged woman, recently dead, had often used the metaphorical expression, in her
fireside talk, that miles and miles of the Pyncheon lands had been shovelled into
Maule's grave; which, by the bye, was but a
very shallow nook, between two rocks, near the summit of Gallows Hill.
Again, when the lawyers were making inquiry for the missing document, it was a by-word
that it would never be found, unless in the wizard's skeleton hand.
So much weight had the shrewd lawyers assigned to these fables, that (but Mr.
Pyncheon did not see fit to inform the carpenter of the fact) they had secretly
caused the wizard's grave to be searched.
Nothing was discovered, however, except that, unaccountably, the right hand of the
skeleton was gone.
Now, what was unquestionably important, a portion of these popular rumors could be
traced, though rather doubtfully and indistinctly, to chance words and obscure
hints of the executed wizard's son, and the father of this present Matthew Maule.
And here Mr. Pyncheon could bring an item of his own personal evidence into play.
Though but a child at the time, he either remembered or fancied that Matthew's father
had had some job to perform on the day before, or possibly the very morning of the
Colonel's decease, in the private room
where he and the carpenter were at this moment talking.
Certain papers belonging to Colonel Pyncheon, as his grandson distinctly
recollected, had been spread out on the table.
Matthew Maule understood the insinuated suspicion.
"My father," he said,--but still there was that dark smile, making a riddle of his
countenance,--"my father was an honester man than the bloody old Colonel!
Not to get his rights back again would he have carried off one of those papers!"
"I shall not bandy words with you," observed the foreign-bred Mr. Pyncheon,
with haughty composure.
"Nor will it become me to resent any rudeness towards either my grandfather or
myself.
A gentleman, before seeking intercourse with a person of your station and habits,
will first consider whether the urgency of the end may compensate for the
disagreeableness of the means.
It does so in the present instance."
He then renewed the conversation, and made great pecuniary offers to the carpenter, in
case the latter should give information leading to the discovery of the lost
document, and the consequent success of the Eastern claim.
For a long time Matthew Maule is said to have turned a cold ear to these
propositions.
At last, however, with a strange kind of laugh, he inquired whether Mr. Pyncheon
would make over to him the old wizard's homestead-ground, together with the House
of the Seven Gables, now standing on it, in
requital of the documentary evidence so urgently required.
The wild, chimney-corner legend (which, without copying all its extravagances, my
narrative essentially follows) here gives an account of some very strange behavior on
the part of Colonel Pyncheon's portrait.
This picture, it must be understood, was supposed to be so intimately connected with
the fate of the house, and so magically built into its walls, that, if once it
should be removed, that very instant the
whole edifice would come thundering down in a heap of dusty ruin.
All through the foregoing conversation between Mr. Pyncheon and the carpenter, the
portrait had been frowning, clenching its fist, and giving many such proofs of
excessive discomposure, but without
attracting the notice of either of the two colloquists.
And finally, at Matthew Maule's audacious suggestion of a transfer of the seven-
gabled structure, the ghostly portrait is averred to have lost all patience, and to
have shown itself on the point of descending bodily from its frame.
But such incredible incidents are merely to be mentioned aside.
"Give up this house!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, in amazement at the proposal.
"Were I to do so, my grandfather would not rest quiet in his grave!"
"He never has, if all stories are true," remarked the carpenter composedly.
"But that matter concerns his grandson more than it does Matthew Maule.
I have no other terms to propose."
Impossible as he at first thought it to comply with Maule's conditions, still, on a
second glance, Mr. Pyncheon was of opinion that they might at least be made matter of
discussion.
He himself had no personal attachment for the house, nor any pleasant associations
connected with his childish residence in it.
On the contrary, after seven-and-thirty years, the presence of his dead grandfather
seemed still to pervade it, as on that morning when the affrighted boy had beheld
him, with so ghastly an aspect, stiffening in his chair.
His long abode in foreign parts, moreover, and familiarity with many of the castles
and ancestral halls of England, and the marble palaces of Italy, had caused him to
look contemptuously at the House of the
Seven Gables, whether in point of splendor or convenience.
It was a mansion exceedingly inadequate to the style of living which it would be
incumbent on Mr. Pyncheon to support, after realizing his territorial rights.
His steward might deign to occupy it, but never, certainly, the great landed
proprietor himself.
In the event of success, indeed, it was his purpose to return to England; nor, to say
the truth, would he recently have quitted that more congenial home, had not his own
fortune, as well as his deceased wife's, begun to give symptoms of exhaustion.
The Eastern claim once fairly settled, and put upon the firm basis of actual
possession, Mr. Pyncheon's property--to be measured by miles, not acres--would be
worth an earldom, and would reasonably
entitle him to solicit, or enable him to purchase, that elevated dignity from the
British monarch.
Lord Pyncheon!--or the Earl of Waldo!--how could such a magnate be expected to
contract his grandeur within the pitiful compass of seven shingled gables?
In short, on an enlarged view of the business, the carpenter's terms appeared so
ridiculously easy that Mr. Pyncheon could scarcely forbear laughing in his face.
He was quite ashamed, after the foregoing reflections, to propose any diminution of
so moderate a recompense for the immense service to be rendered.
"I consent to your proposition, Maule!" cried he.
"Put me in possession of the document essential to establish my rights, and the
House of the Seven Gables is your own!"
According to some versions of the story, a regular contract to the above effect was
drawn up by a lawyer, and signed and sealed in the presence of witnesses.
Others say that Matthew Maule was contented with a private written agreement, in which
Mr. Pyncheon pledged his honor and integrity to the fulfillment of the terms
concluded upon.
The gentleman then ordered wine, which he and the carpenter drank together, in
confirmation of their bargain.
During the whole preceding discussion and subsequent formalities, the old Puritan's
portrait seems to have persisted in its shadowy gestures of disapproval; but
without effect, except that, as Mr.
Pyncheon set down the emptied glass, he thought he beheld his grandfather frown.
"This sherry is too potent a wine for me; it has affected my brain already," he
observed, after a somewhat startled look at the picture.
"On returning to Europe, I shall confine myself to the more delicate vintages of
Italy and France, the best of which will not bear transportation."
"My Lord Pyncheon may drink what wine he will, and wherever he pleases," replied the
carpenter, as if he had been privy to Mr. Pyncheon's ambitious projects.
"But first, sir, if you desire tidings of this lost document, I must crave the favor
of a little talk with your fair daughter Alice."
"You are mad, Maule!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon haughtily; and now, at last, there
was anger mixed up with his pride. "What can my daughter have to do with a
business like this?"
Indeed, at this new demand on the carpenter's part, the proprietor of the
Seven Gables was even more thunder-struck than at the cool proposition to surrender
his house.
There was, at least, an assignable motive for the first stipulation; there appeared
to be none whatever for the last.
Nevertheless, Matthew Maule sturdily insisted on the young lady being summoned,
and even gave her father to understand, in a mysterious kind of explanation,--which
made the matter considerably darker than it
looked before,--that the only chance of acquiring the requisite knowledge was
through the clear, crystal medium of a pure and *** intelligence, like that of the
fair Alice.
Not to encumber our story with Mr. Pyncheon's scruples, whether of conscience,
pride, or fatherly affection, he at length ordered his daughter to be called.
He well knew that she was in her chamber, and engaged in no occupation that could not
readily be laid aside; for, as it happened, ever since Alice's name had been spoken,
both her father and the carpenter had heard
the sad and sweet music of her harpsichord, and the airier melancholy of her
accompanying voice. So Alice Pyncheon was summoned, and
appeared.
A portrait of this young lady, painted by a Venetian artist, and left by her father in
England, is said to have fallen into the hands of the present Duke of Devonshire,
and to be now preserved at Chatsworth; not
on account of any associations with the original, but for its value as a picture,
and the high character of beauty in the countenance.
If ever there was a lady born, and set apart from the world's vulgar mass by a
certain gentle and cold stateliness, it was this very Alice Pyncheon.
Yet there was the womanly mixture in her; the tenderness, or, at least, the tender
capabilities.
For the sake of that redeeming quality, a man of generous nature would have forgiven
all her pride, and have been content, almost, to lie down in her path, and let
Alice set her slender foot upon his heart.
All that he would have required was simply the acknowledgment that he was indeed a
man, and a fellow-being, moulded of the same elements as she.
As Alice came into the room, her eyes fell upon the carpenter, who was standing near
its centre, clad in green woollen jacket, a pair of loose breeches, open at the knees,
and with a long pocket for his rule, the
end of which protruded; it was as proper a mark of the artisan's calling as Mr.
Pyncheon's full-dress sword of that gentleman's aristocratic pretensions.
A glow of artistic approval brightened over Alice Pyncheon's face; she was struck with
admiration--which she made no attempt to conceal--of the remarkable comeliness,
strength, and energy of Maule's figure.
But that admiring glance (which most other men, perhaps, would have cherished as a
sweet recollection all through life) the carpenter never forgave.
It must have been the devil himself that made Maule so subtile in his preception.
"Does the girl look at me as if I were a brute beast?" thought he, setting his
teeth.
"She shall know whether I have a human spirit; and the worse for her, if it prove
stronger than her own!" "My father, you sent for me," said Alice,
in her sweet and harp-like voice.
"But, if you have business with this young man, pray let me go again.
You know I do not love this room, in spite of that Claude, with which you try to bring
back sunny recollections."
"Stay a moment, young lady, if you please!" said Matthew Maule.
"My business with your father is over. With yourself, it is now to begin!"
Alice looked towards her father, in surprise and inquiry.
"Yes, Alice," said Mr. Pyncheon, with some disturbance and confusion.
"This young man--his name is Matthew Maule- -professes, so far as I can understand him,
to be able to discover, through your means, a certain paper or parchment, which was
missing long before your birth.
The importance of the document in question renders it advisable to neglect no
possible, even if improbable, method of regaining it.
You will therefore oblige me, my dear Alice, by answering this person's
inquiries, and complying with his lawful and reasonable requests, so far as they may
appear to have the aforesaid object in view.
As I shall remain in the room, you need apprehend no rude nor unbecoming
deportment, on the young man's part; and, at your slightest wish, of course, the
investigation, or whatever we may call it, shall immediately be broken off."
"Mistress Alice Pyncheon," remarked Matthew Maule, with the utmost deference, but yet a
half-hidden sarcasm in his look and tone, "will no doubt feel herself quite safe in
her father's presence, and under his all- sufficient protection."
"I certainly shall entertain no manner of apprehension, with my father at hand," said
Alice with maidenly dignity.
"Neither do I conceive that a lady, while true to herself, can have aught to fear
from whomsoever, or in any circumstances!" Poor Alice!
By what unhappy impulse did she thus put herself at once on terms of defiance
against a strength which she could not estimate?
"Then, Mistress Alice," said Matthew Maule, handing a chair,--gracefully enough, for a
craftsman, "will it please you only to sit down, and do me the favor (though
altogether beyond a poor carpenter's deserts) to fix your eyes on mine!"
Alice complied, She was very proud.
Setting aside all advantages of rank, this fair girl deemed herself conscious of a
power--combined of beauty, high, unsullied purity, and the preservative force of
womanhood--that could make her sphere
impenetrable, unless betrayed by treachery within.
She instinctively knew, it may be, that some sinister or evil potency was now
striving to pass her barriers; nor would she decline the contest.
So Alice put woman's might against man's might; a match not often equal on the part
of woman.
Her father meanwhile had turned away, and seemed absorbed in the contemplation of a
landscape by Claude, where a shadowy and sun-streaked vista penetrated so remotely
into an ancient wood, that it would have
been no wonder if his fancy had lost itself in the picture's bewildering depths.
But, in truth, the picture was no more to him at that moment than the blank wall
against which it hung.
His mind was haunted with the many and strange tales which he had heard,
attributing mysterious if not supernatural endowments to these Maules, as well the
grandson here present as his two immediate ancestors.
Mr. Pyncheon's long residence abroad, and intercourse with men of wit and fashion,--
courtiers, worldings, and free-thinkers,-- had done much towards obliterating the grim
Puritan superstitions, which no man of New
England birth at that early period could entirely escape.
But, on the other hand, had not a whole community believed Maule's grandfather to
be a wizard?
Had not the crime been proved? Had not the wizard died for it?
Had he not bequeathed a legacy of hatred against the Pyncheons to this only
grandson, who, as it appeared, was now about to exercise a subtle influence over
the daughter of his enemy's house?
Might not this influence be the same that was called witchcraft?
Turning half around, he caught a glimpse of Maule's figure in the looking-glass.
At some paces from Alice, with his arms uplifted in the air, the carpenter made a
gesture as if directing downward a slow, ponderous, and invisible weight upon the
maiden.
"Stay, Maule!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, stepping forward.
"I forbid your proceeding further!"
"Pray, my dear father, do not interrupt the young man," said Alice, without changing
her position. "His efforts, I assure you, will prove very
harmless."
Again Mr. Pyncheon turned his eyes towards the Claude.
It was then his daughter's will, in opposition to his own, that the experiment
should be fully tried.
Henceforth, therefore, he did but consent, not urge it.
And was it not for her sake far more than for his own that he desired its success?
That lost parchment once restored, the beautiful Alice Pyncheon, with the rich
dowry which he could then bestow, might wed an English duke or a German reigning-
prince, instead of some New England clergyman or lawyer!
At the thought, the ambitious father almost consented, in his heart, that, if the
devil's power were needed to the accomplishment of this great object, Maule
might evoke him.
Alice's own purity would be her safeguard. With his mind full of imaginary
magnificence, Mr. Pyncheon heard a half- uttered exclamation from his daughter.
It was very faint and low; so indistinct that there seemed but half a will to shape
out the words, and too undefined a purport to be intelligible.
Yet it was a call for help!--his conscience never doubted it;--and, little more than a
whisper to his ear, it was a dismal shriek, and long reechoed so, in the region round
his heart!
But this time the father did not turn. After a further interval, Maule spoke.
"Behold your daughter," said he. Mr. Pyncheon came hastily forward.
The carpenter was standing erect in front of Alice's chair, and pointing his finger
towards the maiden with an expression of triumphant power, the limits of which could
not be defined, as, indeed, its scope
stretched vaguely towards the unseen and the infinite.
Alice sat in an attitude of profound repose, with the long brown lashes drooping
over her eyes.
"There she is!" said the carpenter. "Speak to her!"
"Alice! My daughter!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon.
"My own Alice!"
She did not stir. "Louder!" said Maule, smiling.
"Alice! Awake!" cried her father.
"It troubles me to see you thus!
Awake!" He spoke loudly, with terror in his voice,
and close to that delicate ear which had always been so sensitive to every discord.
But the sound evidently reached her not.
It is indescribable what a sense of remote, dim, unattainable distance betwixt himself
and Alice was impressed on the father by this impossibility of reaching her with his
voice.
"Best touch her!" said Matthew Maule "Shake the girl, and roughly, too!
My hands are hardened with too much use of axe, saw, and plane,--else I might help
you!"
Mr. Pyncheon took her hand, and pressed it with the earnestness of startled emotion.
He kissed her, with so great a heart-throb in the kiss, that he thought she must needs
feel it.
Then, in a gust of anger at her insensibility, he shook her maiden form
with a violence which, the next moment, it affrighted him to remember.
He withdrew his encircling arms, and Alice- -whose figure, though flexible, had been
wholly impassive--relapsed into the same attitude as before these attempts to arouse
her.
Maule having shifted his position, her face was turned towards him slightly, but with
what seemed to be a reference of her very slumber to his guidance.
Then it was a strange sight to behold how the man of conventionalities shook the
powder out of his periwig; how the reserved and stately gentleman forgot his dignity;
how the gold-embroidered waistcoat
flickered and glistened in the firelight with the convulsion of rage, terror, and
sorrow in the human heart that was beating under it.
"Villain!" cried Mr. Pyncheon, shaking his clenched fist at Maule.
"You and the fiend together have robbed me of my daughter.
Give her back, spawn of the old wizard, or you shall climb Gallows Hill in your
grandfather's footsteps!" "Softly, Mr. Pyncheon!" said the carpenter
with scornful composure.
"Softly, an' it please your worship, else you will spoil those rich lace-ruffles at
your wrists!
Is it my crime if you have sold your daughter for the mere hope of getting a
sheet of yellow parchment into your clutch? There sits Mistress Alice quietly asleep.
Now let Matthew Maule try whether she be as proud as the carpenter found her awhile
since."
He spoke, and Alice responded, with a soft, subdued, inward acquiescence, and a bending
of her form towards him, like the flame of a torch when it indicates a gentle draught
of air.
He beckoned with his hand, and, rising from her chair,--blindly, but undoubtingly, as
tending to her sure and inevitable centre,- -the proud Alice approached him.
He waved her back, and, retreating, Alice sank again into her seat.
"She is mine!" said Matthew Maule. "Mine, by the right of the strongest
spirit!"
In the further progress of the legend, there is a long, grotesque, and
occasionally awe-striking account of the carpenter's incantations (if so they are to
be called), with a view of discovering the lost document.
It appears to have been his object to convert the mind of Alice into a kind of
telescopic medium, through which Mr. Pyncheon and himself might obtain a glimpse
into the spiritual world.
He succeeded, accordingly, in holding an imperfect sort of intercourse, at one
remove, with the departed personages in whose custody the so much valued secret had
been carried beyond the precincts of earth.
During her trance, Alice described three figures as being present to her
spiritualized perception.
One was an aged, dignified, stern-looking gentleman, clad as for a solemn festival in
grave and costly attire, but with a great blood-stain on his richly wrought band; the
second, an aged man, meanly dressed, with a
dark and malign countenance, and a broken halter about his neck; the third, a person
not so advanced in life as the former two, but beyond the middle age, wearing a coarse
woollen tunic and leather breeches, and
with a carpenter's rule sticking out of his side pocket.
These three visionary characters possessed a mutual knowledge of the missing document.
One of them, in truth,--it was he with the blood-stain on his band,--seemed, unless
his gestures were misunderstood, to hold the parchment in his immediate keeping, but
was prevented by his two partners in the
mystery from disburdening himself of the trust.
Finally, when he showed a purpose of shouting forth the secret loudly enough to
be heard from his own sphere into that of mortals, his companions struggled with him,
and pressed their hands over his mouth; and
forthwith--whether that he were choked by it, or that the secret itself was of a
crimson hue--there was a fresh flow of blood upon his band.
Upon this, the two meanly dressed figures mocked and jeered at the much-abashed old
dignitary, and pointed their fingers at the stain.
At this juncture, Maule turned to Mr. Pyncheon.
"It will never be allowed," said he.
"The custody of this secret, that would so enrich his heirs, makes part of your
grandfather's retribution. He must choke with it until it is no longer
of any value.
And keep you the House of the Seven Gables! It is too dear bought an inheritance, and
too heavy with the curse upon it, to be shifted yet awhile from the Colonel's
posterity."
Mr. Pyncheon tried to speak, but--what with fear and passion--could make only a
gurgling murmur in his throat. The carpenter smiled.
"Aha, worshipful sir!--so you have old Maule's blood to drink!" said he jeeringly.
"Fiend in man's shape! why dost thou keep dominion over my child?" cried Mr.
Pyncheon, when his choked utterance could make way.
"Give me back my daughter.
Then go thy ways; and may we never meet again!"
"Your daughter!" said Matthew Maule. "Why, she is fairly mine!
Nevertheless, not to be too hard with fair Mistress Alice, I will leave her in your
keeping; but I do not warrant you that she shall never have occasion to remember
Maule, the carpenter."
He waved his hands with an upward motion; and, after a few repetitions of similar
gestures, the beautiful Alice Pyncheon awoke from her strange trance.
She awoke without the slightest recollection of her visionary experience;
but as one losing herself in a momentary reverie, and returning to the consciousness
of actual life, in almost as brief an
interval as the down-sinking flame of the hearth should quiver again up the chimney.
On recognizing Matthew Maule, she assumed an air of somewhat cold but gentle dignity,
the rather, as there was a certain peculiar smile on the carpenter's visage that
stirred the native pride of the fair Alice.
So ended, for that time, the quest for the lost title-deed of the Pyncheon territory
at the Eastward; nor, though often subsequently renewed, has it ever yet
befallen a Pyncheon to set his eye upon that parchment.
But, alas for the beautiful, the gentle, yet too haughty Alice!
A power that she little dreamed of had laid its grasp upon her maiden soul.
A will, most unlike her own, constrained her to do its grotesque and fantastic
bidding.
Her father as it proved, had martyred his poor child to an inordinate desire for
measuring his land by miles instead of acres.
And, therefore, while Alice Pyncheon lived, she was Maule's slave, in a bondage more
humiliating, a thousand-fold, than that which binds its chain around the body.
Seated by his humble fireside, Maule had but to wave his hand; and, wherever the
proud lady chanced to be,--whether in her chamber, or entertaining her father's
stately guests, or worshipping at church,--
whatever her place or occupation, her spirit passed from beneath her own control,
and bowed itself to Maule.
"Alice, laugh!"--the carpenter, beside his hearth, would say; or perhaps intensely
will it, without a spoken word.
And, even were it prayer-time, or at a funeral, Alice must break into wild
laughter.
"Alice, be sad!"--and, at the instant, down would come her tears, quenching all the
mirth of those around her like sudden rain upon a bonfire.
"Alice, dance."--and dance she would, not in such court-like measures as she had
learned abroad, but some high-paced jig, or hop-skip rigadoon, befitting the brisk
lasses at a rustic merry-making.
It seemed to be Maule's impulse, not to ruin Alice, nor to visit her with any black
or gigantic mischief, which would have crowned her sorrows with the grace of
tragedy, but to wreak a low, ungenerous scorn upon her.
Thus all the dignity of life was lost. She felt herself too much abased, and
longed to change natures with some worm!
One evening, at a bridal party (but not her own; for, so lost from self-control, she
would have deemed it sin to marry), poor Alice was beckoned forth by her unseen
despot, and constrained, in her gossamer
white dress and satin slippers, to hasten along the street to the mean dwelling of a
laboring-man.
There was laughter and good cheer within; for Matthew Maule, that night, was to wed
the laborer's daughter, and had summoned proud Alice Pyncheon to wait upon his
bride.
And so she did; and when the twain were one, Alice awoke out of her enchanted
sleep.
Yet, no longer proud,--humbly, and with a smile all steeped in sadness,--she kissed
Maule's wife, and went her way.
It was an inclement night; the southeast wind drove the mingled snow and rain into
her thinly sheltered ***; her satin slippers were wet through and through, as
she trod the muddy sidewalks.
The next day a cold; soon, a settled cough; anon, a hectic cheek, a wasted form, that
sat beside the harpsichord, and filled the house with music!
Music in which a strain of the heavenly choristers was echoed!
Oh; joy! For Alice had borne her last humiliation!
Oh, greater joy!
For Alice was penitent of her one earthly sin, and proud no more!
The Pyncheons made a great funeral for Alice.
The kith and kin were there, and the whole respectability of the town besides.
But, last in the procession, came Matthew Maule, gnashing his teeth, as if he would
have bitten his own heart in twain,--the darkest and wofullest man that ever walked
behind a corpse!
He meant to humble Alice, not to kill her; but he had taken a woman's delicate soul
into his rude gripe, to play with--and she was dead!
>
CHAPTER XIV hoebe's Good-Bye
HOLGRAVE, plunging into his tale with the energy and absorption natural to a young
author, had given a good deal of action to the parts capable of being developed and
exemplified in that manner.
He now observed that a certain remarkable drowsiness (wholly unlike that with which
the reader possibly feels himself affected) had been flung over the senses of his
auditress.
It was the effect, unquestionably, of the mystic gesticulations by which he had
sought to bring bodily before Phoebe's perception the figure of the mesmerizing
carpenter.
With the lids drooping over her eyes,--now lifted for an instant, and drawn down again
as with leaden weights,--she leaned slightly towards him, and seemed almost to
regulate her breath by his.
Holgrave gazed at her, as he rolled up his manuscript, and recognized an incipient
stage of that curious psychological condition which, as he had himself told
Phoebe, he possessed more than an ordinary faculty of producing.
A veil was beginning to be muffled about her, in which she could behold only him,
and live only in his thoughts and emotions.
His glance, as he fastened it on the young girl, grew involuntarily more concentrated;
in his attitude there was the consciousness of power, investing his hardly mature
figure with a dignity that did not belong to its physical manifestation.
It was evident, that, with but one wave of his hand and a corresponding effort of his
will, he could complete his mastery over Phoebe's yet free and *** spirit: he
could establish an influence over this
good, pure, and simple child, as dangerous, and perhaps as disastrous, as that which
the carpenter of his legend had acquired and exercised over the ill-fated Alice.
To a disposition like Holgrave's, at once speculative and active, there is no
temptation so great as the opportunity of acquiring empire over the human spirit; nor
any idea more seductive to a young man than
to become the arbiter of a young girl's destiny.
Let us, therefore,--whatever his defects of nature and education, and in spite of his
scorn for creeds and institutions,--concede to the daguerreotypist the rare and high
quality of reverence for another's individuality.
Let us allow him integrity, also, forever after to be confided in; since he forbade
himself to twine that one link more which might have rendered his spell over Phoebe
indissoluble.
He made a slight gesture upward with his hand.
"You really mortify me, my dear Miss Phoebe!" he exclaimed, smiling half-
sarcastically at her.
"My poor story, it is but too evident, will never do for Godey or Graham!
Only think of your falling asleep at what I hoped the newspaper critics would pronounce
a most brilliant, powerful, imaginative, pathetic, and original winding up!
Well, the manuscript must serve to light lamps with;--if, indeed, being so imbued
with my gentle dulness, it is any longer capable of flame!"
"Me asleep!
How can you say so?" answered Phoebe, as unconscious of the crisis through which she
had passed as an infant of the precipice to the verge of which it has rolled.
"No, no!
I consider myself as having been very attentive; and, though I don't remember the
incidents quite distinctly, yet I have an impression of a vast deal of trouble and
calamity,--so, no doubt, the story will prove exceedingly attractive."
By this time the sun had gone down, and was tinting the clouds towards the zenith with
those bright hues which are not seen there until some time after sunset, and when the
horizon has quite lost its richer brilliancy.
The moon, too, which had long been climbing overhead, and unobtrusively melting its
disk into the azure,--like an ambitious demagogue, who hides his aspiring purpose
by assuming the prevalent hue of popular
sentiment,--now began to shine out, broad and oval, in its middle pathway.
These silvery beams were already powerful enough to change the character of the
lingering daylight.
They softened and embellished the aspect of the old house; although the shadows fell
deeper into the angles of its many gables, and lay brooding under the projecting
story, and within the half-open door.
With the lapse of every moment, the garden grew more picturesque; the fruit-trees,
shrubbery, and flower-bushes had a dark obscurity among them.
The commonplace characteristics--which, at noontide, it seemed to have taken a century
of sordid life to accumulate--were now transfigured by a charm of romance.
A hundred mysterious years were whispering among the leaves, whenever the slight sea-
breeze found its way thither and stirred them.
Through the foliage that roofed the little summer-house the moonlight flickered to and
fro, and fell silvery white on the dark floor, the table, and the circular bench,
with a continual shift and play, according
as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs admitted or shut out the glimmer.
So sweetly cool was the atmosphere, after all the feverish day, that the summer eve
might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid moonlight, with a dash of icy temper
in them, out of a silver vase.
Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human heart,
and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of nature.
The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence fell.
It made him feel--what he sometimes almost forgot, thrust so early as he had been into
the rude struggle of man with man--how youthful he still was.
"It seems to me," he observed, "that I never watched the coming of so beautiful an
eve, and never felt anything so very much like happiness as at this moment.
After all, what a good world we live in!
How good, and beautiful! How young it is, too, with nothing really
rotten or age-worn in it!
This old house, for example, which sometimes has positively oppressed my
breath with its smell of decaying timber!
And this garden, where the black mould always clings to my spade, as if I were a
sexton delving in a graveyard!
Could I keep the feeling that now possesses me, the garden would every day be ***
soil, with the earth's first freshness in the flavor of its beans and squashes; and
the house!--it would be like a bower in
Eden, blossoming with the earliest roses that God ever made.
Moonlight, and the sentiment in man's heart responsive to it, are the greatest of
renovators and reformers.
And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove to be no better than
moonshine!"
"I have been happier than I am now; at least, much gayer," said Phoebe
thoughtfully.
"Yet I am sensible of a great charm in this brightening moonlight; and I love to watch
how the day, tired as it is, lags away reluctantly, and hates to be called
yesterday so soon.
I never cared much about moonlight before. What is there, I wonder, so beautiful in
it, to-night?"
"And you have never felt it before?" inquired the artist, looking earnestly at
the girl through the twilight.
"Never," answered Phoebe; "and life does not look the same, now that I have felt it
so.
It seems as if I had looked at everything, hitherto, in broad daylight, or else in the
ruddy light of a cheerful fire, glimmering and dancing through a room.
Ah, poor me!" she added, with a half- melancholy laugh.
"I shall never be so merry as before I knew Cousin Hepzibah and poor Cousin Clifford.
I have grown a great deal older, in this little time.
Older, and, I hope, wiser, and,--not exactly sadder,--but, certainly, with not
half so much lightness in my spirits!
I have given them my sunshine, and have been glad to give it; but, of course, I
cannot both give and keep it. They are welcome, notwithstanding!"
"You have lost nothing, Phoebe, worth keeping, nor which it was possible to
keep," said Holgrave after a pause.
"Our first youth is of no value; for we are never conscious of it until after it is
gone.
But sometimes--always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly unfortunate--there comes
a sense of second youth, gushing out of the heart's joy at being in love; or, possibly,
it may come to crown some other grand
festival in life, if any other such there be.
This bemoaning of one's self (as you do now) over the first, careless, shallow
gayety of youth departed, and this profound happiness at youth regained,--so much
deeper and richer than that we lost,--are essential to the soul's development.
In some cases, the two states come almost simultaneously, and mingle the sadness and
the rapture in one mysterious emotion."
"I hardly think I understand you," said Phoebe.
"No wonder," replied Holgrave, smiling; "for I have told you a secret which I
hardly began to know before I found myself giving it utterance.
Remember it, however; and when the truth becomes clear to you, then think of this
moonlight scene!"
"It is entirely moonlight now, except only a little flush of faint crimson, upward
from the west, between those buildings," remarked Phoebe.
"I must go in.
Cousin Hepzibah is not quick at figures, and will give herself a headache over the
day's accounts, unless I help her." But Holgrave detained her a little longer.
"Miss Hepzibah tells me," observed he, "that you return to the country in a few
days."
"Yes, but only for a little while," answered Phoebe; "for I look upon this as
my present home.
I go to make a few arrangements, and to take a more deliberate leave of my mother
and friends.
It is pleasant to live where one is much desired and very useful; and I think I may
have the satisfaction of feeling myself so here."
"You surely may, and more than you imagine," said the artist.
"Whatever health, comfort, and natural life exists in the house is embodied in your
person.
These blessings came along with you, and will vanish when you leave the threshold.
Miss Hepzibah, by secluding herself from society, has lost all true relation with
it, and is, in fact, dead; although she galvanizes herself into a semblance of
life, and stands behind her counter,
afflicting the world with a greatly-to-be- deprecated scowl.
Your poor cousin Clifford is another dead and long-buried person, on whom the
governor and council have wrought a necromantic miracle.
I should not wonder if he were to crumble away, some morning, after you are gone, and
nothing be seen of him more, except a heap of dust.
Miss Hepzibah, at any rate, will lose what little flexibility she has.
They both exist by you." "I should be very sorry to think so,"
answered Phoebe gravely.
"But it is true that my small abilities were precisely what they needed; and I have
a real interest in their welfare,--an odd kind of motherly sentiment,--which I wish
you would not laugh at!
And let me tell you frankly, Mr. Holgrave, I am sometimes puzzled to know whether you
wish them well or ill."
"Undoubtedly," said the daguerreotypist, "I do feel an interest in this antiquated,
poverty-stricken old maiden lady, and this degraded and shattered gentleman,--this
abortive lover of the beautiful.
A kindly interest, too, helpless old children that they are!
But you have no conception what a different kind of heart mine is from your own.
It is not my impulse, as regards these two individuals, either to help or hinder; but
to look on, to analyze, to explain matters to myself, and to comprehend the drama
which, for almost two hundred years, has
been dragging its slow length over the ground where you and I now tread.
If permitted to witness the close, I doubt not to derive a moral satisfaction from it,
go matters how they may.
There is a conviction within me that the end draws nigh.
But, though Providence sent you hither to help, and sends me only as a privileged and
meet spectator, I pledge myself to lend these unfortunate beings whatever aid I
can!"
"I wish you would speak more plainly," cried Phoebe, perplexed and displeased;
"and, above all, that you would feel more like a Christian and a human being!
How is it possible to see people in distress without desiring, more than
anything else, to help and comfort them?
You talk as if this old house were a theatre; and you seem to look at Hepzibah's
and Clifford's misfortunes, and those of generations before them, as a tragedy, such
as I have seen acted in the hall of a
country hotel, only the present one appears to be played exclusively for your
amusement. I do not like this.
The play costs the performers too much, and the audience is too cold-hearted."
"You are severe," said Holgrave, compelled to recognize a degree of truth in the
piquant sketch of his own mood.
"And then," continued Phoebe, "what can you mean by your conviction, which you tell me
of, that the end is drawing near? Do you know of any new trouble hanging over
my poor relatives?
If so, tell me at once, and I will not leave them!"
"Forgive me, Phoebe!" said the daguerreotypist, holding out his hand, to
which the girl was constrained to yield her own.
"I am somewhat of a mystic, it must be confessed.
The tendency is in my blood, together with the faculty of mesmerism, which might have
brought me to Gallows Hill, in the good old times of witchcraft.
Believe me, if I were really aware of any secret, the disclosure of which would
benefit your friends,--who are my own friends, likewise,--you should learn it
before we part.
But I have no such knowledge." "You hold something back!" said Phoebe.
"Nothing,--no secrets but my own," answered Holgrave.
"I can perceive, indeed, that Judge Pyncheon still keeps his eye on Clifford,
in whose ruin he had so large a share. His motives and intentions, however are a
mystery to me.
He is a determined and relentless man, with the genuine character of an inquisitor; and
had he any object to gain by putting Clifford to the rack, I verily believe that
he would wrench his joints from their sockets, in order to accomplish it.
But, so wealthy and eminent as he is,--so powerful in his own strength, and in the
support of society on all sides,--what can Judge Pyncheon have to hope or fear from
the imbecile, branded, half-torpid Clifford?"
"Yet," urged Phoebe, "you did speak as if misfortune were impending!"
"Oh, that was because I am morbid!" replied the artist.
"My mind has a twist aside, like almost everybody's mind, except your own.
Moreover, it is so strange to find myself an inmate of this old Pyncheon House, and
sitting in this old garden--(hark, how Maule's well is murmuring!)--that, were it
only for this one circumstance, I cannot
help fancying that Destiny is arranging its fifth act for a catastrophe."
"There!" cried Phoebe with renewed vexation; for she was by nature as hostile
to mystery as the sunshine to a dark corner.
"You puzzle me more than ever!"
"Then let us part friends!" said Holgrave, pressing her hand.
"Or, if not friends, let us part before you entirely hate me.
You, who love everybody else in the world!"
"Good-by, then," said Phoebe frankly. "I do not mean to be angry a great while,
and should be sorry to have you think so.
There has Cousin Hepzibah been standing in the shadow of the doorway, this quarter of
an hour past! She thinks I stay too long in the damp
garden.
So, good-night, and good-by."
On the second morning thereafter, Phoebe might have been seen, in her straw bonnet,
with a shawl on one arm and a little carpet-bag on the other, bidding adieu to
Hepzibah and Cousin Clifford.
She was to take a seat in the next train of cars, which would transport her to within
half a dozen miles of her country village.
The tears were in Phoebe's eyes; a smile, dewy with affectionate regret, was
glimmering around her pleasant mouth.
She wondered how it came to pass, that her life of a few weeks, here in this heavy-
hearted old mansion, had taken such hold of her, and so melted into her associations,
as now to seem a more important centre-
point of remembrance than all which had gone before.
How had Hepzibah--grim, silent, and irresponsive to her overflow of cordial
sentiment--contrived to win so much love?
And Clifford,--in his abortive decay, with the mystery of fearful crime upon him, and
the close prison-atmosphere yet lurking in his breath,--how had he transformed himself
into the simplest child, whom Phoebe felt
bound to watch over, and be, as it were, the providence of his unconsidered hours!
Everything, at that instant of farewell, stood out prominently to her view.
Look where she would, lay her hand on what she might, the object responded to her
consciousness, as if a moist human heart were in it.
She peeped from the window into the garden, and felt herself more regretful at leaving
this spot of black earth, vitiated with such an age-long growth of weeds, than
joyful at the idea of again scenting her pine forests and fresh clover-fields.
She called Chanticleer, his two wives, and the venerable chicken, and threw them some
crumbs of bread from the breakfast-table.
These being hastily gobbled up, the chicken spread its wings, and alighted close by
Phoebe on the window-sill, where it looked gravely into her face and vented its
emotions in a croak.
Phoebe bade it be a good old chicken during her absence, and promised to bring it a
little bag of buckwheat.
"Ah, Phoebe!" remarked Hepzibah, "you do not smile so naturally as when you came to
us! Then, the smile chose to shine out; now,
you choose it should.
It is well that you are going back, for a little while, into your native air.
There has been too much weight on your spirits.
The house is too gloomy and lonesome; the shop is full of vexations; and as for me, I
have no faculty of making things look brighter than they are.
Dear Clifford has been your only comfort!"
"Come hither, Phoebe," suddenly cried her cousin Clifford, who had said very little
all the morning. "Close!--closer!--and look me in the face!"
Phoebe put one of her small hands on each elbow of his chair, and leaned her face
towards him, so that he might peruse it as carefully as he would.
It is probable that the latent emotions of this parting hour had revived, in some
degree, his bedimmed and enfeebled faculties.
At any rate, Phoebe soon felt that, if not the profound insight of a seer, yet a more
than feminine delicacy of appreciation, was making her heart the subject of its regard.
A moment before, she had known nothing which she would have sought to hide.
Now, as if some secret were hinted to her own consciousness through the medium of
another's perception, she was fain to let her eyelids droop beneath Clifford's gaze.
A blush, too,--the redder, because she strove hard to keep it down,--ascended
bigger and higher, in a tide of fitful progress, until even her brow was all
suffused with it.
"It is enough, Phoebe," said Clifford, with a melancholy smile.
"When I first saw you, you were the prettiest little maiden in the world; and
now you have deepened into beauty.
Girlhood has passed into womanhood; the bud is a bloom!
Go, now--I feel lonelier than I did."
Phoebe took leave of the desolate couple, and passed through the shop, twinkling her
eyelids to shake off a dew-drop; for-- considering how brief her absence was to
be, and therefore the folly of being cast
down about it--she would not so far acknowledge her tears as to dry them with
her handkerchief.
On the doorstep, she met the little urchin whose marvellous feats of gastronomy have
been recorded in the earlier pages of our narrative.
She took from the window some specimen or other of natural history,--her eyes being
too dim with moisture to inform her accurately whether it was a rabbit or a
hippopotamus,--put it into the child's hand as a parting gift, and went her way.
Old Uncle Venner was just coming out of his door, with a wood-horse and saw on his
shoulder; and, trudging along the street, he scrupled not to keep company with
Phoebe, so far as their paths lay together;
nor, in spite of his patched coat and rusty beaver, and the curious fashion of his tow-
cloth trousers, could she find it in her heart to outwalk him.
"We shall miss you, next Sabbath afternoon," observed the street
philosopher.
"It is unaccountable how little while it takes some folks to grow just as natural to
a man as his own breath; and, begging your pardon, Miss Phoebe (though there can be no
offence in an old man's saying it), that's just what you've grown to me!
My years have been a great many, and your life is but just beginning; and yet, you
are somehow as familiar to me as if I had found you at my mother's door, and you had
blossomed, like a running vine, all along my pathway since.
Come back soon, or I shall be gone to my farm; for I begin to find these wood-sawing
jobs a little too tough for my back-ache."
"Very soon, Uncle Venner," replied Phoebe. "And let it be all the sooner, Phoebe, for
the sake of those poor souls yonder," continued her companion.
"They can never do without you, now,-- never, Phoebe; never--no more than if one
of God's angels had been living with them, and making their dismal house pleasant and
Don't it seem to you they'd be in a sad case, if, some pleasant summer morning like
this, the angel should spread his wings, and fly to the place he came from?
Well, just so they feel, now that you're going home by the railroad!
They can't bear it, Miss Phoebe; so be sure to come back!"
"I am no angel, Uncle Venner," said Phoebe, smiling, as she offered him her hand at the
street-corner.
"But, I suppose, people never feel so much like angels as when they are doing what
little good they may. So I shall certainly come back!"
Thus parted the old man and the rosy girl; and Phoebe took the wings of the morning,
and was soon flitting almost as rapidly away as if endowed with the aerial
locomotion of the angels to whom Uncle Venner had so graciously compared her.
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