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_ HALFWAY down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands
a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing
towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered
chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house
is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference,
rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by
the title of the Pyncheon Elm. On my occasional visits to the
town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down Pyncheon Street,
for the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquities,
--the great elm-tree and the weather-beaten edifice.
The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like
a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward
storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of
mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed
within. Were these to be worthily recounted, they would form a
narrative of no small interest and instruction, and possessing,
moreover, a certain remarkable unity, which might almost seem
the result of artistic arrangement. But the story would include
a chain of events extending over the better part of two centuries,
and, written out with reasonable amplitude, would fill a bigger
folio volume, or a longer series of duodecimos, than could prudently
be appropriated to the annals of all New England during a similar
period. It consequently becomes imperative to make short work
with most of the traditionary lore of which the old Pyncheon House,
otherwise known as the House of the Seven Gables, has been the
theme. With a brief sketch, therefore, of the circumstances
amid which the foundation of the house was laid, and a rapid
glimpse at its quaint exterior, as it grew black in the prevalent
east wind,--pointing, too, here and there, at some spot of more
verdant mossiness on its roof and walls,--we shall commence the
real action of our tale at an epoch not very remote from the
present day. Still, there will be a connection with the long
past--a reference to forgotten events and personages, and to
manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete
--which, if adequately translated to the reader, would serve
to illustrate how much of old material goes to make up the
freshest novelty of human life. Hence, too, might be drawn a
weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth, that the act of
the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce
good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together with
the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term
expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring
growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity.
The House of the Seven Gables, antique as it now looks, was not
the first habitation erected by civilized man on precisely the same
spot of ground. Pyncheon Street formerly bore the humbler appellation
of Maule's Lane, from the name of the original occupant of the soil,
before whose cottage-door it was a cow-path. A natural spring of
soft and pleasant water--a rare treasure on the sea-girt peninsula
where the Puritan settlement was made--had early induced Matthew
Maule to build a hut, shaggy with thatch, at this point, although
somewhat too remote from what was then the centre of the village.
In the growth of the town, however, after some thirty or forty
years, the site covered by this rude hovel had become exceedingly
desirable in the eyes of a prominent and powerful personage, who
asserted plausible claims to the proprietorship of this and a
large adjacent tract of land, on the strength of a grant from the
legislature. Colonel Pyncheon, the claimant, as we gather from
whatever traits of him are preserved, was characterized by an
iron energy of purpose. Matthew Maule, on the other hand, though
an obscure man, was stubborn in the defence of what he considered
his right; and, for several years, he succeeded in protecting the
acre or two of earth which, with his own toil, he had hewn out
of the primeval forest, to be his garden ground and homestead.
No written record of this dispute is known to be in existence.
Our acquaintance with the whole subject is derived chiefly from
tradition. It would be bold, therefore, and possibly unjust,
to venture a decisive opinion as to its merits; although it
appears to have been at least a matter of doubt, whether Colonel
Pyncheon's claim were not unduly stretched, in order to make it
cover the small metes and bounds of Matthew Maule. What greatly
strengthens such a suspicion is the fact that this controversy
between two ill-matched antagonists --at a period, moreover,
laud it as we may, when personal influence had far more weight
than now--remained for years undecided, and came to a close only
with the death of the party occupying the disputed soil. The mode
of his death, too, affects the mind differently, in our day,
from what it did a century and a half ago. It was a death that
blasted with strange horror the humble name of the dweller in
the cottage, and made it seem almost a religious act to drive
the plough over the little area of his habitation, and obliterate
his place and memory from among men.
Old Matthew Maule, in a word, was executed for the crime of
witchcraft. He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion,
which should teach us, among its other morals, that the influential
classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the
people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever
characterized the maddest mob. Clergymen, judges, statesmen,--the
wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day stood in the inner
circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of
blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived. If any
one part of their proceedings can be said to deserve less blame
than another, it was the singular indiscrimination with which
they persecuted, not merely the poor and aged, as in former
judicial massacres, but people of all ranks; their own equals,
brethren, and wives. Amid the disorder of such various ruin,
it is not strange that a man of inconsiderable note, like Maule,
should have trodden the martyr's path to the hill of execution
almost unremarked in the throng of his fellow sufferers. But,
in after days, when the frenzy of that hideous epoch had subsided,
it was remembered how loudly Colonel Pyncheon had joined in the
general cry, to purge the land from witchcraft; nor did it fail
to be whispered, that there was an invidious acrimony in the
zeal with which he had sought the condemnation of Matthew Maule.
It was well known that the victim had recognized the bitterness
of personal enmity in his persecutor's conduct towards him, and
that he declared himself hunted to death for his spoil. At the
moment of execution--with the halter about his neck, and while
Colonel Pyncheon sat on horseback, grimly gazing at the scene
Maule had addressed him from the scaffold, and uttered a prophecy,
of which history, as well as fireside tradition, has preserved
the very words. "God," said the dying man, pointing his finger,
with a ghastly look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy,
--"God will give him blood to drink!" After the reputed wizard's
death, his humble homestead had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel
Pyncheon's grasp. When it was understood, however, that the
Colonel intended to erect a family mansion-spacious, ponderously
framed of oaken timber, and calculated to endure for many generations
of his posterity over the spot first covered by the log-built hut
of Matthew Maule, there was much shaking of the head among the
village gossips. Without absolutely expressing a doubt whether
the stalwart Puritan had acted as a man of conscience and integrity
throughout the proceedings which have been sketched, they,
nevertheless, hinted that he was about to build his house over
an unquiet grave. His home would include the home of the dead
and buried wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter
a kind of privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers
into which future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where
children of the Pyncheon blood were to be born. The terror and
ugliness of Maule's crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment,
would darken the freshly plastered walls, and infect them early
with the scent of an old and melancholy house. Why, then, --while
so much of the soil around him was bestrewn with the virgin forest
leaves,--why should Colonel Pyncheon prefer a site that had
already been accurst?
But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned
aside from his well-considered scheme, either by dread of the
wizard's ghost, or by flimsy sentimentalities of any kind, however
specious. Had he been told of a bad air, it might have moved him
somewhat; but he was ready to encounter an evil spirit on his own
ground. Endowed with commonsense, as massive and hard as blocks
of granite, fastened together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with
iron clamps, he followed out his original design, probably without
so much as imagining an objection to it. On the score of delicacy,
or any scrupulousness which a finer sensibility might have taught him,
the Colonel, like most of his breed and generation, was impenetrable.
He therefore dug his cellar, and laid the deep foundations of his
mansion, on the square of earth whence Matthew Maule, forty years
before, had first swept away the fallen leaves. It was a curious,
and, as some people thought, an ominous fact, that, very soon after
the workmen began their operations, the spring of water, above
mentioned, entirely lost the deliciousness of its pristine quality.
Whether its sources were disturbed by the depth of the new cellar,
or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the bottom, it is certain
that the water of Maule's Well, as it continued to be called,
grew hard and brackish. Even such we find it now; and any old
woman of the neighborhood will certify that it is productive of
intestinal mischief to those who quench their thirst there.
The reader may deem it singular that the head carpenter of the new
edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead
gripe the property of the soil had been wrested. Not improbably he
was the best workman of his time; or, perhaps, the Colonel thought
it expedient, or was impelled by some better feeling, thus openly
to cast aside all animosity against the race of his fallen antagonist.
Nor was it out of keeping with the general coarseness and matter-of-fact
character of the age, that the son should be willing to earn an honest
penny, or, rather, a weighty amount of sterling pounds, from the purse
of his father's deadly enemy. At all events, Thomas Maule became the
architect of the House of the Seven Gables, and performed his duty so
faithfully that the timber framework fastened by his hands still
holds together.
Thus the great house was built. Familiar as it stands in the writer's
recollection,--for it has been an object of curiosity with him from
boyhood, both as a specimen of the best and stateliest architecture
of a longpast epoch, and as the scene of events more full of human
interest, perhaps, than those of a gray feudal castle,--familiar as
it stands, in its rusty old age, it is therefore only the more
difficult to imagine the bright novelty with which it first caught
the sunshine. The impression of its actual state, at this distance
of a hundred and sixty years, darkens inevitably through the picture
which we would fain give of its appearance on the morning when the
Puritan magnate bade all the town to be his guests. A ceremony of
consecration, festive as well as religious, was now to be performed.
A prayer and discourse from the Rev. Mr. Higginson, and the outpouring
of a psalm from the general throat of the community, was to be made
acceptable to the grosser sense by ale, cider, wine, and brandy,
in copious effusion, and, as some authorities aver, by an ox, roasted
whole, or at least, by the weight and substance of an ox, in more
manageable joints and sirloins. The carcass of a deer, shot within
twenty miles, had supplied material for the vast circumference of a
pasty. A codfish of sixty pounds, caught in the bay, had been dissolved
into the rich liquid of a chowder. The chimney of the new house,
in short, belching forth its kitchen smoke, impregnated the whole air
with the scent of meats, fowls, and fishes, spicily concocted with
odoriferous herbs, and onions in abundance. The mere smell of such
festivity, making its way to everybody's nostrils, was at once an
invitation and an appetite.
Maule's Lane, or Pyncheon Street, as it were now more decorous to
call it, was thronged, at the appointed hour, as with a congregation
on its way to church. All, as they approached, looked upward at
the imposing edifice, which was henceforth to assume its rank among
the habitations of mankind. There it rose, a little withdrawn from
the line of the street, but in pride, not modesty. Its whole visible
exterior was ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the
grotesqueness of a Gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the
glittering plaster, composed of lime, pebbles, and bits of glass,
with which the woodwork of the walls was overspread. On every side
the seven gables pointed sharply towards the sky, and presented the
aspect of a whole sisterhood of edifices, breathing through the
spiracles of one great chimney. The many lattices, with their small,
diamond-shaped panes, admitted the sunlight into hall and chamber,
while, nevertheless, the second story, projecting far over the base,
and itself retiring beneath the third, threw a shadowy and thoughtful
gloom into the lower rooms. Carved globes of wood were affixed under
the jutting stories. Little spiral rods of iron beautified each of
the seven peaks. On the triangular portion of the gable, that fronted
next the street, was a dial, put up that very morning, and on which
the sun was still marking the passage of the first bright hour in a
history that was not destined to be all so bright. All around were
scattered shavings, chips, shingles, and broken halves of bricks;
these, together with the lately turned earth, on which the grass
had not begun to grow, contributed to the impression of strangeness
and novelty proper to a house that had yet its place to make among
men's daily interests.
The principal entrance, which had almost the breadth of a
church-door, was in the angle between the two front gables, and
was covered by an open porch, with benches beneath its shelter.
Under this arched doorway, scraping their feet on the unworn
threshold, now trod the clergymen, the elders, the magistrates,
the deacons, and whatever of aristocracy there was in town or
county. Thither, too, thronged the plebeian classes as freely as
their betters, and in larger number. Just within the entrance,
however, stood two serving-men, pointing some of the guests to
the neighborhood of the kitchen and ushering others into the
statelier rooms,--hospitable alike to all, but still with a
scrutinizing regard to the high or low degree of each. Velvet
garments sombre but rich, stiffly plaited ruffs and bands,
embroidered gloves, venerable beards, the mien and countenance
of authority, made it easy to distinguish the gentleman of worship,
at that period, from the tradesman, with his plodding air, or the
laborer, in his leathern jerkin, stealing awe-stricken into the
house which he had perhaps helped to build.
One inauspicious circumstance there was, which awakened a hardly
concealed displeasure in the breasts of a few of the more punctilious
visitors. The founder of this stately mansion--a gentleman noted
for the square and ponderous courtesy of his demeanor, ought surely
to have stood in his own hall, and to have offered the first welcome
to so many eminent personages as here presented themselves in honor
of his solemn festival. He was as yet invisible; the most favored
of the guests had not beheld him. This sluggishness on Colonel
Pyncheon's part became still more unaccountable, when the second
dignitary of the province made his appearance, and found no more
ceremonious a reception. The lieutenant-governor, although his
visit was one of the anticipated glories of the day, had alighted
from his horse, and assisted his lady from her side-saddle, and
crossed the Colonel's threshold, without other greeting than that
of the principal domestic.
This person--a gray-headed man, of quiet and most respectful
deportment --found it necessary to explain that his master still
remained in his study, or private apartment; on entering which,
an hour before, he had expressed a wish on no account to be disturbed.
"Do not you see, fellow," said the high-sheriff of the county,
taking the servant aside, "that this is no less a man than the
lieutenant-governor? Summon Colonel Pyncheon at once! I know that
he received letters from England this morning; and, in the perusal
and consideration of them, an hour may have passed away without his
noticing it. But he will be ill-pleased, I judge if you suffer him
to neglect the courtesy due to one of our chief rulers, and who may
be said to represent King William, in the absence of the governor
himself. Call your master instantly."
"Nay, please your worship," answered the man, in much perplexity,
but with a backwardness that strikingly indicated the hard and
severe character of Colonel Pyncheon's domestic rule; "my master's
orders were exceeding strict; and, as your worship knows, he
permits of no discretion in the obedience of those who owe him
service. Let who list open yonder door; I dare not, though the
governor's own voice should bid me do it!"
"Pooh, pooh, master high sheriff!" cried the lieutenant-governor,
who had overheard the foregoing discussion, and felt himself high
enough in station to play a little with his dignity. "I will take
the matter into my own hands. It is time that the good Colonel came
forth to greet his friends; else we shall be apt to suspect that he
has taken a sip too much of his Canary wine, in his extreme deliberation
which cask it were best to broach in honor of the day! But since he
is so much behindhand, I will give him a remembrancer myself!"
Accordingly, with such a tramp of his ponderous riding-boots as
might of itself have been audible in the remotest of the seven
gables, he advanced to the door, which the servant pointed out,
and made its new panels reecho with a loud, free knock. Then,
looking round, with a smile, to the spectators, he awaited a
response. As none came, however, he knocked again, but with the
same unsatisfactory result as at first. And now, being a trifle
choleric in his temperament, the lieutenant-governor uplifted the
heavy hilt of his sword, wherewith he so beat and banged upon the
door, that, as some of the bystanders whispered, the racket might
have disturbed the dead. Be that as it might, it seemed to produce
no awakening effect on Colonel Pyncheon. When the sound subsided,
the silence through the house was deep, dreary, and oppressive,
notwithstanding that the tongues of many of the guests had already
been loosened by a surreptitious cup or two of wine or spirits.
"Strange, forsooth!--very strange!" cried the lieutenant-governor,
whose smile was changed to a frown. "But seeing that our host
sets us the good example of forgetting ceremony, I shall likewise
throw it aside, and make free to intrude on his privacy."
He tried the door, which yielded to his hand, and was flung wide
open by a sudden gust of wind that passed, as with a loud sigh,
from the outermost portal through all the passages and apartments
of the new house. It rustled the silken garments of the ladies,
and waved the long curls of the gentlemen's wigs, and shook the
window-hangings and the curtains of the bedchambers; causing
everywhere a singular stir, which yet was more like a hush.
A shadow of awe and half-fearful anticipation--nobody knew
wherefore, nor of what--had all at once fallen over the company.
They thronged, however, to the now open door, pressing the
lieutenant-governor, in the eagerness of their curiosity, into
the room in advance of them. At the first glimpse they beheld
nothing extraordinary: a handsomely furnished room, of moderate
size, somewhat darkened by curtains; books arranged on shelves;
a large map on the wall, and likewise a portrait of Colonel
Pyncheon, beneath which sat the original Colonel himself, in an
oaken elbow-chair, with a pen in his hand. Letters, parchments,
and blank sheets of paper were on the table before him. He
appeared to gaze at the curious crowd, in front of which stood
the lieutenant-governor; and there was a frown on his dark and
massive countenance, as if sternly resentful of the boldness that
had impelled them into his private retirement.
A little boy--the Colonel's grandchild, and the only human being
that ever dared to be familiar with him--now made his way among
the guests, and ran towards the seated figure; then pausing
halfway, he began to shriek with terror. The company, tremulous
as the leaves of a tree, when all are shaking together, drew
nearer, and perceived that there was an unnatural distortion in
the fixedness of Colonel Pyncheon's stare; that there was blood
on his ruff, and that his hoary beard was saturated with it.
It was too late to give assistance. The iron-hearted Puritan,
the relentless persecutor, the grasping and strong-willed man was
dead! Dead, in his new house! There is a tradition, only worth
alluding to as lending a tinge of superstitious awe to a scene
perhaps gloomy enough without it, that a voice spoke loudly among
the guests, the tones of which were like those of old Matthew
Maule, the executed wizard,--"God hath given him blood to drink!"
Thus early had that one guest,--the only guest who is certain,
at one time or another, to find his way into every human dwelling,
--thus early had Death stepped across the threshold of the House
of the Seven Gables!
Colonel Pyncheon's sudden and mysterious end made a vast deal
of noise in its day. There were many rumors, some of which have
vaguely drifted down to the present time, how that appearances
indicated violence; that there were the marks of fingers on his
throat, and the print of a bloody hand on his plaited ruff; and
that his peaked beard was dishevelled, as if it had been fiercely
clutched and pulled. It was averred, likewise, that the lattice
window, near the Colonel's chair, was open; and that, only a few
minutes before the fatal occurrence, the figure of a man had been
seen clambering over the garden fence, in the rear of the house.
But it were folly to lay any stress on stories of this kind, which
are sure to spring up around such an event as that now related,
and which, as in the present case, sometimes prolong themselves
for ages afterwards, like the toadstools that indicate where the
fallen and buried trunk of a tree has long since mouldered into
the earth. For our own part, we allow them just as little
credence as to that other fable of the skeleton hand which the
lieutenant- governor was said to have seen at the Colonel's throat,
but which vanished away, as he advanced farther into the room.
Certain it is, however, that there was a great consultation and
dispute of doctors over the dead body. One,--John Swinnerton
by name,--who appears to have been a man of eminence, upheld it,
if we have rightly understood his terms of art, to be a case of
apoplexy. His professional brethren, each for himself, adopted
various hypotheses, more or less plausible, but all dressed out
in a perplexing mystery of phrase, which, if it do not show a
bewilderment of mind in these erudite physicians, certainly causes
it in the unlearned peruser of their opinions. The coroner's
jury sat upon the corpse, and, like sensible men, returned an
unassailable verdict of "Sudden Death!"
It is indeed difficult to imagine that there could have been
a serious suspicion of murder, or the slightest grounds for
implicating any particular individual as the perpetrator.
The rank, wealth, and eminent character of the deceased must
have insured the strictest scrutiny into every ambiguous
circumstance. As none such is on record, it is safe to assume
that none existed Tradition,--which sometimes brings down truth
that history has let slip, but is oftener the wild babble of the
time, such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now congeals
in newspapers,--tradition is responsible for all contrary averments.
In Colonel Pyncheon's funeral sermon, which was printed, and is
still extant, the Rev. Mr. Higginson enumerates, among the many
felicities of his distinguished parishioner's earthly career,
the happy seasonableness of his death. His duties all performed,
--the highest prosperity attained,--his race and future generations
fixed on a stable basis, and with a stately roof to shelter them
for centuries to come,--what other upward step remained for this
good man to take, save the final step from earth to the golden
gate of heaven! The pious clergyman surely would not have uttered
words like these had he in the least suspected that the Colonel
had been thrust into the other world with the clutch of violence
upon his throat.
The family of Colonel Pyncheon, at the epoch of his death, seemed
destined to as fortunate a permanence as can anywise consist with
the inherent instability of human affairs. It might fairly be
anticipated that the progress of time would rather increase and
ripen their prosperity, than wear away and destroy it. For, not only
had his son and heir come into immediate enjoyment of a rich estate,
but there was a claim through an Indian deed, confirmed by a subsequent
grant of the General Court, to a vast and as yet unexplored and
unmeasured tract of Eastern lands. These possessions--for as such
they might almost certainly be reckoned--comprised the greater part
of what is now known as Waldo County, in the state of Maine, and were
more extensive than many a dukedom, or even a reigning prince's
territory, on European soil. When the pathless forest that still
covered this wild principality should give place--as it inevitably
must, though perhaps not till ages hence--to the golden fertility
of human culture, it would be the source of incalculable wealth
to the Pyncheon blood. Had the Colonel survived only a few weeks
longer, it is probable that his great political influence, and
powerful connections at home and abroad, would have consummated
all that was necessary to render the claim available. But, in
spite of good Mr. Higginson's congratulatory eloquence, this
appeared to be the one thing which Colonel Pyncheon, provident
and sagacious as he was, had allowed to go at loose ends. So far
as the prospective territory was concerned, he unquestionably
died too soon. His son lacked not merely the father's eminent
position, but the talent and force of character to achieve it:
he could, therefore, effect nothing by dint of political interest;
and the bare justice or legality of the claim was not so apparent,
after the Colonel's decease, as it had been pronounced in his
lifetime. Some connecting link had slipped out of the evidence,
and could not anywhere be found.
Efforts, it is true, were made by the Pyncheons, not only then,
but at various periods for nearly a hundred years afterwards,
to obtain what they stubbornly persisted in deeming their right.
But, in course of time, the territory was partly regranted to more
favored individuals, and partly cleared and occupied by actual
settlers. These last, if they ever heard of the Pyncheon title,
would have laughed at the idea of any man's asserting a right--on
the strength of mouldy parchments, signed with the faded autographs
of governors and legislators long dead and forgotten--to the lands
which they or their fathers had wrested from the wild hand of
nature by their own sturdy toil. This impalpable claim, therefore,
resulted in nothing more solid than to cherish, from generation to
generation, an absurd delusion of family importance, which all along
characterized the Pyncheons. It caused the poorest member of the
race to feel as if he inherited a kind of nobility, and might yet
come into the possession of princely wealth to support it. In the
better specimens of the breed, this peculiarity threw an ideal grace
over the hard material of human life, without stealing away any truly
valuable quality. In the baser sort, its effect was to increase the
liability to sluggishness and dependence, and induce the victim of a
shadowy hope to remit all self-effort, while awaiting the realization
of his dreams. Years and years after their claim had passed out of
the public memory, the Pyncheons were accustomed to consult the
Colonel's ancient map, which had been projected while Waldo County
was still an unbroken wilderness. Where the old land surveyor had
put down woods, lakes, and rivers, they marked out the cleared spaces,
and dotted the villages and towns, and calculated the progressively
increasing value of the territory, as if there were yet a prospect of
its ultimately forming a princedom for themselves.
In almost every generation, nevertheless, there happened to be
some one descendant of the family gifted with a portion of the
hard, keen sense, and practical energy, that had so remarkably
distinguished the original founder. His character, indeed, might
be traced all the way down, as distinctly as if the Colonel himself,
a little diluted, had been gifted with a sort of intermittent
immortality on earth. At two or three epochs, when the fortunes
of the family were low, this representative of hereditary qualities
had made his appearance, and caused the traditionary gossips of
the town to whisper among themselves, "Here is the old Pyncheon
come again! Now the Seven Gables will be new-shingled!" From father
to son, they clung to the ancestral house with singular tenacity of
home attachment. For various reasons, however, and from impressions
often too vaguely founded to be put on paper, the writer cherishes
the belief that many, if not most, of the successive proprietors of
this estate were troubled with doubts as to their moral right to
hold it. Of their legal tenure there could be no question; but old
Matthew Maule, it is to be feared, trode downward from his own age
to a far later one, planting a heavy footstep, all the way, on the
conscience of a Pyncheon. If so, we are left to dispose of the
awful query, whether each inheritor of the property-conscious of
wrong, and failing to rectify it--did not commit anew the great
guilt of his ancestor, and incur all its original responsibilities.
And supposing such to be the case, would it not be a far truer
mode of expression to say of the Pyncheon family, that they
inherited a great misfortune, than the reverse?
We have already hinted that it is not our purpose to trace down
the history of the Pyncheon family, in its unbroken connection
with the House of the Seven Gables; nor to show, as in a magic
picture, how the rustiness and infirmity of age gathered over the
venerable house itself. As regards its interior life, a large,
dim looking-glass used to hang in one of the rooms, and was fabled
to contain within its depths all the shapes that had ever been
reflected there,--the old Colonel himself, and his many descendants,
some in the garb of antique babyhood, and others in the bloom of
feminine beauty or manly prime, or saddened with the wrinkles of
frosty age. Had we the secret of that mirror, we would gladly sit
down before it, and transfer its revelations to our page. But there
was a story, for which it is difficult to conceive any foundation,
that the posterity of Matthew Maule had some connection with the
mystery of the looking-glass, and that, by what appears to have
been a sort of mesmeric process, they could make its inner region
all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not as they had shown themselves
to the world, nor in their better and happier hours, but as doing
over again some deed of sin, or in the crisis of life's bitterest
sorrow. The popular imagination, indeed, long kept itself busy
with the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon and the wizard Maule;
the curse which the latter flung from his scaffold was remembered,
with the very important addition, that it had become a part of the
Pyncheon inheritance. If one of the family did but gurgle in his
throat, a bystander would be likely enough to whisper, between jest
and earnest,"He has Maule's blood to drink!" The sudden death of a
Pyncheon, about a hundred years ago, with circumstances very similar
to what have been related of the Colonel's exit, was held as giving
additional probability to the received opinion on this topic. It was
considered, moreover, an ugly and ominous circumstance, that Colonel
Pyncheon's picture--in obedience, it was said, to a provision of his
will--remained affixed to the wall of the room in which he died.
Those stern, immitigable features seemed to symbolize an evil influence,
and so darkly to mingle the shadow of their presence with the sunshine
of the passing hour, that no good thoughts or purposes could ever
spring up and blossom there. To the thoughtful mind there will be no
tinge of superstition in what we figuratively express, by affirming
that the ghost of a dead progenitor--perhaps as a portion of his own
punishment--is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family.
The Pyncheons, in brief, lived along, for the better part of two
centuries, with perhaps less of outward vicissitude than has
attended most other New England families during the same period
of time. Possessing very distinctive traits of their own, they
nevertheless took the general characteristics of the little
community in which they dwelt; a town noted for its frugal,
discreet, well-ordered, and home-loving inhabitants, as well as
for the somewhat confined scope of its sympathies; but in which,
be it said, there are odder individuals, and, now and then,
stranger occurrences, than one meets with almost anywhere else.
During the Revolution, the Pyncheon of that epoch, adopting the
royal side, became a refugee; but repented, and made his reappearance,
just at the point of time to preserve the House of the Seven Gables
from confiscation. For the last seventy years the most noted
event in the Pyncheon annals had been likewise the heaviest
calamity that ever befell the race; no less than the violent
death--for so it was adjudged--of one member of the family by
the criminal act of another. Certain circumstances attending
this fatal occurrence had brought the deed irresistibly home to
a nephew of the deceased Pyncheon. The young man was tried and
convicted of the crime; but either the circumstantial nature of
the evidence, and possibly some lurking doubts in the breast of
the executive, or" lastly--an argument of greater weight in a
republic than it could have been under a monarchy,--the high
respectability and political influence of the criminal's connections,
had availed to mitigate his doom from death to perpetual imprisonment.
This sad affair had chanced about thirty years before the action
of our story commences. Latterly, there were rumors (which few
believed, and only one or two felt greatly interested in) that
this long-buried man was likely, for some reason or other, to be
summoned forth from his living tomb.
It is essential to say a few words respecting the victim of this
now almost forgotten murder. He was an old bachelor, and possessed
of great wealth, in addition to the house and real estate which
constituted what remained of the ancient Pyncheon property.
Being of an eccentric and melancholy turn of mind, and greatly given
to rummaging old records and hearkening to old traditions, he had
brought himself, it is averred, to the conclusion that Matthew Maule,
the wizard, had been foully wronged out of his homestead, if not out
of his life. Such being the case, and he, the old bachelor, in
possession of the ill-gotten spoil,--with the black stain of blood
sunken deep into it, and still to be scented by conscientious nostrils,
--the question occurred, whether it were not imperative upon him,
even at this late hour, to make restitution to Maule's posterity.
To a man living so much in the past, and so little in the present,
as the secluded and antiquarian old bachelor, a century and a
half seemed not so vast a period as to obviate the propriety of
substituting right for wrong. It was the belief of those who knew
him best, that he would positively have taken the very singular
step of giving up the House of the Seven Gables to the representative
of Matthew Maule, but for the unspeakable tumult which a suspicion
of the old gentleman's project awakened among his Pyncheon relatives.
Their exertions had the effect of suspending his purpose; but it
was feared that he would perform, after death, by the operation of
his last will, what he had so hardly been prevented from doing in
his proper lifetime. But there is no one thing which men so
rarely do, whatever the provocation or inducement, as to bequeath
patrimonial property away from their own blood. They may love other
individuals far better than their relatives,--they may even cherish
dislike, or positive hatred, to the latter; but yet, in view of death,
the strong prejudice of propinquity revives, and impels the testator
to send down his estate in the line marked out by custom so immemorial
that it looks like nature. In all the Pyncheons, this feeling had the
energy of disease. It was too powerful for the conscientious scruples
of the old bachelor; at whose death, accordingly, the mansion-house,
together with most of his other riches, passed into the possession of
his next legal representative.
This was a nephew, the cousin of the miserable young man who
had been convicted of the uncle's murder. The new heir, up to
the period of his accession, was reckoned rather a dissipated youth,
but had at once reformed, and made himself an exceedingly respectable
member of society. In fact, he showed more of the Pyncheon quality,
and had won higher eminence in the world, than any of his race since
the time of the original Puritan. Applying himself in earlier manhood
to the study of the law, and having a natural tendency towards office,
he had attained, many years ago, to a judicial situation in some
inferior court, which gave him for life the very desirable and
imposing title of judge. Later, he had engaged in politics, and
served a part of two terms in Congress, besides making a considerable
figure in both branches of the State legislature. Judge Pyncheon
was unquestionably an honor to his race. He had built himself a
country-seat within a few miles of his native town, and there spent
such portions of his time as could be spared from public service in
the display of every grace and virtue--as a newspaper phrased it,
on the eve of an election--befitting the Christian, the good citizen,
the horticulturist, and the gentleman.
There were few of the Pyncheons left to sun themselves in the
glow of the Judge's prosperity. In respect to natural increase,
the breed had not thriven; it appeared rather to be dying out.
The only members of the family known to be extant were, first,
the Judge himself, and a single surviving son, who was now travelling
in Europe; next, the thirty years' prisoner, already alluded to,
and a sister of the latter, who occupied, in an extremely retired
manner, the House of the Seven Gables, in which she had a life-estate
by the will of the old bachelor. She was understood to be wretchedly
poor, and seemed to make it her choice to remain so; inasmuch as
her affluent cousin, the Judge, had repeatedly offered her all the
comforts of life, either in the old mansion or his own modern
residence. The last and youngest Pyncheon was a little country-girl
of seventeen, the daughter of another of the Judge's cousins,
who had married a young woman of no family or property, and died
early and in poor circumstances. His widow had recently taken
another husband.
As for Matthew Maule's posterity, it was supposed now to be extinct.
For a very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however,
the Maules had continued to inhabit the town where their progenitor
had suffered so unjust a death. To all appearance, they were a quiet,
honest, well-meaning race of people, cherishing no malice against
individuals or the public for the wrong which had been done them;
or if, at their own fireside, they transmitted from father to child
any hostile recollection of the wizard's fate and their lost patrimony,
it was never acted upon, nor openly expressed. Nor would it have
been singular had they ceased to remember that the House of the
Seven Gables was resting its heavy framework on a foundation that
was rightfully their own. There is something so massive, stable,
and almost irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of
established rank and great possessions, that their very existence
seems to give them a right to exist; at least, so excellent a
counterfeit of right, that few poor and humble men have moral
force enough to question it, even in their secret minds. Such is
the case now, after so many ancient prejudices have been overthrown;
and it was far more so in ante-Revolutionary days, when the aristocracy
could venture to be proud, and the low were content to be abased.
Thus the Maules, at all events, kept their resentments within their
own breasts. They were generally poverty-stricken; always plebeian
and obscure; working with unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts;
laboring on the wharves, or following the sea, as sailors before
the mast; living here and there about the town, in hired tenements,
and coming finally to the almshouse as the natural home of their old
age. At last, after creeping, as it were, for such a length of time
along the utmost verge of the opaque puddle of obscurity, they had
taken that downright plunge which, sooner or later, is the destiny
of all families, whether princely or plebeian. For thirty years
past, neither town-record, nor gravestone, nor the directory,
nor the knowledge or memory of man, bore any trace of Matthew
Maule's descendants. His blood might possibly exist elsewhere;
here, where its lowly current could be traced so far back, it had
ceased to keep an onward course.
So long as any of the race were to be found, they had been
marked out from other men--not strikingly, nor as with a sharp
line, but with an effect that was felt rather than spoken of--by
an hereditary character of reserve. Their companions, or those
who endeavored to become such, grew conscious of a circle round
about the Maules, within the sanctity or the spell of which, in
spite of an exterior of sufficient frankness and good-fellowship,
it was impossible for any man to step. It was this indefinable
peculiarity, perhaps, that, by insulating them from human aid,
kept them always so unfortunate in life. It certainly operated
to prolong in their case, and to confirm to them as their only
inheritance, those feelings of repugnance and superstitious terror
with which the people of the town, even after awakening from their
frenzy, continued to regard the memory of the reputed witches.
The mantle, or rather the ragged cloak, of old Matthew Maule had
fallen upon his children. They were half believed to inherit
mysterious attributes; the family eye was said to possess strange
power. Among other good-for-nothing properties and privileges,
one was especially assigned them,--that of exercising an influence
over people's dreams. The Pyncheons, if all stories were true,
haughtily as they bore themselves in the noonday streets of their
native town, were no better than bond-servants to these plebeian
Maules, on entering the topsy-turvy commonwealth of sleep.
Modern psychology, it may be, will endeavor to reduce these
alleged necromancies within a system, instead of rejecting
them as altogether fabulous.
A descriptive paragraph or two, treating of the seven-gabled
mansion in its more recent aspect, will bring this preliminary
chapter to a close. The street in which it upreared its venerable
peaks has long ceased to be a fashionable quarter of the town;
so that, though the old edifice was surrounded by habitations of
modern date, they were mostly small, built entirely of wood, and
typical of the most plodding uniformity of common life. Doubtless,
however, the whole story of human existence may be latent in each
of them, but with no picturesqueness, externally, that can attract
the imagination or sympathy to seek it there. But as for the old
structure of our story, its white-oak frame, and its boards,
shingles, and crumbling plaster, and even the huge, clustered
chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and
meanest part of its reality. So much of mankind's varied experience
had passed there,--so much had been suffered, and something, too,
enjoyed,--that the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture
of a heart. It was itself like a great human heart, with a life
of its own, and full of rich and sombre reminiscences.
The deep projection of the second story gave the house such a
meditative look, that you could not pass it without the idea that
it had secrets to keep, and an eventful history to moralize upon.
In front, just on the edge of the unpaved sidewalk, grew the
Pyncheon Elm, which, in reference to such trees as one usually
meets with, might well be termed gigantic. It had been planted
by a great-grandson of the first Pyncheon, and, though now
fourscore years of age, or perhaps nearer a hundred, was still in
its strong and broad maturity, throwing its shadow from side to
side of the street, overtopping the seven gables, and sweeping the
whole black roof with its pendant foliage. It gave beauty to the
old edifice, and seemed to make it a part of nature. The street
having been widened about forty years ago, the front gable was
now precisely on a line with it. On either side extended a ruinous
wooden fence of open lattice-work, through which could be seen
a grassy yard, and, especially in the angles of the building,
an enormous fertility of burdocks, with leaves, it is hardly an
exaggeration to say, two or three feet long. Behind the house
there appeared to be a garden, which undoubtedly had once been
extensive, but was now infringed upon by other enclosures, or shut
in by habitations and outbuildings that stood on another street.
It would be an omission, trifling, indeed, but unpardonable,
were we to forget the green moss that had long since gathered
over the projections of the windows, and on the slopes of the
roof nor must we fail to direct the reader's eye to a crop, not
of weeds, but flower-shrubs, which were growing aloft in the air,
not a great way from the chimney, in the nook between two of the
gables. They were called Alice's Posies. The tradition was, that
a certain Alice Pyncheon had flung up the seeds, in sport, and that
the dust of the street and the decay of the roof gradually formed
a kind of soil for them, out of which they grew, when Alice had
long been in her grave. However the flowers might have come there,
it was both sad and sweet to observe how Nature adopted to herself
this desolate, decaying, gusty, rusty old house of the Pyncheon
family; and how the even-returning summer did her best to gladden
it with tender beauty, and grew melancholy in the effort.
There is one other feature, very essential to be noticed, but
which, we greatly fear, may damage any picturesque and romantic
impression which we have been willing to throw over our sketch of
this respectable edifice. In the front gable, under the impending
brow of the second story, and contiguous to the street, was a
shop-door, divided horizontally in the midst, and with a window
for its upper segment, such as is often seen in dwellings of a
somewhat ancient date. This same shop-door had been a subject
of No slight mortification to the present occupant of the august
Pyncheon House, as well as to some of her predecessors. The matter
is disagreeably delicate to handle; but, since the reader must
needs be let into the secret, he will please to understand, that,
about a century ago, the head of the Pyncheons found himself
involved in serious financial difficulties. The fellow (gentleman,
as he styled himself) can hardly have been other than a spurious
interloper; for, instead of seeking office from the king or the
royal governor, or urging his hereditary claim to Eastern lands,
he bethought himself of no better avenue to wealth than by cutting
a shop-door through the side of his ancestral residence. It was
the custom of the time, indeed, for merchants to store their goods
and transact business in their own dwellings. But there was
something pitifully small in this old Pyncheon's mode of setting
about his commercial operations; it was whispered, that, with his
own hands, all beruffled as they were, he used to give change for
a shilling, and would turn a half-penny twice over, to make sure
that it was a good one. Beyond all question, he had the blood of
a petty huckster in his veins, through whatever channel it may have
found its way there.
Immediately on his death, the shop-door had been locked, bolted,
and barred, and, down to the period of our story, had probably
never once been opened. The old counter, shelves, and other
fixtures of the little shop remained just as he had left them.
It used to be affirmed, that the dead shop-keeper, in a white
wig, a faded velvet coat, an apron at his waist, and his ruffles
carefully turned back from his wrists, might be seen through the
chinks of the shutters, any night of the year, ransacking his till,
or poring over the dingy pages of his day-book. From the look
of unutterable woe upon his face, it appeared to be his doom to
spend eternity in a vain effort to make his accounts balance.
And now--in a very humble way, as will be seen--we proceed to
open our narrative. _
Read next: CHAPTER II - THE LITTLE SHOP-WINDOW
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