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_ MISS HEPZIBAH PYNCHEON sat in the oaken elbow-chair, with her
hands over her face, giving way to that heavy down-sinking of the
heart which most persons have experienced, when the image of hope
itself seems ponderously moulded of lead, on the eve of an enterprise
at once doubtful and momentous. She was suddenly startled by the
tinkling alarum--high, sharp, and irregular--of a little bell.
The maiden lady arose upon her feet, as pale as a ghost at cock-crow;
for she was an enslaved spirit, and this the talisman to which she
owed obedience. This little bell,--to speak in plainer terms,
--being fastened over the shop-door, was so contrived as to vibrate
by means of a steel spring, and thus convey notice to the inner regions
of the house when any customer should cross the threshold. Its ugly
and spiteful little din (heard now for the first time, perhaps, since
Hepzibah's periwigged predecessor had retired from trade) at once set
every nerve of her body in responsive and tumultuous vibration. The
crisis was upon her! Her first customer was at the door!
Without giving herself time for a second thought, she rushed into
the shop, pale, wild, desperate in gesture and expression, scowling
portentously, and looking far better qualified to do fierce battle
with a housebreaker than to stand smiling behind the counter, bartering
small wares for a copper recompense. Any ordinary customer, indeed,
would have turned his back and fled. And yet there was nothing fierce
in Hepzibah's poor old heart; nor had she, at the moment, a single
bitter thought against the world at large, or one individual man or
woman. She wished them all well, but wished, too, that she herself
were done with them, and in her quiet grave.
The applicant, by this time, stood within the doorway. Coming
freshly, as he did, out of the morning light, he appeared to have
brought some of its cheery influences into the shop along with him.
It was a slender young man, not more than one or two and twenty
years old, with rather a grave and thoughtful expression for his
years, but likewise a springy alacrity and vigor. These qualities
were not only perceptible, physically, in his make and motions,
but made themselves felt almost immediately in his character.
A brown beard, not too silken in its texture, fringed his chin,
but as yet without completely hiding it; he wore a short mustache,
too, and his dark, high-featured countenance looked all the better
for these natural ornaments. As for his dress, it was of the
simplest kind; a summer sack of cheap and ordinary material,
thin checkered pantaloons, and a straw hat, by no means of the
finest braid. Oak Hall might have supplied his entire equipment.
He was chiefly marked as a gentleman--if such, indeed, he made
any claim to be--by the rather remarkable whiteness and nicety
of his clean linen.
He met the scowl of old Hepzibah without apparent alarm,
as having heretofore encountered it and found it harmless.
"So, my dear Miss Pyncheon," said the daguerreotypist, --for it
was that sole other occupant of the seven-gabled mansion,-- "I am
glad to see that you have not shrunk from your good purpose.
I merely look in to offer my best wishes, and to ask if I can
assist you any further in your preparations."
People in difficulty and distress, or in any manner at odds with the
world, can endure a vast amount of harsh treatment, and perhaps be
only the stronger for it; whereas they give way at once before the
simplest expression of what they perceive to be genuine sympathy.
So it proved with poor Hepzibah; for, when she saw the young man's
smile,--looking so much the brighter on a thoughtful face,--and heard
his kindly tone, she broke first into a hysteric giggle and then
began to sob.
"Ah, Mr. Holgrave," cried she, as soon as she could speak, "I
never can go through with it Never, never, never I wish I were
dead, and in the old family tomb, with all my forefathers! With
my father, and my mother, and my sister. Yes, and with my brother,
who had far better find me there than here! The world is too chill
and hard,--and I am too old, and too feeble, and too hopeless!"
"Oh, believe me, Miss Hepzibah," said the young man quietly,
"these feelings will not trouble you any longer, after you are
once fairly in the midst of your enterprise. They are unavoidable
at this moment, standing, as you do, on the outer verge of your
long seclusion, and peopling the world with ugly shapes, which
you will soon find to be as unreal as the giants and ogres of a
child's story-book. I find nothing so singular in life, as that
everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually
grapples with it. So it will be with what you think so terrible."
"But I am a woman!" said Hepzibah piteously. "I was going to say,
a lady,--but I consider that as past."
"Well; no matter if it be past!" answered the artist, a strange
gleam of half-hidden sarcasm flashing through the kindliness of
his manner. "Let it go You are the better without it. I speak
frankly, my dear Miss Pyncheon! for are we not friends? I look
upon this as one of the fortunate days of your life. It ends an
epoch and begins one. Hitherto, the life-blood has been gradually
chilling in your veins as you sat aloof, within your circle of
gentility, while the rest of the world was fighting out its battle
with one kind of necessity or another. Henceforth, you will at
least have the sense of healthy and natural effort for a purpose,
and of lending your strength be it great or small--to the united
struggle of mankind. This is success,--all the success that
anybody meets with!"
"It is natural enough, Mr. Holgrave, that you should have ideas
like these," rejoined Hepzibah, drawing up her gaunt figure with
slightly offended dignity. "You are a man, a young man, and brought
up, I suppose, as almost everybody is nowadays, with a view to seeking
your fortune. But I was born a lady. and have always lived one;
no matter in what narrowness of means, always a lady."
"But I was not born a gentleman; neither have I lived like one,"
said Holgrave, slightly smiling; "so, my dear madam, you will
hardly expect me to sympathize with sensibilities of this kind;
though, unless I deceive myself, I have some imperfect
comprehension of them. These names of gentleman and lady had
a meaning, in the past history of the world, and conferred
privileges, desirable or otherwise, on those entitled to bear
them. In the present--and still more in the future condition
of society-they imply, not privilege, but restriction!"
"These are new notions," said the old gentlewoman, shaking her
head. "I shall never understand them; neither do I wish it."
"We will cease to speak of them, then," replied the artist, with
a friendlier smile than his last one, "and I will leave you to
feel whether it is not better to be a true woman than a lady.
Do you really think, Miss Hepzibah, that any lady of your family
has ever done a more heroic thing, since this house was built,
than you are performing in it to-day? Never; and if the Pyncheons
had always acted so nobly, I doubt whether an old wizard Maule's
anathema, of which you told me once, would have had much weight
with Providence against them."
"Ah!--no, no!" said Hepzibah, not displeased at this allusion to
the sombre dignity of an inherited curse. "If old Maule's ghost,
or a descendant of his, could see me behind the counter to-day.
he would call it the fulfillment of his worst wishes. But I thank
you for your kindness, Mr. Holgrave, and will do my utmost to be
a good shop-keeper."
"Pray do" said Holgrave, "and let me have the pleasure of being
your first customer. I am about taking a walk to the seashore,
before going to my rooms, where I misuse Heaven's blessed sunshine
by tracing out human features through its agency. A few of those
biscuits, dipt in sea-water, will be just what I need for breakfast.
What is the price of half a dozen?"
"Let me be a lady a moment longer," replied Hepzibah, with a manner
of antique stateliness to which a melancholy smile lent a kind of grace.
She put the biscuits into his hand, but rejected the compensation.
"A Pyncheon must not, at all events under her forefathers' roof,
receive money for a morsel of bread from her only friend!"
Holgrave took his departure, leaving her, for the moment, with
spirits not quite so much depressed. Soon, however, they had
subsided nearly to their former dead level. With a beating heart,
she listened to the footsteps of early passengers, which now
began to be frequent along the street. Once or twice they seemed
to linger; these strangers, or neighbors, as the case might be,
were looking at the display of toys and petty commodities in
Hepzibah's shop-window. She was doubly tortured; in part, with
a sense of overwhelming shame that strange and unloving eyes
should have the privilege of gazing, and partly because the idea
occurred to her, with ridiculous importunity, that the window was
not arranged so skilfully, nor nearly to so much advantage, as it
might have been. It seemed as if the whole fortune or failure of
her shop might depend on the display of a different set of articles,
or substituting a fairer apple for one which appeared to be specked.
So she made the change, and straightway fancied that everything was
spoiled by it; not recognizing that it was the nervousness of the
juncture, and her own native squeamishness as an old maid, that
wrought all the seeming mischief.
Anon, there was an encounter, just at the door-step, betwixt two
laboring men, as their rough voices denoted them to be. After
some slight talk about their own affairs, one of them chanced to
notice the shop-window, and directed the other's attention to it.
"See here!" cried he; "what do you think of this? Trade seems to
be looking up in Pyncheon Street!"
"Well, well, this is a sight, to be sure!" exclaimed the other.
"In the old Pyncheon House, and underneath the Pyncheon Elm! Who
would have thought it? Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a cent-shop!"
"Will she make it go, think you, Dixey;" said his friend. "I don't
call it a very good stand. There's another shop just round the
corner."
"Make it go!" cried Dixey, with a most contemptuous expression,
as if the very idea were impossible to be conceived. "Not a bit
of it! Why, her face--I've seen it, for I dug her garden for her
one year--her face is enough to frighten the Old Nick himself, if
he had ever so great a mind to trade with her. People can't stand
it, I tell you! She scowls dreadfully, reason or none, out of pure
ugliness of temper."
"Well, that's not so much matter," remarked the other man.
"These sour-tempered folks are mostly handy at business, and
know pretty well what they are about. But, as you say, I don't
think she'll do much. This business of keeping cent-shops is
overdone, like all other kinds of trade, handicraft, and bodily
labor. I know it, to my cost! My wife kept a cent-shop three
months, and lost five dollars on her outlay."
"Poor business!" responded Dixey, in a tone as if he were shaking
his head,--"poor business."
For some reason or other, not very easy to analyze, there had
hardly been so bitter a pang in all her previous misery about the
matter as what thrilled Hepzibah's heart on overhearing the above
conversation. The testimony in regard to her scowl was frightfully
important; it seemed to hold up her image wholly relieved from the
false light of her self-partialities, and so hideous that she dared
not look at it. She was absurdly hurt, moreover, by the slight and
idle effect that her setting up shop--an event of such breathless
interest to herself--appeared to have upon the public, of which
these two men were the nearest representatives. A glance; a passing
word or two; a coarse laugh; and she was doubtless forgotten before
they turned the corner. They cared nothing for her dignity, and just
as little for her degradation. Then, also, the augury of ill-success,
uttered from the sure wisdom of experience, fell upon her half-dead
hope like a clod into a grave. The man's wife had already tried the
same experiment, and failed! How could the born, lady the recluse of
half a lifetime, utterly unpractised in the world, at sixty years of
age,--how could she ever dream of succeeding, when the hard, vulgar,
keen, busy, hackneyed New England woman had lost five dollars on her
little outlay! Success presented itself as an impossibility, and the
hope of it as a wild hallucination.
Some malevolent spirit, doing his utmost to drive Hepzibah mad,
unrolled before her imagination a kind of panorama, representing
the great thoroughfare of a city all astir with customers. So many
and so magnificent shops as there were! Groceries, toy-shops,
drygoods stores, with their immense panes of plate-glass, their
gorgeous fixtures, their vast and complete assortments of
merchandise, in which fortunes had been invested; and those
noble mirrors at the farther end of each establishment, doubling
all this wealth by a brightly burnished vista of unrealities! On
one side of the street this splendid bazaar, with a multitude of
perfumed and glossy salesmen, smirking, smiling, bowing,
and measuring out the goods. On the other, the dusky old House
of the Seven Gables, with the antiquated shop-window under its
projecting story, and Hepzibah herself, in a gown of rusty black
silk, behind the counter, scowling at the world as it went by!
This mighty contrast thrust itself forward as a fair expression
of the odds against which she was to begin her struggle for a
subsistence. Success? Preposterous! She would never think of it
again! The house might just as well be buried in an eternal fog
while all other houses had the sunshine on them; for not a foot
would ever cross the threshold, nor a hand so much as try the door!
But, at this instant, the shop-bell, right over her head, tinkled
as if it were bewitched. The old gentlewoman's heart seemed to be
attached to the same steel spring, for it went through a series of
sharp jerks, in unison with the sound. The door was thrust open,
although no human form was perceptible on the other side of the
half-window. Hepzibah, nevertheless, stood at a gaze, with her
hands clasped, looking very much as if she had summoned up an evil
spirit, and were afraid, yet resolved, to hazard the encounter.
"Heaven help me!" she groaned mentally. "Now is my hour of need!"
The door, which moved with difficulty on its creaking and rusty
hinges, being forced quite open, a square and sturdy little urchin
became apparent, with cheeks as red as an apple. He was clad
rather shabbily (but, as it seemed, more owing to his mother's
carelessness than his father's poverty), in a blue apron, very
wide and short trousers, shoes somewhat out at the toes, and a
chip hat, with the frizzles of his curly hair sticking through
its crevices. A book and a small slate, under his arm, indicated
that he was on his way to school. He stared at Hepzibah a moment,
as an elder customer than himself would have been likely enough
to do, not knowing what to make of the tragic attitude and queer
scowl wherewith she regarded him.
"Well, child," said she, taking heart at sight of a personage so
little formidable,--"well, my child, what did you wish for?"
"That Jim Crow there in the window," answered the urchin, holding
out a cent, and pointing to the gingerbread figure that had attracted
his notice, as he loitered along to school; "the one that has not a
broken foot."
So Hepzibah put forth her lank arm, and, taking the effigy from
the shop-window, delivered it to her first customer.
"No matter for the money," said she, giving him a little push
towards the door; for her old gentility was contumaciously
squeamish at sight of the copper coin, and, besides, it seemed
such pitiful meanness to take the child's pocket-money in exchange
for a bit of stale gingerbread. "No matter for the cent. You are
welcome to Jim Crow."
The child, staring with round eyes at this instance of liberality,
wholly unprecedented in his large experience of cent-shops, took
the man of gingerbread, and quitted the premises. No sooner had
he reached the sidewalk (little cannibal that he was!) than Jim
Crow's head was in his mouth. As he had not been careful to
shut the door, Hepzibah was at the pains of closing it after him,
with a pettish ejaculation or two about the troublesomeness of
young people, and particularly of small boys. She had just placed
another representative of the renowned Jim Crow at the window,
when again the shop-bell tinkled clamorously, and again the door
being thrust open, with its characteristic jerk and jar, disclosed
the same sturdy little urchin who, precisely two minutes ago, had
made his exit. The crumbs and discoloration of the cannibal feast,
as yet hardly consummated, were exceedingly visible about his mouth.
"What is it now, child?" asked the maiden lady rather impatiently;
"did you Come back to shut the door?"
"No," answered the urchin, pointing to the figure that had just
been put up; "I want that other Jim. Crow"
"Well, here it is for you," said Hepzibah, reaching it down; but
recognizing that this pertinacious customer would not quit her On
any other terms, so long as she had a gingerbread figure in her
shop, she partly drew back her extended hand, "Where is the cent?"
The little boy had the cent ready, but, like a true-born Yankee,
would have preferred the better bargain to the worse. Looking
somewhat chagrined, he put the coin into Hepzibah's hand, and
departed, sending the second Jim Crow in quest of the former one.
The new shop-keeper dropped the first solid result of her commercial
enterprise into the till. It was done! The sordid stain of that
copper coin could never be washed away from her palm. The little
schoolboy, aided by the impish figure of the negro dancer, had wrought
an irreparable ruin. The structure of ancient aristocracy had been
demolished by him, even as if his childish gripe had torn down the
seven-gabled mansion. Now let Hepzibah turn the old Pyncheon
portraits with their faces to the wall, and take the map of her
Eastern territory to kindle the kitchen fire, and blow up the flame
with the empty breath of her ancestral traditions! What had she to
do with ancestry? Nothing; no more than with posterity! No lady,
now, but simply Hepzibah Pyncheon, a forlorn old maid, and keeper
of a cent-shop!
Nevertheless, even while she paraded these ideas somewhat
ostentatiously through her mind, it is altogether surprising what
a calmness had come over her. The anxiety and misgivings which
had tormented her, whether asleep or in melancholy day-dreams,
ever since her project began to take an aspect of solidity, had
now vanished quite away. She felt the novelty of her position,
indeed, but no longer with disturbance or affright. Now and then,
there came a thrill of almost youthful enjoyment. It was the
invigorating breath of a fresh outward atmosphere, after the
long torpor and monotonous seclusion of her life. So wholesome
is effort! So miraculous the strength that we do not know of!
The healthiest glow that Hepzibah had known for years had come
now in the dreaded crisis, when, for the first time, she had
put forth her hand to help herself. The little circlet of the
schoolboy's copper coin--dim and lustreless though it was, with
the small services which it had been doing here and there about
the world --had proved a talisman, fragrant with good, and
deserving to be set in gold and worn next her heart. It was
as potent, and perhaps endowed with the same kind of efficacy,
as a galvanic ring! Hepzibah, at all events, was indebted to its
subtile operation both in body and spirit; so much the more,
as it inspired her with energy to get some breakfast, at which,
still the better to keep up her courage, she allowed herself an
extra spoonful in her infusion of black tea.
Her introductory day of shop-keeping did not run on, however,
without many and serious interruptions of this mood of cheerful
vigor. As a general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to
mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which
suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their
powers. In the case of our old gentlewoman, after the excitement
of new effort had subsided, the despondency of her whole life
threatened, ever and anon, to return. It was like the heavy mass
of clouds which we may often see obscuring the sky, and making
a gray twilight everywhere, until, towards nightfall, it yields
temporarily to a glimpse of sunshine. But, always, the envious
cloud strives to gather again across the streak of celestial azure.
Customers came in, as the forenoon advanced, but rather slowly;
in some cases, too, it must be owned, with little satisfaction
either to themselves or Miss Hepzibah; nor, on the whole, with
an aggregate of very rich emolument to the till. A little girl,
sent by her mother to match a skein of cotton thread, of a peculiar
hue, took one that the near-sighted old lady pronounced extremely
like, but soon came running back, with a blunt and cross message,
that it would not do, and, besides, was very rotten! Then, there
was a pale, care-wrinkled woman, not old but haggard, and already
with streaks of gray among her hair, like silver ribbons; one of
those women, naturally delicate, whom you at once recognize as worn
to death by a brute--probably a drunken brute--of a husband, and
at least nine children. She wanted a few pounds of flour, and
offered the money, which the decayed gentlewoman silently rejected,
and gave the poor soul better measure than if she had taken it.
Shortly afterwards, a man in a blue cotton frock, much soiled, came
in and bought a pipe, filling the whole shop, meanwhile, with the
hot odor of strong drink, not only exhaled in the torrid atmosphere
of his breath, but oozing out of his entire system, like an
inflammable gas. It was impressed on Hepzibah's mind that this
was the husband of the care-wrinkled woman. He asked for a paper
of tobacco; and as she had neglected to provide herself with the
article, her brutal customer dashed down his newly-bought pipe and
left the shop, muttering some unintelligible words, which had the
tone and bitterness of a curse. Hereupon Hepzibah threw up her
eyes, unintentionally scowling in the face of Providence!
No less than five persons, during the forenoon, inquired for
ginger-beer, or root-beer, or any drink of a similar brewage,
and, obtaining nothing of the kind, went off in an exceedingly
bad humor. Three of them left the door open, and the other two
pulled it so spitefully in going out that the little bell played
the very deuce with Hepzibah's nerves. A round, bustling,
fire-ruddy housewife of the neighborhood burst breathless into
the shop, fiercely demanding yeast; and when the poor gentlewoman,
with her cold shyness of manner, gave her hot customer to understand
that she did not keep the article, this very capable housewife took
upon herself to administer a regular rebuke.
"A cent-shop, and No yeast!" quoth she; "that will never do!
Who ever heard of such a thing? Your loaf will never rise, no
more than mine will to-day. You had better shut up shop at once."
"Well," said Hepzibah, heaving a deep sigh, "perhaps I had!"
Several times, moreover, besides the above instance, her lady-like
sensibilities were seriously infringed upon by the familiar,
if not rude, tone with which people addressed her. They evidently
considered themselves not merely her equals, but her patrons and
superiors. Now, Hepzibah had unconsciously flattered herself with
the idea that there would be a gleam or halo, of some kind or
other, about her person, which would insure an obeisance to her
sterling gentility, or, at least, a tacit recognition of it.
On the other hand, nothing tortured her more intolerably than when
this recognition was too prominently expressed. To one or two rather
officious offers of sympathy, her responses were little short of
acrimonious; and, we regret to say, Hepzibah was thrown into a
positively unchristian state of mind by the suspicion that one of
her customers was drawn to the shop, not by any real need of
the article which she pretended to seek, but by a wicked wish to
stare at her. The vulgar creature was determined to see for
herself what sort of a figure a mildewed piece of aristocracy,
after wasting all the bloom and much of the decline of her life
apart from the world, would cut behind a counter. In this
particular case, however mechanical and innocuous it might be at
other times, Hepzibah's contortion of brow served her in good stead.
"I never was so frightened in my life!" said the curious customer,
in describing the incident to one of her acquaintances. "She's a
real old vixen, take my word of it! She says little, to be sure;
but if you could only see the mischief in her eye!"
On the whole, therefore, her new experience led our decayed
gentlewoman to very disagreeable conclusions as to the temper
and manners of what she termed the lower classes, whom heretofore
she had looked down upon with a gentle and pitying complaisance,
as herself occupying a sphere of unquestionable superiority.
But, unfortunately, she had likewise to struggle against a bitter
emotion of a directly opposite kind: a sentiment of virulence,
we mean, towards the idle aristocracy to which it had so recently
been her pride to belong. When a lady, in a delicate and costly
summer garb, with a floating veil and gracefully swaying gown,
and, altogether, an ethereal lightness that made you look at her
beautifully slippered feet, to see whether she trod on the dust
or floated in the air,--when such a vision happened to pass through
this retired street, leaving it tenderly and delusively fragrant
with her passage, as if a bouquet of tea-roses had been borne along,
--then again, it is to be feared, old Hepzibah's scowl could no
longer vindicate itself entirely on the plea of near-sightedness.
"For what end," thought she, giving vent to that feeling of
hostility which is the only real abasement of the poor in presence
of the rich,--"for what good end, in the wisdom of Providence,
does that woman live? Must the whole world toil, that the palms
of her hands may be kept white and delicate?"
Then, ashamed and penitent, she hid her face.
"May God forgive me!" said she.
Doubtless, God did forgive her. But, taking the inward and
outward history of the first half-day into consideration, Hepzibah
began to fear that the shop would prove her ruin in a moral and
religious point of view, without contributing very essentially
towards even her temporal welfare. _
Read next: CHAPTER IV - A DAY BEHIND THE COUNTER
Read previous: CHAPTER II - THE LITTLE SHOP-WINDOW
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