________________________________________________
_ TOWARDS noon, Hepzibah saw an elderly gentleman, large and
portly, and of remarkably dignified demeanor, passing slowly
along on the opposite side of the white and dusty street. On
coming within the shadow of the Pyncheon Elm, he stopt, and
(taking off his hat, meanwhile, to wipe the perspiration from his
brow) seemed to scrutinize, with especial interest, the dilapidated
and rusty-visaged House of the Seven Gables. He himself, in a
very different style, was as well worth looking at as the house.
No better model need be sought, nor could have been found, of
a very high order of respectability, which, by some indescribable
magic, not merely expressed itself in his looks and gestures, but
even governed the fashion of his garments, and rendered them all
proper and essential to the man. Without appearing to differ,
in any tangible way, from other people's clothes, there was yet a
wide and rich gravity about them that must have been a characteristic
of the wearer, since it could not be defined as pertaining either
to the cut or material. His gold-headed cane, too,--a serviceable
staff, of dark polished wood,--had similar traits, and, had it chosen
to take a walk by itself, would have been recognized anywhere as a
tolerably adequate representative of its master. This character
--which showed itself so strikingly in everything about him, and the
effect of which we seek to convey to the reader--went no deeper
than his station, habits of life, and external circumstances.
One perceived him to be a personage of marked influence and authority;
and, especially, you could feel just as certain that he was opulent
as if he had exhibited his bank account, or as if you had seen him
touching the twigs of the Pyncheon Elm, and, Midas-like, transmuting
them to gold.
In his youth, he had probably been considered a handsome man;
at his present age, his brow was too heavy, his temples too bare,
his remaining hair too gray, his eye too cold, his lips too closely
compressed, to bear any relation to mere personal beauty. He would
have made a good and massive portrait; better now, perhaps, than at
any previous period of his life, although his look might grow
positively harsh in the process of being fixed upon the canvas.
The artist would have found it desirable to study his face, and prove
its capacity for varied expression; to darken it with a frown,
--to kindle it up with a smile.
While the elderly gentleman stood looking at the Pyncheon House,
both the frown and the smile passed successively over his countenance.
His eye rested on the shop-window, and putting up a pair of gold-bowed
spectacles, which he held in his hand, he minutely surveyed Hepzibah's
little arrangement of toys and commodities. At first it seemed not to
please him,--nay, to cause him exceeding displeasure,--and yet, the
very next moment, he smiled. While the latter expression was yet on
his lips, he caught a glimpse of Hepzibah, who had involuntarily bent
forward to the window; and then the smile changed from acrid and
disagreeable to the sunniest complacency and benevolence. He bowed,
with a happy mixture of dignity and courteous kindliness, and pursued
his way.
"There he is!" said Hepzibah to herself, gulping down a very bitter
emotion, and, since she could not rid herself of it, trying to drive
it back into her heart. "What does he think of it, I wonder? Does it
please him? Ah! he is looking back!"
The gentleman had paused in the street, and turned himself half
about, still with his eyes fixed on the shop-window. In fact, he
wheeled wholly round, and commenced a step or two, as if designing
to enter the shop; but, as it chanced, his purpose was anticipated
by Hepzibah's first customer, the little cannibal of Jim Crow, who,
staring up at the window, was irresistibly attracted by an elephant
of gingerbread. What a grand appetite had this small urchin!
--Two Jim Crows immediately after breakfast!--and now an elephant,
as a preliminary whet before dinner. By the time this latter purchase
was completed, the elderly gentleman had resumed his way, and turned
the street corner.
"Take it as you like, Cousin Jaffrey." muttered the maiden lady,
as she drew back, after cautiously thrusting out her head, and
looking up and down the street,--"Take it as you like! You have
seen my little shop--window. Well!--what have you to say?--is
not the Pyncheon House my own, while I'm alive?"
After this incident, Hepzibah retreated to the back parlor, where
she at first caught up a half-finished stocking, and began knitting
at it with nervous and irregular jerks; but quickly finding herself
at odds with the stitches, she threw it aside, and walked hurriedly
about the room. At length she paused before the portrait of the
stern old Puritan, her ancestor, and the founder of the house. In
one sense, this picture had almost faded into the canvas, and hidden
itself behind the duskiness of age; in another, she could not but
fancy that it had been growing more prominent and strikingly
expressive, ever since her earliest familiarity with it as a child.
For, while the physical outline and substance were darkening away
from the beholder's eye, the bold, hard, and, at the same time,
indirect character of the man seemed to be brought out in a kind of
spiritual relief. Such an effect may occasionally be observed in
pictures of antique date. They acquire a look which an artist
(if he have anything like the complacency of artists nowadays)
would never dream of presenting to a patron as his own
characteristic expression, but which, nevertheless, we at once
recognize as reflecting the unlovely truth of a human soul. In
such cases, the painter's deep conception of his subject's inward
traits has wrought itself into the essence of the picture, and is
seen after the superficial coloring has been rubbed off by time.
While gazing at the portrait, Hepzibah trembled under its eye.
Her hereditary reverence made her afraid to judge the character
of the original so harshly as a perception of the truth compelled
her to do. But still she gazed, because the face of the picture
enabled her--at least, she fancied so--to read more accurately, and
to a greater depth, the face which she had just seen in the street.
"This is the very man!" murmured she to herself. "Let Jaffrey
Pyncheon smile as he will, there is that look beneath! Put on him
a skull-cap, and a band, and a black cloak, and a Bible in one
hand and a sword in the other,--then let Jaffrey smile as he
might,--nobody would doubt that it was the old Pyncheon come
again. He has proved himself the very man to build up a new house!
Perhaps, too, to draw down a new curse!"
Thus did Hepzibah bewilder herself with these fantasies of the old
time. She had dwelt too much alone,--too long in the Pyncheon House,
--until her very brain was impregnated with the dry-rot of its timbers.
She needed a walk along the noonday street to keep her sane.
By the spell of contrast, another portrait rose up before her,
painted with more daring flattery than any artist would have
ventured upon, but yet so delicately touched that the likeness
remained perfect. Malbone's miniature, though from the same
original, was far inferior to Hepzibah's air-drawn picture,
at which affection and sorrowful remembrance wrought together.
Soft, mildly, and cheerfully contemplative, with full, red lips,
just on the verge of a smile, which the eyes seemed to herald
by a gentle kindling-up of their orbs! Feminine traits, moulded
inseparably with those of the other sex! The miniature, likewise,
had this last peculiarity; so that you inevitably thought of the
original as resembling his mother, and she a lovely and lovable
woman, with perhaps some beautiful infirmity of character, that
made it all the pleasanter to know and easier to love her.
"Yes," thought Hepzibah, with grief of which it was only the more
tolerable portion that welled up from her heart to her eyelids,
"they persecuted his mother in him! He never was a Pyncheon!"
But here the shop-bell rang; it was like a sound from a remote
distance,--so far had Hepzibah descended into the sepulchral
depths of her reminiscences. On entering the shop, she found
an old man there, a humble resident of Pyncheon Street, and
whom, for a great many years past, she had suffered to be a kind
of familiar of the house. He was an immemorial personage, who
seemed always to have had a white head and wrinkles, and never
to have possessed but a single tooth, and that a half-decayed one,
in the front of the upper jaw. Well advanced as Hepzibah was,
she could not remember when Uncle Venner, as the neighborhood
called him, had not gone up and down the street, stooping a
little and drawing his feet heavily over the gravel or pavement.
But still there was something tough and vigorous about him,
that not only kept him in daily breath, but enabled him to fill
a place which would else have been vacant in the apparently
crowded world. To go of errands with his slow and shuffling gait,
which made you doubt how he ever was to arrive anywhere; to saw a
small household's foot or two of firewood, or knock to pieces an
old barrel, or split up a pine board for kindling-stuff; in summer,
to dig the few yards of garden ground appertaining to a low-rented
tenement, and share the produce of his labor at the halves; in winter,
to shovel away the snow from the sidewalk, or open paths to the
woodshed, or along the clothes-line; such were some of the essential
offices which Uncle Venner performed among at least a score of families.
Within that circle, he claimed the same sort of privilege, and probably
felt as much warmth of interest, as a clergyman does in the range of
his parishioners. Not that he laid claim to the tithe pig; but,
as an analogous mode of reverence, he went his rounds, every morning,
to gather up the crumbs of the table and overflowings of the dinner-pot,
as food for a pig of his own.
In his younger days--for, after all, there was a dim tradition that
he had been, not young, but younger--Uncle Venner was commonly
regarded as rather deficient, than otherwise, in his wits. In
truth he had virtually pleaded guilty to the charge, by scarcely
aiming at such success as other men seek, and by taking only that
humble and modest part in the intercourse of life which belongs to
the alleged deficiency. But now, in his extreme old age,--whether it
were that his long and hard experience had actually brightened him,
or that his decaying judgment rendered him less capable of fairly
measuring himself,--the venerable man made pretensions to no little
wisdom, and really enjoyed the credit of it. There was likewise, at
times, a vein of something like poetry in him; it was the moss or
wall-flower of his mind in its small dilapidation, and gave a charm
to what might have been vulgar and commonplace in his earlier and
middle life. Hepzibah had a regard for him, because his name was
ancient in the town and had formerly been respectable. It was a still
better reason for awarding him a species of familiar reverence that
Uncle Venner was himself the most ancient existence, whether of man
or thing, in Pyncheon Street, except the House of the Seven Gables,
and perhaps the elm that overshadowed it.
This patriarch now presented himself before Hepzibah, clad in an
old blue coat, which had a fashionable air, and must have accrued
to him from the cast-off wardrobe of some dashing clerk. As for
his trousers, they were of tow-cloth, very short in the legs,
and bagging down strangely in the rear, but yet having a suitableness
to his figure which his other garment entirely lacked. His hat had
relation to no other part of his dress, and but very little to the
head that wore it. Thus Uncle Venner was a miscellaneous old gentleman,
partly himself, but, in good measure, somebody else; patched together,
too, of different epochs; an epitome of times and fashions.
"So, you have really begun trade," said he,--" really begun trade!
Well, I'm glad to see it. Young people should never live idle in
the world, nor old ones neither, unless when the rheumatize gets
hold of them. It has given me warning already; and in two or
three years longer, I shall think of putting aside business and
retiring to my farm. That's yonder,--the great brick house, you
know,--the workhouse, most folks call it; but I mean to do my
work first, and go there to be idle and enjoy myself. And I'm
glad to see you beginning to do your work, Miss Hepzibah!"
"Thank you, Uncle Venner" said Hepzibah, smiling; for she always
felt kindly towards the simple and talkative old man. Had he been
an old woman, she might probably have repelled the freedom, which
she now took in good part. "It is time for me to begin work,
indeed! Or, to speak the truth, I have just begun when I ought
to be giving it up."
"Oh, never say that, Miss Hepzibah!" answered the old man. "You
are a young woman yet. Why, I hardly thought myself younger than
I am now, it seems so little while ago since I used to see you playing
about the door of the old house, quite a small child! Oftener, though,
you used to be sitting at the threshold, and looking gravely into the
street; for you had always a grave kind of way with you,--a grown-up
air, when you were only the height of my knee. It seems as if I saw
you now; and your grandfather with his red cloak, and his white wig,
and his cocked hat, and his cane, coming out of the house, and stepping
so grandly up the street! Those old gentlemen that grew up before the
Revolution used to put on grand airs. In my young days, the great
man of the town was commonly called King; and his wife, not Queen
to be sure, but Lady. Nowadays, a man would not dare to be called
King; and if he feels himself a little above common folks, he only
stoops so much the lower to them. I met your cousin, the Judge,
ten minutes ago; and, in my old tow-cloth trousers, as you see,
the Judge raised his hat to me, I do believe! At any rate, the Judge
bowed and smiled!"
"Yes," said Hepzibah, with something bitter stealing unawares
into her tone; "my cousin Jaffrey is thought to have a very
pleasant smile!"
"And so he has" replied Uncle Venner. "And that's rather remarkable
in a Pyncheon; for, begging your pardon, Miss Hepzibah, they never
had the name of being an easy and agreeable set of folks. There
was no getting close to them. But Now, Miss Hepzibah, if an old
man may be bold to ask, why don't Judge Pyncheon, with his great
means, step forward, and tell his cousin to shut up her little shop
at once? It's for your credit to be doing something, but it's not
for the Judge's credit to let you!"
"We won't talk of this, if you please, Uncle Venner," said Hepzibah
coldly. "I ought to say, however, that, if I choose to earn bread
for myself, it is not Judge Pyncheon's fault. Neither will he deserve
the blame," added she more kindly, remembering Uncle Venner's privileges
of age and humble familiarity, "if I should, by and by, find it
convenient to retire with you to your farm."
"And it's no bad place, either, that farm of mine!" cried the old
man cheerily, as if there were something positively delightful in
the prospect. "No bad place is the great brick farm-house,
especially for them that will find a good many old cronies there,
as will be my case. I quite long to be among them, sometimes,
of the winter evenings; for it is but dull business for a
lonesome elderly man, like me, to be nodding, by the hour together,
with no company but his air-tight stove. Summer or winter,
there's a great deal to be said in favor of my farm! And, take it
in the autumn, what can be pleasanter than to spend a whole day
on the sunny side of a barn or a wood-pile, chatting with somebody
as old as one's self; or, perhaps, idling away the time with a
natural-born simpleton, who knows how to be idle, because even
our busy Yankees never have found out how to put him to any use?
Upon my word, Miss Hepzibah, I doubt whether I've ever been so
comfortable as I mean to be at my farm, which most folks call
the workhouse. But you,--you're a young woman yet,--you never
need go there! Something still better will turn up for you.
I'm sure of it!"
Hepzibah fancied that there was something peculiar in her
venerable friend's look and tone; insomuch, that she gazed into
his face with considerable earnestness, endeavoring to discover
what secret meaning, if any, might be lurking there. Individuals
whose affairs have reached an utterly desperate crisis almost
invariably keep themselves alive with hopes, so much the more
airily magnificent as they have the less of solid matter within
their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and moderate expectation
of good. Thus, all the while Hepzibah was perfecting the scheme
of her little shop, she had cherished an unacknowledged idea that
some harlequin trick of fortune would intervene in her favor.
For example, an uncle--who had sailed for India fifty years before,
and never been heard of since--might yet return, and adopt her to
be the comfort of his very extreme and decrepit age, and adorn her
with pearls, diamonds, and Oriental shawls and turbans, and make
her the ultimate heiress of his unreckonable riches. Or the member
of Parliament, now at the head of the English branch of the family,
--with which the elder stock, on this side of the Atlantic, had held
little or no intercourse for the last two centuries,--this eminent
gentleman might invite Hepzibah to quit the ruinous House of the
Seven Gables, and come over to dwell with her kindred at Pyncheon
Hall. But, for reasons the most imperative, she could not yield to
his request. It was more probable, therefore, that the descendants
of a Pyncheon who had emigrated to Virginia, in some past generation,
and became a great planter there,--hearing of Hepzibah's destitution,
and impelled by the splendid generosity of character with which their
Virginian mixture must have enriched the New England blood,--would
send her a remittance of a thousand dollars, with a hint of repeating
the favor annually. Or,--and, surely, anything so undeniably just
could not be beyond the limits of reasonable anticipation,--the great
claim to the heritage of Waldo County might finally be decided in
favor of the Pyncheons; so that, instead of keeping a cent-shop,
Hepzibah would build a palace, and look down from its highest tower
on hill, dale, forest, field, and town, as her own share of the
ancestral territory.
These were some of the fantasies which she had long dreamed about;
and, aided by these, Uncle Venner's casual attempt at encouragement
kindled a strange festal glory in the poor, bare, melancholy chambers
of her brain, as if that inner world were suddenly lighted up with gas.
But either he knew nothing of her castles in the air,--as how should he?
--or else her earnest scowl disturbed his recollection, as it might a
more courageous man's. Instead of pursuing any weightier topic,
Uncle Venner was pleased to favor Hepzibah with some sage counsel in
her shop-keeping capacity.
"Give no credit!"--these were some of his goldenmxims,--"Never
take paper-money. Look well to your change! Ring the silver on
the four-pound weight! Shove back all English half-pence and base
copper tokens, such as are very plenty about town! At your leisure
hours, knit children's woollen socks and mittens! Brew your own
yeast, and make your own ginger-beer!"
And while Hepzibah was doing her utmost to digest the hard little
pellets of his already uttered wisdom, he gave vent to his final,
and what he declared to be his all-important advice, as follows:--
"Put on a bright face for your customers, and smile pleasantly as
you hand them what they ask for! A stale article, if you dip it
in a good, warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one
that you've scowled upon."
To this last apothegm poor Hepzibah responded with a sigh so
deep and heavy that it almost rustled Uncle Venner quite away,
like a withered leaf,--as he was,--before an autumnal gale.
Recovering himself, however, he bent forward, and, with a good
deal of feeling in his ancient visage, beckoned her nearer to him.
"When do you expect him home?" whispered he.
"Whom do you mean?" asked Hepzibah, turning pale.
"Ah? you don't love to talk about it," said Uncle Venner. "Well,
well! we'll say no more, though there's word of it all over town.
I remember him, Miss Hepzibah, before he could run alone!"
During the remainder of the day, poor Hepzibah acquitted herself
even less creditably, as a shop-keeper, than in her earlier efforts.
She appeared to be walking in a dream; or, more truly, the vivid
life and reality assumed by her emotions made all outward
occurrences unsubstantial, like the teasing phantasms of a
half-conscious slumber. She still responded, mechanically,
to the frequent summons of the shop-bell, and, at the demand of
her customers, went prying with vague eyes about the shop,
proffering them one article after another, and thrusting aside
--perversely, as most of them supposed--the identical thing
they asked for. There is sad confusion, indeed, when the spirit
thus flits away into the past, or into the more awful future, or,
in any manner, steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its
own region and the actual world; where the body remains to guide
itself as best it may, with little more than the mechanism of
animal life. It is like death, without death's quiet privilege,
--its freedom from mortal care. Worst of all, when the actual duties
are comprised in such petty details as now vexed the brooding soul
of the old gentlewoman. As the animosity of fate would have it,
there was a great influx of custom in the course of the afternoon.
Hepzibah blundered to and fro about her small place of business,
committing the most unheard-of errors: now stringing up twelve,
and now seven, tallow-candles, instead of ten to the pound; selling
ginger for Scotch snuff, pins for needles, and needles for pins;
misreckoning her change, sometimes to the public detriment, and
much oftener to her own; and thus she went on, doing her utmost
to bring chaos back again, until, at the close of the day's labor,
to her inexplicable astonishment, she found the money-drawer almost
destitute of coin. After all her painful traffic, the whole proceeds
were perhaps half a dozen coppers, and a questionable ninepence which
ultimately proved to be copper likewise.
At this price, or at whatever price, she rejoiced that the day had
reached its end. Never before had she had such a sense of the
intolerable length of time that creeps between dawn and sunset,
and of the miserable irksomeness of having aught to do, and of
the better wisdom that it would be to lie down at once, in sullen
resignation, and let life, and its toils and vexations, trample over
one's prostrate body as they may! Hepzibah's final operation was
with the little devourer of Jim Crow and the elephant, who now
proposed to eat a camel. In her bewilderment, she offered him
first a wooden dragoon, and next a handful of marbles; neither
of which being adapted to his else omnivorous appetite, she
hastily held out her whole remaining stock of natural history in
gingerbread, and huddled the small customer out of the shop. She
then muffled the bell in an unfinished stocking, and put up the
oaken bar across the door.
During the latter process, an omnibus came to a stand-still under
the branches of the elm-tree. Hepzibah's heart was in her mouth.
Remote and dusky, and with no sunshine on all the intervening
space, was that region of the Past whence her only guest might
be expected to arrive! Was she to meet him. now?
Somebody, at all events, was passing from the farthest interior of
the omnibus towards its entrance. A gentleman alighted; but it was
only to offer his hand to a young girl whose slender figure, nowise
needing such assistance, now lightly descended the steps, and made
an airy little jump from the final one to the sidewalk. She rewarded
her cavalier with a smile, the cheery glow of which was seen
reflected on his own face as he reentered the vehicle. The girl
then turned towards the House of the Seven Gables, to the door of
which, meanwhile,--not the shop-door, but the antique portal,--the
omnibus-man had carried a light trunk and a bandbox. First giving
a sharp rap of the old iron knocker, he left his passenger and
her luggage at the door-step, and departed.
"Who can it be?" thought Hepzibah, who had been screwing her
visual organs into the acutest focus of which they were capable.
"The girl must have mistaken the house." She stole softly into
the hall, and, herself invisible, gazed through the dusty side-lights
of the portal at the young, blooming, and very cheerful face
which presented itself for admittance into the gloomy old
mansion. It was a face to which almost any door would have
opened of its own accord.
The young girl, so fresh, so unconventional, and yet so orderly
and obedient to common rules, as you at once recognized her to
be, was widely in contrast, at that moment, with everything about
her. The sordid and ugly luxuriance of gigantic weeds that grew
in the angle of the house, and the heavy projection that overshadowed
her, and the time-worn framework of the door,--none of these things
belonged to her sphere. But, even as a ray of sunshine, fall into
what dismal place it may, instantaneously creates for itself a
propriety in being there, so did it seem altogether fit that the
girl should be standing at the threshold. It was no less evidently
proper that the door should swing open to admit her. The maiden
lady herself, sternly inhospitable in her first purposes, soon began
to feel that the door ought to be shoved back, and the rusty key be
turned in the reluctant lock.
"Can it be Phoebe?" questioned she within herself. "It must be
little Phoebe; for it can be nobody else,--and there is a look
of her father about her, too! But what does she want here? And
how like a country cousin, to come down upon a poor body in
this way, without so much as a day's notice, or asking whether
she would be welcome! Well; she must have a night's lodging,
I suppose; and to-morrow the child shall go back to her mother."
Phoebe, it must be understood, was that one little offshoot of the
Pyncheon race to whom we have already referred, as a native of
a rural part of New England, where the old fashions and feelings
of relationship are still partially kept up. In her own circle,
it was regarded as by no means improper for kinsfolk to visit one
another without invitation, or preliminary and ceremonious warning.
Yet, in consideration of Miss Hepzibah's recluse way of life, a letter
had actually been written and despatched, conveying information of
Phoebe's projected visit. This epistle, for three or four days past,
had been in the pocket of the penny-postman, who, happening to have
no other business in Pyncheon Street, had not yet made it convenient
to call at the House of the Seven Gables.
"No--she can stay only one night," said Hepzibah, unbolting the
door. "If Clifford were to find her here, it might disturb him!" _
Read next: CHAPTER V - MAY AND NOVEMBER
Read previous: CHAPTER III - THE FIRST CUSTOMER
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