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She then muffledthe bell in an unfinished stocking, and put up the oaken bar across the door. Let us pardon her one other pause; for it is given tothe sole sentiment, or, we might better say,—heightened and renderedintense, as it has been, by sorrow and seclusion,—to the strong passionof her life. We heard the turning of a key in a small lock; she has opened asecret drawer of an escritoire, and is probably looking at a certain miniature,done in Malbone’s most perfect style, and representing a face worthy ofno less delicate a pencil. Itis a likeness of a young man, in a silken dressing-gown of an old fashion, thesoft richness of which is well adapted to the countenance of reverie, with itsfull, tender lips, and beautiful eyes, that seem to indicate not so muchcapacity of thought, as gentle and voluptuous emotion. Of the possessor of suchfeatures we shall have a right to ask nothing, except that he would take therude world easily, and make himself happy in it.
Thomas Maule
Just then, as it happened, the train reached a solitary way-station. Takingadvantage of the brief pause, Clifford left the car, and drew Hepzibah alongwith him. A moment afterwards, the train—with all the life of itsinterior, amid which Clifford had made himself so conspicuous anobject—was gliding away in the distance, and rapidly lessening to a pointwhich, in another moment, vanished.
Matthew Maule (The Elder)
It is indeed difficult to imagine that there could have been a serioussuspicion of murder, or the slightest grounds for implicating any particularindividual as the perpetrator. The rank, wealth, and eminent character of thedeceased must have insured the strictest scrutiny into every ambiguouscircumstance. Tradition,—which sometimes brings down truth that history haslet slip, but is oftener the wild babble of the time, such as was formerlyspoken at the fireside and now congeals in newspapers,—tradition isresponsible for all contrary averments. In Colonel Pyncheon’s funeralsermon, which was printed, and is still extant, the Rev. Mr. Higginsonenumerates, among the many felicities of his distinguished parishioner’searthly career, the happy seasonableness of his death. His duties allperformed,—the highest prosperity attained,—his race and futuregenerations fixed on a stable basis, and with a stately roof to shelter themfor centuries to come,—what other upward step remained for this good manto take, save the final step from earth to the golden gate of heaven! The piousclergyman surely would not have uttered words like these had he in the leastsuspected that the Colonel had been thrust into the other world with the clutchof violence upon his throat.
A look inside the Historic Seven Gables house - Shelby Star
A look inside the Historic Seven Gables house.
Posted: Thu, 02 Nov 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Alice Pyncheon
It was this, indeed, that gave him the controlwhich he had at once, and so irresistibly, established over his movements. Or, it might more fancifullybe compared to a joyous piece of music, played with wild vivacity, but upon adisordered instrument. As the cracked jarring note might always be heard, andas it jarred loudest amidst the loftiest exultation of the melody, so was therea continual quake through Clifford, causing him most to quiver while he wore atriumphant smile, and seemed almost under a necessity to skip in his gait. And, in accordance with his words, he began to laugh, still pointing his fingerat the object, invisible to Hepzibah, within the parlor.
Her hand, tremulous with the shrinking purposewhich directed it, had smitten so feebly against the door that the sound couldhardly have gone inward. She had struck with the entire force of her heart’svibration, communicating, by some subtile magnetism, her own terror to thesummons. Clifford would turn his face to the pillow, and cover his head beneaththe bedclothes, like a startled child at midnight. She knocked a third time,three regular strokes, gentle, but perfectly distinct, and with meaning inthem; for, modulate it with what cautious art we will, the hand cannot helpplaying some tune of what we feel upon the senseless wood.
Striking most disagreeably on Clifford’sauditory organs and the characteristic sensibility of his nerves, it caused himto start upright out of his chair. Then his face darkened, as if the shadow of a cavern or a dungeon had come overit; there was no more light in its expression than might have come through theiron grates of a prison-window—still lessening, too, as if he weresinking farther into the depths. Phœbe (being of that quickness and activityof temperament that she seldom long refrained from taking a part, and generallya good one, in what was going forward) now felt herself moved to address thestranger. The two relatives—the young maid and the old one—found time beforenightfall, in the intervals of trade, to make rapid advances towards affectionand confidence.
Three of them left the door open,and the other two pulled it so spitefully in going out that the little bellplayed 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 shynessof manner, gave her hot customer to understand that she did not keep thearticle, this very capable housewife took upon herself to administer a regularrebuke. But, at this instant, the shop-bell, right over her head, tinkled as if it werebewitched. The old gentlewoman’s heart seemed to be attached to the samesteel spring, for it went through a series of sharp jerks, in unison with thesound. The door was thrust open, although no human form was perceptible on theother side of the half-window. Hepzibah, nevertheless, stood at a gaze, withher hands clasped, looking very much as if she had summoned up an evil spirit,and were afraid, yet resolved, to hazard the encounter.
His apparently benevolent attempts to help Clifford and Hepzibah are as false as the smiles he presents to the public. In the end, the public learns (albeit) through rumors, about his hand in the old Jaffrey Pyncheon's death and Clifford's imprisonment. Hepzibah feels as though she is in a dream while Clifford feels exhilarated by the events.
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They were half believed to inherit mysterious attributes; the familyeye was said to possess strange power. Among other good-for-nothing propertiesand privileges, one was especially assigned them,—that of exercising aninfluence 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 thetopsy-turvy commonwealth of sleep. Modern psychology, it may be, will endeavorto reduce these alleged necromancies within a system, instead of rejecting themas altogether fabulous. There were few of the Pyncheons left to sun themselves in the glow of theJudge’s prosperity.
Little Phœbe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusivepatrimony, the gift of practical arrangement. It is a kind of natural magicthat enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of thingsaround them; and particularly to give a look of comfort and habitableness toany place which, for however brief a period, may happen to be their home. Awild hut of underbrush, tossed together by wayfarers through the primitiveforest, would acquire the home aspect by one night’s lodging of such awoman, and would retain it long after her quiet figure had disappeared into thesurrounding shade. No less a portion of such homely witchcraft was requisite toreclaim, as it were, Phœbe’s waste, cheerless, and dusky chamber, whichhad been untenanted so long—except by spiders, and mice, and rats, andghosts—that it was all overgrown with the desolation which watches toobliterate every trace of man’s happier hours.
As he draws back from the door, an all-comprehensive benignityblazes from his visage, indicating that he gathers Hepzibah, little Phœbe, andthe invisible Clifford, all three, together with the whole world besides, intohis immense heart, and gives them a warm bath in its flood of affection. On raising her eyes, Phœbe was startled by the change in JudgePyncheon’s face. It was quite as striking, allowing for the difference ofscale, as that betwixt a landscape under a broad sunshine and just before athunder-storm; not that it had the passionate intensity of the latter aspect,but was cold, hard, immitigable, like a day-long brooding cloud. Silently, and rather surprised at her own compliance, Phœbe accordingly betookherself to weeding a flower-bed, but busied herself still more with cogitationsrespecting this young man, with whom she so unexpectedly found herself on termsapproaching to familiarity. His characterperplexed the little country-girl, as it might a more practised observer; for,while the tone of his conversation had generally been playful, the impressionleft on her mind was that of gravity, and, except as his youth modified it,almost sternness.
Returning to the arched window, she lifted her eyes,—scowling, poor,dim-sighted Hepzibah, in the face of Heaven! —and strove hard to send up aprayer through the dense gray pavement of clouds. Those mists had gathered, asif to symbolize a great, brooding mass of human trouble, doubt, confusion, andchill indifference, between earth and the better regions. It smote her with the wretched conviction that Providenceintermeddled not in these petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor hadany balm for these little agonies of a solitary soul; but shed its justice, andits mercy, in a broad, sunlike sweep, over half the universe at once. But Hepzibah did not see that, just as there comes awarm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of God’s careand pity for every separate need. Several days passed over the Seven Gables, heavily and drearily enough.
Be that as it might, itseemed to produce no awakening effect on Colonel Pyncheon. When the soundsubsided, the silence through the house was deep, dreary, and oppressive,notwithstanding that the tongues of many of the guests had already beenloosened by a surreptitious cup or two of wine or spirits. Experience a more personal history of Salem from the perspectives of the people who don’t make it into the history books. From enslaved people to indentured servants to immigrants fleeing... A hundred years before, Alice’s father, Gervayse Pyncheon, summoned the young grandson of the older Matthew Maule, a carpenter also named Matthew Maule. Gervayse believed that since the younger Matthew Maule’s father built the Pyncheon house, the young man might know where to find the missing deed to the Pyncheon land.
It was too powerful for the conscientiousscruples of the old bachelor; at whose death, accordingly, the mansion-house,together with most of his other riches, passed into the possession of his nextlegal representative. The dark, moldering house and the diminutive chickens remaining in the yard symbolize the fall of the Pyncheons from high estate to low. Yet, decayed as the house is, Judge Pyncheon believes that it somewhere conceals a map that will enable him to lay claim, at last, to a princely tract of land in Maine. That belief brings him to the house, motivates his wish to speak with Clifford, and precipitates his clash with Hepzibah.
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