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And especially now, while,with her crested teaspoons and antique china, she was flattering herself withideas of gentility, she felt an unspeakable disinclination to confront acustomer. 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-offwardrobe 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 havinga suitableness to his figure which his other garment entirely lacked.
Chamber music to benefit the House of the Seven Gables - The Salem News
Chamber music to benefit the House of the Seven Gables.
Posted: Fri, 26 Apr 2024 08:30:00 GMT [source]
Hawthorne's Shadow Audio Tour
The old gentlewoman took a dreary and proud satisfaction in leading Phœbe fromroom to room of the house, and recounting the traditions with which, as we maysay, the walls were lugubriously frescoed. She showed the indentations made bythe lieutenant-governor’s sword-hilt in the door-panels of the apartmentwhere old Colonel Pyncheon, a dead host, had received his affrighted visitorswith an awful frown. The dusky terror of that frown, Hepzibah observed, wasthought to be lingering ever since in the passageway.
IV: A Day Behind the Counter
Just before his death, Matthew Maule (the elder) curses Colonel Pyncheon, stating that "God will give him blood to drink." During the Colonel's first house warming festivities, he indeed dies with blood covering his beard and shirt. This first death is followed by the similar deaths of old Jaffrey Pyncheon and his nephew, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon. Although these deaths can be attributed to a family predisposition for apoplexy, the existence of the curse and the similar nature of each death suggest something supernatural about the way in which such sinful behavior resurfaces within a family's lineage.
Matthew Maule (The Elder)
It was perceptible, even there, in the dark old parlor, in theinevitable polarity with which his eyes were attracted towards the quiveringplay of sunbeams through the shadowy foliage. It was seen in his appreciatingnotice of the vase of flowers, the scent of which he inhaled with a zest almostpeculiar to a physical organization so refined that spiritual ingredients aremoulded in with it. It was betrayed in the unconscious smile with which heregarded Phœbe, whose fresh and maidenly figure was both sunshine andflowers,—their essence, in a prettier and more agreeable mode ofmanifestation. Not less evident was this love and necessity for the Beautiful,in the instinctive caution with which, even so soon, his eyes turned away fromhis hostess, and wandered to any quarter rather than come back. How couldhe,—so yellow as she was, so wrinkled, so sad of mien, with that odduncouthness of a turban on her head, and that most perverse of scowlscontorting her brow,—how could he love to gaze at her?
The Old Pyncheon Family
It must have beenthe devil himself that made Maule so subtile in his preception. As he stept into the house, a note of sweet and melancholy music thrilled andvibrated along the passage-way, proceeding from one of the rooms above stairs.It was the harpsichord which Alice Pyncheon had brought with her from beyondthe sea. The fair Alice bestowed most of her maiden leisure between flowers andmusic, although the former were apt to droop, and the melodies were often sad.She was of foreign education, and could not take kindly to the New Englandmodes of life, in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed.
The curse of Matthew Maule, some said, persists in plaguing the old house and its inhabitants. Now over a century and a half later, the sole family member inhabiting the old place is Hepzibah Pyncheon, an aging old maid. There is also a Mr. Holgrave, a daguerreotypist and artist, who rents upstairs apartments. The site upon which the house stood originally belonged to a man of poor circumstances named Matthew Maule. In the center of the site was a wonderful spring of sweet flowing water. To obtain it he was instrumental in Matthew Maule's being charged with witchcraft, for which Maule was hanged.
By long transmission among household facts, they grow to look likethem, and have such a familiar way of making themselves at home that theirinfluence is usually greater than we suspect. Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged andwell-provisioned breakfast-table. The vapor of thebroiled fish arose like incense from the shrine of a barbarian idol, while thefragrance of the Mocha might have gratified the nostrils of a tutelary Lar, orwhatever power has scope over a modern breakfast-table.
At last our small acquaintance, Ned Higgins, trudged up the street, on his wayto school; and happening, for the first time in a fortnight, to be thepossessor of a cent, he could by no means get past the shop-door of the SevenGables. Again and again, however, and half a dozen otheragains, with the inexorable pertinacity of a child intent upon some objectimportant to itself, did he renew his efforts for admittance. He had,doubtless, set his heart upon an elephant; or, possibly, with Hamlet, he meantto eat a crocodile. In response to his more violent attacks, the bell gave, nowand then, a moderate tinkle, but could not be stirred into clamor by anyexertion of the little fellow’s childish and tiptoe strength. Holding bythe door-handle, he peeped through a crevice of the curtain, and saw that theinner door, communicating with the passage towards the parlor, was closed. Will the Judge still insist withHepzibah on the interview with Clifford?
As the Pyncheons and Holgrave depart for their new home, the ghost of Alice Pyncheon can be heard playing the harpsichord one last time before leaving the House of the Seven Gables for heaven. After this, Phoebe takes a trip home to her village, and morale in the House of the Seven Gables declines sharply. One day, Judge Pyncheon appears at the House and insists on seeing Clifford. He suspects that Clifford knows the whereabouts of Uncle Jaffrey’s remaining fortune.
One was a map of the Pyncheon territory at the eastward, notengraved, but the handiwork of some skilful old draughtsman, and grotesquelyilluminated with pictures of Indians and wild beasts, among which was seen alion; the natural history of the region being as little known as its geography,which was put down most fantastically awry. The other adornment was theportrait of old Colonel Pyncheon, at two thirds length, representing the sternfeatures of a Puritanic-looking personage, in a skull-cap, with a laced bandand a grizzly beard; holding a Bible with one hand, and in the other upliftingan iron sword-hilt. The latter object, being more successfully depicted by theartist, stood out in far greater prominence than the sacred volume. Face toface with this picture, on entering the apartment, Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon cameto a pause; regarding it with a singular scowl, a strange contortion of thebrow, which, by people who did not know her, would probably have beeninterpreted as an expression of bitter anger and ill-will. She, in fact, felt a reverence for the pictured visage, of which only afar-descended and time-stricken virgin could be susceptible; and thisforbidding scowl was the innocent result of her near-sightedness, and an effortso to concentrate her powers of vision as to substitute a firm outline of theobject instead of a vague one. The impression of itsactual state, at this distance of a hundred and sixty years, darkens inevitablythrough the picture which we would fain give of its appearance on the morningwhen the Puritan magnate bade all the town to be his guests.
A susceptible observer, at any rate, might haveregarded it as affording very little evidence of the general benignity of soulwhereof it purported to be the outward reflection. And if the observer chancedto be ill-natured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably suspectthat the smile on the gentleman’s face was a good deal akin to the shineon his boots, and that each must have cost him and his boot-black,respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and preserve them. The guest seated himself in the place assigned him, and looked strangelyaround. He was evidently trying to grapple with the present scene, and bring ithome to his mind with a more satisfactory distinctness.
In her aspectthere was a familiar gladness, and a holiness that you could play with, and yetreverence it as much as ever. She was like a prayer, offered up in thehomeliest beauty of one’s mother-tongue. Fresh was Phœbe, moreover, andairy and sweet in her apparel; as if nothing that she wore—neither hergown, nor her small straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than hersnowy stockings—had ever been put on before; or, if worn, were all thefresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the rosebuds.
This flurry of creativity and editing enabled him, for the first time, to meet the family's expenses. Hograve and Phoebe decide that the best thing they can do is to open the front doors so the magistrate can enter the house. With the opening of the house, not only does the public enter in, but the Pyncheons are able to go out. Thus ends the long habitation of generations of Pyncheons in the house of the seven gables.
Phœbe’s Indiancakes were the sweetest offering of all,—in their hue befitting therustic altars of the innocent and golden age,—or, so brightly yellow werethey, resembling some of the bread which was changed to glistening gold whenMidas tried to eat it. The butter must not be forgotten,—butter whichPhœbe herself had churned, in her own rural home, and brought it to her cousinas a propitiatory gift,—smelling of clover-blossoms, and diffusing thecharm of pastoral scenery through the dark-panelled parlor. As to Phœbe’s not being a lady, or whether she were a lady or no, it wasa point, perhaps, difficult to decide, but which could hardly have come up forjudgment at all in any fair and healthy mind. Out of New England, it would beimpossible to meet with a person combining so many ladylike attributes with somany others that form no necessary (if compatible) part of the character.
Fora very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however, the Maules hadcontinued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had suffered so unjust adeath. Nor would ithave been singular had they ceased to remember that the House of the SevenGables was resting its heavy framework on a foundation that was rightfullytheir own. Such is the case now, afterso many ancient prejudices have been overthrown; and it was far more so inante-Revolutionary days, when the aristocracy could venture to be proud, andthe low were content to be abased.
A baker’s cart had already rattled throughthe street, chasing away the latest vestige of night’s sanctity with thejingle-jangle of its dissonant bells. A milkman was distributing the contentsof his cans from door to door; and the harsh peal of a fisherman’s conchshell was heard far off, around the corner. Nothing remained, except to take down the bar fromthe shop-door, leaving the entrance free—more than free—welcome, asif all were household friends—to every passer-by, whose eyes might beattracted by the commodities at the window.
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