 CHAPTER XII It must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so active as Phoebe could be wholly confined within the precincts of the old Pinchon house. Clifford's demands upon her time were usually satisfied, in those long days, considerably earlier than sunset. Quiet as his daily existence seemed, it nevertheless drained all the resources by which he lived. It was not physical exercise that overweared him, for, except that he sometimes wrought a little with a hoe, or paced the garden-walk, or in rainy weather, traversed a large unoccupied room. It was his tendency to remain only too quiescent as regarded any toil of the limbs and muscles. But either there was a smoldering fire within him that consumed his vital energy, or the monotony that would have dragged itself with benumbing effect over a mind differently situated was no monotony to Clifford. Possibly he was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights, sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more practised with the world. As all his activity and vicissitude to the new mind of a child, so might it be likewise to a mind that had undergone a kind of new creation after its long suspended life. Be the cause what it may, Clifford commonly retired to rest, thoroughly exhausted, while the sunbeams were still melting through his window-curtains, or were thrown with late luster on the chamber wall. And while he thus slept early, as other children do, and dreamed of childhood, Phoebe was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder of the day and evening. This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe. The old house, as we have already said, had both the dry rot and the damp rot in its walls. It was not good to breathe no other atmosphere than that. Hepsiba, though she had her valuable and redeeming traits, had grown to be a kind of lunatic by imprisoning herself so long in one place, with no other company than a single series of ideas and but one affection and one bitter sense of wrong. Clifford, the reader may perhaps imagine, was too inert to operate morally on his fellow creatures, however intimate and exclusive their relations with him. But the sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtle and universal than we think. It exists, indeed, among different classes of organized life, and vibrates from one to another. A flower, for instance, as Phoebe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in Clifford's hand, or Hepsiba's, than in her own, and by the same law, converting her whole daily life into a flower fragrance for these two sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast. Unless she had now and then indulged her brisk impulses, and breathed rural air in a suburban walk, or ocean breezes along the shore, had occasionally obeyed the impulse of nature in New England girls by attending a metaphysical or philosophical lecture, or viewing a seven-mile panorama, or listening to a concert, had gone out shopping about the city, ransacking entire depots of splendid merchandise, and bringing home a ribbon, had employed likewise a little time to read the Bible in her chamber, and had stolen a little more to think of her mother and her native place. Unless for such moral medicines as the above, we should soon have beheld our poor Phoebe grow thin and put on a bleached, unwholesome aspect, and assume strange, shy ways, prophetic of old maidenhood and a cheerless future. Even as it was, a change grew visible, a change partly to be regretted, although whatever charm it infringed upon was repaired by another, perhaps more precious. She was not so constantly gay, but had her moods of thought, which Clifford on the whole liked better than her former phase of unmingled cheerfulness, because now she understood him better and more delicately, and sometimes even interpreted him to himself. Her eyes looked larger and darker and deeper, so deep, at some silent moments, that they seemed like artesian wells, down, down into the infinite. She was less girlish than when we first beheld her alighting from the omnibus, less girlish, but more a woman. The only youthful mind with which Phoebe had an opportunity of frequent intercourse was that of the daguerre typist. Inevitably, by the pressure of the seclusion about them, they had been brought into habits of some familiarity. Had they met under different circumstances, neither of these young persons would have been likely to bestow much thought upon the other, unless, indeed, their extreme dissimilarity should have proved a principle of mutual attraction. Both it is true where characters proper to New England life, and possessing a common ground, therefore, in their more external developments, but as unlike in their respective interiors, as if their native climes had been at world-wide distance. During the early part of their acquaintance, Phoebe had held back rather more than was customary, with her frank and simple manners, from whole graves not very marked advances. Nor was she yet satisfied that she knew him well, although they almost daily met and talked together in a kind, friendly, and what seemed to be a familiar way. The artist in a desultory manner had imparted to Phoebe something of his history. Young as he was, and had his career terminated at the point already attained, there had been enough of incident to fill, very creditably, an autobiographic volume. A romance on the plan of Gil Bloss, adapted to American society and manners, would cease to be a romance. The experience of many individuals among us, who think it hardly worth the telling, would equal the vicissitudes of the Spaniard's earlier life, while their ultimate success, or the point whether they tend, might be incomparably higher than any that a novelist would imagine for his hero. Whole Grave, as he told Phoebe somewhat proudly, could not boast of his origin, unless as being exceedingly humble, nor of his education, except that it had been the scantiest possible, and obtained by a few winter months attendance at a district school. Left early to his own guidance, he had begun to be self-dependent while yet a boy, and it was a condition aptly suited to his natural force of will. Though now but twenty-two years old, lacking some months, which are years in such a life, he had already been, first, a country schoolmaster, next, a salesman in a country store, and either at the same time or afterwards, the political editor of a country newspaper. He had subsequently traveled New England and the Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut manufacturer of cologne water and other essences. In an episodical way, he had studied and practiced dentistry and with very flattering success, especially in many of the factory towns along our inland streams. As a supernumerary official of some kind or other aboard a packet ship, he had visited Europe and found some means before his return to see Italy and part of France and Germany. At a later period, he had spent some months in a community of four-year-ists. Still more recently, he had been a public lecturer on mesmerism, for which science, as he assured Phoebe, and indeed satisfactorily proved, by putting shot to clear who happened to be scratching nearby, to sleep, he had very remarkable endowments. His present phase, as a daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in his own view, nor likely to be more permanent than any of the preceding ones. It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an adventurer who had his bread to earn. It would be thrown aside as carelessly whenever he should choose to earn his bread by some other equally digressive means. But what was most remarkable, and perhaps showed a more than common poise in the young man, was the fact that, amid all these personal vicissitudes, he had never lost his identity. Homeless as he had been, continually changing his whereabout, and therefore responsible neither to public opinion nor to individuals, putting off one exterior and snatching up another, to be soon shifted for a third. He had never violated the innermost man, but it carried his conscience along with him. It was impossible to know whole grave without recognizing this to be the fact. Hepsiba had seen it. Phoebe soon saw it likewise, and gave him the sort of confidence which such a certainty inspires. She was startled, however, and sometimes repelled, not by any doubt of his integrity to whatever law he acknowledged, but by a sense that his law differed from her own. He made her uneasy, and seemed to unsettle everything around her by his lack of reverence for what was fixed, unless, at a moment's warning, it could establish its right to hold its ground. Then, moreover, she scarcely thought him affectionate in his nature. He was too calm and cool an observer. Phoebe felt his eye, often. His heart seldom or never. He took a certain kind of interest in Hepsiba and her brother, and Phoebe herself. He studied them attentively, and allowed no slightest circumstance of their individualities to escape him. He was ready to do them whatever good he might, but, after all, he never exactly made common cause with them, nor gave any reliable evidence that he loved them better in proportion as he knew them more. In his relations with them, he seemed to be in quest of metal food, not heart-sustenance. Phoebe could not conceive what interested him so much in her friends and herself, intellectually, since he cared nothing for them, or comparatively so little as objects of human affection. Always in his interviews with Phoebe the artist made a special inquiry as to the welfare of Clifford, whom, except at the Sunday festival, he seldom saw. Does he still seem happy? he asked one day. As happy as a child, answered Phoebe. But like a child, too, very easily disturbed. How disturbed! inquired Holgrave. By things without, or by thoughts within. I cannot see his thoughts. How should I? replied Phoebe with simple frequency. Very often his humor changes without any reason that can be guessed at, just as a cloud comes over the sun. Latterly, since I have begun to know him better, I feel it to be not quite right to look closely into his moods. He's had such a great sorrow that his heart is made all solemn and sacred by it. When he is cheerful, when the sun shines into his mind, then I venture to peep in, just as far as the light reaches, but no further. It is wholly ground where the shadow falls. How pridly you express this sentiment, said the artist. I can understand the feeling without possessing it. Had I your opportunities, no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to the full depth of my plummet line. How strange that you should wish it! remarked Phoebe involuntarily. What is cousin Clifford to you? Oh, nothing, of course nothing! answered Holgrave with a smile. Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible world. The more I look at it, the more it puzzles me, and I begin to suspect that a man's bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom. Men and women, and children too, are such strange creatures that one never can be certain that he really knows them, nor ever guess what they have been from what he sees them to be now. Judge Pinchon, Clifford, what a complex riddle, a complexity of complexities, do they present. It requires intuitive sympathy like a young girl's to solve it. A mere observer, like myself, who never have any intuitions and am at best only subtle and acute, is pretty certain to go astray. The artist now turned his conversation to themes less dark than that which they had touched upon. Phoebe and he were young together, nor had Holgrave, in his premature experience of life, wasted entirely that beautiful spirit of youth, which, gushing forth from one small heart and fancy, may diffuse itself over the universe, making it all as bright as on the first day of creation. Man's own youth is the world's youth, at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth's granite substance is something not yet hardened and which he can mold into whatever shape he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk sagely about the world's old age, but never actually believed what he said. He was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the world, that gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable, as a tender stripling capable of being improved into all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest promise of becoming. He had that sense, or inward prophecy, such a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish, that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era to be accomplished in his own lifetime. It seemed to Holgrave, as doubtless it has seemed to the hopeful of every century since the epoch of Adam's grandchildren, that in this age, more than ever before, the moss grown and rotten past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to begin anew. As to the main point, may we never live to doubt it, as to the better centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right. His error lay in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork, in applying his own little lifespan as the measure of an interminable achievement, and, more than all, infancing that it mattered anything to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or against it. Yet it was well for him to think so. This enthusiasm, infusing itself through the calmness of his character, and thus taking an aspect of settled thought and wisdom, would serve to keep his youth pure, and make his aspirations high. And when, when the years settling down more weightily upon him, his early faith should be modified by inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution of his sentiments. He would still have faith in man's brightening destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he should recognize his helplessness in his own behalf, and the haughty faith with which he began life would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its close, in discerning that man's best directed effort accomplishes a kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities. Hullgrave had read very little, and that little in passing through the thoroughfare of life, where the mystic language of his books was necessarily mixed up with the babble of the multitude, so that both one and the other were apt to lose any sense that might have been properly their own. He considered himself a thinker, and was certainly of a thoughtful turn, but with his own path to discover, had perhaps hardly yet reached the point where an educated man begins to think. The true value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward strength, which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely like a change of garments. In that enthusiasm, so quiet that he scarcely knew of its existence, but which gave a warmth to everything that he laid his hand on, in that personal ambition, hidden from his own as well as other eyes, among his more generous impulses, but in which lurked a certain efficacy that might solidify him from a theorist into the champion of some practicable cause. Altogether in his culture and want of culture, in his crude, wild and misty philosophy, and the practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies, in his magnanimous zeal for man's welfare, and his recklessness of whatever the ages had established in man's behalf, in his faith, and in his infidelity, in what he had, and in what he lacked, the artist might fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compiers in his native land. His career it would be difficult to prefigure. There appeared to be qualities in a whole grave, such as, in a country where everything is free to the hand that can grasp it, could hardly fail to put some of the world's prizes within his reach. But these matters are delightfully uncertain. At almost every step in life we meet with young men of just about whole graves age, for whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, even after much and careful inquiry, we never happen to hear another word. The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves and other people. Like certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely in their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing day. But our business is with whole grave as we find him on this particular afternoon, and in the arbor of the Pinchung Garden. In that point of view it was a pleasant sight to behold this young man, with so much faith in himself, and so fair an appearance of admirable powers, so little harm, too, by the many tests that had tried his metal. It was pleasant to see him in his kindly intercourse with Phoebe. Her thought had scarcely done him justice when it pronounced him cold, or, if so, he had grown warmer now. Without such purpose on her part, and unconsciously on his, she made the house of the seven gables like a home to him, and the garden a familiar precinct. With the insight on which he prided himself, he fancied that he could look through Phoebe, and all around her, and could read her off like a page of a child's storybook. But these transparent natures are often deceptive in their depth. Those pebbles at the bottom of the fountain are farther from us than we think. Thus the artist, whatever he might judge of Phoebe's capacity, was beguiled, by some silent charm of hers, to talk freely of what he dreamed of doing in the world. He poured himself out, as to another self. Very possibly he forgot Phoebe while he talked to her, and was moved only by the inevitable tendency of thought, when rendered sympathetic by enthusiasm and emotion, to flow into the first safe reservoir which it finds. But had you peeped at them through the chinks of the garden fence, the young man's earnestness and heightened color might have led you to suppose that he was making love to the young girl. At length something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for Phoebe to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin Hepsiba, and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old Pinchon house. Without directly answering her, he turned from the future, which had heretofore been the theme of his discourse, and began to speak of the influences of the past. One subject indeed is but the reverberation of the other. Shall we never, never get rid of this past? cried he, keeping up the earnest tone of his preceding conversation. It lies upon the present like a giant's dead body. In fact, the cases just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in caring about the corpse of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle you to see what slaves we are to bygone times, to death if we give the matter the right word, but I do not see it. Observe, Phoebe. For example, then, continued Holgrave. A dead man, if he happens to have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own. Or, if he die in test-state, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment seats, and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books. We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos. We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients. We worship the living deity according to dead men's forms and creeds. Whatever we seek to do of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand obstructs us. Turn our eyes to what point we may. A dead man's white, inimitable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart. And we must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's houses, as, for instance, in this of the seven gables. And why not, said Phoebe, so long as we can be comfortable in them? But we shall live to see the day I trust, went on the artist. When no man shall build his house for posterity, why should he? He might just as reasonably order a durable suit of clothes, leather or gutta percha, or whatever else last longest, so that his great-grandchildren should have the benefit of them, and cut precisely the same figure in the world that he himself does. If each generation were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change, comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform which society is now suffering for. I doubt whether even our public edifices, our capitals, state houses, courthouses, city hall and churches ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and reform the institutions which they symbolize. How you hate everything old, said Phoebe in dismay. It makes me dizzy to think of such a shifting world. I certainly love nothing moldy, answered Holgrave. Now this old pinch on house. Is it a wholesome place to live in, with its black shingles and the green moss that shows how damp they are? Its dark, low-studded rooms, its grime and sordidness, which are the crystallization on its walls of the human breath that has been drawn and exhaled here in discontent and anguish? The house ought to be purified with fire, purified till only its ashes remain. Then why do you live in it? asked Phoebe, a little peaked. Oh, I am pursuing my studies here. Not in books, however, replied Holgrave. The house, in my view, is expressive of that odious and abominable past with all its bad influences against which I have just been declaiming. I dwell in it for a while that I may know the better how to hate it. By the by did you ever hear the story of Maul, the wizard, and what happened between him and your immeasurably great-grandfather? Yes, indeed, said Phoebe. I heard it long ago, from my father, and two or three times from my cousin Hepsiba, in the month that I have been here. She seems to think that all the calamities of the pinchons began from that quarrel with the wizard, as you call him. And you, Mr. Holgrave, look as if you thought so too. How singular that you should believe what is so very absurd when you reject many things that are a great deal worthier of credit. I do believe it, said the artist seriously. Not as a superstition, however, but as proved by unquestionable facts, and as exemplifying a theory. Now see, under those seven gables at which we now look up, and which old Colonel Pinchon meant to be the house of his descendants, in prosperity and happiness, down to an epic far beyond the present, under that roof, through a portion of three centuries, there has been perpetual remorse of conscience, a constantly defeated hope, strife amongst kindred, various misery, a strange form of death, dark suspicion, unspeakable disgrace, all or most of which calamity I have the means of tracing to the old Puritans inordinate desire to plant and endow a family. To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is that, once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great obscure mass of humanity and forget all about its ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean pipes. In the family existence of these Pinchons, for instance—forgive me, Phoebe, but I cannot think of you as one of them—in their brief New England pedigree, there has been time enough to infect them all with some kind of lunacy or another. You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred, said Phoebe, debating within herself whether she ought to take offense. I speak true thoughts to a true mind, answered Holgrave, with a vehemence which Phoebe had not before witnessed in him. The truth is, as I say. Furthermore, the original perpetrator and father of this mischief appears to have perpetuated himself and still walks the street—at least his very image, in mind and body—with a fairest prospect of transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched an inheritance as he has received. Do you remember the daguerreotype and its resemblance to the old portrait? How strangely and earnest you are! exclaimed Phoebe, looking at him with surprise and perplexity, half alarmed, and partly inclined to laugh. You talk of the lunacy of the Pinchons. Is it contagious? I understand you, said the artist, colouring and laughing. I believe I am a little mad. This subject has taken hold of my mind with the stragest tenacity of clutch since I have lodged in yonder old Gable. As one method of throwing it off I have put an incident of the Pinchon family history, with which I happen to be acquainted, into the form of a legend and mean to publish it in a magazine. Do you write for the magazines? inquired Phoebe. Is it possible you did not know it? cried Holgrave. Well, such is literary fame. Yes, Miss Phoebe Pinchon, among the multitude of my marvelous gifts I have that of writing stories, and my name has figured I can assure you, on the covers of Graham and Godie, making as respectable an appearance, for ought I could see, as any of the canonized bead-roll with which it was associated. In the humorous line I am thought to have a very pretty way with me, and as for Pethos I am as provocative of tears as an onion. But shall I read you my story? Yes, if it is not very long, said Phoebe, and added laughingly, nor very dull. As this latter point was one which the daguerreotypeis could not decide for himself, he forthwith produced his role of manuscript, and, while the late sunbeams gilded the Seven Gables, began to read. End of chapter. Chapter 13 of The House of the Seven Gables This Lieberbox recording is in the public domain and is read by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina. The House of the Seven Gables By Nathaniel Hawthorne Chapter 13 Alice Pinchon There was a message brought one day from the worshipful Trevesa Pinchon to young Matthew Mall, the carpenter, desiring his immediate presence at the House of the Seven Gables. And what does your master want with me? said the carpenter to Mr. Pinchon's black servant. Does the house need any repair? Well, it may by this time. And no blame to my father who built it, neither. I was reading the old Colonel's tombstone, no longer ago than last Sabbath, and reckoning from that date the house has stood seven and thirty years. No wonder if there should be a job to do on the roof. Don't know what Master wants. Answered Scipio. The house is a very good house, and old Colonel Pinchon thinks so too, I reckon. Elsewhere has the old man haunted so and frightened a poor nigger as he does. Well, well, friend Scipio, let your master know that I'm coming. Said the carpenter with a laugh. For a fair workman-like job he'll find me his man. And so the house is haunted, is it? It will take a tighter workman than I am to keep the spirits out of the seven gables, even if the Colonel would be quiet. He added muttering to himself. My old grandfather the wizard will be pretty sure to stick to the Pinchons as long as their walls hold together. Once that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Mall, asked Scipio, and what fall do you look so black at me? No matter, doggie, said the carpenter. Do you think nobody is to look black but yourself? Go tell your master I'm coming, and if you happen to see Mistress Alice, his daughter, give Matthew Mall's humble respects to her. She has brought a fair face from Italy. Fair and gentle and proud has that same Alice Pinchon. He talked of Mistress Alice, cried Scipio as he returned from his errand. The low carpenter man, he know business so much as to look at her a great way off. This young Matthew Mall, the carpenter, it must be observed, was a person little understood, and not very generally liked, in the town where he resided. Not that anything could be alleged against his integrity, or his skill and diligence in the handicraft which he exercised. The aversion, as it might justly be called, with which many persons regarded him was partly the result of his own character and deportment, and partly an inheritance. He was the grandson of a former Matthew Mall, one of the early settlers of the town, and who had been a famous and terrible wizard in his day. This old reprobate was one of the sufferers when Cotton Mather, and his brother ministers and the learned judges and otherwise men, and Sir William Phipps, the sagacious Governor, made such laudable efforts to weaken the great enemy of souls by sending a multitude of his adherents up the rocky pathway of Gallows Hill. Since those days, no doubt, it had grown to be suspected that, in consequence of an unfortunate overdoing of a work pre-sworthy in itself, the proceedings against the witches had proved far less acceptable to the beneficent father than to that very arch enemy whom they were intended to distress and utterly overwhelm. It is not the less certain, however, that awe and terror brooded over the memories of those who died for this horrible crime of witchcraft. Their graves, in the crevices of the rocks, were supposed to be incapable of retaining the occupants who had been so hastily thrust into them. Old Matthew Mall, especially, was known to have as little hesitation or difficulty in rising out of his grave as an ordinary man in getting out of bed, and was as often seen at midnight as living people at noonday. This pestilent wizard, in whom his just punishment seemed to have wrought no manner of amendment, had an inveterate habit of haunting a certain mansion, styled the House of the Seven Gables, against the owner of which he pretended to hold an unsettled claim for ground rent. The ghost, it appears, with the pertinacity which was one of his distinguishing characteristics while alive, insisted that he was the rightful proprietor of the site upon which the house stood. His terms were that either the aforesaid ground rent from the day when the cellar began to be dug should be paid down, or the mansion itself given up, else he, the ghostly creditor, would have his finger in all the affairs of the Pinchons and make everything go wrong with them, though it should be a thousand years after his death. It was a wild story, perhaps, but seemed not altogether so incredible to those who could remember what an inflexibly obstinate old fellow this wizard maul had been. Now the wizard's grandson, the young Matthew Maul of our story, was popularly supposed to have inherited some of his ancestors' questionable traits. It is wonderful how many absurdities were promulgated in reference to the young man. He was fabled, for example, to have a strange power of getting into people's dreams and regulating matters there according to his own fancy. Pretty much like the stage manager of a theatre. There was a great deal of talk among the neighbours, especially the pedicoded ones, about what they called the witchcraft of Maul's eye. Some said that he could look into people's minds, others that by the marvellous power of this eye he could draw people into his own mind, or send them, if he pleased, to do errands to his grandfather in the spiritual world. Others, again, that it was what is termed an evil eye, and possessed the valuable faculty of blighting corn and drying children into mummies with the heartburn. But after all, what worked most to the young carpenter's disadvantage was, first, the reserve and sternness of his natural disposition, and next, the fact of his not being a church communicant, and the suspicion of his holding heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity. After receiving Mr. Pinchon's message, the carpenter merely tarried to finish a small job which he happened to have in hand, and then took his way towards the house of the Seven Gables. This noted edifice, though its style might be getting a little out of fashion, was still as respectable a family residence as that of any gentleman in town. The present owner, Gervaisa Pinchon, was said to have contracted a dislike to the house, in consequence of a shock to his sensibility in early childhood from the sudden death of his grandfather. In the very act of running to climb Colonel Pinchon's knee, the boy had discovered the old Puritan to be a corpse. On arriving at Manhood, Mr. Pinchon had visited England where he married a lady of fortune, and had subsequently spent many years partly in the mother country and partly in various cities on the continent of Europe. During this period the family mansion had been consigned to the charge of a kinsman who was allowed to make it his home for the time being in consideration of keeping the premises in thorough repair. So faithfully had this contract been fulfilled that now, as the carpenter approached the house, his practice eye could detect nothing to criticize in its condition. The peaks of the seven gables rose up sharply, the shingled roof looked thoroughly watertight, and the glittering plaster work entirely covered the exterior walls and sparkled in the October sun, as if it had been new only a week ago. The house had that pleasant aspect of life which is like the cheery expression of comfortable activity in the human countenance. You could see at once that there was the stir of a large family within it. A huge load of oak wood was passing through the gateway towards the outbuildings in the rear. The fat cook, or probably it might be the housekeeper, stood at the side door, bargaining for some turkeys and poultry which a countryman had brought for sale. Now and then a maid servant neatly dressed, and now the shining sable face of a slave, might be seen bustling across the windows in the lower part of the house. At an open window of a room in the second story, hanging over some pots of beautiful and delicate flowers, exotics, but which had never known a more genial sunshine than that of the New England autumn, was the figure of a young lady, an exotic, like the flowers, and beautiful and delicate as they. Her presence imparted an indescribable grace and faint witchery to the whole edifice. In other respects it was a substantial jolly-looking mansion, and seemed fit to be the residence of a patriarch, who might establish his own headquarters in the front gable, and assign one of the remainder to each of his six children, while the great chimney in the center should symbolize the old fellow's hospitable heart, which kept them all warm, and made a great hole of the seven smaller ones. There was a vertical sundial on the front gable, and as the carpenter passed beneath it he looked up and noted the hour. Three o'clock, said he to himself, my father told me that dial was put up only an hour before the old Colonel's death. How truly it has kept time these seven and thirty years past! The shadow creeps and creeps, and is always looking over the shoulder of the sunshine. It might have befitted a craftsman, like Matthew Mall, on being sent for, to a gentleman's house, to go to the back door, where servants and work people were usually admitted, or at least to the side entrance, where the better class of tradesmen made application. But the carpenter had a great deal of pride and stiffness in his nature, and at this moment, moreover, his heart was bitter with a sense of hereditary wrong, because he considered the great pinch on house to be standing on soil which should have been his own. On this very sight, beside a spring of delicious water, his grandfather had felled the pine trees and built a cottage in which children had been born to him, and it was only from a dead man's stiffened fingers that Colonel Pinchon had rested away the tidal deeds. So young Mall went straight to the principal entrance, beneath the portal of carved oak, and gave such a peel of the iron knocker that you would have imagined the stern old wizard himself to be standing at the threshold. Black Scipio answered the summons in a prodigious hurry, but showed the whites of his eyes in amazement of beholding only the carpenter. Lord a mercy, what a great man he be, this carpenter fella, mumbled Scipio down in his throat. Anybody think he beat on the door with his biggest hammer? Here I am, said Mall sternly, show me the way to your master's parlor. As he stepped into the house, a note of sweet and melancholy music thrilled and vibrated along the passageway, proceeding from one of the rooms above stairs. It was the harpsichord which Alice Pinchon had brought with her from beyond the sea. The fair Alice bestowed most of her maiden leisure between flowers and music, 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 England modes of life, in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed. As Mr. Pinchon had been impatiently awaiting Mall's arrival, Black Scipio, of course, lost no time in ushering the carpenter into his master's presence. The room in which this gentleman sat was a parlor of moderate size, looking out upon the garden of the house, and having its windows partly shadowed by the foliage of fruit trees. It was Mr. Pinchon's peculiar apartment, and was provided with furniture in an elegant and costly style, principally from Paris. The floor, which was unusual at that day, being covered with a carpet, so skillfully and richly wrought that it seemed to glow as with living flowers. In one corner stood a marble woman, to whom her own beauty was the sole and sufficient garment. Some pictures, that looked old and had a mellow tinge diffused through all their artful splendor, hung on the walls. Near the fireplace was a large and very beautiful casket of ebony, inlaid with ivory, a piece of antique furniture which Mr. Pinchon had bought in Venice, and which he used as the treasure-place for metals, ancient coins, and whatever small and valuable curiosities he had picked up on his travels. Through all this variety of decoration, however, the room showed its original characteristics, its low stud, its cross-beam, its chimney-piece, with the old-fashioned Dutch tiles, so that it was the emblem of a mind industriously stored with foreign ideas, and elaborated into artificial refinement, but neither larger, nor in its proper self, more elegant than before. There were two objects that appeared rather out of place in this very handsomely furnished room. One was a large map, or a surveyor's plan, of attractive land, which looked as if it had been drawn a good many years ago, and was now dingy with smoke and soiled here and there with a touch of fingers. The other was a portrait of a stern old man in a puritan garb, painted roughly but with a bold effect, and a remarkably strong expression of character. At a small table, before a fire of English sea coal, sat Mr. Pinchon sipping coffee, which had grown to be a very favorite beverage with him in France. He was a middle-aged and really handsome man, with a wig flowing down upon his shoulders. His coat was of blue velvet, with lace on the borders and at the buttonholes, and the firelight glistened on the spacious breath of his waistcoat, which was flowered all over with gold. On the entrance of Scipio, ushering in the carpenter, Mr. Pinchon turned partly round, but resumed his former position and proceeded deliberately to finish his cup of coffee, without immediate notice of the guest whom he had summoned to his presence. It was not that he intended any rudeness or improper neglect, which indeed he would have blushed to be guilty of. But it never occurred to him that a person in Maul's station had a claim on his courtesy, or would trouble himself about it one way or the other. The carpenter, however, stepped it once to the hearth and turned himself about so as to look Mr. Pinchon in the face. You sent for me, said he, be pleased to explain your business that I may go back to my own affairs. Ah, excuse me, said Mr. Pinchon quietly. I did not mean to tax your time without a recompense. Your name, I think, is Maul, Thomas, or Matthew Maul, a son or grandson of the builder of this house? Matthew Maul, replied the carpenter, son of him who built the house, grandson of the rightful proprietor of the soil. I know the dispute to which you allude, observed Mr. Pinchon with undisturbed equanimity. I am well aware that my grandfather was compelled to resort to a suit at law in order to establish his claim to the foundation site of this edifice. We will not, if you please, renew the discussion. The matter was settled at the time and by the competent authorities. Equitably, it is to be presumed, and at all events irrevocably. Yet, singularly enough, there is an incidental reference to this very subject in what I am now about to say to you. And this same inveterate grudge—excuse me, I mean no offense— this irritability which you have just shown is not entirely aside from the matter. If you can find anything for your purpose, Mr. Pinchon, said the carpenter, it demands natural resentment for the wrongs done to his blood, you are welcome to it. I take you at your word, Goodman Mall, said the owner of the seven gables with a smile, and will proceed to suggest a mode in which your hereditary resentments, justifiable or otherwise, may have had a bearing on my affairs. You have heard, I suppose, that the Pinchon family, ever since my grandfather's days, has been prosecuting a still unsettled claim to a very large extent of territory at the eastward? Often, replied Mall, and it is said that a smile came over his face, very often, from my father. This claim, continued Mr. Pinchon, after pausing a moment, as if to consider what the carpenter's smile might mean, appeared to be on the very verge of a settlement and full allowance at the period of my grandfather's decease. It was well known to those in his confidence that he anticipated neither difficulty nor delay. Now, Colonel Pinchon, I need hardly say, was a practical man, well acquainted with public and private business, and not at all the person to cherish ill-founded hopes, or to attempt the following out of an impracticable scheme. It is obvious to conclude, therefore, that he had grounds, not apparent to his heirs, for his confident anticipation of success in the matter of this eastern claim. In a word, I believe, and my legal advisors coincide in the belief, which moreover is authorized to a certain extent by the family traditions, that my grandfather was in possession of some deed or other document essential to this claim, but which has since disappeared. Very likely, said Matthew Mall, and again it is said there was a dark smile on his face. But what can a poor carpenter have to do with the grand affairs of the Pinchon family? Perhaps nothing, returned Mr. Pinchon, possibly much. Here ensued a great many words between Matthew Mall and the proprietor of the Seven Gables, on the subject which the latter had thus broached. It seems, although Mr. Pinchon had some hesitation in referring to stories so exceedingly absurd in their aspect, that the popular belief pointed to some mysterious connection and dependence, existing between the family of the Malls, and these vast unrealized possessions of the Pinchons. It was an ordinary saying that the old wizard, hanged though he was, had obtained the best end of the bargain in his contest with Colonel Pinchon, in as much as he had got possession of the great Eastern claim in exchange for an acre or two of guarding-ground. A very aged woman, recently dead, had often used the metaphorical expression in her fireside talk that the miles and miles of the Pinchon lands had been shoveled into Mall's grave, which, by the by, was but a very shallow nook between two rocks near the summit of Gallows Hill. Again, when the lawyers were making inquiry for the missing document, it was a byword that it would never be found unless in the wizard's skeleton hand. So much weight had the shrewd lawyers assigned to these fables that, but Mr. Pinchon did not see fit to inform the carpenter of the fact. They had secretly caused the wizard's grave to be searched. Nothing was discovered, however, except that, unaccountably, the right hand of the skeleton was gone. Now, what was unquestionably important? A portion of these popular rumors could be traced, though rather doubtfully and indistinctly, to chance words and obscure hints of the executed wizard's son and the father of this present Matthew Mall. And here Mr. Pinchon could bring an item of his own personal evidence into play. Though but a child at the time he either remembered or fancied that Matthew's father had had some job to perform on the day before, or possibly the very morning of the Colonel's decease, in the private room where he and the carpenter were at this moment talking. Certain papers belonging to Colonel Pinchon, as his grandson distinctly recollected, had been spread out on the table. Matthew Mall understood the insinuated suspicion. My father, he said, but still there was that dark smile making a riddle of his countenance. My father was an honester man than the bloody old Colonel, not to get his rights back again what he had carried off one of those papers. I shall not bendy words with you, observed the foreign bread Mr. Pinchon with haughty composure, nor will it become me to resent any rudeness towards either my grandfather or myself. A gentleman, before seeking intercourse with the person of your station and habits, will first consider whether the urgency of the end may compensate for the disagreeableness of the means. It does so in the present instance. He then renewed the conversation and made great pecuniary offers to the carpenter, in case the latter should give information leading to the discovery of the lost document, and the consequent success of the Eastern claim. For a long time Matthew Maul is said to have turned a cold ear to these propositions. At last, however, with a strange kind of laugh, he inquired whether Mr. Pinchon would make over to him the old wizard's homestead ground, together with the house of the seven gables now standing on it, in requital of the documentary evidence so urgently required. The wild chimney-corner legend, which without copying all its extravagances, my narrative essentially follows, here gives an account of some very strange behavior on the part of Colonel Pinchon's portrait. This picture, it must be understood, was supposed to be so intimately connected with the fate of the house, and so magically built into its walls, that if once it should be removed, that very instant the whole edifice would come thundering down in a heap of dusty ruin. All through the foregoing conversation between Mr. Pinchon and the carpenter, the portrait had been frowning, clenching its fist, and giving many such proofs of excessive discomposure, but without attracting the notice of either of the two colloquists. And finally, at Matthew Mall's audacious suggestion of a transfer of the seven gabled structure, the ghostly portrait is avert to have lost all patience, and to have shown itself on the point of descending bodily from its frame. But such incredible incidents are merely to be mentioned aside. Give up this house! exclaimed Mr. Pinchon, in amazement at the proposal. Were I to do so, my grandfather would not rest quiet in his grave. He never has, if all stories are true, remarked the carpenter composedly, but that matter concerns his grandson more than it does Matthew Mall. I have no other terms to propose. Impossible as he at first thought it to comply with Mall's conditions, still, on a second glance, Mr. Pinchon was of opinion that they might at least be made matter of discussion. He himself had no personal attachment for the house, nor any pleasant associations connected with his childish residence in it. On the contrary, after seven and thirty years, the presence of his dead grandfather still seemed to pervade it, as on the morning when the affrighted boy had beheld him with so ghastly an aspect stiffening in his chair. His long abode in foreign parts, moreover, and familiarity with many of the castles and ancestral halls of England, and the marble palaces of Italy, had caused him to look contemptuously at the house of the seven gables, whether in point of splendor or convenience. It was a mention exceedingly inadequate to the style of living which it would be incumbent on Mr. Pinchon to support, after realizing his territorial rights. His steward might deign to occupy it, but never, certainly, the great landed proprietor himself. In the event of success, indeed, it was his purpose to return to England, nor, to say the truth, what he recently have quitted that more congenial home had not his own fortune, as well as his deceased wife's, begun to give symptoms of exhaustion. The eastern claim once fairly settled, and put upon the firm basis of actual possession, Mr. Pinchon's property, to be measured by miles, not acres, would be worth an earldom, and would reasonably entitle him to solicit, or enable him to purchase, that elevated dignity from the British monarch. Lord Pinchon! Or the Earl of Waldo! How could such a magnet be expected to contract his grandeur within the pitiful compass of seven shingled gables? In short, on an enlarged view of the business, the carpenter's terms appeared so ridiculously easy that Mr. Pinchon could scarcely forbear laughing in his face. He was quite ashamed, after the foregoing reflections, to propose any diminution of so moderate a recompense for the immense service to be rendered. I consent to your proposition, Maul, cried he. Put me in possession of the document essential to establish my rights, and the house of the seven gables is your own. According to some versions of the story, a regular contract to the above effect was drawn up by a lawyer, and signed and sealed in the presence of witnesses. Others say that Matthew Maul was contented with a private written agreement, in which Mr. Pinchon pledged his honor and integrity to the fulfillment of the terms concluded upon. The gentleman then ordered wine, which he and the carpenter drank together, in confirmation of their bargain. During the whole preceding discussion and subsequent formalities, the old Purigen's portrait seemed to have persisted in its shadowy gestures of disapproval. But without effect, except that, as Mr. Pinchon set down the empty glass, he thought he beheld his grandfather frown. This sherry is too potent a wine for me. It has affected my brain already. He observed, after a somewhat startled look at the picture, on returning to Europe I shall confine myself to the more delicate vintages of Italy and France, the best of which will not bear transportation. My Lord Pinchon may drink what wine he will and wherever he pleases, replied the carpenter, as if he had been privy to Mr. Pinchon's ambitious projects. But first, sir, if you desire tidings of this lost document, I must crave the favor of a little talk with your fair daughter Alice. You are mad, Maul! exclaimed Mr. Pinchon haughtily, and now at last there was anger mixed up with his pride. What can my daughter have to do with a business like this? Indeed, at this new demand on the carpenter's part, the proprietor of the seven gables was even more thunderstruck than at the cool proposition to surrender his house. There was, at least, an assignable motive for the first stipulation. There appeared to be none whatever for the last. Nevertheless, Matthew Maul sturdily insisted on the young lady being summoned, and even gave her father to understand, in a mysterious kind of explanation, which made the matter considerably darker than it looked before, that the only chance of acquiring the requisite knowledge was through the clear, crystal medium of a pure and virgin intelligence like that of the fair Alice. Not to encumber our story with Mr. Pinchon's scruples, whether of conscience, pride, or fatherly affection, he at length ordered his daughter to be called. He well knew that she was in her chamber, and engaged in no occupation that could not readily be laid aside, for as it happened, ever since Alice's name had been spoken, both her father and the carpenter had heard the sad and sweet music of her harpsichord and the airier melancholy of her accompanying voice. So Alice Pinchon was summoned and appeared. A portrait of this young lady, painted by a Venetian artist and left by her father in England, is said to have fallen into the hands of the present Duke of Devonshire, and to be now preserved at Chatsworth, not on account of any associations with the original, but for its value as a picture and the high character of beauty in the countenance. If ever there was a lady born and set apart from the world's vulgar mass by a certain gentle and cold stateliness, it was this very Alice Pinchon. Yet there was the womanly mixture in her, the tenderness, or at least the tender capabilities. For the sake of that redeeming quality a man of generous nature would have forgiven all her pride and have been content, almost, to lie down in her path and let Alice set her slender foot upon his heart. All that he would have required was simply the acknowledgment that he was indeed a man and a fellow being molded of the same elements as she. As Alice came into the room her eyes fell upon the carpenter, who was standing near its center, clad in a green woollen jacket, a pair of loose breeches open at the knees, and with a long pocket for his rule, the end of which protruded. It was as proper a mark of the artisan's calling as Mr. Pinchon's full-dressed sword of that gentleman's aristocratic pretensions. A glow of artistic approval brightened over Alice Pinchon's face she was struck with admiration, which she made no attempt to conceal, of the remarkable comeliness, strength, and energy of Maul's figure. But that admiring glance, which most other men perhaps would have cherished as a sweet recollection all through life, the carpenter never forgave. It must have been the devil himself that made Maul so subtle in his perception. Does the girl look at me as if I were a brute beast? thought he setting his teeth. She shall know whether I have a human spirit, and the worse for her, if it proves stronger than her own. My father, you sent for me, said Alice in her sweet and harp-like voice. But if you have business with this young man, pray let me go again. You know I do not love this room in spite of that clode with which you try to bring back sunny recollections. Say a moment, young lady, if you please, said Matthew Maul, my business with your father is over. With yourself it is now to begin. Alice looked towards her father in surprise and inquiry. Yes, Alice, said Mr. Pinchon with some disturbance and confusion. This young man, his name is Matthew Maul, professes so far as I can understand him, to be able to discover, through your means, a certain paper or parchment which was missing long before your birth. The importance of the document in question renders it advisable to neglect no possible, even if improbable, method of regaining it. You will therefore oblige me, my dear Alice, by answering this person's inquiries and complying with his lawful and reasonable requests, so far as they may appear to have the aforesaid object in view. As I shall remain in the room you need apprehend no rude nor unbecoming deportment on the young man's part, and at your slightest wish, of course, the investigation, or whatever we may call it, shall immediately be broken off. Mr. Alice Pinchon remarked Matthew Maul with the utmost deference, but yet a half-hidden sarcasm in his look and tone. Will no doubt feel herself quite safe in her father's presence, and under his all sufficient protection. I shall certainly entertain no manner of apprehension with my father at hand, said Alice with maidenly dignity. Neither do I conceive that a lady, while true to herself, can have ought to fear from whomsoever, or in any circumstances. Poor Alice, by what unhappy impulse did she thus put herself at once on terms of defiance against the strength which she could not estimate. Then, Mistress Alice, said Matthew Maul, handing a chair, gracefully enough for a craftsman, will it please you only to sit down and do me the favour, though altogether beyond a poor carpenter's desserts, to fix your eyes on mine. Alice complied. She was very proud. Setting aside all advantages of rank, this fair girl deemed herself conscious of a power, combined of beauty, high, unsullied purity, and the preservative force of womanhood, which could make her sphere impenetrable unless be betrayed by treachery within. She instinctively knew, it may be, that some sinister or evil potency was now striving to pass her barriers, nor would she decline the contest. So Alice put woman's might against man's might, a match not often equal on the part of woman. Her father, meanwhile, had turned away, and seemed absorbed in the contemplation of a landscape by clode where a shadowy and sun-streaked vista penetrated so remotely into an ancient wood, that it would have been no wonder if his fancy had lost itself in the picture's bewildering depths. But in truth, the picture was no more to him at that moment than the blank wall against which it hung. His mind was haunted with the many and strange tales which he had heard, attributing mysterious, if not supernatural, endowments to these malls, as well the grandson here present as his two immediate ancestors. Mr. Pinchon's long resonance abroad, an intercourse with men of wit and fashion, courtiers, worldings, and free thinkers, had done much towards obliterating the grim Puritan superstitions which no man of New England birth at that early period could entirely escape. But on the other hand, had not a whole community believed Mall's grandfather to be a wizard? Had not the crime been proved? Had not the wizard died for it? Had not he bequeathed the legacy of hatred against the Pinchon's to this only grandson, who, as it appeared, was now about to exercise a subtle influence over the daughter of his enemy's house? Might not this influence be the same that was called witchcraft? Turning half around, he caught a glimpse of Mall's figure in the looking glass. At some paces from Alice, with his arms uplifted in the air, the carpenter made a gesture as if directing downward as slow, ponderous, and invisible weight upon the maiden. Stay, Mall! exclaimed Mr. Pinchon, stepping forward. I forbid you are proceeding further. Pray, my dear father, do not interrupt the young man, said Alice without changing her position. His efforts, I assure you, will prove very harmless. Again Mr. Pinchon turned his eyes towards the clode. It was then his daughter's will, in opposition to his own, that the experiment should be fully tried. Henceforth, therefore, he did but consent not urge it. And was it not for her sake far more than for his own that he desired its success? That lost parchment once restored the beautiful Alice Pinchon, with the rich dowry which she could then bestow, might wed an English duke or a German reigning prince, instead of some New England clergyman or lawyer. At the thought the ambitious father almost consented in his heart, if the devil's power were needed to be the accomplishment of this great object, Mall might evoke him. Alice's own purity would be her safeguard. With his mind full of imaginary magnificence, Mr. Pinchon heard a half-uttered exclamation from his daughter. It was very faint and low, so indistinct that there seemed but half a will to shape out the words, and too undefined a purport to be intelligible. Yet it was a call for help. His conscience never doubted it, and little more than a whisper to his ear it was a dismal shriek, and long re-echoed so in the region round his heart. But this time the father did not turn. After a further interval Mall spoke. Behold, your daughter! said he. Mr. Pinchon came hastily forward. The carpenter was standing erect in front of Alice's chair and pointing his finger towards the maiden with an expression of triumphant power, the limits of which could not be defined, as indeed its scope stretched vaguely towards the unseen and the infinite. Alice sat in an attitude of profound repose, with the long brown lashes drooping over her eyes. There she is, said the carpenter, speak to her. Alice, my daughter, exclaimed Mr. Pinchon. My own Alice! She did not stir. Louder, said Mall, smiling. Alice, awake! cried her father. It troubles me to see you thus. Awake! He spoke loudly, with terror in his voice, and close to that delicate ear which had always been so sensitive to every discord. But the sound evidently reached her not. It is indescribable what a sense of remote, dim, unattainable distance betwixt himself and Alice was impressed on the father by this impossibility of reaching her with this voice. Best touch her! said Matthew Mall. Shake the girl! and roughly two. My hands are hardened with too much use of ax, saw, and plane, else I might help you. Mr. Pinchon took her hand and pressed it with the earnestness of startled emotion. He kissed her, who was so great a heartthrob in the kiss, that he thought she must needs feel it. Then, in a gust of anger at her insensibility, he shook her maiden form with a violent switch the next moment it affrighted him to remember. He withdrew his encircling arms, and Alice, whose figure, though flexible, had been wholly impassive, relapsed into the same attitude as before these attempts to arouse her. Mall having shifted his position, her face was turned towards him slightly, but with what seemed to be a reference of her very slumber to his guidance. Then it was a strange sight to behold how the man of conventionalities shook the powder out of his periwig, how the reserved and stately gentleman forgot his dignity, how the gold-embroidered waistcoat flickered and glistened in the firelight with the convulsion of rage, terror, and sorrow in the human heart that was beating under it. Villain! cried Mr. Pinchon, shaking his clenched fist at Mall. You and the fiend together have robbed me of my daughter. Give her back, spawn of the old wizard, or you shall climb Gallows Hill in your grandfather's footsteps. Softly, Mr. Pinchon, said the carpenter with scornful composure, softly, and at please your worship, else you will spoil those rich lace ruffles at your wrists. Is it my crime, if you have sold your daughter for the mere hope of getting a sheet of yellow parchment into your clutch? There sits Mr. Alice quietly asleep. Now let Matthew Mall try whether she be as proud as the carpenter found her a while since. He spoke, and Alice responded, with a soft, subdued inward acquiescence, and a bending of her form towards him, like the flame of a torch when it indicates a gentle draft of air. He beckoned with his hand, and, rising from her chair, finally but undoubtedly, as tending to her sure and inevitable center, the proud Alice approached him. He waved her back, and, retreating, Alice sank again into her seat. She is mine, said Matthew Mall. Mine by the right of the strongest spirit! In the further progress of the legend there is a long grotesque and occasionally awe-striking account of the carpenter's incantations, if so they are to be called, with a view of discovering the lost document. It appears to have been his object to convert the mind of Alice into a kind of telescopic medium through which Mr. Pinchon and himself might obtain a glimpse into the spiritual world. He succeeded, accordingly, in holding an imperfect sort of intercourse, at one remove, with the departed personages in whose custody the so much valued secret had been carried beyond the precincts of earth. During her trance Alice described three figures as being present to her spiritualized perception. One was an aged, dignified, stern-looking gentleman, clad as for a solemn festival in grave and costly attire, but with a great blood stain on his richly wrought band. The second, an aged man, meanly dressed, with a dark and maligned countenance, and a broken halter about his neck. The third, a person not so advanced in life as the former two, but beyond the middle age, wearing a coarse woollen tunic and leather breeches, and with the carpenter's rules sticking out of his side pocket. These three visionary characters possessed a mutual knowledge of the missing document. One of them, in truth. It was he with the blood stain on his band, seemed, unless his gestures were misunderstood, to hold the parchment in his immediate keeping, but was prevented by his two partners in the mystery from disburdening himself of the trust. Finally, when he showed a purpose of shouting forth the secret loudly enough to be heard from his own sphere into that of mortals, his companions struggled with him, and pressed their hands over his mouth, and forthwith, whether that he were choked by it, or that the secret itself was of a crimson hue, there was a fresh flow of blood upon his band. Upon this the two meanly dressed figures mocked and jeered at the much abashed old dignitary, and pointed their fingers at the stain. At this juncture, Maul turned to Mr. Pinshaw. It will never be allowed, said he. The custody of this secret, which would so enrich his heirs, makes part of your grandfather's retribution. He must choke with it until it is no longer of any value. And keep you the house of the seven gables. It is too dear-bought an inheritance, and too heavy with a curse upon it, to be shifted yet a while from the Colonel's posterity. Mr. Pinshaw tried to speak, but what with fear and passion could make only a gurgling murmur in his throat, the carpenter smiled. Ah-ha, worshipful sir! Ah-ha, worshipful sir! So you have old Maul's blood to drink, said he, jeeringly. Fiend in man's shape! Why dost thou keep dominion over my child? cried Mr. Pinshaw, when his choked utterance could make way. Give me back my daughter, and then go thy ways, and may we never meet again. Your daughter, said Matthew Maul, why, she is fairly mine. Nevertheless, not to be too hard with fair Mistress Alice. I will leave her in your keeping. But I do not warrant you that she shall never have occasion to remember Maul, the carpenter. He waved his hands with an upward motion, and, after a few repetitions of similar gestures, the beautiful Alice Pinshaw awoke from her strange trance. She awoke without the slightest recollection of her visionary experience, but as one losing herself in a momentary reverie, and returning to the consciousness of actual life, in almost as brief an interval as the down-sinking flame of the hearth should quiver again up the chimney. On recognizing Matthew Maul, she assumed an air of somewhat cold but gentle dignity. The rather, as there was a certain peculiar smile on the carpenter's visage, that stirred the native pride of the fair Alice. So ended, for that time, the quest for the lost title deed of the Pinshaw territory at the eastward. Nor, though often subsequently renewed, has it ever yet befallen a Pinshawn to set his eye upon that parchment. But alas for the beautiful, the gentle, yet too haughty Alice. A power that she little dreamed of had laid its grasp upon her maiden soul. A will, most unlike her own, constrained her to do its grotesque and fantastic bidding. Her father, as it proved, had martyred his poor child to an inordinate desire for measuring his land by miles instead of acres. And therefore, while Alice Pinshawn lived, she was Maul's slave, in a bondage more humiliating, a thousandfold, than that which binds its chain around the body. Seated by his humble fireside, Maul had but to wave his hand, and wherever the proud lady chanced to be, whether in her chamber or entertaining her father's stately guests, or worshiping a church, whatever her place or occupation, her spirit passed from beneath her own control and bowed itself to Maul. Alice, laugh! The carpenter, beside his hearth, would say, or perhaps intensely will it without a spoken word. And even where at prayer-time, or at a funeral, Alice must break into wild laughter. Alice, be sad! And at the instant down would come her tears, quenching all the mirth of those around her like sudden rain upon a bonfire. Alice, dance! And dance, she would, not in such court-like measures as she had learned abroad, but some high-paced jig, or hopskip rigadoon, befitting the brisk glasses at a rustic merry-making. It seemed to be Maul's impulse not to ruin Alice, nor to visit her with any black or gigantic mischief, which would have crowned her sorrows with the grace of tragedy, but to wreak a low, ungenerous scorn upon her. Thus all the dignity of life was lost. She felt herself too much abased, and longed to change natures with some worm. One evening, at a bridal party, but not her own, for, so lost from self-control, she would have deemed it sinned to marry. Poor Alice was beckoned forth by her unseen despot, and constrained, in her gossamer white dress and satin slippers, to hasten along the street to the mean dwelling of a laboring man. There was laughter and good cheer within, for Matthew Maul that night was to wed the laborer's daughter, and had summoned proud Alice Pinchon to wait upon his bride. And so she did, and when the twain were won, Alice awoke out of her enchanted sleep. Yet no longer proud, humbly, and with a smile all steeped in sadness, she kissed Maul's wife and went her way. It was an inclement night. The southeast wind drove the mingled snow and rain into her thinly-sheltered bosom. Her satin slippers were wet, through and through, as she trod the muddy sidewalks. The next day a cold, soon a settled cough, a non, a hectic cheek, a wasted form, that sat beside the harpsichord, and filled the house with music. Music in which a strain of the heavenly choristers was echoed. Oh, joy! Before Alice had borne her last humiliation, oh, greater joy! For Alice was penitent of her one earthly sin, and proud no more. The Pinchons made a great funeral for Alice. The Kith and Kin were there, and the whole respectability of the town besides. But last in the procession came Matthew Maul gnashing his teeth, as if he would have bitten his own heart in twain, the darkest and woefulest man that ever walked behind a corpse. He meant to humble Alice, not to kill her, but he had taken a woman's delicate soul into his rude grip, to play with—and she was dead. End of chapter. CHAPTER XIV. OF THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain and is read by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina. THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. BY NATHANIEL HOTHORNE. CHAPTER XIV. FEBE'S GOODBYE. Hullgrave, plunging into his tale with the energy and absorption natural to a young author, had given a good deal of action to the parts capable of being developed and exemplified in that manner. He now observed that a certain remarkable drowsiness, wholly unlike that with which the reader possibly feels himself affected, had been flung over the senses of his auditress. It was the effect, unquestionably, of the mystic gesticulations by which he had sought to bring bodily before Febe's perception the figure of the mesmerizing carpenter. With the lids drooping over her eyes, now lifted for an instant and drawn down again as with leaden weights, she'd leaned slightly towards him and seemed almost to regulate her breath by his. Hullgrave gazed at her, as he rolled up his manuscript, and recognized an incipient stage of that curious psychological condition which, as he had himself told Febe, he possessed more than an ordinary faculty of producing. Aveya was beginning to be muffled about her, in which she could behold only him and live only in his thoughts and emotions. His glance, as he fastened it on the young girl, grew involuntarily more concentrated. In his attitude there was the consciousness of power. Investing his hardly mature figure with a dignity that did not belong to its physical manifestation. It was evident that, with but one wave of his hand and a corresponding effort of his will, he could complete his mastery over Febe's yet free and virgin spirit. He could establish an influence over this good, pure and simple child, as dangerous, and perhaps as disastrous, as that which the carpenter of his legend had acquired and exercised over the ill-fated Alas. To a disposition like Hullgrave's, at once speculative and active, there is no temptation so great as the opportunity of acquiring empire over the human spirit, nor any idea more seductive to a young man than to become the arbiter of a young girl's destiny. Let us, therefore, whatever his defects of nature and education, and in spite of his scorn for creeds and institutions, concede to the daguerreotypist the rare and high quality of reverence for another's individuality. Let us allow him integrity, also, for ever after to be confided in, since he forbade himself to twine that one link more, which might have rendered his spell over Febe indissoluble. He made a slight gesture upward with his hand. "'You really mortify me, my dear Miss Febe?' he exclaimed, smiling half-sarcastically at her. "'My poor story, it is but too evident, will never do for Godi or Graham. Only think of your falling asleep at what I hoped the newspaper critics would pronounce the most brilliant, powerful, imaginative, pathetic, and original winding up. Well, the manuscript must serve to light-lamps with, if indeed being so imbued with my gentle dullness it is any longer capable of flame.' "'Me asleep? How can you say so?' answered Febe, as unconscious of the crisis through which she had passed, as an infant of the precipice to the verge of which it is rolled. "'No, no. I consider myself as having been very attentive, and though I don't remember the incidents quite distinctly, yet I have an impression of a vast deal of trouble and calamity. So no doubt the story will prove exceedingly attractive.' By this time the sun had gone down and was tinting the clouds towards the zenith, with those bright hues which are not seen there until some time after sunset, and when the horizon has quite lost its richer brilliancy. The moon, too, which had long been climbing overhead, and unobtrusively melting its disk into the azure, like an ambitious demagogue who hides his aspiring purpose by assuming the prevalent hue of popular sentiment, now began to shine out broad and oval in its middle pathway. These silvery beams were already powerful enough to change the character of the lingering daylight. They softened and embellished the aspect of the old house, although the shadows fell deeper into the angles of its many gables, and lay brooding under the projecting story, and within the half-open door. With the lapse of every moment, the garden grew more picturesque. The fruit trees, shrubbery, and flower bushes had a dark obscurity among them. The commonplace characteristics, which at noontide it seemed to have taken a century of sordid life to accumulate, were now transfigured by a charm of romance. A hundred mysterious years were whispering among the leaves whenever the slight sea breeze found its way thither and stirred them. Through the foliage that roofed the little summer-house, the moonlight flickered to and fro, and fell silvery white on the dark floor, the table, and the circular bench, with a continual shift in play, according as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs admitted or shut out the glimmer. So sweetly cool was the atmosphere, after all the feverish day, that the summer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid moonlight, with a dash of icy temper in them, out of a silver vase. Here and there a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of nature. The artist's chance to be one on whom the reviving influence fell, it made him feel, what he sometimes almost forgot, thrust so early as he had been into the rude struggle of man with man, how youthful he still was. It seems to me, he observed, that I never watched the coming of so beautiful an eve, and never felt anything so very much like happiness, as at this moment. After all, what a good world we live in! How good and beautiful! How young it is, too, with nothing really rotten or age-worn in it! This old house, for example, which sometimes has positively oppressed my breath with its smell of decaying timber. And this garden where the black mold always clings to my spade, as if I were a sexton delving in a graveyard. Could I keep the feeling that now possesses me, the garden would every day be virgin soil, with the earth's first freshness and the flavor of its beans and squashes, and the house, it would be like a bower in Eden, blossoming with the earliest roses that God ever made. Moonlight, and the sentiment in man's heart responsive to it, are the greatest of renovators and reformers, and all of the reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove to be no better than moonshine. I have been happier than I am now, at least much gayer, said Phoebe thoughtfully. Yet I am sensible of a great charm in this brightening moonlight, and I love to watch how the day, tired as it is, lags away reluctantly, and hates to be called yesterday so soon. I never cared much about moonlight before. What is there, I wonder, so beautiful in it, to-night? And you have never felt it before? inquired the artist, looking earnestly at the girl through the twilight. Never, answered Phoebe. And life does not look the same, now that I have felt it so. It seems as if I had looked at everything hither, too, in broad daylight, or else in the ruddy light of a cheerful fire, glimmering and dancing through a room. Ah! poor me! she added, with a half-melancholy laugh. I shall never be so merry as before I knew cousin Hepsiba and poor cousin Clifford. I have grown a great deal older, in this little time. Wiser, and I hope wiser, and not exactly sadder, but certainly with not half so much lightness in my spirits. I have given them my sunshine, and have been glad to give it. But of course I cannot both give and keep it. They are welcome, notwithstanding. You have lost nothing, Phoebe, worth keeping, nor which it was possible to keep, said Holgrave, after a pause. Our first youth is of no value, for we are never conscious of it until after it is gone. But sometimes, always I suspect, unless one is exceedingly unfortunate, there comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the heart's joy at being in love, or possibly it may come to crown some other grand festival in life, if any other such there be. This bemoaning of one's self, as you do now, over the first, careless, shallow gaiety of youth departed, and this profound happiness at youth regained, so much deeper and richer than that we lost, are essential to the soul's development. In some cases, the two states come almost simultaneously, and mingle the sadness and the rapture in one mysterious emotion. I hardly think I understand you, said Phoebe. No wonder, replied Holgrave, smiling, for I have told you a secret which I hardly began to know, before I found myself giving it utterance. Remember it, however, and when the truth becomes clear to you, then think of this moonlight scene. It is entirely moonlight now, except only a little flush of faint crimson, upward from the west, between those buildings. Remarked Phoebe. I must go in, because in Hepsiba is not quick at figures, and will give herself a headache over the day's accounts, unless I help her. But Holgrave detained her a little longer. Miss Hepsiba tells me, observed he, that you returned to the country in a few days. Yes, but only for a little while. Answered Phoebe. For I look upon this as my present home. I go to make a few arrangements, and to take a more deliberate leave of my mother and friends. It is pleasant to live where one is much desired and very useful, and I think I may have the satisfaction of feeling myself so here. You surely may, and more than you imagine, said the artist. Whatever health, comfort, and natural life exists in the house is embodied in your person. These blessings came along with you, and will vanish when you leave the threshold. Miss Hepsiba, by secluding herself from society, has lost all true relation with it, and is, in fact, dead, although she galvanizes herself into a semblance of life, and stands behind her counter, casting the world with a greatly-to-be-deprecated scowl. Your poor cousin Clifford is another dead and long-buried person, on whom the Governor and Council have wrought a necromatic miracle. I should not wonder if he were to crumble away some morning, after you were gone, and nothing be seen of him more, except a heap of dust. Miss Hepsiba, at any rate, will lose what little flexibility she has. They both exist by you. I should be very sorry to think so, answered Phoebe gravely. But it is true that my small abilities were precisely what they needed, and I have a real interest in their welfare—an odd kind of motherly sentiment, which I wish you would not laugh at. And let me tell you frankly, Mr. Holgrave, I am sometimes puzzled to know whether you wish them well or ill. Undoubtedly, said the daguerreotypist, I do feel an interest in this antiquated poverty-stricken old maiden lady, and this degraded and shattered gentleman, this abortive lover of the beautiful. A kindly interest, too. Helpless old children that they are. But you have no conception what a different kind of heart mine is from your own. It is not my impulse, as regards these two individuals, either to help or hinder, but to look on, to analyze, to explain matters to myself, and to comprehend the drama which, for almost two hundred years, has been dragging its slow length over the ground where you and I now tread. If permitted to witness the close, I doubt not, to derive a moral satisfaction from it, go matters how they may. There is a conviction within me that the end draws nigh. But though Providence sent you hither to help, and sends me only as a privileged and meet spectator, I pledge myself to lend these unfortunate beings whatever aid I can. I wish you would speak more plainly! cried Phoebe, perplexed and displeased. And above all that you would feel more like a Christian and a human being. How is it possible to see people in distress without desiring more than anything else, to help and comfort them? You talk as if this old house were a theatre, and you seem to look at Hepsibos and Clifford's misfortunes, and those of generations before them as a tragedy, such as I have seen acted in the hall of a country hotel, only the present one appears to be played exclusively for your amusement. I do not like this. The play cost the performers too much, and the audience is too cold-hearted. You are severe, said Holgrave, compelled to recognize a degree of truth in the pecanth sketch of his own mood. And then, continued Phoebe, what can you mean by your conviction, which you tell me of, that the end is drawing nigh? Do you know of any new trouble hanging over my poor relatives? If so, tell me at once, and I will not leave them. Forgive me, Phoebe, said the daguerreotypist, holding out his hand to which the girl was constrained to yield her own. I am somewhat of a mystic, it must be confessed. The tendency is in my blood, together with the faculty of mesmerism, which might have brought me to Gallows Hill in the good old times of witchcraft. Give me, if I were really aware of any secret, the disclosure of which would benefit your friends, who are my own friends likewise. You should learn it before we part. But I have no such knowledge. You hold something back, said Phoebe. Nothing, no secrets but my own. Answered Holgrave. I can perceive indeed that Judge Pinchon still keeps his eye on Clifford, in whose ruin he had so large a share. His motives and intentions, however, are a mystery to me. He is a determined and relentless man, with a genuine character of an inquisitor, and had he any object to gain by putting Clifford to the rack. I verily believe that he would wrench his joints from their sockets in order to accomplish it. But so wealthy and eminent as he is, so powerful in his own strength and in the support of society on all sides, what can Judge Pinchon have to hope or fear from the imbecile, branded, half-torped Clifford? Yet, urged Phoebe, you did speak as if misfortune were impending. Oh, that was because I am morbid, replied the artist. My mind has a twist aside, like almost everybody's mind, except your own. Moreover, it is so strange to find myself an inmate of this old Pinchon house, and sitting in this old garden, hark how mauls well is murmuring, that word only for this one circumstance I cannot help fancying that destiny is arranging its fifth act for a catastrophe. There! cried Phoebe, with renewed vexation, for she was by nature as hostile to mystery as the sunshine to a dark corner. You puzzle me more than ever! Then let us part, friends, said Holgrave, pressing her hand. Or if not friends, let us part before you entirely hate me. You who love everybody else in the world! Good-bye, then, said Phoebe, frankly. I do not mean to be angry a great while, and should be sorry to have you think so. There has cousin Hepsiba been standing in the shadow of the doorway this quarter of an hour past. She thinks I stay too long in the damp garden. So good-night, and good-bye. On the second morning thereafter, Phoebe might have been seen, in her straw bonnet, with a shawl on one arm and a little carpet bag on the other, bidding adieu to Hepsiba and cousin Clifford. She was to take a seat in the next train of cars, which would transport her to within half a dozen miles of her country village. The tears were in Phoebe's eyes. A smile, dewy with affectionate regret, was glimmering around her pleasant mouth. She wondered how it came to pass that her life of a few weeks, here in this heavy-hearted old mansion, had taken such hold of her, and so melted into her associations, as now to seem a more important center-point of remembrance than all which had gone before. How had Hepsiba, grim, silent, and irresponsible to her overflow of cordial sentiment, contrived to win so much love? And Clifford, in his abortive decay, with a mystery of fearful crime upon him, and the close prison atmosphere yet lurking in his breath, how had he transformed himself into the simplest child, whom Phoebe felt bound to watch over, and be, as it were, the providence of his unconsidered hours? Everything at that instant of farewell stood out prominently to her view. Look where she would, lay her hand on what she might, the object responded to her consciousness as if a moist human heart were in it. She peeped from the window into the garden, and felt herself more regretful at leaving this spot of black earth, vitiated with such an age-long growth of weeds, then joyful at the idea of again sending her pine forests and fresh clover-fields. She called Chanticleer, his two wives, and the venerable Chicken, and threw them some crumbs of bread from the breakfast-table. These being hastily gobbled up, the chicken spread its wings, and alighted close by Phoebe on the windowsill, where it looked gravely unto her face, and vented its emotions in a croak. Phoebe bade it be a good old chicken during her absence, and promised to bring it a little bag of buckwheat. Ah, Phoebe! remarked Hepsiba. You do not smile so naturally as when you came to us. Then the smile chose to shine out. Now you choose it should. It is well that you are going back, for a little while, into your native air. There has been too much weight on your spirits. The house is too gloomy and lonesome. The shop is full of vexations. And as for me, I have no faculty of making things look brighter than they are. Dear Clifford has been your only comfort. Come hither, Phoebe!" Suddenly cried her cousin Clifford, who had said very little all the morning, Close! Closer! And look me in the face! Phoebe put one of her small hands on each elbow of his chair, and leaned her face towards him, so that he might peruse it as carefully as he would. It is probable that the latent emotions of this parting hour had revived, in some degree, his bedimbed and enfeebled faculties. At any rate, Phoebe soon felt that, if not the profound insight of a seer, yet a more than feminine delicacy of appreciation was making her heart the subject of its regard. A moment before, she had known nothing which she would have sought to hide. Now, as if some secret were hinted to her own consciousness through the medium of another's perception, she was feigned to let her eyelids droop beneath Clifford's gaze. A blush, too. The redder, because she strove hard to keep it down, ascended bigger and higher, in a tide of fitful progress, until even her brow was all suffused with it. It is enough, Phoebe, said Clifford with a melancholy smile. When I first saw you, you were the prettiest little maiden in the world, and now you have deepened into beauty. Girlhood has passed into womanhood. The bud is a bloom. Go now! I feel lonelier than I did. Phoebe took leave of the desolate couple and passed through the shop, twinkling her eyelids to shake off a dew-drop, for, considering how brief her absence was to be, and therefore the folly of being cast down about it, she would not so far acknowledge her tears as to dry them with her handkerchief. On the doorstep she met the little urchin whose marvellous feats of gastronomy have been recorded in the earlier pages of our narrative. She took from the window some specimen or other of natural history, her eyes being too dim with moisture to inform her accurately, whether it was a rabbit or a hippopotamus, put it into the child's hand as a parting gift, and went her way. Old Uncle Venner was just coming out of his door, with a wood-horse and saw on his shoulder, and trudging along the street he scrupled not to keep company with Phoebe, so far as their paths lay together, nor in spite of his patch-coat and rusty beaver, and the curious fashion of his toe-cloth trousers, could she find it in her heart to outwalk him. We shall miss you, next sabbath-afternoon, observed the street philosopher. It is unaccountable how little while it takes some folks to grow just as natural to a man as his own breath, and begging your pardon, Miss Phoebe, though there can be no offence in an old man saying it. That's just what you've grown to me. My years have been a great many, and your life is but just beginning, and yet you are somehow as familiar to me as if I'd found you at my mother's door, and you had blossomed like a running vine all along my pathway since. Come back soon, or I shall be gone to my farm, for I begin to find these wood-sawing jobs a little too tough for my backache. Very soon, Uncle Venner replied Phoebe. And let it be all the sooner, Phoebe, for the sake of those poor souls yonder, continued her companion, they can never do without you now. Never, Phoebe, never. No more than if one of God's angels had been living with them, and making their dismal house pleasant and comfortable. And it seemed to you they'd be in a sad case, if some pleasant summer morning like this the angel should spread his wings and fly to the place he came from. Well, just so they feel, now that you're going home by the railroad, they can't bear it, Miss Phoebe, so be sure to come back. I see no angel, Uncle Venner, said Phoebe, smiling, as she offered him her hand at the street corner. But I suppose people never feel so much like angels as when they are doing what little good they may, so I shall certainly come back. Thus parted the old man and the rosy girl, and Phoebe took the wings of the morning, and was soon flitting almost as rapidly away as if endowed with the aerial locomotion of the angels to whom Uncle Venner had so graciously compared her.