 CHAPTER XI of the House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne Read by Nicodemus The arched window. From the inertness, or what we may term the vegetative character of his ordinary mood, Sifford would perhaps have been content to spend one day after another, interminably, or at least throughout the summertime, in just the kind of life described in the preceding pages. Fancying, however, that it might be for his benefit occasionally to diversify the scene, Phoebe sometimes suggested that he should look out upon the life of the street. For this purpose they used to mount the staircase together to the second story of the house, where at the termination of a wide entry there was an arched window of uncommonly large dimensions, shaded by a pair of curtains. It opened above the porch, where there had formerly been a balcony, the balustrade of which had long since gone to decay and been removed. At this arched window, throwing it open, but keeping himself in comparative obscurity by means of the curtain, Clifford had an opportunity of witnessing such a portion of the great world's movement as might be supposed to roll through one of the retired streets of a not very populous city. But he and Phoebe made a sight as well worth seeing as any that the city could exhibit. The pale, gray, childish, aged melancholy, yet often simply cheerful and sometimes delicately intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson of the curtain, watching the monotony of everyday occurrences with the kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and at every petty throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of the bright young girl. If once he were fairly seated at the window, even pension street would hardly be so dull and lonely, but that somewhere or other along its extent Clifford might discover matter to occupy his eye and titillate if not engross his observation. Things familiar to the youngest child that had begun its outlook at existence seemed strange to him. A cab, an omnibus, with its populous interior, dropping here and there a passenger and picking up another, and thus typifying that vast rolling vehicle the world, the end of whose journey is everywhere and nowhere. These objects he followed eagerly with his eyes, but forgot them before the dust raised by the horses and wheels had settled along their track. As regarded novelties among which cabs and omnibuses were to be reckoned, his mind appeared to have lost its proper gripe and retentiveness. Twice or thrice, for example, during the sunny hours of the day, a water cart went along by the pension house, leaving a broad wake of moistened earth instead of the white dust that had risen at a lady's slightest footfall. It was like a summer shower which the city authorities had caught and tamed and compelled it into the commonest routine of their convenience. With the water cart Clifford could never grow familiar. It always affected him with just the same surprise as at first. His mind took an apparently sharp impression from it, but lost the recollection of this per ambulatory shower before its next reappearance, as completely as did the street itself, along which the heat so quickly strewed white dust again. It was the same with the railroad. Clifford could hear the obstreperous howl of the steam-devil, and by leaning a little away from the arched window could catch a glimpse of the trains of cars, flashing a brief transit across the extremity of the street. The idea of terrible energy thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence, and seemed to affect him as disagreeably and with almost as much surprise the hundredth time as the first. Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment. It can merely be a suspended animation, for were the power actually to perish, and be little use of immortality. We are less than ghosts for the time being whenever this calamity befalls us. Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives. All the antique fashions of the street were dear to him, even such as were characterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed his fastidious senses. He loved the old rumbling and jolting carts, the former track of which he still found in his long-buried remembrance, as the observer of today finds the wheel tracks of ancient vehicles in Herculaneum. The butcher's cart, with its snowy canopy, was an acceptable object. So was the fish cart heralded by its horn. So likewise was the countryman's cart of vegetables, plotting from door to door with long pauses of the patient horse, while his owner drove a trade in turnips, carrots, summer squashes, string beans, green peas, and new potatoes with half the housewives of the neighborhood. The baker's cart, with the harsh music of its bells, had a pleasant effect on Clifford, because as few things else did, it jingled the very dissonance of yore. One afternoon a scissor grinder chanced to set his wheel a-going under the pension elm, and just in front of the arched window. Children came running with their mother's scissors, with a carving knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an edge, except indeed poor Clifford's wits, that the grinder might apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new. Round went the busily revolving machinery, kept in motion by the scissor grinder's foot, and wore away the hard steel against the hard stone, whence issued an intense and spiteful prolongation of a hiss as fierce as those emitted by Satan in his compiers in pandemonium, though squeezed into smaller compass. It was an ugly little venomous serpent of a noise, as ever did petty violence to human ears. But Clifford listened with rapturous delight. The sound, however disagreeable, had very brisk life in it, and together with the circle of curious children watching the revolutions of the wheel, appeared to give him a more vivid sense of active, bustling, and sun-shiny existence than he had attained in almost any other way. Nevertheless its charm lay chiefly in the past, for the scissor grinder's wheel had hissed in his childish ears. He sometimes made doleful complaint that there were no stagecoaches nowadays, and he asked in an injured tone what had become of all those old square-top chases, with wings sticking out on either side, that used to be drawn by a plow-horse and driven by a farmer's wife and daughter, peddling waddle-berries and blackberries about the town. Their disappearance made him doubt, he said, whether the berries had not left off growing in the broad pastures and along the shady country lanes. But anything that appealed to the sense of beauty, in however humble a way, did not require to be recommended by these old associations. This was observable when one of those Italian boys, who are rather a modern feature of our streets, came along with his barrel organ and stopped under the wide and cool shadows of the elm. With his quick professional eye he took note of the two faces watching him from the arched window, and opening his instrument began to scatter its melodies abroad. He had a monkey on his shoulder, dressed in a highland plaid, and to complete the sum of splendid attractions wherewith he presented himself to the public. There was a company of little figures whose sphere in habitation was in the mahogany case of his organ and whose principle of life was the music which the Italian made it his business to grind out. In all their variety of occupation, the cobbler, the blacksmith, the soldier, the lady with her fan, the toper with his bottle, the milkmaid sitting by her cow, this fortunate little society might truly be said to enjoy a harmonious existence and to make life literally a dance. The Italian turned a crank, and behold, every one of these small individuals started into the most curious vivacity. The cobbler wrought upon a shoe. The blacksmith hammered his iron. The soldier waved his glittering blade. The lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan. The jolly toper swigged lustily at his bottle. A scholar opened his book with eager thirst for knowledge and turned his head to and fro along the page. The milkmaid energetically drained her cow, and the miser counted gold into his strongbox, all at the same turning of a crank. Yes, and moved by the self-same impulse, a lover saluted his mistress on her lips. Possibly some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to signify in this pantomimic scene that we mortals whatever our business or amusement, however serious, however trifling, all dance to one identical tune, and in spite of our ridiculous activity bring nothing finally to pass. For the most remarkable aspect of the affair was that at the cessation of the music everybody was petrified at once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor. Neither was the cobbler's shoe finished, nor the blacksmith's iron shaped out, nor was there a drop less of brandy in the topper's bottle, nor a drop more of milk in the milkmaid's pail, nor one additional coin in the miser's strongbox, nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book. All were precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so ridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to become wise. Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier for the maidens granted kiss. But rather than swallow this last two-acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show. The monkey, meanwhile, with a thick tail curling out into preposterous prolixity from beneath his tartans, took his station at the Italian's feet. He turned a wrinkled and abominable little visage to every passer-by, and to the circle of children that soon gathered round, and to Hepsiba's shop door, and upward to the arched window where Phoebe and Clifford were looking down. Every moment also, he took off his highland bonnet and performed a bow and scrape. Sometimes, moreover, he made personal application to individuals, holding out his small black palm and otherwise plainly signifying his excessive desire for whatever filthy looker might happen to be in anybody's pocket. The mean and low, yet strangely man-like expression of his wilted countenance, the prying and crafty glance that showed him ready to gripe at every miserable advantage, his enormous tail too enormous to be decently concealed under his gabardine, and the deviltry of nature which it betokened. Take this monkey just as he was, in short, and you could desire no better image of the mammon of copper coin, symbolizing the grossest form of the love of money. Neither was there any possibility of satisfying the covetous little devil. Phoebe threw down a whole handful of scents which he picked up with joyless eagerness, handed them over to the Italian for safekeeping, and immediately recommended a series of pantomimic petitions for more. Doubtless more than one New Englander, or let him be of what country he might, and is likely to be the case, passed by and threw a look at the monkey, and went on, without imagining how nearly his own moral condition was here exemplified. Clifford, however, was a being of another order. He had taken childish delight in the music, and smiled too at the figures which it set in motion. But after looking a while at the long-tailed imp, he was so shocked by his horrible ugliness, spiritual as well as physical, that he actually began to shed tears. A weakness which men of merely delicate endowments in destitute of the fiercer, deeper, and more tragic power of laughter can hardly avoid when the worst and meanest aspect of life happens to be presented to them. Pension Street was sometimes enlivened by spectacles of more imposing pretensions than the above, and which brought the multitude along with them. With the shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact with the world, a powerful impulse still seized on Clifford whenever the rush and roar of the human tide grew strongly audible to him. This was made evident one day when a political procession with hundreds of flaunting banners and drums, fiefs, clarions, and cymbals, reverberating between the rows of buildings, marched all through town, and trailed its length of trampling footsteps and most infrequent uproar past the ordinarily quiet house of the Seven Gables. As a mere object of sight nothing is more deficient in picturesque features than a procession seen in its passage through narrow streets. The spectator feels it to be fool's play when he can distinguish the tedious commonplace of each man's visage with the perspiration and weary self-importance on it and the very cut of his pantaloons and the stiffness or laxity of his shirt collar and the dust on the back of his black coat. In order to become majestic it should be viewed from some vantage point as it rolls its slow and long array through the centre of a wide plain or the stateliest public square of a city. For then, by its remoteness it melts all the petty personalities of which it is made up into one broad mass of existence, one great life, one collected body of mankind with the vast homogenous spirit animating it. But on the other hand an impressable person standing alone over the brink of one of these processions should behold it, not in its atoms but in its aggregate as a mighty river of life massive in its tide and black with mystery and out of its depths calling to the kindred depth within him then the contiguity would add to the effect. It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies. So it proved with Clifford. He shuddered, he grew pale, he threw an appalling look at Hepsiba and Phoebe who were with him at the window. They comprehended nothing of his emotions and supposed him merely disturbed by the unaccustomed tumult. At last with tremulous limbs he started up, set his foot on the windowsill and in an instant more would have been in the unguarded balcony. As it was the whole procession might have seen him a wild, haggard figure his gray locks floating in the wind that waved their banners a lonely being estranged from his race but now feeling himself man again by virtue of the irrepressible instinct that possessed him. Had Clifford attained the balcony he would probably have leaped into the street but weather impelled by the species of terror that sometimes urges its victims over the very precipice which he shrinks from or by a natural magnetism tending towards the great centre of humanity it were not easy to decide. Both impulses might have wrought on him at once but his companions affrighted by his gesture which was that of a man hurried away in spite of himself seized Clifford's garment and held him back Hepsiba shrieked Phoebe to whom all extravagance was a horror burst into sobs and tears Clifford, Clifford Are you crazy? cried his sister I hardly know Hepsiba said Clifford, drawing a long breath Fear nothing, it is over now but had I taken that plunge and survived it me thinks it would have made me another man possibly in some sense Clifford may have been right he needed a shock or perhaps he required to take a deep plunge into the ocean of human life and to sink down and be covered by its profoundness and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated restored to the world and to himself perhaps again he required nothing less than the great final remedy death a similar yearning to renew the broken links of brotherhood with his kind sometime showed itself in a milder form and once it was made beautiful by the religion that lay even deeper than itself in the incident now to be sketched there was a touching recognition on Clifford's part of God's care and love towards him towards this poor forsaken man who, if any mortal could might have been pardoned for regarding himself as thrown aside, forgotten and left to be the sport of some fiend whose playfulness was an ecstasy of mischief it was the Sabbath morning one of those bright calm Sabbaths with its own hallowed atmosphere when heaven seems to diffuse itself over the earth's face in a solemn smile no less sweet than solemn on such a Sabbath morn where we pure enough to be its medium we should be conscious of the earth's natural worship ascending through our frames on whatever spot of ground we stood the church bells with various tones but all in harmony we're calling out and responding to one another it is the Sabbath, the Sabbath yay the Sabbath and over the whole city the bells scattered the blessed sounds now slowly now with livelier joy now one bell alone now all the bells together crying earnestly it is the Sabbath and flinging their accents far off to melt into the air and pervade it with the holy word the air with God's sweetest and tenderest sunshine in it was meat for mankind to breathe into their hearts and send it forth again as the utterance of prayer Clifford sat at the window with Hebsba watching the neighbors as they stepped into the street all of them, however unspiritual on other days were transfigured by the Sabbath influence so that their very garments whether it were an old man's decent coat well brushed for the thousandth time or a little boy's first sack and trousers finished yesterday by his mother's needle had somewhat of the quality of ascension robes forth likewise from the portal of the old house stepped Phoebe putting up her small green sun shade and throwing upward a glance and smile of parting kindness to the faces at the arched window in her aspect there was a familiar gladness and a holiness that you could play with and yet reverence it as much as ever she was like a prayer offered up in the homeliest beauty of one's mother tongue fresh was Phoebe moreover and airy and sweet in her apparel as if nothing that she wore neither her gown nor her small straw bonnet nor her little kerchief any more than her snowy stockings had ever been put on before or if worn were all the fresher for it and with the fragrance as if they had lain among the rose buds the girl waved her hand to Hebsba and Clifford and went up the street a religion in herself and simple, true with the substance that could walk on earth and a spirit that was capable of heaven Hebsba asked Clifford after watching Phoebe to the corner do you never go to church? no Clifford she replied not these many many years were I to be there he rejoined it seems to me that I could pray once more when so many human souls were praying all around me she looked into Clifford's face and beheld there a soft natural effusion for his heart gushed out as it were and ran over at his eyes in delightful reverence for God and kindly affection for his human brethren the emotion communicated itself to Hebsba she yearned to take him by the hand and go and kneel down they two together both so long separate from the world and as she now recognized scarcely friends with him above to kneel down among the people and be reconciled to God and man at once dear brother said she earnestly let us go we belong nowhere we have not a foot of space in any church to kneel upon but let us go to some place of worship even if we stand in the broad aisle poor and forsaken as we are some pew door will be open to us so Hebsba and her brother made themselves ready as ready as they could in the best of their old fashioned garments which had hung on pegs or been laid away in trunks so long that the dampness and moldy smell of the past was on them made themselves ready and there faded better most to go to church they descended the staircase together gaunt, sallow Hebsba and pale emaciated age-stricken Clifford they pulled open the front door and stepped across the threshold and felt both of them as if they were standing in the presence of the whole world and with mankind's great and terrible eye on them alone the eye of their father seemed to be withdrawn and gave them no encouragement the warm sunny air on the street made them shiver their hearts quaked within them at the idea of taking one step farther it cannot be Hebsba it is too late said Clifford with deep sadness we are ghosts we have no right among human beings no right anywhere but in this old house which has a curse on it and which therefore we are doomed to haunt and besides he continued with the fastidious sensibility an alienably characteristic of the man it would not be fit or beautiful to go it is an ugly thought that I should be frightful to my fellow beings and that children would cling to their mother's gowns at sight of me they shrank back into the dusky passageway and closed the door but going up the staircase again they found the whole interior of the house tenfold more dismal and the air closer and heavier for the glimpse in breath of freedom which they had just snatched they could not flee their jailer had but left the door ajar in mockery and stood behind it to watch them stealing out at the threshold they felt his pitiless gripe upon them for what other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart what jailer so inexorable as one's self but it would be no fair picture of Clifford's state of mind were we to represent him as continually or prevailingly wretched on the contrary there was no other man in the city, we are bold to affirm of so much as half his years who enjoyed so many lightsome and griefless moments as himself he had no burden of care upon him there were none of those questions and contingencies with the future to be settled which wear away all other lives and render them not worth having by the very process of providing for their support in this respect he was a child a child for the whole term of his existence be it long or short indeed his life seemed to be standing still at a period little in advance of childhood and to cluster all his reminiscences about that epoch just as after the torpor of a heavy blow the sufferer's reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerably behind the accident that stupefied him he sometimes told Phoebe and Hepsiba his dreams in which he invariably played the part of a child or a very young man so vivid were they in his relation of them that he once held a dispute with his sister as to the particular figure or print of a chins morning dress which he had seen their mother wear in the dream of the preceding night Hepsiba peeking herself on a woman's accuracy in such matters held it to be slightly different from what Clifford described but producing the very gown from an old trunk it proved to be identical with his remembrance of it had Clifford every time that he emerged out of dreams so lifelike undergone the torture of transformation from a boy into an old and broken man the daily recurrence of the shock would have been too much to bear it would have caused an acute agony to thrill from the morning twilight all the day through until bedtime and even then would have mingled a dull, inscrutable pain and pallid hue of misfortune with the visionary bloom and adolescence of his slumber but the nightly moonshine interwoven itself with the morning mist and enveloped him as in a robe which he hugged about his person and seldom let realities pierce through he was not often quite awake but slept open-eyed and perhaps fancied himself most dreaming then thus lingering always so near his childhood he had sympathies with children and kept his heart the fresher thereby like a reservoir into which rivulets were pouring not far from the fountain-head though prevented by a subtle sense of propriety from desiring to associate with them he loved few things better than to look out of the arched window and see a little girl driving her hoop along the sidewalk or schoolboys at a game of ball their voices also were very pleasant to him heard at a distance all swarming and intermingling together as flies do in a sunny room Clifford Wood doubtless have been glad to share their sports one afternoon he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow soap-bubbles an amusement as Hepsiba told Phoebe apart that had been a favourite one with her brother when they were both children behold him therefore at the arched window with an earthen pipe in his mouth behold him with his grey hair and a wan unreal smile over his countenance where still hovered a beautiful grace which his worst enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal since it had survived so long behold him scattering airy spheres abroad from the window into the street little impalpable worlds were those soap-bubbles with the big world depicted and hues bright as imagination on the nothing of their surface it was curious to see how the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies as they came floating down and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them some stopped to gaze and perhaps carried a pleasant recollection of the bubbles onward as far as the street corner some looked angrily upward as if poor Clifford wronged them by setting an image of beauty afloat so near their dusty pathway a great many put out their fingers or their walking sticks to touch with all and were perversely gratified no doubt when the bubble with all its pictured earthen sky-scene vanished as if it had never been at length just as an elderly gentleman a very dignified presence happened to be passing a large bubble sailed majestically down and burst right against his nose he looked up at first with the stern, keen glance which penetrated at once into the obscurity behind the arched window then with a smile which might be conceived as diffusing a dog-day sultriness for the space of several yards about him Aha! Cousin Clifford! cried Judge Pension What, still blowing soap-bubbles! the tone seemed as if meant to be kind and soothing but yet had a bitterness of sarcasm in it as for Clifford an absolute palsy of fear came over him apart from any definite cause of dread which his past experience might have given him he felt that native and original horror of the excellent judge which is proper to a weak, delicate and apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength Strength is incomprehensible by weakness and therefore the more terrible there is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle of his own connections End of Chapter 11 of The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne read by Nicodemus Chapter 12 This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Chapter 12 of The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne read by Nicodemus The Degarotypist It must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so active as Thebe is wholly confined within the precincts of the old pension 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 over-wearied him for except that he sometimes wrought a little with the 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 is 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 might 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 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 daguerreotypist 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 were characters proper to New England life and possessing a common ground therefore and their more external developments but as unlike in their respective interiors as if their native climbs had been at worldwide 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 adultery 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 Blass adapted to American society in 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 Spaniards earlier life while their ultimate success or the point whether they tend may 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 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 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 Fourieris still more recently he had been a public lecturer on mesmerism for which science, as he assured Phoebe and indeed satisfactorily proved by putting Chanticleer who happened to be scratching nearby to sleep he had very remarkable endowments his present phase as a daguerreotypeist 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 more 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 had 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 or 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 and 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 mental 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 pecancy very often his humor changes without any reason that can be guessed at just as the 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 has 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 pritally you express this sentiment said the artist I can understand the feeling 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 a 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 pension Clifford what a complex riddle a complexity of complexities do they present it requires intuitive sympathy like a young girls to solve it a mere observer like myself who never had any intuitions and am at best only subtle and acute is pretty certain to go astray the artist now turned the 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 which 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 life span as the measure of an interminable achievement and more than all in fancying 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 with 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 and discerning that man's best directed effort accomplishes a kind of dream while God is the sole worker of realities Holgrave had read very little and that little in passing through the thoroughfare of life where the mystic language of 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 and 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 practical cause altogether in his culture and want of culture in his crude wild and misty philosophy and the practical experience that counteracted some of his tendencies in his magnanimous zeal from 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 whole grave such as in a country where everything is free to 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 chinses, calicoes and gingums they show finally 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 pension 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 and admirable harm too by the many tests that had tried his medal it was pleasant to see him in this kindly intercourse with Phoebe her thought has 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 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 a 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 whole grave he 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 pension 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? is it possible for Phoebe keeping up the earnest tone of his preceding conversation? it lies upon the present like a giant's dead body in fact the case is just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength and 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 observed 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 date 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 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 visible 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 how 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 good to purchase 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 who have come 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 pension 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 its socialization on its walls of the human breath that has been drawn and exiled 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 Hepsaba in the month that I have been here she seems to think that all the calamities of the pensions began from that quarrel with the wizard as you call him and you Mr. Holgrave look as 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 in which we now look up under the ancient old Colonel pension meant to be the house of his descendants in prosperity and happiness down to an epoch 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 pensions 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 one kind of lunacy or another you speak very unceremoniously of my kindred said Phoebe debating with herself whether she ought to take offence I speak true thoughts to a true mind answered whole grave with the 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 and mind and body with the 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 in 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 pensions is it contagious I understand you said the artist coloring and laughing I believe I am a little mad this subject has taken hold of my mind with the strangest tenacity of clutch since I have lodged in yonder gable as one method of throwing it off I have put an incident of the pension 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 do not know it quite whole grave well such is literary fame yes miss Phoebe pension 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 Godi making his respectable appearance for art I could see as any of the canonized bread roll with which it was associated and the humorous line I am thought to have a very pretty way with me and as for pathos 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 daguerreotype could not decide for himself he forthwith produced his role of manuscript and while the late sunbeams of the seven gables began to read end of chapter 12 of the house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne read by Nicodemus chapter 13 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org chapter 13 of the house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne read by Nicodemus there was a message brought one day from the worshipful Gervais Pension to young Matthew Maul 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. Pension'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 Massa wants answered Scipio the house is a very good house and old colonel Pension thinks so too I reckon else why 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 pensions as long as their walls hold together what's that you mutter to yourself Matthew Maugh asked Scipio and what for do you look so black at me no matter darky 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 Maugh's humble respects to her she has brought a fair face from Italy fair and gentle and proud has that same Alice pension he talk of Mistress Alice cried Scipio as he returned from his errand the low carpenter man he know business so much as look at her a great way off this young Matthew Maugh 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 just 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 Maugh 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 in consequence of an unfortunate overdoing of a work praiseworthy 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 all and terror brooded over the memories of those who died for this horrible crime of witchcraft their graves in the crevices of rocks were supposed to be incapable of retaining the occupants who had been so hastily thrust into them Old Matthew Maugh especially was known to have as little representation or difficulty in rising out of his grave as an ordinary man and getting out of bed and was as often seen at midnight as living people at noon day 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 seller 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 pensions and make everything go wrong with them though it should be a thousand years after his death it was a wild story perhaps but seems not altogether so incredible to those who could remember what an inflexibly obstinate old fellow this wizard mall had been now the wizard's grandson the young matthew mall 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 theater there was a great deal of talk among the neighbors particularly the petticoated ones about what they called the witchcraft of mall's eye some said that he could look into people's minds others that by the marvelous 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 sturdiness 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. Pension'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, Gervais Pension was said to have contracted a dislike to the house and consequence and was shocked to his sensibility in early childhood from the sudden death of his grandfather in the very act of running to climb Colonel Pension's knee the boy had discovered the old Puritan to be a corpse on arriving at manhood Mr. Pension 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 practised eye could detect nothing to criticise in its condition the peaks of the seven gables rose up sharply the shingled roof looked thoroughly watertight and the glittering plasterwork 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 design 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 whole 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 the sense of hereditary wrong because he considered the great pension 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 Pynchon had rested away the tidal deeds so young Mall went straight to the principal entrance beneath the portal of carved oak and gave such appeal 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 on beholding only the carpenter Lord of mercy what a great man he be this carpenter fellow 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 toddler 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 Pynchon 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 a foreign education and could not take kindly to the New England modes of life in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed as Mr. Pynchon 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. Pynchon'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 the 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 soul 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 cabinet of ebony inlaid with ivory a piece of antique furniture which Mr. Pynchon 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 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 with the 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. Pynchon 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 the wig flubbing 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 breadth of his waistcoat which was flowered all over with gold on the entrance of Scipio ushering in the carpenter Mr. Pynchon 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 mall station had a claim on his courtesy or would trouble himself about it one way or the other the carpenter however stepped at once to the hearth and turned himself about so as to look Mr. Pynchon 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 Mr. Pynchon 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. Pynchon 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 and what I am now about to say to you and this same inveterate grudge excuse me I mean no offence this irritability which you have just shown is not entirely aside from the matter if you can find anything for your purpose Mr. Pynchon said the carpenter in a man's natural resentment for the wrongs done to his blood you are welcome to it I take you at your word Goodman Maul 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 Pynchon family ever since my grandfather's days have been prosecuting a still unsettled claim to a very large extent of territory at the eastward often replied Maul and it is said that a smile came over his face very often from my father this claim continued Mr. Pynchon 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 Pynchon, 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 my grandfather was in possession of some deed or other document essential to this claim but which has since disappeared very likely said Matthew Maul and again it is said that there was a dark smile on his face I am sure that my grandfather would have thought that he would have thought that he would have thought that he would have thought that he would have thought that he would have thought that there was a dark smile on his face but what can a poor carpenter have to do with the grand affairs of the Pynchon family perhaps nothing returned Mr. Pynchon possibly much here ensued a great many words between Matthew Maul and the proprietor of the Seven Gables on the subject which the latter had thus broached it seems although Mr. Pynchon had some hesitation in referring to stories so exceedingly absurd in their subject the chief pointed to some mysterious connection and dependence existing between the family of the Mauls and these vast unrealized possessions of the Pynchons it was an ordinary saying that the old wizard hanged though he was had obtained the best end of the bargain in this contest with Colonel Pynchon and as much as he had got possession of the great eastern claim in exchange for an acre or two of garden ground a very aged woman recently dead with a historical expression in her fireside talk that miles and miles of the Pynchon lands had been shoveled into Maul'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 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 Maul and here Mr. Pynchon 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 deceased in the private room where he and the carpenter were at this moment talking certain papers belonging to Colonel Pynchon as his grandson distinctly recollected had been spread out on the table Matthew Maul 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 would he have carried off one of those papers I shall not bandy words with you observe the foreign bread Mr. Pynchon with haughty composure nor will it become me to resent any rudeness towards either my grandfather or myself a gentleman therefore 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 has said to have turned a cold ear to these propositions at last however with the strange kind of laugh he inquired whether Mr. Pynchon would make over to him the old wizard's homestead ground together with the house of the seven gables now standing on it and 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 Pynchon'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. Pynchon and the carpenter the portrait had been frowning clenching its fist these 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 gable structure the ghostly portrait is a bird 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. Pynchon 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 first thought it to comply with Mall's conditions still on a second glance Mr. Pynchon 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 seemed still to pervade it as on that 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 mansion exceedingly inadequate to the style of living which it would be incumbent on Mr. Pynchon 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 future 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. Pynchon'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 Pynchon or the Earl of Waldo how could such a magnate 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. Pynchon 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 Maugh 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 Maugh was contented with a private written agreement in which Mr. Pynchon pledged his honour and integrity to the fulfilment of the terms concluded upon the gentleman then ordered wine which he and the carpenter drank together and confirmation of their bargain during the whole preceding discussion and subsequent formalities the old Puritan's portrait seemed to have persisted in its shadowy gestures of disapproval but without effect that as Mr. Pynchon set down the emptied 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 Pynchon may drink what wine he will and wherever he pleases as if he had been privy to Mr. Pynchon's ambitious projects but first sir if you desire tidings of this lost document I must crave the favour of a little talk with your fair daughter Alice you are mad Maul exclaimed Mr. Pynchon hotly 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. Pynchon'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 airy or melancholy of her accompanying voice so Alice Pynchon 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 of the high character of beauty and 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 Pynchon 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 her all pride and have been content almost 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 green woolen jacket a pair of loose breeches open up knees and with a long pocket for his rule it was as proper a mark of the artisan's calling as Mr. Pynchon's full dressed sword of that gentleman's aristocratic pretensions a glow of artistic approval brightened over Alice Pynchon'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 clawed with which you try to bring back sunny recollections stay 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 and surprised an inquiry yes Alice said Mr. Pynchon 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 and 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 Pynchon 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 certainly shall 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 whom so ever or in any circumstance poor Alice by what unhappy impulse did she thus put herself at once on terms of defiance and 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 the power combined of beauty purity on the preservative force of womanhood that could make her sphere impenetrable unless 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 Claude 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 Mauls his grandson here present as his two immediate ancestors Mr. Pension's long residence 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 Mauls' grandfather to be a wizard had not the crime been proved had not the wizard died for it had he not bequeathed a legacy of hatred against the pensions 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 Mauls' figure in the looking-glass at some paces from Alice with his arms uplifted in the air as if directing downward a slow ponderous and invisible weight upon the maiden stay Maul exclaimed Mr. Pension stepping forward I forbid your 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. Pension turned his eyes towards the Claude it was then his daughter's will to show 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 Pension with the rich dowry which he 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 that if the devil's power were needed to the accomplishment of this great object Maul might invoke him Alice's own purity would be her safeguard with his mind full of imaginary magnificence Mr. Pension 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 conscious 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 Maul spoke behold your daughter said he Mr. Pension 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. Pension my own Alice she did not stir louder said Maul 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 his voice best touch her said Matthew Maul 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. Pension took her hand and pressed it with the earnestness of startled emotion he kissed her with so great a heartthrob in the kiss that he thought she must needs feel it then most of anger at her insensibility he shook her maiden form with the violence which the next moment it frightened 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 Maul 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. Pension shaking his clenched fist at Maul 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. Pension said the carpenter with scornful composure softly and at pleasure 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 mistress Alice deeply asleep now let Matthew Maul 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 blindly but undoubtedly as tending to her shore the carpenter the proud Alice approached him he waved her back and retreating Alice sank again into her seat she is mine said Matthew Maul mine by the right of the strongest spirit in the further progress of the legend there is a long grotesque and occasionally all striking account of the carpenter's incantations if so they are to be called with the 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. Pension 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 and 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 and grave and costly attire but with the great blood stain on his richly wrought band the second an aged man meanly dressed with a dark and maligned countenance and the broken halter about his neck the third a person not so advanced in life as the former to but beyond the middle age wearing a coarse woolen tunic and with the carpenter's rule 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 and to that of mortals his companion 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. pension it will never be allowed said he the custody of this secret that 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 in inheritance and too heavy with the curse upon it to be shifted yet a while from the colonel's posterity mr. pension tried to speak but what with fear and passion could make only a gurgling murmur in his throat the carpenter smiled aha 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. pension when his choked utterance could make way give me back my daughter 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 pension 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 and 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 made of pride of the fair alice so ended for that time the quest for the lost title deed of the pension territory at the eastward nor though often subsequently renewed has it ever yet befallen a pension to set his eye upon that parchment but alas for the beautiful and gentle yet too haughty alice a power that she little dreamed of had laid its grasp upon her maiden soul a will almost 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 alas pension lived she was maul's slave in a bondage more humiliating a thousand fold 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 at church whatever her place or occupation her spirit passed from beneath her own control and bowed itself to maul alas laugh the carpenter beside his hearth would say or perhaps intensely will it without a spoken word and even were it prayer time or at a funeral alas must break into wild laughter alas 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 alas 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 alas 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 sin to marry poor alas 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 alas pension to wait upon his bride and so she did and when the twain were won alas 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 for alas had borne her last humiliation oh greater joy for alas was penitent of her one earthly sin and proud no more the pensions made a great funeral for alas 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 and twain the darkest and woefulest man that ever walked behind a corpse he meant to humble alas not to kill her but he had taken a woman's delicate soul into his rude gripe to play with and she was dead end of chapter 13 of the house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne