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The miniature, likewise, had this last peculiarity; so that youinevitably thought of the original as resembling his mother, and she a lovelyand lovable woman, with perhaps some beautiful infirmity of character, thatmade it all the pleasanter to know and easier to love her. The gentleman had paused in the street, and turned himself half about, stillwith his eyes fixed on the shop-window. In fact, he wheeled wholly round, andcommenced a step or two, as if designing to enter the shop; but, as it chanced,his purpose was anticipated by Hepzibah’s first customer, the littlecannibal of Jim Crow, who, staring up at the window, was irresistibly attractedby an elephant of gingerbread. By the time this latter purchasewas completed, the elderly gentleman had resumed his way, and turned the streetcorner.
Clifford and Phœbe
But, either there was asmouldering fire within him that consumed his vital energy, or the monotonythat would have dragged itself with benumbing effect over a mind differentlysituated was no monotony to Clifford. Possibly, he was in a state of secondgrowth and recovery, and was constantly assimilating nutriment for his spiritand intellect from sights, sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void topersons more practised with the world. As all is activity and vicissitude tothe new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had undergonea kind of new creation, after its long-suspended life.
VIII: The Pyncheon of To-Day
”—and flinging their accents afar off, to melt into the airand pervade it with the holy word. The air with God’s sweetest andtenderest sunshine in it, was meet for mankind to breathe into their hearts,and send it forth again as the utterance of prayer. Their disappearance made himdoubt, he said, whether the berries had not left off growing in the broadpastures and along the shady country lanes. Clifford, except for Phœbe’s more active instigation would ordinarilyhave yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of being, andwhich sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair till eventide. Butthe girl seldom failed to propose a removal to the garden, where Uncle Vennerand the daguerreotypist had made such repairs on the roof of the ruinous arbor,or summer-house, that it was now a sufficient shelter from sunshine and casualshowers. The hop-vine, too, had begun to grow luxuriantly over the sides of thelittle edifice, and made an interior of verdant seclusion, with innumerablepeeps and glimpses into the wider solitude of the garden.
Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon
As for Hepzibah, she seemed not merely possessed with the east wind, but to be,in her very person, only another phase of this gray and sullen spell ofweather; the East-Wind itself, grim and disconsolate, in a rusty black silkgown, and with a turban of cloud-wreaths on its head. The custom of the shopfell off, because a story got abroad that she soured her small beer and otherdamageable commodities, by scowling on them. It is, perhaps, true that thepublic had something reasonably to complain of in her deportment; but towardsClifford she was neither ill-tempered nor unkind, nor felt less warmth of heartthan always, had it been possible to make it reach him. The inutility of herbest efforts, however, palsied the poor old gentlewoman. She could do littleelse than sit silently in a corner of the room, when the wet pear-treebranches, sweeping across the small windows, created a noonday dusk, whichHepzibah unconsciously darkened with her woe-begone aspect.
First comes the ancestor himself, in his black cloak, steeple-hat, andtrunk-breeches, girt about the waist with a leathern belt, in which hangs hissteel-hilted sword; he has a long staff in his hand, such as gentlemen inadvanced life used to carry, as much for the dignity of the thing as for thesupport to be derived from it. He looks up at the portrait; a thing of nosubstance, gazing at its own painted image! The purpose of his brain has been kept sacred thus long after the manhimself has sprouted up in graveyard grass. —is it not, rather afrown of deadly import, that darkens over the shadow of his features? So decided is his look of discontent as to impartadditional distinctness to his features; through which, nevertheless, themoonlight passes, and flickers on the wall beyond. Here comeother Pyncheons, the whole tribe, in their half a dozen generations, jostlingand elbowing one another, to reach the picture.
Alice Pyncheon
Young and unknown, mere vagrantadventurer as he was, she had been conscious of a force in Holgrave which mightwell adapt him to be the champion of a crisis. With this thought in her mind,she unbolted a door, cobwebbed and long disused, but which had served as aformer medium of communication between her own part of the house and the gablewhere the wandering daguerreotypist had now established his temporary home. A book, face downward, on the table, a roll of manuscript, ahalf-written sheet, a newspaper, some tools of his present occupation, andseveral rejected daguerreotypes, conveyed an impression as if he were close athand. But, at this period of the day, as Hepzibah might have anticipated, theartist was at his public rooms.
Local family preserves and restores Seven Gables - Shelby Star
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She instinctivelyknew, it may be, that some sinister or evil potency was now striving to passher barriers; nor would she decline the contest. So Alice put woman’smight against man’s might; a match not often equal on the part of woman. He then renewed the conversation, and made great pecuniary offers to thecarpenter, in case the latter should give information leading to the discoveryof the lost document, and the consequent success of the Eastern claim. For along time Matthew Maule is said to have turned a cold ear to thesepropositions. At last, however, with a strange kind of laugh, he inquiredwhether Mr. Pyncheon would make over to him the old wizard’shomestead-ground, together with the House of the Seven Gables, now standing onit, in requital of the documentary evidence so urgently required.
By Nathaniel Hawthorne
At that instant, however, the blast of a fish-dealer’s conchwas heard, announcing his approach along the street. With energetic raps at theshop-window, Hepzibah summoned the man in, and made purchase of what hewarranted as the finest mackerel in his cart, and as fat a one as ever he feltwith his finger so early in the season. Requesting Phœbe to roast somecoffee,—which she casually observed was the real Mocha, and so long keptthat each of the small berries ought to be worth its weight in gold,—themaiden lady heaped fuel into the vast receptacle of the ancient fireplace insuch quantity as soon to drive the lingering dusk out of the kitchen. Thecountry-girl, willing to give her utmost assistance, proposed to make an Indiancake, after her mother’s peculiar method, of easy manufacture, and whichshe could vouch for as possessing a richness, and, if rightly prepared, adelicacy, unequalled by any other mode of breakfast-cake. Hepzibah gladlyassenting, the kitchen was soon the scene of savory preparation. Perchance,amid their proper element of smoke, which eddied forth from the ill-constructedchimney, the ghosts of departed cook-maids looked wonderingly on, or peepeddown the great breadth of the flue, despising the simplicity of the projectedmeal, yet ineffectually pining to thrust their shadowy hands into each inchoatedish.
The Old Curiosity Shop
When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that hewishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, whichhe would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to bewriting a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a veryminute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinarycourse of man’s experience. The former—while, as a work of art, itmust rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far asit may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly a rightto present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of thewriter’s own choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may somanage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepenand enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make avery moderate use of the privileges here stated, and, especially, to mingle theMarvelous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor, than as anyportion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public.
She was not so constantly gay, but had her moods of thought, whichClifford, on the whole, liked better than her former phase of unmingledcheerfulness; because now she understood him better and more delicately, andsometimes even interpreted him to himself. Her eyes looked larger, and darker,and deeper; so deep, at some silent moments, that they seemed like Artesianwells, down, down, into the infinite. She was less girlish than when we firstbeheld her alighting from the omnibus; less girlish, but more a woman. It must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so active asPhœbe could be wholly confined within the precincts of the old Pyncheon House.Clifford’s demands upon her time were usually satisfied, in those longdays, considerably earlier than sunset. Quiet as his daily existence seemed, itnevertheless drained all the resources by which he lived. It was not physicalexercise that overwearied him,—for except that he sometimes wrought alittle with a hoe, or paced the garden-walk, or, in rainy weather, traversed alarge unoccupied room,—it was his tendency to remain only too quiescent,as regarded any toil of the limbs and muscles.
But the stormdemon kept watch above, and, whenever a flame was kindled, drove the smoke backagain, choking the chimney’s sooty throat with its own breath.Nevertheless, during four days of this miserable storm, Clifford wrapt himselfin an old cloak, and occupied his customary chair. On the morning of the fifth,when summoned to breakfast, he responded only by a broken-hearted murmur,expressive of a determination not to leave his bed. In fact, entirely as she loved him, Hepzibah couldhardly have borne any longer the wretched duty—so impracticable by herfew and rigid faculties—of seeking pastime for a still sensitive, butruined mind, critical and fastidious, without force or volition. It was atleast something short of positive despair, that to-day she might sit shiveringalone, and not suffer continually a new grief, and unreasonable pang ofremorse, at every fitful sigh of her fellow sufferer. The tears were in Phœbe’s eyes; a smile, dewy with affectionate regret,was glimmering around her pleasant mouth.
Clifford feels young in Uncle Venner's presence and is uncharacteristically social with him. Holgrave tries to engage with Clifford as well, but seems to be motivated by something other than beneficence. The narrator calls Clifford part crazy and part imbecile and cautions him to enjoy what he has because happiness other than this may always elude him. Toward the afternoon, a large, elderly gentleman (Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon) passes by the shop and gazes upon it with both a frown and a smile. When he sees Hepzibah his "smile changed from acrid and disagreeable to the sunniest complacency and benevolence." Hepzibah shows dislike for the man and draws a comparison between his likeness and that of the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, which hangs in the house. He is the oldest resident of Pyncheon Street and is happy to see that Hepzibah has opened a shop instead of remaining idle.
One of the available means of amusement, of which Phœbe made the most inClifford’s behalf, was that feathered society, the hens, a breed of whom,as we have already said, was an immemorial heirloom in the Pyncheon family. Incompliance with a whim of Clifford, as it troubled him to see them inconfinement, they had been set at liberty, and now roamed at will about thegarden; doing some little mischief, but hindered from escape by buildings onthree sides, and the difficult peaks of a wooden fence on the other. All hens are well worthstudying for the piquancy and rich variety of their manners; but by nopossibility can there have been other fowls of such odd appearance anddeportment as these ancestral ones.
If ever there was a lady born, and set apart from theworld’s vulgar mass by a certain gentle and cold stateliness, it was thisvery Alice Pyncheon. Yet there was the womanly mixture in her; the tenderness,or, at least, the tender capabilities. For the sake of that redeeming quality,a man of generous nature would have forgiven all her pride, and have beencontent, almost, to lie down in her path, and let Alice set her slender footupon his heart. All that he would have required was simply the acknowledgmentthat he was indeed a man, and a fellow-being, moulded of the same elements asshe. It might have befitted a craftsman, like Matthew Maule, on being sent for to agentleman’s house, to go to the back door, where servants and work-peoplewere usually admitted; or at least to the side entrance, where the better classof tradesmen made application. But the carpenter had a great deal of pride andstiffness in his nature; and, at this moment, moreover, his heart was bitterwith the sense of hereditary wrong, because he considered the great PyncheonHouse to be standing on soil which should have been his own.
The moon,too, which had long been climbing overhead, and unobtrusively melting its diskinto the azure,—like an ambitious demagogue, who hides his aspiringpurpose by assuming the prevalent hue of popular sentiment,—now began toshine out, broad and oval, in its middle pathway. These silvery beams werealready powerful enough to change the character of the lingering daylight. Theysoftened and embellished the aspect of the old house; although the shadows felldeeper into the angles of its many gables, and lay brooding under theprojecting story, and within the half-open door. With the lapse of everymoment, the garden grew more picturesque; the fruit-trees, shrubbery, andflower-bushes had a dark obscurity among them. The commonplacecharacteristics—which, at noontide, it seemed to have taken a century ofsordid life to accumulate—were now transfigured by a charm of romance.
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His terms were, that either the aforesaid ground-rent,from the day when the cellar began to be dug, should be paid down, or themansion itself given up; else he, the ghostly creditor, would have his fingerin all the affairs of the Pyncheons, and make everything go wrong with them,though it should be a thousand years after his death. It was a wild story,perhaps, but seemed not altogether so incredible to those who could rememberwhat an inflexibly obstinate old fellow this wizard Maule had been. Pyncheon Street was sometimes enlivened by spectacles of more imposingpretensions than the above, and which brought the multitude along with them.With a shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact with the world, apowerful impulse still seized on Clifford, whenever the rush and roar of thehuman tide grew strongly audible to him. This was made evident, one day, when apolitical procession, with hundreds of flaunting banners, and drums, fifes,clarions, and cymbals, reverberating between the rows of buildings, marched allthrough town, and trailed its length of trampling footsteps, and mostinfrequent uproar, past the ordinarily quiet House of the Seven Gables. As amere object of sight, nothing is more deficient in picturesque features than aprocession seen in its passage through narrow streets. The spectator feels itto be fool’s play, when he can distinguish the tedious commonplace ofeach 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 hisshirt-collar, and the dust on the back of his black coat.
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