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Clifford finds Phoebe delightful, though he is startled by Hepzibah’s aged appearance. Phoebe also meets Judge Pyncheon in the shop and is alarmed by his rapid transition between harsh and sunny moods; he reminds her uncomfortably of Colonel Pyncheon’s portrait. When the Judge pushes past her into the house, Hepzibah bars him from seeing Clifford, who fears him.
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It separated Phœbe and himself from the world, and bound them toeach other, by their exclusive knowledge of Judge Pyncheon’s mysteriousdeath, and the counsel which they were forced to hold respecting it. Thesecret, so long as it should continue such, kept them within the circle of aspell, a solitude in the midst of men, a remoteness as entire as that of anisland in mid-ocean; once divulged, the ocean would flow betwixt them, standingon its widely sundered shores. Meanwhile, all the circumstances of theirsituation seemed to draw them together; they were like two children who go handin hand, pressing closely to one another’s side, through a shadow-hauntedpassage.
Clifford and Phœbe
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Hepzibah,at all events, was indebted to its subtile operation both in body and spirit;so much the more, as it inspired her with energy to get some breakfast, atwhich, still the better to keep up her courage, she allowed herself an extraspoonful in her infusion of black tea. The child, staring with round eyes at this instance of liberality, whollyunprecedented in his large experience of cent-shops, took the man ofgingerbread, and quitted the premises. No sooner had he reached the sidewalk(little cannibal that he was!) than Jim Crow’s head was in his mouth. Ashe had not been careful to shut the door, Hepzibah was at the pains of closingit after him, with a pettish ejaculation or two about the troublesomeness ofyoung people, and particularly of small boys. She had just placed anotherrepresentative of the renowned Jim Crow at the window, when again the shop-belltinkled clamorously, and again the door being thrust open, with itscharacteristic jerk and jar, disclosed the same sturdy little urchin who,precisely two minutes ago, had made his exit. The crumbs and discoloration ofthe cannibal feast, as yet hardly consummated, were exceedingly visible abouthis mouth.
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And, amid theserich and potent devices of the culinary art (not one of which, probably, hadbeen tested, within the memory of any man’s grandfather), poor Hepzibahwas seeking for some nimble little titbit, which, with what skill she had, andsuch materials as were at hand, she might toss up for breakfast. The old gentlewoman took a dreary and proud satisfaction in leading Phœbe fromroom to room of the house, and recounting the traditions with which, as we maysay, the walls were lugubriously frescoed. She showed the indentations made bythe lieutenant-governor’s sword-hilt in the door-panels of the apartmentwhere old Colonel Pyncheon, a dead host, had received his affrighted visitorswith an awful frown. The dusky terror of that frown, Hepzibah observed, wasthought to be lingering ever since in the passageway. She bade Phœbe step intoone of the tall chairs, and inspect the ancient map of the Pyncheon territoryat the eastward. In a tract of land on which she laid her finger, there existeda silver mine, the locality of which was precisely pointed out in somememoranda of Colonel Pyncheon himself, but only to be made known when thefamily claim should be recognized by government.
But, even now, she wassupposed to haunt the House of the Seven Gables, and, a great manytimes,—especially when one of the Pyncheons was to die,—she hadbeen heard playing sadly and beautifully on the harpsichord. One of thesetunes, just as it had sounded from her spiritual touch, had been written downby an amateur of music; it was so exquisitely mournful that nobody, to thisday, could bear to hear it played, unless when a great sorrow had made themknow the still profounder sweetness of it. At this price, or at whatever price, she rejoiced that the day had reached itsend. Never before had she had such a sense of the intolerable length of timethat creeps between dawn and sunset, and of the miserable irksomeness of havingaught to do, and of the better wisdom that it would be to lie down at once, insullen resignation, and let life, and its toils and vexations, trample overone’s prostrate body as they may!
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Clifford, depressed by his isolation from humanity and his lost youth spent in prison, stands at a large arched window above the stairs and has a sudden urge to jump. The departure of Phoebe, the focus of his attention, leaves him bed-ridden. Nathaniel Hawthorne, a relative of the Ingersolls, was infamous for being reclusive during his time living in Salem, in part because Hawthorne himself exaggerated his reputation. Hawthorne was more inspired by the way "seven gables" sounded than what the house looked like. As he wrote in a letter, "The expression was new and struck me forcibly... I think I shall make something of it."[6] The idea inspired Hawthorne's novel The House of the Seven Gables. The House of the Seven Gables can engage the reader successfully either in its love story, its picturesque Salem history, its Yankee humor, its romantic legend, its modern realism, its melodrama, or even its few moments of gothic terror.
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It was like dragging a hideous shape of death into the cleanlyand cheerful space before a household fire, where it would present all theuglier aspect, amid the decorousness of everything about it. Looking in the direction whence it proceeded, Phœbesaw little Ned Higgins, a good way down the street, stamping, shaking his headviolently, making deprecatory gestures with both hands, and shouting to her atmouth-wide screech. At least, we would gladly forewarn the unsuspecting girl that there is nothingin human shape or substance to receive her, unless it be the figure of JudgePyncheon, who—wretched spectacle that he is, and frightful in ourremembrance, since our night-long vigil with him! Judge Pyncheon, while his two relatives have fled away with such ill-consideredhaste, still sits in the old parlor, keeping house, as the familiar phrase is,in the absence of its ordinary occupants.
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Black Scipio answered the summons in a prodigious hurry; but showed the whitesof his eyes, in amazement on beholding only the carpenter. There was a vertical sundial on the front gable; and as the carpenter passedbeneath it, he looked up and noted the hour. There was a message brought, one day, from the worshipful Gervayse Pyncheon toyoung Matthew Maule, the carpenter, desiring his immediate presence at theHouse of the Seven Gables. Be the cause what it might, Clifford commonly retired to rest, thoroughlyexhausted, while the sunbeams were still melting through his window-curtains,or were thrown with late lustre on the chamber wall.
Thus it happened that the relationheretofore existing between her brother and herself was changed. At home, shewas his guardian; here, Clifford had become hers, and seemed to comprehendwhatever belonged to their new position with a singular rapidity ofintelligence. He had been startled into manhood and intellectual vigor; or, atleast, into a condition that resembled them, though it might be both diseasedand transitory.
A flower, for instance, as Phœbe herselfobserved, always began to droop sooner in Clifford’s hand, orHepzibah’s, than in her own; and by the same law, converting her wholedaily life into a flower fragrance for these two sickly spirits, the bloominggirl must inevitably droop and fade much sooner than if worn on a younger andhappier breast. 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 idea ofterrible energy thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence, and seemed toaffect him as disagreeably, and with almost as much surprise, the hundredthtime as the first. It being her first day of complete estrangement from rural objects, Phœbefound an unexpected charm in this little nook of grass, and foliage, andaristocratic flowers, and plebeian vegetables. The eye of Heaven seemed to lookdown into it pleasantly, and with a peculiar smile, as if glad to perceive thatnature, elsewhere overwhelmed, and driven out of the dusty town, had here beenable to retain a breathing-place. The spot acquired a somewhat wilder grace,and yet a very gentle one, from the fact that a pair of robins had built theirnest in the pear-tree, and were making themselves exceedingly busy and happy inthe dark intricacy of its boughs. Bees, too,—strange to say,—hadthought it worth their while to come hither, possibly from the range of hivesbeside some farm-house miles away. How many aerial voyages might they havemade, in quest of honey, or honey-laden, betwixt dawn and sunset!
Then,also, the augury of ill-success, uttered from the sure wisdom of experience,fell upon her half-dead hope like a clod into a grave. How could the bornlady—the recluse of half a lifetime, utterly unpractised in the world, atsixty years of age,—how could she ever dream of succeeding, when thehard, vulgar, keen, busy, hackneyed New England woman had lost five dollars onher little outlay! Success presented itself as an impossibility, and the hopeof it as a wild hallucination. The sunshine might nowbe seen stealing down the front of the opposite house, from the windows ofwhich came a reflected gleam, struggling through the boughs of the elm-tree,and enlightening the interior of the shop more distinctly than heretofore.
There is evidentlya mystery about the picture, that perplexes these poor Pyncheons when theyought to be at rest. In a corner, meanwhile, stands the figure of an elderlyman, in a leathern jerkin and breeches, with a carpenter’s rule stickingout of his side pocket; he points his finger at the bearded Colonel and hisdescendants, nodding, jeering, mocking, and finally bursting into obstreperous,though inaudible laughter. They met few people abroad, even on passing from the retired neighborhood ofthe House of the Seven Gables into what was ordinarily the more thronged andbusier portion of the town. What a treasure-trove to these venerable quidnuncs, could theyhave guessed the secret which Hepzibah and Clifford were carrying along withthem! But their two figures attracted hardly so much notice as that of a younggirl, who passed at the same instant, and happened to raise her skirt a trifletoo high above her ankles.
Asmall stock of brown sugar, some white beans and split peas, and a few othercommodities of low price, and such as are constantly in demand, made up thebulkier portion of the merchandise. It might have been taken for a ghostly orphantasmagoric reflection of the old shop-keeper Pyncheon’s shabbilyprovided shelves, save that some of the articles were of a description andoutward form which could hardly have been known in his day. For instance, therewas a glass pickle-jar, filled with fragments of Gibraltar rock; not, indeed,splinters of the veritable stone foundation of the famous fortress, but bits ofdelectable candy, neatly done up in white paper. Jim Crow, moreover, was seenexecuting his world-renowned dance, in gingerbread. A party of leaden dragoonswere galloping along one of the shelves, in equipments and uniform of moderncut; and there were some sugar figures, with no strong resemblance to thehumanity of any epoch, but less unsatisfactorily representing our own fashionsthan those of a hundred years ago. Another phenomenon, still more strikinglymodern, was a package of lucifer matches, which, in old times, would have beenthought actually to borrow their instantaneous flame from the nether fires ofTophet.
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