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ArcaMax Publishing > Books > Fiction > House of the Seven Gables > Section 2
House of the Seven Gables

Nathaniel Hawthorne

I.  The Old Pyncheon Family


HALFWAY down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands
a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing
towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered
chimney in the midst.  The street is Pyncheon Street; the house
is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference,
rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by
the title of the Pyncheon Elm.  On my occasional visits to the
town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down Pyncheon Street,
for the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquities,
--the great elm-tree and the weather-beaten edifice.

The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like
a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward
storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of
mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed
within.  Were these to be worthily recounted, they would form a
narrative of no small interest and instruction, and possessing,
moreover, a certain remarkable unity, which might almost seem
the result of artistic arrangement.  But the story would include
a chain of events extending over the better part of two centuries,
and, written out with reasonable amplitude, would fill a bigger
folio volume, or a longer series of duodecimos, than could prudently
be appropriated to the annals of all New England during a similar
period.  It consequently becomes imperative to make short work
with most of the traditionary lore of which the old Pyncheon House,
otherwise known as the House of the Seven Gables, has been the
theme.   With a brief sketch, therefore, of the circumstances
amid which the foundation of the house was laid, and a rapid
glimpse at its quaint exterior, as it grew black in the prevalent
east wind,--pointing, too, here and there, at some spot of more
verdant mossiness on its roof and walls,--we shall commence the
real action of our tale at an epoch not very remote from the
present day.  Still, there will be a connection with the long
past--a reference to forgotten events and personages, and to
manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete
--which, if adequately translated to the reader, would serve
to illustrate how much of old material goes to make up the
freshest novelty of human life.  Hence, too, might be drawn a
weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth, that the act of
the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce
good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together with
the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term
expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring
growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity.

The House of the Seven Gables, antique as it now looks, was not
the first habitation erected by civilized man on precisely the same
spot of ground.  Pyncheon Street formerly bore the humbler appellation
of Maule's Lane, from the name of the original occupant of the soil,
before whose cottage-door it was a cow-path.  A natural spring of
soft and pleasant water--a rare treasure on the sea-girt peninsula
where the Puritan settlement was made--had early induced Matthew
Maule to build a hut, shaggy with thatch, at this point, although
somewhat too remote from what was then the centre of the village.
In the growth of the town, however, after some thirty or forty
years, the site covered by this rude hovel had become exceedingly
desirable in the eyes of a prominent and powerful personage, who
asserted plausible claims to the proprietorship of this and a
large adjacent tract of land, on the strength of a grant from the
legislature.  Colonel Pyncheon, the claimant, as we gather from
whatever traits of him are preserved, was characterized by an
iron energy of purpose.  Matthew Maule, on the other hand, though
an obscure man, was stubborn in the defence of what he considered
his right; and, for several years, he succeeded in protecting the
acre or two of earth which, with his own toil, he had hewn out
of the primeval forest, to be his garden ground and homestead.
No written record of this dispute is known to be in existence.
Our acquaintance with the whole subject is derived chiefly from
tradition.  It would be bold, therefore, and possibly unjust,
to venture a decisive opinion as to its merits; although it
appears to have been at least a matter of doubt, whether Colonel
Pyncheon's claim were not unduly stretched, in order to make it
cover the small metes and bounds of Matthew Maule.  What greatly
strengthens such a suspicion is the fact that this controversy
between two ill-matched antagonists --at a period, moreover,
laud it as we may, when personal influence had far more weight
than now--remained for years undecided, and came to a close only
with the death of the party occupying the disputed soil.  The mode
of his death, too, affects the mind differently, in our day,
from what it did a century and a half ago.  It was a death that
blasted with strange horror the humble name of the dweller in
the cottage, and made it seem almost a religious act to drive
the plough over the little area of his habitation, and obliterate
his place and memory from among men.

Old Matthew Maule, in a word, was executed for the crime of
witchcraft.  He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion,
which should teach us, among its other morals, that the influential
classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the
people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever
characterized the maddest mob.  Clergymen, judges, statesmen,--the
wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day stood in the inner
circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of
blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived.  If any
one part of their proceedings can be said to deserve less blame
than another, it was the singular indiscrimination with which
they persecuted, not merely the poor and aged, as in former
judicial massacres, but people of all ranks; their own equals,
brethren, and wives.  Amid the disorder of such various ruin,
it is not strange that a man of inconsiderable note, like Maule,
should have trodden the martyr's path to the hill of execution
almost unremarked in the throng of his fellow sufferers.  But,
in after days, when the frenzy of that hideous epoch had subsided,
it was remembered how loudly Colonel Pyncheon had joined in the
general cry, to purge the land from witchcraft; nor did it fail
to be whispered, that there was an invidious acrimony in the
zeal with which he had sought the condemnation of Matthew Maule.
It was well known that the victim had recognized the bitterness
of personal enmity in his persecutor's conduct towards him, and
that he declared himself hunted to death for his spoil.  At the
moment of execution--with the halter about his neck, and while
Colonel Pyncheon sat on horseback, grimly gazing at the scene
Maule had addressed him from the scaffold, and uttered a prophecy,
of which history, as well as fireside tradition, has preserved
the very words.  "God," said the dying man, pointing his finger,
with a ghastly look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy,
--"God will give him blood to drink!"  After the reputed wizard's
death, his humble homestead had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel
Pyncheon's grasp.  When it was understood, however, that the
Colonel intended to erect a family mansion-spacious, ponderously
framed of oaken timber, and calculated to endure for many generations
of his posterity over the spot first covered by the log-built hut
of Matthew Maule, there was much shaking of the head among the
village gossips.  Without absolutely expressing a doubt whether
the stalwart Puritan had acted as a man of conscience and integrity
throughout the proceedings which have been sketched, they,
nevertheless, hinted that he was about to build his house over
an unquiet grave.  His home would include the home of the dead
and buried wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter
a kind of privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers
into which future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where
children of the Pyncheon blood were to be born.  The terror and
ugliness of Maule's crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment,
would darken the freshly plastered walls, and infect them early
with the scent of an old and melancholy house.  Why, then, --while
so much of the soil around him was bestrewn with the virgin forest
leaves,--why should Colonel Pyncheon prefer a site that had
already been accurst?

But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned
aside from his well-considered scheme, either by dread of the
wizard's ghost, or by flimsy sentimentalities of any kind, however
specious.  Had he been told of a bad air, it might have moved him
somewhat; but he was ready to encounter an evil spirit on his own
ground.  Endowed with commonsense, as massive and hard as blocks
of granite, fastened together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with
iron clamps, he followed out his original design, probably without
so much as imagining an objection to it.  On the score of delicacy,
or any scrupulousness which a finer sensibility might have taught him,
the Colonel, like most of his breed and generation, was impenetrable.
He therefore dug his cellar, and laid the deep foundations of his
mansion, on the square of earth whence Matthew Maule, forty years
before, had first swept away the fallen leaves.  It was a curious,
and, as some people thought, an ominous fact, that, very soon after
the workmen began their operations, the spring of water, above
mentioned, entirely lost the deliciousness of its pristine quality.
Whether its sources were disturbed by the depth of the new cellar,
or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the bottom, it is certain
that the water of Maule's Well, as it continued to be called,
grew hard and brackish.  Even such we find it now; and any old
woman of the neighborhood will certify that it is productive of
intestinal mischief to those who quench their thirst there.

The reader may deem it singular that the head carpenter of the new
edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead
gripe the property of the soil had been wrested.  Not improbably he
was the best workman of his time; or, perhaps, the Colonel thought
it expedient, or was impelled by some better feeling, thus openly
to cast aside all animosity against the race of his fallen antagonist.
Nor was it out of keeping with the general coarseness and matter-of-fact
character of the age, that the son should be willing to earn an honest
penny, or, rather, a weighty amount of sterling pounds, from the purse
of his father's deadly enemy.  At all events, Thomas Maule became the
architect of the House of the Seven Gables, and performed his duty so
faithfully that the timber framework fastened by his hands still
holds together.

Thus the great house was built.  Familiar as it stands in the writer's
recollection,--for it has been an object of curiosity with him from
boyhood, both as a specimen of the best and stateliest architecture
of a longpast epoch, and as the scene of events more full of human
interest, perhaps, than those of a gray feudal castle,--familiar as
it stands, in its rusty old age, it is therefore only the more
difficult to imagine the bright novelty with which it first caught
the sunshine.  The impression of its actual state, at this distance
of a hundred and sixty years, darkens inevitably through the picture
which we would fain give of its appearance on the morning when the
Puritan magnate bade all the town to be his guests.  A ceremony of
consecration, festive as well as religious, was now to be performed.
A prayer and discourse from the Rev.  Mr. Higginson, and the outpouring
of a psalm from the general throat of the community, was to be made
acceptable to the grosser sense by ale, cider, wine, and brandy,
in copious effusion, and, as some authorities aver, by an ox, roasted
whole, or at least, by the weight and substance of an ox, in more
manageable joints and sirloins.  The carcass of a deer, shot within
twenty miles, had supplied material for the vast circumference of a
pasty.  A codfish of sixty pounds, caught in the bay, had been dissolved
into the rich liquid of a chowder.   The chimney of the new house,
in short, belching forth its kitchen smoke, impregnated the whole air
with the scent of meats, fowls, and fishes, spicily concocted with
odoriferous herbs, and onions in abundance.  The mere smell of such
festivity, making its way to everybody's nostrils, was at once an
invitation and an appetite.

Maule's Lane, or Pyncheon Street, as it were now more decorous to
call it, was thronged, at the appointed hour, as with a congregation
on its way to church.  All, as they approached, looked upward at
the imposing edifice, which was henceforth to assume its rank among
the habitations of mankind.  There it rose, a little withdrawn from
the line of the street, but in pride, not modesty.  Its whole visible
exterior was ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the
grotesqueness of a Gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the
glittering plaster, composed of lime, pebbles, and bits of glass,
with which the woodwork of the walls was overspread.  On every side
the seven gables pointed sharply towards the sky, and presented the
aspect of a whole sisterhood of edifices, breathing through the
spiracles of one great chimney.  The many lattices, with their small,
diamond-shaped panes, admitted the sunlight into hall and chamber,
while, nevertheless, the second story, projecting far over the base,
and itself retiring beneath the third, threw a shadowy and thoughtful
gloom into the lower rooms.  Carved globes of wood were affixed under
the jutting stories.  Little spiral rods of iron beautified each of
the seven peaks.  On the triangular portion of the gable, that fronted
next the street, was a dial, put up that very morning, and on which
the sun was still marking the passage of the first bright hour in a
history that was not destined to be all so bright.  All around were
scattered shavings, chips, shingles, and broken halves of bricks;
these, together with the lately turned earth, on which the grass
had not begun to grow, contributed to the impression of strangeness
and novelty proper to a house that had yet its place to make among
men's daily interests.

The principal entrance, which had almost the breadth of a
church-door, was in the angle between the two front gables, and
was covered by an open porch, with benches beneath its shelter.
Under this arched doorway, scraping their feet on the unworn
threshold, now trod the clergymen, the elders, the magistrates,
the deacons, and whatever of aristocracy there was in town or
county.  Thither, too, thronged the plebeian classes as freely as
their betters, and in larger number.  Just within the entrance,
however, stood two serving-men, pointing some of the guests to
the neighborhood of the kitchen and ushering others into the
statelier rooms,--hospitable alike to all, but still with a
scrutinizing regard to the high or low degree of each.  Velvet
garments sombre but rich, stiffly plaited ruffs and bands,
embroidered gloves, venerable beards, the mien and countenance
of authority, made it easy to distinguish the gentleman of worship,
at that period, from the tradesman, with his plodding air, or the
laborer, in his leathern jerkin, stealing awe-stricken into the
house which he had perhaps helped to build.

One inauspicious circumstance there was, which awakened a hardly
concealed displeasure in the breasts of a few of the more punctilious
visitors.  The founder of this stately mansion--a gentleman noted
for the square and ponderous courtesy of his demeanor, ought surely
to have stood in his own hall, and to have offered the first welcome
to so many eminent personages as here presented themselves in honor
of his solemn festival.  He was as yet invisible; the most favored
of the guests had not beheld him.  This sluggishness on Colonel
Pyncheon's part became still more unaccountable, when the second
dignitary of the province made his appearance, and found no more
ceremonious a reception.  The lieutenant-governor, although his
visit was one of the anticipated glories of the day, had alighted
from his horse, and assisted his lady from her side-saddle, and
crossed the Colonel's threshold, without other greeting than that
of the principal domestic.

This person--a gray-headed man, of quiet and most respectful
deportment --found it necessary to explain that his master still
remained in his study, or private apartment; on entering which,
an hour before, he had expressed a wish on no account to be disturbed.

"Do not you see, fellow," said the high-sheriff of the county,
taking the servant aside, "that this is no less a man than the
lieutenant-governor? Summon Colonel Pyncheon at once! I know that
he received letters from England this morning; and, in the perusal
and consideration of them, an hour may have passed away without his
noticing it.  But he will be ill-pleased, I judge if you suffer him
to neglect the courtesy due to one of our chief rulers, and who may
be said to represent King William, in the absence of the governor
himself.   Call your master instantly."

"Nay, please your worship," answered the man, in much perplexity,
but with a backwardness that strikingly indicated the hard and
severe character of Colonel Pyncheon's domestic rule; "my master's
orders were exceeding strict; and, as your worship knows, he
permits of no discretion in the obedience of those who owe him
service.  Let who list open yonder door; I dare not, though the
governor's own voice should bid me do it!"

"Pooh, pooh, master high sheriff!" cried the lieutenant-governor,
who had overheard the foregoing discussion, and felt himself high
enough in station to play a little with his dignity.  "I will take
the matter into my own hands.  It is time that the good Colonel came
forth to greet his friends; else we shall be apt to suspect that he
has taken a sip too much of his Canary wine, in his extreme deliberation
which cask it were best to broach in honor of the day! But since he
is so much behindhand, I will give him a remembrancer myself!"

Accordingly, with such a tramp of his ponderous riding-boots as
might of itself have been audible in the remotest of the seven
gables, he advanced to the door, which the servant pointed out,
and made its new panels reecho with a loud, free knock.  Then,
looking round, with a smile, to the spectators, he awaited a
response.  As none came, however, he knocked again, but with the
same unsatisfactory result as at first.  And now, being a trifle
choleric in his temperament, the lieutenant-governor uplifted the
heavy hilt of his sword, wherewith he so beat and banged upon the
door, that, as some of the bystanders whispered, the racket might
have disturbed the dead.  Be that as it might, it seemed to produce
no awakening effect on Colonel Pyncheon.  When the sound subsided,
the silence through the house was deep, dreary, and oppressive,
notwithstanding that the tongues of many of the guests had already
been loosened by a surreptitious cup or two of wine or spirits.

"Strange, forsooth!--very strange!" cried the lieutenant-governor,
whose smile was changed to a frown.  "But seeing that our host
sets us the good example of forgetting ceremony, I shall likewise
throw it aside, and make free to intrude on his privacy."

He tried the door, which yielded to his hand, and was flung wide
open by a sudden gust of wind that passed, as with a loud sigh,
from the outermost portal through all the passages and apartments
of the new house.  It rustled the silken garments of the ladies,
and waved the long curls of the gentlemen's wigs, and shook the
window-hangings and the curtains of the bedchambers; causing
everywhere a singular stir, which yet was more like a hush.
A shadow of awe and half-fearful anticipation--nobody knew
wherefore, nor of what--had all at once fallen over the company.

They thronged, however, to the now open door, pressing the
lieutenant-governor, in the eagerness of their curiosity, into
the room in advance of them.  At the first glimpse they beheld
nothing extraordinary:  a handsomely furnished room, of moderate
size, somewhat darkened by curtains; books arranged on shelves;
a large map on the wall, and likewise a portrait of Colonel
Pyncheon, beneath which sat the original Colonel himself, in an
oaken elbow-chair, with a pen in his hand.  Letters, parchments,
and blank sheets of paper were on the table before him.  He
appeared to gaze at the curious crowd, in front of which stood
the lieutenant-governor; and there was a frown on his dark and
massive countenance, as if sternly resentful of the boldness that
had impelled them into his private retirement.

A little boy--the Colonel's grandchild, and the only human being
that ever dared to be familiar with him--now made his way among
the guests, and ran towards the seated figure; then pausing
halfway, he began to shriek with terror.  The company, tremulous
as the leaves of a tree, when all are shaking together, drew
nearer, and perceived that there was an unnatural distortion in
the fixedness of Colonel Pyncheon's stare; that there was blood
on his ruff, and that his hoary beard was saturated with it.
It was too late to give assistance.  The iron-hearted Puritan,
the relentless persecutor, the grasping and strong-willed man was
dead! Dead, in his new house! There is a tradition, only worth
alluding to as lending a tinge of superstitious awe to a scene
perhaps gloomy enough without it, that a voice spoke loudly among
the guests, the tones of which were like those of old Matthew
Maule, the executed wizard,--"God hath given him blood to drink!"

Thus early had that one guest,--the only guest who is certain,
at one time or another, to find his way into every human dwelling,
--thus early had Death stepped across the threshold of the House
of the Seven Gables!

Colonel Pyncheon's sudden and mysterious end made a vast deal
of noise in its day.  There were many rumors, some of which have
vaguely drifted down to the present time, how that appearances
indicated violence; that there were the marks of fingers on his
throat, and the print of a bloody hand on his plaited ruff; and
that his peaked beard was dishevelled, as if it had been fiercely
clutched and pulled.  It was averred, likewise, that the lattice
window, near the Colonel's chair, was open; and that, only a few
minutes before the fatal occurrence, the figure of a man had been
seen clambering over the garden fence, in the rear of the house.
But it were folly to lay any stress on stories of this kind, which
are sure to spring up around such an event as that now related,
and which, as in the present case, sometimes prolong themselves
for ages afterwards, like the toadstools that indicate where the
fallen and buried trunk of a tree has long since mouldered into
the earth.  For our own part, we allow them just as little
credence as to that other fable of the skeleton hand which the
lieutenant-governor was said to have seen at the Colonel's throat,
but which vanished away, as he advanced farther into the room.
Certain it is, however, that there was a great consultation and
dispute of doctors over the dead body.   One,--John Swinnerton
by name,--who appears to have been a man of eminence, upheld it,
if we have rightly understood his terms of art, to be a case of
apoplexy.  His professional brethren, each for himself, adopted
various hypotheses, more or less plausible, but all dressed out
in a perplexing mystery of phrase, which, if it do not show a
bewilderment of mind in these erudite physicians, certainly causes
it in the unlearned peruser of their opinions.  The coroner's
jury sat upon the corpse, and, like sensible men, returned an
unassailable verdict of "Sudden Death!"

It is indeed difficult to imagine that there could have been
a serious suspicion of murder, or the slightest grounds for
implicating any particular individual as the perpetrator.
The rank, wealth, and eminent character of the deceased must
have insured the strictest scrutiny into every ambiguous
circumstance.  As none such is on record, it is safe to assume
that none existed Tradition,--which sometimes brings down truth
that history has let slip, but is oftener the wild babble of the
time, such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now congeals
in newspapers,--tradition is responsible for all contrary averments.
In Colonel Pyncheon's funeral sermon, which was printed, and is
still extant, the Rev. Mr. Higginson enumerates, among the many
felicities of his distinguished parishioner's earthly career,
the happy seasonableness of his death.  His duties all performed,
--the highest prosperity attained,--his race and future generations
fixed on a stable basis, and with a stately roof to shelter them
for centuries to come,--what other upward step remained for this
good man to take, save the final step from earth to the golden
gate of heaven! The pious clergyman surely would not have uttered
words like these had he in the least suspected that the Colonel
had been thrust into the other world with the clutch of violence
upon his throat.
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