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Updated: May 22, 2025
"Why, sometimes," answered Hepzibah, "I have seriously made it a question, whether I ought not to send him away. A woman clings to slight acquaintances when she lives so much alone as I do." "But if Mr. Holgrave is a lawless person!" remonstrated Phoebe, a part of whose essence it was to keep within the limits of law.
Poor Hepzibah, when she heard the kindly tone of his voice, began to sob. "Ah, Mr. Holgrave," she cried, "I never can go through with it! Never, never, never! I wish I were dead in the old family tomb with all my forefathers yes, and with my brother, who had far better find me there than here! I am too old, too feeble, and too hopeless!
This occurs in the temptation which besets Holgrave, when he finds that he possesses the same mesmeric sway over Phoebe, the latest Pyncheon offshoot, as that which his ancestor Matthew Maule exercised over Alice Pyncheon.
But Holgrave detained her a little longer. "Miss Hepzibah tells me," observed he, "that you return to the country in a few days." "Yes, but only for a little while," answered Phoebe; "for I look upon this as my present home. I go to make a few arrangements, and to take a more deliberate leave of my mother and friends.
At length, something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for Phoebe to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin Hepzibah, and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old Pyncheon 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.
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 Holgrave without recognizing this to be the fact.
It is scarcely necessary to point out how clearly this foreshadows the final union of those hereditary foes, the Pyncheons and Maules, through the marriage of Phoebe and Holgrave.
Holgrave, the young daguerreotypist in "The House of the Seven Gables," a type of the universal Yankee, had practised a number of these queer trades: had been a strolling dentist, a lecturer on mesmerism, a salesman in a village store, a district schoolmaster, editor of a country newspaper; and "had subsequently travelled New England and the Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut manufactory of Cologne water and other essences."
"I speak true thoughts to a true mind!" answered Holgrave, with a vehemence which Phoebe had not before witnessed in him. "The truth is as I say!
They were conscious of nothing sad or old. Presently the voices of Clifford and Hepzibah were heard at the door, and when they entered Clifford appeared the stronger of the two. "It is our own little Phoebe! Ah! And Holgrave with her!" he exclaimed. "I thought of you both as we came down the street. And so the flower of Eden has bloomed even in this old, darksome house to-day."
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