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A fresh spasm of shivering seized her. Suddenly she remembered the opossum rug she had left. She opened the door leading from Maule's room into the veranda, and went out. She stood bewilderedly, looking across the faint-lit yard to the dim veranda of the kitchen wing opposite, as she fought against the sick faintness that threatened to overcome her.
The last and youngest Pyncheon was a little country-girl of seventeen, the daughter of another of the Judge's cousins, who had married a young woman of no family or property, and died early and in poor circumstances. His widow had recently taken another husband. As for Matthew Maule's posterity, it was supposed now to be extinct.
We soon after reached Maule's creek, the passage of which, on account of its steep banks, cost us an hour and a half. This induced me to encamp there, influenced also by the apprehension of a want of water, at any convenient distance beyond it.
White followed Maule's river for some miles to the westward, so that we could judge of the direction in which it fell into the Namoi.
"If old Maule's ghost, or a descendant of his, could see me behind the counter to-day, he would call it the fulfillment of his worst wishes. But I thank you for your kindness, Mr. Holgrave, and will do my utmost to be a good shop-keeper." "Pray do" said Holgrave, "and let me have the pleasure of being your first customer.
Had not the wizard died for it? Had he not bequeathed a legacy of hatred against the Pyncheons 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 Maule's figure in the looking-glass.
'But latterly, said Joan, 'I haven't heard anything about your doings not since you wrote from Castle Gaverick after after Mr Willoughby Maule's marriage? The light died out of Bridget's face. 'Ah, I'll tell you Do you know, Rosamond saw them the Willoughby Maules before we all left. She met them at Shoolbred's buying furniture.
The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm tree before the door is known as the Pyncheon elm. 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. Colonel Pyncheon, the claimant, was a man of iron energy of purpose.
Pyncheon's long residence abroad, and 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 Maule's grandfather to be a wizard? Had not the crime been proved?
This mode of death had been an idiosyncrasy with his family, for generations past; not often occurring, indeed, but, when it does occur, usually attacking individuals about the Judge's time of life, and generally in the tension of some mental crisis, or, perhaps, in an access of wrath. Old Maule's prophecy was probably founded on a knowledge of this physical predisposition in the Pyncheon race.
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