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JUDGE PYNCHEON, while his two relatives have fled away with such ill-considered haste, still sits in the old parlor, keeping house, as the familiar phrase is, in the absence of its ordinary occupants. To him, and to the venerable House of the Seven Gables, does our story now betake itself, like an owl, bewildered in the daylight, and hastening back to his hollow tree.
Then all at once it struck Phoebe that this very Judge Pyncheon was the original of a miniature which Mr. Holgrave who took portraits, and whose acquaintance she had made within a few hours of her arrival had shown her yesterday. There was the same hard, stern, relentless look on the face. In reality, the miniature was copied from an old portrait of Colonel Pyncheon which hung within the house.
We behold aged men and grandames, a clergyman with the Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien, and a red-coated officer of the old French war; and there comes the shop-keeping Pyncheon of a century ago, with the ruffles turned back from his wrists; and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artist's legend, with the beautiful and pensive Alice, who brings no pride out of her virgin grave.
It was the belief of those who knew him best, that he would positively have taken the very singular step of giving up the House of the Seven Gables to the representative of Matthew Maule, but for the unspeakable tumult which a suspicion of the old gentleman's project awakened among his Pyncheon relatives.
A cautious man is proverbially said to sleep with one eye open. That may be wisdom. But not with both; for this were heedlessness! No, no! Judge Pyncheon cannot be asleep. It is odd, however, that a gentleman so burdened with engagements, and noted, too, for punctuality, should linger thus in an old lonely mansion, which he has never seemed very fond of visiting.
Thus did Hepzibah bewilder herself with these fantasies of the old time. She had dwelt too much alone, too long in the Pyncheon House, until her very brain was impregnated with the dry-rot of its timbers. She needed a walk along the noonday street to keep her sane.
On this very site, beside a spring of delicious water, his grandfather had felled the pine-trees and built a cottage, in which children had been born to him; and it was only from a dead man's stiffened fingers that Colonel Pyncheon had wrested away the title-deeds.
The truth was, nevertheless, that it had been planted by Alice Pyncheon, she was Phoebe's great-great-grand-aunt, in soil which, reckoning only its cultivation as a garden-plat, was now unctuous with nearly two hundred years of vegetable decay.
It was the harpsichord which Alice Pyncheon had brought with her from beyond the sea. The fair Alice bestowed most of her maiden leisure between flowers and music, although the former were apt to droop, and the melodies were often sad. She was of foreign education, and could not take kindly to the New England modes of life, in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed. As Mr.
At some paces from Alice, with his arms uplifted in the air, the carpenter made a gesture as if directing downward a slow, ponderous, and invisible weight upon the maiden. "Stay, Maule!" exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, stepping forward. "I forbid your proceeding further!" "Pray, my dear father, do not interrupt the young man," said Alice, without changing her position.
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