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Updated: May 27, 2025
The fantasy would not quit her, that the original Puritan, of whom she had heard so many sombre traditions, the progenitor of the whole race of New England Pyncheons, the founder of the House of the Seven Gables, and who had died so strangely in it, had now stept into the shop. In these days of off-hand equipment, the matter was easily enough arranged.
The son of the executed Matthew Maule, while building this house, took the opportunity to construct that recess, and hide away the Indian deed, on which depended the immense land-claim of the Pyncheons. Thus they bartered their eastern territory for Maule's garden-ground." "And now" said Uncle Venner "I suppose their whole claim is not worth one man's share in my farm yonder!"
"This is the very parchment, the attempt to recover which cost the beautiful Alice Pyncheon her happiness and life," said the artist, alluding to his legend. "It is what the Pyncheons sought in vain, while it was valuable; and now that they find the treasure, it has long been worthless." "Poor Cousin Jaffrey! This is what deceived him," exclaimed Hepzibah.
In the family existence of these Pyncheons, for instance, forgive me Phoebe, but I cannot think of you as one of them, in their brief New England pedigree, there has been time enough to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another." "You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred," said Phoebe, debating with herself whether she ought to take offence.
"How strangely in earnest you are!" exclaimed Phoebe, looking at him with surprise and perplexity; half alarmed and partly inclined to laugh. "You talk of the lunacy of the Pyncheons; is it contagious?" "I understand you!" said the artist, coloring and laughing. "I believe I am a little mad.
Still, from generation to generation, the Pyncheons cherished an absurd delusion of family importance on the strength of this impalpable claim; and from father to son they clung with tenacity to the ancestral house for the better part of two centuries.
Thus, while the general suggestion of the Hawthorne line and its fortunes was followed in the romance, the Pyncheons taking the place of the author's family, certain distinguishing marks of the Hawthornes were assigned to the imaginary Maule posterity.
Whatever she had heard, from legendary aunts and grandmothers, concerning the good or evil fortunes of the Pyncheons, stories which had heretofore been kept warm in her remembrance by the chimney-corner glow that was associated with them, now recurred to her, sombre, ghastly, cold, like most passages of family history, when brooded over in melancholy mood.
I do not suppose that he searched the names out and founded his use of them upon some suggestion already connected with them; indeed, he expressly declared, when remonstrated with on his use of the Pyncheons, that he did not know of any person of that title connected with Salem history of that time; but the circumstance of his using the other names is interesting as showing that many minute facts must have gone to make up the atmosphere of that half-historic and half-imaginative area whereon so many of his short tales and two of the romances were enacted.
It will take a tighter workman than I am to keep the spirits out of the Seven Gables. Even if the Colonel would be quiet," he added, muttering to himself, "my old grandfather, the wizard, will be pretty sure to stick to the Pyncheons as long as their walls hold together." "What's that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule?" asked Scipio. "And what for do you look so black at me?"
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