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The narrator notes that despite the actions engaged in by each figure, when the music stops, they have come no further than when they started. The cobbler does not finish making his shoe, the black-smith's iron is not shaped, and the milkmaid has fetched no milk. Clifford enjoys the music but finally cries about the monkey because of its physical and spiritual ugliness. On another day, a procession passes the house and while watching the throngs of people, Clifford makes an attempt to jump into the crowd from the balcony.
Matthew Maule
He hadno burden of care upon him; there were none of those questions andcontingencies with the future to be settled which wear away all other lives,and render them not worth having by the very process of providing for theirsupport. In this respect he was a child,—a child for the whole term ofhis existence, be it long or short. Indeed, his life seemed to be standingstill at a period little in advance of childhood, and to cluster all hisreminiscences about that epoch; just as, after the torpor of a heavy blow, thesufferer’s reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerablybehind the accident that stupefied him.
By Nathaniel HawthorneIntroduction by Katherine HoweAfterword by Brenda Wineapple
The second of Chanticleer’s two wives, ever since Phœbe’s arrival,had been in a state of heavy despondency, caused, as it afterwards appeared, byher inability to lay an egg. Shortlyafter, there was a prodigious cackling and gratulation of Chanticleer and allhis family, including the wizened chicken, who appeared to understand thematter quite as well as did his sire, his mother, or his aunt. That afternoonPhœbe found a diminutive egg,—not in the regular nest, it was far tooprecious to be trusted there,—but cunningly hidden under thecurrant-bushes, on some dry stalks of last year’s grass. Hepzibah, onlearning the fact, took possession of the egg and appropriated it toClifford’s breakfast, on account of a certain delicacy of flavor, forwhich, as she affirmed, these eggs had always been famous.
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Endowed with commonsense, as massive and hard asblocks of granite, fastened together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with ironclamps, he followed out his original design, probably without so much asimagining an objection to it. On the score of delicacy, or any scrupulousnesswhich a finer sensibility might have taught him, the Colonel, like most of hisbreed and generation, was impenetrable. He therefore dug his cellar, and laidthe deep foundations of his mansion, on the square of earth whence MatthewMaule, forty years before, had first swept away the fallen leaves. It was acurious, and, as some people thought, an ominous fact, that, very soon afterthe workmen began their operations, the spring of water, above mentioned,entirely lost the deliciousness of its pristine quality. Whether its sourceswere disturbed by the depth of the new cellar, or whatever subtler cause mightlurk at the bottom, it is certain that the water of Maule’s Well, as itcontinued to be called, grew hard and brackish.
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Immediately on his death, the shop-door had been locked, bolted, and barred,and, down to the period of our story, had probably never once been opened. Theold counter, shelves, and other fixtures of the little shop remained just as hehad left them. It used to be affirmed, that the dead shop-keeper, in a whitewig, a faded velvet coat, an apron at his waist, and his ruffles carefullyturned back from his wrists, might be seen through the chinks of the shutters,any night of the year, ransacking his till, or poring over the dingy pages ofhis day-book. From the look of unutterable woe upon his face, it appeared to behis doom to spend eternity in a vain effort to make his accounts balance.
Phœbe, when she hung over the fountain by Clifford’s side,could see nothing of all this,—neither the beauty nor theugliness,—but only the colored pebbles, looking as if the gush of thewaters shook and disarranged them. And the dark face, that so troubledClifford, was no more than the shadow thrown from a branch of one of thedamson-trees, and breaking the inner light of Maule’s well. The truthwas, however, that his fancy—reviving faster than his will and judgment,and always stronger than they—created shapes of loveliness that weresymbolic of his native character, and now and then a stern and dreadful shapethat typified his fate. The girl’s was not one of thosenatures which are most attracted by what is strange and exceptional in humancharacter. The path which would best have suited her was the well-worn track ofordinary life; the companions in whom she would most have delighted were suchas one encounters at every turn. The mystery which enveloped Clifford, so faras it affected her at all, was an annoyance, rather than the piquant charmwhich many women might have found in it.
Few of hersex, on such occasions, have ever looked so terrible as our poor scowlingHepzibah. But the visitor quietly closed the shop-door behind him, stood up hisumbrella against the counter, and turned a visage of composed benignity, tomeet the alarm and anger which his appearance had excited. Phœbe took leave of the desolate couple, and passed through the shop,twinkling her eyelids to shake off a dew-drop; for—considering how briefher absence was to be, and therefore the folly of being cast down aboutit—she would not so far acknowledge her tears as to dry them with herhandkerchief. On the doorstep, she met the little urchin whose marvellous featsof gastronomy have been recorded in the earlier pages of our narrative.
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It was the Sabbath morning; one of those bright, calm Sabbaths, with its ownhallowed atmosphere, when Heaven seems to diffuse itself over the earth’sface in a solemn smile, no less sweet than solemn. On such a Sabbath morn, werewe pure enough to be its medium, we should be conscious of the earth’snatural worship ascending through our frames, on whatever spot of ground westood. The church-bells, with various tones, but all in harmony, were callingout and responding to one another,—“It is the Sabbath! ”—and over the whole city the bellsscattered the blessed sounds, now slowly, now with livelier joy, now one bellalone, now all the bells together, crying earnestly,—“It is theSabbath!
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It was the invigorating breath of a fresh outward atmosphere, after the long torpor and monotonous seclusion of her life. The healthiest glow, that Hepzibah had known for years, had come now, in the dreaded crisis, when, for the first time, she had put forth her hand to help herself. Uncle Venner is one of the oldest habitants of Pyncheon Street who befriends Hepzibah, Clifford, and Phoebe. Clifford finds his company agreeable as well, and he joins the two along with Phoebe and Holgrave for picnics. Old Jaffrey Pyncheon is the uncle of Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, Clifford, and Hepzibah. His affliction is triggered when he finds the younger Jaffrey rifling through his personal papers.
The monkey, meanwhile, with a thick tail curling out into preposterousprolixity from beneath his tartans, took his station at the Italian’sfeet. He turned a wrinkled and abominable little visage to every passer-by, andto the circle of children that soon gathered round, and to Hepzibah’sshop-door, and upward to the arched window, whence Phœbe and Clifford werelooking down. Every moment, also, he took off his Highland bonnet, andperformed a bow and scrape. Sometimes, moreover, he made personal applicationto individuals, holding out his small black palm, and otherwise plainlysignifying his excessive desire for whatever filthy lucre might happen to be inanybody’s pocket.
October at The House of the Seven Gables - Destination Salem
October at The House of the Seven Gables.
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In fact(not to attribute the whole gloom of sky and earth to the one inauspiciouscircumstance of Phœbe’s departure), an easterly storm had set in, andindefatigably apply itself to the task of making the black roof and walls ofthe old house look more cheerless than ever before. Poor Clifford was cut off, at once, from allhis scanty resources of enjoyment. The garden, with its muddy walks, and the chill, drippingfoliage of its summer-house, was an image to be shuddered at. Nothingflourished in the cold, moist, pitiless atmosphere, drifting with the brackishscud of sea-breezes, except the moss along the joints of the shingle-roof, andthe great bunch of weeds, that had lately been suffering from drought, in theangle between the two front gables. She peeped from the window into the garden, and felt herself more regretful atleaving this spot of black earth, vitiated with such an age-long growth ofweeds, than joyful at the idea of again scenting her pine forests and freshclover-fields.
And, ever since the unfolding of the first bud, amultitude of humming-birds had been attracted thither. At times, it seemed asif for every one of the hundred blossoms there was one of these tiniest fowlsof the air,—a thumb’s bigness of burnished plumage, hovering andvibrating about the bean-poles. It was with indescribable interest, and evenmore than childish delight, that Clifford watched the humming-birds. He used tothrust his head softly out of the arbor to see them the better; all the while,too, motioning Phœbe to be quiet, and snatching glimpses of the smile upon herface, so as to heap his enjoyment up the higher with her sympathy. He delighted in the swell and subsidence ofthe rhythm, and the happily recurring rhyme.
On this very site,beside a spring of delicious water, his grandfather had felled the pine-treesand built a cottage, in which children had been born to him; and it was onlyfrom a dead man’s stiffened fingers that Colonel Pyncheon had wrestedaway the title-deeds. So young Maule went straight to the principal entrance,beneath a portal of carved oak, and gave such a peal of the iron knocker thatyou would have imagined the stern old wizard himself to be standing at thethreshold. One afternoonhe was seized with an irresistible desire to blow soap-bubbles; an amusement,as Hepzibah told Phœbe apart, that had been a favorite one with her brotherwhen they were both children. Behold him, therefore, at the arched window, withan earthen pipe in his mouth! Behold him, with his gray hair, and a wan, unrealsmile over his countenance, where still hovered a beautiful grace, which hisworst enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal, since it hadsurvived so long!
In 1818, his mother moved the family to Raymond, Maine, where they lived in the home that Hawthorne's Uncle Richard built in anticipation of making Maine the new center for the Manning family. The next morning, a man named Clifford with long, graying hair appears at the breakfast table—it was his voice and step Phoebe heard the night before. Clifford appears disoriented and bewildered by his surroundings, but there’s also a graceful air about him, suggesting that he must have been handsome once. Clifford finds Phoebe delightful, though he is startled by Hepzibah’s aged appearance. Phoebe also meets Judge Pyncheon in the shop and is alarmed by his rapid transition between harsh and sunny moods; he reminds her uncomfortably of Colonel Pyncheon’s portrait. When the Judge pushes past her into the house, Hepzibah bars him from seeing Clifford, who fears him.
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