University of Virginia Library

2. II.
THE LITTLE SHOP-WINDOW.

It still lacked half an hour of sunrise, when Miss Hepzibah
Pyncheon — we will not say awoke; it being doubtful
whether the poor lady had so much as closed her eyes, during
the brief night of midsummer — but, at all events, arose
from her solitary pillow, and began what it would be mockery
to term the adornment of her person. Far from us be
the indecorum of assisting, even in imagination, at a maiden
lady's toilet! Our story must therefore await Miss Hepzibah
at the threshold of her chamber; only presuming,
meanwhile, to note some of the heavy sighs that labored
from her bosom, with little restraint as to their lugubrious
depth and volume of sound, inasmuch as they could be
audible to nobody, save a disembodied listener like ourself.
The Old Maid was alone in the old house. Alone, except
for a certain respectable and orderly young man, an artist
in the daguerreotype line, who, for about three months back,
had been a lodger in a remote gable, — quite a house by
itself, indeed, — with locks, bolts, and oaken bars, on all the
intervening doors. Inaudible, consequently, were poor Miss
Hepzibah's gusty sighs. Inaudible, the creaking joints of
her stiffened knees, as she knelt down by the bedside. And
inaudible, too, by mortal ear, but heard with all-comprehending
love and pity in the furthest heaven, that almost
agony of prayer — now whispered, now a groan, now a
struggling silence — wherewith she besought the Divine
assistance through the day! Evidently, this is to be a day
of more than ordinary trial to Miss Hepzibah, who, for

above a quarter of a century gone by, has dwelt in strict
seclusion, taking no part in the business of life, and just as
little in its intercourse and pleasures. Not with such fervor
prays the torpid recluse, looking forward to the cold, sunless,
stagnant calm of a day that is to be like innumerable
yesterdays!

The maiden lady's devotions are concluded. Will she
now issue forth over the threshold of our story? Not yet,
by many moments. First, every drawer in the tall, old-fashioned
bureau is to be opened, with difficulty, and with a
succession of spasmodic jerks; then, all must close again,
with the same fidgety reluctance. There is a rustling of
stiff silks; a tread of backward and forward footsteps, to
and fro, across the chamber. We suspect Miss Hepzibah,
moreover, of taking a step upward into a chair, in order to
give heedful regard to her appearance, on all sides, and at
full length, in the oval, dingy-framed toilet-glass, that hangs
above her table. Truly! well, indeed! who would have
thought it! Is all this precious time to be lavished on the
matutinal repair and beautifying of an elderly person, who
never goes abroad, whom nobody ever visits, and from
whom, when she shall have done her utmost, it were the
best charity to turn one's eyes another way?

Now she is almost ready. Let us pardon her one other
pause; for it is given to the sole sentiment, or, we might
better say — heightened and rendered intense, as it has
been, by sorrow and seclusion — to the strong passion, of her
life. We heard the turning of a key in a small lock; she
has opened a secret drawer of an escritoir, and is probably
looking at a certain miniature, done in Malbone's most perfect
style, and representing a face worthy of no less delicate
a pencil. It was once our good fortune to see this picture.
It is a likeness of a young man, in a silken dressing-gown
of an old fashion, the soft richness of which is well adapted

to the countenance of reverie, with its full, tender lips, and
beautiful eyes, that seem to indicate not so much capacity
of thought, as gentle and voluptuous emotion. Of the possessor
of such features we shall have a right to ask nothing,
except that he would take the rude world easily, and make
himself happy in it. Can it have been an early lover of
Miss Hepzibah? No; she never had a lover — poor thing,
how could she? — nor ever knew, by her own experience,
what love technically means. And yet, her undying faith
and trust, her fresh remembrance, and continual devotedness
towards the original of that miniature, have been the
only substance for her heart to feed upon.

She seems to have put aside the miniature, and is standing
again before the toilet-glass. There are tears to be
wiped off. A few more footsteps to and fro; and here, at
last — with another pitiful sigh, like a gust of chill, damp
wind out of a long-closed vault, the door of which has accidentally
been set ajar — here comes Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon!
Forth she steps into the dusky, time-darkened
passage; a tall figure, clad in black silk, with a long and
shrunken waist, feeling her way towards the stairs like a
near-sighted person, as in truth she is.

The sun, meanwhile, if not already above the horizon,
was ascending nearer and nearer to its verge. A few clouds,
floating high upward, caught some of the earliest light, and
threw down its golden gleam on the windows of all the
houses in the street, not forgetting the House of the Seven
Gables, which — many such sunrises as it had witnessed —
looked cheerfully at the present one. The reflected radiance
served to show, pretty distinctly, the aspect and arrangement
of the room which Hepzibah entered, after descending
the stairs. It was a low-studded room, with a beam
across the ceiling, panelled with dark wood, and having a
large chimney-piece, set round with pictured tiles, but now

closed by an iron fire-board, through which ran the funnel
of a modern stove. There was a carpet on the floor, originally
of rich texture, but so worn and faded, in these latter
years, that its once brilliant figure had quite vanished into
one indistinguishable hue. In the way of furniture, there
were two tables: one, constructed with perplexing intricacy,
and exhibiting as many feet as a centipede; the other, most
delicately wrought, with four long and slender legs, so apparently
frail that it was almost incredible what a length of
time the ancient tea-table had stood upon them. Half a
dozen chairs stood about the room, straight and stiff, and so
ingeniously contrived for the discomfort of the human person
that they were irksome even to sight, and conveyed the
ugliest possible idea of the state of society to which they
could have been adapted. One exception there was, however,
in a very antique elbow-chair, with a high back,
carved elaborately in oak, and a roomy depth within its
arms, that made up, by its spacious comprehensiveness, for
the lack of any of those artistic curves which abound in a
modern chair.

As for ornamental articles of furniture, we recollect but
two, if such they may be called. One was a map of the
Pyncheon territory at the eastward, not engraved, but the
handiwork of some skilful old draftsman, and grotesquely
illuminated with pictures of Indians and wild beasts, among
which was seen a lion; the natural history of the region
being as little known as its geography, which was put down
most fantastically awry. The other adornment was the
portrait of old Colonel Pyncheon, at two-thirds length, representing
the stern features of a puritanic-looking personage, in
a skull-cap, with a laced band and a grizzly beard; holding a
Bible with one hand, and in the other uplifting an iron
sword-hilt. The latter object, being more successfully depicted
by the artist, stood out in far greater prominence than

the sacred volume. Face to face with this picture, on entering
the apartment, Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon came to a
pause; regarding it with a singular scowl, a strange contortion
of the brow, which, by people who did not know
her, would probably have been interpreted as an expression
of bitter anger and ill-will. But it was no such thing. She,
in fact, felt a reverence for the pictured visage of which
only a far-descended and time-stricken virgin could be susceptible;
and this forbidding scowl was the innocent result
of her near-sightedness, and an effort so to concentrate her
powers of vision as to substitute a firm outline of the object
instead of a vague one.

We must linger a moment on this unfortunate expression
of poor Hepzibah's brow. Her scowl — as the world, or
such part of it as sometimes caught a transitory glimpse of
her at the window, wickedly persisted in calling it — her
scowl had done Miss Hepzibah a very ill office, in establishing
her character as an ill-tempered old maid; nor does it
appear improbable, that, by often gazing at herself in a dim
looking-glass, and perpetually encountering her own frown
within its ghostly sphere, she had been led to interpret the
expression almost as unjustly as the world did. “How miserably
cross I look!” she must often have whispered to herself;
— and ultimately have fancied herself so, by a sense
of inevitable doom. But her heart never frowned. It was
naturally tender, sensitive, and full of little tremors and
palpitations; all of which weaknesses it retained, while her
visage was growing so perversely stern, and even fierce.
Nor had Hepzibah ever any hardihood, except what came
from the very warmest nook in her affections.

All this time, however, we are loitering faint-heartedly on
the threshold of our story. In very truth, we have an invincible
reluctance to disclose what Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon
was about to do.

It has already been observed, that, in the basement story
of the gable fronting on the street, an unworthy ancestor,
nearly a century ago, had fitted up a shop. Ever since the
old gentleman retired from trade, and fell asleep under his
coffin-lid, not only the shop-door, but the inner arrangements,
had been suffered to remain unchanged; while the
dust of ages gathered inch-deep over the shelves and counter,
and partly filled an old pair of scales, as if it were of
value enough to be weighed. It treasured itself up, too, in
the half-open till, where there still lingered a base sixpence,
worth neither more nor less than the hereditary pride which
had here been put to shame. Such had been the state and
condition of the little shop in old Hepzibah's childhood,
when she and her brother used to play at hide-and-seek in
its forsaken precincts. So it had remained, until within a
few days past.

But now, though the shop-window was still closely curtained
from the public gaze, a remarkable change had taken
place in its interior. The rich and heavy festoons of cobweb,
which it had cost a long ancestral succession of spiders
their life's labor to spin and weave, had been carefully
brushed away from the ceiling. The counter, shelves, and
floor, had all been scoured, and the latter was overstrewn
with fresh blue sand. The brown scales, too, had evidently
undergone rigid discipline, in an unavailing effort to rub off
the rust, which, alas! had eaten through and through their
substance. Neither was the little old shop any longer
empty of merchantable goods. A curious eye, privileged
to take an account of stock, and investigate behind the
counter, would have discovered a barrel, — yea, two or three
barrels and half ditto, — one containing flour, another apples,
and a third, perhaps, Indian meal. There was likewise
a square box of pine-wood, full of soap in bars; also,
another of the same size, in which were tallow candles, ten

to the pound. A small stock of brown sugar, some white
beans and split peas, and a few other commodities of low
price, and such as are constantly in demand, made up the
bulkier portion of the merchandise. It might have been
taken for a ghostly or phantasmagoric reflection of the old
shop-keeper Pyncheon's shabbily-provided shelves, save
that some of the articles were of a description and outward
form which could hardly have been known in his day. For
instance, there was a glass pickle-jar, filled with fragments
of Gibraltar rock; not, indeed, splinters of the veritable
stone foundation of the famous fortress, but bits of delectable
candy, neatly done up in white paper. Jim Crow, moreover,
was seen executing his world-renowned dance, in ginger-bread.
A party of leaden dragoons were galloping along
one of the shelves, in equipments and uniform of modern
cut; and there were some sugar figures, with no strong
resemblance to the humanity of any epoch, but less unsatisfactorily
representing our own fashions than those of a hundred
years ago. Another phenomenon, still more strikingly
modern, was a package of lucifer matches, which, in old
times, would have been thought actually to borrow their
instantaneous flame from the nether fires of Tophet.

In short, to bring the matter at once to a point, it was
incontrovertibly evident that somebody had taken the shop
and fixtures of the long-retired and forgotten Mr. Pyncheon,
and was about to renew the enterprise of that departed
worthy, with a different set of customers. Who could this
bold adventurer be? And, of all places in the world, why
had he chosen the House of the Seven Gables as the scene
of his commercial speculations?

We return to the elderly maiden. She at length withdrew
her eyes from the dark countenance of the colonel's
portrait, heaved a sigh, — indeed, her breast was a very cave
of Æolus, that morning, — and stept across the room on tiptoe,

as is the customary gait of elderly women. Passing
through an intervening passage, she opened a door that
communicated with the shop, just now so elaborately described.
Owing to the projection of the upper story — and
still more to the thick shadow of the Pyncheon-elm, which
stood almost directly in front of the gable — the twilight,
here, was still as much akin to night as morning. Another
heavy sigh from Miss Hepzibah! After a moment's pause
on the threshold, peering towards the window with her near-sighted
scowl, as if frowning down some bitter enemy, she
suddenly projected herself into the shop. The haste, and,
as it were, the galvanic impulse of the movement, were
really quite startling.

Nervously — in a sort of frenzy, we might almost say —
she began to busy herself in arranging some children's
play-things, and other little wares, on the shelves and at
the shop-window. In the aspect of this dark-arrayed, pale-faced,
lady-like old figure, there was a deeply tragic character,
that contrasted irreconcilably with the ludicrous pettiness
of her employment. It seemed a queer anomaly, that
so gaunt and dismal a personage should take a toy in hand;
a miracle, that the toy did not vanish in her grasp; a
miserably absurd idea, that she should go on perplexing her
stiff and sombre intellect with the question how to tempt
little boys into her premises! Yet such is undoubtedly her
object. Now she places a gingerbread elephant against the
window, but with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon
the floor, with the dismemberment of three legs and its
trunk; it has ceased to be an elephant, and has become
a few bits of musty gingerbread. There, again, she has
upset a tumbler of marbles, all of which roll different ways,
and each individual marble, devil-directed, into the most
difficult obscurity that it can find. Heaven help our poor
old Hepzibah, and forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of

her position! As her rigid and rusty frame goes down
upon its hands and knees, in quest of the absconding marbles,
we positively feel so much the more inclined to shed
tears of sympathy, from the very fact that we must needs
turn aside and laugh at her. For here — and if we fail to
impress it suitably upon the reader, it is our own fault, not
that of the theme — here is one of the truest points of
melancholy interest that occur in ordinary life. It was the
final throe of what called itself old gentility. A lady —
who had fed herself from childhood with the shadowy food
of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was that
a lady's hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for
bread — this born lady, after sixty years of narrowing
means, is fain to step down from her pedestal of imaginary
rank. Poverty, treading closely at her heels for a lifetime,
has come up with her at last. She must earn her
own food, or starve! And we have stolen upon Miss Hepzibah
Pyncheon, too irreverently, at the instant of time
when the patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman.

In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of
our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.
The tragedy is enacted with as continual a repetition as
that of a popular drama on a holiday; and, nevertheless, is
felt as deeply, perhaps, as when an hereditary noble sinks
below his order. More deeply; since, with us, rank is the
grosser substance of wealth and a splendid establishment,
and has no spiritual existence after the death of these, but
dies hopelessly along with them. And, therefore, since we
have been unfortunate enough to introduce our heroine at
so inauspicious a juncture, we would entreat for a mood of
due solemnity in the spectators of her fate. Let us behold,
in poor Hepzibah, the immemorial lady, — two hundred
years old, on this side of the water, and thrice as many on

the other, — with her antique portraits, pedigrees, coats of
arms, records and traditions, and her claim, as joint heiress,
to that princely territory at the eastward, no longer a wilderness,
but a populous fertility, — born, too, in Pyncheon-street,
under the Pyncheon-elm, and in the Pyncheon-house,
where she has spent all her days, — reduced now, in that
very house, to be the hucksteress of a cent-shop!

This business of setting up a petty shop is almost the
only resource of women, in circumstances at all similar to
those of our unfortunate recluse. With her near-sightedness,
and those tremulous fingers of hers, at once inflexible
and delicate, she could not be a seamstress; although her
sampler, of fifty years gone-by, exhibited some of the most
recondite specimens of ornamental needle-work. A school
for little children had been often in her thoughts; and, at
one time, she had begun a review of her early studies in
the New England primer, with a view to prepare herself for
the office of instructress. But the love of children had never
been quickened in Hepzibah's heart, and was now torpid,
if not extinct; she watched the little people of the neighborhood
from her chamber-window, and doubted whether
she could tolerate a more intimate acquaintance with them.
Besides, in our day, the very A B C has become a science,
greatly too abstruse to be any longer taught by pointing a
pin from letter to letter. A modern child could teach old
Hepzibah more than old Hepzibah could teach the child.
So — with many a cold, deep heart-quake at the idea of at
last coming into sordid contact with the world, from which
she had so long kept aloof, while every added day of seclusion
had rolled another stone against the cavern-door of her
hermitage — the poor thing bethought herself of the ancient
shop-window, the rusty scales, and dusty till. She might
have held back a little longer; but another circumstance, not
yet hinted at, had somewhat hastened her decision. Her

humble preparations, therefore, were duly made, and the
enterprise was now to be commenced. Nor was she entitled
to complain of any remarkable singularity in her fate; for,
in the town of her nativity, we might point to several little
shops of a similar description; some of them in houses as
ancient as that of the seven gables; and one or two, it may
be, where a decayed gentlewoman stands behind the counter,
as grim an image of family pride as Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon
herself.

It was overpoweringly ridiculous — we must honestly confess
it — the deportment of the maiden lady while setting
her shop in order for the public eye. She stole on tiptoe to
the window, as cautiously as if she conceived some bloody-minded
villain to be watching behind the elm-tree, with
intent to take her life. Stretching out her long, lank arm,
she put a paper of pearl-buttons, a Jew's-harp, or whatever
the small article might be, in its destined place, and straightway
vanished back into the dusk, as if the world need never
hope for another glimpse of her. It might have been fancied,
indeed, that she expected to minister to the wants of the
community unseen, like a disembodied divinity, or enchantress,
holding forth her bargains to the reverential and awe-stricken
purchaser, in an invisible hand. But Hepzibah had
no such flattering dream. She was well aware that she
must ultimately come forward, and stand revealed in her
proper individuality; but, like other sensitive persons, she
could not bear to be observed in the gradual process, and
chose rather to flash forth on the world's astonished gaze at
once.

The inevitable moment was not much longer to be delayed.
The sunshine might now be seen stealing down the front of
the opposite house, from the windows of which came a reflected
gleam, struggling through the boughs of the elm-tree,
and enlightening the interior of the shop more distinctly

than heretofore. The town appeared to be waking up. A
baker's cart had already rattled through the street, chasing
away the latest vestige of night's sanctity with the jingle-jangle
of its dissonant bells. A milkman was distributing
the contents of his cans from door to door; and the harsh
peal of a fisherman's coach-shell was heard far off, around
the corner. None of these tokens escaped Hepzibah's notice.
The moment had arrived. To delay longer would
be only to lengthen out her misery. Nothing remained,
except to take down the bar from the shop-door, leaving the
entrance free — more than free — welcome, as if all were
household friends — to every passer-by, whose eyes might
be attracted by the commodities at the window. This last
act Hepzibah now performed, letting the bar fall with what
smote upon her excited nerves as a most astounding clatter.
Then — as if the only barrier betwixt herself and the world
had been thrown down, and a flood of evil consequences
would come tumbling through the gap — she fled into the
inner parlor, threw herself into the ancestral elbow-chair,
and wept.

Our miserable old Hepzibah! It is a heavy annoyance to
a writer, who endeavors to represent nature, its various
attitudes and circumstances, in a reasonably correct outline
and true coloring, that so much of the mean and ludicrous
should be hopelessly mixed up with the purest pathos which
life anywhere supplies to him. What tragic dignity, for
example, can be wrought into a scene like this! How can
we elevate our history of retribution for the sin of long ago,
when, as one of our most prominent figures, we are compelled
to introduce — not a young and lovely woman, nor even
the stately remains of beauty, storm-shattered by affliction
— but a gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed maiden, in a long-waisted
silk gown, and with the strange horror of a turban
on her head! Her visage is not even ugly. It is redeemed

from insignificance only by the contraction of her eyebrows
into a near-sighted scowl. And, finally, her great life-trial
seems to be, that, after sixty years of idleness, she finds it
convenient to earn comfortable bread by setting up a shop
in a small way. Nevertheless, if we look through all the
heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find this same entanglement
of something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest
in joy or sorrow. Life is made up of marble and mud.
And, without all the deeper trust in a comprehensive sympathy
above us, we might hence be led to suspect the insult
of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the iron
countenance of fate. What is called poetic insight is the
gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely-mingled elements,
the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to
assume a garb so sordid.