University of Virginia Library

4. IV.
A DAY BEHIND THE COUNTER.

Towards noon, Hepzibah saw an elderly gentleman,
large and portly, and of remarkably dignified demeanor,
passing slowly along, on the opposite side of the white and
dusty street. On coming within the shadow of the Pyncheon-elm,
he stopt, and (taking off his hat, meanwhile, to
wipe the perspiration from his brow) seemed to scrutinize,
with especial interest, the dilapidated and rusty-visaged
House of the Seven Gables. He himself, in a very different
style, was as well worth looking at as the house. No
better model need be sought, nor could have been found, of
a very high order of respectability, which, by some indescribable
magic, not merely expressed itself in his looks and
gestures, but even governed the fashion of his garments,
and rendered them all proper and essential to the man.
Without appearing to differ, in any tangible way, from other
people's clothes, there was yet a wide and rich gravity
about them, that must have been a characteristic of the
wearer, since it could not be defined as pertaining either to
the cut or material. His gold-headed cane, too, — a serviceable
staff, of dark, polished wood, — had similar traits,
and had it chosen to take a walk by itself, would have been
recognized anywhere as a tolerably adequate representative
of its master. This character — which showed itself so
strikingly in everything about him, and the effect of which
we seek to convey to the reader — went no deeper than his
station, habits of life, and external circumstances. One
perceived him to be a personage of mark, influence, and

authority; and, especially, you could feel just as certain
that he was opulent as if he had exhibited his bank
account, or as if you had seen him touching the twigs of
the Pyncheon-elm, and, Midas-like, transmuting them to
gold.

In his youth, he had probably been considered a handsome
man; at his present age, his brow was too heavy, his
temples too bare, his remaining hair too gray, his eye too
cold, his lips too closely compressed, to bear any relation to
mere personal beauty. He would have made a good and
massive portrait; better now, perhaps, than at any previous
period of his life, although his look might grow positively
harsh, in the process of being fixed upon the canvas. The
artist would have found it desirable to study his face, and
prove its capacity for varied expression; to darken it with a
frown, — to kindle it up with a smile.

While the elderly gentleman stood looking at the Pyncheon-house,
both the frown and the smile passed successively
over his countenance. His eye rested on the shop-window,
and, putting up a pair of gold-bowed spectacles,
which he held in his hand, he minutely surveyed Hepzibah's
little arrangement of toys and commodities. At first it
seemed not to please him, — nay, to cause him exceeding
displeasure, — and yet, the very next moment, he smiled.
While the latter expression was yet on his lips, he caught a
glimpse of Hepzibah, who had involuntarily bent forward
to the window; and then the smile changed from acrid and
disagreeable to the sunniest complacency and benevolence.
He bowed, with a happy mixture of dignity and courteous
kindliness, and pursued his way.

“There he is!” said Hepzibah to herself, gulping down
a very bitter emotion, and, since she could not rid herself of
it, trying to drive it back into her heart. “What does he

think of it, I wonder? Does it please him? Ah! — he is
looking back!”

The gentleman had paused in the street, and turned himself
half about, still with his eyes fixed on the shop-window.
In fact, he wheeled wholly round, and commenced a step or
two, as if designing to enter the shop; but, as it chanced,
his purpose was anticipated by Hepzibah's first customer,
the little cannibal of Jim Crow, who, staring up at the window,
was irresistibly attracted by an elephant of ginger-bread.
What a grand appetite had this small urchin! —
two Jim Crows, immediately after breakfast! — and now
an elephant, as a preliminary whet before dinner! By the
time this latter purchase was completed, the elderly gentleman
had resumed his way, and turned the street corner.

“Take it as you like, Cousin Jaffrey!” muttered the
maiden lady, as she drew back, after cautiously thrusting
out her head, and looking up and down the street. “Take
it as you like! You have seen my little shop-window!
Well! — What have you to say? — is not the Pyncheon-house
my own, while I'm alive?”

After this incident, Hepzibah retreated to the back parlor,
where she at first caught up a half-finished stocking, and
began knitting at it with nervous and irregular jerks; but
quickly finding herself at odds with the stitches, she threw
it aside, and walked hurriedly about the room. At length,
she paused before the portrait of the stern old Puritan, her
ancestor, and the founder of the house. In one sense, this
picture had almost faded into the canvas, and hidden itself
behind the duskiness of age; in another, she could not but
fancy that it had been growing more prominent, and strikingly
expressive, ever since her earliest familiarity with it, as
a child. For, while the physical outline and substance were
darkening away from the beholder's eye, the bold, hard,
and, at the same time, indirect character of the man, seemed

to be brought out in a kind of spiritual relief. Such an
effect may occasionally be observed in pictures of antique
date. They acquire a look which an artist (if he have
anything like the complacency of artists now-a-days) would
never dream of presenting to a patron as his own characteristic
expression, but which, nevertheless, we at once recognize
as reflecting the unlovely truth of a human soul. In
such cases, the painter's deep conception of his subject's
inward traits has wrought itself into the essence of the
picture, and is seen after the superficial coloring has been
rubbed off by time.

While gazing at the portrait, Hepzibah trembled under
its eye. Her hereditary reverence made her afraid to judge
the character of the original so harshly as a perception
of the truth compelled her to do. But still she gazed, because
the face of the picture enabled her — at least, she
fancied so — to read more accurately, and to a greater depth,
the face which she had just seen in the street.

“This is the very man!” murmured she to herself.
“Let Jaffrey Pyncheon smile as he will, there is that look
beneath! Put on him a skull-cap, and a band, and a black
cloak, and a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other, —
then let Jaffrey smile as he might, — nobody would doubt
that it was the old Pyncheon come again! He has proved
himself the very man to build up a new house! Perhaps,
too, to draw down a new curse!”

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 noon-day street, to keep her sane.

By the spell of contrast, another portrait rose up before
her, painted with more daring flattery than any artist would
have ventured upon, but yet so delicately touched that the

likeness remained perfect. Malbone's miniature, though
from the same original, was far inferior to Hepzibah's air-drawn
picture, at which affection and sorrowful remembrance
wrought together. Soft, mildly, and cheerfully contemplative,
with full, red lips, just on the verge of a smile,
which the eyes seemed to herald by a gentle kindling-up of
their orbs! Feminine traits, moulded inseparably with those
of the other sex! The miniature, likewise, had this last
peculiarity; so that you inevitably thought of the original
as resembling his mother, and she, a lovely and lovable
woman, with perhaps some beautiful infirmity of character,
that made it all the pleasanter to know, and easier to love
her.

“Yes,” thought Hepzibah, with grief of which it was only
the more tolerable portion that welled up from her heart to
her eyelids, “they persecuted his mother in him! He never
was a Pyncheon!”

But here the shop-bell rang; it was like a sound from a
remote distance — so far had Hepzibah descended into the
sepulchral depths of her reminiscences. On entering the
shop, she found an old man there, a humble resident of
Pyncheon-street, and whom, for a great many years past,
she had suffered to be a kind of familiar of the house. He
was an immemorial personage, who seemed always to have
had a white head and wrinkles, and never to have possessed
but a single tooth, and that a half-decayed one, in the front
of the upper jaw. Well advanced as Hepzibah was, she
could not remember when Uncle Venner, as the neighborhood
called him, had not gone up and down the street,
stooping a little and drawing his feet heavily over the gravel
or pavement. But still there was something tough and
vigorous about him, that not only kept him in daily breath,
but enabled him to fill a place which would else have been
vacant in the apparently crowded world. To go of errands,

with his slow and shuffling gait, which made you doubt how
he ever was to arrive anywhere; to saw a small household's
foot or two of fire-wood, or knock to pieces an old
barrel, or split up a pine board, for kindling-stuff; in summer,
to dig the few yards of garden ground appertaining to a
low-rented tenement, and share the produce of his labor at
the halves; in winter, to shovel away the snow from the
side-walk, or open paths to the wood-shed, or along the
clothes-line; such were some of the essential offices which
Uncle Venner performed among at least a score of families.
Within that circle, he claimed the same sort of privilege,
and probably felt as much warmth of interest, as a clergyman
does in the range of his parishioners. Not that he
laid claim to the tithe pig; but, as an analogous mode of
reverence, he went his rounds, every morning, to gather up
the crumbs of the table and overflowings of the dinner-pot,
as food for a pig of his own.

In his younger days — for, after all, there was a dim tradition
that he had been, not young, but younger — Uncle
Venner was commonly regarded as rather deficient, than
otherwise, in his wits. In truth, he had virtually pleaded
guilty to the charge, by scarcely aiming at such success as
other men seek, and by taking only that humble and modest
part, in the intercourse of life, which belongs to the alleged
deficiency. But, now, in his extreme old age, — whether
it were that his long and hard experience had actually
brightened him, or that his decaying judgment rendered
him less capable of fairly measuring himself, — the venerable
man made pretensions to no little wisdom, and really
enjoyed the credit of it. There was likewise, at times, a
vein of something like poetry in him; it was the moss or
wall-flower of his mind in its small dilapidation, and gave a
charm to what might have been vulgar and common-place
in his earlier and middle life. Hepzibah had a regard for

him, because his name was ancient in the town, and had
formerly been respectable. It was a still better reason for
awarding him a species of familiar reverence, that Uncle
Venner was himself the most ancient existence, whether of
man or thing, in Pyncheon-street, except the House of the
Seven Gables, and perhaps the elm that overshadowed it.

This patriarch now presented himself before Hepzibah,
clad in an old blue coat, which had a fashionable air, and
must have accrued to him from the cast-off wardrobe of some
dashing clerk. As for his trousers, they were of tow-cloth,
very short in the legs, and bagging down strangely in the
rear, but yet having a suitableness to his figure which his
other garment entirely lacked. His had had relation to no
other part of his dress, and but very little to the head that
wore it. Thus Uncle Venner was a miscellaneous old
gentleman, partly himself, but, in good measure, somebody
else; patched together, too, of different epochs; an epitome
of times and fashions.

“So, you have really begun trade,” said he, — “really
begun trade! Well, I 'm glad to see it. Young people
should never live idle in the world, nor old ones neither,
unless when the rheumatize gets hold of them. It has given
me warning already; and in two or three years longer, I
shall think of putting aside business, and retiring to my
farm. That 's yonder — the great brick house, you know
— the workhouse, most folks call it; but I mean to do my
work first, and go there to be idle and enjoy myself. And
I 'm glad to see you beginning to do your work, Miss Hepzibah!”

“Thank you, Uncle Venner,” said Hepzibah, smiling; for
she always felt kindly towards the simple and talkative old
man. Had he been an old woman, she might probably have
repelled the freedom which she now took in good part. “It

is time for me to begin work, indeed! Or, to speak the truth,
I have just begun, when I ought to be giving it up.”

“O, never say that, Miss Hepzibah,” answered the old
man. “You are a young woman yet. Why, I hardly
thought myself younger than I am now, it seems so little
while ago since I used to see you playing about the door
of the old house, quite a small child! Oftener, though, you
used to be sitting at the threshold, and looking gravely
into the street; for you had always a grave kind of way
with you, — a grown-up air, when you were only the height
of my knee. It seems as if I saw you now; and your
grandfather with his red cloak, and his white wig, and his
cocked hat, and his cane, coming out of the house, and
stepping so grandly up the street! Those old gentlemen
that grew up before the Revolution used to put on grand
airs. In my young days, the great man of the town was
commonly called King; and his wife, not Queen to be sure,
but Lady. Now-a-days, a man would not dare to be called
King; and if he feels himself a little above common folks,
he only stoops so much the lower to them. I met your
cousin, the judge, ten minutes ago; and, in my old tow-cloth
trousers, as you see, the judge raised his hat to me,
I do believe! At any rate, the judge bowed and smiled!”

“Yes,” said Hepzibah, with something bitter stealing unawares
into her tone; “my cousin Jaffrey is thought to have
a very pleasant smile!”

“And so he has!” replied Uncle Venner. “And that 's
rather remarkable in a Pyncheon; for, begging your pardon,
Miss Hepzibah, they never had the name of being an
easy and agreeable set of folks. There was no getting close
to them. But now, Miss Hepzibah, if an old man may be
bold to ask, why don't Judge Pyncheon, with his great
means, step forward, and tell his cousin to shut up her little

shop at once? It 's for your credit to be doing something;
but it 's not for the judge's credit to let you!”

“We won't talk of this, if you please, Uncle Venner,”
said Hepzibah, coldly. “I ought to say, however, that, if I
choose to earn bread for myself, it is not Judge Pyncheon's
fault. Neither will he deserve the blame,” added she,
more kindly, remembering Uncle Venner's privileges of age
and humble familiarity, “if I should, by-and-by, find it
convenient to retire with you to your farm.”

“And it 's no bad place, neither, that farm of mine!” cried
the old man, cheerily, as if there were something positively
delightful in the prospect. “No bad place is the great
brick farm-house, especially for them that will find a good
many old cronies there, as will be my case. I quite long to
be among them, sometimes, of the winter evenings; for it
is but dull business for a lonesome elderly man, like me, to
be nodding, by the hour together, with no company but his
air-tight stove. Summer or winter, there 's a great deal to
be said in favor of my farm! And, take it in the autumn,
what can be pleasanter than to spend a whole day on the
sunny side of a barn or a wood-pile, chatting with somebody
as old as one's self; or, perhaps, idling away the time with
a natural born simpleton, who knows how to be idle, because
even our busy Yankees never have found out how to put
him to any use? Upon my word, Miss Hepzibah, I doubt
whether I 've ever been so comfortable as I mean to be at
my farm, which most folks call the workhouse. But you, —
you 're a young woman yet, — you never need go there!
Something still better will turn up for you. I 'm sure of it!”

Hepzibah fancied that there was something peculiar in her
venerable friend's look and tone; insomuch, that she gazed
into his face with considerable earnestness, endeavoring to
discover what secret meaning, if any, might be lurking there.
Individuals whose affairs have reached an utterly desperate

crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive with hopes,
so much the more airily magnificent, as they have the less
of solid matter within their grasp, whereof to mould any
judicious and moderate expectation of good. Thus, all the
while Hepzibah was perfecting the scheme of her little
shop, she had cherished an unacknowledged idea that some
harlequin trick of fortune would intervene in her favor.
For example, an uncle — who had sailed for India, fifty
years before, and never been heard of since — might yet return,
and adopt her to be the comfort of his very extreme
and decrepit age, and adorn her with pearls, diamonds, and
oriental shawls and turbans, and make her the ultimate
heiress of his unreckonable riches. Or the member of
parliament, now at the head of the English branch of the
family, — with which the elder stock, on this side of the
Atlantic, had held little or no intercourse for the last two
centuries, — this eminent gentleman might invite Hepzibah
to quit the ruinous House of the Seven Gables, and come
over to dwell with her kindred at Pyncheon Hall. But,
for reasons the most imperative, she could not yield to his
request. It was more probable, therefore, that the descendants
of a Pyncheon who had emigrated to Virginia, in
some past generation, and became a great planter there, —
hearing of Hepzibah's destitution, and impelled by the splendid
generosity of character with which their Virginian mixture
must have enriched the New England blood, — would
send her a remittance of a thousand dollars, with a hint
of repeating the favor, annually. Or — and, surely, anything
so undeniably just could not be beyond the limits
of reasonable anticipation — the great claim to the heritage
of Waldo County might finally be decided in favor of the
Pyncheons; so that, instead of keeping a cent-shop, Hepzibah
would build a palace, and look down from its highest
tower on hill, dale, forest, field, and town, as her own share
of the ancestral territory.

These were some of the fantasies which she had long
dreamed about; and, aided by these, Uncle Venner's casual
attempt at encouragement kindled a strange festal glory in
the poor, bare, melancholy chambers of her brain, as if that
inner world were suddenly lighted up with gas. But either
he knew nothing of her castles in the air — as how should
he? — or else her earnest scowl disturbed his recollection,
as it might a more courageous man's. Instead of pursuing
any weightier topic, Uncle Venner was pleased to favor
Hepzibah with some sage counsel in her shop-keeping
capacity.

“Give no credit!” — these were some of his golden maxims,
— “Never take paper-money! Look well to your
change! Ring the silver on the four-pound weight! Shove
back all English half-pence and base copper tokens, such
as are very plenty about town! At your leisure hours,
knit children's woollen socks and mittens! Brew your own
yeast, and make your own ginger-beer!”

And while Hepzibah was doing her utmost to digest the
hard little pellets of his already uttered wisdom, he gave
vent to his final, and what he declared to be his all-important
advice, as follows: —

“Put on a bright face for your customers, and smile
pleasantly as you hand them what they ask for! A stale
article, if you dip it in a good, warm, sunny smile, will go
off better than a fresh one that you 've scowled upon.”

To this last apothegm poor Hepzibah responded with a
sigh so deep and heavy that it almost rustled Uncle Venner
quite away, like a withered leaf, — as he was, — before an
autumnal gale. Recovering himself, however, he bent forward,
and, with a good deal of feeling in his ancient visage,
beckoned her nearer to him.

“When do you expect him home?” whispered he.

“Whom do you mean?” asked Hepzibah, turning pale.

“Ah! you don 't love to talk about it,” said Uncle Venner.
“Well, well! we 'll say no more, though there 's word
of it, all over town. I remember him, Miss Hepzibah,
before he could run alone!”

During the remainder of the day, poor Hepzibah acquitted
herself even less creditably, as a shopkeeper, than in her
earlier efforts. She appeared to be walking in a dream;
or, more truly, the vivid life and reality assumed by her
emotions made all outward occurrences unsubstantial, like
the teasing phantasms of a half-conscious slumber. She
still responded, mechanically, to the frequent summons of
the shop-bell, and, at the demand of her customers, went
prying with vague eyes about the shop, proffering them one
article after another, and, thrusting aside — perversely, as
most of them supposed — the identical thing they asked for.
There is sad confusion, indeed, when the spirit thus flits
away into the past, or into the more awful future, or, in any
manner, steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its own
region and the actual world; where the body remains to
guide itself, as best it may, with little more than the mechanism
of animal life. It is like death, without death's quiet
privilege, — its freedom from mortal care. Worst of all,
when the actual duties are comprised in such petty details
as now vexed the brooding soul of the old gentlewoman.
As the animosity of fate would have it, there was a great
influx of custom, in the course of the afternoon. Hepzibah
blundered to and fro about her small place of business,
committing the most unheard of errors: now stringing up
twelve, and now seven tallow-candles, instead of ten to the
pound; selling ginger for Scotch snuff, pins for needles, and
needles for pins; misreckoning her change, sometimes to the
public detriment, and much oftener to her own; and thus

she went on, doing her utmost to bring chaos back again,
until, at the close of the day's labor, to her inexplicable
astonishment, she found the money-drawer almost destitute
of coin. After all her painful traffic, the whole proceeds
were perhaps half a dozen coppers, and a questionable nine-pence,
which ultimately proved to be copper likewise.

At this price, or at whatever price, she rejoiced that the
day had reached its end. Never before had she had such a
sense of the intolerable length of time that creeps between
dawn and sunset, and of the miserable irksomeness of having
aught to do, and of the better wisdom that it would be,
to lie down at once, in sullen resignation, and let life, and
its toils and vexations, trample over one's prostrate body, as
they may! Hepzibah's final operation was with the little
devourer of Jim Crow and the elephant, who now proposed
to eat a camel. In her bewilderment, she offered him first
a wooden dragoon, and next a handful of marbles; neither
of which being adapted to his else omnivorous appetite, she
hastily held out her whole remaining stock of natural history
in gingerbread, and huddled the small customer out of
the shop. She then muffled the bell in an unfinished stocking,
and put up the oaken bar across the door.

During the latter process, an omnibus came to a stand-still
under the branches of the elm-tree. Hepzibah's heart
was in her mouth. Remote and dusky, and with no sunshine
on all the intervening space, was that region of the
Past whence her only guest might be expected to arrive!
Was she to meet him now?

Somebody, at all events, was passing from the furthest
interior of the omnibus towards its entrance. A gentleman
alighted; but it was only to offer his hand to a young girl,
whose slender figure, nowise needing such assistance, now
lightly descended the steps, and made an airy little jump
from the final one to the sidewalk. She rewarded her cavalier

with a smile, the cheery glow of which was seen reflected
on his own face, as he reëntered the vehicle. The
girl then turned towards the House of the Seven Gables;
to the door of which, meanwhile, — not the shop-door, but
the antique portal, — the omnibus-man had carried a light
trunk and a band-box. First giving a sharp rap of the old
iron knocker, he left his passenger and her luggage at the
door-step, and departed.

“Who can it be?” thought Hepzibah, who had been
screwing her visual organs into the acutest focus of which
they were capable. “The girl must have mistaken the
house!”

She stole softly into the hall, and, herself invisible, gazed
through the dusty side-lights of the portal at the young,
blooming, and very cheerful face, which presented itself for
admittance into the gloomy old mansion. It was a face to
which almost any door would have opened of its own accord.

The young girl, so fresh, so unconventional, and yet so
orderly and obedient to common rules, as you at once recognized
her to be, was widely in contrast, at that moment,
with everything about her. The sordid and ugly luxuriance
of gigantic weeds that grew in the angle of the house, and
the heavy projection that overshadowed her, and the timeworn
frame-work of the door, — none of these things belonged
to her sphere. But, even as a ray of sunshine, fall
into what dismal place it may, instantaneously creates for
itself a propriety in being there, so did it seem altogether
fit that the girl should be standing at the threshold. It
was no less evidently proper that the door should swing
open to admit her. The maiden lady, herself, sternly inhospitable
in her first purposes, soon began to feel that the
door ought to be shoved back, and the rusty key be turned
in the reluctant lock.

“Can it be Phœbe?” questioned she within herself. “It

must be little Phœbe; for it can be nobody else, — and there
is a look of her father about her, too! But what does she
want here? And how like a country cousin, to come down
upon a poor body in this way, without so much as a day's
notice, or asking whether she would be welcome! Well;
she must have a night's lodging, I suppose; and to-morrow
the child shall go back to her mother!”

Phœbe, it must be understood, was that one little off-shoot
of the Pyncheon race to whom we have already referred, as
a native of a rural part of New England, where the old
fashions and feelings of relationship are still partially kept
up. In her own circle, it was regarded as by no means improper
for kinsfolk to visit one another, without invitation,
or preliminary and ceremonious warning. Yet, in consideration
of Miss Hepzibah's recluse way of life, a letter had
actually been written and despatched, conveying information
of Phœbe's projected visit. This epistle, for three or four
days past, had been in the pocket of the penny-postman,
who, happening to have no other business in Pyncheon-street,
had not yet made it convenient to call at the House
of the Seven Gables.

“No! — she can stay only one night,” said Hepzibah, unbolting
the door. “If Clifford were to find her here, it
might disturb him!”