University of Virginia Library

21. XXI.
THE DEPARTURE.

The sudden death of so prominent a member of the social
world as the Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a
sensation (at least, in the circles more immediately connected
with the deceased) which had hardly quite subsided
in a fortnight.

It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which
constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one —
none, certainly, of anything like a similar importance — to
which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.
In most other cases and contingencies, the individual is present
among us, mixed up with the daily revolution of affairs,
and affording a definite point for observation. At his decease,
there is only a vacancy, and a momentary eddy, —
very small, as compared with the apparent magnitude of the
ingurgitated object, — and a bubble or two, ascending out
of the black depth, and bursting at the surface. As regarded
Judge Pyncheon, it seemed probable, at first blush, that the
mode of his final departure might give him a larger and
longer posthumous vogue than ordinarily attends the memory
of a distinguished man. But when it came to be
understood, on the highest professional authority, that the
event was a natural, and — except for some unimportant
particulars, denoting a slight idiosyncrasy — by no means
an unusual form of death, the public, with its customary
alacrity, proceeded to forget that he had ever lived. In
short, the honorable judge was beginning to be a stale subject,

before half the county newspapers had found time to
put their columns in mourning, and publish his exceedingly
eulogistic obituary.

Nevertheless, creeping darkly through the places which
this excellent person had haunted in his lifetime, there was
a hidden stream of private talk, such as it would have
shocked all decency to speak loudly at the street-corners. It
is very singular, how the fact of a man's death often seems
to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good
or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living
and acting among them. Death is so genuine a fact that it
excludes falsehood, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touch-stone
that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal.
Could the departed, whoever he may be, return in a week
after his decease, he would almost invariably find himself at
a higher or lower point han he had formerly occupied, on
the scale of public appreciation. But the talk, or scandal,
to which we now allude, had reference to matters of no less
old a date than the supposed murder, thirty or forty years
ago, of the late Judge Pyncheon's uncle. The medical
opinion, with regard to his own recent and regretted decease,
had almost entirely obviated the idea that a murder was
committed, in the former case. Yet, as the record showed,
there were circumstances irrefragably indicating that some
person had gained access to old Jaffrey Pyncheon's private
apartments, at or near the moment of his death. His desk
and private drawers, in a room contiguous to his bedchamber,
had been ransacked; money and valuable articles were
missing; there was a bloody hand-print on the old man's
linen; and, by a powerfully welded chain of deductive evidence,
the guilt of the robbery and apparent murder had
been fixed on Clifford, then residing with his uncle in the
House of the Seven Gables.

Whencesoever originating, there now arose a theory that
undertook so to account for these circumstances as to exclude
the idea of Clifford's agency. Many persons affirmed that
the history and elucidation of the facts, long so mysterious,
had been obtained by the daguerreotypist from one of those
mesmerical seers, who, now-a-days, so strangely perplex the
aspect of human affairs, and put everybody's natural vision
to the blush, by the marvels which they see with their eyes
shut.

According to this version of the story, Judge Pyncheon,
exemplary as we have portrayed him in our narrative, was,
in his youth, an apparently irreclaimable scapegrace. The
brutish, the animal instincts, as is often the case, had been
developed earlier than the intellectual qualities, and the
force of character, for which he was afterwards remarkable.
He had shown himself wild, dissipated, addicted to low
pleasures, little short of ruffianly in his propensities, and
recklessly expensive, with no other resources than the
bounty of his uncle. This course of conduct had alienated
the old bachelor's affection, once strongly fixed upon him.
Now, it is averred, — but whether on authority available in
a court of justice, we do not pretend to have investigated,
— that the young man was tempted by the devil, one night,
to search his uncle's private drawers, to which he had
unsuspected means of access. While thus criminally occupied,
he was startled by the opening of the chamber-door.
There stood old Jaffrey Pyncheon, in his night-clothes!
The surprise of such a discovery, his agitation, alarm, and
horror, brought on the crisis of a disorder to which the old
bachelor had an hereditary liability; — he seemed to choke
with blood, and fell upon the floor, striking his temple a
heavy blow against the corner of a table. What was to be
done? The old man was surely dead! Assistance would

come too late! What a misfortune, indeed, should it come
too soon, since his reviving consciousness would bring the
recollection of the ignominious offence which he had beheld
his nephew in the very act of committing!

But he never did revive. With the cool hardihood that
always pertained to him, the young man continued his
search of the drawers, and found a will, of recent date, in
favor of Clifford, — which he destroyed, — and an older one,
in his own favor, which he suffered to remain. But, before
retiring, Jaffrey bethought himself of the evidence, in these
ransacked drawers, that some one had visited the chamber
with sinister purposes. Suspicion, unless averted, might fix
upon the real offender. In the very presence of the dead
man, therefore, he laid a scheme that should free himself at
the expense of Clifford, his rival, for whose character he had
at once a contempt and a repugnance. It is not probable, be
it said, that he acted with any set purpose of involving Clifford
in a charge of murder. Knowing that his uncle did
not die by violence, it may not have occurred to him, in the
hurry of the crisis, that such an inference might be drawn.
But, when the affair took this darker aspect, Jaffrey's
previous steps had already pledged him to those which
remained. So craftily had he arranged the circumstances,
that, at Clifford's trial, his cousin hardly found it necessary
to swear to anything false, but only to withhold the one
decisive explanation, by refraining to state what he had
himself done and witnessed.

Thus Jaffrey Pyncheon's inward criminality, as regarded
Clifford, was, indeed, black and damnable; while its mere
outward show and positive commission was the smallest
that could possibly consist with so great a sin. This is just
the sort of guilt that a man of eminent respectability finds
it easiest to dispose of. It was suffered to fade out of sight,

or be reckoned a venial matter, in the Honorable Judge
Pyncheon's long subsequent survey of his own life. He
shuffled it aside, among the forgotten and forgiven frailties
of his youth, and seldom thought of it again.

We leave the judge to his repose. He could not be
styled fortunate, at the hour of death. Unknowingly,
he was a childless man, while striving to add more wealth
to his only child's inheritance. Hardly a week after his
decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of
the death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheon's son, just at the
point of embarkation for his native land. By this misfortune,
Clifford became rich; so did Hepzibah; so did our little village-maiden,
and, through her, that sworn foe of wealth and
all manner of conservatism, — the wild reformer, — Holgrave!

It was now far too late in Clifford's life for the good opinion
of society to be worth the trouble and anguish of a formal
vindication. What he needed was the love of a very few;
not the admiration, or even the respect, of the unknown
many. The latter might probably have been won for him,
had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had
fallen deemed it advisable to expose Clifford to a miserable
resuscitation of past ideas, when the condition of whatever
comfort he might expect lay in the calm of forgetfulness.
After such wrong as he had suffered, there is no reparation.
The pitiable mockery of it, which the world might have
been ready enough to offer, coming so long after the agony
had done its utmost work, would have been fit only to provoke
bitterer laughter than poor Clifford was ever capable of.
It is a truth (and it would be a very sad one, but for the
higher hopes which it suggests) that no great mistake,
whether acted or endured, in our mortal sphere, is ever
really set right. Time, the continual vicissitude of circumstances,

and the invariable inopportunity of death, render it
impossible. If, after long lapse of years, the right seems
to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in. The better
remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he
once thought his irreparable ruin far behind him.

The shock of Judge Pyncheon's death had a permanently
invigorating and ultimately beneficial effect on Clifford.
That strong and ponderous man had been Clifford's nightmare.
There was no free breath to be drawn, within the
sphere of so malevolent an influence. The first effect of
freedom, as we have witnessed in Clifford's aimless flight,
was a tremulous exhilaration. Subsiding from it, he did
not sink into his former intellectual apathy. He never, it
is true, attained to nearly the full measure of what might
have been his faculties. But he recovered enough of them
partially to light up his character, to display some outline
of the marvellous grace that was abortive in it, and to make
him the object of no less deep, although less melancholy
interest than heretofore. He was evidently happy. Could
we pause to give another picture of his daily life, with all
the appliances now at command to gratify his instinct for
the Beautiful, the garden scenes, that seemed so sweet to
him, would look mean and trivial in comparison.

Very soon after their change of fortune, Clifford, Hepzibah,
and little Phœbe, with the approval of the artist,
concluded to remove from the dismal old House of the
Seven Gables, and take up their abode, for the present,
at the elegant country-seat of the late Judge Pyncheon.
Chanticleer and his family had already been transported
thither, where the two hens had forthwith begun an indefatigable
process of egg-laying, with an evident design, as a
matter of duty and conscience, to continue their illustrious
breed under better auspices than for a century past. On

the day set for their departure, the principal personages
of our story, including good Uncle Venner, were assembled
in the parlor.

“The country-house is certainly a very fine one, so far
as the plan goes,” observed Holgrave, as the party were discussing
their future arrangements. “But I wonder that
the late judge — being so opulent, and with a reasonable
prospect of transmitting his wealth to descendants of his
own — should not have felt the propriety of embodying so
excellent a piece of domestic architecture in stone, rather
than in wood. Then, every generation of the family might
have altered the interior, to suit its own taste and convenience;
while the exterior, through the lapse of years,
might have been adding venerableness to its original beauty,
and thus giving that impression of permanence which I
consider essential to the happiness of any one moment.”

“Why,” cried Phœbe, gazing into the artist's face with
infinite amazement, “how wonderfully your ideas are
changed! A house of stone, indeed! It is but two or
three weeks ago, that you seemed to wish people to live in
something as fragile and temporary as a bird's nest!”

“Ah, Phœbe, I told you how it would be!” said the
artist, with a half-melancholy laugh. “You find me a
conservative already! Little did I think ever to become
one. It is especially unpardonable in this dwelling of so
much hereditary misfortune, and under the eye of yonder
portrait of a model conservative, who, in that very character,
rendered himself so long the evil destiny of his race.”

“That picture!” said Clifford, seeming to shrink from its
stern glance. “Whenever I look at it, there is an old, dreamy
recollection haunting me, but keeping just beyond the grasp
of my mind. Wealth, it seems to say! — boundless wealth!
— unimaginable wealth! I could fancy that, when I was a

child, or a youth, that portrait had spoken, and told me
a rich secret, or had held forth its hand, with the written
record of hidden opulence. But those old matters are so
dim with me, now-a-days! What could this dream have
been?”

“Perhaps I can recall it,” answered Holgrave. “See!
There are a hundred chances to one, that no person, unacquainted
with the secret, would ever touch this spring.”

“A secret spring!” cried Clifford. “Ah, I remember
now! I did discover it, one summer afternoon, when I was
idling and dreaming about the house, long, long ago. But
the mystery escapes me.”

The artist put his finger on the contrivance to which he
had referred. In former days, the effect would probably
have been to cause the picture to start forward. But, in so
long a period of concealment, the machinery had been eaten
through with rust; so that, at Holgrave's pressure, the portrait,
frame and all, tumbled suddenly from its position, and
lay face downward on the floor. A recess in the wall was
thus brought to light, in which lay an object so covered with
a century's dust that it could not immediately be recognized
as a folded sheet of parchment. Holgrave opened it, and
displayed an ancient deed, signed with the hieroglyphics of
several Indian sagamores, and conveying to Colonel Pyncheon
and his heirs, forever, a vast extent of territory at
the eastward.

“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. “When they were young together,

Clifford probably made a kind of fairy-tale of this discovery.
He was always dreaming hither and thither about the house,
and lighting up its dark corners with beautiful stories. And
poor Jaffrey, who took hold of everything as if it were real,
thought my brother had found out his uncle's wealth. He
died with this delusion in his mind!”

“But,” said Phœbe, apart to Holgrave, “how came you
to know the secret?”

“My dearest Phœbe,” said Holgrave, “how will it please
you to assume the name of Maule? As for the secret, it is
the only inheritance that has come down to me from my
ancestors. You should have known sooner (only that I was
afraid of frightening you away) that, in this long drama of
wrong and retribution, I represent the old wizard, and am
probably as much of a wizard as ever he was. 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!”

“Uncle Venner,” cried Phœbe, taking the patched philosopher's
hand, “you must never talk any more about your
farm! You shall never go there, as long as you live! There
is a cottage in our new garden, — the prettiest little yellowish-brown
cottage you ever saw; and the sweetest-looking place,
for it looks just as if it were made of gingerbread, — and
we are going to fit it up and furnish it, on purpose for you.
And you shall do nothing but what you choose, and shall
be as happy as the day is long, and shall keep Cousin Clifford
in spirits with the wisdom and pleasantness which is
always dropping from your lips!”

“Ah! my dear child,” quoth good Uncle Venner, quite
overcome, “if you were to speak to a young man as you do
to an old one, his chance of keeping his heart another
minute would not be worth one of the buttons on my waistcoat!
And — soul alive! — that great sigh, which you
made me heave, has burst off the very last of them! But
never mind! It was the happiest sigh I ever did heave;
and it seems as if I must have drawn in a gulp of heavenly
breath, to make it with. Well, well, Miss Phœbe! They 'll
miss me in the gardens, hereabouts, and round by the back-doors;
and Pyncheon-street, I 'm afraid, will hardly look the
same without old Uncle Venner, who remembers it with a
mowing field on one side, and the garden of the seven
gables on the other. But either I must go to your country-seat,
or you must come to my farm — that 's one of two
things certain; and I leave you to choose which!”

“O, come with us, by all means, Uncle Venner!”
said Clifford, who had a remarkable enjoyment of the old
man's mellow, quiet, and simple spirit. “I want you
always to be within five minutes' saunter of my chair.
You are the only philosopher I ever knew of, whose wisdom
has not a drop of bitter essence at the bottom!”

“Dear me!” cried Uncle Venner, beginning partly to
realize what manner of man he was. “And yet folks used
to set me down among the simple ones, in my younger
days! But I suppose I am like a Roxbury russet, — a great
deal the better, the longer I can be kept. Yes; and my
words of wisdom, that you and Phœbe tell me of, are like
the golden dandelions, which never grow in the hot months,
but may be seen glistening among the withered grass, and
under the dry leaves, sometimes as late as December. And
you are welcome, friends, to my mess of dandelions, if there
were twice as many!”

A plain, but handsome, dark-green barouche had now
drawn up in front of the ruinous portal of the old mansion-house.
The party came forth, and (with the exception of
good Uncle Venner, who was to follow in a few days) proceeded
to take their places. They were chatting and laughing
very pleasantly together; and — as proves to be often
the case, at moments when we ought to palpitate with sensibility
— Clifford and Hepzibah bade a final farewell to
the abode of their forefathers, with hardly more emotion
than if they had made it their arrangement to return thither
at tea-time. Several children were drawn to the spot by
so unusual a spectacle as the barouche and pair of gray
horses. Recognizing little Ned Higgins among them, Hepzibah
put her hand into her pocket, and presented the
urchin, her earliest and staunchest customer, with silver
enough to people the Domdaniel cavern of his interior with
as various a procession of quadrupeds as passed into the
ark.

Two men were passing, just as the barouche drove off.

“Well, Dixey,” said one of them, “what do you think of
this? My wife kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five
dollars on her outlay. Old Maid Pyncheon has been in
trade just about as long, and rides off in her carriage with
a couple of hundred thousand, — reckoning her share, and
Clifford's, and Phœbe's, — and some say twice as much!
If you choose to call it luck, it is all very well; but if we
are to take it as the will of Providence, why, I can't exactly
fathom it!”

“Pretty good business!” quoth the sagacious Dixey.
“Pretty good business!”

Maule's well, all this time, though left in solitude, was
throwing up a succession of kaleidoscopic pictures, in which
a gifted eye might have seen fore-shadowed the coming fortunes

of Hepzibah and Clifford, and the descendant of the
legendary wizard, and the village-maiden, over whom he
had thrown Love's web of sorcery. The Pyncheon-elm,
moreover, with what foliage the September gale had spared
to it, whispered unintelligible prophecies. And wise Uncle
Venner, passing slowly from the ruinous porch, seemed to
hear a strain of music, and fancied that sweet Alice Pyncheon
— after witnessing these deeds, this by-gone woe,
and this present happiness, of her kindred mortals — had
given one farewell touch of a spirit's joy upon her harpsichord,
as she floated heavenward from the House of the
Seven Gables!