Chapter: 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
country 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 touchstone 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 than 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, nowadays, 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 nightclothes! 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
     Phoebe, 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 Phoebe, 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, Phoebe, 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, nowadays! 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 Phoebe, apart to Holgrave, "how came you to know the
     secret?"

     "My dearest Phoebe," 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 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 Phoebe, 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 Phoebe!
     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!"

     "Oh, 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 Phoebe 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 Phoebe'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 foreshadowed 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 bygone 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!

 Before Holgrave can throw open the doors of the house and admit the warm sunlight, Hepzibah and Clifford enter and embrace Phoebe, now happily returned to them. After what is soon termed a "natural death," Judge Pyncheon is quickly forgotten. A theory is advanced that as a youth he was surprised by his uncle while ransacking his uncle's desk. The old man had a seizure and died, and his would-be robber found two wills, one favoring the Judge and another will of a later date favoring Clifford. Destroying the latter, the Judge planted evidence pointing the finger of suspicion at Clifford, who was, accordingly, imprisoned for murder. The son of the Judge has now predeceased him; so Clifford and Hepzibah inherit his wealth and country estate, to which they decide to move. Clifford is easier in his mind and happier now, but he is still not well. No great mistake can ever be really set right, Hawthorne seems to say. Holgrave finally tells Phoebe that he is a Maule, and laughingly he expresses the non-reformer's sorrow that their country estate is made of wood rather than of permanent stone. He finds a spring -- which Clifford now vaguely remembers -- in the ancestral portrait and reveals that behind it lies the now useless deed to the Indian lands. When they all decide in September to move into the country, they take Uncle Venner with them. The old man fancies that he hears the shade of Alice Pyncheon playing sweet music.

