II The Little Shop-Window
IT still lacked half an hour of sunrise, when Miss HepzibahPyncheon--we will not say awoke, it being doubtful whether the poorlady had so much as closed her eyes during the brief night ofmidsummer--but, at all events, arose from her solitary pillow, andbegan what it would be mockery to term the adornment of her person.Far from us be the indecorum of assisting, even in imagination, at amaiden lady's toilet! Our story must therefore await Miss Hepzibah atthe threshold of her chamber; only presuming, meanwhile, to note someof the heavy sighs that labored from her bosom, with little restraintas to their lugubrious depth and volume of sound, inasmuch as theycould be audible to nobody save a disembodied listener like ourself.The Old Maid was alone in the old house. Alone, except for a certainrespectable and orderly young man, an artist in the daguerreotype line,who, for about three months back, had been a lodger in a remotegable,--quite a house by itself, indeed,--with locks, bolts, and oakenbars on all the intervening doors. Inaudible, consequently, were poorMiss Hepzibah's gusty sighs. Inaudible the creaking joints of herstiffened knees, as she knelt down by the bedside. And inaudible, too,by mortal ear, but heard with all-comprehending love and pity in thefarthest heaven, that almost agony of prayer--now whispered, now agroan, now a struggling silence--wherewith she besought the Divineassistance through the day! Evidently, this is to be a day of more thanordinary trial to Miss Hepzibah, who, for above a quarter of a centurygone by, has dwelt in strict seclusion, taking no part in the businessof life, and just as little in its intercourse and pleasures. Not withsuch fervor prays the torpid recluse, looking forward to the cold,sunless, stagnant calm of a day that is to be like innumerableyesterdays.
The maiden lady's devotions are concluded. Will she now issue forthover the threshold of our story? Not yet, by many moments. First,every drawer in the tall, old-fashioned bureau is to be opened, withdifficulty, and with a succession of spasmodic jerks then, all mustclose again, with the same fidgety reluctance. There is a rustling ofstiff silks; a tread of backward and forward footsteps to and froacross the chamber. We suspect Miss Hepzibah, moreover, of taking astep upward into a chair, in order to give heedful regard to herappearance on all sides, and at full length, in the oval, dingy-framedtoilet-glass, that hangs above her table. Truly! well, indeed! whowould have thought it! Is all this precious time to be lavished on thematutinal repair and beautifying of an elderly person, who never goesabroad, whom nobody ever visits, and from whom, when she shall havedone her utmost, it were the best charity to turn one's eyes anotherway?
Now she is almost ready. Let us pardon her one other pause; for it isgiven to the sole sentiment, or, we might better say,--heightened andrendered intense, as it has been, by sorrow and seclusion,--to thestrong passion of her life. We heard the turning of a key in a smalllock; she has opened a secret drawer of an escritoire, and is probablylooking at a certain miniature, done in Malbone's most perfect style,and representing a face worthy of no less delicate a pencil. It wasonce our good fortune to see this picture. It is a likeness of a youngman, in a silken dressing-gown of an old fashion, the soft richness ofwhich is well adapted to the countenance of reverie, with its full,tender lips, and beautiful eyes, that seem to indicate not so muchcapacity of thought, as gentle and voluptuous emotion. Of thepossessor of such features we shall have a right to ask nothing, exceptthat 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 alover--poor thing, how could she?--nor ever knew, by her ownexperience, what love technically means. And yet, her undying faithand trust, her fresh remembrance, and continual devotedness towards theoriginal of that miniature, have been the only substance for her heartto feed upon.
She seems to have put aside the miniature, and is standing again beforethe toilet-glass. There are tears to be wiped off. A few morefootsteps 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 ofwhich has accidentally been set, ajar--here comes Miss HepzibahPyncheon! Forth she steps into the dusky, time-darkened passage; a tallfigure, clad in black silk, with a long and shrunken waist, feeling herway towards the stairs like a near-sighted person, as in truth she is.
The sun, meanwhile, if not already above the horizon, was ascendingnearer and nearer to its verge. A few clouds, floating high upward,caught some of the earliest light, and threw down its golden gleam onthe windows of all the houses in the street, not forgetting the Houseof the Seven Gables, which--many such sunrises as it hadwitnessed--looked cheerfully at the present one. The reflectedradiance served to show, pretty distinctly, the aspect and arrangementof the room which Hepzibah entered, after descending the stairs. Itwas a low-studded room, with a beam across the ceiling, panelled withdark wood, and having a large chimney-piece, set round with picturedtiles, but now closed by an iron fire-board, through which ran thefunnel of a modern stove. There was a carpet on the floor, originallyof rich texture, but so worn and faded in these latter years that itsonce brilliant figure had quite vanished into one indistinguishablehue. In the way of furniture, there were two tables: one, constructedwith perplexing intricacy and exhibiting as many feet as a centipede;the other, most delicately wrought, with four long and slender legs, soapparently frail that it was almost incredible what a length of timethe ancient tea-table had stood upon them. Half a dozen chairs stoodabout the room, straight and stiff, and so ingeniously contrived forthe discomfort of the human person that they were irksome even tosight, and conveyed the ugliest possible idea of the state of societyto which they could have been adapted. One exception there was,however, in a very antique elbow-chair, with a high back, carvedelaborately in oak, and a roomy depth within its arms, that made up, byits spacious comprehensiveness, for the lack of any of those artisticcurves which abound in a modern chair.
As for ornamental articles of furniture, we recollect but two, if suchthey may be called. One was a map of the Pyncheon territory at theeastward, not engraved, but the handiwork of some skilful olddraughtsman, and grotesquely illuminated with pictures of Indians andwild beasts, among which was seen a lion; the natural history of theregion being as little known as its geography, which was put down mostfantastically awry. The other adornment was the portrait of oldColonel Pyncheon, at two thirds length, representing the stern featuresof a Puritanic-looking personage, in a skull-cap, with a laced band anda grizzly beard; holding a Bible with one hand, and in the otheruplifting an iron sword-hilt. The latter object, being moresuccessfully depicted by the artist, stood out in far greaterprominence than the sacred volume. Face to face with this picture, onentering 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 beeninterpreted as an expression of bitter anger and ill-will. But it wasno such thing. She, in fact, felt a reverence for the pictured visage,of which only a far-descended and time-stricken virgin could besusceptible; and this forbidding scowl was the innocent result of hernear-sightedness, and an effort so to concentrate her powers of visionas to substitute a firm outline of the object instead of a vague one.
We must linger a moment on this unfortunate expression of poorHepzibah's brow. Her scowl,--as the world, or such part of it assometimes caught a transitory glimpse of her at the window, wickedlypersisted in calling it,--her scowl had done Miss Hepzibah a very illoffice, in establishing her character as an ill-tempered old maid; nordoes it appear improbable that, by often gazing at herself in a dimlooking-glass, and perpetually encountering her own frown with itsghostly sphere, she had been led to interpret the expression almost asunjustly as the world did. "How miserably cross I look!" she mustoften have whispered to herself; and ultimately have fancied herselfso, by a sense of inevitable doom. But her heart never frowned. Itwas naturally tender, sensitive, and full of little tremors andpalpitations; all of which weaknesses it retained, while her visage wasgrowing so
perversely stern, and even fierce. Nor had Hepzibah everany hardihood, except what came from the very warmest nook in heraffections.
All this time, however, we are loitering faintheartedly on thethreshold of our story. In very truth, we have an invinciblereluctance to disclose what Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon was about to do.
It has already been observed, that, in the basement story of the gablefronting on the street, an unworthy ancestor, nearly a century ago, hadfitted up a shop. Ever since the old gentleman retired from trade, andfell asleep under his coffin-lid, not only the shop-door, but the innerarrangements, had been suffered to remain unchanged; while the dust ofages gathered inch-deep over the shelves and counter, and partly filledan old pair of scales, as if it were of value enough to be weighed. Ittreasured itself up, too, in the half-open till, where there stilllingered a base sixpence, worth neither more nor less than thehereditary pride which had here been put to shame. Such had been thestate 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 forsakenprecincts. So it had remained, until within a few days past.
But now, though the shop-window was still closely curtained from thepublic gaze, a remarkable change had taken place in its interior. Therich and heavy festoons of cobweb, which it had cost a long ancestralsuccession of spiders their life's labor to spin and weave, had beencarefully brushed away from the ceiling. The counter, shelves, andfloor had all been scoured, and the latter was overstrewn with freshblue sand. The brown scales, too, had evidently undergone rigiddiscipline, in an unavailing effort to rub off the rust, which, alas!had eaten through and through their substance. Neither was the littleold shop any longer empty of merchantable goods. A curious eye,privileged to take an account of stock and investigate behind thecounter, would have discovered a barrel, yea, two or three barrels andhalf 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 weretallow candles, ten to the pound. A small stock of brown sugar, somewhite beans and split peas, and a few other commodities of low price,and such as are constantly in demand, made up the bulkier portion ofthe merchandise. It might have been taken for a ghostly orphantasmagoric reflection of the old shop-keeper Pyncheon's shabbilyprovided shelves, save that some of the articles were of a descriptionand outward form which could hardly have been known in his day. Forinstance, there was a glass pickle-jar, filled with fragments ofGibraltar rock; not, indeed, splinters of the veritable stonefoundation of the famous fortress, but bits of delectable candy, neatlydone up in white paper. Jim Crow, moreover, was seen executing hisworld-renowned dance, in gingerbread. A party of leaden dragoons weregalloping along one of the shelves, in equipments and uniform of moderncut; and there were some sugar figures, with no strong resemblance tothe humanity of any epoch, but less unsatisfactorily representing ourown 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 theirinstantaneous flame from the nether fires of Tophet.
In short, to bring the matter at once to a point, it wasincontrovertibly evident that somebody had taken the shop and fixturesof the long-retired and forgotten Mr. Pyncheon, and was about to renewthe enterprise of that departed worthy, with a different set ofcustomers. Who could this bold adventurer be? And, of all places inthe world, why had he chosen the House of the Seven Gables as the sceneof his commercial speculations?
We return to the elderly maiden. She at length withdrew her eyes fromthe dark countenance of the Colonel's portrait, heaved a sigh,--indeed,her breast was a very cave of Aolus that morning,--and stept across theroom on tiptoe, as is the customary gait of elderly women. Passingthrough an intervening passage, she opened a door that communicatedwith the shop, just now so elaborately described. Owing to theprojection of the upper story--and still more to the thick shadow ofthe Pyncheon Elm, which stood almost directly in front of thegable--the twilight, here, was still as much akin to night as morning.Another heavy sigh from Miss Hepzibah! After a moment's pause on thethreshold, peering towards the window with her near-sighted scowl, asif frowning down some bitter enemy, she suddenly projected herself intothe shop. The haste, and, as it were, the galvanic impulse of themovement, were really quite startling.
Nervously--in a sort of frenzy, we might almost say--she began to busyherself in arranging some children's playthings, and other littlewares, on the shelves and at the shop-window. In the aspect of thisdark-arrayed, pale-faced, ladylike old figure there was a deeply tragiccharacter that contrasted irreconcilably with the ludicrous pettinessof her employment. It seemed a queer anomaly, that so gaunt and dismala personage should take a toy in hand; a miracle, that the toy did notvanish in her grasp; a miserably absurd idea, that she should go onperplexing her stiff and sombre intellect with the question how totempt little boys into her premises! Yet such is undoubtedly herobject. Now she places a gingerbread elephant against the window, butwith so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with thedismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it has ceased to be anelephant, and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread. There,again, she has upset a tumbler of marbles, all of which roll differentways, and each individual marble, devil-directed, into the mostdifficult obscurity that it can find. Heaven help our poor oldHepzibah, and forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of her position!As her rigid and rusty frame goes down upon its hands and knees, inquest of the absconding marbles, we positively feel so much the moreinclined to shed tears of sympathy, from the very fact that we mustneeds turn aside and laugh at her. For here,--and if we fail toimpress it suitably upon the reader, it is our own fault, not that ofthe theme, here is one of the truest points of melancholy interest thatoccur in ordinary life. It was the final throe of what called itselfold gentility. A lady--who had fed herself from childhood with theshadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it wasthat a lady's hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught forbread,--this born lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fainto step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank. Poverty, treadingclosely at her heels for a lifetime, has come up with her at last. Shemust earn her own food, or starve! And we have stolen upon MissHepzibah Pyncheon, too irreverently, at the instant of time when thepatrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman.
In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our sociallife, somebody is always at the drowning-point. The tragedy is enactedwith as continual a repetition as that of a popular drama on a holiday,and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, perhaps, as when an hereditarynoble sinks below his order. More deeply; since, with us, rank is thegrosser substance of wealth and a splendid establishment, and has nospiritual existence after the death of these, but dies hopelessly alongwith them. And, therefore, since we have been unfortunate enough tointroduce our heroine at so inauspicious a juncture, we would entreatfor a mood of due solemnity in the spectators of her fate. Let usbehold, in poor Hepzibah, the immemorial, lady--two hundred years old,on this side of the water, and thrice as many on the other,--with herantique portraits, pedigrees, coats of arms, records and traditions,and her claim, as joint heiress, to that princely territory at theeastward, 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 ofwomen, in circumstances at all similar to those of our unfortunaterecluse. With her near-sightedness, and those tremulous fingers ofhers, at once inflexible and delicate, she could not be a seamstress;although her sampler, of fifty years gone by, exhibited some of themost recondite specimens of ornamental needlework. A school for littlechildren had been often in her thoughts; and, at one time, she hadbegun a review of her early
studies in the New England Primer, with aview to prepare herself for the office of instructress. But the loveof children had never been quickened in Hepzibah's heart, and was nowtorpid, if not extinct; she watched the little people of theneighborhood from her chamber-window, and doubted whether she couldtolerate a more intimate acquaintance with them. Besides, in our day,the very ABC has become a science greatly too abstruse to be any longertaught by pointing a pin from letter to letter. A modern child couldteach old Hepzibah more than old Hepzibah could teach the child.So--with many a cold, deep heart-quake at the idea of at last cominginto sordid contact with the world, from which she had so long keptaloof, while every added day of seclusion had rolled another stoneagainst the cavern door of her hermitage--the poor thing bethoughtherself of the ancient shop-window, the rusty scales, and dusty till.She might have held back a little longer; but another circumstance, notyet hinted at, had somewhat hastened her decision. Her humblepreparations, therefore, were duly made, and the enterprise was now tobe commenced. Nor was she entitled to complain of any remarkablesingularity in her fate; for, in the town of her nativity, we mightpoint to several little shops of a similar description, some of them inhouses as ancient as that of the Seven Gables; and one or two, it maybe, where a decayed gentlewoman stands behind the counter, as grim animage of family pride as Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon herself.
It was overpoweringly ridiculous,--we must honestly confess it,--thedeportment of the maiden lady while setting her shop in order for thepublic eye. She stole on tiptoe to the window, as cautiously as if sheconceived some bloody-minded villain to be watching behind theelm-tree, with intent to take her life. Stretching out her long, lankarm, she put a paper of pearl-buttons, a jew's-harp, or whatever thesmall article might be, in its destined place, and straightway vanishedback into the dusk, as if the world need never hope for another glimpseof her. It might have been fancied, indeed, that she expected tominister to the wants of the community unseen, like a disembodieddivinity or enchantress, holding forth her bargains to the reverentialand awe-stricken purchaser in an invisible hand. But Hepzibah had nosuch flattering dream. She was well aware that she must ultimately comeforward, and stand revealed in her proper individuality; but, likeother sensitive persons, she could not bear to be observed in thegradual process, and chose rather to flash forth on the world'sastonished gaze at once.
The inevitable moment was not much longer to be delayed. The sunshinemight now be seen stealing down the front of the opposite house, fromthe windows of which came a reflected gleam, struggling through theboughs of the elm-tree, and enlightening the interior of the shop moredistinctly than heretofore. The town appeared to be waking up. Abaker's cart had already rattled through the street, chasing away thelatest vestige of night's sanctity with the jingle-jangle of itsdissonant bells. A milkman was distributing the contents of his cansfrom door to door; and the harsh peal of a fisherman's conch shell washeard far off, around the corner. None of these tokens escapedHepzibah's notice. The moment had arrived. To delay longer would beonly to lengthen out her misery. Nothing remained, except to take downthe bar from the shop-door, leaving the entrance free--more thanfree--welcome, as if all were household friends--to every passer-by,whose eyes might be attracted by the commodities at the window. Thislast act Hepzibah now performed, letting the bar fall with what smoteupon her excited nerves as a most astounding clatter. Then--as if theonly barrier betwixt herself and the world had been thrown down, and aflood of evil consequences would come tumbling through the gap--shefled into the inner parlor, threw herself into the ancestralelbow-chair, and wept.
Our miserable old Hepzibah! It is a heavy annoyance to a writer, whoendeavors to represent nature, its various attitudes and circumstances,in a reasonably correct outline and true coloring, that so much of themean and ludicrous should be hopelessly mixed up with the purest pathoswhich life anywhere supplies to him. What tragic dignity, for example,can be wrought into a scene like this! How can we elevate our historyof retribution for the sin of long ago, when, as one of our mostprominent figures, we are compelled to introduce--not a young andlovely woman, nor even the stately remains of beauty, storm-shatteredby affliction--but a gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed maiden, in along-waisted silk gown, and with the strange horror of a turban on herhead! Her visage is not even ugly. It is redeemed from insignificanceonly by the contraction of her eyebrows into a near-sighted scowl.And, finally, her great life-trial seems to be, that, after sixty yearsof idleness, she finds it convenient to earn comfortable bread bysetting up a shop in a small way. Nevertheless, if we look through allthe heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find this same entanglement ofsomething mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow.Life is made up of marble and mud. And, without all the deeper trustin a comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspectthe insult of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the ironcountenance of fate. What is called poetic insight is the gift ofdiscerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beautyand the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.
The House of the Seven Gables Page 4