The House of the Seven Gables | Page 8

grave. His home would include the home of the dead
and buried wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind
of privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers into which
future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where children of the
Pyncheon blood were to be born. The terror and ugliness of Maule's
crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment, would darken the
freshly plastered walls, and infect them early with the scent of an old
and melancholy house. Why, then, --while so much of the soil around
him was bestrewn with the virgin forest leaves,--why should Colonel
Pyncheon prefer a site that had already been accurst?
But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned aside
from his well-considered scheme, either by dread of the wizard's ghost,
or by flimsy sentimentalities of any kind, however specious. Had he
been told of a bad air, it might have moved him somewhat; but he was
ready to encounter an evil spirit on his own ground. Endowed with
commonsense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, fastened
together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps, he followed
out his original design, probably without so much as imagining an
objection to it. On the score of delicacy, or any scrupulousness which a
finer sensibility might have taught him, the Colonel, like most of his
breed and generation, was impenetrable. He therefore dug his cellar,
and laid the deep foundations of his mansion, on the square of earth
whence Matthew Maule, forty years before, had first swept away the
fallen leaves. It was a curious, and, as some people thought, an
ominous fact, that, very soon after the workmen began their operations,
the spring of water, above mentioned, entirely lost the deliciousness of
its pristine quality. Whether its sources were disturbed by the depth of
the new cellar, or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the bottom, it is
certain that the water of Maule's Well, as it continued to be called, grew
hard and brackish. Even such we find it now; and any old woman of the
neighborhood will certify that it is productive of intestinal mischief to
those who quench their thirst there.
The reader may deem it singular that the head carpenter of the new
edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead

gripe the property of the soil had been wrested. Not improbably he was
the best workman of his time; or, perhaps, the Colonel thought it
expedient, or was impelled by some better feeling, thus openly to cast
aside all animosity against the race of his fallen antagonist. Nor was it
out of keeping with the general coarseness and matter-of-fact character
of the age, that the son should be willing to earn an honest penny, or,
rather, a weighty amount of sterling pounds, from the purse of his
father's deadly enemy. At all events, Thomas Maule became the
architect of the House of the Seven Gables, and performed his duty so
faithfully that the timber framework fastened by his hands still holds
together.
Thus the great house was built. Familiar as it stands in the writer's
recollection,--for it has been an object of curiosity with him from
boyhood, both as a specimen of the best and stateliest architecture of a
longpast epoch, and as the scene of events more full of human interest,
perhaps, than those of a gray feudal castle,--familiar as it stands, in its
rusty old age, it is therefore only the more difficult to imagine the
bright novelty with which it first caught the sunshine. The impression
of its actual state, at this distance of a hundred and sixty years, darkens
inevitably through the picture which we would fain give of its
appearance on the morning when the Puritan magnate bade all the town
to be his guests. A ceremony of consecration, festive as well as
religious, was now to be performed. A prayer and discourse from the
Rev. Mr. Higginson, and the outpouring of a psalm from the general
throat of the community, was to be made acceptable to the grosser
sense by ale, cider, wine, and brandy, in copious effusion, and, as some
authorities aver, by an ox, roasted whole, or at least, by the weight and
substance of an ox, in more manageable joints and sirloins. The carcass
of a deer, shot within twenty miles, had supplied material for the vast
circumference of a pasty. A codfish of sixty pounds, caught in the bay,
had been dissolved into the rich liquid of a chowder. The chimney of
the new house, in short, belching forth its kitchen smoke, impregnated
the whole air with the scent of meats, fowls, and fishes, spicily
concocted with odoriferous herbs,