She told, too, how that there was undoubtedly an immense treasure of English guineas hidden somewhere about the house, or in the cellar, or possibly in the garden.
"If you should happen to find it, Phoebe," said Hepzibah, glancing aside at her with a grim yet kindly smile, "we will tie up the shop bell for good and all."
"Yes, my dear cousin," answered Phoebe; "but, in the meantime, I hear somebody ringing it!"
When the customer was gone, Hepzibah talked rather vaguely, and at great length, about a certain Alice Pyncheon, who had been exceedingly beautiful and accomplished in her lifetime, a hundred years ago. The fragrance of her rich and delightful character still lingered about the place where she had lived, as a dried rosebud scents the drawer where it has withered and perished.
This lovely Alice had met with some great and mysterious calamity, and had grown thin and white, and gradually faded out of the world.
But, even now, she was supposed to haunt the House of Seven Gables, and a great many times—especially when one of the Pyncheons was to die—she had been heard playing sadly and beautifully on the harpsichord.
One of these tunes, just as it had sounded from her spiritual touch, had been written down by an amateur of music; it was so exquisitely mournful that nobody, to this day, could bear to hear it played, unless when a great sorrow had made them know the still profounder sweetness of it.
"Was it the same harpsichord that you showed me?" inquired Phoebe.
"The very same," said Hepzibah.
"It was Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord.
When I was learning music, my father would never let me open it. So, as I could only play on my teacher's instrument, I have forgotten all my music long ago."
Leaving these antique themes, the old lady began to talk about the daguerreotypist, whom, as he seemed to be a well-meaning and orderly young man, and in narrow circumstances, she had permitted to take up his residence in one of the seven gables.
But on seeing more of Mr. Holgrave, she hardly knew what to make of him.
He had the strangest companions imaginable; men with long beards, and dressed in linen blouses, and other such new-fangled and ill-fitting garments; reformers, temperance lecturers, and all manner of cross-looking philanthropists; community-men, and come-outers, as Hepzibah believed, who acknowledged no law, and ate no solid food, but lived on the scent of other people's cookery, and turned up their noses at the fare.
As for the daguerreotypist, she had read a paragraph in a penny paper, the other day, accusing him of making a speech full of wild and disorganising matter, at a meeting of his banditti-like associates.
For her own part, she had reason to believe that he practiced animal magnetism, and, if such things were in fashion nowadays, should be apt to suspect him of studying the Black Art, up there in his lonesome chamber.
"But, dear cousin," said Phoebe, "if the young man is so dangerous, why do you let him stay? If he does nothing worse, he may set the house on fire!"
"Why, sometimes," answered Hepzibah,
"I have seriously made it a question, whether I ought not to send him away.
But, with all his oddities, he is a quiet kind of a person, and has such a way of taking hold of one's mind, that, without exactly liking him (for I don't know enough of the young man), I should be sorry to lose sight of him entirely.
A woman clings to slight acquaintances, when she lives so much alone as I do."
"But if Mr. Holgrave is a lawless person!" remonstrated Phoebe, a part of whose essence it was to keep within the limits of law.
"O!" said Hepzibah, carelessly—for formal as she was, still, in her life's experience, she had gnashed her teeth against human law—"I suppose he has a law of his own!"
Chapter Six.
Maule's Well
After an early tea, the little country-girl strayed into the garden.
The enclosure had formerly been very extensive, but was now contracted within small compass, and hemmed about, partly by high wooden fences, and partly by the outbuildings of houses that stood on another street.
In its center was a grass plot, surrounding a ruinous little structure, which showed just enough of its original design to indicate that it had once been a summerhouse.
A hop-vine, springing from last year's root, was beginning to clamber over it, but would be long in covering the roof with its green mantle.
Three of the seven gables either fronted or looked sideways, with a dark solemnity of aspect, down into the garden.
The black rich soil had fed itself with the decay of a long period of time; such as fallen leaves, the petals of flowers, and the stalks and seed-vessels of vagrant and lawless plants, more useful after their death than ever while flaunting in the sun. The evil of these departed years would naturally have sprung up again, in such rank weeds (symbolic of the transmitted vices of society) as are always prone to root themselves about human dwellings.
Phoebe saw, however, that their growth must have been checked by a degree of careful labor, bestowed daily and systematically on the garden.
The white double rose-bush had evidently been propped up anew against the house, since the commencement of the season; and a pear tree and three damson trees, which, except a row of currant bushes, constituted the only varieties of fruit, bore marks of the recent amputation of several superfluous or defective limbs.
There were also a few species of antique and hereditary flowers in no very flourishing condition, but scrupulously weeded; as if some person, either out of love or curiosity, had been anxious to bring them to such perfection as they were capable of attaining.
The remainder of the garden presented a well-selected assortment of esculent vegetables, in a praiseworthy state of advancement. Summer squashes, almost in their golden blossom; cucumbers, now evincing a tendency to spread away from the main stock, and ramble far and wide; two or three rows of stringbeans, and as many more that were about to festoon themselves on poles; tomatoes, occupying a site so sheltered and sunny, that the plants were already gigantic, and promised an early and abundant harvest.
Phoebe wondered whose care and toil it could have been that had planted these vegetables, and kept the soil so clean and orderly.
Not, surely, her cousin Hepzibah's, who had no taste nor spirits for the lady-like employment of cultivating flowers, and—with her recluse habits, and tendency to shelter herself within the dismal shadow of the house—would hardly have come forth, under the speck of open sky, to weed and hoe among the fraternity of beans and squashes.
It being her first day of complete estrangement from rural objects, Phoebe found an unexpected charm in this little nook of grass, and foliage, and aristocratic flowers, and plebeian vegetables.
The eye of Heaven seemed to look down into it pleasantly, and with a peculiar smile, as if glad to perceive that nature, elsewhere overwhelmed, and driven out of the dusty town, had here been able to retain a breathing-place.
The spot acquired a somewhat wilder grace, and yet a very gentle one, from the fact that a pair of robins had built their nest in the pear tree, and were making themselves exceedingly busy and happy in the dark intricacy of its boughs.
Bees, too—strange to say—had thought it worth their while to come hither, possibly from the range of hives beside some farmhouse, miles away.
How many aerial voyages might they have made, in quest of honey, or honey-laden, betwixt dawn and sunset!
Yet, late as it now was, there still arose a pleasant hum out of one or two of the squash blossoms, in the depths of which these bees were plying their golden labor.
There was one other object in the garden which nature might fairly claim as her inalienable property, in spite of whatever man could do to render it his own.
This was a fountain, set round with a rim of old mossy stones, and paved, in its bed, with what appeared to be a sort of Mosaic work of variously colored pebbles.
The play and slight agitation of the water, in its upward gush, wrought magically with these variegated pebbles, and made a continually shifting apparition of quaint figures, vanishing too suddenly to be definable.
Thence, swelling over the rim of moss-grown stones, the water stole away under the fence, through what we regret to call a gutter rather than a channel.
Nor must we forget to mention a hen-coop of very reverend antiquity that stood in the further corner of the garden, not a great way from the fountain.
It now contained only Chanticleer, his two wives, and a solitary chicken. All of them were pure specimens of a breed which had been transmitted down as an heirloom in the Pyncheon family, and were said, while in their prime, to have attained almost the size of turkeys, and, on the score of delicate flesh, to be fit for a prince's table.
In proof of the authenticity of this legendary renown, Hepzibah could have exhibited the shell of a great egg, which an ostrich need hardly have been ashamed of.