Awake!" He spoke loudly, with terror in his voice, and close to that delicate ear, which had always been so sensitive to every discord.
But the sound evidently reached her not.
It is indescribable what a sense of remote, dim, unattainable distance, betwixt himself and Alice, was impressed on the father by this impossibility of reaching her with his voice.
"Best touch her!" said Matthew Maule.
"Shake the girl, and roughly too!
My hands are hardened with too much use of axe, saw, and plane, else I might help you!"
Mr. Pyncheon took her hand, and pressed it with the earnestness of startled emotion.
He kissed her, with so great a heart-throb in the kiss, that he thought she must needs feel it.
Then, in a gust of anger at her insensibility, he shook her maiden form with a violence which, the next moment, it affrighted him to remember.
He withdrew his encircling arms, and Alice—whose figure, though flexible, had been wholly impassive—relapsed into the same attitude as before these attempts to arouse her.
Maule having shifted his position, her face was turned towards him, slightly, but with what seemed to be a reference of her very slumber to his guidance.
Then it was a strange sight to behold how the man of conventionalities shook the powder out of his periwig; how the reserved and stately gentleman forgot his dignity; how the gold-embroidered waistcoat flickered and glistened in the firelight, with the convulsion of rage, terror, and sorrow, in the human heart that was beating under it.
"Villain!" cried Mr. Pyncheon, shaking his clenched fist at Maule.
"You and the fiend together have robbed me of my daughter!
Give her back, spawn of the old wizard, or you shall climb Gallows Hill in your grandfather's footsteps!" "Softly, Mr. Pyncheon!" said the carpenter, with scornful composure.
"Softly, an' it please your worship, else you will spoil those lace ruffles at your wrists!
Is it my crime if you have sold your daughter for the mere hope of getting a sheet of yellow parchment into your clutch? There sits Mistress Alice, quietly asleep!
Now let Matthew Maule try whether she be as proud as the carpenter found her a while since."
He spoke, and Alice responded with a soft, subdued, inward acquiescence, and a bending of her form towards him, like the flame of a torch when it indicates a gentle draft of air.
He beckoned with his hand, and rising from her chair—blindly but undoubtingly, as tending to her sure and inevitable center—the proud Alice approached him.
He waved her back, and retreating, Alice sank again into her seat.
"She is mine!" said Matthew Maule.
"Mine, by the right of the strongest spirit!"
In the further progress of the legend there is a long, grotesque, and occasionally awe-striking account of the carpenter's incantations (if so they are to be called) with a view of discovering the lost document. It appears to have been his object to convert the mind of Alice into a kind of telescopic medium, through which Mr. Pyncheon and himself might obtain a glimpse into the spiritual world. He succeeded accordingly, in holding an imperfect sort of intercourse, at one remove, with the departed personages, in whose custody the so much valued secret had been carried beyond the precincts of earth. During her trance, Alice described three figures as being present to her spiritualised perception.
One was an aged, dignified, stern-looking gentleman, clad as for a solemn festival, in grave and costly attire, but with a great blood-stain on his richly wrought band; the second, an aged man, meanly dressed, with a dark and malign countenance, and a broken halter about his neck; the third, a person not so advanced in life as the former two, but beyond the middle age, wearing a coarse woollen tunic and leather breeches and with a carpenter's rule sticking out of his side pocket.
These three visionary characters possessed a mutual knowledge of the missing document.
One of them, in truth—it was he with the blood-stain on his band—seemed, unless his gestures were misunderstood, to hold the parchments in his immediate keeping but was prevented, by his two partners in the mystery, from disburthening himself of the trust.
Finally, when he showed a purpose of shouting forth the secret, loudly enough to be heard from his own sphere into that of mortals, his companions struggled with him, and pressed their hands over his mouth; and forthwith—whether that he was choked by it, or that the secret itself was of a crimson hue—there was a fresh flow of blood upon his band.
Upon this, the two meanly dressed figures mocked and jeered at the much-abashed old dignitary, and pointed their fingers at the stain.
At this juncture, Maule turned to Mr. Pyncheon. "It will never be allowed," said he.
"The custody of this secret, that would so enrich his heirs, makes part of your grandfather's retribution.
He must choke with it until it is no longer of any value. And keep you the House of Seven Gables!
It is too dearly bought an inheritance, and too heavy with the curse upon it, to be shifted yet awhile from the Colonel's posterity!"
Mr. Pyncheon tried to speak, but—what with fear and passion—could make only a gurgling murmur in his throat.
The carpenter smiled.
"Aha, worshipful sir!—so you have old Maule's blood to drink!" said he, jeeringly. "Fiend in man's shape! why dost thou keep dominion over my child!" cried Mr. Pyncheon, when his choked utterance could make way.
"Give me back my daughter! Then go thy ways; and may we never meet again!" "Your daughter!" said Matthew Maule.
"Why, she is fairly mine!
Nevertheless, not to be too hard with fair Mistress Alice, I will leave her in your keeping; but I do not warrant you that she shall never have occasion to remember Maule, the carpenter." He waved his hands with an upward motion; and after a few repetitions of similar gestures, the beautiful Alice Pyncheon awoke from her strange trance.
She awoke without the slightest recollection of her visionary experience; but as one losing herself in a momentary reverie, and returning to the consciousness of actual life in almost as brief an interval as the down-sinking flame of the hearth could quiver again up the chimney.
On recognising Matthew Maule, she assumed an air of somewhat cold but gentle dignity; the rather, as there was a certain peculiar smile on the carpenter's visage, that stirred the native pride of the fair Alice.
So ended, for that time, the quest for the lost title-deed of the Pyncheon territory at the eastward; nor, though often subsequently renewed, has it ever yet befallen a Pyncheon to set his eye upon that parchment.
But, alas for the beautiful, the gentle, yet too haughty Alice!
A power that she little dreamed of had laid its grasp upon her maiden soul. A will, most unlike her own, constrained her to do its grotesque and fantastic bidding.
Her father, as it proved, had martired his poor child to an inordinate desire for measuring his land by miles instead of acres.
And, therefore, while Alice Pyncheon lived she was Maule's slave, in a bondage more humiliating a thousandfold than that which binds its chain around the body. Seated by his humble fireside, Maule had but to wave his hand; and wherever the proud lady chanced to be—whether in her chamber, or entertaining her father's stately guests, or worshipping at church—whatever her place or occupation, her spirit passed from beneath her own control, and bowed itself to Maule. "Alice, laugh!"—the carpenter, beside his hearth, would say; or perhaps intensely will it, without a spoken word. And even were it prayertime, or at a funeral, Alice must break into wild laughter. "Alice, be sad!"—and at the instant down would come her tears, quenching all the mirth of those around her like sudden rain upon a bonfire. "Alice, dance!"—and dance she would, not in such court-like measures as she had learned abroad, but some high-paced jig, or hop-skip rigadoon, befitting the brisk lasses at a rustic merry-making. It seemed to be Maule's impulse not to ruin Alice, nor to visit her with any black or gigantic mischief, which would have crowned her sorrows with the grace of tragedy, but to wreak a low, ungenerous scorn upon her. Thus all the dignity of life was lost.
She felt herself too much abased, and longed to change natures with some worm!
One evening, at a bridal-party (but not her own; for, so lost from self-control, she would have deemed it sin to marry), poor Alice was beckoned forth by her unseen despot, and constrained, in her gossamer white dress and satin slippers, to hasten along the street to the mean dwelling of a laboring-man.
There was laughter and good cheer within; for Matthew Maule, that night, was to wed the laborer's daughter, and had summoned proud Alice Pyncheon to wait upon his bride.
And so she did; and when the twain were one, Alice awoke out of her enchanted sleep.