The Pyncheons, in brief, lived along, for the better part of two
centuries, with perhaps less of outward vicissitude than has attended
most other New England families during the same period of time.
Possessing very distinctive traits of their own, they nevertheless took
the general characteristics of the little community in which they
dwelt; a town noted for its frugal, discreet, well-ordered, and
home-loving inhabitants, as well as for the somewhat confined scope of
its sympathies; but in which, be it said, there are odder individuals,
and, now and then, stranger occurrences, than one meets with almost
anywhere else. During the Revolution, the Pyncheon of that epoch,
adopting the royal side, became a refugee; but repented, and made his
reappearance, just at the point of time to preserve the House of the
Seven Gables from confiscation. For the last seventy years the most
noted event in the Pyncheon annals had been likewise the heaviest
calamity that ever befell the race; no less than the violent death--for
so it was adjudged--of one member of the family by the criminal act of
another. Certain circumstances attending this fatal occurrence had
brought the deed irresistibly home to a nephew of the deceased
Pyncheon. The young man was tried and convicted of the crime; but
either the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and possibly some
lurking doubts in the breast of the executive, or, lastly--an argument
of greater weight in a republic than it could have been under a
monarchy,--the high respectability and political influence of the
criminal's connections, had availed to mitigate his doom from death to
perpetual imprisonment. This sad affair had chanced about thirty years
before the action of our story commences. Latterly, there were rumors
(which few believed, and only one or two felt greatly interested in)
that this long-buried man was likely, for some reason or other, to be
summoned forth from his living tomb.
It is essential to say a few words respecting the victim of this now
almost forgotten murder. He was an old bachelor, and possessed of
great wealth, in addition to the house and real estate which
constituted what remained of the ancient Pyncheon property. Being of
an eccentric and melancholy turn of mind, and greatly given to
rummaging old records and hearkening to old traditions, he had brought
himself, it is averred, to the conclusion that Matthew Maule, the
wizard, had been foully wronged out of his homestead, if not out of his
life. Such being the case, and he, the old bachelor, in possession of
the ill-gotten spoil,--with the black stain of blood sunken deep into
it, and still to be scented by conscientious nostrils,--the question
occurred, whether it were not imperative upon him, even at this late
hour, to make restitution to Maule's posterity. To a man living so
much in the past, and so little in the present, as the secluded and
antiquarian old bachelor, a century and a half seemed not so vast a
period as to obviate the propriety of substituting right for wrong. It
was the belief of those who knew him best, that he would positively
have taken the very singular step of giving up the House of the Seven
Gables to the representative of Matthew Maule, but for the unspeakable
tumult which a suspicion of the old gentleman's project awakened among
his Pyncheon relatives. Their exertions had the effect of suspending
his purpose; but it was feared that he would perform, after death, by
the operation of his last will, what he had so hardly been prevented
from doing in his proper lifetime. But there is no one thing which men
so rarely do, whatever the provocation or inducement, as to bequeath
patrimonial property away from their own blood. They may love other
individuals far better than their relatives,--they may even cherish
dislike, or positive hatred, to the latter; but yet, in view of death,
the strong prejudice of propinquity revives, and impels the testator to
send down his estate in the line marked out by custom so immemorial
that it looks like nature. In all the Pyncheons, this feeling had the
energy of disease. It was too powerful for the conscientious scruples
of the old bachelor; at whose death, accordingly, the mansion-house,
together with most of his other riches, passed into the possession of
his next legal representative.