In short, to bring the matter at once to a point, it was
incontrovertibly evident that somebody had taken the shop and fixtures
of the long-retired and forgotten Mr. Pyncheon, and was about to renew
the enterprise of that departed worthy, with a different set of
customers. Who could this bold adventurer be? And, of all places in
the world, why had he chosen the House of the Seven Gables as the scene
of his commercial speculations?
We return to the elderly maiden. She at length withdrew her eyes from
the dark countenance of the Colonel's portrait, heaved a sigh,--indeed,
her breast was a very cave of Aolus that morning,--and stept across the
room on tiptoe, as is the customary gait of elderly women. Passing
through an intervening passage, she opened a door that communicated
with the shop, just now so elaborately described. Owing to the
projection of the upper story--and still more to the thick shadow of
the Pyncheon Elm, which stood almost directly in front of the
gable--the twilight, here, was still as much akin to night as morning.
Another heavy sigh from Miss Hepzibah! After a moment's pause on the
threshold, peering towards the window with her near-sighted scowl, as
if frowning down some bitter enemy, she suddenly projected herself into
the shop. The haste, and, as it were, the galvanic impulse of the
movement, were really quite startling.
Nervously--in a sort of frenzy, we might almost say--she began to busy
herself in arranging some children's playthings, and other little
wares, on the shelves and at the shop-window. In the aspect of this
dark-arrayed, pale-faced, ladylike old figure there was a deeply tragic
character that contrasted irreconcilably with the ludicrous pettiness
of her employment. It seemed a queer anomaly, that so gaunt and dismal
a personage should take a toy in hand; a miracle, that the toy did not
vanish in her grasp; a miserably absurd idea, that she should go on
perplexing her stiff and sombre intellect with the question how to
tempt little boys into her premises! Yet such is undoubtedly her
object. Now she places a gingerbread elephant against the window, but
with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with the
dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it has ceased to be an
elephant, and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread. There,
again, she has upset a tumbler of marbles, all of which roll different
ways, and each individual marble, devil-directed, into the most
difficult obscurity that it can find. Heaven help our poor old
Hepzibah, and forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of her position!
As her rigid and rusty frame goes down upon its hands and knees, in
quest of the absconding marbles, we positively feel so much the more
inclined to shed tears of sympathy, from the very fact that we must
needs turn aside and laugh at her. For here,--and if we fail to
impress it suitably upon the reader, it is our own fault, not that of
the theme, here is one of the truest points of melancholy interest that
occur in ordinary life. It was the final throe of what called itself
old gentility. A lady--who had fed herself from childhood with the
shadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was
that a lady's hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for
bread,--this born lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain
to step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank. Poverty, treading
closely at her heels for a lifetime, has come up with her at last. She
must earn her own food, or starve! And we have stolen upon Miss
Hepzibah Pyncheon, too irreverently, at the instant of time when the
patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman.