For example: tradition affirmed that the Puritan had been greedy of
wealth; the Judge, too, with all the show of liberal expenditure, was
said to be as close-fisted as if his gripe were of iron. The ancestor
had clothed himself in a grim assumption of kindliness, a rough
heartiness of word and manner, which most people took to be the genuine
warmth of nature, making its way through the thick and inflexible hide
of a manly character. His descendant, in compliance with the
requirements of a nicer age, had etherealized this rude benevolence
into that broad benignity of smile wherewith he shone like a noonday
sun along the streets, or glowed like a household fire in the
drawing-rooms of his private acquaintance. The Puritan--if not belied
by some singular stories, murmured, even at this day, under the
narrator's breath--had fallen into certain transgressions to which men
of his great animal development, whatever their faith or principles,
must continue liable, until they put off impurity, along with the gross
earthly substance that involves it. We must not stain our page with
any contemporary scandal, to a similar purport, that may have been
whispered against the Judge. The Puritan, again, an autocrat in his
own household, had worn out three wives, and, merely by the remorseless
weight and hardness of his character in the conjugal relation, had sent
them, one after another, broken-hearted, to their graves. Here the
parallel, in some sort, fails. The Judge had wedded but a single wife,
and lost her in the third or fourth year of their marriage. There was
a fable, however,--for such we choose to consider it, though, not
impossibly, typical of Judge Pyncheon's marital deportment,--that the
lady got her death-blow in the honeymoon, and never smiled again,
because her husband compelled her to serve him with coffee every
morning at his bedside, in token of fealty to her liege-lord and master.
But it is too fruitful a subject, this of hereditary resemblances,--the
frequent recurrence of which, in a direct line, is truly unaccountable,
when we consider how large an accumulation of ancestry lies behind
every man at the distance of one or two centuries. We shall only add,
therefore, that the Puritan--so, at least, says chimney-corner
tradition, which often preserves traits of character with marvellous
fidelity--was bold, imperious, relentless, crafty; laying his purposes
deep, and following them out with an inveteracy of pursuit that knew
neither rest nor conscience; trampling on the weak, and, when essential
to his ends, doing his utmost to beat down the strong. Whether the
Judge in any degree resembled him, the further progress of our
narrative may show.
Scarcely any of the items in the above-drawn parallel occurred to
Phoebe, whose country birth and residence, in truth, had left her
pitifully ignorant of most of the family traditions, which lingered,
like cobwebs and incrustations of smoke, about the rooms and
chimney-corners of the House of the Seven Gables. Yet there was a
circumstance, very trifling in itself, which impressed her with an odd
degree of horror. She had heard of the anathema flung by Maule, the
executed wizard, against Colonel Pyncheon and his posterity,--that God
would give them blood to drink,--and likewise of the popular notion,
that this miraculous blood might now and then be heard gurgling in
their throats. The latter scandal--as became a person of sense, and,
more especially, a member of the Pyncheon family--Phoebe had set down
for the absurdity which it unquestionably was. But ancient
superstitions, after being steeped in human hearts and embodied in
human breath, and passing from lip to ear in manifold repetition,
through a series of generations, become imbued with an effect of homely
truth. The smoke of the domestic hearth has scented them through and
through. By long transmission among household facts, they grow to look
like them, and have such a familiar way of making themselves at home
that their influence is usually greater than we suspect. Thus it
happened, that when Phoebe heard a certain noise in Judge Pyncheon's
throat,--rather habitual with him, not altogether voluntary, yet
indicative of nothing, unless it were a slight bronchial complaint, or,
as some people hinted, an apoplectic symptom,--when the girl heard this
queer and awkward ingurgitation (which the writer never did hear, and
therefore cannot describe), she very foolishly started, and clasped her
hands.