It was but little after sunrise,when Uncle Venner made his appearance, as aforesaid,impelling a wheelbarrow along the street.He was going his matutinal rounds to collect cabbage-leaves,turnip-tops, potato-skins,and the miscellaneous refuse of the dinner-pot,which the thrifty housewives of the neighborhood were accustomed to put aside,as fit only to feed a pig.Uncle Venner’s pig was fed entirely,and kept in prime order,on these eleemosynary contributions;insomuch that the patched philosopher used to promise that,before retiring to his farm,he would make a feast of the portly grunter,and invite all his neighbors to partake of the joints and spare-ribs which they had helped to fatten. Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon’s housekeeping had so greatly improved, since Clifford became a member of the family, that her share of the banquet would have been no lean one; and Uncle Venner, accordingly, was a good deal disappointed not to find the large earthen pan, full of fragmentary eatables, that ordinarily awaited his coming at the back doorstep of the Seven Gables.
“I never knew Miss Hepzibah so forgetful before,” said the patriarch to himself.“She must have had a dinner yesterday,—no question of that!She always has one, nowadays.So where’s the pot-liquor and potato-skins, I ask?Shall I knock, and see if she’s stirring yet?No, no,—’twon’t do!If little Phœbe was about the house,I should not mind knocking; but Miss Hepzibah,likely as not, would scowl down at me out of the window,and look cross, even if she felt pleasantly. So,I’ll come back at noon.”
With these reflections,the old man was shutting the gate of the little back-yard.Creaking on its hinges, however,like every other gate and door about the premises,the sound reached the ears of the occupant of the northern gable,one of the windows of which had a side-view towards the gate.
“Good-morning, Uncle Venner!” said the daguerreotypist, leaning out of the window.“Do you hear nobody stirring?”
“Not a soul,” said the man of patches.“But that’s no wonder.’Tis barely half an hour past sunrise, yet.But I’m really glad to see you, Mr. Holgrave!There’s a strange, lonesome look about this side of the house;so that my heart misgave me, somehow or other,and I felt as if there was nobody alive in it.The front of the house looks a good deal cheerier;and Alice’s Posies are blooming there beautifully;and if I were a young man, Mr. Holgrave,my sweetheart should have one of those flowers in her bosom,though I risked my neck climbing for it!Well, and did the wind keep you awake last night?”
“It did, indeed!” answered the artist, smiling.“If I were a believer in ghosts,—and I don’t quite know whether I am or not,—I should have concluded that all the old Pyncheons were running riot in the lower rooms, especially in Miss Hepzibah’s part of the house. But it is very quiet now.”
“Yes, Miss Hepzibah will be apt to over-sleep herself,after being disturbed, all night, with the racket,” said Uncle Venner. “But it would be odd, now,wouldn’t it, if the Judge had taken both his cousins into the country along with him?I saw him go into the shop yesterday.”
“At what hour?” inquired Holgrave.
“Oh, along in the forenoon,” said the old man. “Well, well!I must go my rounds, and so must my wheelbarrow.But I’ll be back here at dinner-time;for my pig likes a dinner as well as a breakfast.No meal-time, and no sort of victuals,ever seems to come amiss to my pig.Good morning to you!And, Mr. Holgrave, if I were a young man, like you,I’d get one of Alice’s Posies,and keep it in water till Phœbe comes back.”
“I have heard,” said the daguerreotypist,as he drew in his head,“that the water of Maule’s well suits those flowers best. ”
Here the conversation ceased,and Uncle Venner went on his way.For half an hour longer,nothing disturbed the repose of the Seven Gables;nor was there any visitor, except a carrier-boy, who,as he passed the front doorstep,threw down one of his newspapers; for Hepzibah,of late, had regularly taken it in. After a while,there came a fat woman, making prodigious speed,and stumbling as she ran up the steps of the shop-door.Her face glowed with fire-heat, and,it being a pretty warm morning, she bubbled and hissed,as it were, as if all a-fry with chimney-warmth,and summer-warmth, and the warmth of her own corpulent velocity.She tried the shop-door; it was fast.She tried it again,with so angry a jar that the bell tinkled angrily back at her.
“The deuce take Old Maid Pyncheon!” muttered the irascible housewife.“Think of her pretending to set up a cent-shop,and then lying abed till noon!These are what she calls gentlefolk’s airs, I suppose!But I’ll either start her ladyship,or break the door down!”
She shook it accordingly, and the bell,having a spiteful little temper of its own,rang obstreperously, making its remonstrances heard,—not, indeed, by the ears for which they were intended,—but by a good lady on the opposite side of the street.She opened the window,and addressed the impatient applicant.
“You’ll find nobody there, Mrs. Gubbins.”
“But I must and will find somebody here!” cried Mrs. Gubbins,inflicting another outrage on the bell.“I want a half-pound of pork,to fry some first-rate flounders for Mr.Gubbins’s breakfast; and, lady or not,Old Maid Pyncheon shall get up and serve me with it!”
“But do hear reason, Mrs. Gubbins!” responded the lady opposite. “She,and her brother too, have both gone to their cousin’s,Judge Pyncheon’s at his country-seat.There’s not a soul in the house,but that young daguerreotype-man that sleeps in the north gable.I saw old Hepzibah and Clifford go away yesterday;and a queer couple of ducks they were,paddling through the mud-puddles!They’re gone, I’ll assure you.”
“And how do you know they’re gone to the Judge’s?” asked Mrs. Gubbins. “He’s a rich man;and there’s been a quarrel between him and Hepzibah this many a day,because he won’t give her a living.That’s the main reason of her setting up a cent-shop.”
“I know that well enough,” said the neighbor.“But they’re gone,—that’s one thing certain.And who but a blood relation,that couldn’t help himself, I ask you,would take in that awful-tempered old maid,and that dreadful Clifford?That’s it, you may be sure.”
Mrs. Gubbins took her departure,still brimming over with hot wrath against the absent Hepzibah.For another half-hour, or, perhaps, considerably more,there was almost as much quiet on the outside of the house as within.The elm, however, made a pleasant, cheerful,sunny sigh, responsive to the breeze that was elsewhere imperceptible;a swarm of insects buzzed merrily under its drooping shadow,and became specks of light whenever they darted into the sunshine;a locust sang, once or twice,in some inscrutable seclusion of the tree;and a solitary little bird, with plumage of pale gold,came and hovered about Alice’s Posies.
At last our small acquaintance, Ned Higgins,trudged up the street, on his way to school;and happening, for the first time in a fortnight,to be the possessor of a cent,he could by no means get past the shop-door of the Seven Gables.But it would not open. Again and again, however,and half a dozen other agains,with the inexorable pertinacity of a child intent upon some object important to itself, did he renew his efforts for admittance. He had, doubtless, set his heart upon an elephant; or, possibly, with Hamlet, he meant to eat a crocodile. In response to his more violent attacks, the bell gave, now and then, a moderate tinkle, but could not be stirred into clamor by any exertion of the little fellow’s childish and tiptoe strength. Holding by the door-handle, he peeped through a crevice of the curtain, and saw that the inner door, communicating with the passage towards the parlor, was closed.
“Miss Pyncheon!” screamed the child, rapping on the window-pane,“I want an elephant!”
There being no answer to several repetitions of the summons,Ned began to grow impatient;and his little pot of passion quickly boiling over,he picked up a stone,with a naughty purpose to fling it through the window;at the same time blubbering and sputtering with wrath.A man—one of two who happened to be passing by—caught the urchin’s arm.
“What’s the trouble, old gentleman?” he asked.