A little boy--the Colonel's grandchild, and the only human being that
ever dared to be familiar with him--now made his way among the guests,
and ran towards the seated figure; then pausing halfway, he began to
shriek with terror. The company, tremulous as the leaves of a tree,
when all are shaking together, drew nearer, and perceived that there
was an unnatural distortion in the fixedness of Colonel Pyncheon's
stare; that there was blood on his ruff, and that his hoary beard was
saturated with it. It was too late to give assistance. The
iron-hearted Puritan, the relentless persecutor, the grasping and
strong-willed man was dead! Dead, in his new house! There is a
tradition, only worth alluding to as lending a tinge of superstitious
awe to a scene perhaps gloomy enough without it, that a voice spoke
loudly among the guests, the tones of which were like those of old
Matthew Maule, the executed wizard,--"God hath given him blood to
drink!"
Thus early had that one guest,--the only guest who is certain, at one
time or another, to find his way into every human dwelling,--thus early
had Death stepped across the threshold of the House of the Seven Gables!
Colonel Pyncheon's sudden and mysterious end made a vast deal of noise
in its day. There were many rumors, some of which have vaguely drifted
down to the present time, how that appearances indicated violence; that
there were the marks of fingers on his throat, and the print of a
bloody hand on his plaited ruff; and that his peaked beard was
dishevelled, as if it had been fiercely clutched and pulled. It was
averred, likewise, that the lattice window, near the Colonel's chair,
was open; and that, only a few minutes before the fatal occurrence, the
figure of a man had been seen clambering over the garden fence, in the
rear of the house. But it were folly to lay any stress on stories of
this kind, which are sure to spring up around such an event as that now
related, and which, as in the present case, sometimes prolong
themselves for ages afterwards, like the toadstools that indicate where
the fallen and buried trunk of a tree has long since mouldered into the
earth. For our own part, we allow them just as little credence as to
that other fable of the skeleton hand which the lieutenant-governor was
said to have seen at the Colonel's throat, but which vanished away, as
he advanced farther into the room. Certain it is, however, that there
was a great consultation and dispute of doctors over the dead body.
One,--John Swinnerton by name,--who appears to have been a man of
eminence, upheld it, if we have rightly understood his terms of art, to
be a case of apoplexy. His professional brethren, each for himself,
adopted various hypotheses, more or less plausible, but all dressed out
in a perplexing mystery of phrase, which, if it do not show a
bewilderment of mind in these erudite physicians, certainly causes it
in the unlearned peruser of their opinions. The coroner's jury sat
upon the corpse, and, like sensible men, returned an unassailable
verdict of "Sudden Death!"