Efforts, it is true, were made by the Pyncheons, not only then, but at
various periods for nearly a hundred years afterwards, to obtain what
they stubbornly persisted in deeming their right. But, in course of
time, the territory was partly regranted to more favored individuals,
and partly cleared and occupied by actual settlers. These last, if
they ever heard of the Pyncheon title, would have laughed at the idea
of any man's asserting a right--on the strength of mouldy parchments,
signed with the faded autographs of governors and legislators long dead
and forgotten--to the lands which they or their fathers had wrested
from the wild hand of nature by their own sturdy toil. This impalpable
claim, therefore, resulted in nothing more solid than to cherish, from
generation to generation, an absurd delusion of family importance,
which all along characterized the Pyncheons. It caused the poorest
member of the race to feel as if he inherited a kind of nobility, and
might yet come into the possession of princely wealth to support it.
In the better specimens of the breed, this peculiarity threw an ideal
grace over the hard material of human life, without stealing away any
truly valuable quality. In the baser sort, its effect was to increase
the liability to sluggishness and dependence, and induce the victim of
a shadowy hope to remit all self-effort, while awaiting the realization
of his dreams. Years and years after their claim had passed out of the
public memory, the Pyncheons were accustomed to consult the Colonel's
ancient map, which had been projected while Waldo County was still an
unbroken wilderness. Where the old land surveyor had put down woods,
lakes, and rivers, they marked out the cleared spaces, and dotted the
villages and towns, and calculated the progressively increasing value
of the territory, as if there were yet a prospect of its ultimately
forming a princedom for themselves.
In almost every generation, nevertheless, there happened to be some one
descendant of the family gifted with a portion of the hard, keen sense,
and practical energy, that had so remarkably distinguished the original
founder. His character, indeed, might be traced all the way down, as
distinctly as if the Colonel himself, a little diluted, had been gifted
with a sort of intermittent immortality on earth. At two or three
epochs, when the fortunes of the family were low, this representative
of hereditary qualities had made his appearance, and caused the
traditionary gossips of the town to whisper among themselves, "Here is
the old Pyncheon come again! Now the Seven Gables will be
new-shingled!" From father to son, they clung to the ancestral house
with singular tenacity of home attachment. For various reasons,
however, and from impressions often too vaguely founded to be put on
paper, the writer cherishes the belief that many, if not most, of the
successive proprietors of this estate were troubled with doubts as to
their moral right to hold it. Of their legal tenure there could be no
question; but old Matthew Maule, it is to be feared, trode downward
from his own age to a far later one, planting a heavy footstep, all the
way, on the conscience of a Pyncheon. If so, we are left to dispose of
the awful query, whether each inheritor of the property--conscious of
wrong, and failing to rectify it--did not commit anew the great guilt
of his ancestor, and incur all its original responsibilities. And
supposing such to be the case, would it not be a far truer mode of
expression to say of the Pyncheon family, that they inherited a great
misfortune, than the reverse?