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? We have already hinted that it is not our purpose to trace down the history of the Pyncheon family, in its unbroken connection with the House of Seven Gables; nor to show, as in a magic picture, how the rustiness and infirmity of age gathered over the venerable house itself. As regards its interior life, a large, dim looking-glass used to hang in one of the rooms, and was fabled to contain within its depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected there-the old colonel himself, and his many descendants, some in the garb of antique babyhood, and others in the bloom of feminine beauty or manly prime, or saddened with the wrinkles of frosty age. | Мы уже сказали, что не беремся проследить всю историю Пинчонов в непрерывной ее связи с Домом с семью шпилями, не беремся также изобразить дух дряхлости и запустения, повисший над самим домом. А внутри этого почтенного здания, в одной из комнат, всегда висело большое мутное зеркало; оно, по баснословному преданию, удерживало в своей глубине все образы, какие когда-либо отражались в нем, - образы самого полковника и множества его потомков. Некоторые из них были в старинной детской одежде, другие в расцвете женской красоты, или мужественной молодости, или в сединах пасмурной старости. |
But there was a story, for which it is difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity of Matthew Maule had some connection with the mystery of the looking-glass, and that, by what appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not as they had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the crisis of life's bitterest sorrow. |