n to convicting Maule. As Hawthorne describes it,
[I]t was remembered how loudly Pyncheon had joined in the general cry, to purge the land from witchcraft; nor did it fail to be whispered, that there was an invidious acrimony in the zeal with which he had sought the condemnation of Matthew Maule (Hawthorne 126-7).
Matthew Maule curses Pyncheon, but none of this prevents Colonel Pyncheon, boldly single-minded, from erecting the house of the seven gables: "Endowed with common sense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, fastened together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps, he followed out his original design, probably without so much as imagining an objection to it. On the score of delicacy, or any scrupulousness which a finer sensibility might have taught him, the colonel, like most of his breed and generation, was impenetrable" (Hawthorne 127). In other words, Pyncheon does not heed the curse, and the balance of the novel shows that the sins of this father are visited on the children. Pyncheon himself chokes on the blood of apoplexy. His descendant Judge Pyncheon is described as one who is the very image of the Colonel's portrait and possesses other of the Colonel's trait:
[T]radition 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 etherealize this rude benevolence into that broad benignity of smile (Hawthorne 193).
To put it another way, what you see is decidedly not what you get. Hawthorne also describes the judge as one who personifies marital cruelty: "Ther...