ting 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 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" (3:127). 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 f 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 etherealized this rude
benevolence into that broad benignity of smile (3:193).
To put it another way, what you see is decidedly not what you get. Hawthorne also describes t...