As for Matthew Maule's posterity, it was supposed now to be extinct.
For a very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however,
the Maules had continued to inhabit the town where their progenitor
had suffered so unjust a death. To all appearance, they were a quiet,
honest, well-meaning race of people, cherishing no malice against
individuals or the public for the wrong which had been done them;
or if, at their own fireside, they transmitted from father to child
any hostile recollection of the wizard's fate and their lost patrimony,
it was never acted upon, nor openly expressed. Nor would it have
been singular had they ceased to remember that the House of the
Seven Gables was resting its heavy framework on a foundation that
was rightfully their own. There is something so massive, stable,
and almost irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of
established rank and great possessions, that their very existence
seems to give them a right to exist; at least, so excellent a
counterfeit of right, that few poor and humble men have moral
force enough to question it, even in their secret minds. Such is
the case now, after so many ancient prejudices have been overthrown;
and it was far more so in ante-Revolutionary days, when the aristocracy
could venture to be proud, and the low were content to be abased.
Thus the Maules, at all events, kept their resentments within their
own breasts. They were generally poverty-stricken; always plebeian
and obscure; working with unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts;
laboring on the wharves, or following the sea, as sailors before
the mast; living here and there about the town, in hired tenements,
and coming finally to the almshouse as the natural home of their old
age. At last, after creeping, as it were, for such a length of time
along the utmost verge of the opaque puddle of obscurity, they had
taken that downright plunge which, sooner or later, is the destiny