In Chapter 18, the story moves "like an owl, bewildered in the daylight" to the house where the dead Judge is. This chapter is an ironic meditation on time and the eternity into which the dead man has entered. Time passes, minute by minute, and with it the Judge's carefully organized commitments, including the political dinner which would have made him the next governor of Massachusetts.
Figuratively, however, the influence of the Judge still seems to brood over the chamber. Hawthorne notes the shadows of the tall furniture becoming deeper, losing their distinctiveness of outline in the "dark, gray tide of oblivion." The gloom, he says, has brooded here all day, and now, "will possess itself of everything." But the Judge's white face, curiously, does not become dark; instead, it turns into a kind of swarthy whiteness. The features all seem to be gone; there is only the paleness left.
While the two fugitives are embarked on their wild flight through the streets and aboard the train, and as Clifford is temporarily assuming the outside world's veneer, the corpse of Judge Pyncheon is gradually fading into the shadows of the house. Throughout his life he has clutched at the solid "realities" of the past—real estate, in particular—while shrugging off the intangible heredity that contains his ultimate doom. On the surface, his motives are clear. Through his political influence, the Judge has had Clifford released from prison for one reason only: Clifford will either divulge the whereabouts of the map and the deed "to the large tracts of land to the east"—or else Jaffrey will have him declared insane.
Yet, the matter is not all that simple: From the beginning, when Hepzibah first opened her shop, and the Judge scrutinized the old house from "the opposite side" of the street, one felt that his efforts to get inside the house unconsciously stemmed from something even deeper than greed. Hawthorne makes us feel that the Judge believed that he could "exorcise" the black evil which infested the ancestral home; he seemed to feel the need to wrench out and analyze the secret of the dark old house's interior—its heart of darkness. Although that obsession is never made absolutely explicit, Hepzibah hints at it when she tells Jaffrey that he is "diseased in mind." The macabre chapter in which the narrator gloats almost to excess over the Judge's death may repel some modern readers, but the passages are critical and necessary because they climax the subtle interaction between the sense of space and time that permeates this book. In addition, one of the novel's key ironies lies here. Judge Jaffrey was a devotee of the mechanical system in which time is measured spatially; such a view of time assumes that our experience takes place at distinct, short instants. But the little card that falls out of Jaffrey's pocket on the doorstep forms "a prospective epitome of the day's history"; furthermore, his unerringly accurate watch measures the distance between his various engagements. One might say, indeed, that, in death, the Judge's watch replaces his pulse. In the darkening inner parlor of the house, both the Judge's watch and his pulse run down; the Judge is overwhelmed by real time, and despite the Judge's death, "the great world-clock of Time still keeps its beat." Hawthorne compresses the outcome in one sarcastic pun: "Time, all at once, appears to have become a matter of no moment with the Judge!" But the rhetoric of this chapter is not just a showpiece; it functions as part of the irony. The old Pyncheon house is a custodian: It holds the documents, books, and poetry from the past. In the Judge's material fashion, he tried to effect a synthesis between himself and his past—and the attempt killed him.
