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Doctor Grimshawe's Secret — a Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne · English · Gutenberg #7183 · 551,884 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Doctor Grimshawe's Secret — a Romance

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Editor: Julian Hawthorne


        
Release date: December 1, 2004 [eBook #7183]
                Most recently updated: December 14, 2016

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE'S SECRET — A ROMANCE ***




Produced by Michelle Shephard, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team









                        DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE’S SECRET



                               A ROMANCE

                                  BY
                          NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

                    EDITED, WITH PREFACE AND NOTES

                         BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE



                                  TO
                MR. AND MRS. GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP,
                    The Son-in-Law and Daughter
                                  OF
                        NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE,
                     THIS ROMANCE IS DEDICATED
                                  BY
                             THE EDITOR.




PREFACE


A preface generally begins with a truism; and I may set out with
the admission that it is not always expedient to bring to light the
posthumous work of great writers. A man generally contrives to publish,
during his lifetime, quite as much as the public has time or inclination
to read; and his surviving friends are apt to show more zeal than
discretion in dragging forth from his closed desk such undeveloped
offspring of his mind as he himself had left to silence. Literature has
never been redundant with authors who sincerely undervalue their own
productions; and the sagacious critics who maintain that what of his own
an author condemns must be doubly damnable, are, to say the least of it,
as often likely to be right as wrong.

Beyond these general remarks, however, it does not seem necessary to
adopt an apologetic attitude. There is nothing in the present volume
which any one possessed of brains and cultivation will not be thankful
to read. The appreciation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings is
more intelligent and wide-spread than it used to be; and the later
development of our national literature has not, perhaps, so entirely
exhausted our resources of admiration as to leave no welcome for even
the less elaborate work of a contemporary of Dickens and Thackeray. As
regards “Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret,”--the title which, for lack of a
better, has been given to this Romance,--it can scarcely be pronounced
deficient in either elaboration or profundity. Had Mr. Hawthorne written
out the story in every part to its full dimensions, it could not have
failed to rank among the greatest of his productions. He had looked
forward to it as to the crowning achievement of his literary career. In
the Preface to “Our Old Home” he alludes to it as a work into which he
proposed to convey more of various modes of truth than he could have
grasped by a direct effort. But circumstances prevented him from
perfecting the design which had been before his mind for seven years,
and upon the shaping of which he bestowed more thought and labor than
upon anything else he had undertaken. The successive and consecutive
series of notes or studies [Footnote: These studies, extracts from which
will be published in one of our magazines, are hereafter to be added, in
their complete form, to the Appendix of this volume.] which he wrote
for this Romance would of themselves make a small volume, and one
of autobiographical as well as literary interest. There is no other
instance, that I happen to have met with, in which a writer’s thought
reflects itself upon paper so immediately and sensitively as in these
studies. To read them is to look into the man’s mind, and see its
quality and action. The penetration, the subtlety, the tenacity; the
stubborn gripe which he lays upon his subject, like that of Hercules
upon the slippery Old Man of the Sea; the clear and cool common-sense,
controlling the audacity of a rich and ardent imagination; the humorous
gibes and strange expletives wherewith he ridicules, to himself, his own
failure to reach his goal; the immense patience with which--again and
again, and yet again--he “tries back,” throwing the topic into fresh
attitudes, and searching it to the marrow with a gaze so piercing as
to be terrible;--all this gives an impression of power, of resource,
of energy, of mastery, that exhilarates the reader. So many inspired
prophets of Hawthorne have arisen of late, that the present writer,
whose relation to the great Romancer is a filial one merely, may
be excused for feeling some embarrassment in submitting his own
uninstructed judgments to competition with theirs. It has occurred
to him, however, that these undress rehearsals of the author of “The
Scarlet Letter” might afford entertaining and even profitable reading
to the later generation of writers whose pleasant fortune it is to charm
one another and the public. It would appear that this author, in his
preparatory work at least, has ventured in some manner to disregard the
modern canons which debar writers from betraying towards their creations
any warmer feeling than a cultured and critical indifference: nor was
his interest in human nature such as to confine him to the dissection of
the moral epidermis of shop-girls and hotel-boarders. On the contrary,
we are presented with the spectacle of a Titan, baring his arms and
plunging heart and soul into the arena, there to struggle for death or
victory with the superb phantoms summoned to the conflict by his own
genius. The men of new times and new conditions will achieve their
triumphs in new ways; but it may still be worth while to consider the
methods and materials of one who also, in his own fashion, won and wore
the laurel of those who know and can portray the human heart.

But let us return to the Romance, in whose clear though shadowy
atmosphere the thunders and throes of the preparatory struggle are
inaudible and invisible, save as they are implied in the fineness of
substance and beauty of form of the artistic structure. The story is
divided into two parts, the scene of the first being laid in America;
that of the second, in England. Internal evidence of various kinds goes
to show that the second part was the first written; or, in other words,
that the present first part is a rewriting of an original first part,
afterwards discarded, and of which the existing second part is the
continuation. The two parts overlap, and it shall be left to the
ingenuity of critics to detect the precise point of junction. In
rewriting the first part, the author made sundry minor alterations in
the plot and characters of the story, which alterations were not carried
into the second part. It results from this that the manuscript presents
various apparent inconsistencies. In transcribing the work for the
press, these inconsistent sentences and passages have been withdrawn
from the text and inserted in the Appendix; or, in a few unimportant
instances, omitted altogether. In other respects, the text is printed as
the author left it, with the exception of the names of the characters.
In the manuscript each personage figures in the course of the narrative
under from three to six different names. This difficulty has been met
by bestowing upon each of the _dramatis personæ_ the name which last
identified him to the author’s mind, and keeping him to it throughout
the volume.

The story, as a story, is complete as it stands; it has a beginning,
a middle, and an end. There is no break in the narrative, and the
legitimate conclusion is reached. To say that the story is complete as
a work of art, would be quite another matter. It lacks balance and
proportion. Some characters and incidents are portrayed with minute
elaboration; others, perhaps not less important, are merely sketched
in outline. Beyond a doubt it was the author’s purpose to rewrite the
entire work from the first page to the last, enlarging it, deepening
it, adorning it with every kind of spiritual and physical beauty, and
rounding out a moral worthy of the noble materials. But these last
transfiguring touches to Aladdin’s Tower were never to be given; and he
has departed, taking with him his Wonderful Lamp. Nevertheless there is
great splendor in the structure as we behold it. The character of
old Doctor Grimshawe, and the picture of his surroundings, are hardly
surpassed in vigor by anything their author has produced; and the dusky
vision of the secret chamber, which sends a mysterious shiver through
the tale, seems to be unique even in Hawthorne.

There have been included in this volume photographic reproductions of
certain pages of the original manuscript of Doctor Grimshawe, selected
at random, upon which those ingenious persons whose convictions are in
advance of their instruction are cordially invited to try their
teeth; for it has been maintained that Mr. Hawthorne’s handwriting
was singularly legible. The present writer possesses specimens of Mr.
Hawthorne’s chirography at various ages, from boyhood until a day or two
before his death. Like the handwriting of most men, it was at its best
between the twenty-fifth and the fortieth years of life; and in some
instances it is a remarkably beautiful type of penmanship. But as time
went on it deteriorated, and, while of course retaining its elementary
characteristics, it became less and less easy to read, especially in
those writings which were intended solely for his own perusal. As with
other men of sensitive organization, the mood of the hour, a good or
a bad pen, a ready or an obstructed flow of thought, would all be
reflected in the formation of the written letters and words. In the
manuscript of the fragmentary sketch which has just been published in a
magazine, which is written in an ordinary commonplace-book, with ruled
pages, and in which the author had not yet become possessed with the
spirit of the story and characters, the handwriting is deliberate and
clear. In the manuscript of “Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret,” on the other
hand, which was written almost immediately after the other, but on
unruled paper, and when the writer’s imagination was warm and eager,
the chirography is for the most part a compact mass of minute cramped
hieroglyphics, hardly to be deciphered save by flashes of inspiration.
The matter is not, in itself, of importance, and is alluded to here only
as having been brought forward in connection with other insinuations,
with the notice of which it seems unnecessary to soil these pages.
Indeed, were I otherwise disposed, Doctor Grimshawe himself would take
the words out of my mouth; his speech is far more poignant and eloquent
than mine. In dismissing this episode, I will take the liberty to
observe that it appears to indicate a spirit in our age less sceptical
than is commonly supposed,--belief in miracles being still possible,
provided only the miracle be a scandalous one.

It remains to tell how this Romance came to be published. It came into
my possession (in the ordinary course of events) about eight years ago.
I had at that time no intention of publishing it; and when, soon after,
I left England to travel on the Continent, the manuscript, together with
the bulk of my library, was packed and stored at a London repository,
and was not again seen by me until last summer, when I unpacked it in
this city. I then finished the perusal of it, and, finding it to be
practically complete, I re-resolved to print it in connection with a
biography of Mr. Hawthorne which I had in preparation. But upon further
consideration it was decided to publish the Romance separately; and
I herewith present it to the public, with my best wishes for their
edification.

                                                JULIAN HAWTHORNE.
NEW YORK, November 21, 1882.




DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE’S SECRET



CHAPTER I


A long time ago, [Endnote: 1] in a town with which I used to be
familiarly acquainted, there dwelt an elderly person of grim aspect,
known by the name and title of Doctor Grimshawe,[Endnote: 2] whose
household consisted of a remarkably pretty and vivacious boy, and a
perfect rosebud of a girl, two or three years younger than he, and an
old maid-of-all-work, of strangely mixed breed, crusty in temper and
wonderfully sluttish in attire. [Endnote: 3] It might be partly owing to
this handmaiden’s characteristic lack of neatness (though primarily,
no doubt, to the grim Doctor’s antipathy to broom, brush, and
dusting-cloths) that the house--at least in such portions of it as any
casual visitor caught a glimpse of--was so overlaid with dust, that, in
lack of a visiting card, you might write your name with your forefinger
upon the tables; and so hung with cobwebs that they assumed the
appearance of dusky upholstery.

It grieves me to add an additional touch or two to the reader’s
disagreeable impression of Doctor Grimshawe’s residence, by confessing
that it stood in a shabby by-street, and cornered on a graveyard, with
which the house communicated by a back door; so that with a hop, skip,
and jump from the threshold, across a flat tombstone, the two children
[Endnote: 4] were in the daily habit of using the dismal cemetery as
their playground. In their graver moods they spelled out the names and
learned by heart doleful verses on the headstones; and in their merrier
ones (which were much the more frequent) they chased butterflies and
gathered dandelions, played hide-and-seek among the slate and marble,
and tumbled laughing over the grassy mounds which were too eminent for
the short legs to bestride. On the whole, they were the better for the
graveyard, and its legitimate inmates slept none the worse for the two
children’s gambols and shrill merriment overhead. Here were old brick
tombs with curious sculptures on them, and quaint gravestones, some of
which bore puffy little cherubs, and one or two others the effigies of
eminent Puritans, wrought out to a button, a fold of the ruff, and a
wrinkle of the skull-cap; and these frowned upon the two children as if
death had not made them a whit more genial than they were in life. But
the children were of a temper to be more encouraged by the good-natured
smiles of the puffy cherubs, than frightened or disturbed by the sour
Puritans.

This graveyard (about which we shall say not a word more than may sooner
or later be needful) was the most ancient in the town. The clay of the
original settlers had been incorporated with the soil; those stalwart
Englishmen of the Puritan epoch, whose immediate ancestors had been
planted forth with succulent grass and daisies for the sustenance of
the parson’s cow, round the low-battlemented Norman church towers in the
villages of the fatherland, had here contributed their rich Saxon mould
to tame and Christianize the wild forest earth of the new world. In
this point of view--as holding the bones and dust of the primeval
ancestor--the cemetery was more English than anything else in the
neighborhood, and might probably have nourished English oaks and English
elms, and whatever else is of English growth, without that tendency to
spindle upwards and lose their sturdy breadth, which is said to be the
ordinary characteristic both of human and vegetable productions when
transplanted hither. Here, at all events, used to be some specimens
of common English garden flowers, which could not be accounted
for,--unless, perhaps, they had sprung from some English maiden’s heart,
where the intense love of those homely things, and regret of them in the
foreign land, had conspired together to keep their vivifying principle,
and cause its growth after the poor girl was buried. Be that as it
might, in this grave had been hidden from sight many a broad, bluff
visage of husbandman, who had been taught to plough among the hereditary
furrows that had been ameliorated by the crumble of ages: much had these
sturdy laborers grumbled at the great roots that obstructed their toil
in these fresh acres. Here, too, the sods had covered the faces of men
known to history, and reverenced when not a piece of distinguishable
dust remained of them; personages whom tradition told about; and here,
mixed up with successive crops of native-born Americans, had been
ministers, captains, matrons, virgins good and evil, tough and tender,
turned up and battened down by the sexton’s spade, over and over again;
until every blade of grass had its relations with the human brotherhood
of the old town. A hundred and fifty years was sufficient to do this;
and so much time, at least, had elapsed since the first hole was dug
among the difficult roots of the forest trees, and the first little
hillock of all these green beds was piled up.

Thus rippled and surged, with its hundreds of little billows, the old
graveyard about the house which cornered upon it; it made the street
gloomy, so that people did not altogether like to pass along the high
wooden fence that shut it in; and the old house itself, covering ground
which else had been sown thickly with buried bodies, partook of its
dreariness, because it seemed hardly possible that the dead people
should not get up out of their graves and steal in to warm themselves at
this convenient fireside. But I never heard that any of them did so;
nor were the children ever startled by spectacles of dim horror in the
night-time, but were as cheerful and fearless as if no grave had ever
been dug. They were of that class of children whose material seems
fresh, not taken at second hand, full of disease, conceits, whims,
and weaknesses, that have already served many people’s turns, and been
moulded up, with some little change of combination, to serve the turn of
some poor spirit that could not get a better case.

So far as ever came to the present writer’s knowledge, there was no
whisper of Doctor Grimshawe’s house being haunted; a fact on which both
writer and reader may congratulate themselves, the ghostly chord
having been played upon in these days until it has become wearisome
and nauseous as the familiar tune of a barrel-organ. The house itself,
moreover, except for the convenience of its position close to the
seldom-disturbed cemetery, was hardly worthy to be haunted. As I
remember it, (and for aught I know it still exists in the same guise,)
it did not appear to be an ancient structure, nor one that would
ever have been the abode of a very wealthy or prominent family;--a
three-story wooden house, perhaps a century old, low-studded, with
a square front, standing right upon the street, and a small enclosed
porch, containing the main entrance, affording a glimpse up and down
the street through an oval window on each side, its characteristic was
decent respectability, not sinking below the boundary of the genteel. It
has often perplexed my mind to conjecture what sort of man he could have
been who, having the means to build a pretty, spacious, and comfortable
residence, should have chosen to lay its foundation on the brink of so
many graves; each tenant of these narrow houses crying out, as it were,
against the absurdity of bestowing much time or pains in preparing any
earthly tabernacle save such as theirs. But deceased people see matters
from an erroneous--at least too exclusive--point of view; a comfortable
grave is an excellent possession for those who need it, but a
comfortable house has likewise its merits and temporary advantages.
[Endnote: 5.]

The founder of the house in question seemed sensible of this truth, and
had therefore been careful to lay out a sufficient number of rooms and
chambers, low, ill-lighted, ugly, but not unsusceptible of warmth and
comfort; the sunniest and cheerfulest of which were on the side
that looked into the graveyard. Of these, the one most spacious and
convenient had been selected by Doctor Grimshawe as a study, and fitted
up with bookshelves, and various machines and contrivances, electrical,
chemical, and distillatory, wherewith he might pursue such researches as
were wont to engage his attention. The great result of the grim Doctor’s
labors, so far as known to the public, was a certain preparation or
extract of cobwebs, which, out of a great abundance of material, he was
able to produce in any desirable quantity, and by the administration of
which he professed to cure diseases of the inflammatory class, and to
work very wonderful effects upon the human system. It is a great pity,
for the good of mankind and the advantage of his own fortunes, that he
did not put forth this medicine in pill-boxes or bottles, and then,
as it were, by some captivating title, inveigle the public into his
spider’s web, and suck out its gold substance, and himself wax fat as he
sat in the central intricacy.

But grim Doctor Grimshawe, though his aim in life might be no very
exalted one, seemed singularly destitute of the impulse to better his
fortunes by the exercise of his wits: it might even have been
supposed, indeed, that he had a conscientious principle or religious
scruple--only, he was by no means a religious man--against reaping
profit from this particular nostrum which he was said to have invented.
He never sold it; never prescribed it, unless in cases selected on some
principle that nobody could detect or explain. The grim Doctor, it must
be observed, was not generally acknowledged by the profession, with
whom, in truth, he had never claimed a fellowship; nor had he ever
assumed, of his own accord the medical title by which the public chose
to know him. His professional practice seemed, in a sort, forced upon
him; it grew pretty extensive, partly because it was understood to be
a matter of favor and difficulty, dependent on a capricious will, to
obtain his services at all. There was unquestionably an odor of quackery
about him; but by no means of an ordinary kind. A sort of mystery--yet
which, perhaps, need not have been a mystery, had any one thought it
worth while to make systematic inquiry in reference to his previous
life, his education, even his native land--assisted the impression
which his peculiarities were calculated to make. He was evidently not
a New-Englander, nor a native of any part of these Western shores.
His speech was apt to be oddly and uncouthly idiomatic, and even
when classical in its form was emitted with a strange, rough depth of
utterance, that came from recesses of the lungs which we Yankees seldom
put to any use. In person, he did not look like one of us; a broad,
rather short personage, with a projecting forehead, a red, irregular
face, and a squab nose; eyes that looked dull enough in their ordinary
state, but had a faculty, in conjunction with the other features, which
those who had ever seen it described as especially ugly and awful. As
regarded dress, Doctor Grimshawe had a rough and careless exterior,
and altogether a shaggy kind of aspect, the effect of which was much
increased by a reddish beard, which, contrary to the usual custom of
the day, he allowed to grow profusely; and the wiry perversity of which
seemed to know as little of the comb as of the razor.

We began with calling the grim Doctor an elderly personage; but in so
doing we looked at him through the eyes of the two children, who were
his intimates, and who had not learnt to decipher the purport and value
of his wrinkles and furrows and corrugations, whether as indicating age,
or a different kind of wear and tear. Possibly--he seemed so aggressive
and had such latent heat and force to throw out when occasion called--he
might scarcely have seemed middle-aged; though here again we hesitate,
finding him so stiffened in his own way, so little fluid, so encrusted
with passions and humors, that he must have left his youth very far
behind him; if indeed he ever had any.

The patients, or whatever other visitors were ever admitted into the
Doctor’s study, carried abroad strange accounts of the squalor of dust
and cobwebs in which the learned and scientific person lived; and the
dust, they averred, was all the more disagreeable, because it could not
well be other than dead men’s almost intangible atoms, resurrected
from the adjoining graveyard. As for the cobwebs, they were no signs of
housewifely neglect on the part of crusty Hannah, the handmaiden; but
the Doctor’s scientific material, carefully encouraged and preserved,
each filmy thread more valuable to him than so much golden wire. Of all
barbarous haunts in Christendom or elsewhere, this study was the one
most overrun with spiders. They dangled from the ceiling, crept upon
the tables, lurked in the corners, and wove the intricacy of their
webs wherever they could hitch the end from point to point across the
window-panes, and even across the upper part of the doorway, and in the
chimney-place. It seemed impossible to move without breaking some of
these mystic threads. Spiders crept familiarly towards you and walked
leisurely across your hands: these were their precincts, and you only an
intruder. If you had none about your person, yet you had an odious sense
of one crawling up your spine, or spinning cobwebs in your brain,--so
pervaded was the atmosphere of the place with spider-life. What they fed
upon (for all the flies for miles about would not have sufficed them)
was a secret known only to the Doctor. Whence they came was another
riddle; though, from certain inquiries and transactions of Doctor
Grimshawe’s with some of the shipmasters of the port, who followed the
East and West Indian, the African and the South American trade, it was
supposed that this odd philosopher was in the habit of importing
choice monstrosities in the spider kind from all those tropic regions.
[Endnote: 6.]

All the above description, exaggerated as it may seem, is merely
preliminary to the introduction of one single enormous spider, the
biggest and ugliest ever seen, the pride of the grim Doctor’s heart, his
treasure, his glory, the pearl of his soul, and, as many people said,
the demon to whom he had sold his salvation, on condition of possessing
the web of the foul creature for a certain number of years. The grim
Doctor, according to this theory, was but a great fly which this
spider had subtly entangled in his web. But, in truth, naturalists are
acquainted with this spider, though it is a rare one; the British
Museum has a specimen, and, doubtless, so have many other scientific
institutions. It is found in South America; its most hideous spread of
legs covers a space nearly as large as a dinner-plate, and radiates from
a body as big as a door-knob, which one conceives to be an agglomeration
of sucked-up poison which the creature treasures through life; probably
to expend it all, and life itself, on some worthy foe. Its colors,
variegated in a sort of ugly and inauspicious splendor, were distributed
over its vast bulb in great spots, some of which glistened like gems. It
was a horror to think of this thing living; still more horrible to think
of the foul catastrophe, the crushed-out and wasted poison, that would
follow the casual setting foot upon it.

No doubt, the lapse of time since the Doctor and his spider lived has
already been sufficient to cause a traditionary wonderment to gather
over them both; and, especially, this image of the spider dangles down
to us from the dusky ceiling of the Past, swollen into somewhat uglier
and huger monstrosity than he actually possessed. Nevertheless, the
creature had a real existence, and has left kindred like himself; but
as for the Doctor, nothing could exceed the value which he seemed to put
upon him, the sacrifices he made for the creature’s convenience, or the
readiness with which he adapted his whole mode of life, apparently, so
that the spider might enjoy the conditions best suited to his tastes,
habits, and health. And yet there were sometimes tokens that made people
imagine that he hated the infernal creature as much as everybody else
who caught a glimpse of him. [Endnote: 7.]




CHAPTER II.


Considering that Doctor Grimshawe, when we first look upon him, had
dwelt only a few years in the house by the graveyard, it is wonderful
what an appearance he, and his furniture, and his cobwebs, and
their unweariable spinners, and crusty old Hannah, all had of having
permanently attached themselves to the locality. For a century, at
least, it might be fancied that the study in particular had existed just
as it was now; with those dusky festoons of spider-silk hanging along
the walls, those book-cases with volumes turning their parchment or
black-leather backs upon you, those machines and engines, that table,
and at it the Doctor, in a very faded and shabby dressing-gown, smoking
a long clay pipe, the powerful fumes of which dwelt continually in his
reddish and grisly beard, and made him fragrant wherever he went. This
sense of fixedness--stony intractability--seems to belong to people
who, instead of hope, which exalts everything into an airy, gaseous
exhilaration, have a fixed and dogged purpose, around which everything
congeals and crystallizes. [Endnote: 1] Even the sunshine, dim through
the dustiness of the two casements that looked upon the graveyard,
and the smoke, as it came warm out of Doctor Grimshawe’s mouth, seemed
already stale. But if the two children, or either of them, happened to
be in the study,--if they ran to open the door at the knock, if they
came scampering and peeped down over the banisters,--the sordid and
rusty gloom was apt to vanish quite away. The sunbeam itself looked like
a golden rule, that had been flung down long ago, and had lain there
till it was dusty and tarnished. They were cheery little imps, who
sucked up fragrance and pleasantness out of their surroundings, dreary
as these looked; even as a flower can find its proper perfume in any
soil where its seed happens to fall. The great spider, hanging by his
cordage over the Doctor’s head, and waving slowly, like a pendulum, in
a blast from the crack of the door, must have made millions and millions
of precisely such vibrations as these; but the children were new, and
made over every day, with yesterday’s weariness left out.

The little girl, however, was the merrier of the two. It was quite
unintelligible, in view of the little care that crusty Hannah took
of her, and, moreover, since she was none of your prim, fastidious
children, how daintily she kept herself amid all this dust; how
the spider’s webs never clung to her, and how, when--without being
solicited--she clambered into the Doctor’s arms and kissed him, she bore
away no smoky reminiscences of the pipe that he kissed continually. She
had a free, mellow, natural laughter, that seemed the ripened fruit of
the smile that was generally on her little face, to be shaken off
and scattered abroad by any breeze that came along. Little Elsie made
playthings of everything, even of the grim Doctor, though against his
will, and though, moreover, there were tokens now and then that the
sight of this bright little creature was not a pleasure to him, but,
on the contrary, a positive pain; a pain, nevertheless, indicating
a profound interest, hardly less deep than though Elsie had been his
daughter.

Elsie did not play with the great spider, but she moved among the whole
brood of spiders as if she saw them not, and, being endowed with other
senses than those allied to these things, might coexist with them and
not be sensible of their presence. Yet the child, I suppose, had her
crying fits, and her pouting fits, and naughtiness enough to entitle her
to live on earth; at least crusty Hannah often said so, and often made
grievous complaint of disobedience, mischief, or breakage, attributable
to little Elsie; to which the grim Doctor seldom responded by anything
more intelligible than a puff of tobacco-smoke, and, sometimes, an
imprecation; which, however, hit crusty Hannah instead of the child.
Where the child got the tenderness that a child needs to live upon, is a
mystery to me; perhaps from some aged or dead mother, or in her dreams;
perhaps from some small modicum of it, such as boys have, from the
little boy; or perhaps it was from a Persian kitten, which had grown to
be a cat in her arms, and slept in her little bed, and now assumed grave
and protective airs towards her former playmate. [Endnote: 2.]

The boy, [Endnote: 3] as we have said, was two or three years Elsie’s
elder, and might now be about six years old. He was a healthy and
cheerful child, yet of a graver mood than the little girl, appearing to
lay a more forcible grasp on the circumstances about him, and to tread
with a heavier footstep on the solid earth; yet perhaps not more so than
was the necessary difference between a man-blossom, dimly conscious of
coming things, and a mere baby, with whom there was neither past nor
future. Ned, as he was named, was subject very early to fits of musing,
the subject of which--if they had any definite subject, or were more
than vague reveries--it was impossible to guess. They were of those
states of mind, probably, which are beyond the sphere of human language,
and would necessarily lose their essence in the attempt to communicate
or record them. The little girl, perhaps, had some mode of sympathy with
these unuttered thoughts or reveries, which grown people had ceased to
have; at all events, she early learned to respect them, and, at other
times as free and playful as her Persian kitten, she never in such
circumstances ventured on any greater freedom than to sit down quietly
beside him, and endeavor to look as thoughtful as the boy himself.

Once, slowly emerging from one of these waking reveries, little Ned
gazed about him, and saw Elsie sitting with this pretty pretence of
thoughtfulness and dreaminess in her little chair, close beside him;
now and then peeping under her eyelashes to note what changes might come
over his face. After looking at her a moment or two, he quietly took her
willing and warm little hand in his own, and led her up to the Doctor.

The group, methinks, must have been a picturesque one, made up as it was
of several apparently discordant elements, each of which happened to be
so combined as to make a more effective whole. The beautiful grave boy,
with a little sword by his side and a feather in his hat, of a brown
complexion, slender, with his white brow and dark, thoughtful eyes, so
earnest upon some mysterious theme; the prettier little girl, a blonde,
round, rosy, so truly sympathetic with her companion’s mood, yet
unconsciously turning all to sport by her attempt to assume one
similar;--these two standing at the grim Doctor’s footstool; he
meanwhile, black, wild-bearded, heavy-browed, red-eyed, wrapped in his
faded dressing-gown, puffing out volumes of vapor from his long pipe,
and making, just at that instant, application to a tumbler, which,
we regret to say, was generally at his elbow, with some dark-colored
potation in it that required to be frequently replenished from a
neighboring black bottle. Half, at least, of the fluids in the grim
Doctor’s system must have been derived from that same black bottle, so
constant was his familiarity with its contents; and yet his eyes were
never redder at one time than another, nor his utterance thicker,
nor his mood perceptibly the brighter or the duller for all his
conviviality. It is true, when, once, the bottle happened to be empty
for a whole day together, Doctor Grimshawe was observed by crusty Hannah
and by the children to be considerably fiercer than usual: so that
probably, by some maladjustment of consequences, his intemperance was
only to be found in refraining from brandy.

Nor must we forget--in attempting to conceive the effect of these two
beautiful children in such a sombre room, looking on the graveyard,
and contrasted with the grim Doctor’s aspect of heavy and smouldering
fierceness--that over his head, at this very moment, dangled the
portentous spider, who seemed to have come down from his web aloft for
the purpose of hearing what the two young people could have to say
to his patron, and what reference it might have to certain mysterious
documents which the Doctor kept locked up in a secret cupboard behind
the door.

“Grim Doctor,” said Ned, after looking up into the Doctor’s face, as
a sensitive child inevitably does, to see whether the occasion was
favorable, yet determined to proceed with his purpose whether so or
not,--“Grim Doctor, I want you to answer me a question.”

“Here’s to your good health, Ned!” quoth the Doctor, eying the pair
intently, as he often did, when they were unconscious. “So you want to
ask me a question? As many as you please, my fine fellow; and I shall
answer as many, and as much, and as truly, as may please myself!”

“Ah, grim Doctor!” said the little girl, now letting go of Ned’s hand,
and climbing upon the Doctor’s knee, “‘ou shall answer as many as Ned
please to ask, because to please him and me!”

“Well, child,” said Doctor Grimshawe, “little Ned will have his rights
at least, at my hands, if not other people’s rights likewise; and, if it
be right, I shall answer his question. Only, let him ask it at once; for
I want to be busy thinking about something else.”

“Then, Doctor Grim,” said little Ned, “tell me, in the first place,
where I came from, and how you came to have me?”

The Doctor looked at the little man, so seriously and earnestly putting
this demand, with a perplexed, and at first it might almost seem a
startled aspect.

“That is a question, indeed, my friend Ned!” ejaculated he, putting
forth a whiff of smoke and imbibing a nip from his tumbler before he
spoke; and perhaps framing his answer, as many thoughtful and secret
people do, in such a way as to let out his secret mood to the child,
because knowing he could not understand it: “Whence did you come? Whence
did any of us come? Out of the darkness and mystery; out of nothingness;
out of a kingdom of shadows; out of dust, clay, mud, I think, and to
return to it again. Out of a former state of being, whence we have
brought a good many shadowy revelations, purporting that it was no very
pleasant one. Out of a former life, of which the present one is the
hell!--And why are you come? Faith, Ned, he must be a wiser man than
Doctor Grim who can tell why you or any other mortal came hither; only
one thing I am well aware of,--it was not to be happy. To toil and moil
and hope and fear; and to love in a shadowy, doubtful sort of way, and
to hate in bitter earnest,--that is what you came for!”

“Ah, Doctor Grim! this is very naughty,” said little Elsie. “You are
making fun of little Ned, when he is in earnest.”

“Fun!” quoth Doctor Grim, bursting into a laugh peculiar to him, very
loud and obstreperous. “I am glad you find it so, my little woman. Well,
and so you bid me tell absolutely where he came from?”

Elsie nodded her bright little head.

“And you, friend Ned, insist upon knowing?”

“That I do, Doctor Grim!” answered Ned. His white, childish brow had
gathered into a frown, such was the earnestness of his determination;
and he stamped his foot on the floor, as if ready to follow up his
demand by an appeal to the little tin sword which hung by his side. The
Doctor looked at him with a kind of smile,--not a very pleasant one;
for it was an unamiable characteristic of his temper that a display of
spirit, even in a child, was apt to arouse his immense combativeness,
and make him aim a blow without much consideration how heavily it might
fall, or on how unequal an antagonist.

“If you insist upon an answer, Master Ned, you shall have it,” replied
he. “You were taken by me, boy, a foundling from an almshouse; and
if ever hereafter you desire to know your kindred, you must take your
chance of the first man you meet. He is as likely to be your father as
another!”

The child’s eyes flashed, and his brow grew as red as fire. It was but
a momentary fierceness; the next instant he clasped his hands over his
face, and wept in a violent convulsion of grief and shame. Little Elsie
clasped her arms about him, kissing his brow and chin, which were all
that her lips could touch, under his clasped hands; but Ned turned away
uncomforted, and was blindly making his way towards the door.

“Ned, my little fellow, come back!” said Doctor Grim, who had very
attentively watched the cruel effect of his communication.

As the boy did not reply, and was still tending towards the door, the
grim Doctor vouchsafed to lay aside his pipe, get up from his arm-chair
(a thing he seldom did between supper and bedtime), and shuffle after
the two children in his slippers. He caught them on the threshold,
brought little Ned back by main force,--for he was a rough man even in
his tenderness,--and, sitting down again and taking him on his knee,
pulled away his hands from before his face. Never was a more pitiful
sight than that pale countenance, so infantile still, yet looking old
and experienced already, with a sense of disgrace, with a feeling of
loneliness; so beautiful, nevertheless, that it seemed to possess all
the characteristics which fine hereditary traits and culture, or many
forefathers, could do in refining a human stock. And this was a nameless
weed, sprouting from some chance seed by the dusty wayside!

“Ned, my dear old boy,” said Doctor Grim,--and he kissed that pale,
tearful face,--the first and last time, to the best of my belief, that
he was ever betrayed into that tenderness; “forget what I have said!
Yes, remember, if you like, that you came from an almshouse; but
remember, too,--what your friend Doctor Grim is ready to affirm and make
oath of,--that he can trace your kindred and race through that sordid
experience, and back, back, for a hundred and fifty years, into an old
English line. Come, little Ned, and look at this picture.”

He led the boy by the hand to a corner of the room, where hung upon the
wall a portrait which Ned had often looked at. It seemed an old picture;
but the Doctor had had it cleaned and varnished, so that it looked dim
and dark, and yet it seemed to be the representation of a man of no
mark; not at least of such mark as would naturally leave his features to
be transmitted for the interest of another generation. For he was
clad in a mean dress of old fashion,--a leather jerkin it appeared to
be,--and round his neck, moreover, was a noose of rope, as if he might
have been on the point of being hanged. But the face of the portrait,
nevertheless, was beautiful, noble, though sad; with a great development
of sensibility, a look of suffering and endurance amounting to
triumph,--a peace through all.

“Look at this,” continued the Doctor, “if you must go on dreaming about
your race. Dream that you are of the blood of this being; for, mean as
his station looks, he comes of an ancient and noble race, and was the
noblest of them all! Let me alone, Ned, and I shall spin out the web
that shall link you to that man. The grim Doctor can do it!”

The grim Doctor’s face looked fierce with the earnestness with which
he said these words. You would have said that he was taking an oath to
overthrow and annihilate a race, rather than to build one up by
bringing forward the infant heir out of obscurity, and making plain the
links--the filaments--which cemented this feeble childish life, in a far
country, with the great tide of a noble life, which had come down like a
chain from antiquity, in old England.

Having said the words, however, the grim Doctor appeared ashamed both of
the heat and of the tenderness into which he had been betrayed; for rude
and rough as his nature was, there was a kind of decorum in it, too,
that kept him within limits of his own. So he went back to his chair,
his pipe, and his tumbler, and was gruffer and more taciturn than ever
for the rest of the evening. And after the children went to bed, he
leaned back in his chair and looked up at the vast tropic spider, who
was particularly busy in adding to the intricacies of his web; until he
fell asleep with his eyes fixed in that direction, and the extinguished
pipe in one hand and the empty tumbler in the other.




CHAPTER III.


Doctor Grimshawe, after the foregone scene, began a practice of
conversing more with the children than formerly; directing his discourse
chiefly to Ned, although Elsie’s vivacity and more outspoken and
demonstrative character made her take quite as large a share in the
conversation as he.

The Doctor’s communications referred chiefly to a village, or
neighborhood, or locality in England, which he chose to call Newnham;
although he told the children that this was not the real name, which,
for reasons best known to himself, he wished to conceal. Whatever the
name were, he seemed to know the place so intimately, that the
children, as a matter of course, adopted the conclusion that it was his
birthplace, and the spot where he had spent his schoolboy days, and
had lived until some inscrutable reason had impelled him to quit its
ivy-grown antiquity, and all the aged beauty and strength that he spoke
of, and to cross the sea.

He used to tell of an old church, far unlike the brick and pine-built
meeting-houses with which the children were familiar; a church, the
stones of which were laid, every one of them, before the world knew of
the country in which he was then speaking: and how it had a spire, the
lower part of which was mantled with ivy, and up which, towards its very
spire, the ivy was still creeping; and how there was a tradition, that,
if the ivy ever reached the top, the spire would fall upon the roof
of the old gray church, and crush it all down among its surrounding
tombstones. [Endnote: 1] And so, as this misfortune would be so heavy
a one, there seemed to be a miracle wrought from year to year, by which
the ivy, though always flourishing, could never grow beyond a certain
point; so that the spire and church had stood unharmed for thirty years;
though the wise old people were constantly foretelling that the passing
year must be the very last one that it could stand.

He told, too, of a place that made little Ned blush and cast down his
eyes to hide the tears of anger and shame at he knew not what, which
would irresistibly spring into them; for it reminded him of the
almshouse where, as the cruel Doctor said, Ned himself had had his
earliest home. And yet, after all, it had scarcely a feature of
resemblance; and there was this great point of difference,--that
whereas, in Ned’s wretched abode (a large, unsightly brick house), there
were many wretched infants like himself, as well as helpless people
of all ages, widows, decayed drunkards, people of feeble wits, and all
kinds of imbecility; it being a haven for those who could not contend
in the hard, eager, pitiless struggle of life; in the place the Doctor
spoke of, a noble, Gothic, mossy structure, there were none but aged
men, who had drifted into this quiet harbor to end their days in a sort
of humble yet stately ease and decorous abundance. And this shelter,
the grim Doctor said, was the gift of a man who had died ages ago; and
having been a great sinner in his lifetime, and having drawn lands,
manors, and a great mass of wealth into his clutches, by violent and
unfair means, had thought to get his pardon by founding this Hospital,
as it was called, in which thirteen old men should always reside; and he
hoped that they would spend their time in praying for the welfare of his
soul. [Endnote: 2.]

Said little Elsie, “I am glad he did it, and I hope the poor old men
never forgot to pray for him, and that it did good to the poor wicked
man’s soul.”

“Well, child,” said Doctor Grimshawe, with a scowl into vacancy, and a
sort of wicked leer of merriment at the same time, as if he saw before
him the face of the dead man of past centuries, “I happen to be no
lover of this man’s race, and I hate him for the sake of one of his
descendants. I don’t think he succeeded in bribing the Devil to let him
go, or God to save him!”

“Doctor Grim, you are very naughty!” said Elsie, looking shocked.

“It is fair enough,” said Ned, “to hate your enemies to the very brink
of the grave, but then to leave him to get what mercy he can.”

“After shoving him in!” quoth the Doctor; and made no further response
to either of these criticisms, which seemed indeed to affect him very
little--if he even listened to them. For he was a man of singularly
imperfect moral culture; insomuch that nothing else was so remarkable
about him as that--possessing a good deal of intellectual ability, made
available by much reading and experience--he was so very dark on the
moral side; as if he needed the natural perceptions that should have
enabled him to acquire that better wisdom. Such a phenomenon often
meets us in life; oftener than we recognize, because a certain tact and
exterior decency generally hide the moral deficiency. But often there is
a mind well polished, married to a conscience and natural impulses left
as they were in childhood, except that they have sprouted up into evil
and poisonous weeds, richly blossoming with strong-smelling flowers, or
seeds which the plant scatters by a sort of impulse; even as the Doctor
was now half-consciously throwing seeds of his evil passions into the
minds of these children. He was himself a grown-up child, without tact,
simplicity, and innocence, and with ripened evil, all the ranker for a
native heat that was in him and still active, which might have nourished
good things as well as evil. Indeed, it did cherish by chance a root or
two of good, the fragrance of which was sometimes perceptible among all
this rank growth of poisonous weeds. A grown-up child he was,--that was
all.

The Doctor now went on to describe an old country-seat, which stood near
this village and the ancient Hospital that he had been telling about,
and which was formerly the residence of the wicked man (a knight and
a brave one, well known in the Lancastrian wars) who had founded the
latter. It was a venerable old mansion, which a Saxon Thane had begun to
build more than a thousand years ago, the old English oak that he built
into the frame being still visible in the ancient skeleton of its roof,
sturdy and strong as if put up yesterday. And the descendants of the
man who built it, through the French line (for a Norman baron wedded the
daughter and heiress of the Saxon), dwelt there yet; and in each century
they had done something for the old Hall,--building a tower, adding
a suite of rooms, strengthening what was already built, putting in a
painted window, making it more spacious and convenient,--till it seemed
as if Time employed himself in thinking what could be done for the old
house. As fast as any part decayed, it was renewed, with such simple
art that the new completed, as it were, and fitted itself to the old. So
that it seemed as if the house never had been finished, until just that
thing was added. For many an age, the possessors had gone on adding
strength to strength, digging out the moat to a greater depth, piercing
the walls with holes for archers to shoot through, or building a turret
to keep watch upon. But at last all necessity for these precautions
passed away, and then they thought of convenience and comfort, adding
something in every generation to these. And by and by they thought of
beauty too; and in this time helped them with its weather-stains, and
the ivy that grew over the walls, and the grassy depth of the dried-up
moat, and the abundant shade that grew up everywhere, where naked
strength would have been ugly.

“One curious thing in the house,” said the Doctor, lowering his voice,
but with a mysterious look of triumph, and that old scowl, too, at the
children, “was that they built a secret chamber,--a very secret one!”

“A secret chamber!” cried little Ned; “who lived in it? A ghost?”

“There was often use for it,” said Doctor Grim; “hiding people who
had fought on the wrong side, or Catholic priests, or criminals,
or perhaps--who knows?--enemies that they wanted put out of the
way,--troublesome folks. Ah! it was often of use, that secret chamber:
and is so still!”

Here the Doctor paused a long while, and leaned back in his chair,
slowly puffing long whiffs from his pipe, looking up at the great
spider-demon that hung over his head, and, as it seemed to the children
by the expression of his face, looking into the dim secret chamber which
he had spoken of, and which, by something in his mode of alluding to it,
assumed such a weird, spectral aspect to their imaginations that they
never wished to hear of it again. Coming back at length out of his
reverie,--returning, perhaps, out of some weird, ghostly, secret
chamber of his memory, whereof the one in the old house was but the less
horrible emblem,--he resumed his tale. He said that, a long time ago,
a war broke out in the old country between King and Parliament. At that
period there were several brothers of the old family (which had adhered
to the Catholic religion), and these chose the side of the King instead
of that of the Puritan Parliament: all but one, whom the family hated
because he took the Parliament side; and he became a soldier, and fought
against his own brothers; and it was said among them that, so inveterate
was he, he went on the scaffold, masked, and was the very man who struck
off the King’s head, and that his foot trod in the King’s blood, and
that always afterwards he made a bloody track wherever he went. And
there was a legend that his brethren once caught the renegade and
imprisoned him in his own birthplace--

“In the secret chamber?” interrupted Ned.

“No doubt!” said the Doctor, nodding, “though I never heard so.”

They imprisoned him, but he made his escape and fled, and in the morning
his prison-place, wherever it was, was empty. But on the threshold
of the door of the old manor-house there was the print of a bloody
footstep; and no trouble that the housemaids took, no rain of all the
years that have since passed, no sunshine, has made it fade: nor have
all the wear and tramp of feet passing over it since then availed to
erase it.

“I have seen it myself,” quoth the Doctor, “and know this to be true.”

“Doctor Grim, now you are laughing at us,” said Ned, trying to look
grave. But Elsie hid her face on the Doctor’s knee; there being
something that affected the vivid little girl with peculiar horror in
the idea of this red footstep always glistening on the doorstep, and
wetting, as she fancied, every innocent foot of child or grown person
that had since passed over it. [Endnote: 3.]

“It is true!” reiterated the grim Doctor; “for, man and boy, I have seen
it a thousand times.”

He continued the family history, or tradition, or fantastic legend,
whichever it might be; telling his young auditors that the Puritan, the
renegade son of the family, was afterwards, by the contrivances of his
brethren, sent to Virginia and sold as a bond slave; and how he had
vanished from that quarter and come to New England, where he was
supposed to have left children. And by and by two elder brothers died,
and this missing brother became the heir to the old estate and to a
title. Then the family tried to track his bloody footstep, and sought
it far and near, through green country paths, and old streets of London;
but in vain. Then they sent messengers to see whether any traces of one
stepping in blood could be found on the forest leaves of America; but
still in vain. The idea nevertheless prevailed that he would come back,
and it was said they kept a bedchamber ready for him yet in the old
house. But much as they pretended to regret the loss of him and his
children, it would make them curse their stars were a descendant of his
to return now. For the child of a younger son was in possession of the
old estate, and was doing as much evil as his forefathers did; and if
the true heir were to appear on the threshold, he would (if he might but
do it secretly) stain the whole doorstep as red as the Bloody Footstep
had stained one little portion of it.

“Do you think he will ever come back?” asked little Ned.

“Stranger things have happened, my little man!” said Doctor Grimshawe,
“than that the posterity of this man should come back and turn these
usurpers out of his rightful inheritance. And sometimes, as I sit here
smoking my pipe and drinking my glass, and looking up at the cunning
plot that the spider is weaving yonder above my head, and thinking of
this fine old family and some little matters that have been between them
and me, I fancy that it may be so! We shall see! Stranger things have
happened.”

And Doctor Grimshawe drank off his tumbler, winking at little Ned in a
strange way, that seemed to be a kind of playfulness, but which did not
affect the children pleasantly; insomuch that little Elsie put both
her hands on Doctor Grim’s knees, and begged him not to do so any more.
[Endnote: 4.]




CHAPTER IV. [Endnote: 1]


The children, after this conversation, often introduced the old English
mansion into their dreams and little romances, which all imaginative
children are continually mixing up with their lives, making the
commonplace day of grown people a rich, misty, glancing orb of
fairy-land to themselves. Ned, forgetting or not realizing the long
lapse of time, used to fancy the true heir wandering all this while in
America, and leaving a long track of bloody footsteps behind him; until
the period when, his sins being expiated (whatever they might be), he
should turn back upon his steps and return to his old native home. And
sometimes the child used to look along the streets of the town where he
dwelt, bending his thoughtful eyes on the ground, and think that perhaps
some time he should see the bloody footsteps there, betraying that the
wanderer had just gone that way.

As for little Elsie, it was her fancy that the hero of the legend still
remained imprisoned in that dreadful secret chamber, which had made a
most dread impression on her mind; and that there he was, forgotten all
this time, waiting, like a naughty child shut up in a closet, until
some one should come to unlock the door. In the pitifulness of her
disposition, she once proposed to little Ned that, as soon as they grew
big enough, they should set out in quest of the old house, and find
their way into it, and find the secret chamber, and let the poor
prisoner out. So they lived a good deal of the time in a half-waking
dream, partly conscious of the fantastic nature of their ideas, yet with
these ideas almost as real to them as the facts of the natural world,
which, to children, are at first transparent and unsubstantial.

The Doctor appeared to have a pleasure, or a purpose, in keeping his
legend forcibly in their memories; he often recurred to the subject of
the old English family, and was continually giving new details about
its history, the scenery in its neighborhood, the aspect of the
mansion-house; indicating a very intense interest in the subject on his
own part, of which this much talk seemed the involuntary overflowing.

There was, however, an affection mingled with this sentiment. It
appeared to be his unfortunate necessity to let his thoughts dwell very
constantly upon a subject that was hateful to him, with which this old
English estate and manor-house and family were somehow connected; and,
moreover, had he spoken thus to older and more experienced auditors,
they might have detected in the manner and matter of his talk, a certain
hereditary reverence and awe, the growth of ages, mixed up with a newer
hatred, impelling him to deface and destroy what, at the same time, it
was his deepest impulse to bow before. The love belonged to his race;
the hatred, to himself individually. It was the feeling of a man lowly
born, when he contracts a hostility to his hereditary superior. In
one way, being of a powerful, passionate nature, gifted with force and
ability far superior to that of the aristocrat, he might scorn him and
feel able to trample on him; in another, he had the same awe that a
country boy feels of the magistrate who flings him a sixpence and shakes
his horsewhip at him.

Had the grim Doctor been an American, he might have had the vast
antipathy to rank, without the trace of awe that made it so much more
malignant: it required a low-born Englishman to feel the two together.
What made the hatred so fiendish was a something that, in the natural
course of things, would have been loyalty, inherited affection, devoted
self-sacrifice to a superior. Whatever it might be, it seemed at times
(when his potations took deeper effect than ordinary) almost to drive
the grim Doctor mad; for he would burst forth in wild diatribes and
anathemas, having a strange, rough force of expression and a depth of
utterance, as if his words came from a bottomless pit within himself,
where burned an everlasting fire, and where the furies had their home;
and plans of dire revenge were welded into shape as in the heat of a
furnace. After the two poor children had been affrighted by paroxysms
of this kind, the strange being would break out into one of his roars of
laughter, that seemed to shake the house, and, at all events, caused
the cobwebs and spiders suspended from the ceiling, to swing and vibrate
with the motion of the volumes of reverberating breath which he thus
expelled from his capacious lungs. Then, catching up little Elsie upon
one knee and Ned upon the other, he would become gentler than in his
usual moods, and, by the powerful magnetism of his character, cause them
to think him as tender and sweet an old fellow as a child could desire
for a playmate. Upon the whole, strange as it may appear, they loved
the grim Doctor dearly; there was a loadstone within him that drew them
close to him and kept them there, in spite of the horror of many things
that he said and did. One thing that, slight as it seemed, wrought
mightily towards their mutually petting each other, was that no amount
of racket, hubbub, shouting, laughter, or noisy mischief which the
two children could perpetrate, ever disturbed the Doctor’s studies,
meditations, or employments of whatever kind. He had a hardy set of
nerves, not refined by careful treatment in himself or his ancestors,
but probably accustomed from of old to be drummed on by harsh voices,
rude sounds, and the clatter and clamor of household life among homely,
uncultivated, strongly animal people.

As the two children grew apace, it behooved their strange guardian to
take some thought for their instruction. So far as little Elsie was
concerned, however, he seemed utterly indifferent to her having
any cultivation: having imbibed no modern ideas respecting feminine
capacities and privileges, but regarding woman, whether in the bud or
in the blossom, as the plaything of man’s idler moments, and the
helpmeet--but in a humble capacity--of his daily life. He sometimes bade
her go to the kitchen and take lessons of crusty Hannah in bread-making,
sweeping, dusting, washing, the coarser needlework, and such other
things as she would require to know when she came to be a woman; but
carelessly allowed her to gather up the crumbs of such instruction as he
bestowed on her playmate Ned, and thus learn to read, write, and cipher;
which, to say the truth, was about as far in the way of scholarship as
little Elsie cared to go.

But towards little Ned the grim Doctor adopted a far different system.
No sooner had he reached the age when the soft and tender intellect
of the child became capable of retaining impressions, than he took him
vigorously in hand, assigning him such tasks as were fit for him, and
curiously investigating what were the force and character of the powers
with which the child grasped them. Not that the Doctor pressed him
forward unduly; indeed, there was no need of it; for the boy manifested
a remarkable docility for instruction, and a singular quickness
in mastering the preliminary steps which lead to science: a subtle
instinct, indeed, which it seemed wonderful a child should possess
for anything as artificial as systems of grammar and arithmetic. A
remarkable boy, in truth, he was, to have been found by chance in an
almshouse; except that, such being his origin, we are at liberty to
suppose for him whatever long cultivation and gentility we may think
necessary, in his parentage of either side,--such as was indicated also
by his graceful and refined beauty of person. He showed, indeed, even
before he began to read at all, an instinctive attraction towards books,
and a love for and interest in even the material form of knowledge,--the
plates, the print, the binding of the Doctor’s volumes, and even in
a bookworm which he once found in an old volume, where it had eaten a
circular furrow. But the little boy had too quick a spirit of life to
be in danger of becoming a bookworm himself. He had this side of the
intellect, but his impulse would be to mix with men, and catch something
from their intercourse fresher than books could give him; though these
would give him what they might.

In the grim Doctor, rough and uncultivated as he seemed, this budding
intelligence found no inadequate instructor. Doctor Grimshawe proved
himself a far more thorough scholar, in the classics and mathematics,
than could easily have been found in our country. He himself must have
had rigid and faithful instruction at an early period of life, though
probably not in his boyhood. For, though the culture had been bestowed,
his mind had been left in so singularly rough a state that it seemed
as if the refinement of classical study could not have been begun very
early. Or possibly the mind and nature were incapable of polish; or he
may have had a coarse and sordid domestic life around him in his infancy
and youth. He was a gem of coarse texture, just hewn out. An American
with a like education would more likely have gained a certain fineness
and grace, and it would have been difficult to distinguish him from one
who had been born to culture and refinement. This sturdy Englishman,
after all that had been done for his mind, and though it had been well
done, was still but another ploughman, of a long race of such, with a
few scratchings of refinement on his hard exterior. His son, if he left
one, might be a little less of the ploughman; his grandson, provided
the female element were well chosen, might approach to refinement; three
generations--a century at least--would be required for the slow toil
of hewing, chiselling, and polishing a gentleman out of this ponderous
block, now rough from the quarry of human nature. But, in the mean time,
he evidently possessed in an unusual degree the sort of learning that
refines other minds,--the critical acquaintance with the great poets and
historians of antiquity, and apparently an appreciation of their merits,
and power to teach their beauty. So the boy had an able tutor, capable,
it would seem, of showing him the way to the graces he did not himself
possess; besides helping the growth of the strength without which
refinement is but sickly and disgusting.

Another sort of culture, which it seemed odd that this rude man should
undertake, was that of manners; but, in fact, rude as the grim Doctor’s
own manners were, he was one of the nicest and severest censors in that
department that was ever known. It is difficult to account for this;
although it is almost invariably found that persons in a low rank of
life, such as servants and laborers, will detect the false pretender to
the character of a gentleman, with at least as sure an instinct as the
class into which they seek to thrust themselves. Perhaps they recognize
something akin to their own vulgarity, rather than appreciate what is
unlike themselves. The Doctor possessed a peculiar power of rich rough
humor on this subject, and used to deliver lectures, as it were, to
little Ned, illustrated with sketches of living individuals in the town
where they dwelt; by an unscrupulous use of whom he sought to teach the
boy what to avoid in manners, if he sought to be a gentleman. But it
must be confessed he spared himself as little as other people, and
often wound up with this compendious injunction,--“Be everything in your
behavior that Doctor Grim is not!”

His pupil, very probably, profited somewhat by these instructions; for
there are specialties and arbitrary rules of behavior which do not come
by nature. But these are few; and beautiful, noble, and genial manners
may almost be called a natural gift; and these, however he inherited
them, soon proved to be an inherent possession of little Ned. He had a
kind of natural refinement, which nothing could ever soil or offend;
it seemed, by some magic or other, absolutely to keep him from the
knowledge of much of the grim Doctor’s rude and sordid exterior, and
to render what was around him beautiful by a sort of affiliation, or
reflection from that quality in himself, glancing its white light upon
it. The Doctor himself was puzzled, and apparently both startled and
delighted at the perception of these characteristics. Sometimes he
would make a low, uncouth bow, after his fashion, to the little fellow,
saying, “Allow me to kiss your hand, my lord!” and little Ned, not quite
knowing what the grim Doctor meant, yet allowed the favor he asked,
with a grave and gracious condescension that seemed much to delight the
suitor. This refusal to recognize or to suspect that the Doctor might be
laughing at him was a sure token, at any rate, of the lack of one vulgar
characteristic in little Ned.

In order to afford little Ned every advantage to these natural gifts,
Doctor Grim nevertheless failed not to provide the best attainable
instructor for such positive points of a polite education as his own
fierce criticism, being destructive rather than generative, would not
suffice for. There was a Frenchman in the town--a M. Le Grand, secretly
calling himself a Count--who taught the little people, and, indeed, some
of their elders, the Parisian pronunciation of his own language; and
likewise dancing (in which he was more of an adept and more successful
than in the former branch) and fencing: in which, after looking at a
lesson or two, the grim Doctor was satisfied of his skill. Under his
instruction, with the stimulus of the Doctor’s praise and criticism, Ned
soon grew to be the pride of the Frenchman’s school, in both the
active departments; and the Doctor himself added a further gymnastic
acquirement (not absolutely necessary, he said, to a gentleman’s
education, but very desirable to a man perfect at all points) by
teaching him cudgel-playing and pugilism. In short, in everything that
related to accomplishments, whether of mind or body, no pains were
spared with little Ned; but of the utilitarian line of education, then
almost exclusively adopted, and especially desirable for a fortuneless
boy like Ned, dependent on a man not wealthy, there was little given.

At first, too, the Doctor paid little attention to the moral and
religious culture of his pupil; nor did he ever make a system of it. But
by and by, though with a singular reluctance and kind of bashfulness,
he began to extend his care to these matters; being drawn into them
unawares, and possibly perceiving and learning what he taught as he went
along. One evening, I know not how, he was betrayed into speaking on
this point, and a sort of inspiration seized him. A vista opened before
him: handling an immortal spirit, he began to know its requisitions, in
a degree far beyond what he had conceived them to be when his great
task was undertaken. His voice grew deep, and had a strange, impressive
pathos in it; his talk became eloquent with depth of meaning and
feeling, as he told the boy of the moral dangers of the world, for which
he was seeking to educate him; and which, he said, presented what looked
like great triumphs, and yet were the greatest and saddest of defeats.
He told him that many things that seemed nearest and dearest to the
heart of man were destructive, eating and gnawing away and corroding
what was best in him; and what a high, noble, re-creating triumph it
was when these dark impulses were resisted and overthrown; and how, from
that epoch, the soul took a new start. He denounced the selfish greed of
gold, lawless passion, revenge,--and here the grim Doctor broke out into
a strange passion and zeal of anathema against this deadly sin, making
a dreadful picture of the ruin that it creates in the heart where it
establishes itself, and how it makes a corrosive acid of those genial
juices. Then he told the boy that the condition of all good was, in the
first place, truth; then, courage; then, justice; then, mercy; out of
which principles operating upon one another would come all brave, noble,
high, unselfish actions, and the scorn of all mean ones; and how that
from such a nature all hatred would fall away, and all good affections
would be ennobled.

I know not at what point it was, precisely, in these ethical
instructions that an insight seemed to strike the grim Doctor that
something more--vastly more--was needed than all he had said; and he
began, doubtfully, to speak of man’s spiritual nature and its demands,
and the emptiness of everything which a sense of these demands did not
pervade, and condense, and weighten into realities. And going on in this
strain, he soared out of himself and astonished the two children,
who stood gazing at him, wondering whether it were the Doctor who was
speaking thus; until some interrupting circumstance seemed to bring him
back to himself, and he burst into one of his great roars of laughter.
The inspiration, the strange light whereby he had been transfigured,
passed out of his face; and there was the uncouth, wild-bearded, rough,
earthy, passionate man, whom they called Doctor Grim, looking ashamed of
himself, and trying to turn the whole matter into a jest. [Endnote: 2.]

It was a sad pity that he should have been interrupted, and brought
into this mocking mood, just when he seemed to have broken away from
the sinfulness of his hot, evil nature, and to have soared into a region
where, with all his native characteristics transfigured, he seemed to
have become an angel in his own likeness. Crusty Hannah, who had been
drawn to the door of the study by the unusual tones of his voice,--a
kind of piercing sweetness in it,--always averred that she saw the
gigantic spider swooping round his head in great crafty circles, and
clutching, as it were, at his brain with its great claws. But it was the
old woman’s absurd idea that this hideous insect was the Devil, in that
ugly guise,--a superstition which deserves absolutely no countenance.
Nevertheless, though this paroxysm of devotional feeling and insight
returned no more to the grim Doctor, it was ever after a memorable
occasion to the two children. It touched that religious chord, in both
their hearts, which there was no mother to touch; but now it
vibrated long, and never ceased to vibrate so long as they remained
together,--nor, perhaps, after they were parted from each other and from
the grim Doctor. And even then, in those after years, the strange music
that had been awakened was continued, as it were the echo from harps on
high. Now, at all events, they made little prayers for themselves, and
said them at bedtime, generally in secret, sometimes in unison; and they
read in an old dusty Bible which lay among the grim Doctor’s books; and
from little heathens, they became Christian children. Doctor Grimshawe
was perhaps conscious of this result of his involuntary preachment, but
he never directly noticed it, and did nothing either to efface or deepen
the impression.

It was singular, however, that, in both the children’s minds, this
one gush of irresistible religious sentiment, breaking out of the grim
Doctor’s inner depths, like a sort of holy lava from a volcano that
usually emitted quite other matter, (such as hot, melted wrath and
hate,) quite threw out of sight, then and always afterwards, his
darker characteristics. They remembered him, with faith and love, as a
religious man, and forgot--what perhaps had made no impression on their
innocent hearts--all the traits that other people might have called
devilish. To them the grim Doctor was a saint, even during his lifetime
and constant intercourse with them, and canonized forever afterwards.
There is almost always, to be sure, this profound faith, with regard
to those they love, in childhood; but perhaps, in this instance, the
children really had a depth of insight that grown people lacked; a
profound recognition of the bottom of this strange man’s nature, which
was of such stuff as martyrs and heroic saints might have been made of,
though here it had been wrought miserably amiss. At any rate, his face
with the holy awe upon it was what they saw and remembered, when they
thought of their friend Doctor Grim.

One effect of his zealous and analytic instruction of the boy was very
perceptible. Heretofore, though enduring him, and occasionally making a
plaything of him, it may be doubted whether the grim Doctor had really
any strong affection for the child: it rather seemed as if his strong
will were forcing him to undertake, and carry sedulously forward, a
self-imposed task. All that he had done--his redeeming the bright child
from poverty and nameless degradation, ignorance, and a sordid life
hopeless of better fortune, and opening to him the whole realm of mighty
possibilities in an American life--did not imply any love for the little
individual whom he thus benefited. It had some other motive.

But now, approaching the child in this close, intimate, and helpful way,
it was very evident that his interest took a tenderer character.
There was everything in the boy, that a boy could possess, to attract
affection; he would have been a father’s pride and joy. Doctor
Grimshawe, indeed, was not his father; but to a person of his character
this was perhaps no cause of lesser love than if there had been the
whole of that holy claim of kindred between them. We speak of the
natural force of blood; we speak of the paternal relation as if it were
productive of more earnest affection than can exist between two persons,
one of whom is protective, but unrelated. But there are wild, forcible,
unrestricted characters, on whom the necessity and even duty of loving
their own child is a sort of barrier to love. They perhaps do not love
their own traits, which they recognize in their children; they shrink
from their own features in the reflection presented by these little
mirrors. A certain strangeness and unlikeness (such as gives poignancy
to the love between the sexes) would excite a livelier affection. Be
this as it may, it is not probable that Doctor Grimshawe would have
loved a child of his own blood, with the coarse characteristics that
he knew both in his race and himself, with nearly such fervor as this
beautiful, slender, yet strenuous, intelligent, refined boy,--with such
a high-bred air, handling common things with so refined a touch, yet
grasping them so firmly; throwing a natural grace on all he did. Was he
not his father,--he that took this fair blossom out of the sordid mud
in which he must soon have withered and perished? Was not this beautiful
strangeness, which he so wondered at, the result of his care?

And little Elsie? did the grim Doctor love her as well? Perhaps not,
for, in the first place, there was a natural tie, though not the
nearest, between her and Doctor Grimshawe, which made him feel that she
was cast upon his love: a burden which he acknowledged himself bound to
undertake. Then, too, there were unutterably painful reminiscences and
thoughts, that made him gasp for breath, that turned his blood sour,
that tormented his dreams with nightmares and hellish phantoms; all
of which were connected with this innocent and happy child; so that,
cheerful and pleasant as she was, there was to the grim Doctor a little
fiend playing about his floor and throwing a lurid light on the wall,
as the shadow of this sun-flickering child. It is certain that there was
always a pain and horror mixed with his feelings towards Elsie; he
had to forget himself, as it were, and all that was connected with the
causes why she came to be, before he could love her. Amid his fondness,
when he was caressing her upon his knee, pressing her to his rough
bosom, as he never took the freedom to press Ned, came these hateful
reminiscences, compelling him to set her down, and corrugating his heavy
brows as with a pang of fiercely resented, strongly borne pain. Still,
the child had no doubt contrived to make her way into the great gloomy
cavern of the grim Doctor’s heart, and stole constantly further and
further in, carrying a ray of sunshine in her hand as a taper to light
her way, and illuminate the rude dark pit into which she so fearlessly
went.




CHAPTER V.


Doctor Grim [Endnote: 1] had the English faith in open air and daily
acquaintance with the weather, whatever it might be; and it was his
habit, not only to send the two children to play, for lack of a better
place, in the graveyard, but to take them himself on long rambles, of
which the vicinity of the town afforded a rich variety. It may be that
the Doctor’s excursions had the wider scope, because both he and the
children were objects of curiosity in the town, and very much the
subject of its gossip: so that always, in its streets and lanes, the
people turned to gaze, and came to their windows and to the doors of
shops to see this grim, bearded figure, leading along the beautiful
children each by a hand, with a surly aspect like a bulldog. Their
remarks were possibly not intended to reach the ears of the party, but
certainly were not so cautiously whispered but they occasionally did do
so. The male remarks, indeed, generally died away in the throats that
uttered them; a circumstance that doubtless saved the utterer from some
very rough rejoinder at the hands of the Doctor, who had grown up in the
habit of a very ready and free recourse to his fists, which had a way
of doubling themselves up seemingly of their own accord. But the shrill
feminine voices sometimes sent their observations from window to window
without dread of any such repartee on the part of the subject of them.

“There he goes, the old Spider-witch!” quoth one shrill woman, “with
those two poor babes that he has caught in his cobweb, and is going to
feed upon, poor little tender things! The bloody Englishman makes
free with the dead bodies of our friends and the living ones of our
children!”

“How red his nose is!” quoth another; “he has pulled at the
brandy-bottle pretty stoutly to-day, early as it is! Pretty habits those
children will learn, between the Devil in the shape of a great spider,
and this devilish fellow in his own shape! It were well that our
townsmen tarred and feathered the old British wizard!”

And, as he got further off, two or three little blackguard barefoot boys
shouted shrilly after him,--

                      “Doctor Grim, Doctor Grim,
                       The Devil wove a web for him!”

being a nonsensical couplet that had been made for the grim Doctor’s
benefit, and was hooted in the streets, and under his own windows.
Hearing such remarks and insults, the Doctor would glare round at them
with red eyes, especially if the brandy-bottle had happened to be much
in request that day.

Indeed, poor Doctor Grim had met with a fortune which befalls many a
man with less cause than drew the public attention on this odd humorist;
for, dwelling in a town which was as yet but a larger village, where
everybody knew everybody, and claimed the privilege to know and discuss
their characters, and where there were few topics of public interest to
take off their attention, a very considerable portion of town talk and
criticism fell upon him. The old town had a certain provincialism,
which is less the characteristic of towns in these days, when society
circulates so freely, than then: besides, it was a very rude epoch, just
when the country had come through the war of the Revolution, and while
the surges of that commotion were still seething and swelling, and while
the habits and morals of every individual in the community still
felt its influence; and especially the contest was too recent for
an Englishman to be in very good odor, unless he should cease to be
English, and become more American than the Americans themselves in
repudiating British prejudices or principles, habits, mode of thought,
and everything that distinguishes Britons at home or abroad. As Doctor
Grim did not see fit to do this, and as, moreover, he was a very
doubtful, questionable, morose, unamiable old fellow, not seeking to
make himself liked nor deserving to be so, he was a very unpopular
person in the town where he had chosen to reside. Nobody thought
very well of him; the respectable people had heard of his pipe and
brandy-bottle; the religious community knew that he never showed himself
at church or meeting; so that he had not that very desirable strength
(in a society split up into many sects) of being able to rely upon the
party sympathies of any one of them. The mob hated him with the blind
sentiment that makes one surly cur hostile to another surly cur. He
was the most isolated individual to be found anywhere; and, being so
unsupported, everybody was his enemy.

The town, as it happened, had been pleased to interest itself much in
this matter of Doctor Grim and the two children, insomuch as he never
sent them to school, nor came with them to meeting of any kind, but
was bringing them up ignorant heathen to all appearances, and, as many
believed, was devoting them in some way to the great spider, to which he
had bartered his own soul. It had been mooted among the selectmen, the
fathers of the town, whether their duty did not require them to put the
children under more suitable guardianship; a measure which, it may be,
was chiefly hindered by the consideration that, in that case, the cost
of supporting them would probably be transferred from the grim Doctor’s
shoulders to those of the community. Nevertheless, they did what they
could. Maidenly ladies, prim and starched, in one or two instances
called upon the Doctor--the two children meanwhile being in the
graveyard at play--to give him Christian advice as to the management of
his charge. But, to confess the truth, the Doctor’s reception of these
fair missionaries was not extremely courteous. They were, perhaps,
partly instigated by a natural feminine desire to see the interior of
a place about which they had heard much, with its spiders’ webs, its
strange machines and confusing tools; so, much contrary to crusty
Hannah’s advice, they persisted in entering. Crusty Hannah listened at
the door; and it was curious to see the delighted smile which came
over her dry old visage as the Doctor’s growling, rough voice, after an
abrupt question or two, and a reply in a thin voice on the part of the
maiden ladies, grew louder and louder, till the door opened, and forth
came the benevolent pair in great discomposure. Crusty Hannah averred
that their caps were much rumpled; but this view of the thing was
questioned; though it were certain that the Doctor called after them
downstairs, that, had they been younger and prettier, they would have
fared worse. A male emissary, who was admitted on the supposition of
his being a patient, did fare worse; for (the grim Doctor having been
particularly intimate with the black bottle that afternoon) there
was, about ten minutes after the visitor’s entrance, a sudden fierce
upraising of the Doctor’s growl; then a struggle that shook the house;
and, finally, a terrible rumbling down the stairs, which proved to be
caused by the precipitate descent of the hapless visitor; who, if he
needed no assistance of the grim Doctor on his entrance, certainly would
have been the better for a plaster or two after his departure.

Such were the terms on which Doctor Grimshawe now stood with his adopted
townspeople; and if we consider the dull little town to be full of
exaggerated stories about the Doctor’s oddities, many of them forged,
all retailed in an unfriendly spirit; misconceptions of a character
which, in its best and most candidly interpreted aspects, was
sufficiently amenable to censure; surmises taken for certainties;
superstitions--the genuine hereditary offspring of the frame of public
mind which produced the witchcraft delusion--all fermenting together;
and all this evil and uncharitableness taking the delusive hue of
benevolent interest in two helpless children;--we may partly judge what
was the odium in which the grim Doctor dwelt, and amid which he walked.
The horrid suspicion, too, countenanced by his abode in the corner of
the graveyard, affording the terrible Doctor such facilities for making
free, like a ghoul as he was, with the relics of mortality from the
earliest progenitor to the man killed yesterday by the Doctor’s own
drugs, was not likely to improve his reputation.

He had heretofore contented himself with, at most, occasionally shaking
his stick at his assailants; but this day the black bottle had imparted,
it may be, a little more fire than ordinary to his blood; and besides,
an unlucky urchin happened to take particularly good aim with a mud
ball, which took effect right in the midst of the Doctor’s bushy beard,
and, being of a soft consistency, forthwith became incorporated with
it. At this intolerable provocation the grim Doctor pursued the little
villain, amid a shower of similar missiles from the boy’s playmates,
caught him as he was escaping into a back yard, dragged him into the
middle of the street, and, with his stick, proceeded to give him his
merited chastisement.

But, hereupon, it was astonishing how sudden commotion flashed up like
gunpowder along the street, which, except for the petty shrieks and
laughter of a few children, was just before so quiet. Forth out of every
window in those dusky, mean wooden houses were thrust heads of women
old and young; forth out of every door and other avenue, and as if
they started up from the middle of the street, or out of the unpaved
sidewalks, rushed fierce avenging forms, threatening at full yell to
take vengeance on the grim Doctor; who still, with that fierce dark
face of his,--his muddy beard all flying abroad, dirty and foul, his hat
fallen off, his red eyes flashing fire,--was belaboring the poor hinder
end of the unhappy urchin, paying off upon that one part of the boy’s
frame the whole score which he had to settle with the rude boys of the
town; giving him at once the whole whipping which he had deserved every
day of his life, and not a stroke of which he had yet received. Need
enough there was, no doubt, that somebody should interfere with such
grim and immitigable justice; and certainly the interference was prompt,
and promised to be effectual.

“Down with the old tyrant! Thrash him! Hang him! Tar and feather the
viper’s fry! the wizard! the body-snatcher!” bellowed the mob, one
member of which was raving with delirium tremens, and another was a
madman just escaped from bedlam.

It is unaccountable where all this mischievous, bloodthirsty multitude
came from,--how they were born into that quietness in such a moment
of time! What had they been about heretofore? Were they waiting in
readiness for this crisis, and keeping themselves free from other
employment till it should come to pass? Had they been created for
the moment, or were they fiends sent by Satan in the likeness of a
blackguard population? There you might see the offscourings of the
recently finished war,--old soldiers, rusty, wooden-legged: there,
sailors, ripe for any kind of mischief; there, the drunken population
of a neighboring grogshop, staggering helter-skelter to the scene, and
tumbling over one another at the Doctor’s feet. There came the father
of the punished urchin, who had never shown heretofore any care for his
street-bred progeny, but who now came pale with rage, armed with a pair
of tongs; and with him the mother, flying like a fury, with her cap
awry, and clutching a broomstick, as if she were a witch just alighted.
Up they rushed from cellar doors, and dropped down from chamber windows;
all rushing upon the Doctor, but overturning and thwarting themselves by
their very multitude. For, as good Doctor Grim levelled the first that
came within reach of his fist, two or three of the others tumbled
over him and lay grovelling at his feet; the Doctor meanwhile having
retreated into the angle between two houses. Little Ned, with a valor
which did him the more credit inasmuch as it was exercised in spite of
a good deal of childish trepidation, as his pale face indicated,
brandished his fists by the Doctor’s side; and little Elsie did what any
woman may,--that is, screeched in Doctor Grim’s behalf with full stretch
of lungs. Meanwhile the street boys kept up a shower of mud balls,
many of which hit the Doctor, while the rest were distributed upon his
assailants, heightening their ferocity.

“Seize the old scoundrel! the villain! the Tory! the dastardly
Englishman! Hang him in the web of his own devilish spider,--‘t is long
enough! Tar and feather him! tar and feather him!”

It was certainly one of those crises that show a man how few real
friends he has, and the tendency of mankind to stand aside, at least,
and let a poor devil fight his own troubles, if not assist them in
their attack. Here you might have seen a brother physician of the
grim Doctor’s greatly tickled at his plight: or a decorous, powdered,
ruffle-shirted dignitary, one of the weighty men of the town, standing
at a neighbor’s corner to see what would come of it.

“He is not a respectable man, I understand, this Grimshawe,--a quack,
intemperate, always in these scuffles: let him get out as he may!”

And then comes a deacon of one of the churches, and several
church-members, who, hearing a noise, set out gravely and decorously to
see what was going forward in a Christian community.

“Ah! it is that irreligious and profane Grimshawe, who never goes to
meeting. We wash our hands of him!”

And one of the selectmen said,--

“Surely this common brawler ought not to have the care of these nice,
sweet children; something must be done about it; and when the man is
sober, he must be talked to!”

Alas! it is a hard case with a man who lives upon his own bottom and
responsibility, making himself no allies, sewing himself on to nobody’s
skirts, insulating himself,--hard, when his trouble comes; and so poor
Doctor Grimshawe was like to find it.

He had succeeded by dint of good skill, and some previous practice at
quarter-staff, in keeping his assailants at bay, though not without some
danger on his own part; but their number, their fierceness, and the more
skilled assault of some among them must almost immediately have been
successful, when the Doctor’s part was strengthened by an unexpected
ally. This was a person [Endnote: 2] of tall, slight figure, who,
without lifting his hands to take part in the conflict, thrust himself
before the Doctor, and turned towards the assailants, crying,--

“Christian men, what would you do? Peace,--peace!”

His so well intended exhortation took effect, indeed, in a certain way,
but not precisely as might have been wished: for a blow, aimed at Doctor
Grim, took effect on the head of this man, who seemed to have no sort
of skill or alacrity at defending himself, any more than at making
an assault; for he never lifted his hands, but took the blow as
unresistingly as if it had been kindly meant, and it levelled him
senseless on the ground.

Had the mob really been enraged for any strenuous cause, this incident
would have operated merely as a preliminary whet to stimulate them to
further bloodshed. But, as they were mostly actuated only by a natural
desire for mischief, they were about as well satisfied with what had
been done as if the Doctor himself were the victim. And besides, the
fathers and respectabilities of the town, who had seen this mishap from
afar, now began to put forward, crying out, “Keep the peace! keep the
peace! A riot! a riot!” and other such cries as suited the emergency;
and the crowd vanished more speedily than it had congregated, leaving
the Doctor and the two children alone beside the fallen victim of a
quarrel not his own. Not to dwell too long on this incident, the Doctor,
laying hold of the last of his enemies, after the rest had taken to
their heels, ordered him sternly to stay and help him bear the man, whom
he had helped to murder, to his house.

“It concerns you, friend; for, if he dies, you hang to a dead
certainty!”

And this was done accordingly.




CHAPTER VI.


About an hour thereafter there lay on a couch that had been hastily
prepared in the study a person of singularly impressive presence: a
thin, mild-looking man, with a peculiar look of delicacy and natural
refinement about him, although he scarcely appeared to be technically
and as to worldly position what we call a gentleman; plain in dress and
simple in manner, not giving the idea of remarkable intellectual gifts,
but with a kind of spiritual aspect, fair, clear complexion, gentle
eyes, still somewhat clouded and obscured by the syncope into which a
blow on the head had thrown him. He looked middle-aged, and yet there
was a kind of childlike, simple expression, which, unless you looked
at him with the very purpose of seeing the traces of time in his face,
would make you suppose him much younger.

“And how do you find yourself now, my good fellow?” asked Doctor
Grimshawe, putting forth his hand to grasp that of the stranger, and
giving it a good, warm shake. “None the worse, I should hope?” [Endnote:
1.]

“Not much the worse,” answered the stranger: “not at all, it may be.
There is a pleasant dimness and uncertainty in my mode of being. I am
taken off my feet, as it were, and float in air, with a faint delight in
my sensations. The grossness, the roughness, the too great angularity of
the actual, is removed from me. It is a state that I like well. It may
be, this is the way that the dead feel when they awake in another state
of being, with a dim pleasure, after passing through the brief darkness
of death. It is very pleasant.”

He answered dreamily, and sluggishly, reluctantly, as if there were a
sense of repose in him which he disliked to break by putting any of
his sensations into words. His voice had a remarkable sweetness and
gentleness, though lacking in depth of melody.

“Here, take this,” said the Doctor, who had been preparing some kind of
potion in a teaspoon: it may have been a dose of his famous preparation
of spider’s web, for aught I know, the operation of which was said to
be of a soothing influence, causing a delightful silkiness of sensation;
but I know not whether it was considered good for concussions of the
brain, such as it is to be supposed the present patient had undergone.
“Take this: it will do you good; and here I drink your very good health
in something that will do me good.”

So saying, the grim Doctor quaffed off a tumbler of brandy and water.

“How sweet a contrast,” murmured the stranger, “between that scene of
violence and this great peace that has come over me! It is as when one
can say, I have fought the good fight.”

“You are right,” said the Doctor, with what would have been one of his
deep laughs, but which he modified in consideration of his patient’s
tenderness of brain. “We both of us fought a good fight; for though you
struck no actual stroke, you took them as unflinchingly as ever I saw
a man, and so turned the fortune of the battle better than if you smote
with a sledge-hammer. Two things puzzle me in the affair. First, whence
came my assailants, all in that moment of time, unless Satan let loose
out of the infernal regions a synod of fiends, hoping thus to get a
triumph over me. And secondly, whence came you, my preserver, unless you
are an angel, and dropped down from the sky.”

“No,” answered the stranger, with quiet simplicity. “I was passing
through the street to my little school, when I saw your peril, and felt
it my duty to expostulate with the people.”

“Well,” said the grim Doctor, “come whence you will, you did an angel’s
office for me, and I shall do what an earthly man may to requite it.
There, we will talk no more for the present.”

He hushed up the children, who were already, of their own accord,
walking on tiptoe and whispering, and he himself even went so far as
to refrain from the usual incense of his pipe, having observed that the
stranger, who seemed to be of a very delicate organization, had seemed
sensible of the disagreeable effect on the atmosphere of the room. The
restraint lasted, however, only till (in the course of the day) crusty
Hannah had fitted up a little bedroom on the opposite side of the entry,
to which she and the grim Doctor moved the stranger, who, though tall,
they observed was of no great weight and substance,--the lightest man,
the Doctor averred, for his size, that ever he had handled.

Every possible care was taken of him, and in a day or two he was able
to walk into the study again, where he sat gazing at the sordidness
and unneatness of the apartment, the strange festoons and drapery of
spiders’ webs, the gigantic spider himself, and at the grim Doctor, so
shaggy, grizzly, and uncouth, in the midst of these surroundings, with a
perceptible sense of something very strange in it all. His mild, gentle
regard dwelt too on the two beautiful children, evidently with a sense
of quiet wonder how they should be here, and altogether a sense of
their unfitness; they, meanwhile, stood a little apart, looking at him,
somewhat disturbed and awed, as children usually are, by a sense that
the stranger was not perfectly well, that he had been injured, and so
set apart from the rest of the world.

“Will you come to me, little one?” said he, holding out a delicate hand
to Elsie.

Elsie came to his side without any hesitation, though without any of the
rush that accompanied her advent to those whom she affected. “And you,
my little man,” added the stranger, quietly, and looking to Ned, who
likewise willingly approached, and, shaking him by the offered hand, let
it go again, but continued standing by his side.

“Do you know, my little friends,” said the stranger, “that it is my
business in life to instruct such little people as you?”

“Do they obey you well, sir?” asked Ned, perhaps conscious of a want of
force in the person whom he addressed.

The stranger smiled faintly. “Not too well,” said he. “That has been my
difficulty; for I have moral and religious objections, and also a great
horror, to the use of the rod, and I have not been gifted with a
harsh voice and a stern brow; so that, after a while, my little people
sometimes get the better of me. The present generation of men is too
gross for gentle treatment.”

“You are quite right,” quoth Doctor Grimshawe, who had been observing
this little scene, and trying to make out, from the mutual deportment
of the stranger and the two children, what sort of man this fair, quiet
stranger was, with his gentleness and weakness,--characteristics that
were not attractive to himself, yet in which he acknowledged, as he
saw them here, a certain charm; nor did he know, scarcely, whether to
despise the one in whom he saw them, or to yield to a strange sense of
reverence. So he watched the children, with an indistinct idea of being
guided by them. “You are quite right: the world now--and always before,
as far as I ever heard--requires a great deal of brute force, a great
deal of animal food and brandy in the man that is to make an impression
on it.”

The convalescence of the stranger--he gave his name as
Colcord--proceeded favorably; for the Doctor remarked that, delicate as
his system was, it had a certain purity,--a simple healthfulness that
did not run into disease as stronger constitutions might. It did not
apparently require much to crush down such a being as this,--not much
unkindly breath to blow out the taper of his life,--and yet, if not
absolutely killed, there was a certain aptness to keep alive in him not
readily to be overcome.

No sooner was he in a condition so to do, than he went forth to look
after the little school that he had spoken of, but soon came back,
announcing in a very quiet and undisturbed way that, during his
withdrawal from duty, the scholars had been distributed to other
instructors, and consequently he was without place or occupation
[Endnotes: 2, 3, 4.]

“A hard case,” said the Doctor, flinging a gruff curse at those who had
so readily deserted the poor schoolmaster.

“Not so hard,” replied Colcord. “These little fellows are an unruly set,
born of parents who have led rough lives,--here in battle time, too,
with the spirit of battle in them,--therefore rude and contentious
beyond my power to cope with them. I have been taught, long ago,” he
added, with a peaceful smile, “that my business in life does not lie
with grown-up and consolidated men and women; and so, not to be useless
in my day, and to gain the little that my sustenance requires, I have
thought to deal with children. But even for this I lack force.”

“I dare say,” said the Doctor, with a modified laugh. “Little devils
they are, harder to deal with than men. Well, I am glad of your failure
for one reason, and of your being thrown out of business; because
we shall have the benefit of you the longer. Here is this boy to be
instructed. I have made some attempts myself; but having no art of
instructing, no skill, no temper I suppose, I make but an indifferent
hand at it: and besides I have other business that occupies my thoughts.
Take him in hand, if you like, and the girl for company. No matter
whether you teach her anything, unless you happen to be acquainted with
needlework.”

“I will talk with the children,” said Colcord, “and see if I am
likely to do good with them. The lad, I see, has a singular spirit of
aspiration and pride,--no ungentle pride,--but still hard to cope with.
I will see. The little girl is a most comfortable child.”

“You have read the boy as if you had his heart in your hand,” said
the Doctor, rather surprised. “I could not have done it better myself,
though I have known him all but from the egg.”

Accordingly, the stranger, who had been thrust so providentially into
this odd and insulated little community, abode with them, without more
words being spoken on the subject: for it seemed to all concerned
a natural arrangement, although, on both parts, they were mutually
sensible of something strange in the companionship thus brought about.
To say the truth, it was not easy to imagine two persons apparently less
adapted to each other’s society than the rough, uncouth, animal Doctor,
whose faith was in his own right arm, so full of the old Adam as he was,
so sturdily a hater, so hotly impulsive, so deep, subtle, and crooked,
so obstructed by his animal nature, so given to his pipe and black
bottle, so wrathful and pugnacious and wicked,--and this mild spiritual
creature, so milky, with so unforceful a grasp; and it was singular to
see how they stood apart and eyed each other, each tacitly acknowledging
a certain merit and kind of power, though not well able to appreciate
its value. The grim Doctor’s kindness, however, and gratitude, had
been so thoroughly awakened, that he did not feel the disgust that he
probably otherwise might at what seemed the mawkishness of Colcord’s
character; his want, morally speaking, of bone and muscle; his
fastidiousness of character, the essence of which it seemed to be to
bear no stain upon it; otherwise it must die.

On Colcord’s part there was a good deal of evidence to be detected, by
a nice observer, that he found it difficult to put up with the Doctor’s
coarse peculiarities, whether physical or moral. His animal indulgences
of appetite struck him with wonder and horror; his coarse expressions,
his free indulgence of wrath, his sordid and unclean habits; the dust,
the cobwebs, the monster that dangled from the ceiling; his pipe,
diffusing its fragrance through the house, and showing, by the plainest
and simplest proof, how we all breathe one another’s breath, nice and
proud as we may be, kings and daintiest ladies breathing the air that
has already served to inflate a beggar’s lungs. He shrank, too, from
the rude manhood of the Doctor’s character, with its human warmth,--an
element which he seemed not to possess in his own character. He was
capable only of gentle and mild regard,--that was his warmest affection;
and the warmest, too, that he was capable of exciting in others. So that
he was doomed as much apparently as the Doctor himself to be a lonely
creature, without any very deep companionship in the world, though not
incapable, when he, by some rare chance, met a soul distantly akin, of
holding a certain high spiritual communion. With the children, however,
he succeeded in establishing some good and available relations; his
simple and passionless character coincided with their simplicity, and
their as yet unawakened passions: they appeared to understand him better
than the Doctor ever succeeded in doing. He touched springs and elements
in the nature of both that had never been touched till now, and that
sometimes made a sweet, high music. But this was rarely; and as far as
the general duties of an instructor went, they did not seem to be very
successfully performed. Something was cultivated; the spiritual
germ grew, it might be; but the children, and especially Ned,
were intuitively conscious of a certain want of substance in the
instructor,--a something of earthly bulk; a too etherealness. But his
connection with our story does not lie in any excellence, or lack of
excellence, that he showed as an instructor, and we merely mention these
things as illustrating more or less his characteristics.

The grim Doctor’s curiosity was somewhat piqued by what he could see of
the schoolmaster’s character, and he was desirous of finding out what
sort of a life such a man could have led in a world which he himself had
found so rough a one; through what difficulties he had reached middle
age without absolutely vanishing away in his contact with more positive
substances than himself; how the world had given him a subsistence, if
indeed he recognized anything more dense than fragrance, like a certain
people whom Pliny mentioned in Africa,--a point, in fact, which the
grim Doctor denied, his performance at table being inappreciable, and
confined, at least almost entirely, to a dish of boiled rice, which
crusty Hannah set before him, preparing it, it might be, with a sympathy
of her East Indian part towards him.

Well, Doctor Grimshawe easily got at what seemed to be all of the facts
of Colcord’s life; how that he was a New-Englander, the descendant of an
ancient race of settlers, the last of them; for, once pretty numerous
in their quarter of the country, they seemed to have been dying
out,--exhaling from the earth, and passing to some other region.

“No wonder,” said the Doctor bluffly. “You have been letting slip the
vital principle, if you are a fair specimen of the race. You do not
clothe yourself in substance. Your souls are not coated sufficiently.
Beef and brandy would have saved you. You have exhaled for lack of
them.”

The schoolmaster shook his head, and probably thought his earthly
salvation and sustenance not worth buying at such a cost. The remainder
of his history was not tangible enough to afford a narrative. There
seemed, from what he said, to have always been a certain kind of
refinement in his race, a nicety of conscience, a nicety of habit, which
either was in itself a want of force, or was necessarily connected with
it, and which, the Doctor silently thought, had culminated in the person
before him.

“It was always in us,” continued Colcord, with a certain pride which
people generally feel in their ancestral characteristics, be they good
or evil. “We had a tradition among us of our first emigrant, and the
causes that brought him to the New World; and it was said that he had
suffered so much, before quitting his native shores, so painful had been
his track, that always afterwards on the forest leaves of this land his
foot left a print of blood wherever he trod.” [Endnote: 5.]




CHAPTER VII.


“A print of blood!” said the grim Doctor, breaking his pipe-stem by some
sudden spasm in his gripe of it. “Pooh! the devil take the pipe! A very
strange story that! Pray how was it?” [Endnote: 1.]

“Nay, it is but a very dim legend,” answered the schoolmaster: “although
there are old yellow papers and parchments, I remember, in my father’s
possession, that had some reference to this man, too, though there was
nothing in them about the bloody footprints. But our family legend is,
that this man was of a good race, in the time of Charles the First,
originally Papists, but one of them--the second you, our legend
says--was of a milder, sweeter cast than the rest, who were fierce
and bloody men, of a hard, strong nature; but he partook most of his
mother’s character. This son had been one of the earliest Quakers,
converted by George Fox; and moreover there had been love between him
and a young lady of great beauty and an heiress, whom likewise the
eldest son of the house had designed to make his wife. And these
brothers, cruel men, caught their innocent brother and kept him in
confinement long in his own native home--”

“How?” asked the Doctor. “Why did not he appeal to the laws?”

“Our legend says,” replied the schoolmaster, “only that he was kept in a
chamber that was forgotten.” [Endnote: 2.]

“Very strange that!” quoth the Doctor. “He was sold by his brethren.”

The schoolmaster went on to tell, with much shuddering, how a Jesuit
priest had been mixed up with this wretched business, and there had been
a scheme at once religious and political to wrest the estate and the
lovely lady from the fortunate heir; and how this grim Italian priest
had instigated them to use a certain kind of torture with the poor heir,
and how he had suffered from this; but one night, when they left
him senseless, he contrived to make his escape from that cruel home,
bleeding as he went; and how, by some action of his imagination,--his
sense of the cruelty and hideousness of such treatment at his brethren’s
hands, and in the holy name of his religion,--his foot, which had been
crushed by their cruelty, bled as he went, and that blood had never been
stanched. And thus he had come to America, and after many wanderings,
and much track of blood along rough ways, to New England. [Endnote: 3.]

“And what became of his beloved?” asked the grim Doctor, who was puffing
away at a fresh pipe with a very queer aspect.

“She died in England,” replied the schoolmaster. “And before her death,
by some means or other, they say that she found means to send him a
child, the offspring of their marriage, and from that child our race
descended. And they say, too, that she sent him a key to a coffin, in
which was locked up a great treasure. But we have not the key. But he
never went back to his own country; and being heart-broken, and sick
and weary of the world and its pomps and vanities, he died here, after
suffering much persecution likewise from the Puritans. For his peaceful
religion was accepted nowhere.”

“Of all legends,--all foolish legends,” quoth the Doctor, wrathfully,
with a face of a dark blood-red color, so much was his anger and
contempt excited, “and of all absurd heroes of a legend, I never heard
the like of this! Have you the key?”

“No; nor have I ever heard of it,” answered the schoolmaster.

“But you have some papers?”

“They existed once: perhaps are still recoverable by search,” said the
schoolmaster. “My father knew of them.”

“A foolish legend,” reiterated the Doctor. “It is strange how human
folly strings itself on to human folly, as a story originally false and
foolish grows older.”

He got up and walked about the room, with hasty and irregular strides
and a prodigious swinging of his ragged dressing-gown, which swept away
as many cobwebs as it would take a week to reproduce. After a few turns,
as if to change the subject, the Doctor asked the schoolmaster if he had
any taste for pictures, and drew his attention to the portrait which
has been already mentioned,--the figure in antique sordid garb, with a
halter round his neck, and the expression in his face which the Doctor
and the two children had interpreted so differently. Colcord, who
probably knew nothing about pictures, looked at it at first merely from
the gentle and cool complaisance of his character; but becoming absorbed
in the contemplation, stood long without speaking; until the Doctor,
looking in his face, perceived his eyes were streaming with tears.

“What are you crying about?” said he, gruffly.

“I don’t know,” said the schoolmaster quietly. “But there is something
in this picture that affects me inexpressibly; so that, not being a man
passionate by nature, I have hardly ever been so moved as now!”

“Very foolish,” muttered the Doctor, resuming his strides about the
room. “I am ashamed of a grown man that can cry at a picture, and can’t
tell the reason why.”

After a few more turns he resumed his easy-chair and his tumbler,
and, looking upward, beckoned to his pet spider, which came dangling
downward, great parti-colored monster that he was, and swung about
his master’s head in hideous conference as it seemed; a sight that so
distressed the schoolmaster, or shocked his delicate taste, that he
went out, and called the two children to take a walk with him, with
the purpose of breathing air that was neither infected with spiders nor
graves.

After his departure, Doctor Grimshawe seemed even more disturbed than
during his presence: again he strode about the study; then sat down with
his hands on his knees, looking straight into the fire, as if it imaged
the seething element of his inner man, where burned hot projects, smoke,
heat, blackness, ashes, a smouldering of old thoughts, a blazing up
of new; casting in the gold of his mind, as Aaron did that of the
Israelites, and waiting to see what sort of a thing would come out of
the furnace. The children coming in from their play, he spoke harshly to
them, and eyed little Ned with a sort of savageness, as if he meant to
eat him up, or do some other dreadful deed: and when little Elsie came
with her usual frankness to his knee, he repelled her in such a way that
she shook her little hand at him, saying, “Naughty Doctor Grim, what has
come to you?”

Through all that day, by some subtle means or other, the whole household
knew that something was amiss; and nobody in it was comfortable. It was
like a spell of weather; like the east wind; like an epidemic in the
air, that would not let anything be comfortable or contented,--this
pervading temper of the Doctor. Crusty Hannah knew it in the kitchen:
even those who passed the house must have known it somehow or other, and
have felt a chill, an irritation, an influence on the nerves, as they
passed. The spiders knew it, and acted as they were wont to do in
stormy weather. The schoolmaster, when he returned from his walk, seemed
likewise to know it, and made himself secure and secret, keeping in his
own room, except at dinner, when he ate his rice in silence, without
looking towards the Doctor, and appeared before him no more till
evening, when the grim Doctor summoned him into the study, after sending
the two children to bed.

“Sir,” began the Doctor, “you have spoken of some old documents in your
possession relating to the English descent of your ancestors. I have a
curiosity to see these documents. Where are they?” [Endnote: 4.]

“I have them about my person,” said the schoolmaster; and he produced
from his pocket a bundle of old yellow papers done up in a parchment
cover, tied with a piece of white cord, and presented them to Doctor
Grimshawe, who looked over them with interest. They seemed to consist of
letters, genealogical lists, certified copies of entries in registers,
things which must have been made out by somebody who knew more of
business than this ethereal person in whose possession they now were.
The Doctor looked at them with considerable attention, and at last did
them hastily up in the bundle again, and returned them to the owner.

“Have you any idea what is now the condition of the family to whom these
papers refer?” asked he.

“None whatever,--none for almost a hundred years,” said the
schoolmaster. “About that time ago, I have heard a vague story that one
of my ancestors went to the old country and saw the place. But, you see,
the change of name has effectually covered us from view; and I feel that
our true name is that which my ancestor assumed when he was driven forth
from the home of his fathers, and that I have nothing to do with any
other. I have no views on the estate,--none whatever. I am not so
foolish and dreamy.”

“Very right,” said the Doctor. “Nothing is more foolish than to follow
up such a pursuit as this, against all the vested interests of two
hundred years, which of themselves have built up an impenetrably strong
allegation against you. They harden into stone, in England, these years,
and become indestructible, instead of melting away as they do in this
happy country.”

“It is not a matter of interest with me,” replied the schoolmaster.

“Very right,--very right!” repeated the grim Doctor.

But something was evidently amiss with him this evening. It was
impossible to feel easy and comfortable in contact with him: if you
looked in his face, there was the red, lurid glare of his eyes; meeting
you fiercely and craftily as ever: sometimes he bit his lip and frowned
in an awful manner. Once, he burst out into an awful fit of swearing,
for no good reason, or any reason whatever that he explained, or that
anybody could tell. Again, for no more suitable reason, he uplifted his
stalwart arm, and smote a heavy blow with his fist upon the oak table,
making the tumbler and black bottle leap up, and damaging, one would
think, his own knuckles. Then he rose up, and resumed his strides about
the room. He paused before the portrait before mentioned; then resumed
his heavy, quick, irregular tread, swearing under his breath; and
you would imagine, from what you heard, that all his thoughts and the
movement of his mind were a blasphemy. Then again--but this was only
once--he heaved a deep, ponderous sigh, that seemed to come up in spite
of him, out of his depths, an exhalation of deep suffering, as if some
convulsion had given it a passage to upper air, instead of its being
hidden, as it generally was, by accumulated rubbish of later time heaped
above it.

This latter sound appealed to something within the simple schoolmaster,
who had been witnessing the demeanor of the Doctor, like a being
looking from another sphere into the trouble of the mortal one; a being
incapable of passion, observing the mute, hard struggle of one in its
grasp.

“Friend,” said he at length, “thou hast something on thy mind.”

“Aye,” said the grim Doctor, coming to a stand before his chair. “You
see that? Can you see as well what it is?”

“Some stir and writhe of something in the past that troubles you, as if
you had kept a snake for many years in your bosom, and stupefied it
with brandy, and now it awakes again, and troubles you with bites and
stings.”

“What sort of a man do you think me?” asked the Doctor.

“I cannot tell,” said the schoolmaster. “The sympathies of my nature are
not those that should give me knowledge of such men.”

“Am I, think you,” continued the grim Doctor, “a man capable of great
crime?”

“A great one, if any,” said Colcord; “a great good, likewise, it might
be.”

“What would I be likely to do,” asked Doctor Grim, “supposing I had
a darling purpose, to the accomplishment of which I had given my
soul,--yes, my soul,--my success in life, my days and nights of thought,
my years of time, dwelling upon it, pledging myself to it, until at
last I had grown to love the burden of it, and not to regret my own
degradation? I, a man of strongest will. What would I do, if this were
to be resisted?”

“I do not conceive of the force of will shaping out my ways,” said the
schoolmaster. “I walk gently along and take the path that opens before
me.”

“Ha! ha! ha!” shouted the grim Doctor, with one of his portentous
laughs. “So do we all, in spite of ourselves; and sometimes the path
comes to a sudden ending!” And he resumed his drinking.

The schoolmaster looked at him with wonder, and a kind of shuddering, at
something so unlike himself; but probably he very imperfectly estimated
the forces that were at work within this strange being, and how
dangerous they made him. He imputed it, a great deal, to the brandy,
which he had kept drinking in such inordinate quantities; whereas it is
probable that this had a soothing, emollient effect, as far as it went,
on the Doctor’s emotions; a sort of like to like, that he instinctively
felt to be a remedy, But in truth it was difficult to see these two
human creatures together, without feeling their incompatibility; without
having a sense that one must be hostile to the other. The schoolmaster,
through his fine instincts, doubtless had a sense of this, and sat
gazing at the lurid, wrathful figure of the Doctor, in a sort of trance
and fascination: not able to stir; bewildered by the sight of the great
spider and other surroundings; and this strange, uncouth fiend, who had
always been abhorrent to him,--he had a kind of curiosity in it, waited
to see what would come of it, but felt it to be an unnatural state to
him. And again the grim Doctor came and stood before him, prepared to
make another of those strange utterances with which he had already so
perplexed him.

That night--that midnight--it was rumored through the town that one
of the inhabitants, going home late along the street that led by the
graveyard, saw the grim Doctor standing by the open window of the study
behind the elm tree, in his old dressing-gown, chill as was the night,
and flinging his arms abroad wildly into the darkness, and muttering
like the growling of a tempest, with occasional vociferations that grew
even shrill with passion. The listener, though affrighted, could not
resist an impulse to pause, and attempt overhearing something that might
let him into the secret counsels of this strange wild man, whom the town
held in such awe and antipathy; to learn, perhaps, what was the great
spider, and whether he were summoning the dead out of their graves.
However, he could make nothing out of what he overheard, except it were
fragmentary curses, of a dreadful character, which the Doctor brought up
with might and main out of the depths of his soul, and flung them forth,
burning hot, aimed at what, and why, and to what practical end, it
was impossible to say; but as necessarily as a volcano, in a state of
eruption, sends forth boiling lava, sparkling and scintillating stones,
and a sulphurous atmosphere, indicative of its inward state. [Endnote:
5.]

Dreading lest some one of these ponderous anathemas should alight,
reason or none, on his own head, the man crept away, and whispered the
thing to his cronies, from whom it was communicated to the townspeople
at large, and so became one of many stories circulating with reference
to our grim hero, which, if not true to the fact, had undoubtedly
a degree of appositeness to his character, of which they were the
legitimate flowers and symbols. If the anathemas took no other effect,
they seemed to have produced a very remarkable one on the unfortunate
elm tree, through the naked branches of which the Doctor discharged this
fiendish shot. For, the next spring, when April came, no tender leaves
budded forth, no life awakened there; and never again, on that old elm,
widely as its roots were imbedded among the dead of many years, was
there rustling bough in the summer time, or the elm’s early golden
boughs in September; and after waiting till another spring to give it
a fair chance of reviving, it was cut down and made into coffins, and
burnt on the sexton’s hearth. The general opinion was that the grim
Doctor’s awful profanity had blasted that tree, fostered, as it had
been, on grave-mould of Puritans. In Lancashire they tell of a similar
anathema. It had a very frightful effect, it must be owned, this idea of
a man cherishing emotions in his breast of so horrible a nature that
he could neither tell them to any human being, nor keep them in their
plenitude and intensity within the breast where they had their germ,
and so was forced to fling them forth upon the night, to pollute and put
fear into the atmosphere, and that people should breathe-in somewhat
of horror from an unknown source, and be affected with nightmare, and
dreams in which they were startled at their own wickedness.




CHAPTER VIII.


At the breakfast-table the next morning, however, appeared Doctor
Grimshawe, wearing very much the same aspect of an uncombed, unshorn,
unbrushed, odd sort of a pagan as at other times, and making no
difference in his breakfast, except that he poured a pretty large dose
of brandy into his cup of tea; a thing, however, by no means unexampled
or very unusual in his history. There were also the two children,
fresher than the morning itself, rosy creatures, with newly scrubbed
cheeks, made over again for the new day, though the old one had left no
dust upon them;[Endnote: 1] laughing with one another, flinging their
little jokes about the table, and expecting that the Doctor might, as
was often his wont, set some ponderous old English joke trundling round
among the breakfast cups; eating the corn-cakes which crusty Hannah,
with the aboriginal part of her, had a knack of making in a peculiar and
exquisite fashion. But there was an empty chair at table; one cup, one
little jug of milk, and another of pure water, with no guest to partake
of them.

“Where is the schoolmaster?” said Ned, pausing as he was going to take
his seat.

“Yes, Doctor Grim?” said little Elsie.

“He has overslept himself for once,” quoth Doctor Grim gruffly; “a
strange thing, too, for a man whose victuals and drink are so light as
the schoolmaster’s. The fiend take me if I thought he had mortal mould
enough in him ever to go to sleep at all; though he is but a kind of
dream-stuff in his widest-awake state. Hannah, you bronze jade, call the
schoolmaster to come to breakfast.”

Hannah departed on her errand, and was heard knocking at the door of
the schoolmaster’s chamber several times, till the Doctor shouted to
her wrathfully to cease her clatter and open the door at once, which she
appeared to do, and speedily came back.

“He no there, massa. Schoolmaster melted away!”

“Vanished like a bubble!” quoth the Doctor.

“The great spider caught him like a fly,” quoth crusty Hannah, chuckling
with a sense of mischief that seemed very pleasant to her strange
combination.

“He has taken a morning walk,” said little Ned; “don’t you think so,
Doctor Grim?”

“Yes,” said the grim Doctor. “Go on with your breakfast, little monkey;
the walk may be a long one, or he is so slight a weight that the wind
may blow him overboard.”

A very long walk it proved; or it might be that some wind, whether evil
or good, had blown him, as the Doctor suggested, into parts unknown;
for, from that time forth, the Yankee schoolmaster returned no more. It
was a singular disappearance.

The bed did not appear to have been slept in; there was a bundle, in a
clean handkerchief, containing two shirts, two pocket handkerchiefs, two
pairs of cotton socks, a Testament, and that was all. Had he intended to
go away, why did he not take this little luggage in his hand, being all
he had, and of a kind not easily dispensed with? The Doctor made small
question about it, however; he had seemed surprised, at first, yet gave
certainly no energetic token of it; and when Ned, who began to have
notions of things, proposed to advertise him in the newspapers, or send
the town crier round, the Doctor ridiculed the idea unmercifully.

“Lost, a lank Yankee schoolmaster,” quoth he, uplifting his voice after
the manner of the town crier; “supposed to have been blown out of Doctor
Grim’s window, or perhaps have ridden off astride of a humble-bee.”

“It is not pretty to laugh in that way, Doctor Grim,” said little Elsie,
looking into his face, with a grave shake of her head.

“And why not, you saucy little witch?” said the Doctor.

“It is not the way to laugh, Doctor Grim,” persisted the child, but
either could not or would not assign any reason for her disapprobation,
although what she said appeared to produce a noticeable effect on Doctor
Grimshawe, who lapsed into a rough, harsh manner, that seemed to satisfy
Elsie better. Crusty Hannah, meanwhile, seemed to dance about the house
with a certain singular alacrity, a wonderful friskiness, indeed, as
if the diabolical result of the mixture in her nature was particularly
pleased with something; so she went, with queer gesticulations,
crossings, contortions, friskings, evidently in a very mirthful state;
until, being asked by her master what was the matter, she replied,
“Massa, me know what became of the schoolmaster. Great spider catch in
his web and eat him!”

Whether that was the mode of his disappearance, or some other,
certainly the schoolmaster was gone; and the children were left in great
bewilderment at the sudden vacancy in his place. They had not contracted
a very yearning affection for him, and yet his impression had been
individual and real, and they felt that something was gone out of their
lives, now that he was no longer there. Something strange in their
circumstances made itself felt by them; they were more sensible of the
grim Doctor’s uncouthness, his strange, reprehensible habits, his dark,
mysterious life,--in looking at these things, and the spiders, and the
graveyard, and their insulation from the world, through the crystal
medium of this stranger’s character. In remembering him in connection
with these things, a certain seemly beauty in him showed strikingly the
unfitness, the sombre and tarnished color, the outréness, of the rest
of their lot. Little Elsie perhaps felt the loss of him more than her
playmate, although both had been interested by him. But now things
returned pretty much to their old fashion; although, as is inevitably
the case, whenever persons or things have been taken suddenly or
unaccountably out of our sphere, without telling us whither and why
they have disappeared, the children could not, for a long while, bring
themselves to feel that he had really gone. Perhaps, in imitation of
the custom in that old English house, of which the Doctor had told them,
little Elsie insisted that his place should still be kept at the table;
and so, whenever crusty Hannah neglected to do so, she herself would
fetch a plate, and a little pitcher of water, and set it beside a vacant
chair; and sometimes, so like a shadow had he been, this pale, slender
creature, it almost might have been thought that he was sitting with
them. But crusty Hannah shook her head, and grinned. “The spider know
where he is. We never see him more!”

His abode in the house had been of only two or three weeks; and in the
natural course of things, had he come and gone in an ordinary way, his
recollection would have grown dim and faded out in two or three weeks
more; but the speculations, the expectations, the watchings for his
reappearance, served to cut and grave the recollection of him into the
children’s hearts, so that it remained a life-long thing with them,--a
sense that he was something that had been lost out of their life too
soon, and that was bound, sooner or later, to reappear, and finish what
business he had with them. Sometimes they prattled around the Doctor’s
chair about him, and they could perceive sometimes that he appeared
to be listening, and would chime in with some remark; but he never
expressed either wonder or regret; only telling Ned, once, that he had
no reason to be sorry for his disappearance.

“Why, Doctor Grim?” asked the boy.

The Doctor mused, and smoked his pipe, as if he himself were thinking
why, and at last he answered, “He was a dangerous fellow, my old boy.”

“Why?” said Ned again.

“He would have taken the beef out of you,” said the Doctor.

I know not how long it was before any other visitor (except such as
brought their shattered constitutions there in hopes that the Doctor
would make the worn-out machinery as good as new) came to the lonely
little household on the corner of the graveyard. The intercourse between
themselves and the rest of the town remained as scanty as ever. Still,
the grim, shaggy Doctor was seen setting doggedly forth, in all seasons
and all weathers, at a certain hour of the day, with the two children,
going for long walks on the sea-shore, or into the country, miles
away, and coming back, hours afterwards, with plants and herbs that had
perhaps virtue in them, or flowers that had certainly beauty; even, in
their season, the fragrant magnolias, leaving a trail of fragrance after
them, that grow only in spots, the seeds having been apparently
dropped by some happy accident when those proper to the climate were
distributed. Shells there were, also, in the baskets that they carried,
minerals, rare things, that a magic touch seemed to have created out
of the rude and common things that others find in a homely and ordinary
region. The boy was growing tall, and had got out of the merely
infantile age; agile he was, bright, but still with a remarkable
thoughtfulness, or gravity, or I know not what to call it; but it was a
shadow, no doubt, falling upon him from something sombre in his warp of
life, which the impressibility of his age and nature so far acknowledged
as to be a little pale and grave, without positive unhappiness; and when
a playful moment came, as they often did to these two healthy children,
it seemed all a mistake that you had ever thought either of them too
grave for their age. But little Elsie was still the merrier. They were
still children, although they quarrelled seldomer than of yore, and
kissed seldomer, and had ceased altogether to complain of one another
to the Doctor; perhaps the time when Nature saw these bickerings to be
necessary to the growth of some of their faculties was nearly gone. When
they did have a quarrel, the boy stood upon his dignity, and visited
Elsie with a whole day, sometimes, of silent and stately displeasure,
which she was accustomed to bear, sometimes with an assumption of cold
indifference, sometimes with liveliness, mirth in double quantity,
laughter almost as good as real,--little arts which showed themselves
in her as naturally as the gift of tears and smiles. In fact, having
no advantage of female intercourse, she could not well have learnt them
unless from crusty Hannah, who was such an anomaly of a creature, with
all her mixtures of race, that she struck you as having lost all sex as
one result of it. Yet this little girl was truly feminine, and had all
the manners and pre-eminently uncriticisable tenets proper to women at
her early age.

She had made respectable advancement in study; that is, she had taught
herself to write, with even greater mechanical facility than Ned; and
other knowledge had fallen upon her, as it were, by a reflected light
from him; or, to use another simile, had been spattered upon her by
the full stream which the Doctor poured into the vessel of the boy’s
intellect. So that she had even some knowledge of the rudiments of
Latin, and geometry, and algebra; inaccurate enough, but yet with such a
briskness that she was sometimes able to assist Ned in studies in which
he was far more deeply grounded than herself. All this, however, was
more by sympathy than by any natural taste for such things; being
kindly, and sympathetic, and impressible, she took the color of what was
nearest to her, and especially when it came from a beloved object, so
that it was difficult to discover that it was not really one of her
native tastes. The only thing, perhaps, altogether suited to her
idiosyncrasy (because it was truly feminine, calculated for dainty
fingers, and a nice little subtlety) was that kind of embroidery,
twisting, needle-work, on textile fabric, which, as we have before said,
she learnt from crusty Hannah, and which was emblematic perhaps of that
creature’s strange mixture of races.

Elsie seemed not only to have caught this art in its original spirit,
but to have improved upon it, creating strange, fanciful, and graceful
devices, which grew beneath her finger as naturally as the variegated
hues grow in a flower as it opens; so that the homeliest material
assumed a grace and strangeness as she wove it, whether it were grass,
twigs, shells, or what not. Never was anything seen, that so combined
a wild, barbarian freedom with cultivated grace; and the grim Doctor
himself, little open to the impressions of the beautiful, used to
hold some of her productions in his hand, gazing at them with deep
intentness, and at last, perhaps, breaking out into one of his deep
roars of laughter; for it seemed to suggest thoughts to him that the
children could not penetrate. This one feature of strangeness and wild
faculty in the otherwise sweet and natural and homely character of Elsie
had a singular effect; it was like a wreath of wild-flowers in her hair,
like something that set her a little way apart from the rest of the
world, and had an even more striking effect than if she were altogether
strange.

Thus were the little family going on; the Doctor, I regret to say,
growing more morose, self-involved, and unattainable since the
disappearance of the schoolmaster than before; more given up to his one
plaything, the great spider; less frequently even than before coming
out of the grim seclusion of his moodiness, to play with the children,
though they would often be sensible of his fierce eyes fixed upon them,
and start and feel incommoded by the intensity of his regard;--thus
things were going on, when one day there was really again a visitor,
and not a dilapidated patient, to the grim Doctor’s study. Crusty
Hannah brought up his name as Mr. Hammond, and the Doctor--filling his
everlasting pipe, meanwhile, and ordering Hannah to give him a coal
(perhaps this was the circumstance that made people say he had imps to
bring him coals from Tophet)--ordered him to be shown up. [Endnote: 2.]

A fresh-colored, rather young man [Endnote: 3] entered the study, a
person of rather cold and ungraceful manners, yet genial-looking enough;
at least, not repulsive. He was dressed in rather a rough, serviceable
travelling-dress, and except for a nicely brushed hat, and unmistakably
white linen, was rather careless in attire. You would have thought
twice, perhaps, before deciding him to be a gentleman, but finally
would have decided that he was; one great token being, that the singular
aspect of the room into which he was ushered, the spider festoonery, and
other strange accompaniments, the grim aspect of the Doctor himself,
and the beauty and intelligence of his two companions, and even that
horrific weaver, the great dangling spider,--neither one nor all of
these called any expression of surprise to the stranger’s face.

“Your name is Hammond?” begins the Doctor, with his usual sparseness of
ornamental courtesy. [Endnote: 4.]

The stranger bowed.

“An Englishman, I perceive,” continued the Doctor, but nowise intimating
that the fact of being a countryman was any recommendation in his eyes.

“Yes, an Englishman,” replied Hammond; “a briefless barrister, [Endnote:
5] in fact, of Lincoln’s Inn, who, having little or nothing to detain
him at home, has come to spend a few idle months in seeing the new
republic which has been made out of English substance.”

“And what,” continued Doctor Grim, not a whit relaxing the repulsiveness
of his manner, and scowling askance at the stranger,--“what may have
drawn on me the good fortune of being compelled to make my time idle,
because yours is so?”

The stranger’s cheek flushed a little; but he smiled to himself, as if
saying that here was a grim, rude kind of humorist, who had lost the
sense of his own peculiarity, and had no idea that he was rude at all.
“I came to America, as I told you,” said he, “chiefly because I was
idle, and wanted to turn my enforced idleness to what profit I could, in
the way of seeing men, manners, governments, and problems, which I hope
to have no time to study by and by. But I also had an errand intrusted
to me, and of a singular nature; and making inquiry in this little town
(where my mission must be performed, if at all), I have been directed
to you, by your townspeople, as to a person not unlikely to be able to
assist me in it.”

“My townspeople, since you choose to call them so,” answered the grim
Doctor, “ought to know, by this time, that I am not the sort of man
likely to assist any person, in any way.”

“Yet this is so singular an affair,” said the stranger, still with mild
courtesy, “that at least it may excite your curiosity. I have come here
to find a grave.”

“To find a grave!” said Doctor Grim, giving way to a grim sense of
humor, and relaxing just enough to let out a joke, the tameness of which
was a little redeemed, to his taste, by its grimness. “I might help you
there, to be sure, since it is all in the way of business. Like others
of my profession, I have helped many people to find their graves, no
doubt, and shall be happy to do the same for you. You have hit upon the
one thing in which my services are ready.”

“I thank you, my dear sir,” said the young stranger, having tact enough
to laugh at Dr. Grim’s joke, and thereby mollifying him a little; “but
as far as I am personally concerned, I prefer to wait a while before
making the discovery of that little spot in Mother Earth which I am
destined to occupy. It is a grave which has been occupied as such for
at least a century and a half which I am in quest of; and it is as an
antiquarian, a genealogist, a person who has had dealings with the
dead of long ago, not as a professional man engaged in adding to their
number, that I ask your aid.”

“Ah, ahah!” said the Doctor, laying down his pipe, and looking earnestly
at the stranger; not kindly nor genially, but rather with a lurid glance
of suspicion out of those red eyes of his, but no longer with a desire
to escape an intruder; rather as one who meant to clutch him. “Explain
your meaning, sir, at once.”

“Then here it is,” said Mr. Hammond. “There is an old English family,
one of the members of which, very long ago, emigrated to this part of
America, then a wilderness, and long afterwards a British colony. He was
on ill terms with his family. There is reason to believe that documents,
deeds, titular proofs, or some other thing valuable to the family,
were buried in the grave of this emigrant; and there have been various
attempts, within a century, to find this grave, and if possible some
living descendant of the man, or both, under the idea that either of
these cases might influence the disputed descent of the property, and
enable the family to prove its claims to an ancient title. Now, rather
as a matter of curiosity, than with any real hope of success,--and being
slightly connected with the family,--I have taken what seems to myself a
wild-goose chase; making it merely incidental, you well understand, not
by any means the main purpose of my voyage to America.”

“What is the name of this family?” asked the Doctor, abruptly.

“The man whose grave I seek,” said the stranger, “lived and died, in
this country, under the assumed name of Colcord.”

“How do you expect to succeed in this ridiculous quest?” asked the
Doctor, “and what marks, signs, directions, have you to guide your
search? And moreover, how have you come to any knowledge whatever about
the matter, even that the emigrant ever assumed this name of Colcord,
and that he was buried anywhere, and that his place of burial, after
more than a century, is of the slightest importance?”

“All this was ascertained by a messenger on a similar errand with my
own, only undertaken nearly a century ago, and more in earnest than I
can pretend to be,” replied the Englishman. “At that period, however,
there was probably a desire to find nothing that might take the
hereditary possessions of the family out of the branch which still
held them; and there is strong reason to suspect that the information
acquired was purposely kept secret by the person in England into whose
hands it came. The thing is differently situated now; the possessor of
the estate is recently dead; and the discovery of an American heir would
not be unacceptable to many. At all events, any knowledge gained here
would throw light on a somewhat doubtful matter.”

“Where, as nearly as you can judge,” said the Doctor, after a turn or
two through the study, “was this man buried?”

“He spent the last years of his life, certainly, in this town,” said
Hammond, “and may be found, if at all, among the dead of that period.”

“And they--their miserable dust, at least, which is all that still
exists of them--were buried in the graveyard under these windows,” said
the Doctor. “What marks, I say,--for you might as well seek a vanished
wave of the sea, as a grave that surged upward so long ago.”

“On the gravestone,” said Hammond, “a slate one, there was rudely
sculptured the impress of a foot. What it signifies I cannot conjecture,
except it had some reference to a certain legend of a bloody footstep,
which is currently told, and some token of which yet remains on one of
the thresholds of the ancient mansion-house.”

Ned and Elsie had withdrawn themselves from the immediate vicinity of
the fireside, and were playing at fox and geese in a corner near the
window. But little Elsie, having very quick ears, and a faculty of
attending to more affairs than one, now called out, “Doctor Grim, Ned
and I know where that gravestone is.”

“Hush, Elsie,” whispered Ned, earnestly.

“Come forward here, both of you,” said Doctor Grimshawe.




CHAPTER IX.


The two children approached, and stood before the Doctor and his guest,
the latter of whom had not hitherto taken particular notice of them. He
now looked from one to the other, with the pleasant, genial expression
of a person gifted with a natural liking for children, and the
freemasonry requisite to bring him acquainted with them; and it lighted
up his face with a pleasant surprise to see two such beautiful specimens
of boyhood and girlhood in this dismal, spider-haunted house, and under
the guardianship of such a savage lout as the grim Doctor. He seemed
particularly struck by the intelligence and sensibility of Ned’s face,
and met his eyes with a glance that Ned long afterwards remembered; but
yet he seemed quite as much interested by Elsie, and gazed at her face
with a perplexed, inquiring glance.

“These are fine children,” said he. “May I ask if they are your
own?--Pardon me if I ask amiss,” added he, seeing a frown on the
Doctor’s brow.

“Ask nothing about the brats,” replied he grimly. “Thank Heaven, they
are not my children; so your question is answered.”

“I again ask pardon,” said Mr. Hammond. “I am fond of children; and the
boy has a singularly fine countenance; not in the least English.
The true American face, no doubt. As to this sweet little girl, she
impresses me with a vague resemblance to some person I have seen. Hers I
should deem an English face.”

“These children are not our topic,” said the grim Doctor, with gruff
impatience. “If they are to be so, our conversation is ended. Ned, what
do you know of this gravestone with the bloody foot on it?”

“It is not a bloody foot, Doctor Grim,” said Ned, “and I am not sure
that it is a foot at all; only Elsie and I chose to fancy so, because
of a story that we used to play at. But we were children then. The
gravestone lies on the ground, within a little bit of a walk of our
door; but this snow has covered it all over; else we might go out and
see it.”

“We will go out at any rate,” said the Doctor, “and if the Englishman
chooses to come to America, he must take our snows as he finds them.
Take your shovel, Ned, and if necessary we will uncover the gravestone.”

They accordingly muffled themselves in their warmest, and plunged forth
through a back door into Ned and Elsie’s playground, as the grim Doctor
was wont to call it. The snow, except in one spot close at hand, lay
deep, like cold oblivion, over the surging graves, and piled itself in
drifted heaps against every stone that raised itself above the level;
it filled enviously the letters of the inscriptions, enveloping all the
dead in one great winding-sheet, whiter and colder than those which they
had individually worn. The dreary space was pathless; not a footstep
had tracked through the heavy snow; for it must be warm affection indeed
that could so melt this wintry impression as to penetrate through the
snow and frozen earth, and establish any warm thrills with the dead
beneath: daisies, grass, genial earth, these allow of the magnetism of
such sentiments; but winter sends them shivering back to the baffled
heart.

“Well, Ned,” said the Doctor, impatiently.

Ned looked about him somewhat bewildered, and then pointed to a spot
within not more than ten paces of the threshold which they had just
crossed; and there appeared, not a gravestone, but a new grave (if
any grave could be called new in that often-dug soil, made up of old
mortality), an open hole, with the freshly-dug earth piled up beside it.
A little snow (for there had been a gust or two since morning) appeared,
as they peeped over the edge, to have fallen into it; but not enough to
prevent a coffin from finding fit room and accommodation in it. But it
was evident that the grave had been dug that very day.

“The headstone, with the foot on it, was just here,” said Ned, in much
perplexity, “and, as far as I can judge, the old sunken grave exactly
marked out the space of this new one.” [Endnote: 1.]

“It is a shame,” said Elsie, much shocked at the indecorum, “that the
new person should be thrust in here; for the old one was a friend of
ours.”

“But what has become of the headstone!” exclaimed the young English
stranger.

During their perplexity, a person had approached the group, wading
through the snow from the gateway giving entrance from the street; a
gaunt figure, with stooping shoulders, over one of which was a spade and
some other tool fit for delving in the earth; and in his face there was
the sort of keen, humorous twinkle that grave-diggers somehow seem
to get, as if the dolorous character of their business necessitated
something unlike itself by an inevitable reaction.

“Well, Doctor,” said he, with a shrewd wink in his face, “are you
looking for one of your patients? The man who is to be put to bed here
was never caught in your spider’s web.”

“No,” said Doctor Grimshawe; “when my patients have done with me, I
leave them to you and the old Nick, and never trouble myself about them
more. What I want to know is, why you have taken upon you to steal a
man’s grave, after he has had immemorial possession of it. By what right
have you dug up this bed, undoing the work of a predecessor of yours,
who has long since slept in one of his own furrows?”

“Why, Doctor,” said the grave-digger, looking quietly into the cavernous
pit which he had hollowed, “it is against common sense that a dead man
should think to keep a grave to himself longer than till you can take up
his substance in a shovel. It would be a strange thing enough, if,
when living families are turned out of their homes twice or thrice in a
generation, (as they are likely to be in our new government,) a dead
man should think he must sleep in one spot till the day of judgment. No;
turn about, I say, to these old fellows. As long as they can decently be
called dead men, I let them lie; when they are nothing but dust, I just
take leave to stir them on occasion. This is the way we do things under
the republic, whatever your customs be in the old country.”

“Matters are very much the same in any old English churchyard,” said
the English stranger. “But, my good friend, I have come three thousand
miles, partly to find this grave, and am a little disappointed to find
my labor lost.”

“Ah! and you are the man my father was looking for,” said the
grave-digger, nodding his head at Mr. Hammond. “My father, who was a
grave-digger afore me, died four and thirty years ago, when we were
under the King; and says he, ‘Ebenezer, do not you turn up a sod in this
spot, till you have turned up every other in the ground.’ And I have
always obeyed him.”

“And what was the reason of such a singular prohibition?” asked Hammond.

“My father knew,” said the grave-digger, “and he told me the reason too;
but since we are under the republic, we have given up remembering those
old-world legends, as we used to. The newspapers keep us from talking in
the chimney-corner; and so things go out of our minds. An old man, with
his stories of what he has seen, and what his great-grandfather saw
before him, is of little account since newspapers came up. Stop--I
remember--no, I forget,--it was something about the grave holding a
witness, who had been sought before and might be again.”

“And that is all you know about it?” said Hammond.

“All,--every mite,” said the old grave-digger. “But my father knew, and
would have been glad to tell you the whole story. There was a great
deal of wisdom and knowledge, about graves especially, buried out yonder
where my old father was put away, before the Stamp Act was thought of.
But it is no great matter, I suppose. People don’t care about old graves
in these times. They just live, and put the dead out of sight and out of
mind.”

“Well; but what have you done with the headstone?” said the Doctor. “You
can’t have eaten it up.”

“No, no, Doctor,” said the grave-digger, laughing; “it would crack
better teeth than mine, old and crumbly as it is. And yet I meant to do
something with it that is akin to eating; for my oven needs a new floor,
and I thought to take this stone, which would stand the fire well. But
here,” continued he, scraping away the snow with his shovel, a task in
which little Ned gave his assistance,--“here is the headstone, just as I
have always seen it, and as my father saw it before me.”

The ancient memorial, being cleared of snow, proved to be a slab of
freestone, with some rude traces of carving in bas-relief around the
border, now much effaced, and an impression, which seemed to be as much
like a human foot as anything else, sunk into the slab; but this device
was wrought in a much more clumsy way than the ornamented border, and
evidently by an unskilful hand. Beneath was an inscription, over which
the hard, flat lichens had grown, and done their best to obliterate it,
although the following words might be written [Endnote: 2] or guessed:--

“Here lyeth the mortal part of Thomas Colcord, an upright man, of
tender and devout soul, who departed this troublous life September ye
nineteenth, 1667, aged 57 years and nine months. Happier in his death
than in his lifetime. Let his bones be.”

The name, Colcord, was somewhat defaced; it was impossible, in the
general disintegration of the stone, to tell whether wantonly, or with
a purpose of altering and correcting some error in the spelling, or, as
occurred to Hammond, to change the name entirely.

“This is very unsatisfactory,” said Hammond, “but very curious, too. But
this certainly is the impress of what was meant for a human foot, and
coincides strangely with the legend of the Bloody Footstep,--the mark of
the foot that trod in the blessed King Charles’s blood.”

“For that matter,” said the grave-digger, “it comes into my mind that my
father used to call it the stamp of Satan’s foot, because he claimed
the dead man for his own. It is plain to see that there was a deep deft
between two of the toes.”

“There are two ways of telling that legend,” remarked the Doctor. “But
did you find nothing in the grave, Hewen?”

“O, yes,--a bone or two,--as much as could be expected after above a
hundred years,” said the grave-digger. “I tossed them aside; and if you
are curious about them, you will find them when the snow melts. That was
all; and it would have been unreasonable in old Colcord--especially in
these republican times--to have wanted to keep his grave any longer,
when there was so little of him left.”

“I must drop the matter here, then,” said Hammond, with a sigh. “Here,
my friend, is a trifle for your trouble.”

“No trouble,” said the grave-digger, “and in these republican times we
can’t take anything for nothing, because it won’t do for a poor man to
take off his hat and say thank you.”

Nevertheless, he did take the silver, and winked a sort of
acknowledgment.

The Doctor, with unwonted hospitality, invited the English stranger to
dine in his house; and though there was no pretence of cordiality in
the invitation, Mr. Hammond accepted it, being probably influenced by
curiosity to make out some definite idea of the strange household in
which he found himself. Doctor Grimshawe having taken it upon him to
be host,--for, up to this time, the stranger stood upon his own
responsibility, and, having voluntarily presented himself to the Doctor,
had only himself to thank for any scant courtesy he might meet,--but
now the grim Doctor became genial after his own fashion. At dinner he
produced a bottle of port, which made the young Englishman almost
fancy himself on the other side of the water; and he entered into a
conversation, which I fancy was the chief object which the grim Doctor
had in view in showing himself in so amiable a light, [Endnote: 3] for
in the course of it the stranger was insensibly led to disclose many
things, as it were of his own accord, relating to the part of England
whence he came, and especially to the estate and family which have been
before mentioned,--the present state of that family, together with other
things that he seemed to himself to pour out naturally,--for, at last,
he drew himself up, and attempted an excuse.

“Your good wine,” said he, “or the unexpected accident of meeting a
countryman, has made me unusually talkative, and on subjects, I fear,
which have not a particular interest for you.”

“I have not quite succeeded in shaking off my country, as you see,”
 said Doctor Grimshawe, “though I neither expect nor wish ever to see it
again.”

There was something rather ungracious in the grim Doctor’s response, and
as they now adjourned to his study, and the Doctor betook himself to
his pipe and tumbler, the young Englishman sought to increase his
acquaintance with the two children, both of whom showed themselves
graciously inclined towards him; more warmly so than they had been to
the schoolmaster, as he was the only other guest whom they had ever met.

“Would you like to see England, my little fellow?” he inquired of Ned.

“Oh, very much! more than anything else in the world,” replied the boy,
his eyes gleaming and his cheeks flushing with the earnestness of
his response; for, indeed, the question stirred up all the dreams and
reveries which the child had cherished, far back into the dim regions
of his memory. After what the Doctor had told him of his origin, he had
never felt any home feeling here; it seemed to him that he was wandering
Ned, whom the wind had blown from afar. Somehow or other, from many
circumstances which he put together and seethed in his own childish
imagination, it seemed to him that he was to go back to that far old
country, and there wander among the green, ivy-grown, venerable scenes;
the older he grew, the more his mind took depth, the stronger was this
fancy in him; though even to Elsie he had scarcely breathed it.

“So strong a desire,” said the stranger, smiling at his earnestness,
“will be sure to work out its own accomplishment. I shall meet you in
England, my young friend, one day or another. And you, my little girl,
are you as anxious to see England as your brother?”

“Ned is not my brother,” said little Elsie.

The Doctor here interposed some remark on a different subject; for it
was observable that he never liked to have the conversation turn on
these children, their parentage, or relations to each other or himself.

The children were sent to bed; and the young Englishman, finding the
conversation lag, and his host becoming gruffer and less communicative
than he thought quite courteous, retired. But before he went, however,
he could not refrain from making a remark on the gigantic spider, which
was swinging like a pendulum above the Doctor’s head.

“What a singular pet!” said he; for the nervous part of him had latterly
been getting uppermost, so that it disturbed him; in fact, the
spider above and the grim man below equally disturbed him. “Are you a
naturalist? Have you noted his habits?”

“Yes,” said the Doctor, “I have learned from his web how to weave a
plot, and how to catch my victim and devour him!”

“Thank God,” said the Englishman, as he issued forth into the cold gray
night, “I have escaped the grim fellow’s web, at all events. How strange
a group,--those two sweet children, that grim old man!”

As regards this matter of the ancient grave, it remains to be recorded,
that, when the snow melted, little Ned and Elsie went to look at the
spot, where, by this time, there was a little hillock with the brown
sods laid duly upon it, which the coming spring would make green. By
the side of it they saw, with more curiosity than repugnance, a few
fragments of crumbly bones, which they plausibly conjectured to have
appertained to some part of the framework of the ancient Colcord,
wherewith he had walked through the troublous life of which his
gravestone spoke. And little Elsie, whose eyes were very sharp, and her
observant qualities of the quickest, found something which Ned at first
pronounced to be only a bit of old iron, incrusted with earth; but Elsie
persisted to knock off some of the earth that seemed to have incrusted
it, and discovered a key. The children ran with their prize to the grim
Doctor, who took it between his thumb and finger, turned it over and
over, and then proceeded to rub it with a chemical substance which soon
made it bright. It proved to be a silver key, of antique and curious
workmanship.

“Perhaps this is what Mr. Hammond was in search of,” said Ned. “What a
pity he is gone! Perhaps we can send it after him.”

“Nonsense,” said the gruff Doctor.

And attaching the key to a chain, which he took from a drawer, and which
seemed to be gold, he hung it round Ned’s neck.

“When you find a lock for this key,” said he, “open it, and consider
yourself heir of whatever treasure is revealed there!”

Ned continued that sad, fatal habit of growing out of childhood, as boys
will, until he was now about ten years old, and little Elsie as much as
six or seven. He looked healthy, but pale; something there was in the
character and influences of his life that made him look as if he were
growing up in a shadow, with less sunshine than he needed for a robust
and exuberant development, though enough to make his intellectual growth
tend towards a little luxuriance, in some directions. He was likely to
turn out a fanciful, perhaps a poetic youth; young as he was, there had
been already discoveries, on the grim Doctor’s part, of certain blotted
and clumsily scrawled scraps of paper, the chirography on which was
arrayed in marshalled lines of unequal length, and each commanded by a
capital letter and marching on from six to ten lame feet. Doctor Grim
inspected these things curiously, and to say the truth most scornfully,
before he took them to light his pipe withal; but they told him little
as regarded this boy’s internal state, being mere echoes, and very
lugubrious ones, of poetic strains that were floating about in the
atmosphere of that day, long before any now remembered bard had begun
to sing. But there were the rudiments of a poetic and imaginative mind
within the boy, if its subsequent culture should be such as the growth
of that delicate flower requires; a brooding habit taking outward things
into itself and imbuing them with its own essence until, after they had
lain there awhile, they assumed a relation both to truth and to himself,
and became mediums to affect other minds with the magnetism of his own.
He lived far too much an inward life for healthfulness, at his age; the
peculiarity of his situation, a child of mystery, with certain reaches
and vistas that seemed to promise a bright solution of his mystery,
keeping his imagination always awake and strong. That castle in the
air,--so much more vivid than other castles, because it had perhaps
a real substance of ancient, ivy-grown, hewn stone somewhere,--that
visionary hall in England, with its surrounding woods and fine lawns,
and the beckoning shadows at the ancient windows, and that fearful
threshold, with the blood still glistening on it,--he dwelt and wandered
so much there, that he had no real life in the sombre house on the
corner of the graveyard; except that the loneliness of the latter, and
the grim Doctor with his grotesque surroundings, and then the great ugly
spider, and that odd, inhuman mixture of crusty Hannah, all served to
remove him out of the influences of common life. Little Elsie was all
that he had to keep life real, and substantial; and she, a child so much
younger than he, was influenced by the same circumstances, and still
more by himself, so that, as far as he could impart himself to her,
he led her hand in hand through the same dream-scenery amid which he
strayed himself. They knew not another child in town; the grim Doctor
was their only friend. As for Ned, this seclusion had its customary and
normal effect upon him; it had made him think ridiculously high of his
own gifts, powers, attainments, and at the same time doubt whether they
would pass with those of others; it made him despise all flesh, as if he
were of a superior race, and yet have an idle and weak fear of coming in
contact with them, from a dread of his incompetency to cope with them;
so he at once depreciated and exalted, to an absurd degree, both himself
and others.

“Ned,” said the Doctor to him one day, in his gruffest tone, “you are
not turning out to be the boy I looked for and meant to make. I have
given you sturdy English instruction, and solidly grounded you in
matters that the poor superficial people and time merely skim over; I
looked to see the rudiments of a man in you, by this time; and you begin
to mope and pule as if your babyhood were coming back on you. You seem
to think more than a boy of your years should; and yet it is not manly
thought, nor ever will be so. What do you mean, boy, by making all my
care of you come to nothing, in this way?”

“I do my best, Doctor Grim,” said Ned, with sullen dignity. “What you
teach me, I learn. What more can I do?”

“I’ll tell you what, my fine fellow,” quoth Doctor Grim, getting rude,
as was his habit. “You disappoint me, and I’ll not bear it. I want you
to be a man; and I’ll have you a man or nothing. If I had foreboded such
a fellow as you turn out to be, I never would have taken you from the
place where, as I once told you, I found you,--the almshouse!”

“O, Doctor Grim, Doctor Grim!” cried little Elsie, in a tone of grief
and bitter reproach.

Ned had risen slowly, as the Doctor uttered those last words, turning
as white as a sheet, and stood gazing at him, with large eyes, in which
there was a calm upbraiding; a strange dignity was in his childish
aspect, which was no longer childish, but seemed to have grown older all
in a moment.

“Sir,” added the Doctor, incensed at the boy’s aspect, “there is
nonsense that ought to be whipt out of you.”

“You have said enough, sir,” said the boy. “Would to God you had left
me where you found me![Endnote: 4] It was not my fault that you took me
from the alms-house. But it will be my fault if I ever eat another bit
of your bread, or stay under your roof an hour longer.”

He was moving towards the door, but little Elsie sprung upon him and
caught him round the neck, although he repelled her with severe dignity;
and Doctor Grimshawe, after a look at the group in which a bitter sort
of mirth and mischief struggled with a better and kindlier sentiment, at
last flung his pipe into the chimney, hastily quaffed the remnant of
a tumbler, and shuffled after Ned, kicking off his old slippers in his
hurry. He caught the boy just by the door.

“Ned, Ned, my boy, I’m sorry for what I said,” cried he. “I am a
guzzling old blockhead, and don’t know how to treat a gentleman when he
honors me with his company. It is not in my blood nor breeding to
have such knowledge. Ned, you will make a man, and I lied if I said
otherwise. Come, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

The boy was easily touched, at these years, as a boy ought to be;
and though he had not yet forgiven the grim Doctor, the tears, to his
especial shame, gushed out of his eyes in a torrent, and his whole frame
shook with sobs. The Doctor caught him in his arms, and hugged him to
his old tobacco-fragrant dressing-gown, hugged him like a bear, as he
was; so that poor Ned hardly knew whether he was embracing him with his
love, or squeezing him to death in his wrath.

“Ned,” said he, “I’m not going to live a great while longer; I seem an
eternal nuisance to you, I know; but it’s not so, I’m mortal and I feel
myself breaking up. Let us be friends while I live; for believe me, Ned,
I’ve done as well by you as I knew, and care for nothing, love nothing,
so much as you. Little Elsie here, yes. I love her too. But that’s
different. You are a boy, and will be a man; and a man whom I destine to
do for me what it has been the object of my life to achieve. Let us
be friends. We will--we must be friends; and when old Doctor Grim,
worthless wretch that he is, sleeps in his grave, you shall not have the
pang of having parted from him in unkindness. Forgive me, Ned; and not
only that, but love me better than ever; for though I am a hasty old
wretch, I am not altogether evil as regards you.”

I know not whether the Doctor would have said all this, if the day had
not been pretty well advanced, and if his potations had not been many;
but, at any rate, he spoke no more than he felt, and his emotions
thrilled through the sensitive system of the boy, and quite melted him
down. He forgave Doctor Grim, and, as he asked, loved him better than
ever; and so did Elsie. Then it was so sweet, so good, to have had this
one outgush of affection,--he, poor child, who had no memory of mother’s
kisses, or of being cared for out of tenderness, and whose heart had
been hungry, all his life, for some such thing; and probably Doctor
Grim, in his way, had the same kind of enjoyment of this passionate
crisis; so that though, the next day, they all three looked at one
another a little ashamed, yet it had some remote analogy to that
delicious embarrassment of two lovers, at their first meeting after they
know all.




CHAPTER X.


It is very remarkable that Ned had so much good in him as we find there;
in the first place, born as he seemed to be of a wild, vagrant stock, a
seedling sown by the breezes, and falling among the rocks and sands; the
growing up without a mother to cultivate his tenderness with kisses
and the inestimable, inevitable love of love breaking out on all little
occasions, without reference to merit or demerit, unfailing whether or
no; mother’s faith in excellences, the buds which were yet invisible
to all other eyes, but to which her warm faith was the genial sunshine
necessary to their growth; mother’s generous interpretation of all that
was doubtful in him, and which might turn out good or bad, according
as should be believed of it; mother’s pride in whatever the boy
accomplished, and unfailing excuses, explanations, apologies, so
satisfactory, for all his failures; mother’s deep intuitive insight,
which should see the permanent good beneath all the appearance of
temporary evil, being wiser through her love than the wisest sage could
be,--the dullest, homeliest mother than the wisest sage. The Creator,
apparently, has set a little of his own infinite wisdom and love (which
are one) in a mother’s heart, so that no child, in the common course of
things, should grow up without some heavenly instruction. Instead of
all this, and the vast deal more that mothers do for children, there had
been only the gruff, passionate Doctor, without sense of religion,
with only a fitful tenderness, with years’ length between the fits, so
fiercely critical, so wholly unradiant of hope, misanthropic, savagely
morbid. Yes; there was little Elsie too; it must have been that she was
the boy’s preserver, being childhood, sisterhood, womanhood, all that
there had been for him of human life, and enough--he being naturally of
such good stuff--to keep him good. He had lost much, but not all: he
was not nearly what he might have been under better auspices; flaws and
imperfections there were, in abundance, great uncultivated wastes and
wildernesses in his moral nature, tangled wilds where there might have
been stately, venerable religious groves; but there was no rank growth
of evil. That unknown mother, that had no opportunity to nurse her boy,
must have had gentle and noblest qualities to endow him with; a noble
father, too, a long, unstained descent, one would have thought. Was this
an almshouse child?

Doctor Grim knew, very probably, that there was all this on the womanly
side that was wanting to Ned’s occasion; and very probably, too, being a
man not without insight, he was aware that tender treatment, as a
mother bestows it, tends likewise to foster strength, and manliness of
character, as well as softer developments; but all this he could not
have supplied, and now as little as ever. But there was something else
which Ned ought to have, and might have; and this was intercourse with
his kind, free circulation, free air, instead of the stived-up house,
with the breeze from the graveyard blowing over it,--to be drawn out of
himself, and made to share the life of many, to be introduced, at one
remove, to the world with which he was to contend. To this end, shortly
after the scene of passion and reconciliation above described, the
Doctor took the resolution of sending Ned to an academy, famous in that
day, and still extant. Accordingly they all three--the grim Doctor, Ned,
and Elsie--set forth, one day of spring, leaving the house to crusty
Hannah and the great spider, in a carryall, being the only excursion
involving a night’s absence that either of the two children remembered
from the house by the graveyard, as at nightfall they saw the modest
pine-built edifice, with its cupola and bell, where Ned was to be
initiated into the schoolboy. The Doctor, remembering perhaps days spent
in some gray, stately, legendary great school of England, instinct with
the boyhood of men afterwards great, puffed forth a depreciating curse
upon it; but nevertheless made all arrangements for Ned’s behoof, and
next morning prepared to leave him there.

“Ned, my son, good by,” cried he, shaking the little fellow’s hand as he
stood tearful and wistful beside the chaise shivering at the loneliness
which he felt settling around him,--a new loneliness to him,--the
loneliness of a crowd. “Do not be cast down, my boy. Face the world;
grasp the thistle strongly, and it will sting you the less. Have faith
in your own fist! Fear no man! Have no secret plot! Never do what you
think wrong! If hereafter you learn to know that Doctor Grim was a
bad man, forgive him, and be a better one yourself. Good by, and if
my blessing be good for anything, in God’s name, I invoke it upon you
heartily.”

Little Elsie was sobbing, and flung her arms about Ned’s neck, and he
his about hers; so that they parted without a word. As they drove away,
a singular sort of presentiment came over the boy, as he stood looking
after them.

“It is all over,--all over,” said he to himself: “Doctor Grim and
little Elsie are gone out of my life. They leave me and will never come
back,--not they to me, not I to them. O, how cold the world is! Would we
three--the Doctor, and Elsie, and I--could have lain down in a row, in
the old graveyard, close under the eaves of the house, and let the grass
grow over us. The world is cold; and I am an alms-house child.”

The house by the graveyard seemed dismal now, no doubt, to little Elsie,
who, being of a cheerful nature herself, (common natures often having
this delusion about a home,) had grown up with the idea that it was the
most delightful spot in the world; the place fullest of pleasant play,
and of household love (because her own love welled over out of her
heart, like a spring in a barrel); the place where everybody was kind
and good, the world beyond its threshold appearing perhaps strange and
sombre; the spot where it was pleasantest to be, for its own mere sake;
the dim old, homely place, so warm and cosey in winter, so cool in
summer. Who else was fortunate enough to have such a home,--with that
nice, kind, beautiful Ned, and that dear, kind, gentle, old Doctor Grim,
with his sweet ways, so wise, so upright, so good, beyond all other men?
O, happy girl that she was, to have grown up in such a home! Was there
ever any other house with such cosey nooks in it? Such probably were the
feelings of good little Elsie about this place, which has seemed to
us so dismal; for the home feeling in the child’s heart, her warm,
cheerful, affectionate nature, was a magic, so far as she herself was
concerned, and made all the house and its inmates over after her own
fashion. But now that little Ned was gone, there came a change. She
moped about the house, and, for the first time, suspected it was dismal.

As for the grim Doctor, there did not appear to be much alteration in
that hard old character; perhaps he drank a little more, though that was
doubtful, because it is difficult to see where he could find niches
to stick in more frequent drinks. Nor did he more frequently breathe
through the pipe. He fell into desuetude, however, of his daily walk,
[Endnote: 1] and sent Elsie to play by herself in the graveyard (a
dreary business enough for the poor child) instead of taking her
to country or seaside himself. He was more savage and blasphemous,
sometimes, than he had been heretofore known to be; but, on the other
hand, he was sometimes softer, with a kind of weary consenting to
circumstances, intervals of helpless resignation, when he no longer
fought and struggled in his heart. He did not seem to be alive all the
time; but, on the other hand, he was sometimes a good deal too much
alive, and could not bear his potations as well as he used to do, and
was overheard blaspheming at himself for being so weakly, and having a
brain that could not bear a thimbleful, and growing to be a milksop
like Colcord, as he said. This person, of whom the Doctor and his young
people had had such a brief experience, appeared nevertheless to hang
upon his remembrance in a singular way,--the more singular as there was
little resemblance between them, or apparent possibility of sympathy.
Little Elsie was startled to hear Doctor Grim sometimes call out,
“Colcord! Colcord!” as if he were summoning a spirit from some secret
place. He muttered, sitting by himself, long, indistinct masses of talk,
in which this name was discernible, and other names. Going on mumbling,
by the hour together, great masses of vague trouble, in which, if it
only could have been unravelled and put in order, no doubt all the
secrets of his life,--secrets of wrath, guilt, vengeance, love, hatred,
all beaten up together, and the best quite spoiled by the worst, might
have been found. His mind evidently wandered. Sometimes, he seemed to be
holding conversation with unseen interlocutors, and almost invariably,
so far as could be gathered, he was bitter, and then sat, immitigable,
pouring out wrath and terror, denunciating, tyrannical, speaking as to
something that lay at his feet, but which he would not spare. [Endnote:
2] Then suddenly, he would start, look round the dark old study, upward
to the dangling spider overhead, and then at the quiet little girl, who,
try as she might, could not keep her affrighted looks from his face, and
always met his eyes with a loyal frankness and unyielded faith in him.

“Oh, you little jade, what have you been overhearing?”

“Nothing, Doctor Grim,--nothing that I could make out.”

“Make out as much as you can,” he said. “I am not afraid of you.”

“Afraid of little Elsie, dear Doctor Grim!”

“Neither of you, nor of the Devil,” murmured the Doctor,--“of nobody
but little Ned and that milksop Colcord. If I have wronged anybody it
is them. As for the rest, let the day of judgment come. Doctor Grim is
ready to fling down his burden at the judgment seat and have it sorted
there.”

Then he would lie back in his chair and look up at the great spider, who
(or else it was Elsie’s fancy) seemed to be making great haste in those
days, filling out his web as if he had less time than was desirable for
such a piece of work.

One morning the Doctor arose as usual, and after breakfast (at which
he ate nothing, and even after filling his coffee-cup half with brandy,
half with coffee, left it untouched, save sipping a little out of a
teaspoon) he went to the study (with a rather unsteady gait, chiefly
remarkable because it was so early in the day), and there established
himself with his pipe, as usual, and his medical books and machines, and
his manuscript. But he seemed troubled, irresolute, weak, and at last he
blew out a volley of oaths, with no apparent appropriateness, and then
seemed to be communing with himself.

“It is of no use to carry this on any further,” said he, fiercely, in a
decided tone, as if he had taken a resolution. “Elsie, my girl, come and
kiss me.”

So Elsie kissed him, amid all the tobacco-smoke which was curling out of
his mouth, as if there were a half-extinguished furnace in his inside.

“Elsie, my little girl, I mean to die to-day,” said the old man.

“To die, dear Doctor Grim? O, no! O, no!”

“O, yes! Elsie,” said the Doctor, in a very positive tone. “I have kept
myself alive by main force these three weeks, and I find it hardly worth
the trouble. It requires so much exercise of will;--and I am weary,
weary. The pipe does not taste good, the brandy bewilders me. Ned is
gone, too;--I have nothing else to do. I have wrought this many a year
for an object, and now, taking all things into consideration, I don’t
know whether to execute it or no. Ned is gone; there is nobody but my
little Elsie,--a good child, but not quite enough to live for. I will
let myself die, therefore, before sunset.”

“O, no! Doctor Grim. Let us send for Ned, and you will think it worth
the trouble of living.”

“No, Elsie, I want no one near my death-bed; when I have finished a
little business, you must go out of the room, and I will turn my face
to the wall, and say good-night. But first send crusty Hannah for Mr.
Pickering.”

He was a lawyer of the town, a man of classical and antiquarian tastes,
as well as legal acquirement, and some of whose pursuits had brought him
and Doctor Grim occasionally together. Besides calling this gentleman,
crusty Hannah (of her own motion, but whether out of good will to
the poor Doctor Grim, or from a tendency to mischief inherent in such
unnatural mixtures as hers) summoned, likewise, in all haste, a medical
man,--and, as it happened, the one who had taken a most decidedly
hostile part to our Doctor,--and a clergyman, who had often devoted our
poor friend to the infernal regions, almost by name, in his sermons; a
kindness, to say the truth, which the Doctor had fully reciprocated
in many anathemas against the clergyman. These two worthies, arriving
simultaneously, and in great haste, were forthwith ushered to where the
Doctor lay half reclining in his study; and upon showing their heads,
the Doctor flew into an awful rage, threatening, in his customary
improper way, when angry, to make them smell the infernal regions, and
proceeding to put his threats into execution by flinging his odorous
tobacco-pipe in the face of the medical man, and rebaptizing the
clergyman with a half-emptied tumbler of brandy and water, and sending
a terrible vociferation of oaths after them both, as they clattered
hastily down the stairs. Really, that crusty Hannah must have been the
Devil, for she stood grinning and chuckling at the foot of the stairs,
curtseying grotesquely.

“He terrible man, our old Doctor Grim,” quoth crusty Hannah. “He drive
us all to the wicked place before him.”

This, however, was the final outbreak of poor Doctor Grim. Indeed, he
almost went off at once in the exhaustion that succeeded. The lawyer
arrived shortly after, and was shut up with him for a considerable
space; after which crusty Hannah was summoned, and desired to call two
indifferent persons from the street, as witnesses to a will; and this
document was duly executed, and given into the possession of the lawyer.
This done, and the lawyer having taken his leave, the grim Doctor
desired, and indeed commanded imperatively, that crusty Hannah
should quit the room, having first--we are sorry to say--placed the
brandy-bottle within reach of his hand, and leaving him propped up in
his arm-chair, in which he leaned back, gazing up at the great spider,
who was, dangling overhead. As the door closed behind crusty Hannah’s
grinning and yet strangely interested face, the Doctor caught a glimpse
of little Elsie in the passage, bathed in tears, and lingering and
looking earnestly into the chamber. [Endnote: 3.]

Seeing the poor little girl, the Doctor cried out to her, half
wrathfully, half tenderly, “Don’t cry, you little wretch! Come and kiss
me once more.” So Elsie, restraining her grief with a great effort, ran
to him and gave him a last kiss.

“Tell Ned,” said the Doctor solemnly, “to think no more of the old
English hall, or of the bloody footstep, or of the silver key, or any of
all that nonsense. Good by, my dear!” Then he said, with his thunderous
and imperative tone, “Let no one come near me till to-morrow morning.”

So that parting was over; but still the poor little desolate child
hovered by the study door all day long, afraid to enter, afraid to
disobey, but unable to go. Sometimes she heard the Doctor muttering,
as was his wont; once she fancied he was praying, and dropping on her
knees, she also prayed fervently, and perhaps acceptably; then, all at
once, the Doctor called out, in a loud voice, “No, Ned, no. Drop it,
drop it!”

And then there was an utter silence, unbroken forevermore by the lips
that had uttered so many objectionable things.

And finally, after an interval which had been prescribed by the grim
Doctor, a messenger was sent by the lawyer to our friend Ned, to inform
him of this sad event, and to bring him back temporarily to town, for
the purpose of hearing what were his prospects, and what disposition
was now to be made of him. We shall not attempt to describe the grief,
astonishment, and almost incredulity of Ned, on discovering that a
person so mixed up with and built into his whole life as the stalwart
Doctor Grimshawe had vanished out of it thus unexpectedly, like
something thin as a vapor,--like a red flame, that one [instant] is very
bright in its lurid ray, and then is nothing at all, amid the darkness.
To the poor boy’s still further grief and astonishment, he found, on
reaching the spot that he called home, that little Elsie (as the lawyer
gave him to understand, by the express orders of the Doctor, and for
reasons of great weight) had been conveyed away by a person under whose
guardianship she was placed, and that Ned could not be informed of the
place. Even crusty Hannah had been provided for and disposed of, and was
no longer to be found. Mr. Pickering explained to Ned the dispositions
in his favor which had been made by his deceased friend, who, out of a
moderate property, had left him the means of obtaining as complete an
education as the country would afford, and of supporting himself until
his own exertions would be likely to give him the success which his
abilities were calculated to win. The remainder of his property (a less
sum than that thus disposed of) was given to little Elsie, with the
exception of a small provision to crusty Hannah, with the recommendation
from the Doctor that she should retire and spend the remainder of her
life among her own people. There was likewise a certain sum left for
the purpose of editing and printing (with a dedication to the Medical
Society of the State) an account of the process of distilling balm from
cobwebs; the bequest being worded in so singular a way that it was just
as impossible as it had ever been to discover whether the grim Doctor
was in earnest or no.

What disappointed the boy, in a greater degree than we shall try to
express, was the lack of anything in reference to those dreams and
castles of the air,--any explanation of his birth; so that he was left
with no trace of it, except just so far as the alms-house whence the
Doctor had taken him. There all traces of his name and descent vanished,
just as if he had been made up of the air, as an aerolite seems to be
before it tumbles on the earth with its mysterious iron.

The poor boy, in his bewilderment, had not yet come to feel what his
grief was; it was not to be conceived, in a few days, that he was
deprived of every person, thing, or thought that had hitherto kept his
heart warm. He tried to make himself feel it, yearning for this grief as
for his sole friend. Being, for the present, domiciled with the lawyer,
he obtained the key of his former home, and went through the desolate
house that he knew so well, and which now had such a silent, cold,
familiar strangeness, with none in it, though the ghosts of the grim
Doctor, of laughing little Elsie, of crusty Hannah,--dead and alive
alike,--were all there, and his own ghost among them; for he himself
was dead, that is, his former self, which he recognized as himself, had
passed away, as they were. In the study everything looked as formerly,
yet with a sort of unreality, as if it would dissolve and vanish on
being touched; and, indeed, it partly proved so; for over the Doctor’s
chair seemed still to hang the great spider, but on looking closer at
it, and finally touching it with the end of the Doctor’s stick, Ned
discovered that it was merely the skin, shell, apparition, of the real
spider,[Endnote: 4] the reality of whom, it is to be supposed, had
followed the grim Doctor, whithersoever he had gone.

A thought struck Ned while he was here; he remembered the secret niche
in the wall, where he had once seen the Doctor deposit some papers. He
looked, and there they were. Who was the heir of those papers, if not
he? If there were anything wrong in appropriating them, it was not
perceptible to him in the desolation, anxiety, bewilderment, and despair
of that moment. He grasped the papers, and hurried from the room and
down the stairs, afraid to look round, and half expecting to hear the
gruff voice of Doctor Grim thundering after him to bring them back.

Then Ned went out of the back door, and found his way to the Doctor’s
new grave, which, as it happened, was dug close beside that one which
occupied the place of the one which the stranger had come to seek; and,
as if to spite the Doctor’s professional antipathies, it lay beside a
grave of an old physician and surgeon, one Doctor Summerton, who used
to help diseases and kill patients above a hundred years ago. But Doctor
Grim was undisturbed by these neighbors, and apparently not more by the
grief of poor little Ned, who hid his face in the crumbly earth of the
grave, and the sods that had not begun to grow, and wept as if his heart
would break.

But the heart never breaks on the first grave; and, after many graves,
it gets so obtuse that nothing can break it.

And now let the mists settle down over the trail of our story, hiding it
utterly on its onward course, for a long way to come, until, after many
years, they may disperse and discover something which, were it worth
while to follow it through all that obscurity, would prove to be
the very same track which that boy was treading when we last saw
him,--though it may have lain over land and sea since then; but the
footsteps that trod there are treading here.




CHAPTER XI.


There is--or there was, now many years ago, and a few years also it
was still extant--a chamber, which when I think of, it seems to me
like entering a deep recess of my own consciousness, a deep cave of
my nature; so much have I thought of it and its inmate, through a
considerable period of my life. After I had seen it long in fancy, then
I saw it in reality, with my waking eyes; and questioned with myself
whether I was really awake.

Not that it was a picturesque or stately chamber; not in the least. It
was dim, dim as a melancholy mood; so dim, to come to particulars, that,
till you were accustomed to that twilight medium, the print of a book
looked all blurred; a pin was an indistinguishable object; the face
of your familiar friend, or your dearest beloved one, would be
unrecognizable across it, and the figures, so warm and radiant with
life and heart, would seem like the faint gray shadows of our thoughts,
brooding in age over youthful images of joy and love. Nevertheless, the
chamber, though so difficult to see across, was small. You detected that
it was within very narrow boundaries, though you could not precisely see
them; only you felt yourself shut in, compressed, impeded, in the deep
centre of something; and you longed for a breath of fresh air. Some
articles of furniture there seemed to be; but in this dim medium, to
which we are unaccustomed, it is not well to try to make out what they
were, or anything else--now at least--about the chamber. Only one thing;
small as the light was, it was rather wonderful how there came to be
any; for no windows were apparent; no communication with the outward
day. [Endnote: 1.]

Looking into this chamber, in fancy it is some time before we who come
out of the broad sunny daylight of the world discover that it has an
inmate. Yes, there is some one within, but where? We know it; but do not
precisely see him, only a presence is impressed upon us. It is in
that corner; no, not there; only a heap of darkness and an old antique
coffer, that, as we look closely at it, seems to be made of carved wood.
Ah! he is in that other dim corner; and now that we steal close to him,
we see him; a young man, pale, flung upon a sort of mattress-couch. He
seems in alarm at something or other. He trembles, he listens, as if for
voices. It must be a great peril, indeed, that can haunt him thus and
make him feel afraid in such a seclusion as you feel this to be; but
there he is, tremulous, and so pale that really his face is almost
visible in the gloomy twilight. How came he here? Who is he? What does
he tremble at? In this duskiness we cannot tell. Only that he is a young
man, in a state of nervous excitement and alarm

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