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.