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Doctor Grimshawe\'s Secret

N >> Nathaniel Hawthorne >> Doctor Grimshawe\'s Secret




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.

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