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Doctor Grimshawe\'s Secret

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




"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.]

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