Doctor Grimshawe, after the foregone scene, began a practice of
conversing more with the children than formerly; directing his discourse
chiefly to Ned, although Elsie’s vivacity and more outspoken and
demonstrative character made her take quite as large a share in the
conversation as he.
The Doctor’s communications referred chiefly to a village, or
neighborhood, or locality in England, which he chose to call Newnham;
although he told the children that this was not the real name, which,
for reasons best known to himself, he wished to conceal. Whatever the
name were, he seemed to know the place so intimately, that the
children, as a matter of course, adopted the conclusion that it was his
birthplace, and the spot where he had spent his schoolboy days, and
had lived until some inscrutable reason had impelled him to quit its
ivy-grown antiquity, and all the aged beauty and strength that he spoke
of, and to cross the sea.
He used to tell of an old church, far unlike the brick and pine-built
meeting-houses with which the children were familiar; a church, the
stones of which were laid, every one of them, before the world knew of
the country in which he was then speaking: and how it had a spire, the
lower part of which was mantled with ivy, and up which, towards its very
spire, the ivy was still creeping; and how there was a tradition, that,
if the ivy ever reached the top, the spire would fall upon the roof
of the old gray church, and crush it all down among its surrounding
tombstones. [Endnote: 1] And so, as this misfortune would be so heavy
a one, there seemed to be a miracle wrought from year to year, by which
the ivy, though always flourishing, could never grow beyond a certain
point; so that the spire and church had stood unharmed for thirty years;
though the wise old people were constantly foretelling that the passing
year must be the very last one that it could stand.
He told, too, of a place that made little Ned blush and cast down his
eyes to hide the tears of anger and shame at he knew not what, which
would irresistibly spring into them; for it reminded him of the
almshouse where, as the cruel Doctor said, Ned himself had had his
earliest home. And yet, after all, it had scarcely a feature of
resemblance; and there was this great point of difference,--that
whereas, in Ned’s wretched abode (a large, unsightly brick house), there
were many wretched infants like himself, as well as helpless people
of all ages, widows, decayed drunkards, people of feeble wits, and all
kinds of imbecility; it being a haven for those who could not contend
in the hard, eager, pitiless struggle of life; in the place the Doctor
spoke of, a noble, Gothic, mossy structure, there were none but aged
men, who had drifted into this quiet harbor to end their days in a sort
of humble yet stately ease and decorous abundance. And this shelter,
the grim Doctor said, was the gift of a man who had died ages ago; and
having been a great sinner in his lifetime, and having drawn lands,
manors, and a great mass of wealth into his clutches, by violent and
unfair means, had thought to get his pardon by founding this Hospital,
as it was called, in which thirteen old men should always reside; and he
hoped that they would spend their time in praying for the welfare of his
soul. [Endnote: 2.]
Said little Elsie, “I am glad he did it, and I hope the poor old men
never forgot to pray for him, and that it did good to the poor wicked
man’s soul.”
“Well, child,” said Doctor Grimshawe, with a scowl into vacancy, and a
sort of wicked leer of merriment at the same time, as if he saw before
him the face of the dead man of past centuries, “I happen to be no
lover of this man’s race, and I hate him for the sake of one of his
descendants. I don’t think he succeeded in bribing the Devil to let him
go, or God to save him!”
“Doctor Grim, you are very naughty!” said Elsie, looking shocked.
“It is fair enough,” said Ned, “to hate your enemies to the very brink
of the grave, but then to leave him to get what mercy he can.”
“After shoving him in!” quoth the Doctor; and made no further response
to either of these criticisms, which seemed indeed to affect him very
little--if he even listened to them. For he was a man of singularly
imperfect moral culture; insomuch that nothing else was so remarkable
about him as that--possessing a good deal of intellectual ability, made
available by much reading and experience--he was so very dark on the
moral side; as if he needed the natural perceptions that should have
enabled him to acquire that better wisdom. Such a phenomenon often
meets us in life; oftener than we recognize, because a certain tact and
exterior decency generally hide the moral deficiency. But often there is
a mind well polished, married to a conscience and natural impulses left
as they were in childhood, except that they have sprouted up into evil
and poisonous weeds, richly blossoming with strong-smelling flowers, or
seeds which the plant scatters by a sort of impulse; even as the Doctor
was now half-consciously throwing seeds of his evil passions into the
minds of these children. He was himself a grown-up child, without tact,
simplicity, and innocence, and with ripened evil, all the ranker for a
native heat that was in him and still active, which might have nourished
good things as well as evil. Indeed, it did cherish by chance a root or
two of good, the fragrance of which was sometimes perceptible among all
this rank growth of poisonous weeds. A grown-up child he was,--that was
all.
The Doctor now went on to describe an old country-seat, which stood near
this village and the ancient Hospital that he had been telling about,
and which was formerly the residence of the wicked man (a knight and
a brave one, well known in the Lancastrian wars) who had founded the
latter. It was a venerable old mansion, which a Saxon Thane had begun to
build more than a thousand years ago, the old English oak that he built
into the frame being still visible in the ancient skeleton of its roof,
sturdy and strong as if put up yesterday. And the descendants of the
man who built it, through the French line (for a Norman baron wedded the
daughter and heiress of the Saxon), dwelt there yet; and in each century
they had done something for the old Hall,--building a tower, adding
a suite of rooms, strengthening what was already built, putting in a
painted window, making it more spacious and convenient,--till it seemed
as if Time employed himself in thinking what could be done for the old
house. As fast as any part decayed, it was renewed, with such simple
art that the new completed, as it were, and fitted itself to the old. So
that it seemed as if the house never had been finished, until just that
thing was added. For many an age, the possessors had gone on adding
strength to strength, digging out the moat to a greater depth, piercing
the walls with holes for archers to shoot through, or building a turret
to keep watch upon. But at last all necessity for these precautions
passed away, and then they thought of convenience and comfort, adding
something in every generation to these. And by and by they thought of
beauty too; and in this time helped them with its weather-stains, and
the ivy that grew over the walls, and the grassy depth of the dried-up
moat, and the abundant shade that grew up everywhere, where naked
strength would have been ugly.
“One curious thing in the house,” said the Doctor, lowering his voice,
but with a mysterious look of triumph, and that old scowl, too, at the
children, “was that they built a secret chamber,--a very secret one!”
“A secret chamber!” cried little Ned; “who lived in it? A ghost?”
“There was often use for it,” said Doctor Grim; “hiding people who
had fought on the wrong side, or Catholic priests, or criminals,
or perhaps--who knows?--enemies that they wanted put out of the
way,--troublesome folks. Ah! it was often of use, that secret chamber:
and is so still!”
Here the Doctor paused a long while, and leaned back in his chair,
slowly puffing long whiffs from his pipe, looking up at the great
spider-demon that hung over his head, and, as it seemed to the children
by the expression of his face, looking into the dim secret chamber which
he had spoken of, and which, by something in his mode of alluding to it,
assumed such a weird, spectral aspect to their imaginations that they
never wished to hear of it again. Coming back at length out of his
reverie,--returning, perhaps, out of some weird, ghostly, secret
chamber of his memory, whereof the one in the old house was but the less
horrible emblem,--he resumed his tale. He said that, a long time ago,
a war broke out in the old country between King and Parliament. At that
period there were several brothers of the old family (which had adhered
to the Catholic religion), and these chose the side of the King instead
of that of the Puritan Parliament: all but one, whom the family hated
because he took the Parliament side; and he became a soldier, and fought
against his own brothers; and it was said among them that, so inveterate
was he, he went on the scaffold, masked, and was the very man who struck
off the King’s head, and that his foot trod in the King’s blood, and
that always afterwards he made a bloody track wherever he went. And
there was a legend that his brethren once caught the renegade and
imprisoned him in his own birthplace--
“In the secret chamber?” interrupted Ned.
“No doubt!” said the Doctor, nodding, “though I never heard so.”
They imprisoned him, but he made his escape and fled, and in the morning
his prison-place, wherever it was, was empty. But on the threshold
of the door of the old manor-house there was the print of a bloody
footstep; and no trouble that the housemaids took, no rain of all the
years that have since passed, no sunshine, has made it fade: nor have
all the wear and tramp of feet passing over it since then availed to
erase it.
“I have seen it myself,” quoth the Doctor, “and know this to be true.”
“Doctor Grim, now you are laughing at us,” said Ned, trying to look
grave. But Elsie hid her face on the Doctor’s knee; there being
something that affected the vivid little girl with peculiar horror in
the idea of this red footstep always glistening on the doorstep, and
wetting, as she fancied, every innocent foot of child or grown person
that had since passed over it. [Endnote: 3.]
“It is true!” reiterated the grim Doctor; “for, man and boy, I have seen
it a thousand times.”
He continued the family history, or tradition, or fantastic legend,
whichever it might be; telling his young auditors that the Puritan, the
renegade son of the family, was afterwards, by the contrivances of his
brethren, sent to Virginia and sold as a bond slave; and how he had
vanished from that quarter and come to New England, where he was
supposed to have left children. And by and by two elder brothers died,
and this missing brother became the heir to the old estate and to a
title. Then the family tried to track his bloody footstep, and sought
it far and near, through green country paths, and old streets of London;
but in vain. Then they sent messengers to see whether any traces of one
stepping in blood could be found on the forest leaves of America; but
still in vain. The idea nevertheless prevailed that he would come back,
and it was said they kept a bedchamber ready for him yet in the old
house. But much as they pretended to regret the loss of him and his
children, it would make them curse their stars were a descendant of his
to return now. For the child of a younger son was in possession of the
old estate, and was doing as much evil as his forefathers did; and if
the true heir were to appear on the threshold, he would (if he might but
do it secretly) stain the whole doorstep as red as the Bloody Footstep
had stained one little portion of it.
“Do you think he will ever come back?” asked little Ned.
“Stranger things have happened, my little man!” said Doctor Grimshawe,
“than that the posterity of this man should come back and turn these
usurpers out of his rightful inheritance. And sometimes, as I sit here
smoking my pipe and drinking my glass, and looking up at the cunning
plot that the spider is weaving yonder above my head, and thinking of
this fine old family and some little matters that have been between them
and me, I fancy that it may be so! We shall see! Stranger things have
happened.”
And Doctor Grimshawe drank off his tumbler, winking at little Ned in a
strange way, that seemed to be a kind of playfulness, but which did not
affect the children pleasantly; insomuch that little Elsie put both
her hands on Doctor Grim’s knees, and begged him not to do so any more.
[Endnote: 4.]