The children, after this conversation, often introduced the old English
mansion into their dreams and little romances, which all imaginative
children are continually mixing up with their lives, making the
commonplace day of grown people a rich, misty, glancing orb of
fairy-land to themselves. Ned, forgetting or not realizing the long
lapse of time, used to fancy the true heir wandering all this while in
America, and leaving a long track of bloody footsteps behind him; until
the period when, his sins being expiated (whatever they might be), he
should turn back upon his steps and return to his old native home. And
sometimes the child used to look along the streets of the town where he
dwelt, bending his thoughtful eyes on the ground, and think that perhaps
some time he should see the bloody footsteps there, betraying that the
wanderer had just gone that way.
As for little Elsie, it was her fancy that the hero of the legend still
remained imprisoned in that dreadful secret chamber, which had made a
most dread impression on her mind; and that there he was, forgotten all
this time, waiting, like a naughty child shut up in a closet, until
some one should come to unlock the door. In the pitifulness of her
disposition, she once proposed to little Ned that, as soon as they grew
big enough, they should set out in quest of the old house, and find
their way into it, and find the secret chamber, and let the poor
prisoner out. So they lived a good deal of the time in a half-waking
dream, partly conscious of the fantastic nature of their ideas, yet with
these ideas almost as real to them as the facts of the natural world,
which, to children, are at first transparent and unsubstantial.
The Doctor appeared to have a pleasure, or a purpose, in keeping his
legend forcibly in their memories; he often recurred to the subject of
the old English family, and was continually giving new details about
its history, the scenery in its neighborhood, the aspect of the
mansion-house; indicating a very intense interest in the subject on his
own part, of which this much talk seemed the involuntary overflowing.
There was, however, an affection mingled with this sentiment. It
appeared to be his unfortunate necessity to let his thoughts dwell very
constantly upon a subject that was hateful to him, with which this old
English estate and manor-house and family were somehow connected; and,
moreover, had he spoken thus to older and more experienced auditors,
they might have detected in the manner and matter of his talk, a certain
hereditary reverence and awe, the growth of ages, mixed up with a newer
hatred, impelling him to deface and destroy what, at the same time, it
was his deepest impulse to bow before. The love belonged to his race;
the hatred, to himself individually. It was the feeling of a man lowly
born, when he contracts a hostility to his hereditary superior. In
one way, being of a powerful, passionate nature, gifted with force and
ability far superior to that of the aristocrat, he might scorn him and
feel able to trample on him; in another, he had the same awe that a
country boy feels of the magistrate who flings him a sixpence and shakes
his horsewhip at him.
Had the grim Doctor been an American, he might have had the vast
antipathy to rank, without the trace of awe that made it so much more
malignant: it required a low-born Englishman to feel the two together.
What made the hatred so fiendish was a something that, in the natural
course of things, would have been loyalty, inherited affection, devoted
self-sacrifice to a superior. Whatever it might be, it seemed at times
(when his potations took deeper effect than ordinary) almost to drive
the grim Doctor mad; for he would burst forth in wild diatribes and
anathemas, having a strange, rough force of expression and a depth of
utterance, as if his words came from a bottomless pit within himself,
where burned an everlasting fire, and where the furies had their home;
and plans of dire revenge were welded into shape as in the heat of a
furnace. After the two poor children had been affrighted by paroxysms
of this kind, the strange being would break out into one of his roars of
laughter, that seemed to shake the house, and, at all events, caused
the cobwebs and spiders suspended from the ceiling, to swing and vibrate
with the motion of the volumes of reverberating breath which he thus
expelled from his capacious lungs. Then, catching up little Elsie upon
one knee and Ned upon the other, he would become gentler than in his
usual moods, and, by the powerful magnetism of his character, cause them
to think him as tender and sweet an old fellow as a child could desire
for a playmate. Upon the whole, strange as it may appear, they loved
the grim Doctor dearly; there was a loadstone within him that drew them
close to him and kept them there, in spite of the horror of many things
that he said and did. One thing that, slight as it seemed, wrought
mightily towards their mutually petting each other, was that no amount
of racket, hubbub, shouting, laughter, or noisy mischief which the
two children could perpetrate, ever disturbed the Doctor’s studies,
meditations, or employments of whatever kind. He had a hardy set of
nerves, not refined by careful treatment in himself or his ancestors,
but probably accustomed from of old to be drummed on by harsh voices,
rude sounds, and the clatter and clamor of household life among homely,
uncultivated, strongly animal people.
As the two children grew apace, it behooved their strange guardian to
take some thought for their instruction. So far as little Elsie was
concerned, however, he seemed utterly indifferent to her having
any cultivation: having imbibed no modern ideas respecting feminine
capacities and privileges, but regarding woman, whether in the bud or
in the blossom, as the plaything of man’s idler moments, and the
helpmeet--but in a humble capacity--of his daily life. He sometimes bade
her go to the kitchen and take lessons of crusty Hannah in bread-making,
sweeping, dusting, washing, the coarser needlework, and such other
things as she would require to know when she came to be a woman; but
carelessly allowed her to gather up the crumbs of such instruction as he
bestowed on her playmate Ned, and thus learn to read, write, and cipher;
which, to say the truth, was about as far in the way of scholarship as
little Elsie cared to go.
But towards little Ned the grim Doctor adopted a far different system.
No sooner had he reached the age when the soft and tender intellect
of the child became capable of retaining impressions, than he took him
vigorously in hand, assigning him such tasks as were fit for him, and
curiously investigating what were the force and character of the powers
with which the child grasped them. Not that the Doctor pressed him
forward unduly; indeed, there was no need of it; for the boy manifested
a remarkable docility for instruction, and a singular quickness
in mastering the preliminary steps which lead to science: a subtle
instinct, indeed, which it seemed wonderful a child should possess
for anything as artificial as systems of grammar and arithmetic. A
remarkable boy, in truth, he was, to have been found by chance in an
almshouse; except that, such being his origin, we are at liberty to
suppose for him whatever long cultivation and gentility we may think
necessary, in his parentage of either side,--such as was indicated also
by his graceful and refined beauty of person. He showed, indeed, even
before he began to read at all, an instinctive attraction towards books,
and a love for and interest in even the material form of knowledge,--the
plates, the print, the binding of the Doctor’s volumes, and even in
a bookworm which he once found in an old volume, where it had eaten a
circular furrow. But the little boy had too quick a spirit of life to
be in danger of becoming a bookworm himself. He had this side of the
intellect, but his impulse would be to mix with men, and catch something
from their intercourse fresher than books could give him; though these
would give him what they might.
In the grim Doctor, rough and uncultivated as he seemed, this budding
intelligence found no inadequate instructor. Doctor Grimshawe proved
himself a far more thorough scholar, in the classics and mathematics,
than could easily have been found in our country. He himself must have
had rigid and faithful instruction at an early period of life, though
probably not in his boyhood. For, though the culture had been bestowed,
his mind had been left in so singularly rough a state that it seemed
as if the refinement of classical study could not have been begun very
early. Or possibly the mind and nature were incapable of polish; or he
may have had a coarse and sordid domestic life around him in his infancy
and youth. He was a gem of coarse texture, just hewn out. An American
with a like education would more likely have gained a certain fineness
and grace, and it would have been difficult to distinguish him from one
who had been born to culture and refinement. This sturdy Englishman,
after all that had been done for his mind, and though it had been well
done, was still but another ploughman, of a long race of such, with a
few scratchings of refinement on his hard exterior. His son, if he left
one, might be a little less of the ploughman; his grandson, provided
the female element were well chosen, might approach to refinement; three
generations--a century at least--would be required for the slow toil
of hewing, chiselling, and polishing a gentleman out of this ponderous
block, now rough from the quarry of human nature. But, in the mean time,
he evidently possessed in an unusual degree the sort of learning that
refines other minds,--the critical acquaintance with the great poets and
historians of antiquity, and apparently an appreciation of their merits,
and power to teach their beauty. So the boy had an able tutor, capable,
it would seem, of showing him the way to the graces he did not himself
possess; besides helping the growth of the strength without which
refinement is but sickly and disgusting.
Another sort of culture, which it seemed odd that this rude man should
undertake, was that of manners; but, in fact, rude as the grim Doctor’s
own manners were, he was one of the nicest and severest censors in that
department that was ever known. It is difficult to account for this;
although it is almost invariably found that persons in a low rank of
life, such as servants and laborers, will detect the false pretender to
the character of a gentleman, with at least as sure an instinct as the
class into which they seek to thrust themselves. Perhaps they recognize
something akin to their own vulgarity, rather than appreciate what is
unlike themselves. The Doctor possessed a peculiar power of rich rough
humor on this subject, and used to deliver lectures, as it were, to
little Ned, illustrated with sketches of living individuals in the town
where they dwelt; by an unscrupulous use of whom he sought to teach the
boy what to avoid in manners, if he sought to be a gentleman. But it
must be confessed he spared himself as little as other people, and
often wound up with this compendious injunction,--“Be everything in your
behavior that Doctor Grim is not!”
His pupil, very probably, profited somewhat by these instructions; for
there are specialties and arbitrary rules of behavior which do not come
by nature. But these are few; and beautiful, noble, and genial manners
may almost be called a natural gift; and these, however he inherited
them, soon proved to be an inherent possession of little Ned. He had a
kind of natural refinement, which nothing could ever soil or offend;
it seemed, by some magic or other, absolutely to keep him from the
knowledge of much of the grim Doctor’s rude and sordid exterior, and
to render what was around him beautiful by a sort of affiliation, or
reflection from that quality in himself, glancing its white light upon
it. The Doctor himself was puzzled, and apparently both startled and
delighted at the perception of these characteristics. Sometimes he
would make a low, uncouth bow, after his fashion, to the little fellow,
saying, “Allow me to kiss your hand, my lord!” and little Ned, not quite
knowing what the grim Doctor meant, yet allowed the favor he asked,
with a grave and gracious condescension that seemed much to delight the
suitor. This refusal to recognize or to suspect that the Doctor might be
laughing at him was a sure token, at any rate, of the lack of one vulgar
characteristic in little Ned.
In order to afford little Ned every advantage to these natural gifts,
Doctor Grim nevertheless failed not to provide the best attainable
instructor for such positive points of a polite education as his own
fierce criticism, being destructive rather than generative, would not
suffice for. There was a Frenchman in the town--a M. Le Grand, secretly
calling himself a Count--who taught the little people, and, indeed, some
of their elders, the Parisian pronunciation of his own language; and
likewise dancing (in which he was more of an adept and more successful
than in the former branch) and fencing: in which, after looking at a
lesson or two, the grim Doctor was satisfied of his skill. Under his
instruction, with the stimulus of the Doctor’s praise and criticism, Ned
soon grew to be the pride of the Frenchman’s school, in both the
active departments; and the Doctor himself added a further gymnastic
acquirement (not absolutely necessary, he said, to a gentleman’s
education, but very desirable to a man perfect at all points) by
teaching him cudgel-playing and pugilism. In short, in everything that
related to accomplishments, whether of mind or body, no pains were
spared with little Ned; but of the utilitarian line of education, then
almost exclusively adopted, and especially desirable for a fortuneless
boy like Ned, dependent on a man not wealthy, there was little given.
At first, too, the Doctor paid little attention to the moral and
religious culture of his pupil; nor did he ever make a system of it. But
by and by, though with a singular reluctance and kind of bashfulness,
he began to extend his care to these matters; being drawn into them
unawares, and possibly perceiving and learning what he taught as he went
along. One evening, I know not how, he was betrayed into speaking on
this point, and a sort of inspiration seized him. A vista opened before
him: handling an immortal spirit, he began to know its requisitions, in
a degree far beyond what he had conceived them to be when his great
task was undertaken. His voice grew deep, and had a strange, impressive
pathos in it; his talk became eloquent with depth of meaning and
feeling, as he told the boy of the moral dangers of the world, for which
he was seeking to educate him; and which, he said, presented what looked
like great triumphs, and yet were the greatest and saddest of defeats.
He told him that many things that seemed nearest and dearest to the
heart of man were destructive, eating and gnawing away and corroding
what was best in him; and what a high, noble, re-creating triumph it
was when these dark impulses were resisted and overthrown; and how, from
that epoch, the soul took a new start. He denounced the selfish greed of
gold, lawless passion, revenge,--and here the grim Doctor broke out into
a strange passion and zeal of anathema against this deadly sin, making
a dreadful picture of the ruin that it creates in the heart where it
establishes itself, and how it makes a corrosive acid of those genial
juices. Then he told the boy that the condition of all good was, in the
first place, truth; then, courage; then, justice; then, mercy; out of
which principles operating upon one another would come all brave, noble,
high, unselfish actions, and the scorn of all mean ones; and how that
from such a nature all hatred would fall away, and all good affections
would be ennobled.
I know not at what point it was, precisely, in these ethical
instructions that an insight seemed to strike the grim Doctor that
something more--vastly more--was needed than all he had said; and he
began, doubtfully, to speak of man’s spiritual nature and its demands,
and the emptiness of everything which a sense of these demands did not
pervade, and condense, and weighten into realities. And going on in this
strain, he soared out of himself and astonished the two children,
who stood gazing at him, wondering whether it were the Doctor who was
speaking thus; until some interrupting circumstance seemed to bring him
back to himself, and he burst into one of his great roars of laughter.
The inspiration, the strange light whereby he had been transfigured,
passed out of his face; and there was the uncouth, wild-bearded, rough,
earthy, passionate man, whom they called Doctor Grim, looking ashamed of
himself, and trying to turn the whole matter into a jest. [Endnote: 2.]
It was a sad pity that he should have been interrupted, and brought
into this mocking mood, just when he seemed to have broken away from
the sinfulness of his hot, evil nature, and to have soared into a region
where, with all his native characteristics transfigured, he seemed to
have become an angel in his own likeness. Crusty Hannah, who had been
drawn to the door of the study by the unusual tones of his voice,--a
kind of piercing sweetness in it,--always averred that she saw the
gigantic spider swooping round his head in great crafty circles, and
clutching, as it were, at his brain with its great claws. But it was the
old woman’s absurd idea that this hideous insect was the Devil, in that
ugly guise,--a superstition which deserves absolutely no countenance.
Nevertheless, though this paroxysm of devotional feeling and insight
returned no more to the grim Doctor, it was ever after a memorable
occasion to the two children. It touched that religious chord, in both
their hearts, which there was no mother to touch; but now it
vibrated long, and never ceased to vibrate so long as they remained
together,--nor, perhaps, after they were parted from each other and from
the grim Doctor. And even then, in those after years, the strange music
that had been awakened was continued, as it were the echo from harps on
high. Now, at all events, they made little prayers for themselves, and
said them at bedtime, generally in secret, sometimes in unison; and they
read in an old dusty Bible which lay among the grim Doctor’s books; and
from little heathens, they became Christian children. Doctor Grimshawe
was perhaps conscious of this result of his involuntary preachment, but
he never directly noticed it, and did nothing either to efface or deepen
the impression.
It was singular, however, that, in both the children’s minds, this
one gush of irresistible religious sentiment, breaking out of the grim
Doctor’s inner depths, like a sort of holy lava from a volcano that
usually emitted quite other matter, (such as hot, melted wrath and
hate,) quite threw out of sight, then and always afterwards, his
darker characteristics. They remembered him, with faith and love, as a
religious man, and forgot--what perhaps had made no impression on their
innocent hearts--all the traits that other people might have called
devilish. To them the grim Doctor was a saint, even during his lifetime
and constant intercourse with them, and canonized forever afterwards.
There is almost always, to be sure, this profound faith, with regard
to those they love, in childhood; but perhaps, in this instance, the
children really had a depth of insight that grown people lacked; a
profound recognition of the bottom of this strange man’s nature, which
was of such stuff as martyrs and heroic saints might have been made of,
though here it had been wrought miserably amiss. At any rate, his face
with the holy awe upon it was what they saw and remembered, when they
thought of their friend Doctor Grim.
One effect of his zealous and analytic instruction of the boy was very
perceptible. Heretofore, though enduring him, and occasionally making a
plaything of him, it may be doubted whether the grim Doctor had really
any strong affection for the child: it rather seemed as if his strong
will were forcing him to undertake, and carry sedulously forward, a
self-imposed task. All that he had done--his redeeming the bright child
from poverty and nameless degradation, ignorance, and a sordid life
hopeless of better fortune, and opening to him the whole realm of mighty
possibilities in an American life--did not imply any love for the little
individual whom he thus benefited. It had some other motive.
But now, approaching the child in this close, intimate, and helpful way,
it was very evident that his interest took a tenderer character.
There was everything in the boy, that a boy could possess, to attract
affection; he would have been a father’s pride and joy. Doctor
Grimshawe, indeed, was not his father; but to a person of his character
this was perhaps no cause of lesser love than if there had been the
whole of that holy claim of kindred between them. We speak of the
natural force of blood; we speak of the paternal relation as if it were
productive of more earnest affection than can exist between two persons,
one of whom is protective, but unrelated. But there are wild, forcible,
unrestricted characters, on whom the necessity and even duty of loving
their own child is a sort of barrier to love. They perhaps do not love
their own traits, which they recognize in their children; they shrink
from their own features in the reflection presented by these little
mirrors. A certain strangeness and unlikeness (such as gives poignancy
to the love between the sexes) would excite a livelier affection. Be
this as it may, it is not probable that Doctor Grimshawe would have
loved a child of his own blood, with the coarse characteristics that
he knew both in his race and himself, with nearly such fervor as this
beautiful, slender, yet strenuous, intelligent, refined boy,--with such
a high-bred air, handling common things with so refined a touch, yet
grasping them so firmly; throwing a natural grace on all he did. Was he
not his father,--he that took this fair blossom out of the sordid mud
in which he must soon have withered and perished? Was not this beautiful
strangeness, which he so wondered at, the result of his care?
And little Elsie? did the grim Doctor love her as well? Perhaps not,
for, in the first place, there was a natural tie, though not the
nearest, between her and Doctor Grimshawe, which made him feel that she
was cast upon his love: a burden which he acknowledged himself bound to
undertake. Then, too, there were unutterably painful reminiscences and
thoughts, that made him gasp for breath, that turned his blood sour,
that tormented his dreams with nightmares and hellish phantoms; all
of which were connected with this innocent and happy child; so that,
cheerful and pleasant as she was, there was to the grim Doctor a little
fiend playing about his floor and throwing a lurid light on the wall,
as the shadow of this sun-flickering child. It is certain that there was
always a pain and horror mixed with his feelings towards Elsie; he
had to forget himself, as it were, and all that was connected with the
causes why she came to be, before he could love her. Amid his fondness,
when he was caressing her upon his knee, pressing her to his rough
bosom, as he never took the freedom to press Ned, came these hateful
reminiscences, compelling him to set her down, and corrugating his heavy
brows as with a pang of fiercely resented, strongly borne pain. Still,
the child had no doubt contrived to make her way into the great gloomy
cavern of the grim Doctor’s heart, and stole constantly further and
further in, carrying a ray of sunshine in her hand as a taper to light
her way, and illuminate the rude dark pit into which she so fearlessly
went.