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.