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.
“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.]