“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.]
Dreading lest some one of these ponderous anathemas should alight,
reason or none, on his own head, the man crept away, and whispered the
thing to his cronies, from whom it was communicated to the townspeople
at large, and so became one of many stories circulating with reference
to our grim hero, which, if not true to the fact, had undoubtedly
a degree of appositeness to his character, of which they were the
legitimate flowers and symbols. If the anathemas took no other effect,
they seemed to have produced a very remarkable one on the unfortunate
elm tree, through the naked branches of which the Doctor discharged this
fiendish shot. For, the next spring, when April came, no tender leaves
budded forth, no life awakened there; and never again, on that old elm,
widely as its roots were imbedded among the dead of many years, was
there rustling bough in the summer time, or the elm’s early golden
boughs in September; and after waiting till another spring to give it
a fair chance of reviving, it was cut down and made into coffins, and
burnt on the sexton’s hearth. The general opinion was that the grim
Doctor’s awful profanity had blasted that tree, fostered, as it had
been, on grave-mould of Puritans. In Lancashire they tell of a similar
anathema. It had a very frightful effect, it must be owned, this idea of
a man cherishing emotions in his breast of so horrible a nature that
he could neither tell them to any human being, nor keep them in their
plenitude and intensity within the breast where they had their germ,
and so was forced to fling them forth upon the night, to pollute and put
fear into the atmosphere, and that people should breathe-in somewhat
of horror from an unknown source, and be affected with nightmare, and
dreams in which they were startled at their own wickedness.