It is very remarkable that Ned had so much good in him as we find there;
in the first place, born as he seemed to be of a wild, vagrant stock, a
seedling sown by the breezes, and falling among the rocks and sands; the
growing up without a mother to cultivate his tenderness with kisses
and the inestimable, inevitable love of love breaking out on all little
occasions, without reference to merit or demerit, unfailing whether or
no; mother’s faith in excellences, the buds which were yet invisible
to all other eyes, but to which her warm faith was the genial sunshine
necessary to their growth; mother’s generous interpretation of all that
was doubtful in him, and which might turn out good or bad, according
as should be believed of it; mother’s pride in whatever the boy
accomplished, and unfailing excuses, explanations, apologies, so
satisfactory, for all his failures; mother’s deep intuitive insight,
which should see the permanent good beneath all the appearance of
temporary evil, being wiser through her love than the wisest sage could
be,--the dullest, homeliest mother than the wisest sage. The Creator,
apparently, has set a little of his own infinite wisdom and love (which
are one) in a mother’s heart, so that no child, in the common course of
things, should grow up without some heavenly instruction. Instead of
all this, and the vast deal more that mothers do for children, there had
been only the gruff, passionate Doctor, without sense of religion,
with only a fitful tenderness, with years’ length between the fits, so
fiercely critical, so wholly unradiant of hope, misanthropic, savagely
morbid. Yes; there was little Elsie too; it must have been that she was
the boy’s preserver, being childhood, sisterhood, womanhood, all that
there had been for him of human life, and enough--he being naturally of
such good stuff--to keep him good. He had lost much, but not all: he
was not nearly what he might have been under better auspices; flaws and
imperfections there were, in abundance, great uncultivated wastes and
wildernesses in his moral nature, tangled wilds where there might have
been stately, venerable religious groves; but there was no rank growth
of evil. That unknown mother, that had no opportunity to nurse her boy,
must have had gentle and noblest qualities to endow him with; a noble
father, too, a long, unstained descent, one would have thought. Was this
an almshouse child?
Doctor Grim knew, very probably, that there was all this on the womanly
side that was wanting to Ned’s occasion; and very probably, too, being a
man not without insight, he was aware that tender treatment, as a
mother bestows it, tends likewise to foster strength, and manliness of
character, as well as softer developments; but all this he could not
have supplied, and now as little as ever. But there was something else
which Ned ought to have, and might have; and this was intercourse with
his kind, free circulation, free air, instead of the stived-up house,
with the breeze from the graveyard blowing over it,--to be drawn out of
himself, and made to share the life of many, to be introduced, at one
remove, to the world with which he was to contend. To this end, shortly
after the scene of passion and reconciliation above described, the
Doctor took the resolution of sending Ned to an academy, famous in that
day, and still extant. Accordingly they all three--the grim Doctor, Ned,
and Elsie--set forth, one day of spring, leaving the house to crusty
Hannah and the great spider, in a carryall, being the only excursion
involving a night’s absence that either of the two children remembered
from the house by the graveyard, as at nightfall they saw the modest
pine-built edifice, with its cupola and bell, where Ned was to be
initiated into the schoolboy. The Doctor, remembering perhaps days spent
in some gray, stately, legendary great school of England, instinct with
the boyhood of men afterwards great, puffed forth a depreciating curse
upon it; but nevertheless made all arrangements for Ned’s behoof, and
next morning prepared to leave him there.
“Ned, my son, good by,” cried he, shaking the little fellow’s hand as he
stood tearful and wistful beside the chaise shivering at the loneliness
which he felt settling around him,--a new loneliness to him,--the
loneliness of a crowd. “Do not be cast down, my boy. Face the world;
grasp the thistle strongly, and it will sting you the less. Have faith
in your own fist! Fear no man! Have no secret plot! Never do what you
think wrong! If hereafter you learn to know that Doctor Grim was a
bad man, forgive him, and be a better one yourself. Good by, and if
my blessing be good for anything, in God’s name, I invoke it upon you
heartily.”
Little Elsie was sobbing, and flung her arms about Ned’s neck, and he
his about hers; so that they parted without a word. As they drove away,
a singular sort of presentiment came over the boy, as he stood looking
after them.
“It is all over,--all over,” said he to himself: “Doctor Grim and
little Elsie are gone out of my life. They leave me and will never come
back,--not they to me, not I to them. O, how cold the world is! Would we
three--the Doctor, and Elsie, and I--could have lain down in a row, in
the old graveyard, close under the eaves of the house, and let the grass
grow over us. The world is cold; and I am an alms-house child.”
The house by the graveyard seemed dismal now, no doubt, to little Elsie,
who, being of a cheerful nature herself, (common natures often having
this delusion about a home,) had grown up with the idea that it was the
most delightful spot in the world; the place fullest of pleasant play,
and of household love (because her own love welled over out of her
heart, like a spring in a barrel); the place where everybody was kind
and good, the world beyond its threshold appearing perhaps strange and
sombre; the spot where it was pleasantest to be, for its own mere sake;
the dim old, homely place, so warm and cosey in winter, so cool in
summer. Who else was fortunate enough to have such a home,--with that
nice, kind, beautiful Ned, and that dear, kind, gentle, old Doctor Grim,
with his sweet ways, so wise, so upright, so good, beyond all other men?
O, happy girl that she was, to have grown up in such a home! Was there
ever any other house with such cosey nooks in it? Such probably were the
feelings of good little Elsie about this place, which has seemed to
us so dismal; for the home feeling in the child’s heart, her warm,
cheerful, affectionate nature, was a magic, so far as she herself was
concerned, and made all the house and its inmates over after her own
fashion. But now that little Ned was gone, there came a change. She
moped about the house, and, for the first time, suspected it was dismal.
As for the grim Doctor, there did not appear to be much alteration in
that hard old character; perhaps he drank a little more, though that was
doubtful, because it is difficult to see where he could find niches
to stick in more frequent drinks. Nor did he more frequently breathe
through the pipe. He fell into desuetude, however, of his daily walk,
[Endnote: 1] and sent Elsie to play by herself in the graveyard (a
dreary business enough for the poor child) instead of taking her
to country or seaside himself. He was more savage and blasphemous,
sometimes, than he had been heretofore known to be; but, on the other
hand, he was sometimes softer, with a kind of weary consenting to
circumstances, intervals of helpless resignation, when he no longer
fought and struggled in his heart. He did not seem to be alive all the
time; but, on the other hand, he was sometimes a good deal too much
alive, and could not bear his potations as well as he used to do, and
was overheard blaspheming at himself for being so weakly, and having a
brain that could not bear a thimbleful, and growing to be a milksop
like Colcord, as he said. This person, of whom the Doctor and his young
people had had such a brief experience, appeared nevertheless to hang
upon his remembrance in a singular way,--the more singular as there was
little resemblance between them, or apparent possibility of sympathy.
Little Elsie was startled to hear Doctor Grim sometimes call out,
“Colcord! Colcord!” as if he were summoning a spirit from some secret
place. He muttered, sitting by himself, long, indistinct masses of talk,
in which this name was discernible, and other names. Going on mumbling,
by the hour together, great masses of vague trouble, in which, if it
only could have been unravelled and put in order, no doubt all the
secrets of his life,--secrets of wrath, guilt, vengeance, love, hatred,
all beaten up together, and the best quite spoiled by the worst, might
have been found. His mind evidently wandered. Sometimes, he seemed to be
holding conversation with unseen interlocutors, and almost invariably,
so far as could be gathered, he was bitter, and then sat, immitigable,
pouring out wrath and terror, denunciating, tyrannical, speaking as to
something that lay at his feet, but which he would not spare. [Endnote:
2] Then suddenly, he would start, look round the dark old study, upward
to the dangling spider overhead, and then at the quiet little girl, who,
try as she might, could not keep her affrighted looks from his face, and
always met his eyes with a loyal frankness and unyielded faith in him.
“Oh, you little jade, what have you been overhearing?”
“Nothing, Doctor Grim,--nothing that I could make out.”
“Make out as much as you can,” he said. “I am not afraid of you.”
“Afraid of little Elsie, dear Doctor Grim!”
“Neither of you, nor of the Devil,” murmured the Doctor,--“of nobody
but little Ned and that milksop Colcord. If I have wronged anybody it
is them. As for the rest, let the day of judgment come. Doctor Grim is
ready to fling down his burden at the judgment seat and have it sorted
there.”
Then he would lie back in his chair and look up at the great spider, who
(or else it was Elsie’s fancy) seemed to be making great haste in those
days, filling out his web as if he had less time than was desirable for
such a piece of work.
One morning the Doctor arose as usual, and after breakfast (at which
he ate nothing, and even after filling his coffee-cup half with brandy,
half with coffee, left it untouched, save sipping a little out of a
teaspoon) he went to the study (with a rather unsteady gait, chiefly
remarkable because it was so early in the day), and there established
himself with his pipe, as usual, and his medical books and machines, and
his manuscript. But he seemed troubled, irresolute, weak, and at last he
blew out a volley of oaths, with no apparent appropriateness, and then
seemed to be communing with himself.
“It is of no use to carry this on any further,” said he, fiercely, in a
decided tone, as if he had taken a resolution. “Elsie, my girl, come and
kiss me.”
So Elsie kissed him, amid all the tobacco-smoke which was curling out of
his mouth, as if there were a half-extinguished furnace in his inside.
“Elsie, my little girl, I mean to die to-day,” said the old man.
“To die, dear Doctor Grim? O, no! O, no!”
“O, yes! Elsie,” said the Doctor, in a very positive tone. “I have kept
myself alive by main force these three weeks, and I find it hardly worth
the trouble. It requires so much exercise of will;--and I am weary,
weary. The pipe does not taste good, the brandy bewilders me. Ned is
gone, too;--I have nothing else to do. I have wrought this many a year
for an object, and now, taking all things into consideration, I don’t
know whether to execute it or no. Ned is gone; there is nobody but my
little Elsie,--a good child, but not quite enough to live for. I will
let myself die, therefore, before sunset.”
“O, no! Doctor Grim. Let us send for Ned, and you will think it worth
the trouble of living.”
“No, Elsie, I want no one near my death-bed; when I have finished a
little business, you must go out of the room, and I will turn my face
to the wall, and say good-night. But first send crusty Hannah for Mr.
Pickering.”
He was a lawyer of the town, a man of classical and antiquarian tastes,
as well as legal acquirement, and some of whose pursuits had brought him
and Doctor Grim occasionally together. Besides calling this gentleman,
crusty Hannah (of her own motion, but whether out of good will to
the poor Doctor Grim, or from a tendency to mischief inherent in such
unnatural mixtures as hers) summoned, likewise, in all haste, a medical
man,--and, as it happened, the one who had taken a most decidedly
hostile part to our Doctor,--and a clergyman, who had often devoted our
poor friend to the infernal regions, almost by name, in his sermons; a
kindness, to say the truth, which the Doctor had fully reciprocated
in many anathemas against the clergyman. These two worthies, arriving
simultaneously, and in great haste, were forthwith ushered to where the
Doctor lay half reclining in his study; and upon showing their heads,
the Doctor flew into an awful rage, threatening, in his customary
improper way, when angry, to make them smell the infernal regions, and
proceeding to put his threats into execution by flinging his odorous
tobacco-pipe in the face of the medical man, and rebaptizing the
clergyman with a half-emptied tumbler of brandy and water, and sending
a terrible vociferation of oaths after them both, as they clattered
hastily down the stairs. Really, that crusty Hannah must have been the
Devil, for she stood grinning and chuckling at the foot of the stairs,
curtseying grotesquely.
“He terrible man, our old Doctor Grim,” quoth crusty Hannah. “He drive
us all to the wicked place before him.”
This, however, was the final outbreak of poor Doctor Grim. Indeed, he
almost went off at once in the exhaustion that succeeded. The lawyer
arrived shortly after, and was shut up with him for a considerable
space; after which crusty Hannah was summoned, and desired to call two
indifferent persons from the street, as witnesses to a will; and this
document was duly executed, and given into the possession of the lawyer.
This done, and the lawyer having taken his leave, the grim Doctor
desired, and indeed commanded imperatively, that crusty Hannah
should quit the room, having first--we are sorry to say--placed the
brandy-bottle within reach of his hand, and leaving him propped up in
his arm-chair, in which he leaned back, gazing up at the great spider,
who was, dangling overhead. As the door closed behind crusty Hannah’s
grinning and yet strangely interested face, the Doctor caught a glimpse
of little Elsie in the passage, bathed in tears, and lingering and
looking earnestly into the chamber. [Endnote: 3.]
Seeing the poor little girl, the Doctor cried out to her, half
wrathfully, half tenderly, “Don’t cry, you little wretch! Come and kiss
me once more.” So Elsie, restraining her grief with a great effort, ran
to him and gave him a last kiss.
“Tell Ned,” said the Doctor solemnly, “to think no more of the old
English hall, or of the bloody footstep, or of the silver key, or any of
all that nonsense. Good by, my dear!” Then he said, with his thunderous
and imperative tone, “Let no one come near me till to-morrow morning.”
So that parting was over; but still the poor little desolate child
hovered by the study door all day long, afraid to enter, afraid to
disobey, but unable to go. Sometimes she heard the Doctor muttering,
as was his wont; once she fancied he was praying, and dropping on her
knees, she also prayed fervently, and perhaps acceptably; then, all at
once, the Doctor called out, in a loud voice, “No, Ned, no. Drop it,
drop it!”
And then there was an utter silence, unbroken forevermore by the lips
that had uttered so many objectionable things.
And finally, after an interval which had been prescribed by the grim
Doctor, a messenger was sent by the lawyer to our friend Ned, to inform
him of this sad event, and to bring him back temporarily to town, for
the purpose of hearing what were his prospects, and what disposition
was now to be made of him. We shall not attempt to describe the grief,
astonishment, and almost incredulity of Ned, on discovering that a
person so mixed up with and built into his whole life as the stalwart
Doctor Grimshawe had vanished out of it thus unexpectedly, like
something thin as a vapor,--like a red flame, that one [instant] is very
bright in its lurid ray, and then is nothing at all, amid the darkness.
To the poor boy’s still further grief and astonishment, he found, on
reaching the spot that he called home, that little Elsie (as the lawyer
gave him to understand, by the express orders of the Doctor, and for
reasons of great weight) had been conveyed away by a person under whose
guardianship she was placed, and that Ned could not be informed of the
place. Even crusty Hannah had been provided for and disposed of, and was
no longer to be found. Mr. Pickering explained to Ned the dispositions
in his favor which had been made by his deceased friend, who, out of a
moderate property, had left him the means of obtaining as complete an
education as the country would afford, and of supporting himself until
his own exertions would be likely to give him the success which his
abilities were calculated to win. The remainder of his property (a less
sum than that thus disposed of) was given to little Elsie, with the
exception of a small provision to crusty Hannah, with the recommendation
from the Doctor that she should retire and spend the remainder of her
life among her own people. There was likewise a certain sum left for
the purpose of editing and printing (with a dedication to the Medical
Society of the State) an account of the process of distilling balm from
cobwebs; the bequest being worded in so singular a way that it was just
as impossible as it had ever been to discover whether the grim Doctor
was in earnest or no.
What disappointed the boy, in a greater degree than we shall try to
express, was the lack of anything in reference to those dreams and
castles of the air,--any explanation of his birth; so that he was left
with no trace of it, except just so far as the alms-house whence the
Doctor had taken him. There all traces of his name and descent vanished,
just as if he had been made up of the air, as an aerolite seems to be
before it tumbles on the earth with its mysterious iron.
The poor boy, in his bewilderment, had not yet come to feel what his
grief was; it was not to be conceived, in a few days, that he was
deprived of every person, thing, or thought that had hitherto kept his
heart warm. He tried to make himself feel it, yearning for this grief as
for his sole friend. Being, for the present, domiciled with the lawyer,
he obtained the key of his former home, and went through the desolate
house that he knew so well, and which now had such a silent, cold,
familiar strangeness, with none in it, though the ghosts of the grim
Doctor, of laughing little Elsie, of crusty Hannah,--dead and alive
alike,--were all there, and his own ghost among them; for he himself
was dead, that is, his former self, which he recognized as himself, had
passed away, as they were. In the study everything looked as formerly,
yet with a sort of unreality, as if it would dissolve and vanish on
being touched; and, indeed, it partly proved so; for over the Doctor’s
chair seemed still to hang the great spider, but on looking closer at
it, and finally touching it with the end of the Doctor’s stick, Ned
discovered that it was merely the skin, shell, apparition, of the real
spider,[Endnote: 4] the reality of whom, it is to be supposed, had
followed the grim Doctor, whithersoever he had gone.
A thought struck Ned while he was here; he remembered the secret niche
in the wall, where he had once seen the Doctor deposit some papers. He
looked, and there they were. Who was the heir of those papers, if not
he? If there were anything wrong in appropriating them, it was not
perceptible to him in the desolation, anxiety, bewilderment, and despair
of that moment. He grasped the papers, and hurried from the room and
down the stairs, afraid to look round, and half expecting to hear the
gruff voice of Doctor Grim thundering after him to bring them back.
Then Ned went out of the back door, and found his way to the Doctor’s
new grave, which, as it happened, was dug close beside that one which
occupied the place of the one which the stranger had come to seek; and,
as if to spite the Doctor’s professional antipathies, it lay beside a
grave of an old physician and surgeon, one Doctor Summerton, who used
to help diseases and kill patients above a hundred years ago. But Doctor
Grim was undisturbed by these neighbors, and apparently not more by the
grief of poor little Ned, who hid his face in the crumbly earth of the
grave, and the sods that had not begun to grow, and wept as if his heart
would break.
But the heart never breaks on the first grave; and, after many graves,
it gets so obtuse that nothing can break it.
And now let the mists settle down over the trail of our story, hiding it
utterly on its onward course, for a long way to come, until, after many
years, they may disperse and discover something which, were it worth
while to follow it through all that obscurity, would prove to be
the very same track which that boy was treading when we last saw
him,--though it may have lain over land and sea since then; but the
footsteps that trod there are treading here.