The patient [Endnote: 1] had a favorable night, and awoke with a much
clearer head, though still considerably feverish and in a state of great
exhaustion from loss of blood, which kept down the fever. The events
of the preceding day shimmered as it were and shifted illusively in his
recollection; nor could he yet account for the situation in which he
found himself, the antique chamber, the old man of mediæval garb, nor
even for the wound which seemed to have been the occasion of bringing
him thither. One moment, so far as he remembered, he had been straying
along a solitary footpath, through rich shrubbery, with the antlered
deer peeping at him, listening to the lark and the cuckoo; the next, he
lay helpless in this oak-panelled chamber, surrounded with objects that
appealed to some fantastic shadow of recollection, which could have had
no reality. [Endnote: 2.]
To say the truth, the traveller perhaps wilfully kept hold of this
strange illusiveness, and kept his thoughts from too harshly analyzing
his situation, and solving the riddle in which he found himself
involved. In his present weakness, his mind sympathizing with the
sinking down of his physical powers, it was delightful to let all go;
to relinquish all control, and let himself drift vaguely into whatever
region of improbabilities there exists apart from the dull, common plane
of life. Weak, stricken down, given over to influences which had taken
possession of him during an interval of insensibility, he was no longer
responsible; let these delusions, if they were such, linger as long as
they would, and depart of their own accord at last. He, meanwhile, would
willingly accept the idea that some spell had transported him out of an
epoch in which he had led a brief, troubled existence of battle, mental
strife, success, failure, all equally feverish and unsatisfactory, into
some past century, where the business was to rest,--to drag on dreamy
days, looking at things through half-shut eyes; into a limbo where
things were put away, shows of what had once been, now somehow fainted,
and still maintaining a sort of half-existence, a serious mockery; a
state likely enough to exist just a little apart from the actual world,
if we only know how to find our way into it. Scenes and events that had
once stained themselves, in deep colors, on the curtain that Time hangs
around us, to shut us in from eternity, cannot be quite effaced by the
succeeding phantasmagoria, and sometimes, by a palimpsest, show more
strongly than they. [Endnote: 3.]
In the course of the morning, however, he was a little too feelingly
made sensible of realities by the visit of a surgeon, who proceeded
to examine the wound in his shoulder, removing the bandages which he
himself seemed to have put upon this mysterious hurt. The traveller
closed his eyes, and submitted to the manipulations of the professional
person, painful as they were, assisted by the gentle touch of the old
palmer; and there was something in the way in which he resigned himself
that met the approbation of the surgeon, in spite of a little fever, and
slight delirium too, to judge by his eye.
“A very quiet and well-behaved patient,” said he to the palmer. “Unless
I greatly mistake, he has been under the surgeon’s hand for a similar
hurt ere now. He has learned under good discipline how to take such a
thing easily. Yes, yes; just here is a mark where a bullet went in some
time ago,--three or four years since, when he could have been little
more than a boy. A wild fellow this, I doubt.”
“It was an Indian bullet,” said the patient, still fancying himself gone
astray into the past, “shot at me in battle; ‘twas three hundred years
hereafter.”
“Ah! he has served in the East Indies,” said the surgeon. “I thought
this sun-burned cheek had taken its hue elsewhere than in England.”
The patient did not care to take the trouble which would have been
involved in correcting the surgeon’s surmise; so he let it pass, and
patiently awaited the end of the examination, with only a moan or
two, which seemed rather pleasing and desirable than otherwise to the
surgeon’s ear.
“He has vitality enough for his needs,” said he, nodding to the palmer.
“These groans betoken a good degree of pain; though the young fellow is
evidently a self-contained sort of nature, and does not let us know
all he feels. It promises well, however; keep him in bed and quiet, and
within a day or two we shall see.”
He wrote a recipe, or two or three, perhaps, (for in those days the
medical fraternity had faith in their own art,) and took his leave.
The white-bearded palmer withdrew into the half concealment of the
oratory which we have already mentioned, and then, putting on a pair of
spectacles, betook himself to the perusal of an old folio volume, the
leaves of which he turned over so gently that not the slightest sound
could possibly disturb the patient. All his manifestations were gentle
and soft, but of a simplicity most unlike the feline softness which we
are apt to associate with a noiseless tread and movement in the male
sex. The sunshine came through the ivy and glimmered upon his great
book, however, with an effect which a little disturbed the patient’s
nerves; besides, he desired to have a fuller view of his benign
guardian.
“Will you sit nearer the bedside?” said he. “I wish to look at you.”
Weakness, the relaxation of nerves, and the state of dependence on
another’s care--very long unfelt--had made him betray what we must call
childishness; and it was perceptible in the low half-complaining tone in
which he spoke, indicating a consciousness of kindness in the other, a
little plaintiveness in himself; of which, the next instant, weak
and wandering as he was, he was ashamed, and essayed to express it.
[Endnote: 4.]
“You must deem me very poor-spirited,” said he, “not to bear this
trifling hurt with a firmer mind. But perhaps it is not entirely that I
am so weak, but I feel you to be so benign.”
“Be weak, and be the stronger for it,” said the old man, with a grave
smile. “It is not in the pride of our strength that we are best or
wisest. To be made anew, we even must be again a little child, and
consent to be enwrapt quietly in the arms of Providence, as a child in
its mother’s arms.”
“I never knew a mother’s care,” replied the traveller, in a low,
regretful tone, being weak to the incoming of all soft feelings, in his
present state. “Since my boyhood, I have lived among men,--a life of
struggle and hard rivalry. It is good to find myself here in the long
past, and in a sheltered harbor.”
And here he smiled, by way of showing to this old palmer that he saw
through the slight infirmity of mind that impelled him to say such
things as the above; that he was not its dupe, though he had not
strength, just now, to resist its impulse. After this he dozed off
softly, and felt through all his sleep some twinges of his wound,
bringing him back, as it were, to the conscious surface of the great
deep of slumber, into which he might otherwise have sunk. At all such
brief intervals, half unclosing his eyes, (like a child, when the mother
sits by its bed and he fears that she will steal away if he falls
quite asleep, and leave him in the dark solitude,) he still beheld the
white-bearded, kindly old man, of saintly aspect, sitting near him,
and turning over the pages of his folio volume so softly that not the
faintest rustle did it make; the picture at length got so fully into his
idea, that he seemed to see it even through his closed eyelids. After
a while, however, the slumberous tendency left him more entirely, and,
without having been consciously awake, he found himself contemplating
the old man, with wide-open eyes. The venerable personage seemed soon
to feel his gaze, and, ceasing to look at the folio, he turned his eyes
with quiet inquiry to meet those of the stranger. [Endnote: 5.]
“What great volume is that?” asked the latter. [Endnote: 6.]
“It is a book of English chronicles,” said the old man, “mostly relating
to the part of the island where you now are, and to times previous to
the Stuarts.”
“Ah! it is to you, a contemporary, what reading the newspaper is to
other men,” said the stranger; then, with a smile of self-reproach, “I
shall conquer this idle mood. I’m not so imbecile as you must think me.
But there is something that strangely haunts me,--where, in what state
of being, can I have seen your face before. There is nothing in it I
distinctly remember; but some impression, some characteristic, some
look, with which I have been long ago familiar haunts me and brings back
all old scenes. Do you know me?”
The old man smiled. “I knew, long ago, a bright and impressible boy,”
said he.
“And his name?” said the stranger.
“It was Edward Redclyffe,” said the old man.
“Ah, I see who you are,” said the traveller, not too earnestly, but with
a soft, gratified feeling, as the riddle thus far solved itself. “You
are my old kindly instructor. You are Colcord! That is it. I remember
you disappeared. You shall tell me, when I am quite myself, what was
that mystery,--and whether it is your real self, or only a part of my
dream, and going to vanish when I quite awake. Now I shall sleep and
dream more of it.”
One more waking interval he had that day, and again essayed to enter
into conversation with the old man, who had thus strangely again become
connected with his life, after having so long vanished from his path.
“Where am I?” asked Edward Redclyffe.
“In the home of misfortune,” said Colcord.
“Ah! then I have a right to be here!” said he. “I was born in such a
home. Do you remember it?”
“I know your story,” said Colcord.
“Yes; from Doctor Grim,” said Edward. “People whispered he had made away
with you. I never believed it; but finding you here in this strange way,
and myself having been shot, perhaps to death, it seems not so strange.
Pooh! I wander again, and ought to sleep a little more. And this is
the home of misfortune, but not like the squalid place of rage, idiocy,
imbecility, drunkenness, where I was born. How many times I have blushed
to remember that native home! But not of late! I have struggled; I
have fought; I have triumphed. The unknown boy has come to be no
undistinguished man! His ancestry, should he ever reveal himself to
them, need not blush for the poor foundling.”
“Hush!” said the quiet watcher. “Your fever burns you. Take this
draught, and sleep a little longer.” [Endnote: 7.]
Another day or two found Edward Redclyffe almost a convalescent. The
singular lack of impatience that characterized his present mood--the
repose of spirit into which he had lapsed--had much to do with the
favorable progress of his cure. After strife, anxiety, great mental
exertion, and excitement of various kinds, which had harassed him
ever since he grew to be a man, had come this opportunity of perfect
rest;--this dream in the midst of which he lay, while its magic
boundaries involved him, and kept far off the contact of actual life, so
that its sounds and tumults seemed remote; its cares could not fret
him; its ambitions, objects good or evil, were shut out from him; the
electric wires that had connected him with the battery of life were
broken for the time, and he did not feel the unquiet influence that kept
everybody else in galvanic motion. So, under the benign influence of
the old palmer, he lay in slumberous luxury, undisturbed save by some
twinges of no intolerable pain; which, however, he almost was glad
of, because it made him sensible that this deep luxury of quiet was
essential to his cure, however idle it might seem. For the first time
since he was a child, he resigned himself not to put a finger to the
evolution of his fortune; he determined to accept all things that might
happen, good or evil; he would not imagine an event beyond to-day, but
would let one spontaneous and half-defined thought loiter after another,
through his mind; listen to the spattering shower,--the puffs of
shut-out wind; and look with half-shut eyes at the sunshine glimmering
through the ivy-twigs, and illuminating those old devices on the wall;
at the gathering twilight; at the dim lamp; at the creeping upward of
another day, and with it the lark singing so far away that the thrill of
its delicious song could not disturb him with an impulse to awake. Sweet
as its carol was, he could almost have been content to miss the lark;
sweet and clear, it was too like a fairy trumpet-call, summoning him to
awake and struggle again with eager combatants for new victories, the
best of which were not worth this deep repose.
The old palmer did his best to prolong a mood so beneficial to the
wounded young man. The surgeon also nodded approval, and attributed
this happy state of the patient’s mind, and all the physical advantages
growing out of it, to his own consummate skill; nor, indeed, was he
undeserving of credit, not often to be awarded to medical men, for
having done nothing to impede the good which kind Nature was willing to
bring about. She was doing the patient more good, indeed, than
either the surgeon or the palmer could fully estimate, in taking
this opportunity to recreate a mind that had too early known stirring
impulse, and that had been worked to a degree beyond what its
organization (in some respects singularly delicate) ought to have borne.
Once in a long while the weary actors in the headlong drama of life must
have such repose or else go mad or die. When the machinery of human life
has once been stopped by sickness or other impediment, it often needs an
impulse to set it going again, even after it is nearly wound up.
But it could not last forever. The influx of new life into his being
began to have a poignancy that would not let him lie so quietly, lapped
in the past, in gone by centuries, and waited on by quiet Age, in the
person of the old palmer; he began to feel again that he was young, and
must live in the time when his lot was cast. He began to say to himself,
that it was not well to be any longer passive, but that he must again
take the troublesome burden of his own life on his own shoulders. He
thought of this necessity, this duty, throughout one whole day, and
determined that on the morrow he would make the first step towards
terminating his inaction, which he now began to be half impatient of,
at the same time that he clutched it still, for the sake of the
deliciousness that it had had.
“To-morrow, I hope to be clothed and in my right mind,” said he to the
old palmer, “and very soon I must thank you, with my whole heart, for
your kind care, and go. It is a shame that I burden the hospitality of
this house so long.”
“No shame whatever,” replied the old man, “but, on the contrary, the
fittest thing that could have chanced. You are dependent on no private
benevolence, nor on the good offices of any man now living, or who has
lived these last three hundred years. This ancient establishment is for
the support of poverty, misfortune, and age, and, according to the word
of the founder, it serves him:--he was indebted to the beneficiaries,
not they to him, for, in return for his temporal bequests, he asked
their prayers for his soul’s welfare. He needed them, could they avail
him; for this ponderous structure was built upon the founder’s mortal
transgressions, and even, I may say, out of the actual substance of
them. Sir Edward Redclyffe was a fierce fighter in the Wars of the
Roses, and amassed much wealth by spoil, rapine, confiscation, and all
violent and evil ways that those disturbed times opened to him; and on
his death-bed he founded this Hospital for twelve men, who should be
able to prove kindred with his race, to dwell here with a stipend,
and pray for him; and likewise provision for a sick stranger, until he
should be able to go on his way again.”
“I shall pray for him willingly,” said Edward, moved by the pity which
awaits any softened state of our natures to steal into our hearts.
“Though no Catholic, I will pray for his soul. And that is his crest
which you wear embroidered on his garment?”
“It is,” said the old man. “You will see it carved, painted,
embroidered, everywhere about the establishment; but let us give it
the better and more reasonable interpretation;--not that he sought to
proclaim his own pride of ancestry and race, but to acknowledge his
sins the more manifestly, by stamping the emblem of his race on this
structure of his penitence.”
“And are you,” said Redclyffe, impressed anew by the quiet dignity of
the venerable speaker, “in authority in the establishment?”
“A simple beneficiary of the charity,” said the palmer; “one of the
twelve poor brethren and kinsmen of the founder. Slighter proofs of
kindred are now of necessity received, since, in the natural course of
things, the race has long been growing scarce. But I had it in my power
to make out a sufficient claim.”
“Singular,” exclaimed Redclyffe, “you being an American!” [Endnote: 8.]
“You remember me, then,” said the old man, quietly.
“From the first,” said Edward, “although your image took the fantastic
aspect of the bewilderment in which I then was; and now that I am in
clearer state of mind, it seems yet stranger that you should be here. We
two children thought you translated, and people, I remember, whispered
dark hints about your fate.”
“There was nothing wonderful in my disappearance,” said the old man.
“There were causes, an impulse, an intuition, that made me feel, one
particular night, that I might meet harm, whether from myself or others,
by remaining in a place with which I had the most casual connection. But
I never, so long as I remained in America, quite lost sight of you; and
Doctor Grimshawe, before his death, had knowledge of where I was, and
gave me in charge a duty which I faithfully endeavored to perform.
Singular man that he was! much evil, much good in him. Both, it may be,
will live after him!”
Redclyffe, when the conversation had reached this point, felt a vast
desire to reveal to the old man all that the grim Doctor had instilled
into his childish mind, all that he himself, in subsequent years,
had wrought more definitely out of it, all his accompanying doubts
respecting the secret of his birth and some supposed claims which
he might assert, and which, only half acknowledging the purpose, had
availed to bring him, a republican, hither as to an ancestral centre. He
even fancied that the benign old man seemed to expect and await such a
confidence; but that very idea contributed to make it impossible for him
to speak.
“Another time,” he said to himself. “Perhaps never. It is a fantastic
folly; and with what the workhouse foundling has since achieved, he
would give up too many hopes to take the representation of a mouldy old
English family.”
“I find my head still very weak,” said he, by way of cutting short the
conversation. “I must try to sleep again.”