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THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
BY
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
A SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
ANOTHER SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
ANOTHER FRAGMENT OF THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
INTRODUCTORY NOTE.
THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
In "The Dolliver Romance," only three chapters of which the author
lived to complete, we get an intimation as to what would have been the
ultimate form given to that romance founded on the Elixir of Life, for
which "Septimius Felton" was the preliminary study. Having abandoned
this study, and apparently forsaken the whole scheme in 1862, Hawthorne
was moved to renew his meditation upon it in the following year; and as
the plan of the romance had now seemingly developed to his
satisfaction, he listened to the publisher's proposal that it should
begin its course as a serial story in the "Atlantic Monthly" for
January, 1864--the first instance in which he had attempted such a mode
of publication.
But the change from England to Massachusetts had been marked by, and
had perhaps in part caused, a decline in his health. Illness in his
family, the depressing and harrowing effect of the Civil War upon his
sensibilities, and anxiety with regard to pecuniary affairs, all
combined to make still further inroads upon his vitality; and so early
as the autumn of 1862 Mrs. Hawthorne noted in her private diary that
her husband was looking "miserably ill." At no time since boyhood had
he suffered any serious sickness, and his strong constitution enabled
him to rally from this first attack; but the gradual decline continued.
After sending forth "Our Old Home," he had little strength for any
employment more arduous than reading, or than walking his accustomed
path among the pines and sweetfern on the hill behind The Wayside,
known to his family as the Mount of Vision. The projected work,
therefore, advanced but slowly. He wrote to Mr. Fields:--
"I don't see much probability of my having the first chapter of the
Romance ready so soon as you want it. There are two or three chapters
ready to be written, but I am not yet robust enough to begin, and I
feel as if I should never carry it through."
The presentiment proved to be only too well founded. He had previously
written:--
"There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin. I linger
at the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantasms
to be encountered if I enter. I wish God had given me the faculty of
writing a sunshiny book."
And again, in November, he says: "I foresee that there is little
probability of my getting the first chapter ready by the 15th, although
I have a resolute purpose to write it by the end of the month." He did
indeed send it by that time, but it began to be apparent in January
that he could not go on.
"Seriously," he says, in one letter, "my mind has, for the present,
lost its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had
better keep quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigor if I wait
quietly for it; perhaps not." In another: "I hardly know what to say to
the public about this abortive Romance, though I know pretty well what
the case will be. I shall never finish it.... I cannot finish it unless
a great change comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do
so, it will be my death."
Finally, work had to be given over indefinitely. In April he went
southward with Mr. Ticknor, the senior partner of his publishing house;
but Mr. Ticknor died suddenly in Philadelphia, and Hawthorne returned
to The Wayside more feeble than ever. He lingered there a little while.
Then, early in May, came the last effort to recover tone, by means of a
carriage-journey, with his friend Ex-President Pierce, through the
southern part of New Hampshire. A week passed, and all was ended: at
the hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where he and his companion had
stopped to rest, he died in the night, between the 18th and the 19th of
May, 1864. Like Thackeray and Dickens, he was touched by death's
"petrific mace" before he had had time to do more than lay the
groundwork and begin the main structure of the fiction he had in hand;
and, as in the case of Thackeray, the suddenness of his decease has
never been clearly accounted for. The precise nature of his malady was
not known, since with quiet hopelessness he had refused to take medical
advice. His friend Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was the only physician who
had an opportunity to take even a cursory view of his case, which he
did in the course of a brief walk and conversation in Boston before
Hawthorne started with Mr. Pierce; but he was unable, with that slight
opportunity, to reach any definite conclusion. Dr. Holmes prescribed
and had put up for him a remedy to palliate some of the poignant
symptoms, and this Hawthorne carried with him; but "I feared," Dr.
Holmes writes to the editor, "that there was some internal
organic--perhaps malignant--disease; for he looked wasted and as if
stricken with a mortal illness."
The manuscript of the unfinished "Dolliver Romance" lay upon his coffin
during the funeral services at Concord, but, contrary to the impression
sometimes entertained on this point, was not buried with him. It is
preserved in the Concord Public Library. The first chapter was
published in the "Atlantic" as an isolated portion, soon after his
death; and subsequently the second chapter, which he had been unable to
revise, appeared in the same periodical. Between this and the third
fragment there is a gap, for bridging which no material was found among
his papers; but, after hesitating for several years, Mrs. Hawthorne
copied and placed in the publishers' hands that final portion, which,
with the two parts previously printed, constitutes the whole of what
Hawthorne had put into tangible form.
Hawthorne had purposed prefixing a sketch of Thoreau, "because, from a
tradition which he told me about this house of mine, I got the idea of
a deathless man, which is now taking a shape very different from the
original one." This refers to the tradition mentioned in the editor's
note to "Septimius Felton," and forms a link in the interesting chain
of evidence connecting that romance with the "Dolliver Romance." With
the plan respecting Thoreau he combined the idea of writing an
autobiographical preface, wherein The Wayside was to be described,
after the manner of his Introduction to the "Mosses from an Old Manse";
but, so far as is known, nothing of this was ever actually committed to
paper.
Beginning with the idea of producing an English romance, fragments of
which remain to us in "The Ancestral Footstep," and the incomplete work
known as "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret," he replaced these by another
design, of which "Septimius Felton" represents the partial execution.
But that elaborate study yielded, in its turn, to "The Dolliver
Romance." The last-named work, had the author lived to carry it out,
would doubtless have become the vehicle of a profound and pathetic
drama, based on the instinctive yearning of man for an immortal
existence, the attempted gratification of which would have been set
forth in a variety of ways: First, through the selfish old sensualist,
Colonel Dabney, who greedily seized the mysterious elixir and took such
a draught of it that he perished on the spot; then, through the simple
old Grandsir, anxious to live for Pansie's sake; and, perhaps, through
Pansie herself, who, coming into the enjoyment of some ennobling love,
would wish to defeat death, so that she might always keep the
perfection of her mundane happiness,--all these forms of striving to be
made the adumbration of a higher one, the shadow-play that should
direct our minds to the true immortality beyond this world.
G. P. L.
THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
A SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
Dr. Dolliver, a worthy personage of extreme antiquity, was aroused
rather prematurely, one summer morning, by the shouts of the child
Pansie, in an adjoining chamber, summoning old Martha (who performed
the duties of nurse, housekeeper, and kitchen-maid, in the Doctor's
establishment) to take up her little ladyship and dress her. The old
gentleman woke with more than his customary alacrity, and, after taking
a moment to gather his wits about him, pulled aside the faded moreen
curtains of his ancient bed, and thrust his head into a beam of
sunshine that caused him to wink and withdraw it again. This transitory
glimpse of good Dr. Dolliver showed a flannel night-cap, fringed round
with stray locks of silvery white hair, and surmounting a meagre and
duskily yellow visage, which was crossed and criss-crossed with a
record of his long life in wrinkles, faithfully written, no doubt, but
with such cramped chirography of Father Time that the purport was
illegible. It seemed hardly worth while for the patriarch to get out of
bed any more, and bring his forlorn shadow into the summer day that was
made for younger folks. The Doctor, however, was by no means of that
opinion, being considerably encouraged towards the toil of living
twenty-four hours longer by the comparative ease with which he found
himself going through the usually painful process of bestirring his
rusty joints (stiffened by the very rest and sleep that should have
made them pliable) and putting them in a condition to bear his weight
upon the floor. Nor was he absolutely disheartened by the idea of those
tonsorial, ablutionary, and personally decorative labors which are apt
to become so intolerably irksome to an old gentleman, after performing
them daily and daily for fifty, sixty, or seventy years, and finding
them still as immitigably recurrent as at first. Dr. Dolliver could
nowise account for this happy condition of his spirits and physical
energies, until he remembered taking an experimental sip of a certain
cordial which was long ago prepared by his grandson, and carefully
sealed up in a bottle, and had been reposited in a dark closet, among a
parcel of effete medicines, ever since that gifted young man's death.
"It may have wrought effect upon me," thought the doctor, shaking his
head as he lifted it again from the pillow. "It may be so; for poor
Edward oftentimes instilled a strange efficacy into his perilous drugs.
But I will rather believe it to be the operation of God's mercy, which
may have temporarily invigorated my feeble age for little Pansie's
sake."
A twinge of his familiar rheumatism, as he put his foot out of bed,
taught him that he must not reckon too confidently upon even a day's
respite from the intrusive family of aches and infirmities, which, with
their proverbial fidelity to attachments once formed, had long been the
closest acquaintances that the poor old gentleman had in the world.
Nevertheless, he fancied the twinge a little less poignant than those
of yesterday; and, moreover, after stinging him pretty smartly, it
passed gradually off with a thrill, which, in its latter stages, grew
to be almost agreeable. Pain is but pleasure too strongly emphasized.
With cautious movements, and only a groan or two, the good Doctor
transferred himself from the bed to the floor, where he stood awhile,
gazing from one piece of quaint furniture to another (such as
stiff-backed Mayflower chairs, an oaken chest-of-drawers carved
cunningly with shapes of animals and wreaths of foliage, a table with
multitudinous legs, a family record in faded embroidery, a shelf of
black-bound books, a dirty heap of gallipots and phials in a dim
corner),--gazing at these things, and steadying himself by the bedpost,
while his inert brain, still partially benumbed with sleep, came slowly
into accordance with the realities about him. The object which most
helped to bring Dr. Dolliver completely to his waking perceptions was
one that common observers might suppose to have been snatched bodily
out of his dreams. The same sunbeam that had dazzled the doctor between
the bed-curtains gleamed on the weather-beaten gilding which had once
adorned this mysterious symbol, and showed it to be an enormous
serpent, twining round a wooden post, and reaching quite from the floor
of the chamber to its ceiling.
It was evidently a thing that could boast of considerable antiquity,
the dry-rot having eaten out its eyes and gnawed away the tip of its
tail; and it must have stood long exposed to the atmosphere, for a kind
of gray moss had partially overspread its tarnished gilt surface, and a
swallow, or other familiar little bird in some by-gone summer, seemed
to have built its nest in the yawning and exaggerated mouth. It looked
like a kind of Manichean idol, which might have been elevated on a
pedestal for a century or so, enjoying the worship of its votaries in
the open air, until the impious sect perished from among men,--all save
old Dr. Dolliver, who had set up the monster in his bedchamber for the
convenience of private devotion. But we are unpardonable in suggesting
such a fantasy to the prejudice of our venerable friend, knowing him to
have been as pious and upright a Christian, and with as little of the
serpent in his character, as ever came of Puritan lineage. Not to make
a further mystery about a very simple matter, this bedimmed and rotten
reptile was once the medical emblem or apothecary's sign of the famous
Dr. Swinnerton, who practised physic in the earlier days of New
England, when a head of Aesculapius or Hippocrates would have vexed the
souls of the righteous as savoring of heathendom. The ancient dispenser
of drugs had therefore set up an image of the Brazen Serpent, and
followed his business for many years with great credit, under this
Scriptural device; and Dr. Dolliver, being the apprentice, pupil, and
humble friend of the learned Swinnerton's old age, had inherited the
symbolic snake, and much other valuable property by his bequest.
While the patriarch was putting on his small-clothes, he took care to
stand in the parallelogram of bright sunshine that fell upon the
uncarpeted floor. The summer warmth was very genial to his system, and
yet made him shiver; his wintry veins rejoiced at it, though the
reviving blood tingled through them with a half-painful and only
half-pleasurable titillation. For the first few moments after creeping
out of bed, he kept his back to the sunny window, and seemed
mysteriously shy of glancing thitherward; but, as the June fervor
pervaded him more and more thoroughly, he turned bravely about, and
looked forth at a burial-ground on the corner of which he dwelt. There
lay many an old acquaintance, who had gone to sleep with the flavor of
Dr. Dolliver's tinctures and powders upon his tongue; it was the
patient's final bitter taste of this world, and perhaps doomed to be a
recollected nauseousness in the next. Yesterday, in the chill of his
forlorn old age, the Doctor expected soon to stretch out his weary
bones among that quiet community, and might scarcely have shrunk from
the prospect on his own account, except, indeed, that he dreamily mixed
up the infirmities of his present condition with the repose of the
approaching one, being haunted by a notion that the damp earth, under
the grass and dandelions, must needs be pernicious for his cough and
his rheumatism. But, this morning, the cheerful sunbeams, or the mere
taste of his grandson's cordial that he had taken at bedtime, or the
fitful vigor that often sports irreverently with aged people, had
caused an unfrozen drop of youthfulness, somewhere within him, to
expand.
"Hem! ahem!" quoth the Doctor, hoping with one effort to clear his
throat of the dregs of a ten-years' cough. "Matters are not so far gone
with me as I thought. I have known mighty sensible men, when only a
little age-stricken or otherwise out of sorts, to die of mere
faint-heartedness, a great deal sooner than they need."
He shook his silvery head at his own image in the looking-glass, as if
to impress the apothegm on that shadowy representative of himself; and,
for his part, he determined to pluck up a spirit and live as long as he
possibly could, if it were only for the sake of little Pansie, who
stood as close to one extremity of human life as her great-grandfather
to the other. This child of three years old occupied all the
unfossilized portion of Dr. Dolliver's heart. Every other interest that
he formerly had, and the entire confraternity of persons whom he once
loved, had long ago departed; and the poor Doctor could not follow
them, because the grasp of Pansie's baby-fingers held him back.
So he crammed a great silver watch into his fob, and drew on a
patchwork morning-gown of an ancient fashion. Its original material was
said to have been the embroidered front of his own wedding-waistcoat
and the silken skirt of his wife's bridal attire, which his eldest
granddaughter had taken from the carved chest-of-drawers, after poor
Bessie, the beloved of his youth, had been half a century in the grave.
Throughout many of the intervening years, as the garment got ragged,
the spinsters of the old man's family had quilted their duty and
affection into it in the shape of patches upon patches, rose-color,
crimson, blue, violet, and green, and then (as their hopes faded, and
their life kept growing shadier, and their attire took a sombre hue)
sober gray and great fragments of funereal black, until the Doctor
could revive the memory of most things that had befallen him by looking
at his patchwork-gown, as it hung upon a chair. And now it was ragged
again, and all the fingers that should have mended it were cold. It had
an Eastern fragrance, too, a smell of drugs, strong-scented herbs, and
spicy gums, gathered from the many potent infusions that had from time
to time been spilt over it; so that, snuffing him afar off, you might
have taken Dr. Dolliver for a mummy, and could hardly have been
undeceived by his shrunken and torpid aspect, as he crept nearer.
Wrapt in his odorous and many-colored robe, he took staff in hand, and
moved pretty vigorously to the head of the staircase. As it was
somewhat steep, and but dimly lighted, he began cautiously to descend,
putting his left hand on the banister, and poking down his long stick
to assist him in making sure of the successive steps; and thus he
became a living illustration of the accuracy of Scripture, where it
describes the aged as being "afraid of that which is high,"--a truth
that is often found to have a sadder purport than its external one.
Half-way to the bottom, however, the Doctor heard the impatient and
authoritative tones of little Pansie,--Queen Pansie, as she might
fairly have been styled, in reference to her position in the
household,--calling amain for grandpapa and breakfast. He was startled
into such perilous activity by the summons, that his heels slid on the
stairs, the slippers were shuffled off his feet, and he saved himself
from a tumble only by quickening his pace, and coming down at almost a
run.
"Mercy on my poor old bones!" mentally exclaimed the Doctor, fancying
himself fractured in fifty places. "Some of them are broken, surely,
and, methinks, my heart has leaped out of my mouth! What! all right?
Well, well! but Providence is kinder to me than I deserve, prancing
down this steep staircase like a kid of three months old!"
He bent stiffly to gather up his slippers and fallen staff; and
meanwhile Pansie had heard the tumult of her great-grandfather's
descent, and was pounding against the door of the breakfast-room in her
haste to come at him. The Doctor opened it, and there she stood, a
rather pale and large-eyed little thing, quaint in her aspect, as might
well be the case with a motherless child, dwelling in an uncheerful
house, with no other playmates than a decrepit old man and a kitten,
and no better atmosphere within-doors than the odor of decayed
apothecary's stuff, nor gayer neighborhood than that of the adjacent
burial-ground, where all her relatives, from her great-grandmother
downward, lay calling to her, "Pansie, Pansie, it is bedtime!" even in
the prime of the summer morning. For those dead women-folk, especially
her mother and the whole row of maiden aunts and grand-aunts, could not
but be anxious about the child, knowing that little Pansie would be far
safer under a tuft of dandelions than if left alone, as she soon must
be, in this difficult and deceitful world.
Yet, in spite of the lack of damask roses in her cheeks, she seemed a
healthy child, and certainly showed great capacity of energetic
movement in the impulsive capers with which she welcomed her venerable
progenitor. She shouted out her satisfaction, moreover (as her custom
was, having never had any oversensitive auditors about her to tame down
her voice), till even the Doctor's dull ears were full of the clamor.
"Pansie, darling," said Dr. Dolliver, cheerily, patting her brown hair
with his tremulous fingers, "thou hast put some of thine own friskiness
into poor old grandfather, this fine morning! Dost know, child, that he
came near breaking his neck down-stairs at the sound of thy voice? What
wouldst thou have done then, little Pansie?"
"Kiss poor grandpapa and make him well!" answered the child,
remembering the Doctor's own mode of cure in similar mishaps to
herself. "It shall do poor grandpapa good!" she added, putting up her
mouth to apply the remedy.
"Ah, little one, thou hast greater faith in thy medicines than ever I
had in my drugs," replied the patriarch, with a giggle, surprised and
delighted at his own readiness of response. "But the kiss is good for
my feeble old heart, Pansie, though it might do little to mend a broken
neck; so give grandpapa another dose, and let us to breakfast."
In this merry humor they sat down to the table, great-grandpapa and
Pansie side by side, and the kitten, as soon appeared, making a third
in the party. First, she showed her mottled head out of Pansie's lap,
delicately sipping milk from the child's basin without rebuke: then she
took post on the old gentleman's shoulder, purring like a
spinning-wheel, trying her claws in the wadding of his dressing-gown,
and still more impressively reminding him of her presence by putting
out a paw to intercept a warmed-over morsel of yesterday's chicken on
its way to the Doctor's mouth. After skilfully achieving this feat, she
scrambled down upon the breakfast-table and began to wash her face and
hands. Evidently, these companions were all three on intimate terms, as
was natural enough, since a great many childish impulses were softly
creeping back on the simple-minded old man; insomuch that, if no
worldly necessities nor painful infirmity had disturbed him, his
remnant of life might have been as cheaply and cheerily enjoyed as the
early playtime of the kitten and the child. Old Dr. Dolliver and his
great-granddaughter (a ponderous title, which seemed quite to overwhelm
the tiny figure of Pansie) had met one another at the two extremities
of the life-circle: her sunrise served him for a sunset, illuminating
his locks of silver and hers of golden brown with a homogeneous shimmer
of twinkling light.
Little Pansie was the one earthly creature that inherited a drop of the
Dolliver blood. The Doctor's only child, poor Bessie's offspring, had
died the better part of a hundred years before, and his grandchildren,
a numerous and dimly remembered brood, had vanished along his weary
track in their youth, maturity, or incipient age, till, hardly knowing,
how it had all happened, he found himself tottering onward with an
infant's small fingers in his nerveless grasp. So mistily did his dead
progeny come and go in the patriarch's decayed recollection, that this
solitary child represented for him the successive babyhoods of the many
that had gone before. The emotions of his early paternity came back to
him. She seemed the baby of a past age oftener than she seemed Pansie.
A whole family of grand-aunts (one of whom had perished in her cradle,
never so mature as Pansie now, another in her virgin bloom, another in
autumnal maidenhood, yellow and shrivelled, with vinegar in her blood,
and still another, a forlorn widow, whose grief outlasted even its
vitality, and grew to be merely a torpid habit, and was saddest
then),--all their hitherto forgotten features peeped through the face
of the great-grandchild, and their long-inaudible voices sobbed,
shouted, or laughed, in her familiar tones. But it often happened to
Dr. Dolliver, while frolicking amid this throng of ghosts, where the
one reality looked no more vivid than its shadowy sisters,--it often
happened that his eyes filled with tears at a sudden perception of what
a sad and poverty-stricken old man he was, already remote from his own
generation, and bound to stray further onward as the sole playmate and
protector of a child!
As Dr. Dolliver, in spite of his advanced epoch of life, is likely to
remain a considerable time longer upon our hands, we deem it expedient
to give a brief sketch of his position, in order that the story may get
onward with the greater freedom when he rises from the breakfast-table.
Deeming it a matter of courtesy, we have allowed him the honorary title
of Doctor, as did all his towns-people and contemporaries, except,
perhaps, one or two formal old physicians, stingy of civil phrases and
over-jealous of their own professional dignity. Nevertheless, these
crusty graduates were technically right in excluding Dr. Dolliver from
their fraternity. He had never received the degree of any medical
school, nor (save it might be for the cure of a toothache, or a child's
rash, or a whitlow on a seamstress's finger, or some such trifling
malady) had he ever been even a practitioner of the awful science with
which his popular designation connected him. Our old friend, in short,
even at his highest social elevation, claimed to be nothing more than
an apothecary, and, in these later and far less prosperous days,
scarcely so much. Since the death of his last surviving grandson
(Pansie's father, whom he had instructed in all the mysteries of his
science, and who, being distinguished by an experimental and inventive
tendency, was generally believed to have poisoned himself with an
infallible panacea of his own distillation),--since that final
bereavement, Dr. Dolliver's once pretty flourishing business had
lamentably declined. After a few months of unavailing struggle, he
found it expedient to take down the Brazen Serpent from the position to
which Dr. Swinnerton had originally elevated it, in front of his shop
in the main street, and to retire to his private dwelling, situated in
a by-lane and on the edge of a burial-ground.
This house, as well as the Brazen Serpent, some old medical books, and
a drawer full of manuscripts, had come to him by the legacy of Dr.
Swinnerton. The dreariness of the locality had been of small importance
to our friend in his young manhood, when he first led his fair wife
over the threshold, and so long as neither of them had any kinship with
the human dust that rose into little hillocks, and still kept
accumulating beneath their window. But, too soon afterwards, when poor
Bessie herself had gone early to rest there, it is probable that an
influence from her grave may have prematurely calmed and depressed her
widowed husband, taking away much of the energy from what should have
been the most active portion of his life. Thus he never grew rich. His
thrifty townsmen used to tell him, that, in any other man's hands, Dr.
Swinnerton's Brazen Serpent (meaning, I presume, the inherited credit
and good-will of that old worthy's trade) would need but ten years'
time to transmute its brass into gold. In Dr. Dolliver's keeping, as we
have seen, the inauspicious symbol lost the greater part of what
superficial gilding it originally had. Matters had not mended with him
in more advanced life, after he had deposited a further and further
portion of his heart and its affections in each successive one of a
long row of kindred graves; and as he stood over the last of them,
holding Pansie by the hand and looking down upon the coffin of his
grandson, it is no wonder that the old man wept, partly for those gone
before, but not so bitterly as for the little one that stayed behind.
Why had not God taken her with the rest? And then, so hopeless as he
was, so destitute of possibilities of good, his weary frame, his
decrepit bones, his dried-up heart, might have crumbled into dust at
once, and have been scattered by the next wind over all the heaps of
earth that were akin to him.
This intensity of desolation, however, was of too positive a character
to be long sustained by a person of Dr. Dolliver's original gentleness
and simplicity, and now so completely tamed by age and misfortune. Even
before he turned away from the grave, he grew conscious of a slightly
cheering and invigorating effect from the tight grasp of the child's
warm little hand. Feeble as he was, she seemed to adopt him willingly
for her protector. And the Doctor never afterwards shrank from his duty
nor quailed beneath it, but bore himself like a man, striving, amid the
sloth of age and the breaking-up of intellect, to earn the competency
which he had failed to accumulate even in his most vigorous days.
To the extent of securing a present subsistence for Pansie and himself,
he was successful. After his son's death, when the Brazen Serpent fell
into popular disrepute, a small share of tenacious patronage followed
the old man into his retirement. In his prime, he had been allowed to
possess more skill than usually fell to the share of a Colonial
apothecary, having been regularly apprenticed to Dr. Swinnerton, who,
throughout his long practice, was accustomed personally to concoct the
medicines which he prescribed and dispensed. It was believed, indeed,
that the ancient physician had learned the art at the world-famous
drug-manufactory of Apothecary's Hall, in London, and, as some people
half-malignly whispered, had perfected himself under masters more
subtle than were to be found even there. Unquestionably, in many
critical cases he was known to have employed remedies of mysterious
composition and dangerous potency, which, in less skilful hands, would
have been more likely to kill than cure. He would willingly, it is
said, have taught his apprentice the secrets of these prescriptions,
but the latter, being of a timid character and delicate conscience, had
shrunk from acquaintance with them. It was probably as the result of
the same scrupulosity that Dr. Dolliver had always declined to enter
the medical profession, in which his old instructor had set him such
heroic examples of adventurous dealing with matters of life and death.
Nevertheless, the aromatic fragrance, so to speak, of the learned
Swinnerton's reputation, had clung to our friend through life; and
there were elaborate preparations in the pharmacopoeia of that day,
requiring such minute skill and conscientious fidelity in the concocter
that the physicians were still glad to confide them to one in whom
these qualities were so evident.
Moreover, the grandmothers of the community were kind to him, and
mindful of his perfumes, his rose-water, his cosmetics, tooth-powders,
pomanders, and pomades, the scented memory of which lingered about
their toilet-tables, or came faintly back from the days when they were
beautiful. Among this class of customers there was still a demand for
certain comfortable little nostrums (delicately sweet and pungent to
the taste, cheering to the spirits, and fragrant in the breath), the
proper distillation of which was the airiest secret that the mystic
Swinnerton had left behind him. And, besides, these old ladies had
always liked the manners of Dr. Dolliver, and used to speak of his
gentle courtesy behind the counter as having positively been something
to admire; though of later years, an unrefined, and almost rustic
simplicity, such as belonged to his humble ancestors, appeared to have
taken possession of him, as it often does of prettily mannered men in
their late decay.
But it resulted from all these favorable circumstances that the
Doctor's marble mortar, though worn with long service and considerably
damaged by a crack that pervaded it, continued to keep up an occasional
intimacy with the pestle; and he still weighed drachms and scruples in
his delicate scales, though it seemed impossible, dealing with such
minute quantities, that his tremulous fingers should not put in too
little or too much, leaving out life with the deficiency, or spilling
in death with the surplus. To say the truth, his stanchest friends were
beginning to think that Dr. Dolliver's fits of absence (when his mind
appeared absolutely to depart from him, while his frail old body worked
on mechanically) rendered him not quite trustworthy without a close
supervision of his proceedings. It was impossible, however, to convince
the aged apothecary of the necessity for such vigilance; and if
anything could stir up his gentle temper to wrath, or, as oftener
happened, to tears, it was the attempt (which he was marvellously quick
to detect) thus to interfere with his long-familiar business.
The public, meanwhile, ceasing to regard Dr. Dolliver in his
professional aspect, had begun to take an interest in him as perhaps
their oldest fellow-citizen. It was he that remembered the Great Fire
and the Great Snow, and that had been a grown-up stripling at the
terrible epoch of Witch-Times, and a child just breeched at the
breaking out of King Philip's Indian War. He, too, in his school-boy
days, had received a benediction from the patriarchal Governor
Bradstreet, and thus could boast (somewhat as Bishops do of their
unbroken succession from the Apostles) of a transmitted blessing from
the whole company of sainted Pilgrims, among whom the venerable
magistrate had been an honored companion. Viewing their townsman in
this aspect, the people revoked the courteous Doctorate with which they
had heretofore decorated him, and now knew him most familiarly as
Grandsir Dolliver. His white head, his Puritan band, his threadbare
garb (the fashion of which he had ceased to change, half a century
ago), his gold-headed staff, that had been Dr. Swinnerton's, his
shrunken, frosty figure, and its feeble movement,--all these
characteristics had a wholeness and permanence in the public
recognition, like the meeting-house steeple or the town-pump. All the
younger portion of the inhabitants unconsciously ascribed a sort of
aged immortality to Grandsir Dolliver's infirm and reverend presence.
They fancied that he had been born old (at least, I remember
entertaining some such notions about age-stricken people, when I myself
was young), and that he could the better tolerate his aches and
incommodities, his dull ears and dim eyes, his remoteness from human
intercourse within the crust of indurated years, the cold temperature
that kept him always shivering and sad, the heavy burden that invisibly
bent down his shoulders,--that all these intolerable things might bring
a kind of enjoyment to Grandsir Dolliver, as the lifelong conditions of
his peculiar existence.
But, alas! it was a terrible mistake. This weight of years had a
perennial novelty for the poor sufferer. He never grew accustomed to
it, but, long as he had now borne the fretful torpor of his waning
life, and patient as he seemed, he still retained an inward
consciousness that these stiffened shoulders, these quailing knees,
this cloudiness of sight and brain, this confused forgetfulness of men
and affairs, were troublesome accidents that did not really belong to
him. He possibly cherished a half-recognized idea that they might pass
away. Youth, however eclipsed for a season, is undoubtedly the proper,
permanent, and genuine condition of man; and if we look closely into
this dreary delusion of growing old, we shall find that it never
absolutely succeeds in laying hold of our innermost convictions. A
sombre garment, woven of life's unrealities, has muffled us from our
true self, but within it smiles the young man whom we knew; the ashes
of many perishable things have fallen upon our youthful fire, but
beneath them lurk the seeds of inextinguishable flame. So powerful is
this instinctive faith, that men of simple modes of character are prone
to antedate its consummation. And thus it happened with poor Grandsir
Dolliver, who often awoke from an old man's fitful sleep with a sense
that his senile predicament was but a dream of the past night; and
hobbling hastily across the cold floor to the looking-glass, he would
be grievously disappointed at beholding the white hair, the wrinkles
and furrows, the ashen visage and bent form, the melancholy mask of
Age, in which, as he now remembered, some strange and sad enchantment
had involved him for years gone by!
To other eyes than his own, however, the shrivelled old gentleman
looked as if there were little hope of his throwing off this too
artfully wrought disguise, until, at no distant day, his stooping
figure should be straightened out, his hoary locks be smoothed over his
brows, and his much-enduring bones be laid safely away, with a green
coverlet spread over them, beside his Bessie, who doubtless would
recognize her youthful companion in spite of his ugly garniture of
decay. He longed to be gazed at by the loving eyes now closed; he
shrank from the hard stare of them that loved him not. Walking the
streets seldom and reluctantly, he felt a dreary impulse to elude the
people's observation, as if with a sense that he had gone irrevocably
out of fashion, and broken his connecting links with the net-work of
human life; or else it was that nightmare-feeling which we sometimes
have in dreams, when we seem to find ourselves wandering through a
crowded avenue, with the noonday sun upon us, in some wild extravagance
of dress or nudity. He was conscious of estrangement from his
towns-people, but did not always know how nor wherefore, nor why he
should be thus groping through the twilight mist in solitude. If they
spoke loudly to him, with cheery voices, the greeting translated itself
faintly and mournfully to his ears; if they shook him by the hand, it
was as if a thick, insensible glove absorbed the kindly pressure and
the warmth. When little Pansie was the companion of his walk, her
childish gayety and freedom did not avail to bring him into closer
relationship with men, but seemed to follow him into that region of
indefinable remoteness, that dismal Fairy-Land of aged fancy, into
which old Grandsir Dolliver had so strangely crept away.
Yet there were moments, as many persons had noticed, when the
great-grandpapa would suddenly take stronger hues of life. It was as if
his faded figure had been colored over anew, or at least, as he and
Pansie moved along the street, as if a sunbeam had fallen across him,
instead of the gray gloom of an instant before. His chilled
sensibilities had probably been touched and quickened by the warm
contiguity of his little companion through the medium of her hand, as
it stirred within his own, or some inflection of her voice that set his
memory ringing and chiming with forgotten sounds. While that music
lasted, the old man was alive and happy. And there were seasons, it
might be, happier than even these, when Pansie had been kissed and put
to bed, and Grandsir Dolliver sat by his fireside gazing in among the
massive coals, and absorbing their glow into those cavernous abysses
with which all men communicate. Hence come angels or fiends into our
twilight musings, according as we may have peopled them in by-gone
years. Over our friend's face, in the rosy flicker of the fire-gleam,
stole an expression of repose and perfect trust that made him as
beautiful to look at, in his high-backed chair, as the child Pansie on
her pillow; and sometimes the spirits that were watching him beheld a
calm surprise draw slowly over his features and brighten into joy, yet
not so vividly as to break his evening quietude. The gate of heaven had
been kindly left ajar, that this forlorn old creature might catch a
glimpse within. All the night afterwards, he would be semi-conscious of
an intangible bliss diffused through the fitful lapses of an old man's
slumber, and would awake, at early dawn, with a faint thrilling of the
heart-strings, as if there had been music just now wandering over them.
ANOTHER SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
[Footnote: This scene was not revised by the author, but is printed
from his first draught.]
We may now suppose Grandsir Dolliver to have finished his breakfast,
with a better appetite and sharper perception of the qualities of his
food than he has generally felt of late years, whether it were due to
old Martha's cookery or to the cordial of the night before. Little
Pansie had also made an end of her bread and milk with entire
satisfaction, and afterwards nibbled a crust, greatly enjoying its
resistance to her little white teeth.
How this child came by the odd name of Pansie, and whether it was
really her baptismal name, I have not ascertained. More probably it was
one of those pet appellations that grow out of a child's character, or
out of some keen thrill of affection in the parents, an unsought-for
and unconscious felicity, a kind of revelation, teaching them the true
name by which the child's guardian angel would know it,--a name with
playfulness and love in it, that we often observe to supersede, in the
practice of those who love the child best, the name that they carefully
selected, and caused the clergyman to plaster indelibly on the poor
little forehead at the font,--the love-name, whereby, if the child
lives, the parents know it in their hearts, or by which, if it dies,
God seems to have called it away, leaving the sound lingering faintly
and sweetly through the house. In Pansie's case, it may have been a
certain pensiveness which was sometimes seen under her childish frolic,
and so translated itself into French (_pensée_), her mother having been
of Acadian kin; or, quite as probably, it alluded merely to the color
of her eyes, which, in some lights, were very like the dark petals of a
tuft of pansies in the Doctor's garden. It might well be, indeed, on
account of the suggested pensiveness; for the child's gayety had no
example to sustain it, no sympathy of other children or grown
people,--and her melancholy, had it been so dark a feeling, was but the
shadow of the house, and of the old man. If brighter sunshine came, she
would brighten with it. This morning, surely, as the three companions,
Pansie, puss, and Grandsir Dolliver, emerged from the shadow of the
house into the small adjoining enclosure, they seemed all frolicsome
alike.
The Doctor, however, was intent over something that had reference to
his lifelong business of drugs. This little spot was the place where he
was wont to cultivate a variety of herbs supposed to be endowed with
medicinal virtue. Some of them had been long known in the pharmacopia
of the Old World; and others, in the early days of the country, had
been adopted by the first settlers from the Indian medicine-men, though
with fear and even contrition, because these wild doctors were supposed
to draw their pharmaceutic knowledge from no gracious source, the Black
Man himself being the principal professor in their medical school. From
his own experience, however, Dr. Dolliver had long since doubted,
though he was not bold enough quite to come to the conclusion, that
Indian shrubs, and the remedies prepared from them, were much less
perilous than those so freely used in European practice, and singularly
apt to be followed by results quite as propitious. Into such heterodoxy
our friend was the more liable to fall, because it had been taught him
early in life by his old master, Dr. Swinnerton, who, at those not
infrequent times when he indulged a certain unhappy predilection for
strong waters, had been accustomed to inveigh in terms of the most
cynical contempt and coarsest ridicule against the practice by which he
lived, and, as he affirmed, inflicted death on his fellow-men. Our old
apothecary, though too loyal to the learned profession with which he
was connected fully to believe this bitter judgment, even when
pronounced by his revered master, was still so far influenced that his
conscience was possibly a little easier when making a preparation from
forest herbs and roots than in the concoction of half a score of
nauseous poisons into a single elaborate drug, as the fashion of that
day was.
But there were shrubs in the garden of which he had never ventured to
make a medical use, nor, indeed, did he know their virtue, although
from year to year he had tended and fertilized, weeded and pruned them,
with something like religious care. They were of the rarest character,
and had been planted by the learned and famous Dr. Swinnerton, who, on
his death-bed, when he left his dwelling and all his abstruse
manuscripts to his favorite pupil, had particularly directed his
attention to this row of shrubs. They had been collected by himself
from remote countries, and had the poignancy of torrid climes in them;
and he told him, that, properly used, they would be worth all the rest
of the legacy a hundred-fold. As the apothecary, however, found the
manuscripts, in which he conjectured there was a treatise on the
subject of these shrubs, mostly illegible, and quite beyond his
comprehension in such passages as he succeeded in puzzling out (partly,
perhaps, owing to his very imperfect knowledge of Latin, in which
language they were written), he had never derived from them any of the
promised benefit. And, to say the truth, remembering that Dr.
Swinnerton himself never appeared to triturate or decoct or do anything
else with the mysterious herbs, our old friend was inclined to imagine
the weighty commendation of their virtues to have been the idly solemn
utterance of mental aberration at the hour of death. So, with the
integrity that belonged to his character, he had nurtured them as
tenderly as was possible in the ungenial climate and soil of New
England, putting some of them into pots for the winter; but they had
rather dwindled than flourished, and he had reaped no harvests from
them, nor observed them with any degree of scientific interest.