man's legend of the miraculous virtues of these plants; and it took so
firm a hold of his mind, that the row of outlandish vegetables seemed
rooted in it, and certainly flourished there with richer luxuriance
than in the soil where they actually grew. The story, acting thus early
upon his imagination, may be said to have influenced his brief career
in life, and, perchance, brought about its early close. The young man,
in the opinion of competent judges, was endowed with remarkable
abilities, and according to the rumor of the people had wonderful
gifts, which were proved by the cures he had wrought with remedies of
his own invention. His talents lay in the direction of scientific
analysis and inventive combination of chemical powers. While under the
pupilage of his grandfather, his progress had rapidly gone quite beyond
his instructor's hope,--leaving him even to tremble at the audacity
with which he overturned and invented theories, and to wonder at the
depth at which he wrought beneath the superficialness and mock-mystery
of the medical science of those days, like a miner sinking his shaft
and running a hideous peril of the earth caving in above him.
Especially did he devote himself to these plants; and under his care
they had thriven beyond all former precedent, bursting into luxuriance
of bloom, and most of them bearing beautiful flowers, which, however,
in two or three instances, had the sort of natural repulsiveness that
the serpent has in its beauty, compelled against its will, as it were,
to warn the beholder of an unrevealed danger. The young man had long
ago, it must be added, demanded of his grandfather the documents
included in the legacy of Professor Swinnerton, and had spent days and
nights upon them, growing pale over their mystic lore, which seemed the
fruit not merely of the Professor's own labors, but of those of more
ancient sages than he; and often a whole volume seemed to be compressed
within the limits of a few lines of crabbed manuscript, judging from
the time which it cost even the quick-minded student to decipher them.
Meantime these abstruse investigations had not wrought such disastrous
effects as might have been feared, in causing Edward Dolliver to
neglect the humble trade, the conduct of which his grandfather had now
relinquished almost entirely into his hands. On the contrary, with the
mere side results of his study, or what may be called the chips and
shavings of his real work, he created a prosperity quite beyond
anything that his simple-minded predecessor had ever hoped for, even at
the most sanguine epoch of his life. The young man's adventurous
endowments were miraculously alive, and connecting themselves with his
remarkable ability for solid research, and perhaps his conscience being
as yet imperfectly developed (as it sometimes lies dormant in the
young), he spared not to produce compounds which, if the names were
anywise to be trusted, would supersede all other remedies, and speedily
render any medicine a needless thing, making the trade of apothecary an
untenable one, and the title of Doctor obsolete. Whether there was real
efficacy in these nostrums, and whether their author himself had faith
in them, is more than can safely be said; but, at all events, the
public believed in them, and thronged to the old and dim sign of the
Brazen Serpent, which, though hitherto familiar to them and their
forefathers, now seemed to shine with auspicious lustre, as if its old
Scriptural virtues were renewed. If any faith was to be put in human
testimony, many marvellous cures were really performed, the fame of
which spread far and wide, and caused demands for these medicines to
come in from places far beyond the precincts of the little town. Our
old apothecary, now degraded by the overshadowing influence of his
grandson's character to a position not much above that of a shop-boy,
stood behind the counter with a face sad and distrustful, and yet with
an odd kind of fitful excitement in it, as if he would have liked to
enjoy this new prosperity, had he dared. Then his venerable figure was
to be seen dispensing these questionable compounds by the single bottle
and by the dozen, wronging his simple conscience as he dealt out what
he feared was trash or worse, shrinking from the reproachful eyes of
every ancient physician who might chance to be passing by, but withal
examining closely the silver, or the New England coarsely printed
bills, which he took in payment, as if apprehensive that the delusive
character of the commodity which he sold might be balanced by equal
counterfeiting in the money received, or as if his faith in all things
were shaken.
Is it not possible that this gifted young man had indeed found out
those remedies which Nature has provided and laid away for the cure of
every ill?
The disastrous termination of the most brilliant epoch that ever came
to the Brazen Serpent must be told in a few words. One night, Edward
Dolliver's young wife awoke, and, seeing the gray dawn creeping into
the chamber, while her husband, it should seem, was still engaged in
his laboratory, arose in her nightdress, and went to the door of the
room to put in her gentle remonstrance against such labor. There she
found him dead,--sunk down out of his chair upon the hearth, where were
some ashes, apparently of burnt manuscripts, which appeared to comprise
most of those included in Dr. Swinnerton's legacy, though one or two
had fallen near the heap, and lay merely scorched beside it. It seemed
as if he had thrown them into the fire, under a sudden impulse, in a
great hurry and passion. It may be that he had come to the perception
of something fatally false and deceptive in the successes which he had
appeared to win, and was too proud and too conscientious to survive it.
Doctors were called in, but had no power to revive him. An inquest was
held, at which the jury, under the instruction, perhaps, of those same
revengeful doctors, expressed the opinion that the poor young man,
being given to strange contrivances with poisonous drugs, had died by
incautiously tasting them himself. This verdict, and the terrible event
itself, at once deprived the medicines of all their popularity; and the
poor old apothecary was no longer under any necessity of disturbing his
conscience by selling them. They at once lost their repute, and ceased
to be in any demand. In the few instances in which they were tried the
experiment was followed by no good results; and even those individuals
who had fancied themselves cured, and had been loudest in spreading the
praises of these beneficent compounds, now, as if for the utter
demolition of the poor youth's credit, suffered under a recurrence of
the worst symptoms, and, in more than one case, perished miserably:
insomuch (for the days of witchcraft were still within the memory of
living men and women) it was the general opinion that Satan had been
personally concerned in this affliction, and that the Brazen Serpent,
so long honored among them, was really the type of his subtle
malevolence and perfect iniquity. It was rumored even that all
preparations that came from the shop were harmful: that teeth decayed
that had been made pearly white by the use of the young chemist's
dentifrice; that cheeks were freckled that had been changed to damask
roses by his cosmetics; that hair turned gray or fell off that had
become black, glossy, and luxuriant from the application of his
mixtures; that breath which his drugs had sweetened had now a
sulphurous smell. Moreover, all the money heretofore amassed by the
sale of them had been exhausted by Edward Dolliver in his lavish
expenditure for the processes of his study; and nothing was left for
Pansie, except a few valueless and unsalable bottles of medicine, and
one or two others, perhaps more recondite than their inventor had seen
fit to offer to the public.
Little Pansie's mother lived but a short time after the shock of the
terrible catastrophe; and, as we began our story with saying, she was
left with no better guardianship or support than might be found in the
efforts of a long superannuated man.
Nothing short of the simplicity, integrity, and piety of Grandsir
Dolliver's character, known and acknowledged as far back as the oldest
inhabitants remembered anything, and inevitably discoverable by the
dullest and most prejudiced observers, in all its natural
manifestations, could have protected him in still creeping about the
streets. So far as he was personally concerned, however, all bitterness
and suspicion had speedily passed away; and there remained still the
careless and neglectful good-will, and the prescriptive reverence, not
altogether reverential, which the world heedlessly awards to the
unfortunate individual who outlives his generation.
And now that we have shown the reader sufficiently, or at least to the
best of our knowledge, and perhaps at tedious length, what was the
present position of Grandsir Dolliver, we may let our story pass
onward, though at such a pace as suits the feeble gait of an old man.
The peculiarly brisk sensation of this morning, to which we have more
than once alluded, enabled the Doctor to toil pretty vigorously at his
medicinal herbs,--his catnip, his vervain, and the like; but he did not
turn his attention to the row of mystic plants, with which so much of
trouble and sorrow either was, or appeared to be, connected. In truth,
his old soul was sick of them, and their very fragrance, which the warm
sunshine made strongly perceptible, was odious to his nostrils. But the
spicy, homelike scent of his other herbs, the English simples, was
grateful to him, and so was the earth-smell, as he turned up the soil
about their roots, and eagerly snuffed it in. Little Pansie, on the
other hand, perhaps scandalized at great-grandpapa's neglect of the
prettiest plants in his garden, resolved to do her small utmost towards
balancing his injustice; so with an old shingle, fallen from the roof,
which she had appropriated as her agricultural tool, she began to dig
about them, pulling up the weeds, as she saw grandpapa doing. The
kitten, too, with a look of elfish sagacity, lent her assistance,
plying her paws with vast haste and efficiency at the roots of one of
the shrubs. This particular one was much smaller than the rest, perhaps
because it was a native of the torrid zone, and required greater care
than the others to make it flourish; so that, shrivelled, cankered, and
scarcely showing a green leaf, both Pansie and the kitten probably
mistook it for a weed. After their joint efforts had made a pretty big
trench about it, the little girl seized the shrub with both hands,
bestriding it with her plump little legs, and giving so vigorous a
pull, that, long accustomed to be transplanted annually, it came up by
the roots, and little Pansie came down in a sitting posture, making a
broad impress on the soft earth. "See, see, Doctor!" cries Pansie,
comically enough giving him his title of courtesy,--"look, grandpapa,
the big, naughty weed!"
Now the Doctor had at once a peculiar dread and a peculiar value for
this identical shrub, both because his grandson's investigations had
been applied more ardently to it than to all the rest, and because it
was associated in his mind with an ancient and sad recollection. For he
had never forgotten that his wife, the early lost, had once taken a
fancy to wear its flowers, day after day, through the whole season of
their bloom, in her bosom, where they glowed like a gem, and deepened
her somewhat pallid beauty with a richness never before seen in it. At
least such was the effect which this tropical flower imparted to the
beloved form in his memory, and thus it somehow both brightened and
wronged her. This had happened not long before her death; and whenever,
in the subsequent years, this plant had brought its annual flower, it
had proved a kind of talisman to bring up the image of Bessie, radiant
with this glow that did not really belong to her naturally passive
beauty, quickly interchanging with another image of her form, with the
snow of death on cheek and forehead. This reminiscence had remained
among the things of which the Doctor was always conscious, but had
never breathed a word, through the whole of his long life,--a sprig of
sensibility that perhaps helped to keep him tenderer and purer than
other men, who entertain no such follies. And the sight of the shrub
often brought back the faint, golden gleam of her hair, as if her
spirit were in the sunlights of the garden, quivering into view and out
of it. And therefore, when he saw what Pansie had done, he sent forth a
strange, inarticulate, hoarse, tremulous exclamation, a sort of aged
and decrepit cry of mingled emotion. "Naughty Pansie, to pull up
grandpapa's flower!" said he, as soon as he could speak. "Poison,
Pansie, poison! Fling it away, child!"
And dropping his spade, the old gentleman scrambled towards the little
girl as quickly as his rusty joints would let him,--while Pansie, as
apprehensive and quick of motion as a fawn, started up with a shriek of
mirth and fear to escape him. It so happened that the garden-gate was
ajar; and a puff of wind blowing it wide open, she escaped through this
fortuitous avenue, followed by great-grandpapa and the kitten.
"Stop, naughty Pansie, stop!" shouted our old friend. "You will tumble
into the grave!" The kitten, with the singular sensitiveness that seems
to affect it at every kind of excitement, was now on her back.
And, indeed, this portentous warning was better grounded and had a more
literal meaning than might be supposed; for the swinging gate
communicated with the burial-ground, and almost directly in little
Pansie's track there was a newly dug grave, ready to receive its tenant
that afternoon. Pansie, however, fled onward with outstretched arms,
half in fear, half in fun, plying her round little legs with wonderful
promptitude, as if to escape Time or Death, in the person of Grandsir
Dolliver, and happily avoiding the ominous pitfall that lies in every
person's path, till, hearing a groan from her pursuer, she looked over
her shoulder, and saw that poor grandpapa had stumbled over one of the
many hillocks. She then suddenly wrinkled up her little visage, and
sent forth a full-breathed roar of sympathy and alarm.
"Grandpapa has broken his neck now!" cried little Pansie, amid her sobs.
"Kiss grandpapa, and make it well, then," said the old gentleman,
recollecting her remedy, and scrambling up more readily than could be
expected. "Well," he murmured to himself, "a hair's-breadth more, and I
should have been tumbled into yonder grave. Poor little Pansie! what
wouldst thou have done then?"
"Make the grass grow over grandpapa," answered Pansie, laughing up in
his face.
"Poh, poh, child, that is not a pretty thing to say," said grandpapa,
pettishly and disappointed, as people are apt to be when they try to
calculate on the fitful sympathies of childhood. "Come, you must go in
to old Martha now."
The poor old gentleman was in the more haste to leave the spot because
he found himself standing right in front of his own peculiar row of
gravestones, consisting of eight or nine slabs of slate, adorned with
carved borders rather rudely cut, and the earliest one, that of his
Bessie, bending aslant, because the frost of so many winters had slowly
undermined it. Over one grave of the row, that of his gifted grandson,
there was no memorial. He felt a strange repugnance, stronger than he
had ever felt before, to linger by these graves, and had none of the
tender sorrow, mingled with high and tender hopes, that had sometimes
made it seem good to him to be there. Such moods, perhaps, often come
to the aged, when the hardened earth-crust over their souls shuts them
out from spiritual influences.
Taking the child by the hand,--her little effervescence of infantile
fun having passed into a downcast humor, though not well knowing as yet
what a dusky cloud of disheartening fancies arose from these green
hillocks,--he went heavily toward the garden-gate. Close to its
threshold, so that one who was issuing forth or entering must needs
step upon it or over it, lay a small flat stone, deeply imbedded in the
ground, and partly covered with grass, inscribed with the name of "Dr.
John Swinnerton, Physician."
"Ay," said the old man, as the well-remembered figure of his ancient
instructor seemed to rise before him in his grave-apparel, with beard
and gold-headed cane, black velvet doublet and cloak, "here lies a man
who, as people have thought, had it in his power to avoid the grave! He
had no little grandchild to tease him. He had the choice to die, and
chose it."
So the old gentleman led Pansie over the stone, and carefully closed
the gate; and, as it happened, he forgot the uprooted shrub, which
Pansie, as she ran, had flung away, and which had fallen into the open
grave; and when the funeral came that afternoon, the coffin was let
down upon it, so that its bright, inauspicious flower never bloomed
again.
ANOTHER FRAGMENT OF THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
"Be secret!" and he kept his stern eye fixed upon him, as the coach
began to move.
"Be secret!" repeated the apothecary. "I know not any secret that he
has confided to me thus far, and as for his nonsense (as I will be bold
to style it now he is gone) about a medicine of long life, it is a
thing I forget in spite of myself, so very empty and trashy it is. I
wonder, by the by, that it never came into my head to give the Colonel
a dose of the cordial whereof I partook last night. I have no faith
that it is a valuable medicine--little or none--and yet there has been
an unwonted briskness in me all the morning."
Then a simple joy broke over his face--a flickering sunbeam among his
wrinkles--as he heard the laughter of the little girl, who was running
rampant with a kitten in the kitchen.
"Pansie! Pansie!" cackled he, "grandpapa has sent away the ugly man
now. Come, let us have a frolic in the garden."
And he whispered to himself again, "That is a cordial yonder, and I
will take it according to the prescription, knowing all the
ingredients." Then, after a moment's thought, he added, "All, save one."
So, as he had declared to himself his intention, that night, when
little Pansie had long been asleep, and his small household was in bed,
and most of the quiet, old-fashioned townsfolk likewise, this good
apothecary went into his laboratory, and took out of a cupboard in the
wall a certain ancient-looking bottle, which was cased over with a
net-work of what seemed to be woven silver, like the wicker-woven
bottles of our days. He had previously provided a goblet of pure water.
Before opening the bottle, however, he seemed to hesitate, and pondered
and babbled to himself; having long since come to that period of life
when the bodily frame, having lost much of its value, is more tenderly
cared for than when it was a perfect and inestimable machine.
"I triturated, I infused, I distilled it myself in these very rooms,
and know it--know it all--all the ingredients, save one. They are
common things enough--comfortable things--some of them a little
queer--one or two that folks have a prejudice against--and then there
is that one thing that I don't know. It is foolish in me to be dallying
with such a mess, which I thought was a piece of quackery, while that
strange visitor bade me do it,--and yet, what a strength has come from
it! He said it was a rare cordial, and, methinks, it has brightened up
my weary life all day, so that Pansie has found me the fitter playmate.
And then the dose--it is so absurdly small! I will try it again."
He took the silver stopple from the bottle, and with a practised hand,
tremulous as it was with age, so that one would have thought it must
have shaken the liquor into a perfect shower of misapplied drops, he
dropped--I have heard it said--only one single drop into the goblet of
water. It fell into it with a dazzling brightness, like a spark of ruby
flame, and subtly diffusing itself through the whole body of water,
turned it to a rosy hue of great brilliancy. He held it up between his
eyes and the light, and seemed to admire and wonder at it.
"It is very odd," said he, "that such a pure, bright liquor should have
come out of a parcel of weeds that mingled their juices here. The thing
is a folly,--it is one of those compositions in which the chemists--the
cabalists, perhaps--used to combine what they thought the virtues of
many plants, thinking that something would result in the whole, which
was not in either of them, and a new efficacy be created. Whereas, it
has been the teaching of my experience that one virtue counteracts
another, and is the enemy of it. I never believed the former theory,
even when that strange madman bade me do it. And what a thick, turbid
matter it was, until that last ingredient,--that powder which he put in
with his own hand! Had he let me see it, I would first have analyzed
it, and discovered its component parts. The man was mad, undoubtedly,
and this may have been poison. But its effect is good. Poh! I will
taste again, because of this weak, agued, miserable state of mine;
though it is a shame in me, a man of decent skill in my way, to believe
in a quack's nostrum. But it is a comfortable kind of thing."
Meantime, that single drop (for good Dr. Dolliver had immediately put a
stopper into the bottle) diffused a sweet odor through the chamber, so
that the ordinary fragrances and scents of apothecaries' stuff seemed
to be controlled and influenced by it, and its bright potency also
dispelled a certain dimness of the antiquated room.
The Doctor, at the pressure of a great need, had given incredible pains
to the manufacture of this medicine; so that, reckoning the pains
rather than the ingredients (all except one, of which he was not able
to estimate the cost nor value), it was really worth its weight in
gold. And, as it happened, he had bestowed upon it the hard labor of
his poor life, and the time that was necessary for the support of his
family, without return; for the customers, after playing off this cruel
joke upon the old man, had never come back; and now, for seven years,
the bottle had stood in a corner of the cupboard. To be sure, the
silver-cased bottle was worth a trifle for its silver, and still more,
perhaps, as an antiquarian knick-knack. But, all things considered, the
honest and simple apothecary thought that he might make free with the
liquid to such small extent as was necessary for himself. And there had
been something in the concoction that had struck him; and he had been
fast breaking lately; and so, in the dreary fantasy and lonely
recklessness of his old age, he had suddenly bethought himself of this
medicine (cordial,--as the strange man called it, which had come to him
by long inheritance in his family) and he had determined to try it. And
again, as the night before, he took out the receipt--a roll of antique
parchment, out of which, provokingly, one fold had been lost--and put
on his spectacles to puzzle out the passage.
Guttam unicam in aquam puram, two gills. "If the Colonel should hear of
this," said Dr. Dolliver, "he might fancy it his nostrum of long life,
and insist on having the bottle for his own use. The foolish, fierce
old gentleman! He has grown very earthly, of late, else he would not
desire such a thing. And a strong desire it must be to make him feel it
desirable. For my part, I only wish for something that, for a short
time, may clear my eyes, so that I may see little Pansie's beauty, and
quicken my ears, that I may hear her sweet voice, and give me nerve,
while God keeps me here, that I may live longer to earn bread for dear
Pansie. She provided for, I would gladly lie down yonder with Bessie
and our children. Ah! the vanity of desiring lengthened
days!--There!--I have drunk it, and methinks its final, subtle flavor
hath strange potency in it."
The old man shivered a little, as those shiver who have just swallowed
good liquor, while it is permeating their vitals. Yet he seemed to be
in a pleasant state of feeling, and, as was frequently the case with
this simple soul, in a devout frame of mind. He read a chapter in the
Bible, and said his prayers for Pansie and himself, before he went to
bed, and had much better sleep than usually comes to people of his
advanced age; for, at that period, sleep is diffused through their
wakefulness, and a dim and tiresome half-perception through their
sleep, so that the only result is weariness.