Doctor 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 nightcap, 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 scaled 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
Cornelius 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 apophthegm 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 good 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 womenfolk, 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 over-sensitive 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-grand-daughter
(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 farther 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, an 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 life-long 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 network 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 go 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.