Doctor Grimshawe's Secret — a Romance

Doctor Grim knew, very probably, that there was all this on the womanly side that was wanting to Ned’s occasion; and very probably, too, being a man not without insight, he was aware that tender treatment, as a mother bestows it, tends likewise to foster strength, and manliness of character, as well as softer developments; but all this he could not have supplied, and now as little as ever. But there was something else which Ned ought to have, and might have; and this was intercourse with his kind, free circulation, free air, instead of the stived-up house, with the breeze from the graveyard blowing over it, — to be drawn out of himself, and made to share the life of many, to be introduced, at one remove, to the world with which he was to contend. To this end, shortly after the scene of passion and reconciliation above described, the Doctor took the resolution of sending Ned to an academy, famous in that day, and still extant. Accordingly they all three — the grim Doctor, Ned, and Elsie — set forth, one day of spring, leaving the house to crusty Hannah and the great spider, in a carryall, being the only excursion involving a night’s absence that either of the two children remembered from the house by the graveyard, as at nightfall they saw the modest pine-built edifice, with its cupola and bell, where Ned was to be initiated into the schoolboy. The Doctor, remembering perhaps days spent in some gray, stately, legendary great school of England, instinct with the boyhood of men afterwards great, puffed forth a depreciating curse upon it; but nevertheless made all arrangements for Ned’s behoof, and next morning prepared to leave him there.

“Ned, my son, good by,” cried he, shaking the little fellow’s hand as he stood tearful and wistful beside the chaise shivering at the loneliness which he felt settling around him, — a new loneliness to him, — the loneliness of a crowd. “Do not be cast down, my boy. Face the world; grasp the thistle strongly, and it will sting you the less. Have faith in your own fist! Fear no man! Have no secret plot! Never do what you think wrong! If hereafter you learn to know that Doctor Grim was a bad man, forgive him, and be a better one yourself. Good by, and if my blessing be good for anything, in God’s name, I invoke it upon you heartily.”

Little Elsie was sobbing, and flung her arms about Ned’s neck, and he his about hers; so that they parted without a word. As they drove away, a singular sort of presentiment came over the boy, as he stood looking after them.

“It is all over, — all over,” said he to himself: “Doctor Grim and little Elsie are gone out of my life. They leave me and will never come back, — not they to me, not I to them. O, how cold the world is! Would we three — the Doctor, and Elsie, and I — could have lain down in a row, in the old graveyard, close under the eaves of the house, and let the grass grow over us. The world is cold; and I am an alms-house child.”

The house by the graveyard seemed dismal now, no doubt, to little Elsie, who, being of a cheerful nature herself, (common natures often having this delusion about a home,) had grown up with the idea that it was the most delightful spot in the world; the place fullest of pleasant play, and of household love (because her own love welled over out of her heart, like a spring in a barrel); the place where everybody was kind and good, the world beyond its threshold appearing perhaps strange and sombre; the spot where it was pleasantest to be, for its own mere sake; the dim old, homely place, so warm and cosey in winter, so cool in summer. Who else was fortunate enough to have such a home, — with that nice, kind, beautiful Ned, and that dear, kind, gentle, old Doctor Grim, with his sweet ways, so wise, so upright, so good, beyond all other men? O, happy girl that she was, to have grown up in such a home! Was there ever any other house with such cosey nooks in it? Such probably were the feelings of good little Elsie about this place, which has seemed to us so dismal; for the home feeling in the child’s heart, her warm, cheerful, affectionate nature, was a magic, so far as she herself was concerned, and made all the house and its inmates over after her own fashion. But now that little Ned was gone, there came a change. She moped about the house, and, for the first time, suspected it was dismal.

As for the grim Doctor, there did not appear to be much alteration in that hard old character; perhaps he drank a little more, though that was doubtful, because it is difficult to see where he could find niches to stick in more frequent drinks. Nor did he more frequently breathe through the pipe. He fell into desuetude, however, of his daily walk, [Endnote: 1] and sent Elsie to play by herself in the graveyard (a dreary business enough for the poor child) instead of taking her to country or seaside himself. He was more savage and blasphemous, sometimes, than he had been heretofore known to be; but, on the other hand, he was sometimes softer, with a kind of weary consenting to circumstances, intervals of helpless resignation, when he no longer fought and struggled in his heart. He did not seem to be alive all the time; but, on the other hand, he was sometimes a good deal too much alive, and could not bear his potations as well as he used to do, and was overheard blaspheming at himself for being so weakly, and having a brain that could not bear a thimbleful, and growing to be a milksop like Colcord, as he said. This person, of whom the Doctor and his young people had had such a brief experience, appeared nevertheless to hang upon his remembrance in a singular way, — the more singular as there was little resemblance between them, or apparent possibility of sympathy. Little Elsie was startled to hear Doctor Grim sometimes call out, “Colcord! Colcord!” as if he were summoning a spirit from some secret place. He muttered, sitting by himself, long, indistinct masses of talk, in which this name was discernible, and other names. Going on mumbling, by the hour together, great masses of vague trouble, in which, if it only could have been unravelled and put in order, no doubt all the secrets of his life, — secrets of wrath, guilt, vengeance, love, hatred, all beaten up together, and the best quite spoiled by the worst, might have been found. His mind evidently wandered. Sometimes, he seemed to be holding conversation with unseen interlocutors, and almost invariably, so far as could be gathered, he was bitter, and then sat, immitigable, pouring out wrath and terror, denunciating, tyrannical, speaking as to something that lay at his feet, but which he would not spare. [Endnote: 2] Then suddenly, he would start, look round the dark old study, upward to the dangling spider overhead, and then at the quiet little girl, who, try as she might, could not keep her affrighted looks from his face, and always met his eyes with a loyal frankness and unyielded faith in him.

“Oh, you little jade, what have you been overhearing?”

“Nothing, Doctor Grim, — nothing that I could make out.”

“Make out as much as you can,” he said. “I am not afraid of you.”

“Afraid of little Elsie, dear Doctor Grim!”

“Neither of you, nor of the Devil,” murmured the Doctor, — “of nobody but little Ned and that milksop Colcord. If I have wronged anybody it is them. As for the rest, let the day of judgment come. Doctor Grim is ready to fling down his burden at the judgment seat and have it sorted there.”

Then he would lie back in his chair and look up at the great spider, who (or else it was Elsie’s fancy) seemed to be making great haste in those days, filling out his web as if he had less time than was desirable for such a piece of work.

One morning the Doctor arose as usual, and after breakfast (at which he ate nothing, and even after filling his coffee-cup half with brandy, half with coffee, left it untouched, save sipping a little out of a teaspoon) he went to the study (with a rather unsteady gait, chiefly remarkable because it was so early in the day), and there established himself with his pipe, as usual, and his medical books and machines, and his manuscript. But he seemed troubled, irresolute, weak, and at last he blew out a volley of oaths, with no apparent appropriateness, and then seemed to be communing with himself.

“It is of no use to carry this on any further,” said he, fiercely, in a decided tone, as if he had taken a resolution. “Elsie, my girl, come and kiss me.”

So Elsie kissed him, amid all the tobacco-smoke which was curling out of his mouth, as if there were a half-extinguished furnace in his inside.

“Elsie, my little girl, I mean to die to-day,” said the old man.

“To die, dear Doctor Grim? O, no! O, no!”

“O, yes! Elsie,” said the Doctor, in a very positive tone. “I have kept myself alive by main force these three weeks, and I find it hardly worth the trouble. It requires so much exercise of will; — and I am weary, weary. The pipe does not taste good, the brandy bewilders me. Ned is gone, too; — I have nothing else to do. I have wrought this many a year for an object, and now, taking all things into consideration, I don’t know whether to execute it or no. Ned is gone; there is nobody but my little Elsie, — a good child, but not quite enough to live for. I will let myself die, therefore, before sunset.”

“O, no! Doctor Grim. Let us send for Ned, and you will think it worth the trouble of living.”

“No, Elsie, I want no one near my death-bed; when I have finished a little business, you must go out of the room, and I will turn my face to the wall, and say good-night. But first send crusty Hannah for Mr. Pickering.”

He was a lawyer of the town, a man of classical and antiquarian tastes, as well as legal acquirement, and some of whose pursuits had brought him and Doctor Grim occasionally together. Besides calling this gentleman, crusty Hannah (of her own motion, but whether out of good will to the poor Doctor Grim, or from a tendency to mischief inherent in such unnatural mixtures as hers) summoned, likewise, in all haste, a medical man, — and, as it happened, the one who had taken a most decidedly hostile part to our Doctor, — and a clergyman, who had often devoted our poor friend to the infernal regions, almost by name, in his sermons; a kindness, to say the truth, which the Doctor had fully reciprocated in many anathemas against the clergyman. These two worthies, arriving simultaneously, and in great haste, were forthwith ushered to where the Doctor lay half reclining in his study; and upon showing their heads, the Doctor flew into an awful rage, threatening, in his customary improper way, when angry, to make them smell the infernal regions, and proceeding to put his threats into execution by flinging his odorous tobacco-pipe in the face of the medical man, and rebaptizing the clergyman with a half-emptied tumbler of brandy and water, and sending a terrible vociferation of oaths after them both, as they clattered hastily down the stairs. Really, that crusty Hannah must have been the Devil, for she stood grinning and chuckling at the foot of the stairs, curtseying grotesquely.

“He terrible man, our old Doctor Grim,” quoth crusty Hannah. “He drive us all to the wicked place before him.”

This, however, was the final outbreak of poor Doctor Grim. Indeed, he almost went off at once in the exhaustion that succeeded. The lawyer arrived shortly after, and was shut up with him for a considerable space; after which crusty Hannah was summoned, and desired to call two indifferent persons from the street, as witnesses to a will; and this document was duly executed, and given into the possession of the lawyer. This done, and the lawyer having taken his leave, the grim Doctor desired, and indeed commanded imperatively, that crusty Hannah should quit the room, having first — we are sorry to say — placed the brandy-bottle within reach of his hand, and leaving him propped up in his arm-chair, in which he leaned back, gazing up at the great spider, who was, dangling overhead. As the door closed behind crusty Hannah’s grinning and yet strangely interested face, the Doctor caught a glimpse of little Elsie in the passage, bathed in tears, and lingering and looking earnestly into the chamber. [Endnote: 3.]

Seeing the poor little girl, the Doctor cried out to her, half wrathfully, half tenderly, “Don’t cry, you little wretch! Come and kiss me once more.” So Elsie, restraining her grief with a great effort, ran to him and gave him a last kiss.

“Tell Ned,” said the Doctor solemnly, “to think no more of the old English hall, or of the bloody footstep, or of the silver key, or any of all that nonsense. Good by, my dear!” Then he said, with his thunderous and imperative tone, “Let no one come near me till to-morrow morning.”

So that parting was over; but still the poor little desolate child hovered by the study door all day long, afraid to enter, afraid to disobey, but unable to go. Sometimes she heard the Doctor muttering, as was his wont; once she fancied he was praying, and dropping on her knees, she also prayed fervently, and perhaps acceptably; then, all at once, the Doctor called out, in a loud voice, “No, Ned, no. Drop it, drop it!”

And then there was an utter silence, unbroken forevermore by the lips that had uttered so many objectionable things.

And finally, after an interval which had been prescribed by the grim Doctor, a messenger was sent by the lawyer to our friend Ned, to inform him of this sad event, and to bring him back temporarily to town, for the purpose of hearing what were his prospects, and what disposition was now to be made of him. We shall not attempt to describe the grief, astonishment, and almost incredulity of Ned, on discovering that a person so mixed up with and built into his whole life as the stalwart Doctor Grimshawe had vanished out of it thus unexpectedly, like something thin as a vapor, — like a red flame, that one [instant] is very bright in its lurid ray, and then is nothing at all, amid the darkness. To the poor boy’s still further grief and astonishment, he found, on reaching the spot that he called home, that little Elsie (as the lawyer gave him to understand, by the express orders of the Doctor, and for reasons of great weight) had been conveyed away by a person under whose guardianship she was placed, and that Ned could not be informed of the place. Even crusty Hannah had been provided for and disposed of, and was no longer to be found. Mr. Pickering explained to Ned the dispositions in his favor which had been made by his deceased friend, who, out of a moderate property, had left him the means of obtaining as complete an education as the country would afford, and of supporting himself until his own exertions would be likely to give him the success which his abilities were calculated to win. The remainder of his property (a less sum than that thus disposed of) was given to little Elsie, with the exception of a small provision to crusty Hannah, with the recommendation from the Doctor that she should retire and spend the remainder of her life among her own people. There was likewise a certain sum left for the purpose of editing and printing (with a dedication to the Medical Society of the State) an account of the process of distilling balm from cobwebs; the bequest being worded in so singular a way that it was just as impossible as it had ever been to discover whether the grim Doctor was in earnest or no.

What disappointed the boy, in a greater degree than we shall try to express, was the lack of anything in reference to those dreams and castles of the air, — any explanation of his birth; so that he was left with no trace of it, except just so far as the alms-house whence the Doctor had taken him. There all traces of his name and descent vanished, just as if he had been made up of the air, as an aerolite seems to be before it tumbles on the earth with its mysterious iron.

The poor boy, in his bewilderment, had not yet come to feel what his grief was; it was not to be conceived, in a few days, that he was deprived of every person, thing, or thought that had hitherto kept his heart warm. He tried to make himself feel it, yearning for this grief as for his sole friend. Being, for the present, domiciled with the lawyer, he obtained the key of his former home, and went through the desolate house that he knew so well, and which now had such a silent, cold, familiar strangeness, with none in it, though the ghosts of the grim Doctor, of laughing little Elsie, of crusty Hannah, — dead and alive alike, — were all there, and his own ghost among them; for he himself was dead, that is, his former self, which he recognized as himself, had passed away, as they were. In the study everything looked as formerly, yet with a sort of unreality, as if it would dissolve and vanish on being touched; and, indeed, it partly proved so; for over the Doctor’s chair seemed still to hang the great spider, but on looking closer at it, and finally touching it with the end of the Doctor’s stick, Ned discovered that it was merely the skin, shell, apparition, of the real spider,[Endnote: 4] the reality of whom, it is to be supposed, had followed the grim Doctor, whithersoever he had gone.

A thought struck Ned while he was here; he remembered the secret niche in the wall, where he had once seen the Doctor deposit some papers. He looked, and there they were. Who was the heir of those papers, if not he? If there were anything wrong in appropriating them, it was not perceptible to him in the desolation, anxiety, bewilderment, and despair of that moment. He grasped the papers, and hurried from the room and down the stairs, afraid to look round, and half expecting to hear the gruff voice of Doctor Grim thundering after him to bring them back.

Then Ned went out of the back door, and found his way to the Doctor’s new grave, which, as it happened, was dug close beside that one which occupied the place of the one which the stranger had come to seek; and, as if to spite the Doctor’s professional antipathies, it lay beside a grave of an old physician and surgeon, one Doctor Summerton, who used to help diseases and kill patients above a hundred years ago. But Doctor Grim was undisturbed by these neighbors, and apparently not more by the grief of poor little Ned, who hid his face in the crumbly earth of the grave, and the sods that had not begun to grow, and wept as if his heart would break.

But the heart never breaks on the first grave; and, after many graves, it gets so obtuse that nothing can break it.

And now let the mists settle down over the trail of our story, hiding it utterly on its onward course, for a long way to come, until, after many years, they may disperse and discover something which, were it worth while to follow it through all that obscurity, would prove to be the very same track which that boy was treading when we last saw him, — though it may have lain over land and sea since then; but the footsteps that trod there are treading here.

CHAPTER XI

There is — or there was, now many years ago, and a few years also it was still extant — a chamber, which when I think of, it seems to me like entering a deep recess of my own consciousness, a deep cave of my nature; so much have I thought of it and its inmate, through a considerable period of my life. After I had seen it long in fancy, then I saw it in reality, with my waking eyes; and questioned with myself whether I was really awake.

Not that it was a picturesque or stately chamber; not in the least. It was dim, dim as a melancholy mood; so dim, to come to particulars, that, till you were accustomed to that twilight medium, the print of a book looked all blurred; a pin was an indistinguishable object; the face of your familiar friend, or your dearest beloved one, would be unrecognizable across it, and the figures, so warm and radiant with life and heart, would seem like the faint gray shadows of our thoughts, brooding in age over youthful images of joy and love. Nevertheless, the chamber, though so difficult to see across, was small. You detected that it was within very narrow boundaries, though you could not precisely see them; only you felt yourself shut in, compressed, impeded, in the deep centre of something; and you longed for a breath of fresh air. Some articles of furniture there seemed to be; but in this dim medium, to which we are unaccustomed, it is not well to try to make out what they were, or anything else — now at least — about the chamber. Only one thing; small as the light was, it was rather wonderful how there came to be any; for no windows were apparent; no communication with the outward day. [Endnote: 1.]

Looking into this chamber, in fancy it is some time before we who come out of the broad sunny daylight of the world discover that it has an inmate. Yes, there is some one within, but where? We know it; but do not precisely see him, only a presence is impressed upon us. It is in that corner; no, not there; only a heap of darkness and an old antique coffer, that, as we look closely at it, seems to be made of carved wood. Ah! he is in that other dim corner; and now that we steal close to him, we see him; a young man, pale, flung upon a sort of mattress-couch. He seems in alarm at something or other. He trembles, he listens, as if for voices. It must be a great peril, indeed, that can haunt him thus and make him feel afraid in such a seclusion as you feel this to be; but there he is, tremulous, and so pale that really his face is almost visible in the gloomy twilight. How came he here? Who is he? What does he tremble at? In this duskiness we cannot tell. Only that he is a young man, in a state of nervous excitement and alarm, looking about him, starting to his feet, sometimes standing and staring about him.

Has he been living here? Apparently not; for see, he has a pair of long riding-boots on, coming up to the knees; they are splashed with mud, as if he had ridden hastily through foul ways; the spurs are on the heel. A riding-dress upon him. Ha! is that blood upon the hand which he clasps to his forehead.

What more do you perceive? Nothing, the light is so dim; but only we wonder where is the door, and whence the light comes. There is a strange abundance of spiders, too, we perceive; spinning their webs here, as if they would entrammel something in them. A mouse has run across the floor, apparently, but it is too dim to detect him, or to detect anything beyond the limits of a very doubtful vagueness. We do not even know whether what we seem to have seen is really so; whether the man is young, or old, or what his surroundings are; and there is something so disagreeable in this seclusion, this stifled atmosphere, that we should be loath to remain here long enough to make ourselves certain of what was a mystery. Let us forth into the broad, genial daylight, for there is magic, there is a devilish, subtile influence, in this chamber; which, I have reason to believe, makes it dangerous to remain here. There is a spell on the threshold. Heaven keep us safe from it!

Hark! has a door unclosed? Is there another human being in the room? We have now become so accustomed to the dim medium that we distinguish a man of mean exterior, with a look of habitual subservience that seems like that of an English serving-man, or a person in some menial situation; decent, quiet, neat, softly-behaved, but yet with a certain hard and questionable presence, which we would not well like to have near us in the room.

“Am I safe?” asks the inmate of the prison-chamber.

“Sir, there has been a search.”

“Leave the pistols,” said the voice.

Again, [Endnote: 2] after this time, a long time extending to years, let us look back into that dim chamber, wherever in the world it was, into which we had a glimpse, and where we saw apparently a fugitive. How looks it now? Still dim, — perhaps as dim as ever, — but our eyes, or our imagination, have gained an acquaintance, a customariness, with the medium; so that we can discern things now a little more distinctly than of old. Possibly, there may have been something cleared away that obstructed the light; at any rate, we see now the whereabouts — better than we did. It is an oblong room, lofty but narrow, and some ten paces in length; its floor is heavily carpeted, so that the tread makes no sound; it is hung with old tapestry, or carpet, wrought with the hand long ago, and still retaining much of the ancient colors, where there was no sunshine to fade them; worked on them is some tapestried story, done by Catholic hands, of saints or devils, looking each equally grave and solemnly. The light, whence comes it? There is no window; but it seems to come through a stone, or something like it, — a dull gray medium, that makes noonday look like evening twilight. Though sometimes there is an effect as if something were striving to melt itself through this dull medium, and — never making a shadow — yet to produce the effect of a cloud gathering thickly over the sun. There is a chimney; yes, a little grate in which burns a coal fire, a dim smouldering fire, it might be an illumination, if that were desirable.